~Prologue~
Marissa
Marissa didn’t sleep well. Even after doing her best to wind down after deciding to call it a night, her excitement level was too high to simply sleep. Instead, she spent far too much time staring at the ceiling, then rolling over to stare at her bedroom door, which led to the hallway, and then to the tiny second bedroom in her apartment and her PC.
When she did finally sleep, it still only came in bursts. She regularly woke up several times throughout the night, only to angrily growl at herself when she looked at her fifteen year old digital alarm clock.
She wasn’t sure how many times she had woken up when she finally decided to give it up and leave her bed. The short bursts of sleep seemed to be just enough to satisfy her body - and she had made it to 5 a.m., which was two hours past her normal alarm.
She went to her computer before anything else and hit the power button on the monitor to check where things stood. She felt the full body, defeated sigh and release of tension when it was the log-in screen - not the queue - that greeted her.
Marissa leaned over her desk chair to click her way back into the queue. She smiled briefly, seeing Hibiscus Jade staring back at her blankly at the character select, then hit [Log In].
[In Queue]
[Position in Queue : 10,684]
“Lovely.” Marissa muttered to herself as she stood straight up again. She rubbed at her lower back and yawned. A ten thousand queue would hopefully not be too long, and she needed to brush her teeth and make some tea. It was still too early for an actual breakfast, but maybe one of the croissants she had in her kitchen wouldn’t go amiss.
With one more longing glance at the screen, Marissa stretched out her aching back and walked away to go through her slightly altered morning routine.
----------------------------------------
[In Queue]
[Position in Queue : 17]
Marissa sat back in her chair, her hands behind her head with a slight smile on her face. She kept glancing at the screen, excited.
In the end, not only did she have more than enough time to brush her teeth, have two cups of breakfast tea, and shower, she even went for a jog. Before the shower, just to be clear. Going for a run was not a normal part of Marissa’s routine, but she figured with how antsy she was, maybe the run would do her some good.
She wasn’t sure it did, but the cold San Francisco air certainly woke her up. And more importantly, it wasted a good chunk of time in a ‘productive’ way. And she got to wear the activewear that she received as a gift last year from…someone. She honestly couldn’t remember who it came from.
But all of that ceased to matter to her when her position in the queue dropped to the single digits. She sat up and scooted in toward her PC, ready to go. She had the regular chat program up on her second screen, alongside a designated internet window ready to search whatever she needed.
Not that she’d use it. Probably. Marissa wasn’t about to spoil herself on anything important. Besides, she had paid pretty close attention to most of the marketing for the game. She knew, roughly, what to expect.
And then she was in. She hissed out a “Yesss…” to no one in particular as she watched the loading screen pass. A cinematic started, which she skipped.
Mag Mell was an MMO, and she knew from experience that story was not likely to be one of its strengths. Maybe she would regret it later, but right now she wanted to play.
To be fair, she had already seen the intro cinematic in the form of a trailer. She didn’t plan on following the story too closely, but from what she understood, the set-up was that the player characters were various warriors, bards, heroes, and the like working together with the Tuatha Dé Danann to fight back against the Fomorians.
Kieran had talked to her at length about how the game was working with Celtic mythology, seemingly mostly Irish and Welsh, to establish its setting. He was always more of a loremonger than she was, so Marissa was sure that he would be able to enlighten her on stuff she skipped.
Kieran would also be sure to let her know if the story was actually worth her time later. She could always jump back into it later with lore videos online or by rewatching cutscenes.
For now, Marissa was focused on gameplay and developing her gamesense.
When she was dropped into the world, her first move was to look over her UI, test some buttons out, and see how the game felt.
Most things were as expected. Mag Mell featured an action-based battle system. She moved around with the expected WASD keys. She had a targeting reticle that was controlled with the mouse, as expected. Then there were several empty hotbars that showed various keybinds attached that would no doubt fill out as she leveled and gained new skills.
She couldn’t wait to fill them.
Right now, at level 1, she had two actions; left click was her basic attack, which fired arrows toward wherever she was aiming. They seemed to have fall-off, which meant finite range. That was expected. She was equipped with a [Short Bow], and that seemed to dictate her basic attacks.
Her attacks had a [Might] value, which seemed to be their base damage before anything else was applied - so mostly useful to compare attacks against each other. Her basic attacks had a [Might] of 100, 100, 100, then 250. So, she noted to herself, it would always be beneficial to finish her combo whenever she could.
Her right click, [Full Draw], was a charged shot. When she held it down, a bar appeared below her targeting reticle, and filled over time. It took about a second and a half for it to fill, then it did so a second time, then a third, then a fourth. The color changed each time, from green, to yellow, to red, to white and flashing.
She could run around while charging, and when she let go, she fired a single arrow at her target with a neat animation. The arrow had a larger effect on it, signifying the higher damage, and Hibiscus spun as if the attack had kickback. The skill also had a cooldown of six seconds - and that dictated her rotation for now.
She also had access to a dodge roll with three charges, a sprint button that operated outside of combat, a button that allowed her to sit to recover HP and MP, and some other assorted skills, emotes, and things that didn’t appear to have much use at the moment.
If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
She hit the [C] key to bring up Hibiscus’ character page to look at her stats and see exactly what stats existed in Mag Mell.
Hibiscus Jade
Level : 1
[Path] : [Arrow]
[Dedication] : [--]
HP
100/100
MP
100/100
[Strength]
15
[Intelligence]
8
[Accuracy]
7
[Speed]
5
[Defense]
8
[Resistance]
12
[Slash]
8
[Arcane]
12
[Pierce]
8
[Holy]
12
[Blunt]
8
[Nature]
12
[Parry]
0
[Dark]
12
With a big smile on her face, Marissa got things rolling. She walked up to the NPC with the bright yellow celtic-designed triquetra over his head and hit the [F] key when prompted to interact with him.
The camera zoomed in for a brief, animated exchange between the NPC and Hibiscus, but Marissa quickly mashed her way through the text with the [F] key to get back to the action. When the chat was finished, she had a quest pinned on the right side of her screen, as expected.
[Trial by Combat]
[Kill 10 Fomorians]
[0/10]
Marissa could see on the minimap that the quest zone was just over the hill ahead of her - and there were heaps of other players heading up the hill. She couldn’t see them before, but evidently accepting the first quest had put her in the actual live map with other players.
When she followed the river of people up and over the hill, she got her first taste of one of the things that seemed to make the game special.
The area that laid before her was a pretty standard starting zone. She had spawned in a base camp with a bunch of military-esque NPCs, took her first quest from a commander, and been sent on her merry way. Classic.
The area itself was nothing too special. A widespread grassy plain was laid out, but pockmarked by battle. Impact craters, wooden battlements, crates, dead bodies, and the like were all scattered about the area. Several of the wooden structures that littered the field were on fire. All expected, classic standards for this sort of area.
The enemies though - that’s what surprised her.
Traditionally, especially in starter areas like this one, players were expected to fight and kill a bunch of the same enemy, or ‘mob’. Usually, this amounted to some kind of critter like rats or occasionally a story-related enemy like a cultist or something. So seeing ‘Kill 10 Fomorians’ wasn’t a shock. She just expected copy-and-pasted monsters of some kind that she’d need to take out.
Instead, the enemies were anything but copy-and-pasted. Sure, they all were labeled only as ‘Fomorian’ and had the expected red health bar floating over their heads, but the models were all unique.
Or, at least, if they weren’t truly unique, they were certainly procedurally generated.
Each enemy was monstrous, but not in the same way. They were mostly humanoid-esque, but the more monstrous features were very highly varied. Some had fur. Others, feathers. Body proportions were all over the place, with some enemies having one side of their body being overly large, while others had unusually short limbs. They did, however, unanimously look like monsters.
And beyond that, their idle animations in the area were far more involved than Marissa was used to. They were setting fires, killing NPCs, tearing up the landscape, and just generally causing chaos.
The scene wasn’t altogether something new or unexpected, but the depth involved here for an area that she would probably never visit again was still eye-opening.
Marissa supposed that it was possible that the developers had poured extra love and care into the opening hours of the game to try to really hook players. Other games had done that, and then gone off the rails or at least significantly down in quality as the game progressed.
But if Mag Mell could keep up this seeming level of quality throughout the entire game, Marissa would be suitably impressed.
And probably hooked for the foreseeable future. As long as the endgame content was good, anyway.
“Alright, let’s go!”
Marissa said aloud as she ran down the hill and onto the battlefield. She charged her right click attack, [Full Draw], as she approached her first target. [Full Draw’s] [Might] was 100 at the first stage of charge, and increased from there to 200, then 300, and finally 600. Fully charging the shot was far and away the best option. If anything, she felt like it was more likely that the skill was designed to punish you for poorly timing it and needing to let the attack fly early.
When she entered her attack range - denoted by her targeting reticle turning red while over her intended target - she let the arrow fly.
The enemy Fomorian, who had been rummaging through the burning remains of a wagon, spun to face her and drew a greatsword. As it charged her, she peppered the thing with her basic attack arrows while her charged attack was on cooldown.
The basic attack had a combo and rhythm to it, with the fourth shot in each chain being weightier and dealing more damage. The animations were crisp and satisfying, too, which was nice.
But by the time her first combo was completed, the enemy performed a leaping attack at her, crossing the remaining distance instantly. It didn’t do a ton of damage, but the basic attack that followed did around 25% of her total HP at once. Immediately after that, the Fomorian wound up for a clearly much bigger swing.
The ground in front of the enemy mob glowed red - a classic signal to get out of the damaging area of the attack. She did so, backing out of the area while continuing her basic attack string. Movement while attacking was slower than normal, but still fast enough to avoid the massive cleaving swing of the greatsword.
Marissa clicked [Full Draw] again, as soon as it was off cooldown. She quickly realized that while she could move as normal outside combat while charging, in combat was another story; her movement speed was halved.
As she tried to kite away from the enemy, it closed the gap while she was charging and hit her again for another quarter of her total HP, leaving her hovering around half.
Before the thing could hit her again, she let her second charged shot fly and ended the fight.
All things considered, it wasn’t really a difficult fight. As long as she avoided the clearly marked AoE attack - which probably would kill her - the fight was in her favor as long as she kept up her damage.
The downside was that the damage was high enough that for the moment, she definitely couldn’t chain pull the enemies. A second one of those encounters in a row without any healing would kill her.
So, she returned to the ‘safe’ area of the path through the area where there were no enemies, and hit the [Rest] skill. Hibiscus sat down in a relaxed pose, and Marissa watched her HP tick back up, 5% at a time. With her starting HP at an even 100, it was thankfully easy math. She was back to full in a matter of seconds, so the actual downtime really wasn’t that bad, all things considered.
Before she slipped back into combat, Marissa stretched her arms up over her head. This was going to be a long day.