As beautiful as the lake was, Jessie’s priorities were elsewhere as he quickly logged out and grabbed his phone in a panic. He sighed in relief when he noticed he had only been in the game for several more hours than he usually would have liked. Not bothering to get changed, Jessie simply rolled over and fell asleep, not that he would get much sleep anyway.
With a start Jessie awoke as his alarm went off, if that wasn't bad enough he had left his curtains open slightly and a beam of light landed directly on his face. With a groan of displeasure he rolled out of bed and checked the time and realised he had a lecture to go to at 8, giving him half an hour to get ready and get to uni which was thankfully a 5 minute walk. The main common room was quiet and surprisingly clean, almost as if no one had used it the night before, which was quickly clarified as he saw the small pile of plates in the sink.
“Because of course they didn't clean them.” Jessie muttered as he grabbed himself a couple slices of bread from a bag and threw them into the toaster while he went back to his room. Pulling off the clothes in which he had slept the night before, he changed into something more presentable which happened to be a loose pair of black track pants and bluish grey tee shirt that was more blue than grey. Grabbing his bag and making sure his computer was inside, he left his room and flat heading towards uni while munching on the toast he made earlier. Despite the early hour, or because of the early hour, the streets were crowded with people walking to work or going about their business. Many shops lined the streets with holographic signs displaying names and menus. Due to the proximity to the university, stationary and tech shops were the most common, with fast food stores and bars common every 200 metres or so. As he walked down the street, Jessie was reminded that this was one of the nicer districts of the city, and it truly was beautiful. The buildings were simple when viewed from a distance, but the closer one got the more detail you could make out showcasing the complicated methods that went into them. The streets were clean and police patrols were common to keep the peace.
The university grounds were massive, covering about 200 square kilometres, and many floors, it could cater to several million students at a time, which was evident by the solid block of students walking through the gates. Joining the mass of students he began the slow walk towards the gates which allowed passage through the large and ornate wall that surrounded the entire campus. As he walked through the gates, Jessie began making his way in the direction of one of the buildings, one that looked like a palace. The university had been designed as a neighbourhood for the richest people in the world, but was turned into the largest and most prestigious university in the world after the second american civil war spilled over and began another world war the end result of which left most of the rich assassinated and the American empire being nuked back to the stone age. It had taken humanity two hundred years to recover from the war and the remaining owners of the buildings in the neighbourhood had decided to set up a university to educate future generations, and store what knowledge had survived the near annihilation of several continents .
The start of the day was always the same, and though he was at university, Jessie still had a timetable that he had to follow. And so his first class saw him sitting at the back of the lecture hall, a remodelled theatre in one of the main buildings, listening to a history lecture. As the lecturer droned on about how the third world war had started, and what had led to the american civil war, Jessie occupied himself with random drawings in his notebook, doodles of the great dragon he had seen and hooded skeleton wielding a scythe were the most common doodles, he even had a doodle of the dragon sitting on the skeleton with a smug face. Overall it was a boring morning during which he took a few notes and did more drawings, it wasn't until lunch when something interesting happened.
“YOU BASTARD!”
The yelling occurred after everyone had left the lecture halls to have lunch. The commotion had started shortly after Jessie had begun to walk through one of the many parks that were situated throughout the campus. A group of people, all popular within the student population, had gathered into two sides while a pair of students stood face to face.
“Oh? What about me?” a student who was wearing a pair of black riding pants, a black shirt and black leather riding jacket asked as he faced down a student of similar height.
“WHAT ABOUT YOU!?” the other student, who was dressed more casually in t-shirt and shorts, yelled back. “I SPENT 12 HOURS WORKING ON THAT QUEST, ONLY FOR YOU TO STEAL THE KILL AND SWAGGER AWAY LIKE YOU OWN THE WORLD!.”
“Ah yes.” the boy said with a drawl. “Because a weak fuck like you shouldn’t be allowed first clear of any quests.” The group behind the boy burst into laughter as the other guy's face started to turn red in fury.
“The game has only been out for a weekend.” a voice came from behind Jessie
“Oh, hi Jem.” He said as he turned towards the voice. James had been his one constant friend throughout his life, and it had honestly been a coincidence that their parents sent them to the same schools. “I kinda understand.” Jessie said as they continued to watch the two boys verbally fight.
“Spending 12 hours on a quest only to have the final kill stolen by someone who wasn’t even doing the quest must suck.” James said. “But do they really need to fight over it in public?”
“Possibly a matter of pride.” Jessie said. “Let's get food.”
As they were walking away in the direction of the cafeteria they both looked back at the arguing pair just in time to see the offended boy throw a punch at the boy in the jacket, the fall out of which caused a brawl to occur between the two groups as the people behind the arguing pair joined in.
The cafeteria looked about what one would expect when thinking of a school cafeteria, except on a considerably larger scale due to the size of the student population. As they entered they noticed that the majority of the tables were claimed by students who were chatting about their first experiences in the game and sharing images and videos of their fights and bragging about stats. As they neared the service counter they overheard more conversations, many were talking about how cool the game was, or arguing over the point of playing it. While others were holding arguments of incidents that had happened in the game. Grabbing a tray and some food Jessie made his way to an empty table that sat against an outside wall and was soon joined by James who had grabbed his food as well.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“How's Dorlundon?” Jessie asked after a moment of eating
“Imagine coruscant, except it still has oceans.”
“Seriously?”
“Yep, and technomancey is so cool, i’ve been earning experience as a novice technomancer and it's so interesting how they joined technology and magic into weapons and other items.'' The excitement in James’s voice made Jessie smile a bit, he had always been interested in the mechanical aspects behind objects, though he was mainly focused on weapons.
“Sounds like you’ve been having fun.” Jessie said a slight amount of bitterness entered his voice. Which did not go missed by James.
“Spit it out.” James said. “What happened?”
“Well, you heard about the unicorn right?”
“Yea, you told me over the phone.”
“Right, well, i took a quest to gather wolf parts, encountered a dragon colony, got a dragon egg, returned with the wolf parts, accepted a simple gathering quest, met a former court wizard, got kidnaped by a dryad matriarch who had me tortured to try gain my blessing, got saved by a couple ancient gods, discovered the game has some insane time dilation, got some divine objects and logged out after being sent back to Alecious.” Jessie looked up at James who was just staring at him wide eyed. “You look stunned.” jessie added
“YA FUCKING THINK!” James practically shouted while his voice didn't travel that far due to the overall noise of the cafeteria, the tables near them all turned to look at them in confusion. James did lower his voice when he noticed this. “You go out on a collection quest for simple materials and return with divine objects.”
“You forgot the dragon egg.” jessie said in a lightly teasing voice
“Ah yes, you know Jess, I never thought I would say this, but the dragon egg at this point is an afterthought.” James said with clear exasperation. “On another note, what did the gods give you? “
“Seriously?” Jessie asked, but upon seeing the interests on James’s face he decided to tell him.
“Ok, fine. The first one was given to me by a goddess of creation. It basically hides my blessing from anyone below the level of primordial gods. The next came for a god of fate, it's basically a growth morphic weapon and the last one came from a god of death, it's a book with an interesting magic path.”
“And let me guess.” James said. “You get divine assistance with the magic path.”
“Nope, I have to figure it out myself.”
“Well, there's something, at least you won't have absurd, cheat-like abilities off the bat.” James paused. “What's your blessing?”
“It's a blessing from a god of death.”
“So what, it allows you to become a necromancer?”
“Nope, nothing as interesting unfortunately, i just gain an extra 50% experience from kills.”
“Okay then.” James said with a flat look. “You have some of the best and worst luck I have ever heard of.”
The two of them continued to chat and eat their lunch for a while longer and just as they were about to leave to go grab some resources from the library, a group of students walked into the cafeteria like they owned the place and kicked a group of newer students off their table ignoring the looks of contempt thrown towards them by other students. The only thought Jessie had as he watched this show of arrogance was that if someone knocked their lights out, they would have deserved it.
The rest of the day didn’t involve any arguments about The Stars of Fate between the students, and any conversations that seemed to start getting out of hand were quickly quelled by the lecturers before they could continue. Things started to get interesting when Jessie walked through the door to his dorm and saw his roommates sitting around the Television watching an announcement. Curious, Jessie sat in an empty chair and watched the news anchor stall for time.
“Thankyou for hanging in here folks.” the news anchor said. “We apologise for interrupting your regular viewing schedule, but this announcement is said to be world shattering.” the news anchor paused again. “I shall now hand off to Simon Matthews who is currently live outside the Azure branch company. “
“Thank you Kirsty.” Simon said. “Due to the record shattering number of first day sales surpassing 100 million copies sold world wide, the CEO of the Azure Branch Company has publicly stated online that he is moving up the scheduled release of a feature, he did not meanton what feature he was talking about, but said he would reveal it at a press conference today.” Simon was standing in front of the main gates to the Azure branch company where a podium had been set up. “We have been informed that the company's CEO, Arthur Pendragon, will be with us shortly.” As he said this, the gates began to open allowing a group of people to walk through before closing again. Arthur Pendragon stepped up onto the podium and addressed the crowd.
“Thank you for attending.” He began. “I know that this is unexpected, it is the same for us. The feature which I will announce was planned to be released when we had 100 million players, which was reached within a day of launch which has led to us moving some plans up.” he paused for breath.” I am aware of how abrupt and shocking this is. I would like to say that months before the launch of The Stars Of Fate, we were in talks with the CEO’s of banks and banking companies. These talks have only recently finished and the corresponding codes and systems were meant to be released in a few weeks. But the target was hit and contracts are annoying demons. SO, as of this moment.” Arthur looked down at his watch.” 5:00 pm. In 48 hours time, the servers will go down for 4 hours to allow time for the update to be implemented. Are there any questions?”
An explosion of noise erupted from the gathered media and news reported, the noise so loud the a few birds were startled from the roof of the buildings surround the Azure companies compound
“Ok, quiet please.” Arthur said after a moment.” The most common question I seem to hear is ‘what exactly are we implementing’. Fair, I did a bad job at explaining. We will be implementing an exchange system where you can buy or sell coins for real money. While the prices will rise and fall depending on what is bought or sold, prices will start out as 1 copper being about 1 dollar, a silver being about 100 dollars and a gold being about 1000 dollars.” another roar of noise came from the reporters before Arthur could continue and he was forced to ask them to quiet down again." The pricing is based on 100 copper to a silver and 100 silver to a gold. We have also taken into account how difficult it currently is to obtain copper and silver for most people and have priced the selling point to offer some payoff for their hard work. When buying coins there will be an additional 5% increase to the cost due to the company requiring a source of income to pay its staff, run the servers and as prize money for competitions that may or may not be coming.”
There were more questions for another hour and a half as the media tried to get more information out of the CEO, by which point Jessie had already cooked a meal for himself and the rest of his roommates before heading to his room to continue with his gathering quest.