Chapter three

[Sherry Airgetlamh]

“Hah? What do you mean we can’t log out?” asked the bird-brained noblewoman wannabe. She had this dumb expression on her face suggesting that she couldn’t understand simple English. A depressing sigh was forced out of my throat as I realized I might be spending any length of time with this person due to this situation.

“I mean we literally cannot log out of the game,” I repeated. The game utilized an entirely virtualized interface known as ‘full-immersion’ technology, so we couldn’t just hard reset our computers or force any log outs while inside the game. The noblewoman cosplayer double took as she quickly checked through the menu options and turned pale when she found out it was all true. Does she always wear her expression like a coat? Such a dumb face. No, I get that objectively most people would call her cute, but to me she appeared just like a dumb kid playing make-believe. Besides, think of it this way, since all player characters were created, it’d be weirder for them not be end up looking cool, or pretty, or cute, or whatever.

Well, admittedly I probably had a similar expression to her when I first realized it as well, but this really is a serious problem. To make matters even worse the ‘submit a ticket’ button to report issues and glitches has been disabled as well. I hovered over it but it was a greyed button and nothing happened.

“Wh-wh-wh-what should we do?!” shouted the noblewoman, her eyes spinning around like crazy and sweat dripping like a waterfall. “That’s right! I could contact my guild and…” as she tried doing that her voice trailed off and that's when her expression seriously became blank. It was actually kind of scary.

“What's wrong?”

“It’s… gone. My guild list is… blank.”

I never had a guild so that was the norm for me. Though, I can kind of see why she was so panicked right now. She was the type that most enjoyed it while playing with friends, well, that’s probably the correct way to play an MMORPG to begin with. That said, I did have a moderate friend’s list, but… “as expected, even the friend’s list is empty.”

“Just what is going on?”

“Be that as I may, how long are you going to dress like that?” I asked. What she was wearing was the level 1 starter outfit which offered no defensive or offensive bonuses. It was a ragged grey shirt and skirt- very dull and unimpressive. She even had a crude wooden staff that might as well have just been a branch she picked off from a tree, lying to her side which she probably didn’t notice.

“Eh? Eh?! What is this?! Why am I wearing something like this?!”

“I was wearing the same thing when I woke up. I don’t want to think of it like this, but it could be that our characters were reset. That is, except for our inventory for some reason.”

She wasn’t listening at all, and I presumed she was searching through her inventory for something more suitable to wear. “Oh no! These are all level 200 equipments! It’s not letting me wear them!” she sounded genuinely distressed.

Incidentally level 200 was the cap, although I did hear of a patch that would increase it soon. I wonder if it was this patch...

“What about your previous gear? The ones you would've worn when levelling up?”

“I scraped them for spare parts when I was levelling up my alchemy sub-profession,” she replied while shedding tears of regret. I won’t lie, that got a bit of a kick from me seeing her so down. Whoops, my ‘S’ is showing. In any case, that wasn’t all that odd considering there was no real point to keeping low-level equipment other than for novelty or sentimental purposes. Well, if you had alternative characters they could inherit it as well, but looking at her she’s probably the type that only ever played one character forever. “B-but wait, how come you have all your equipment?” she seemed mortified.

Stolen novel; please report.

“I don’t, the clothes I’m wearing now,” which was a maid outfit, “is just a cash item skin. They don’t provide any combat benefits and is just for appearance’s sake.” This game was mostly free-to-play with an exorbitant- almost exploitative- cash shop that sold many vanity items. Admittedly, I spent quite a bit of money in them but my flavour-of-the-month right now was this cute, black and white maid outfit. Skins go on top of regular equipment, so we could doll up however we wanted while maintaining our original statistics. It was actually hilarious to see a maid uniform tank a hit from a sledgehammer.

“Oh… Then what should I do…?” she hung her head and murmured. She was like a puppy searching for her lost owner, and if I just closed my eyes and visualize it I could see small, dropping dog ears and an unenthusiastic tail.

“Haaa…” I let out a sigh and retrieved several items from my inventory. “Here, take these,” I told her as I tossed several full sets of magician class equipment including the staff. Equipment is usually swapped out every ten levels for better ones, but I had a habit of changing them out every twenty levels because it was much less tedious that way. These equipments were from levels 1 to 180- she should have her own endgame equipment anyway. There were nine sets in total and all fully upgraded and enchanted with the best runes. Basically, they were the best possible gear to wear at each twenty levels.

Her reaction was a bit funny. She had a face as though she had just seen a ghost. “Wh-why are you giving me these? Or rather, why do you even have magician equipment?” she asked but still took them since she had no other option to accept my charity. Well, I wasn’t using them now and if we’re going to be stuck in this situation for a while I’d rather have her be at least somewhat useful. Besides, this makes me seem like a bigger person that she was, doesn’t it?

“Why do I have them? Because I have alts. Don’t you?”

“No… I’ve only ever played with this character.”

Yeah, I figured as much. “Uwaaa… that’s actually pretty amazing. How can you stand playing one character for years on end? I’d go insane.”

“Hmph! It’s called dedication!” she replied with a smug face as if to tell me she’s beaten me at something. I suppose I shouldn’t judge other people's play style; if they wanted to play one character forever that’s none of my business. To be fair, she probably knew more about her main class than I did since I hopped between many characters. In a way it was ‘depth vs. variety’, though I think variety is just a tad bit more useful, but feelings on that topic vary between person to person. “Anyway,” she called out to me with a genuinely soft smile- I didn’t think the game could pull off such detailed textures. “Thanks for the equipment. You’re a much kinder person than I thought.”

Even though I didn’t want to admit it, my face heated up at that moment. “R-right… yeah, it’d be a pain if you became useless because you didn’t have the proper equipment.”

“Ah? What’s this?” she had a condescending smirk as she poked the side of my cheeks. “You’re all red. Don’t tell me you've fallen for me? Fufufu, sorry but I’m a straight batter.”

“Enough! I don’t swing that way either!” I knocked her hand away from me.

She snickered to herself and then extended her hand. “I’m ‘Liliana De Garreau’, though that’s just my character’s name. I know we don’t exactly have the best history with each other, but I hope we can still get along.” When she said proper stuff like that and wasn’t role-playing as an obnoxious noblewoman she could be fairly likeable... I thought fleetingly.

I reached out and hesitantly accepted her hand. “My name is ‘Sherry’. Sherry Airgetlamh. Likewise, it is merely the name of my character.” Airgetlamh translated to ‘silver arm’ because of my obvious silver right arm, and as for why Sherry… well, it was my favourite drink. “In any case, it's no use sitting around here and wondering what’s going on. For now we should try going to the nearest town,” I suggested.

As we were about to leave we heard the sound of light footsteps coming from our left. “Hmm?” turning to the source I noticed two goblins curiously approaching us. They were a sickly, pale green and drooled from their large, disgusting mouths. They were about the size of children, but the most disturbing part about them was their thin, bony arms which creeped me out. “Eww,” I reflexive gagged.

“That does remind me, goblins are supposed to roam these pastures,” Liliana commented as if she remembered something nostalgic. I mean, sure, there was that one quest that had us flushing out a goblin lair, which was one of our very first quests, so I can sort of understand, but they were still goblins…

“Disgusting,” I dismissed as I conjured up small throwing knives into my hand I tossed them half-heartedly. The daggers flew straight into their ugly faces and they screeched real loudly, almost too loudly to the point it almost seemed like it could burst my ear drums. After a few seconds the goblins collapsed into the floor and started bleeding out… wait, bleeding out?

“That was a waste of time,” Liliana sighed and started to walk away, but I grabbed the back collar of her shirt and stopped her. “Ooof, kuh…! What are you doing?! Are you trying to choke me?!”

I pointed towards the two goblin corpses that had yet to disappear. “Hey, those goblin corpses are still there.”

“Huh? What are you daydreaming about? All corpses should disappear after a... few... seconds?” her words trailed off as she stared at the dead goblins.