“I’m level 25 now! I just got this cool ability...” one girl said from a seat near the front of the classroom.

“Have you gone to the pirate dungeon yet? I hear there is a ton of treasure there...” said another.

“There’s a pirate dungeon?” the first replied. Dassah’s eyes flicked up.

“Is no one worried about what happened to the professor?” a third entered the conversation, her distressed voice accompanied by a worried expression.

“He probably just forgot to set his alarm. Wouldn’t be the first time. Anyway, if you go to the docks in Renethal...” the second continued.

Dassah watched from the sidelines, eavesdropping as she finished typing her essay for her Intergalactic Studies class. She should have been having her communications class now, but the professor was a no-show, so the faculty had sent someone to oversee it as a free study period. There were times when the classes on the ‘Berg reminded her more of a high school than a university.

On the other hand, she wasn’t sure this study hall was a normal reaction to the professor’s absence, as a group of boys to the side was whining more about ‘new rules’ than anything else.

“I mean, I have work to do that I could be doing instead,” one man said. “They could at least let us go back to go to the library or cafeteria like they used to.”

Another was squeezing the tip of his tail nervously, saying, “They are only doing this to protect us. They haven’t gone through something like this before...”

The first kicked his seat, causing the second to jump. “The murders only happen at night. There isn’t a reason for these stupid new rules to affect us during the day. Not to mention, they only affect our class. They aren’t protecting anyone...”

“Didn’t you hear them say that no one is allowed to leave their respective ‘Bergs right now? It’s not just us...”

“Whatever...”

Though she didn’t disagree with the first’s sentiment, having just come from Earth recently, Dassah felt these lock-down procedures were relatively normal.

Her assignment finished, Dassah putzed around with her WristComp, pulling up her text messages on the holo screen. Her curiosity wanted her to send a message to Grim, asking if he knew anything, but she clicked on Elric’s name instead.

-Dassah: Hey!

-Elric: Noona!

-Elric: What happened Saturday? You suddenly went offline!

-Dassah: It’s a long story. Basically, I got PKed.

-Elric: D: Pked? By who? Why?

-Dassah: ./sigh. BronzePaw’s brother. Because of a quest. It’s been dealt with.

-Elric: Poor Noona!

-Dassah: It’s fine, really. Are you going to be on later?

-Elric: I should be ~ Are you ready to start that corruption quest?

-Dassah: Not quite. Thanks to being PKed I have some quests to finish up in the Cats, but I need some help. You game? I really need someone else with Veil Sight.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

-Elric: Of course!

-Dassah: Awesome! I’ll meet you in-game tonight, then!

-Elric: See you!

After sending some messages to Stella and Bahena requesting similar backup, she pulled up the forums surrounding Miala De Ri and started reading the comments about the corruption in the forest. Her and her group hadn’t been the only ones to have stumbled in on the powerful creatures and the horrible black goo.

A few had even uncovered the name Octarius—but none had seemed to have made the Hunter’s Guild Connection yet. Part of this, it seemed, was that it was an event that looked to have started within the past week, so players were still trying to figure out the mysteries behind it.

When she searched for Octarius, though, she was surprised at how much information there was about him — but it painted a very different picture than the one that she had gotten from Lithe.

Crown Prince Octarius was hailed as a great hero of the realms; a savior of the kingdom. A general without equal. His glowing reputation wasn’t only in the eyes of the NPCs but players as well.

It seemed like he was part of one of the major questlines in the TheirWorld story, being one of the ones to lead the charge against the Void Lord.

And, if the current lore was anything to go by, it was he who gets the credit for the slaying of the Void Lord’s four generals—including one, Jormund the Pale.

A player named Nemerous wrote:

The Devs have already pretty much told us that the cycle of corruption is something that is going to run a check every month to see if it will run the Void Lord event or not based on the quests the players as a whole have completed. It’s been hinted that there is a similar event if quests on the opposite spectrum are in the majority, similar to how the special class trainers are determined, but since it’s never been run, the information has never been made public.

To which a player named Thexcross replied:

If it works on the same lore-is-determined-by-popular-choice that everything else in the game is, then shouldn’t there be three options? The High Priestess Reitha, the Ever Burning, occasionally becomes the Raid Boss Reitha, the Pestilence, and has also been occasionally been seen as Reitha, the Grey Lady, in the White Tower of Keir in the absence of the other two.

If we assume that it’s a Good-Neutral-Evil system, then what would be the possible outcomes?

Various players responded to bits of this, but a player named Arionia responded with:

It doesn’t really make sense to call it a Good-Neutral-Evil system; after all, if you are playing a character who spends a lot of time in the Veil, you’d learn that some of those corrupted characters are actually good people, and more and more you see players fighting on the side of the Void Lord, rather than against them—their main enemy being the Che as a whole, though there is a lot of spite towards the Imperial Capital and the nobility. In this case, it’s clear that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are subjective. I’d call it more or less a chess game of equally positioned Black and White pieces with a neutral force between them. Veil - Balance - Che.

With this idea, if we are fighting the Void Lord, then the players are favoring the Che in their quests, while the middle option is players granting Che and Veil an equal amount of favor, which would either mean that nothing would happen or, since that would be really boring, I’d like to see it trigger some sort of festival or thanksgiving event. And if the players were to favor the Veil, then I assume that the main raid quest of the month would be fighting against the Imperial Capital.

Dassah leaned back in her chair and read through a few more comments, but most liked the Che vs the Veil idea—roughly, Dassah agreed.

But if Octarius was the cause of the growing corruption in the world, as Lithe and Amikavi had insinuated, then Octarius ends up fighting against the demon that he, himself, summoned.

If Octarius were aware of this, then wouldn’t that make him an evil character?

Or was that simply because Dassah herself was, for all intents and purposes, on the side of the Veil?

Thinking about it all gave her a headache, and she closed her screen. Once she finished and turned in the rest of her Catacombs quest, the next thing that they had to do was find Octavian.

And what if he did know that killing the beasts would summon the Void Lord? What did that make him? What choice would be left to Guin and her companions?

Whatever the case, it was very unlikely that they would be of a level to take him down on their own. If they ever had to fight against the Imperial Capital, she had to assume that Prince Octarius would be, at the very least, one of the Raid Bosses, if not the final boss.

The instructor who had told them to use the class as a study poked his head back into the room and told them that they were free to leave. The class did a little celebration of cheers and backed their things up. Dassah swung her purse over her shoulder and followed the crowd out.

It had already been a long day, but she was finally ready to return to TheirWorld.