Leon Richardson sat behind a computer desk once more, this time in the luxurious office turned workshop inside of his home. Again he was trapped, staring at his monitor in a deep fog, trying to avoid the gazes of the photographs adorning the walls as he thought deeply about the words spoken by Alexy Rodette. His stomach gurgled in hunger, but he ignored it, something he often did nowadays.
Hunger was a good motivator, over time it would force him from the fog where he could continue with his work, keep going with the plan.
'It's about that time,' he told himself. 'It’s about time I get back to it. Get back to work. Otherwise, I will die. I will have no second chance.'
His silent arguments with himself often went this route, his survival instinct assuring him of his death, trying to force him back on track. It had worked wonders at first, when he first came up with his plan. He had worked with a sense of feverous motivation and zeal nearly unheard of for his past self, only occasionally having to re-convince himself out of the fog.
The problem then came when he was forced to motivate himself many times over a long period. The fog kept coming back, seemingly stronger each time. Things looked more and more hopeless even as he slowly carried out each step of his plan, and now here he was, afraid to travel around his own home, modified by his own hands, because of a few pictures on the walls. A few memories in every room. A few seemingly small details which, in a mind as deeply affected as his own, seemed magnified a hundred times until they each struck him like a hammer.
‘I’m going to die.’ He thought.
‘I’m going to die.’
‘I’m going TO DIE.’
The third time it flashed through his mind, a bit of fear came with it. A fear of the unknown, a fear of what would happen to him after his death. Fear worked as another great motivator, when all else failed. It was second on the list of things that could return him from the fog.
Of course, sometimes it also ended up pushing him in even deeper as he shrunk back, sinking into a pit of denial that seemed to scream at fate, loudly and falsely assuring it that no, he wouldn’t die, how could he? He was immortal! He would never die. How could he live only to die?
That was too senseless, therefore, it could not happen.
This too was wrong, he knew that.
Fortunately, his fear of the unknown served him well this time, snapping him out of his revere and bringing him back to the present. He looked down at the tablet in front of him, filled with his neat handwriting and labeled ‘The keys to a new life.’ It was a nice bullet point list, perfectly organized with key ideas and details under each main topic. It read:
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The Keys To a New Life.
1 - Create the Personality Matrix Uploader - DONE
He hadn’t known what to call it until it was halfway finished, at first simply calling it the ‘second-life device.’ It had a nice ring to it, if he did say so himself. He had first had to design the chipset to be plugged into the modified game pod he had installed into his home, something that he had a right to have as a game developer who sometimes worked remotely from home. Then he’d had to code out the entire process of taking his mind and, instead of entering the game in a dreamlike state the way the players would, instead uploading it in its entirety to the body of the NPC he would make.
It had taken him nearly eight months to complete, and many sections of the code had been shamelessly stolen from the games own developmental code - the part that he had access to. He obviously had no access whatsoever to the code that ran the games AI or the massive physics engine that powered New Era Online. Regardless, he had done it. It could be considered the crowning achievement of his life, one that, if his plan was carried out well, no one would ever know that he had accomplished.
2 - Review the code and check for errors in the PMU - DONE
It had taken him weeks to finish the process, which was somehow even harder to do than inventing the code from scratch. When he had first written it, he was inventing something. Creating something new. It was a wonderful piece of technology that bared his heart and soul, and writing it had actually been something he thought he could have enjoyed. If he even knew what happiness felt like anymore, he probably would have felt it during the creation process.
Reviewing it, however, had been a long, endless slog of constantly checking and rechecking his work, pouring over every line and making sure that each one fit, that there would be no errors. He wouldn’t get a second chance at this, any errors would result in unknown and possibly terrible consequences. What if he transferred himself into the game, only to realize he didn’t know his own name? Or perhaps, how to speak?
What if he forgot who he was? Or something small, like how many different gizmo’s he had made over the years? Some things he wouldn’t mind forgetting, like Jennifer, the original source of his pain. But it wasn’t selective, nor was it all-or-nothing. It was more like ‘hopefully, I’ll keep all of it.’
3 - Finalize the process with my lawyer - PENDING
This one he had actually not procrastinated on. The entire outcome on what he wished his lawyer to do after his death depended on if he was able to complete the PMU or not, which he had only just finished. Now he would have to go and speak with his lawyer, Michael Clairmont, and sign the paperwork containing his will, as well as go over how he would like his body to be disposed of. (‘Disposed of.’ He shivered at the thought. ’How callous the world can be.’)
The main point here was that he needed to make sure the lawyer not only disposed of his body, but the game pod as well. The game pod would only be used as a medium to put him into the game, a springboard, so to speak, meaning that after the PMU uploaded his mind, he was no longer truly being housed inside the game pod and would instead exist as code inside the game's hidden mainframe. This meant that it was absolutely essential that no one discovered his tampering with the game pod, nor his invention of the PMU. If either of these things was discovered, it wasn’t a stretch to imagine that someone would eventually figure out that he had put himself into the game. Once they did, he could only imagine what kind of control they might have on him from the outside world.
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That outcome was unacceptable to him, thus, the game pod and all of his work must be destroyed upon a successful upload.
4 - Create an NPC/Player hybrid - IN PROGRESS
He had actually nearly completed this part of the plan. Fortunately for him, his main purpose at E-World was to code the interface for the players, and one of the earliest tweaks he had added to the interface system was the ability for dev testing accounts to access that interface the same way a player would.
This was something that other NPCs would be unable to do or even understand. To them, there was a class system and they had levels and stats just like players would, but it was intangible. The system was essentially invisible and unknowable to the NPCs, and they wouldn’t even understand it if a player were to attempt to describe it to them. The closest understanding the NPCs would have was the existence of power tiers and class archetypes.
Not only would he have access to the system as an NPC, but he would also have access to the internet and player forums. This was extremely important to him for multiple reasons, namely that he had come from this world, Earth, and the complete loss of any way to see what went on in the day to day lives of the people living on it would be a true tragedy to him - even if he had never really interacted with people before.
Another reason was because he needed to know what the players and news might say about him.
His mantra going into this new world was that he would be too dependable for anyone to forget, and in order to truly change himself, he knew he would need to interact with many people, players and NPCs alike. Within the game world he had few choices if he wanted to avoid possible deletion, the safest being that he could remain anonymous and obscure, just another NPC in this massive world who played no major part in the story. This choice was counterintuitive to his goals, and he would avoid it like the plague.
Another choice was to be a very positive influence on the players, or at least one positive enough to where more players wanted him in the game than players wanted him out of it. Players would be outraged if a beloved character suddenly died, which could even cause E-World itself to side with him.
However, If he created a strong surge of dislike among the players and had his account flagged, it would only be a matter of time before he met an unavoidable death within the game...
Creating the actual NPC itself was nearly complete, he just needed another hour or two to finalize the character creation process and ensure that it looked the way he wanted to look, he would have to live as this person after all! He also wanted to take some extra time to study everything that his character would need, picking what would be appropriate for a level 1 character that wouldn't generate too much suspicion.
4 - Decide on a starting location - COMPLETE (mostly)
The reason he had ‘mostly’ next to complete was because his inner meticulousness and careful nature was still agonizing over his choices. He could start the game in almost any city he wanted, being that he was creating and placing an NPC using a dev account and wasn’t joining the game as a player would.
The players would go through a tutorial before being released from what the game referred to as an ‘Ancestor Tower.’ This would make any and all players be immediately noticed by the NPCs around them as the belief in ancestors and reincarnation was strongly held among the NPCs of Ezuno, the first playable world in New Era Online.
He had a choice between four major continents, each one composed of a single ruling country which loosely controlled all of the lands within the bounds of their respective landmasses. Each had their own benefits and disadvantages, heritages, histories, backgrounds, ecosystems, and storylines. Leon had already decided on the class type he wanted, and though he was firm on this point, he still internally argued with himself over which country would allow him to grow the most.
He was mostly set on Luglain, which was predominantly a warrior based culture and contained the only complete warrior pathway on the planet. This was actually not something that he cared about, as he would have the benefits of the system. He would be able to level up without being forced to learn massive amounts of knowledge or spend years learning specific subjects in order to be powerful. Instead, what he cared about was that in a country filled with warriors, there would be less NPCs with experience discovering and fighting those with mage classes.
This was a class type he had set his heart on, and he had good reason not to choose Astus to the south, a country predominantly housing mages with high levels of magical strength. As for the other two countries, he did not even consider them. Eskana, a larger country to the west of Luglain and Astus, was almost a ‘wild west’ comparatively, the monsters, beasts, and roaming bandits there would crush him until he reached a higher level.
The Ashia Isles to the far west were similarly out of reach, due to the proliferation of engineers there and the sheer inaccessibility of the country. These were the most remote lands where he would get the least interaction with others, and so it was a country he was unwilling to pick.
5 - Decide on a path to growth - IN PROGRESS
This was the last point on his list and the only one he was comfortable with not finishing before he started his new life. The reason for that was because there were just too many options for him. He was already dead set on his class - mage - and he knew firmly what he wanted to specialize in, chronomancy.
It was an idea that had stuck firmly and unshakably within his heart, it was also one he knew wouldn’t be immediately flagged as ‘immersion breaking’ or ‘unbeatable.’ Though it was a class which would possess rather extreme strength at the later stages, there were many such classes in New Era Online that could be considered part of that niche.
Leon also had access to a hidden piece of knowledge that almost no player would have - mainly that the game would expand into the universe! At first, this did not seem important when choosing a class, but the key part of this was that once the player reached level 10 they would be asked by the system to visualize and describe to themselves the power that they most wanted to have, and then picture it at its absolute highest level of strength. The system would then create a character ability tree with that power at the highest peak, and then distribute powers throughout the leveling process that matched the players ability and strength, while also building them up to reach their aforementioned ‘peak.’
This was one of the main selling points of the game, the fact that a player or NPC could have almost any power imaginable, and all of these powers were separated into three class types - Warrior, Mage, and Engineer. In other words, the players, who did not know that New Era Online would be expanding into the galaxy, would reach level 10 and imagine themselves having incredibly strong, planet changing abilities. This would actually limit them at peak levels! For example, a player might reach level 10 and imagine that he wants to eventually be so strong he could split a mountain with a single chop of an axe, or be so magically powerful that they could call down meteors from the heavens to rain down on their enemies. While this would still be powerful, how could it compare to someone who imagined themselves eventually having powers that could affect massive areas of space?
The players would learn this eventually, but until they did, Leon and the few who were lucky enough to pick a powerful starting point would have a huge advantage in the later stages of the game.
Leon had already figured out what he would visualize when he reached level 10, his only problem was that he was unsure of how he wanted to achieve those levels. He knew that he did not want to become a crafter, as his whole goal was to change himself into a man of action, and he wouldn’t be able to do that if he spent too much time crafting. This meant that, in order to level up, he would have to kill others. While this didn’t necessarily mean other people, players or NPCs alike, it was almost inevitable if he were to become an adventurer in the game. He was rather apprehensive when it came to killing, furthermore, killing others always carried the risk of being killed himself!
He had no idea if he would be able to revive the same way a player would while in the game, and he had no intentions of finding out. This was something that he would consider further once he was in the game and had a greater idea of what opportunities lay in his surroundings.
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With his list visualized and his key tasks reviewed, he knew he had a solid foundation for entering the game - even if he subconsciously wanted to nitpick the details. At this point he only had a few months until his body could no longer survive, and any further tweaking of his plans would only result in delays that would snowball until he eventually collapsed in his chair, unable to climb into his pod and press the start button. The first three points were the most crucial, absolutely important keys to his new life, and two of them were already complete.
Leon almost slumped back in chair with the knowledge that he was nearly there, content to slide back into the fog again, but instead he took a deep breath, pulled out his phone, and searched through his contacts for his lawyer. After staring at the name on his screen for a few moments, he looked one final time at the list before turning once more to his phone.
With a small click noise, he pressed the ‘call’ button.