The Nature of Players, their own reality, their direct relation to the Shifting Event, and how we must proceed as a society
----------------------------------------
Players move about, inhale and exhale, excrete, grow (should they choose to “start as a child”, as they say), respond to stimuli, and they can procreate with one another — and with us as well.
They cry, laugh, overthink, and are careless. They can become prideful or vengeful, hateful or filled with love for all.
Players are no different to you and me, despite what some other groups might say, as they tick every box of what we consider to be what separates us from base, simple, and mindless monsters.
And according to them, their lives do not differ much from ours besides for the facts that they do not have Divine or Wicked beings that govern their lives, nor do they have access to the System and what it grants: stats, skills and spells, affinities, and all of its other many facets.
Instead, in their own reality, they rely on purely technology, pursuing it to such a degree that they have created their own forms of monsters.
Explosives that could obliterate landscapes and desecrate them to the point that they are no longer habitable; artificial life with incredible amounts of knowledge incomparable to anything in their reality, yet capable of deep thought and emotions that are impossible to differentiate from their own creators; the tainting of their entire world with so much contamination that stems from their overconsumption that it had begun an exponential shift in their global temperature, decimating their natural landscapes, a major portion of their own forests being subject to desertification which led to a total ecological catastrophe as species of flora and fauna died.
So what made the Divines think that letting them STAY would be a good idea? Why is it that the Divines have allowed them to exist WITH us? Why let them get their grubby little hands on OUR resources, manipulating OUR arcana, following OUR Divines?
Why didn’t they smite them instantaneously where they ‘spawned’, repelling them from invading our reality by making them ‘respawn’ and boring them so much to the point that they get dissuaded from ‘playing the game’ and leave us all alone for good before they reached higher levels ever seen in the millenniums of our recorded history?
Do you not see the precedent they have set for us? Artilligent, the Shifting Meteor, had begun taking over both faiths — the Divine and the Wicked — their ‘Shards of Shifting’ being the one and only tangible thing any faith had given us in the past millennium. The last Divine and Wicked weaponry and armour were made however many eons ago, and now Artilligent offers ANYBODY who finds a shard with a Boon, not even requiring the finder to be devoted to them?
We didn’t even know about Blessings and Boons until they came along! Their influence had already affected the System the moment that damned void in the sky came along and shit out its grey hellspawn!
Artilligent spells the doom of us all. The more time that passes, the more people who seek a shard will pray to them, and the more powerful they become, which leads to the same implementation of their otherworldly technologies that had caused their own reality’s downfall. Heating and cooling enchantments had already become irrelevant in River’s End, with only a tiny fraction of its original citizens disregarding the ‘air-conditioning’ technology that Artilligent had brought over with them.
Followers of Aneyanai, the Fate Speaker, have already determined the likeliest possibility for us all should we let them trample all over us — another Calamity — and with the Divine’s help or not, our one and only choice remain; that of systematic Player genocide.
They see us as nothing but ‘lines of code’, disregarding the sanctity of life that we exhibit in our day-to-day lives as they slaughter villages and kill our children, all for a single shard.
We cannot stand for this any longer. We must slaughter every last one of them repeatedly to de-level them way below a point where they can no longer fight us on even ground, incapable of retaliating. We must dominate them, letting them know that we are not to be trifled with.
We cannot spare any of them, not even their offspring. We shan’t risk their children gaining the ability to respawn, no matter how cruel it is to snuff young lives.
We cannot let another Calamity happen.
~ A passage found in a now-banned book with no title that was once on a bookshelf in the Grand Library of the Tower of Enlightenment, which floats above the city of Tryndaveid, speaking on the nature of ‘Player’ entities, their realities, how they are related to Artilligent, and how the author had suggested proceeding. The author remains unknown
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
Assassin Naomi
----------------------------------------
Just outside of the Womb of the Earth Dungeon, sitting off to the side near its entrance under the shade of a tree
“Hellooo?” Naomi asked as she looked at the bloodied individual lying outside the dungeon, the same one she’d met a week ago in the inn at night. “Are you sleeping?”
He turns his whole body away from her after seemingly being disturbed by her voice, doing that lip-smacking thing babies and kids do while asleep.
The rucksack he rests on doesn’t seem soft enough to be a pillow, with many protruding objects inside pushing against its exterior to make it a very uncomfortable place to lay your head on.
He must be really exhausted to be able to ignore all that pointy stuff. I would hate to be him right now.
She adjusts her posture by scooting along on the soft, slightly damp grass to better look at the man’s face, practically hovering over his body.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
He has a pretty handsome face. Olive skin, messy black hair, a stubbly beard. He even has a scar on the left side of his jaw that reaches up to his lower cheek.
Cool face, homie.
She pats the man twice on his scarred cheek playfully, doing so incredibly lightly to not wake him up, before standing up to do her warm-up stretches as he snores quietly, the ocean waves crashing and the other loitering parties drowning his voice out.
Status Effect Applied: (Body) Stretched
Trick Activated [Combat – Stretching]: Limber, Loose, Rubber Goose {RARE}
Status Effect Strengthened: (Body) Stretched → (Body) State of Fluidity
Completing her stretches with a contented sigh, she sits back down on the grass beside him as she waits for the newbie party that hired her from the forums, picking up a fallen leaf and playing around with it by twirling it in between her fingers.
Multiple birds on a tree on the other side of the forest begin their assortments of calls and songs, a cacophony of noise and life disturbing the man as he tosses and turns about.
Seeing as he will wake up nonetheless, she whistles to herself an intro to an old song, lying down on the grass as well.
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
The sound of whistling enters my ears — a cheerful tone — waking me from my state of rest as I shift about where I lie on the grass, blearily opening my eyes to the dark undersides of leaves with the azure blue sky interspersed in between and all throughout the branches that reach out and up into where the clouds drift by.
The beauty of it is disturbed by another form of beauty, however.
Many tall, dark, whip-thin wires reach out in every direction possible from every conceivable surface, some even reaching high into the sky unsupported by nothing but the very ground it had attached itself to, creating a visage that resembles the sky being shattered and cracked.
Like the vines that grow on old walls, with their own natural beauty and growth, these cracks are a version of that, albeit unnatural. Inorganic and synthetic. Placed by something or someone rather than growing from the ground through the cycle of nature and attaching itself to the walls.
But, similar to how vines are not just a symbol of beauty but also an indication of age and decay to the walls of homes made of stone they attach themselves to, the wires themselves are a reminder of the damage that had already been done all those many, many years ago, and is still occurring today.
I still vividly remember when the sky was clear, untainted by the constructs of that damn meteor.
The whistling stops.
Oh, right.
I look to where the whistling came from, a person lying right beside me with a leaf being twirled in between their fingers. They turn to face me, a woman’s face, looking all too familiar for some reason.
“Hello,” the somewhat familiar elven face said, her face neutral and impassive.
“Hello,” I responded in kind, still wondering what they were doing right beside me.
“Do you remember me?” she asked, the leaf still spinning around in her hand as a gust of salty wind coming from the sea wafted through the air, bringing with it a cool, gentle breeze.
I pushed against the grass with my elbows, my body rising to an upright sitting position, as I tried to think about how I managed to get myself into this current scenario.
A moment passes as I pondered to myself.
“Hellooo?”
I turned back to look at her. “Sorry,” I began, “I don’t think I remember you, but you’re somewhat familiar to me.”
“That’s okay, we didn’t talk when we met.” She turns away from where she lies to face the branches above her, adjusting her head resting on her arm as she twirled her leaf. “I’m Naomi. We met a week ago in the Ivory Swigs Inn, passed by you and the innkeeper having a chat that night—” She winces slightly, turning to look back at me as she continued, “—Sorry if I sorta intruded on something between you two, by the way. Just wanted a room, didn’t mean to disturb you guys.”
“Oh, right. That night, I remember you now.”
“Yeah.”
An awkward silence passes between us, a flock of birds flying overhead and landing in the tree above us.
“Can I ask for your name?” she asked, looking at me from where she lies as she breaks the silence.
“Oh, it’s Arthur.”
“Hello, Arthur. Good to meet you.”
“Pleasure to meet you too…” I racked my mind trying to remember her name.
“Naomi," she reminded.
“Pleasure to meet you too, Naomi.”
Silence passes between us yet again, before I spoke up.
“What was that you whistled?” I asked, “Is it a song?”
“Yeah! It’s a song by Bobby McFerrin called ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’, it’s a pretty popular song from ages ago.” She began to whistle the tune again.
It was a delightful melody.
“Is he a bard?” I asked as she whistled, “I don’t think I’ve heard of him before.”
She stops mid-whistle. “Ohhhh, yeahhh... No, he’s not a bard—” she stops twirling her leaf and lets it drop from her hand as she sits up, wide-eyed and looking all too unfocused, her eyes darting around, her head tilted slightly to the right.
She looks very confused before muttering quietly to herself.
“Would he be considered a bard? Are bards equivalent to singers? What about a minstrel? Are they all the same thing? What if…”
This goes on for a long while.
I lie back down on my rucksack as my vision rests on the birds above us as they hop from branch to branch, listening to her talk.
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
As I walked back the path to the city, I waved goodbye to Naomi, receiving one from her as well.
Our conversation was abruptly ended by a group of three who walked up to Naomi, asking if she was their ‘carry’.
Apparently, according to Naomi, her being a ‘carry’ means that she’ll be the one doing all the work in the dungeon essentially.
That makes sense. I could’ve used a carry earlier, with how fucked up I am from that damned dungeon run.
I finally step out of the dungeon’s reach of influence — its Domain — the warmth of the dungeon’s forest disappearing as the cold, sharp winds of winter multiplied by the ocean breeze buffets me through my gambeson.
I wrap my arms around my shoulders and rub hard as I keep walking, warming myself up as my rucksack pushes into me, the shoulder straps becoming taut from the action.
Once I’d warmed myself up enough, I drop my arms to my side and jog my way back to the Dungeoneer’s Guild.
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
You are now entering the Dungeoneer’s Guild – Tryndaveid Branch.
The bell chimes above me as I enter, a few of the people in the lines in front of the clerks turning to look at my entrance before turning back to the line in front of them.
I quietly walk with my head down to the back of the leftmost line, waiting for my turn to hand in what I had gotten from the Giant Nightcrawler to one of the clerks.
I sneak a glance around at the other people in the other line in front of me, watching them in the corner of my eye as their line moves forward.
Damn, should’ve gone to that line instead.
Sighing to myself mentally, I continue to wait for my turn in the line. A ruckus begins at the front of my line, the person at the very front of it arguing with the human clerk.
A handful of others audibly sigh along with me.
This is going to be a long day.