Jay logged into the game when he got home thirty minutes later. He didn’t want to keep Taylor Lynn waiting, but most of all, it was a good escape from the cleaning he should have been doing. The fact of the matter was pretty clear from the piles of clutter hanging around his living room. He brushed aside an overdue electricity bill to sit on his couch and get started.
The VR goggles had user accounts, which included a friend list feature. He sorted through the hundred odd entries in his friend list, found the entry for Taylor Lynn, TLGedurmom, and sent her a message to let her know he was online. Jay was still logged into his old tag: ThrivinNotSurvivin.
With that taken care of, he downloaded the game from the device’s internal content distribution store. It was fast on gigabit internet. Once his account was created, he logged into the game immediately.
It had only taken thirty minutes to get set-up, but throughout the whole process, he had needed to ignore a slew of messages. All twenty messages were the exact same question from Taylor Lynn: Are you ready yet, nerd?
He knew she would be even more insufferable if he didn’t message her back. Jay sent one message back as he reached the character creation screen: Creating my Elf.
The system mapped his known measurements and facial array to create the basis of a character avatar. Jay was always impressed with the various different sensors connected to his hands and legs through the VR system.
According to his account, Jay hadn’t logged in since playing Tempest Stormlords, an adventure game set in the heavens, 438 days ago. He remembered that as the last time Taylor Lynn had broken him down.
He went to choose his class and found a character creation screen different than what he was used to. There were fifteen different character options available to him, with each option pairing a faction and race with a character class.
Player choice was an important part of every game he had ever played. His eyes narrowed at the screen as he thought through his options. According to the supporting text on the side of the screen, all options were randomized for each player.
Jay’s choices were narrowed severely by the need to choose an Elf, so he completely ignored the other factions to save time. His character model didn’t change much as it adapted to an Elf, although he lost a few years off his face and his stubble disappeared. He could have altered it further, but Jay decided to go with the model based on his own appearance.
The three remaining options seemed to follow the traditional pattern of melee, ranged, and mage archetypes.
He focused on the melee-type first. He often chose melee character types, because Taylor Lynn always played a mage-type class. The starter armor looked like basic chain mail gear, and the avatar carried a torch as a weapon, which Jay thought was a little strange. The class was called Torchlight and featured a blend of bludgeoning melee attacks and fire magic. That didn’t seem at all like a traditional melee class to him, so he decided to look over the other two classes as well, to see what was on offer.
The Rune Cleric seemed to fill the “mage” archetype, but it immediately telegraphed something he did not want to play: healer. Nope, Jay instantly dismissed that as an option. He would never let himself be subjected to Taylor Lynn’s requests to “heal me, priest boy” ever again.
The final option was even weirder: Monster Hunter. Jay thought the name was ridiculous since everyone ended up hunting monsters. It didn’t seem to him like the class would have that much to add, but the description spoke of being driven near to extinction by demons from other worlds, which hooked his interest. Demons from other worlds were always cool.
As Jay was looking over the advertised set of abilities, which were divided across ranged, melee, and magic, the game made his selection for him. He had never seen anything like this happen before. The game made selections for him programmatically. Moments later, as he tried to take control back, he was sent into the game world as James Morris, Elven Monster Hunter. There was no explanation of why his control was ripped from him.
He entered in the midst of a beautiful forest. Jay noticed forest creatures flitting around him and wanted to compliment the developers on the spot. A small squirrel noticed him phase into the game nearby and scurried away. The level of detail shown in the animations, even using only the goggle-based gear, was breathtaking.
And he could hear the little sounds of rustling leaves and chattering animals, proving to his senses that he was really in an Elven Forest.
When he looked up, the strange forest canopy hit him even harder than the animals. The Elvish trees were of an almost uniform shape, but featured various leaves of blue, purple, and orange. It made for a beautiful canopy that was also rather difficult to look at due to the vibrancy.
Jay walked closer to inspect one of the trees. When he touched the tree, he could feel the rough sensory feedback from his gloves. The oddest thing about the tree was the color of the bark. It was brown, but emitting a small bluish glow from the seams. He scraped a little bark off the tree and attained one unit of an item called Burlen Bark.
He was still taking in the otherworldly quality of his surroundings, when suddenly an ear-piercing yell rang out.
“It’s time to party!” Taylor Lynn called out. It was exactly like she was really screaming in his ear, since her character was standing right next to him.
“Holy...” he said, drawing out the word. “You gotta calm yourself. You’ll have every creature in the forest hunting us down.” By that moment, he was so taken by the scenario, and distracted by his friend, he forgot all about the weirdness with his class selection.
“I’m so excited,” she confessed, graciously lowering her volume. “Check out my gal. I’m an Evoker. I got so lucky with my Elf mage archetype.”
Her avatar’s robes were a dull gray, which only caused her fierce red hair to stand out. In her hand was a gnarled staff with a curved top. It didn’t have any obvious signs of magic, as there were no runes carved into the wood, nor glowing crystals adorning the object. Jay was surprised how much detail of the carving he could see as he inspected the weapon. He explained his own class as he finished his inspection.
“I’m a Monster Hunter. Apparently, it lets me use a bunch of different types of skills. The name is ridiculous, but I thought it would be a good way to try everything out in one night.”
She gave him a smirk. “You look like a cowboy.”
Jay looked down to inspect his clothes a little more closely. He did sort of look like a cowboy, wearing a wide-brimmed brown hat along with a brown vest that hung lower than his waist. The pants were tan, but fit the overall look.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
He didn’t have a revolver, but his weapons weren’t that far off, either. He found a small dagger in a scabbard cinched to his belt. In lieu of a revolver, there was a crossbow slung around his chest and a small case of bolts for him to pull from.
“I do,” Jay admitted reluctantly. She proceeded to laugh at him as he loaded the crossbow. “I’ll be honest, I hope I get some kind of ability to avoid all this loading and reloading. This is not easy.”
“Let’s try fighting something,” she suggested. “I think I see a boar hiding over that way.”
As he finished loading the weapon, Jay followed her. They slowly crept their way over towards the boar. It seemed to be alone. The boar wasn’t paying much attention to its surroundings because it was taking in water from a stream.
Jay aimed through the sight of the crossbow, putting the boar firmly into his crosshairs. Beside him, he heard Taylor Lynn muttering nonsensical phrases, which he assumed was her casting a spell. He waited for her to fall silent before firing his shot in sync.
A small shard of ice erupted from her hand, striking the Boar in the backside. His bolt was less accurate and impacted the boar in its back leg. The surprise attack did good damage, leaving behind shards of ice clinging to the boar’s leg. The boar roared in pain, searching for its attacker.
Being that he was one of the attackers, Jay was a little nervous, on account of the enemy looking exactly like an actual, factual, furious boar.
Jay tried to reload his crossbow as Taylor Lynn fired another shard of ice. The process seemed intuitive, as the game guided him through how to load bolts properly. On the other hand, their attacks had alerted the boar to their location.
The bigger problem was that Jay had been one hundred percent wrong about there being one boar. A small singular formed as five other boars came into view of the stream. Several were on the small side, but one of them was even bigger than the one they had tried to ambush.
“Uh, Taylor Lynn,” he said anxiously, drawing his dagger and letting the crossbow fall to his side. “I think we should run.”
“They’re boars,” she said, “How bad could it be? Get in there, soldier.”
He learned it could be bad.
Jay couldn’t leave her there to fight alone, so the only choice he had was to follow her instruction. He stepped a few paces in front of her to draw the attention of the boars, which worked like a charm. He was able to dodge the first one to charge as Taylor Lynn continued to blast their enemies with shards of ice every couple of seconds. His dodging would leave Taylor Lynn open, but he didn’t have the spare brain cells to find another plan.
The second charge grazed him in the side; he watched the red numbers pop up on his screen as the gloves attached to his system vibrated. Jay spun to strike back at the two who had charged him, fairly certain he wouldn’t survive another attack.
The dagger slashed along the side of the first boar, but it was the largest of the herd, so Jay’s attack was ineffectual against its strong hide. Neither the character nor Jay were skilled with a dagger, so he had to admit fair was fair. The second boar, the one they had initially wounded, attempted to gore him on the left side, but he stepped out of the way again.
Jay’s mind was getting really confused from the boars everywhere. He was surrounded. He tried to lash out again, but his screen exploded in red as he landed the strike. In exchange, he was mortally wounded.
His review of Monster Hunter combat options would be: lackluster, at best.
Death, at least, was serene. As the red faded, Jay found himself standing in a small pond with some kind of statue in the middle of it. Taylor Lynn wasn’t far behind him. As they moved to leave the pool, they could see it was labeled: Pond of Gereg.
Jay looked closer at the statue, which he figured was constructed with magic as far as the game world was concerned. The statue looked like it had taken some poor designer ages to carve out properly. The statue wasn’t shaped like a person, but instead was formed from several rotating strands of rock, somehow both stone and fluid at the same time. They started from the pedestal and wrapped up to a point at the top, creating a nonsensical silhouette that revealed very little.
“Who is Gereg?” he asked.
“Gereg? I think he’s the god of Balance and Revival. Why do you ask?” Taylor Lynn answered before spotting it herself. “Oh, cool, a statue. That’s a weird way to represent a god.”
“Yeah. Do you think he’s supposed to be some kind of tentacle monster?”
She shook her head as they both laughed at the idea.
Jay continued, “Do you think there’s one of these at every resurrection point?”
“Let’s try not to find out. We only have one night and right now we have negative experience,” she shot back. Jay checked his experience to find out she was right. Shifting to the game messages, he saw they had suffered a level’s worth of experience loss when they died.
Current experience: -100. Experience to next level: 100.
“Brutal,” he said, more impressed than upset. At that moment, he was convinced the game took itself seriously.
Taylor Lynn pouted. “That’s not fair at all. Those boars were level eleven. We need to find something easier.”
Jay hadn’t noticed the level of the boars, but if she was right, they were trying to fight way above their weight class. “How about that?” He pointed to a small squirrel sneaking around the tree tops.
With a few mumbled words, she loosed another small ice shard, which took the squirrel out in one blast. They each gained five experience. It wasn’t a lot, but it would be an easy way to recover their debt from character death.
“We’re going squirrel hunting, aren’t we?” Taylor Lynn asked with a sigh.
Jay hoisted his crossbow onto his shoulder in a move he hoped was cool and competent. “They won’t know what’s coming,” he agreed.
He took aim, using the sight to find another target. He only found one more opportunity in the immediate area: small rat scurrying around the base of one of the tree trunks. Jay adjusted his sight up a tiny fraction to account for the drop of the bolt. He assumed that physics was a thing, magic or no magic.
He loosed the bolt, which did not drop as he had expected it to. It slammed right on the top of the poor rat. They received the same five experience.
Taylor Lynn took off in search of more small creatures. Jay took a different path, which would be close to hers. It didn’t make any sense to fight together when hunting creatures that were pests. He just hoped they didn’t accidentally ruin the ecosystem of the forest by destroying all the prey.
They spent the next hour blasting their way through small animals. The most exciting part had been when Jay had managed to scare a rabbit from its warren. He was so excited, in fact, his arrow hit dirt. It turned out rabbits were really fast.
By the end of that hour, their hard work grinding small game in the area paid off and both Taylor Lynn and he were level two. Just as they were meeting up at the pool to celebrate, the goggles sent Jay a notification that his phone was ringing in his pocket.
“I’ve got a call. I’ll be right back,” He informed her as he hurried to answer.
“Wait, you’re going to ruin-”
Jay never heard what he was going to ruin, though he could guess. The game cut her off as he removed his goggles, automatically sending the system into a paused state. The name on the screen was his boss, so Jay rushed to pick up the phone, almost dropping the VR gear in his haste.
“Uh, hey, Tom. What’s up?” Jay asked. “I’m supposed to be off tonight.”
Tom’s voice came through clearly on the phone, but so did the clattering of pots in the chaos of the kitchen. “Not anymore, you aren’t. I need you to go to a meeting for me.”
“A meeting?” Jay prompted in confusion. He couldn’t recall a time when Tom ever sent him to a meeting on behalf of the bar. He didn’t like Jay going to the meetings for events or catering, either.
“Listen, James, just get to the address. It’s an important meeting. You’re not out of town or something, are you?” Tom sounded overworked, leaving Jay feeling a little guilty for not agreeing immediately. He didn’t get many days off, as he usually worked six days a week, so not that guilty.
“No, I’m just supposed to be off today. It’s my only day off,” he protested, trying not to sound whiny.
“You’ll be off tomorrow. They’re expecting you, James.”
The phone line went dead. He wasn’t happy about it, but Jay hoped Taylor Lynn would forgive him, since he would be available the next night. He even dared hope she would be happy they had extra bonus time today.
Even though he tried not to, Jay was enjoying the game quite a bit. He had been getting better and better at firing the crossbow properly, and the scenery was as gorgeous as it was immersive. His musings were interrupted as his phone buzzed with a text. There was an address and a name of who he was meeting: Mr. Georges.
He couldn’t afford to miss out on the extra cash. It took Jay only five minutes to change his shirt, throw on some cologne, and grab his keys.
He made it to the car before his phone buzzed with another text. Knowing the likely culprit, he checked it to find a message from Taylor Lynn Grace waiting for him: You suck.