Once everyone had, more or less, gotten comfortable being “friends” with each other in the game, the rest of the weekend was a complete blast! Kylie was still stuck out in the middle of nowhere, and slowly killing vines, but she’d made some significant improvement overall. She’d finally used the staff enough to pick up a skill in it, along with tailoring, and dodging. Even though she was only skilled at a one in them for now, it proved that she was improving. Her talent in Identify was up to a nine now, as it was something that she endlessly kept repeating no matter what she was doing in game.
Kyle had tried to spend his character points to improve his character’s crafting skill once he’d acquired it, but the game wouldn’t let him do anything like that. Apparently character points can only be spent in improving basic stats after one enters the game – not on skills, spells, or talents. Since Sera had informed him that twenty was basically average for a character, he decided that it’d probably be best to spend those points to try and raise his endurance up a little closer to average, so that’s what he did. The change in how his character behaved in game from a ten to fifteen endurance was slight, but noticeable. She wasn’t as winded after bashing on the vines, she’d gained ten points of health from the boost, giving her almost 50% percent more than before – which really didn’t seem to matter with her constant “healbash, healbash, healbash, healbash another dozen times and kill them” style of fighting. Kylie simply had too much mana, too much healing power to have to worry about her life at the moment, but Kyle thought it was something he should get up for the harder fights to come in the future.
Pulling up her status windows didn’t show much improvement from playing all weekend, but it did show some steady growth.
Name: Kylie el X’entiaClass: NoneLevel: 1Race: X’entian Elf (Altered)Experience: 480 / 2000Title: Exiled Princess of X’entiaStatus: Exile, Wanted CriminalCP: 0
HP: 34 / 34MP: 220 / 220SP: 20 / 20PD: 0 (10)DR: 0MD: 0
STR: 11KNO: 100WIL: 10AGI: 100MYS: 100PRE: 200END: 16SPI: 10LUC: 10
TALENTS
Mystical Regen: 7.5 – Recovers mystical energy at 7.5 times the normal character rateBeginner Plant Slayer – 5% bonus to hit and damage plant-type monsters.
SPELLS
HEAL: 40 -- heals 40 HP for 1 MP
SKILLS
Identify – Allows identification of basic items or creatures. (9)Fighting – Quarterstaff (1)Tailoring – Tailoring allows players to cut and weave various materials into armor, bags, shirts, and other items. (1)
When all was said and done, Kyle was rather happy with the slow, but steady growth of his character.
As for everyone else in game, the weekend produced various different results for them. Heather sounded like she was both having fun, and also hating everything that happened to her in game. William showed up where she was at, and had turned her life into shambles, much like a tornado moving through a trailer park. To start with, he simply ran up and hugged her in the middle of the street, which she felt harmed her reputation with all the elven people to be seen with a lowly human! When she yelled and slapped at him to get him to back off, the city guards rushed in to stop the two of them from brawling in public, and that’s why William grabbed her hand, dragged her off, and her real misadventures began.
First, she was declared kidnapped. Then, after William had a misunderstanding by “borrowing” some fruit from a vendor and eating it with no money, her status was changed to “accomplice”. The next time they ran into the city guards, she had to freeze one’s feet with her ice bolt to stop from being arrested, and after that she became a wanted criminal for assaulting a guard, resisting arrest, staging a fake kidnapping, theft…
William dragged her down and through the city sewers, where they were attacked first by groups of rats and then later by a few different groups of hooded bandits! They fought and killed the rats when the numbers didn’t seem too overwhelming, and they ran from large packs of them. Heather seemed like she was certain that she could kill them, but anytime they were outnumbered, William would simply grab her arm, tug her helpless behind him like a kite on a string, and flee in some random direction. Even with the in-game map uncovering itself as they explored the sewers, Heather got hopelessly lost!
And as for the fights with the bandits, all she’d fume and say was that she didn’t want to talk about it! And then, she’d rant over and over to Kylie about them! The men were ugly. They tried to kill her! She had to melt one’s face off, and it made her sick. The smell of flesh burning in a game was a little over the top, wasn’t it? Lightning both did and didn’t work well in the sewers. It could bounce off walls and hit things multiple times, but could sometimes come back and hit her or that dumbass jerkface man who was dragging her around everywhere, so she had to be careful about that! And the shock carried through the water as well, if they were down in the tunnels where the sewage was actually flowing and being carried away from the city! And her clothes were being ruined! And jerkface wouldn’t keep his hands off her arm!
Private tell after tell, after endless tell, Heather send to Kylie! Kyle could see why Sera had decided to pretend to be someone else! To get even with her, he started telling Seran privately all the things that Heather was telling Kylie. Just so she’d know about it when they logged off and chatted in the real world about things, of course!
Thankfully, Seran really didn’t bother Kylie with a whole lot of private tells about the things him and Johnb discussed in game – most of their conversation was carried out publically across the whole friend channel so everyone could hear them, just like William’s incessant chatter and Heather’s constant snide remarks about their experience together! Jason was quiet for a long time in game, and then from time to time, he’d start singing terribly crude songs drunkenly. Apparently one of his favorite pass times in game, rather than smithing and fighting, was drinking at the dwarven tavern. And, as his character got drunk, he got loud, obnoxious, and sang terribly off tune songs that made Heather complain, Kylie almost blush, and Seran laugh heartily and join in over the friend chat with him!
One thing that Kyle found endlessly amusing was when Johnb finally caught up to Seran, in game!
“Dude! You’re naked!” Johnb simply exclaimed out of the blue through the party chat, and at first Kylie almost fainted from embarrassment thinking she’d somehow been found out, wearing nothing but her cloak! Seran quickly dispelled her illusions that when he shamelessly declared back, “Me man. Me not need clothes. Me on hunt! HIIIIISSSSSS!!”
“Dude! Don’t swing that thing around in circles at me like that!” Kylie had no idea what thing “that thing” was, but for some odd reason Seran simply hissed back in return. “HIIISSSSS! HISSSSS! See me snake!” He declared boldly.
William got all excited at this point and joined in the friend conversation, “Oh wow! You have a snake? What color is it? Is it big? Has it shed its skin? Is it poisonous?”
“Me snake can shed skin! Me snake grow large and powerful,” Seran bragged, “and me snake no poison!”
“I’ll be damned dude! It’s killing me to look at it!” Johnb complained. “What the hell are you doing anyway?”
“ME HUNT!” Seran screamed, only to be followed by a, “What the fuck, dude!”, from Johnb.
“Dumbass over here just died!” Johnb told everyone. “Just committed suicide, as far as I could tell! And holy shit!” There was a slight pause of silence. “Here he comes again!” Another brief pause. “And now dumbass just committed suicide again! What the hell, are you doing?!” Johnb sounded completely baffled.
“Me hunt!” Seran exclaimed through the friend chat, and everyone got quiet listening to the two talk back and forth.
“Hunt, hell! You just died again!”
“Me hunt!”
“Dammit! Let me smash that rock!”
“Go away! Me almost got it dead! Me told hunt five rock, me almost got second one deaded! Me no need stupid big rock man help!”
“A second one? You mean you killed one of them things by yourself!” Johnb was shocked; you could tell it even in party chat.
“Me die many hundred times, but me hit stupid rock before death. Lure rock near graveyard, me back before it heal! Rock wear down before Seran do! Seran win! Get big hammer!” Seran told everyone through the friend chat. Kylie had to take a few minutes to try and break down what she’d just heard. Apparently Seran had lured a rock of some sort near the graveyard, been killed by it hundreds of times, and respawned back each time so quickly that he managed to hit it once before he died again, and thus in the end had killed it and gotten a big hammer….
This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.
Who the hell deliberately lures a creature to their spawn point to get in an endless death loop?!
Party chat was completely quiet for many minutes, as everyone slowly came to understand how insane what they’d just heard was. It was, of course, Heather who commented on it first. “Are you completely stupid, jerkface, or just brain damaged?” She exclaimed! “What type of moron would suffer the pain of countless hundreds of deaths just to kill a single creature? Do you even realize how much experience you’ve probably lost?!”
“Seran not stupid,” he promptly replied back. “Stupid woman voice, stupid! Seran no got no experience. Seran not lose what not have!”
“Don’t call me stupid, jerkface! I’ll hunt you down and cut off your pecker!” Heather yelled back through the party chat angrily.
“Stupid woman voice no hurt Seran snake! Seran snake bite stupid woman!” Kylie had no idea what that was supposed to mean at all, but Heather broke down into sending her private tells one after another complaining about what a rude jackass Kyle was, and how he shouldn’t treat a woman like that! A completely worthless loser, just pretending to be a man! Kylie simply nodded while killing her own pitiful little tanglevines , and smirked to himself repeating everything word for word to Seran privately in game.
Talk about entertaining! Kyle thought he was going to die from the irony of the situation! Complaining to him, about someone who wasn’t him, but was pretending to be him, when he was pretending to be the person Heather thought she was complaining to… Someday, there might have to be a reckoning, but he didn’t really get along with Heather that much anyway, so it wasn’t a big deal. Best to simply live in the moment, and the moment was amusing as heck!
----------------------------------------
There were several other things which they all learned about the game over the weekend. For one thing, they all realized that there wasn’t any way any of them could play the game all day long. The characters themselves got tired after a bit, and needed to sleep. Even if they pushed themselves and stayed awake for sixteen hours straight in game, exhaustion set in and their characters started to suffer and need to sleep. And, sleeping in game simply gave one an endless blackness to deal with.
You could still talk though friend chat, and do somethings like that, but it was a whole lot like what you could accomplish if you laid down in bed with your eyes closed. And, since they were all getting tired at about the same time, everyone was entering that same dull darkness. There really wasn’t anything to do in game, except talk, and they could do that just as well in the real world – and still be able to see things around them and not just the back of their character’s eyelids!
Sixteen hours in game translated to four hours in the real world. Then their characters all needed at least eight hours of rest, so that meant they needed to stay out of game for at least two hours. Apparently when a player was logged off, the game counted that time as sleep time, and since none of them had stayed up excessively late the past few nights playing, it meant that no one had actually experienced the need to rest in game yet.
In some ways, it was annoying to have to leave or fall asleep in game. In others, it wasn’t so bad. Two hours gave everyone enough time to get up and stretch. Take turns using the bathroom. Go mess around in the kitchen, make Franklin mad, and fix something to eat. It gave them time to talk a bit in the real world about what all had been going on in the game world. Kyle had a little difficult time explaining what he was trying to accomplish with the rocks, since he had no clue himself just what the hell Sera was doing either. When asked, he’d pretend to get ready to answer, but pause for just a moment. “Well, I’ll tell you guys. It’s my master plan!” At which point, excitable William would have to bounce in with some observation about a master plan he saw in a movie, or read in a book, or something else, and everyone would get completely distracted and forget what the heck they’d been talking about before he went off on a tangent.
Since they all hadn’t started in the game until about ten that morning, they only had two trips into Winter’s Tale on Saturday. In at ten, out around two. In again around four, out again by eight. It would’ve been after ten before they could’ve logged in again, and there really wasn’t much point in that – Franklin wouldn’t let any of them stay up and play much later than that anyway. And the idea of guys being up in his daughter’s room until two in the morning? An ice cube had a better chance of surviving a volcano than they did with that!
Instead, they all went downstairs, surfed the TV channels, and eventually decided on a cheesy movie about a zombie ballerina who only wanted to put on a performance for people, but kept eating their brains instead. It was horrible from start to finish, but the camaraderie they all felt complaining about it was palpable.
And afterwards, Sera’s mom regaled them all by telling them how she would have told the story. For a few moments, it was kind of odd for most of them to sit and listen to a grown woman tell a story, but after a bit they all got into it and stared endlessly at Fanny as she gestured, hopped, and got into her tale. Before long, William was bouncing along and acting out parts with her, just as enthusiastically. They were all so enraptured by the performance, none of them even noticed when Franklin sat a tape recorder down and started recording everything.
By the time Fanny had finally finished her version of the story, everyone had completely forgotten what the original movie was even about. It was after midnight – almost one in the morning – and Franklin booted everyone but Heather out mercilessly.
Getting back in Kyle’s home, all the guys could talk about was the kick ass zombie ballerina, the werewolf ninja, the alien stripper, and how awesome the fight with the alien commander was, who was trying to destroy the earth!
It was well after three, and probably closer to four in the morning, before they all wound down enough to sleep.
The morning, they simply missed completely. By the time Kyle and all the rest of the guys had woken up, it was already after noon on Sunday! They grabbed a meal from the kitchen, spent just a little time cleaning up and doing dishes so Kyle’s mother wouldn’t have to when she got in from work, and then they all headed over to Sera’s for another session inside Winter’s Tale.
Things were just as intense and rowdy today, as they were yesterday, and time passed in a blur of enjoyment for all of them before they finally starting getting tired in game and logged back out around six.
Since it was almost suppertime, Sera invited everyone to go to the restaurant with her, and they’d make her father cook them all something. Since most of them had never actually been to her family’s restaurant before – they’d just heard tales from around the school that she had to work there to help make ends meet back home – none of them were prepared for their time at Franklin’s, except Kyle.
As soon as they all walked in the door laughing and making a lot of noise, Franklin yelled at them. “Git da hell out! Don’t want ya kind in here, assholes!” He hadn’t even looked around from where he was cooking in the rear to see who he was telling to get out, and Kyle just yelled back at him. “Stuff it, you old bat terd! Fix us food!”
“I’m busy! Fix it yer own damn self!” Franklin shot back, and with a giggle Sera went on around the counter and dragged Heather with her.
“Don’t worry, we got it back here,” she exclaimed confidently!
“We do? What do we got?” Heather asked, while getting pulled along.
“You boys can take out the trash, clean up the tables, and check on the bathrooms while we’re back here,” Sera told them without even looking back, and Kyle just shrugged.
“Come on Darryl, grab the other side of this can with me. William, you and Jason get the other one. We’ll go dump this junk out back in the dumpsters real fast,” Kyle told them.
“Wait a second,” Darryl said. “You mean we got to do the cleaning around here?”
“Yep,” Kyle told him and nodded. “Don’t work, you don’t eat. Now grab that other side of the can and let’s go!”
“Well I’ll be damned,” Darryl muttered, but did as he was told, while William and Jason were already dragging their can to the door.
Clean up went along fairly easily after that, with them all picking on each other, and the customers who were already in the restaurant, and the meal of Slop Burgers, Eiffel Towers, Chili-n-Cheese Covered Salad, and Milkshakes was enough to leave them all bloated and holding their stomachs.
Everyone went home after that, and all-in-all, Kyle had to admit that he’d had a very enjoyable weekend. Their very first Winter’s Tale marathon couldn’t be considered to be anything less than a blazing success. It was tiresome to have to listen to Heather’s snarky comments all weekend, but after a while he started to think of her as just being a female version of Franklin – loud, full of bluster and wind, but without any real bite. Once he started thinking like that, he’d found she really wasn’t that bad, and his mood had improved quite a bit.
Honestly, it was an experience that Kyle and everyone else -- even Heather, if she were to be honest with herself -- was looking forward to doing again, as soon as possible.