Aetuornos Beta 1-4

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1-4: First Town Experience

"Hey, do you know how all this actually works?" Aranthra asked as they walked.

"Hmm. Well, I'm aware of the basic principles," the sheep-girl responded, nodding. It was probably best not to out herself as an expert. "You know—for example, most humans basically understand what a particle is, even if they know little of how to work with them?"

"That's enough for me. I was wondering—this is supposed to perfectly sync people from around the world, but that can't be right. Magic defies physics, sure, but breaking causality sounds like a bit much for a video game."

"Oh, it can't do that," Jesse said. "Let me see if I can explain...are you familiar with the concept of astral projection?"
"That's like, when your body stays still but your 'spirit' or whatever goes roaming around, right?" Scylla said.

"Correct. There is a method using meditation to send one's consciousness elsewhere, with the advantage that that place need not physically exist. As I understand it, that is the basis of what we are doing now," Jesse said. "The game world is an artificial 'space' created for us to project ourselves into."

"So how does that...wait." The mage thought about it for a second. "If we're in a different 'location', that means we 'travelled' to get here, and we'd have to 'travel' back too, right? And that still takes time, even if it's just a tiny bit."
"That's it," Jesse said. "If you tried to send a message using this method, it could never arrive faster than one travelling at the speed of light because the messengers wouldn't 'move' quickly enough to outpace it."

"Uhh, hang on," Ara said. "We're, not in our own bodies right now? What's to stop someone from just cutting us off so we're stuck 'here' and like, taking over our bodies or killing them or..?"
"The reason, as far as I can tell, that this method was employed is that this, 'projection', is voluntary and requires one to be continually undisturbed to maintain," Jesse said. "In other words, anything that would come close enough to disturb your body would yank you back to it long before anything could be done. And—it's a bit difficult to express, but while you are 'here', this still isn't a real place. It's truly a vision you are experiencing while meditating in place, so if you wish to awake from it, you always will. Trapping you here would be more difficult, in fact, than trapping you inside of an ordinary dream while you were asleep."

"...Hang on, didn't you just say there's a delay from 'traveling' back?"

"There isn't a delay from the perspective of your real body," she explained patiently. "If it were possible to watch the events simultaneously, you would seem to disappear from here 'just before' whatever caused you to wake there. But causality still works because it isn't possible to do that."

"That's..gonna make my head hurt a little." The mage shook her head.
"Well, nobody really worried about that sort of thing before they told us there was meant to be a speed limit," Jesse said, shrugging.

"Enough science quiz time!" Scylla interjected, moving herself up next to Jesse. By now the forest had thinned considerably. "We're supposed to be having fun, right? What class are you, Brawler?"

"Err, that sounds right, I suppose," the sheep-girl said with a small shrug. "I was uncertain what to choose, so I went with the randomization option."
"Well I think it's a winner. I'm a samurai, and Ara's a mage, if that isn't obvious. Hey look!" The wolf-girl was instantly distracted by the sight of a few buildings in the distance. There were patches of farmland in between, indicating an active settlement of some sort. "Tooown!" She took off at an excited run right away, leaving Jesse to shrug in Ara's direction and follow at a pace more amenable to the mage's stamina.

Eventually they came to a path between the farms leading toward the buildings. Scylla made her way up to a human-looking man standing just aside of this path. "Hi there!" she said eagerly, her ears raised and tail wagging excitedly.
"Hello. Welcome to Greenleaf," the man said.

"I'm Scylla, who're you?"
"This is Greenleaf."
The wolf-girl's head tilted, and one of her ears with it. "..That's a weird name."
"That's an NPC, Scylla," Aranthra said as they caught up to her. "Practically a talking signpost."
"Welcome to Greenleaf, stranger."

"Why not just use a signpost, then? This totally ruins the immersion," Scylla complained, leaning in to poke the fake person's nose a couple of times.

"We are playing a beta, remember," the mage said. "They're just filler. The idea is to eventually hire on some people to play the roles of townsfolk and major villains and stuff."
"Hello. Welcome to Greenleaf."
"He does seem unusually unconvincing," Jesse said. "I would expect better approximations to be possible."

"They didn't want people to get too attached. And they really wanted to avoid making the first sapient artificial intelligence in a context like this," Aranthra said. "So these guys serve a purely functional role."

"Greenleaf is a nice town."

"Grr. Let's go," the wolf-girl said, waving forward before stepping around the NPC and on into town.

Even in terms of generic NPCs, the town seemed extremely sparsely populated. There were a few of various races here and there either standing around, pacing, or patrolling on obviously predetermined routes. Two NPCs in particular were standing facing each other, repeating a brief conversation on loop with a short pause between each iteration; similar to the "greeter", their wording changed slightly from one version to another but the general sense remained the same. Eventually Scylla stopped in front of a door with a sign displaying an anvil and hammer over it.

"Aha! I bet this is a blacksmith's."
"Your powers of observation are truly divine," Aranthra droned sarcastically. Then she explained to Jesse: "Usually a game would have a place like this to buy better weapons and armor. There's meant to be a crafting system, too, though I don't know quite how much of it's been implemented yet."

"Well, the materials sure are—" the wolf-girl started, until a man's head poked out the door.

"Ah! I thought I heard someone speaking." He pulled himself the rest of the way out; he was human and looked about as unremarkable as any of the NPC villagers. "Won't you ladies please come in?" He held the door and stepped aside, gesturing for them to enter.

After looking at the others for a second, Scylla shrugged and went inside; Jesse elected to follow, and Ara after her, stopping to look up at him. "Yoouu're...what? Another player?"
"Staff," he replied. "Getting some early practice in." After she followed, he came in after and shut the door again. "Thought I'd take the opportunity to try out some different appearances and 'jobs' while I'm at it. Today I'm the blacksmith!"

"Cool. Maybe you can explain how crafting and stuff works, since there isn't exactly a manual yet," the mage suggested.

"We're hoping a 'tutorial' is never needed," he said, "after all, you three made it out of the forest without anyone telling you what to do. But to put it simply: Smiths do weapons and heavy armor—which none of you are the right class for, Tailors do light armor and clothing, Enchanters do—enchantments, obviously. Then there are Chefs and Alchemists who can make food and potions, respectively. Those are the crafting trades, and there are lots of others planned, too; any class can learn any trade, but certain stats give advantages to each trade. For example, smithing requires strength and patience, so folks with high strength and wisdom will do better at it. Tailors need to be dextrous and charismatic; enchanters and alchemists need lots of intellect, but the former need wisdom while the latter need constitution...so on, so forth. Or you can just have a shop do the work, but we'll charge money and it'll never be quite as good as a player-made item can be."

"Soo, like, once the game's popular and you've got lots of players making better stuff than the shops, what are the shops good for?" Scylla said.

"Well, you can't learn a trade without someone to teach it to you. Plus, whenever you reach a certain level at your trade, you have to go to a master—one of us—to receive a quest which will help you break through a wall and make further progress. Oh, and our constant prices should help stabilize the market so equipment of a certain level will have an average price that's reasonable for players of that level—hopefully."

"I think, for now, we'd prefer to have you do the work," Jesse said. "If you wouldn't mind."
"Not at all. I can see you're just starting out on your journey, after all," the smith said. "Tell you what, for you lovely ladies I'll do anything basic for free."

"Ooh! Can you make my sword better?" Scylla said.

"Hmm. Should be able to work on that with a bit of slime ore. Improving a staff is a job for an enchanter, though," he added, looking in Ara's direction. "My hammer would just snap it in two."

"I don't appear to actually have a weapon," the sheep-girl pointed out.
"We ought to get you one, then! What're you carrying?"

"Just some..pieces of pelt and claws from a giant bear."
"That should be good for some clawgloves, at least. Let me take a look." After she offered him the items in question, he held them up as if to inspect them. "Yeah, high-quality stuff."

While the smith got to work on Scylla's blade, Aranthra put a hand to her chin, thinking. "So..wait. Why do shops make inferior equipment if they're also such masters that every player character has to learn from them?"

"Blame mass production," said the smith. "Or just admit that, at some level, realism takes a backseat to making a better player experience. Here you are; ought to be a little sharper than before," he added, handing the wolf-girl her weapon back.
"Oooo~o." She held it up, staring at the shining metal for a moment, before sheathing it again.

"Now for the gloves..."

While what he did with the blade had appeared to make physical sense—heating it, hammering it on the anvil a few times; maybe not nearly what a real blacksmith would do, but at least a temporally abbreviated version—what the smith did to make the gloves just looked strange. He laid the piece of bear and the claws out on a table and then just whipped his hands around too quickly to see for a moment before lifting them away from the table again, two perfectly-formed gloaves with claws sticking out between the knuckles now in place of the items that had made them. These he picked up and offered them to sheep-girl. "These ought to give your punches a little bit of an edge," he said while she examined them, trying them on and finding them to fit unusually well on her hands.

"I guess there isn't much in the way of a quest system implemented yet," Aranthra said, "but is there anything we 'should' be doing? Wandering aimlessly is fun and all, but a sense of real progress would also be pretty cool."

"Well—I can tell you two things," the smith said, leaning back against a wall. "First of all, you should probably find yourself a healer before going off to fight anything serious. Since they're mostly not very good fighters, the healer types spawn into temples and shrines and such, depending on the class. There's more or less a ring of little towns like this one and such religious structures going around the forest you came from, and the nearest thing would be a shrine off to the east. The forest's to the south of us, see. Second, there's an ore mine up north of here that's been infested with spider monsters. If some brave heroes were to get deep in there and find the mother spider, squish her good, the small fry would scatter and we could reclaim that mine for civilization. Free mining for adventuring sorts, plus it would help develop nearby towns like this one a bit."

"Wow, more than I expected," Ara said.
"Hey. Word of mouth from the beta testers is one of the pillars of our early advertising strategy," he said with a grin. "Can't have you complaining there wasn't a satisfying story in an RPG."

"Well, thank you," Jesse said. "You've been extremely helpful."

"Glad to hear it. If you run into any other players complaining about the bland NPCs today, point 'em here, will ya?"

Outside, Scylla looked around. "Soo, should we hit up any of the other shops before we head for the shrine? Maybe the enchanter?"
"Hmn. I think we need 'monster cores' to do enchanting," Aranthra said. "Actually, I'm eager to get to that shrine. Mages need to meditate at religious sites like that to do spell management, including inventing new ones."

"Inventing?" the sheep-girl asked.

"Right. There are a bunch of standard spells we can learn, but the magic system is super flexible. If you can describe well enough what a spell ought to do, and it fits your class well enough, then you can essentially 'spend' experience to learn it. Even better, once a mage knows a spell they can teach it to other magic-users."

"Ara thought we should both be different kinds of magic classes, but it sounded way too complicated to me," the wolf-girl said. "Anyway, it's bad party balance!"

Now that they knew the forest they'd come from was to the south, it seemed unusually easy to keep track of directions. They didn't run into any other players, nor anything else but the repetitive NPCs, and soon they reached the east edge of town.

"Anyway~," Scylla started, "that smith was pretty cute, right? Or am I the only one who thought that?"

"It is doubtful that's what he really looks like," Jesse commented.

"That doesn't make it wrong to appreciate it, though, riight? What?" Ara was giving her a look.
"..Nothing."

"Hey, if it helps I think you're cute too!"

The mage recoiled slightly. "That's even weirder!"

"I am a bit lost. What is strange about this?" the sheep-girl said, confused.

"Uhh..." Aranthra looked around quickly, and spotted something. "Oh look some monsters on the road let's drop this conversation entirely and go deal with that!" she said in rapid-fire, pointing ahead.

"Huh—oh hey, there are monsters. Nice spot check!" Scylla said. There were four medium-large quadruped things, maybe resembling wolves or hyenas, with black fur, long snouts and sharp teeth and—furthermore—big, almost metallic-looking quills or spines all along their backs.

The mage took out her staff and began chanting right away. After exchanging a brief glance, the two physical fighters spread out slightly, Scylla going left while Jesse went right. The samurai put her hand on her blade's hilt as one of the beasts charged forward, and slashed out at it when it pounced her way; its belly was sliced and it was thrown back the way it came by the blow. Jesse stepped a bit farther in as another of them came her way, jumping in to try to bite her, and she grabbed its muzzle in her hands, swinging the thing around to slam it on the ground behind her.

Aranthra's crescent blade spell went flying toward the other two; one dodged entirely while the other had the blade bury deep into its side, leaving a gash behind as the magic's glow dispersed away. The one that had dodged snarled and ran Ara's way, which got the wolf-girl's attention. She slashed at its back and her weapon clanged audibly against the spines, sending it flying to that side from the impact. "Nuh-uh!" she wagged a finger. "You gotta go through me!"

The sheep-girl faced off the monster she'd just thrown as it stood up and moved carefully forward, swiping a few times with its clawed forepaws. After neatly dodging a few strikes she felt she had a sense of its pattern and interrupted the next one by grabbing its leg just above the paw, swinging the beast around and throwing it at the one Ara had hit with her first spell—itself mid-charge in the mage's direction—sending both bowling over toward the wolf-girl.

Scylla's first target took her taunt seriously, running back toward her at first but then jumping, curling into a ball and rolling toward her, only its spines exposed now. "Sanic!?" She jumped away to one side; at this point Jesse did her throw and the other two came toward Scylla, so she drew her blade and sliced through both of their sides as they sailed past.

A volley of blue sparks came flying from Ara's staff, swirling around each other before all landing right on the head of the beast Scylla had knocked away a moment ago. Then the mage went running to her right as the rolling one continued its way toward her. "Little help!?"

"Are those your only spells?" Jesse asked, running to put herself between the ball of spikes and the mage. She carefully grabbed just one of the spines in each hand and threw it over toward the other three now gathered near Scylla. "Heads up!"

"For now! That's why I wanna get to the shrine."

The wolf-girl made a 'come-on' gesture toward her trio as they recovered themselves, then leapt into the air as they pounced toward her and the rolling beast converged on the same location, knocking into all three of them and finally uncurling itself, stunned on its back with its belly toward the sky. "STEE-RIKE!" She took out her sword and drove its tip into the beast's exposed chest, flipping around so her foot landed neatly on top of the hilt, driving her entire weight and momentum down into the stab; the monster convulsed briefly, making a whining noise, and then stopped moving.

The other three beasts howled in rage at seeing this, one of them immediately pouncing Scylla's way. "Whoops!" She dove down out of the way, not having time to recover her sword before it would have hit her, and rolled a short way along the ground. A second one pounced at her while she tried to get back to her feet, and got one of Ara's crescent blades to the side of its head, making it recoil back. However, even though Jesse was running that way to help, she didn't make it to the wolf-girl in time to keep the third living monster from moving in and chomping hard on her ankle.

"Yowch!" She grabbed a kunai stowed on a small belt on her right thigh, and thrust it at the thing's head a few times, awkwardly leaning toward it. "Hey—get—off!" The first two were carefully dodged, the beast jerking her leg as it moved, but the third strike made it, landing squarely in the beast's eye, and when this made it loosen its grip she let go of the blade, yanked her leg away and punched it on the other side of the muzzle for good measure.

Jesse leapt and grabbed the sword; she didn't really know how to use it per se, but "swing at enemy" was a basic enough action for her to do, making both of the other beasts back off so she could flip the weapon around, holding it with the flat of the blade against her palm and the hilt in Scylla's direction. "Does that hurt?" she said, noticing a fairly nasty-looking bite wound, her sock torn and some blood coming out.

"Nah, it's like I have a sense of how much it would hurt but it doesn't really hurt at all," the wolf-girl said, grabbing the blade and turning it to the ground, picking herself up with the sword and her uninjured leg on the ground, the other one lifted just a bit off to keep her weight off of it. "Thaank-you!" Then she did a quick cartwheeling motion, landing on her free hand and using it to spin around on a vertical axis with her blade held outward, catching a monster's underside as it tried to pounce at her again. Jesse went to the one with a kunai in its eye, still stunned, and picked up her foot, slamming it hard on the back of the weapon to drive it farther into the head—which proved enough to keep the monster down for good. The third beast caught another volley of sparks from Aranthra, largely in the back and sides, but enough of a sting to keep it busy and make it turn the mage's way instead of pursuing the two melee fighters.

Scylla landed on her good leg, keeping the other one bent so weight wasn't on its foot, and slashed her sword back and forth in the direction of the next monster to come her way, keeping it back. Jesse grabbed the tail of the one chasing after Aranthra and whirled it around. "Coming your way!"

"Yep!" She threw it where it would go in front of the samurai, who took the cue to turn her sword's tip toward it and stab as it came, skewering its underside on the blade before swinging, tossing its body in the direction of the only still-living beast so both would go tumbling away. When that last monster rasied its head up again, a crescent blade came from the tip of Aranthra's rod straight at the bottom of its neck, cutting deep into its throat. The monster gave a weak snarl, trying to pick itself up, before shuddering and collapsing, its wounds proving fatal.

"Phee-yew." Scylla placed the tip of her blade in the ground again, leaning on it to keep weight off of the injured foot. "That was a bit close, eh? Think we should go back to that town to use the inn?"

"Inns don't heal you, doofus," the mage said, walking up. "A good night's sleep won't un-break your bones or whatever. You have to go to a temple or whatever for healing if you don't have a healer class around or any healing items on hand. Which we don't."

"Well then what good's an inn?" the wolf-girl said, half-turning her friend's way.
"You sleep to log out, and when you log out you sleep," Ara said. "And if it's in a real bed you get stat bonuses for a while after you wake up. Remember?"

"Oh yeah, there was somethin' like that," she said, twiddling the tip of an ear with her free hand. "So I guess we're going onward?"

"That would be wise," Jesse agreed. "But can you walk?"
"Heheh, sure. I mean, this is an okay crutch," she said, picking up the sword to wave it around. "Whooaa!" She wobbled unsteadily, her tail swishing wildly as it tried to help her keep her balance, until the sheep-girl came up to grab her arm and keep her from falling.

"I believe I can just carry you," Jesse said.
"Oh! Maybe that'd be better, yeah." Scylla took a moment to sheath her sword. "Ara, pick up the loot!" she said, pointing around with the hand not holding onto Jesse for support. "And my kunai, I only have a few of those."

"Yeah, yeah."

While she did that, the sheep-girl carefully picked Scylla up, holding on to her back with one arm and placing the other beneath her knees; the wolf-girl pulled an arm up around her shoulder. "Ooh, yeah, this is way better," she said, leaning in slightly with a teasing grin, which made Jesse blush slightly for reasons she couldn't entirely articulate to herself.

"Err..l-let's hurry. It is only one bite wound, but it looks pretty bad," she said, starting to move in the direction of the shrine.

"You're super strong, huh? I don't even slow you down at all!"
"Indeed. You seem nearly weightless to me," the sheep-girl said. "I could probably carry you in one arm if I needed, but it would be far less comfortable."

"Leet's hope that isn't necessary," Aranthra said. "Surely this early-game area won't have a ton of encounters for just this sort of reason. And even if we get a healer to join us, we should definitely stock up on potions and bandages, too."

"Agreed! Maybe there's somewhere to dump vendor trash for money, even at a shrine?" Scylla said.

Ara sighed. "There is no vendor trash, it's all materials for crafting. I guess I know what you mean, though."

---

I'm no authority on the matter and haven't done any actual research, but I think the dot Hack series is among the first, if not the first, of what we might call LitRPG's. In addition to (to some extent) using the idea of players getting stuck in the game, dot Hack features some game AI who appear to be sapient. The makers of the game in this story are reasonably familiar with these kinds of stories and went out of their way to ensure that sort of thing wouldn't happen either. Also, they didn't try to build an MMO on top of the code for, like, a single-player game made by a slightly crazy person based on some prophetic-sounding epic poem about a wave without thoroughly checking out the code first...or whatever the process that made the game "The World" originally was into "The World". I feel like a lot of horrible sci-fi scenarios depicted in movies and games could be prevented if the people inventing the technologies in question actually used that media as a source to see what might go wrong and how, as a jumping-off point for preventing them?

Anyway, looking forward to the healer's appearance.