Chapter 15

Second Introductions

The next couple of days were a blur. I streamed introduction videos for different types of magic, some How-To videos on using different weapons, and posted the 'Introduction to Affinities and Blessings' lecture. My stream took off like crazy.

I even left my apartment for the first time in days to restock on food.

I walked through the maze of old brick, shining glass, and steel that Boston had become. History class had shown us pictures of what the city used to look like. As much as I saw the old-time appeal in the pictures, I couldn’t imagine living without the autocabs and moving sidewalks. Imagine having to pay for public transportation, what a nightmare. After learning about that in school I had a horrible dream where I was stuck in an autocab but not allowed to leave since I had no money on me.

Walking the streets on my way to buy groceries showed me people, actual everyday people. People living lives and wearing clothing I hadn’t seen in nineteen years. There is that old saying about fashion coming back or something, that was certainly true right before the end of the world as we knew it. Smart suits were men’s casual wear these days, even for day laborers, made of everything from heavy fabrics that could withstand construction work to synth-silk for the businessman. For women, the current style seemed to be ultra-modern takes of Victorian-era dresses, sometimes the dresses were split into flowing pant legs, and other times they just looked like dresses. I never was one for fashion, and you could almost always get away with a blazer and a pair of slacks, so I ignored it most of my life. Hell, I didn’t even notice it my first time around. Seeing today's trends again was both strange and nostalgic.

After finding the store and gathering my groceries, I paid the disinterested cashier, who was busy watching the news about tomorrow’s live interview with the top group in 'Age of Adventure'. I hadn’t realized Katenip and EpicDave were invited too, although it made sense. Unless they were local, they would probably be Streamcast in. I chuckled; Kate is going to be so surprised when she becomes the ideal girl for millions of boys overnight.

As faded as my memories were, I still remembered the original interview. Knightingale was the subject of it and almost all the players were glued to the screen when it went live. In hindsight, he was only a little less lost than the rest of us, but he came off as a wise and epic figure. Other VR games had spells and skills you learned and triggered by word or action, and they only did what they said on the tin. AoA was so different because everything had to be learned and felt. This made it get tons of flack online from gamers without the skills to do what they wanted. Those same gamers played constantly to actually get the skills of the epic character they wanted. Some even developed healthy exercise habits and started to get fit in the real world. As the merge started this became much easier.

While I was out and about, I tried to sense mana. The pain from my wound carrying over made me think that mana might be leaking over earlier than before. I couldn’t sense anything, if that was due to not having any mana senses or there being no mana to sense I couldn’t tell.

I got back to my 4th-floor apartment and put my groceries away. While I was away at college my parents had died and left the apartment to me. I had to drop out and move back to take care of things and keep up the payments. Getting stuck in a dead-end IT job was not my plan but it’s what I got. Now I was a streamer soon to be famous and already making decent money, just in time for the end of the world. Life is funny like that sometimes.

While I was thinking about food, I hopped on my computer and used all the money I had made from streaming to order canned goods and water to be delivered to the storage area of the building. I never learned where my apartment had moved to in the future since I was in-game when it merged, but whoever was around for the transition could use the help. I resolved to make a “doomsday manual” at some point and leave it laying around in places people were likely to go. Hah, it will be like finding random loot in a game.

When the merge hit it took parts of Earth and mixed them with Ardos, like some sort of mad jigsaw puzzle. Parts as small as individual apartments and as big as whole cities got moved randomly. Sometimes they were even mixed together or into the new local geography. It was hell figuring out where anything was. Even after 20 years, there were still so many places we never found, whether they were destroyed or just diced up and made unrecognizable, hell maybe they were just in places we never found, it all amounted to the same thing. Much of humanity was lost in the initial waves of the merge.

Other than my streaming vids I had spent the last two days training. I spent time diving into the druidic spellform theory, learning about ceremonies, the priest and druid version of rituals, and practicing with mana. My scrambled mind was probably the reason I hadn’t noticed how shit my control was, and why I had forgotten the Mana Body skill which could be very powerful if you trained it up. The skill gave you a physical boost based on how much mana you used, and the cap on the skill was based on its level. If you tried to overcharge it though, you could pop like a balloon. Not a pretty sight.

After the talk with Violet, I looked at my skills and thought about my actions. I had made some major mistakes such as not using Primal Form for the Emberwood Boss fight. Not using my elemental striking skills was another mistake. I might try to combine them though, so they are less unwieldy.

I also talked to Santa more when he was out of game and told him about my new path. Since he was an ice-themed monk, he was well acquainted with being an elemental brawler of sorts. The mention of my Stone Shift and Primal Form skills had given him an idea. He thought I should try to create four distinct forms to shift into and limit the magic I used in each to a set that matched one of the classic four. I already had earth pretty much handled, but I would still give it a few more levels before trying to evolve it. Level 25 often gave a good class skill, not always but it was worth waiting to find out. His advice fit pretty well into my disaster theme idea.

I was also starting to think maybe adding some of my old warrior training would be good for my mental health, the discipline and structure might form a link between my young and old minds.

The next day was the interview with MythArc, I had gotten an email to be at an office building downtown at 10 AM. After making myself as presentable as I could I took an autocab and made it with plenty of time to spare.

I found myself in front of a massive building of steel and glass, strange chrome designs decorated the outside in what I was sure was a very expensive display of ‘modern art'. To me, it just looked like a kid drew on the building with a chrome crayon.

I was met at the door by a woman in a silver gown with lime green accents. She whisked me off into an elevator and then a conference room to wait for the interviewer to be ready. The room has a dozen chairs at a large glass table, a fully stocked snack table, and a fridge with drinks in it. I grabbed a beer and sat down. A few minutes later the door opened again, I thought it was the staff lady, but it turned out to be a girl in a light green dress with violet and gold accents. Holy shit that’s Katenip.

“Lazarus?” She said with surprise.

I waved from my seat at the table, “Hey there kid. I didn’t know you were in the area. I thought they would just set each of us up in a room and combine the telecasts or something.” I get up, walk over to her, and extend a hand. “Name’s Jacob… Louis Sanson, nice to meet you in the real world. Call me Jack.” Shit, I nearly forgot my own middle name. It has been something like 15 years since I last used it, and that was only because we were drunk on fairy wine and comparing real names.

She shook my hand nervously, “Nice to meet you outside the game as well, I’m, well it’s amazing they wanted us to do this, isn’t it? Oh, I’m Kate, but you knew that. My real name is Katherine Clair Nipinski.” When she touched my hand my mana senses triggered, which was surprising when I didn’t think those would bleed over this soon. Kate had a decent bit of mana for someone in the real world, for someone this early on it was a huge amount. She could probably cast a couple of those darts of hers before running out. Well, she could if I pointed out she had mana.

She hadn’t let go of my hand yet as she continued to nervously babble. I chuckled, “You didn’t need to do the full name introduction thing just because I did. I almost never use my full name, but I was brought up with the habit of using it to introduce myself. Old habits die hard.” Especially when introducing yourself is something you haven’t done regularly in years. For a long time, people called me some variation on 'Juggernaut' or 'Oh shit it's him', depending on what side they were on. I look at our hands and back at her face and raise an eyebrow. She withdraws her hand like it was burned and mumbles an incoherent apology or something. Damn, she is so nervous she’s a couple of wrong words from a breakdown. I guess I should fix this.

I told her to sit down and grabbed a soda water and danish from the snack table for her. “Calm down, no reason to be nervous, it’s just an interview about the game. Tell them how much you enjoy it and what you like about it and you should be just fine. There is that old bit of advice about picturing the audience naked, but we don’t know what they look like and, truthfully, there are some things I would rather not see.” That finally got a chuckle out of her. With a small smile, she sipped her water and started eating the danish.

After a few minutes of idle chit-chat, we got called in by the assistant lady. She brought us to another room and rushed us through makeup, I have to say that was a strange experience, and then clipped tiny microphones to our clothes.

Once again we were whisked off and each deposited into a closed-off cubicle. The cubicle featured a holodesk and chair, with the chair facing three large monitors on the wall. Two showed Dave and Kate, Kate was just settling into her chair, while the center one was blank and just had a countdown on it. It showed exactly 5 minutes and 34 seconds until the broadcast started.

“Hey there Dave,” I said as I took my seat. “Nice to see you in the real world. It was nice of them to give us a bit of time to talk.”

Dave looked exactly like he normally did, but when he spoke there was a clear difference.

“It is nice to see you as well my friend. So far this has not been too unpleasant of an experience. I hope the interview goes just as smoothly.”

What the hell? Dave was speaking clearly, not just clearly but he was speaking something much closer to proper English than anyone else I knew. Kate saved me the trouble of asking the question and ruining my mystique.

“What was that Dave? You’re speaking clearly…are you sick or something?” She asked.

He laughs “Not at all Kate. I traveled all over while growing up and I now speak and think in more languages than the auto-translation programs can compensate for. I tend to think in three languages at once, and those change periodically. I have encountered this problem with other games as well, they have been making a hash out of my voice ever since the auto-translation package started being added to all multiplayer games a few years ago.” He grinned, “As strange as it makes me sound, I do appreciate it, I am currently having to put effort into just speaking English, in a game I can relax and just speak my mind. My words may come out sounding strange, but it rids me of a burden in the process.”

Well damn, for that to make sense he must know a lot of languages and be fluent as a native in at least 10 of them. My knowledge of the tech was years out of date so my numbers could be off, but either way, it was impressive. Kate piped up again.

“So, you’re some kind of language guru? Would you help me study runes in AoA sometime? It seems I need to learn them for enchanting and other stuff that the mages haven’t explained yet. Something about Prime Spellform Matrix Interactions I think.”

“Sure, I would love to help with learning runes, I was thinking about picking up some books to learn those languages we saw in the vampire lab anyway. While I may have been forced into languages by circumstance, I have grown to love them.”

Ouch, Spellform Matrix Interactions, Prime or otherwise, would be something that even Kate would still need more Int to learn. I have a feeling the mage who mentioned that was talking about way down the road and not anytime soon or trying to impress her. The sometimes-disturbing mystic math of the mages was amazing, headache-inducing, and oh so useful, but it was still a pain in the ass. Prime Spellform Matrix Interactions was the basis for most spatial magics, I would be surprised if the mage that mentioned it fully understood the subject. Although not actually needed learning runes would help in her studies, and runes were just so damn useful anyway, so I decided not to mention it. Kate would figure it out in a year or two if she kept up her rapid pace.

The timer was getting low so I wanted to get one thing out of the way, “Guys, I just want to say that I might say some stuff that you would normally question. I would really appreciate it if you just followed my lead if that happens. I will answer any questions you have in-game or after the interview. Will you do that for me?”

Dave looked interested but just nodded, and Kate just said, “Sure thing”, I don’t think she got what I was saying.

At 2 minutes left on the clock, a golden-haired woman appeared on the center screen, not blond, her hair was actually a checkerboard pattern of gold and silver and her outfit was just as outrageous. She was wearing a dress that looked like two angel wings, one gold, and one silver, that had sprouted from her back and flipped forward to cradle her form. The wings both hid a lot and at the same time left almost nothing to the imagination. The ends of the wings circled around her body to meet on the floor behind her creating a small train. All of that combined with her caramel skin and delicate features made for a striking appearance. A bit gaudy for my tastes but who am I to judge, I have been friends with all kinds of strange folk over the years. Let those who have never accidentally felt up a Dryad cast the first stone.

This was the interviewer, Screen Queen Delilah Sky. A video game news star and one of the reasons so many people would tune in to see this thing. Let no one say MythArc didn’t hire the best.

“Hey dearies, we have two minutes until we go live so get settled and prepare for some fun! Don’t worry about a thing, Queen Sky will make this a blast! Do any of you have anything, in particular, you want to tell people? I need to know so I can schedule it in dears. Mmm EpicDave you are one big hunk of beef, the girls are gonna love ya as much as I do! Let’s get this show on the road and make gaming history!” She did a little twirl after her statement…. She was an odd duck that’s for sure.

I spoke up, “Miss Sky, I have some things I would like to say to the viewers if you can find the time for it?”

She turned to me and grinned as if I had just given her free ice cream. “Oh, that will be no problem at all Mr. Lazarus.” She purred, jotting something down on her own table.