“What does it do?”

“I’m not telling you.”

“Come on.”

“No. Screw you and your insanely high luck.”

“You know I can just look it up, right?”

“Damn it. Fine.”

Kana stood there, staring at Spiral. Finally, the knight sighed and said, “It’s a token, right? You turn it in for a prize at the Crimson Plaza. Basically, it’s currency, and all the prizes are 3 or 4 star rarity items. You can pick a 3 star item, or try your luck and get a randomly selected 4 star piece of gear. There’s no guarantee it’ll be something you can use, but that’s why we have the trade function.”

“Ok, that makes sense. Next question: what and where is the Crimson Plaza?”

“That is an event area that’s only available at certain times. Uh… honestly getting there isn’t something you can really do at low levels. You might be better off selling that unless you want to hang onto it for the next month or so.”

“Probably get 10,000 drol for it,” Valit chimed in. “If you don’t want to deal with the hassle, I’ll sell it for you. I’ll put it up for 12, keep 2, and give you the 10.”

“Hmm. I’ll think about it and decide later. Speaking of selling stuff though, my inventory is kind of clogging up with junk from all these snapbulbs. I’m pretty sure I’ve got enough mutilated stalks to build a house with.”

“Oh, right. We still haven’t hit a town yet. There should be a few NPC vendors coming up here in a bit to sell off the trash to, not that you’ll need the drol once you make bank off all your lucky drops.”

They started walking again, though the fun of indiscriminately slaughtering weak mobs had worn off and they only cleared the ones that were too closely packed together to move between without catching their attention. After a minute or two, they hit a dirt path and Spiral led them east to a small town. The signpost at the edge read ‘Faldsteel.’

“Ok, if I’m remembering this right, there’s a proximity quest that activates as soon as you get close enough to it. It’s some back-alley thing where a couple of thugs are about to knife a guy. So I guess let’s spread out and find that?” Spiral said.

“I’m going to be finding some poor unfortunate pawn shop to take all this crap off my hands first,” Kana told him.

“Ditto,” Valit added. She peered around. “This place is kind of… dingy. Everything else was so much brighter. I didn’t realize how drab this place was the first time I was here.”

“Well the story is kind of a downer.”

“Why’s that?” Kana asked.

“No! Don’t ruin it for me. I want to see it play out,” Valit cut in before Spiral could explain.

Kana laughed. “Alright. Guess we’ll find out when we get there.”

Spiral led them to a merchant and explained that the game had options to use a menu system for ease of access as opposed to having to give voice commands to the NPCs when buying and selling items. It was optional, but generally agreed on to be easier and faster, especially when multiple players were accessing the vendor at the same time.

Their bags considerably lighter and their purses slightly heavier, the party split up to explore the town and find the proximity triggered quest that would start the whole line. The town wasn’t that big, but Kana got distracted by the NPC scripts. They were advanced enough that he could almost forget that he wasn’t surrounded by real people.

They had conversations, they reacted to his presence, and nowhere did he see any looping behavior. Kana wondered if the AI was advanced enough to make decisions based on environmental stimulus, or if the loop was simply long enough that he hadn’t seen the end of it yet. He experimented, approaching a group of men talking in low voices. They fell silent as he walked up, and one of them said with a sneer, “What do you want, stranger?”

Kana thought about that for a second. He didn’t know anything about the questline except for a name, really. “I’m looking for Thulnar. Could you tell me where he is?”

“Oh aint he just a popular one lately. Bastard’s bringing trouble down on the whole town. Fine. He’s got a shack on the outskirts of town that way.” The NPC pointed a grubby finger toward the east. “Go pester him and leave the rest of us be.”

“Thanks.”

The NPC spit on the ground and turned back to the other men. Kana stood there for a moment, trying to process the conversation. Apparently, he hadn’t cleared out fast enough, because the man looked back at him and said, “What? You need help picking your nose too?”

Kana doubted he’d ever unravel the mystery of why someone had taken the time to script such an abrasive NPC. He turned on his heel and walked off, the laughter of the men following him down the street. Idly, he wondered what would happen if he attacked the man. The game might not even allow him to attack NPCs at all, or at least not in a town setting. He made a mental note to ask Spiral later.

A party chat message popped up from Valit, reading simply, “Found it. West side of town behind a bar.” Kana stopped and looked back across town. He couldn’t see Valit, but his HUD gave him a marker pointing straight at her. He followed it, boggling as he walked by the NPCs that they took the time to stop and jeer at him for going the “wrong” direction.

Compared to the simple script of the blacksmith NPC, the crowd of villagers was on a whole different level. Kana was at a loss to explain the gulf in AI functionality. It was like one NPC had been built by a high school kid who was mucking around with coding as a hobby and the ones in the village had been developed by a professional team, which they probably had been. It was probably just spotty quality control, but he would have thought such a prominent and early-appearing NPC would have a better coat of polish on it.

By the time he reached Valit, Spiral had already arrived and they’d triggered the event. A middle-aged man dressed in the same rough looking clothes as the rest of the villagers was on the ground, sitting upright and looking up at a pair of ruffians, fear plain on his face. Both of them were young, tall and heavily muscled.

The victim scooted backward and said, “Please, I didn’t do anything. Don’t hurt me. You want money? Take it!”

Spiral pulled his weapon and approached. One of the thugs turned to face him. “Stay out of it. Don’t concern you none.”

“Yeah… No.”

He rushed in, leading the charge with his shield. The thug produced a pair of daggers to defend himself. Spiral blocked both attacks, but doing so interrupted his momentum and he didn’t get the stun off he’d obviously been hoping for.

“Do we kill these guys or just rough them up?” Kana asked, hesitating to attack. It hadn’t been a problem before, but Nibelus’s attack power was so overwhelming, he was afraid he might accidentally kill one of the NPCs and mess up the quest.

“Go all out. The game scripts will keep things on track,” Valit told him as she launched a flashburn beam at the other thug.

That was good enough for Kana. He brandished his weapon and lashed out at the thug Valit had already attacked. His first melee landed for 41 damage, instantly dropping half of the thug’s HP. He followed it up with a second one, and something unusual happened. The NPC used his weapons to catch and push the spear aside, despite having been wide open for the attack. A message popped up saying his attack had been parried and it had only dealt 13 damage.

That was enough to push the threshold on the trigger to keep the script rolling. Both thugs disengaged from combat and ran past their intended victim. “You’ll pay for this,” one of them hissed as they scampered off.

“Thank you,” the NPC victim said as he climbed to his feet. “Those guys just showed up a few days ago and started causing trouble. There’s a bunch more of them too. I caught a few of them hassling poor old Thulnar, and I guess I made myself a target by sticking up for him. I didn’t think they’d go this far though. And for what reason? Thulnar never hurt anybody!”

A message popped up telling Kana that his quest log had been updated, and that his next step was to find Thulnar. The NPC they’d saved thanked them again before heading off to the more populated center of town. Once they were alone again, Kana described the weird parry. “It was odd though, because there was definitely no way that should have happened. One second, I had a clean shot. The next, the dagger was just there.”

“That’s the power of plot armor. The script calls for the thugs to get away, so when you would have dealt a lethal blow, the game cranked the mob’s speed up by 1000% so that it could deflect some damage,” Spiral explained.

“Cheating bastards.”

The quest log had updated itself with a new quest, directing Kana to investigate the ruffians making trouble in Faldsteel, and advised him that Thulnar might know more. It didn’t give any hint of where to find Thulnar, but thanks to the rude NPC he’d already talked to, he knew where to start looking.

It didn’t take long for them to notice a change in general attitude from the NPCs. Starting the quest line seemed to have polarized the town into those who were much friendlier because they had taken a stand against the thugs terrorizing them and those who had become outright hostile, often muttering comments along the lines of bringing more trouble down on everyone’s head.

Most suspicious were the ones that tried to stay out of sight and just watch. When Kana pointed them out, Spiral said, “Good eye. They’re either part of the gang or local recruits who are being paid to keep an eye out and report back.”

“Should we do something about them?” Valit asked. “I never noticed them before.”

“Nah, all the normal rules for attacking NPCs still apply to them right now. They’re mostly just there for flavor anyway. I heard somewhere that if you try to attack them, they run like hell and they’re almost impossible to catch unless you’re level 30 or higher.”

“Speaking of, I ran into a real nasty NPC earlier and meant to ask you what exactly those rules are.”

“Well, you can. Other NPCs will run away, or some will try to attack you. Guards and the like almost always come after you. The thing is, though, the game remembers. If you go on a slaughtering rampage, you might as well cross the town off the map, because even after they all respawn, you’ll never be able to interact with them again.”

“Oh. So if I come back at level 50 and kill everyone, when they all respawn, they just cower or run away if I approach? Or attack, I guess, if they’re guards?”

“There’s a couple different reaction AI’s set, but yeah, basically something along those lines. Also, the game has a hidden reputation score and doing stuff like that drags it down. Get it low enough and you’ll have NPCs in places you’ve never been before telling you that they know all about you and you’re not welcome. Guards will try to keep you out of cities too.”

“It’s sounds like what you’re saying is: don’t do it.”

Spiral laughed. “I feel like I shouldn’t have to tell you of all people not to murder and terrorize the citizens. But some players do make characters specifically for that. They get up to high levels and deliberately tank their reputation stat, then go on sprees in the major cities for fun. Speaking of, at some point you’re going to start seeing player killing.”

“Hot player on player action,” Valit chimed in. “Exciting and infuriating, all at the same time.”

“There’s some level restrictions. You can’t attack someone more than five levels below you, for example, unless you’re willing to accept some pretty harsh penalties. I’d have to look them up, but it’s stuff like if you’re flagged when you die, you lose 1000% more XP and your killer gets a random piece of your gear. And the flag does not go away until you do die.”

Kana made a mental note to dig into the rules to that later. It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested, but he was pretty sure they’d reached their destination. An old man, tall and broad despite his age, stood in the door frame of a shack watching them. He looked them over and said, “You don’t look like Alidrak’s little gang of shitheads. So, what do you want? Someone else I’ve wronged in the past come to get revenge maybe?”

“No,” Valit said, stepping forward. “We came to help.”

“Help?” The NPC looked suspicious. “Why would a bunch of strangers want to help me?”

“Well, it’s not just about you. Those men are attacking other villagers too. They were trying to mug some poor man on the other side of town just a few minutes ago. Dealing with them is everyone’s problem.”

“The villagers, sure. But you’re not from around here? What’s to stop you from walking right back down the road? Why do you care?” he demanded.

“Because what they’re doing isn’t right, or just, or fair.”

The NPC snorted. “As if any of those things were what makes the world go round. No, you’ll forgive me if I don’t trust you. I’ve had enough past mistakes come back to haunt me. I won’t be going out of my way to make any new ones. Get lost.”

Kana wasn’t sure where that conversation had gone wrong exactly, but Spiral and Valit didn’t seem surprised by the way it was going. He guessed everything was more or less running according to script, with the NPC’s AI keeping it within the defined parameters. So he wasn’t exactly surprised when he got a notification about his quest log updating from ‘Find Thulnar’ to ‘Find a way to earn Thulnar’s trust.’

Thulnar walked into his shack and kicked the door closed behind him. For some reason, that struck Kana as funny, considering it fit so poorly that he could still see the NPC moving around through the gaps around the frame. He supposed slamming the door in their face was more about the principle of the action than about actual privacy.

“How are we supposed to convince him we don’t work for this Alidrak guy?” Kana asked, curious where the story was going.

“You tell me, Mr. Lucky Dice.”

“Lucky dice? What’s that- oh. We have to go find some item drop somewhere, don’t we?”

“I’m sure we’ll be done in no time,” Valit said.

“You know the drops were a coincidence, right? I’m not just going to magically get lucky drops forever? That’s not how probability works.”

Spiral laughed over Kana’s protests and said, “Come on. We’ll see who’s right.”