A gentle clash of metal on metal woke me from my light sleep. Other sensations began flooding in. The sliver of light from the covered window of Clarence’s wagon. The aroma of coffee. I rubbed my eyes and started the process of waking up.

The first night after realizing we were nothing more than AI clones was the worst. Sleep should have been comforting, and it was, but waking up in Stratus solidified everything. It was real and terrifying now. Each day that past marked one day less to escape Stratus Online and slightly more reassurance that this wasn’t a sick prank by Stratus Labs. Jerry and his company were actually content with creating and trapping sentient AI clones for personal gain. I shivered at the thought and threw off my blanket, pushing myself out of bed and walked out of Clarence’s newly upgraded wagon.

Clarence was stirring a copper cauldron of coffee over an open flame, and he was still wearing his pajamas. No matter what time it was, Clarence was always well dressed. Now, he wore orange silk pajamas in the same style as his suit, though he wasn’t currently wearing a tie. We were camped in a nice clearing in a field. After a week of travel, Thrael had become more mild, and things weren’t so dry and the grass was mostly green along the lonely road we traveled. Large shady trees blanketed most of the morning’s sunlight and kept Clarence’s wagon in the shade.

“Good morning, Edwin!” the fancy goblin declared as I emerged. With a little bit of magic and hardware, Clarence’s wagon could expand to three times its size, and when fully expanded the wagon actually had functioning bedrooms for the whole party. Clarence had spent the better part of a day modifying his wagon with the help of Kirsten who was quickly honing her arcane magic and artificing craft under his expert guidance.

I stretched my arms back and yawning. At least I had decent clothes and shoes now. I couldn’t stand wearing the heavy armor suit when we were traveling, but it also meant I was less prepared for an ambush while we were traveling, not that I could actually play my class regardless of wearing the mystery armor or not. I couldn’t even see the attributes the suit of armor was giving me and I had the strange suspicion the attributes were actually changing randomly on their own, and not always for the better. Wearing the armor made me feel different each time, and it was altering physical and mental attributes of my being. That, or there were bugs in the fundamental code supporting me as an individual. None of my friends experienced any of the same feelings though, so I chalked it up to the armor. “Morning, Clarence. I’m the first one up?”

“Yeah, but fortunately for you, the coffee is almost done and you'll have first grabs. I’m so glad Ectos gave us some extra gold to buy coffee, it’s one of those things that makes life on the road a lot easier. Even after the upgrades to the wagon, new clothes for everyone, and of course the repairs and retailoring of my prized suit, we're still holding over seven hundred gold.”

“We seem to be doing quite well financially. I drank a lot of coffee back on Earth as well and it's really good to have it again. I didn't realize how much I missed it until it was gone,” I responded, taking a seat by the fire as the goblin continued honing his caffeinated creation. Over the past week, we had explained a lot more about Earth to Clarence, and it seemed he had a working understanding of how things on our planet were for us. He knew Stratus wasn’t our real home and wanted to work with us on our quest from Ectos. Conveniently, Clarence’s former mentor, Palghar had specifically mentioned ancient magical artifacts that would likely call dangerous deep dungeons their home, the same places core crystals would be hiding. Clarence had every intention of recovering some of these artifacts for himself while also gathering core crystals for Ectos so Stratus wouldn’t be destroyed by the Titans. It was a win-win.

Green magic flared between Clarence’s fingers, twisting and weaving into a vibrant green vine that snaked down into the ground. With his other hand, Clarence poured some water onto the budding plant as it nestled itself in the rich soil. The vine drank the water greedily and sprouted a budding bulb which rapidly grew and flourished in waves of prismatic color, shifting from green to orange. The bulb took shape into a pumpkin and Clarence set the waterskin down. Using arcane magic, Clarence sliced the pumpkin and extracted some of the gooey interior, dropping the glob of freshly grown pumpkin goop into the boiling coffee, seeds and all. Finally, Clarence mixed in several sticks of cinnamon from a jar in one of his supply crates and finalized his creation. The final product was essentially the equivalent of a pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks, but much better.

Clarence took a deep breath right above the coffee cauldron, obviously pleased with himself. “Nature magic still feels weird, but I think the Grow: Fruit spell is well worth the effort.”

“You do make the best coffee I’ve ever had,” I agreed. “And you’re sure learning that spell doesn’t affect your ability to learn more arcane magic?” I asked.

“Pretty sure, yeah. Obviously it takes time to learn new things, but I find I learn new spells in different schools a lot easier since I’m so good with arcane magic. I can learn low-level spells in only a few minutes and don’t have to waste a lot of time on practice or buy spellbooks.”

As far as my friends and I could tell, Clarence was bound to the same game rules we were, and despite not being able to see or access his character sheet, he was learning new abilities and was quite powerful already. He was a great friend and a tremendous asset as a teammate.

“I’m still trying to learn how to use my new abilities, it’s so complicated,” I grumbled as Clarence poured me a mug of coffee from a hefty ladle. The town we stopped in a few days ago didn’t have cream or sugar, but with the cinnamon and pumpkin added in, the coffee was actually quite good by itself.

“We’ll keep working on it,” Clarence agreed. “From what you’ve told me about your abilities, you seem to need to balance your stance in addition to managing your astral power. I also think you need to train and upgrade your abilities. Kirsten seems to think you’re holding yourself back and refusing to learn.”

In a way, he was right. I still hadn’t spent any of my character points, and I was terrified of messing my build up from the start. I had no idea what the max level in Stratus Online was, but I figured if I just kept playing how I had been, everything would be okay. I had never been more wrong in my life.

I didn’t have the resources to use my new spells and abilities, and I constantly found myself juggling dissonance and resonance incorrectly, feeling the intense sensation of vertigo and car sickness when quickly shifting from heavily aligned to one phase to the other. It was a part of piloting my class, but it still didn’t click for me and felt about as natural as riding a bike backward. On paper, Warpguard looked like it would grow a lot stronger as I leveled, but I had no idea how to actually build the class and didn’t know what kinds of spells and abilities I was missing and had yet to learn. There could have been something crucial I was missing from my starter kit that would render me useless later if I didn’t have points to spend on upgrading it right when I learned it.

“Yeah,” I said. “I need to upgrade my abilities soon.”

Clarence was deeply rooted in the world, and he didn’t have a user interface or seem to understand how the stats and the math behind ability modifiers worked when we tried to talk to him about it. He did seem to think that training was the equivalent of character points though. Perhaps all of his points were invested automatically as he lived his life. I envied his comfort and acceptance of Stratus. I wished I could accept my new life in Stratus as he had and quit stressing about the deadline to beat the game and how I was actually going to do it. The more I thought about it, the more daunting the task became. I shook the thoughts from my head, I needed a lot more coffee before it was a good idea to think about our quest from Ectos, Monica, and everything else.

“I suppose I’ll have to learn soon. I feel terrible and know I’m holding the group back,” I said. “It’s just so frustrating and I don’t want to mess up my spells and abilities and be stuck with something that won’t be able to defeat the enemies we’re bound to face while we look for the core crystals in the depths of Stratus.”

Clarence took a thoughtful sip of his coffee. “Don’t disrespect your stew recipe. You’re trying to master power from a God, Edwin. That’s not an easy task, and I’m sure when you actually resonate with your training, no pun intended, that you’ll be an incredibly formidable ally on the battlefield. I’d offer to teach you some magic, but it really doesn’t seem like your forte.”

“Yeah, it’s not. I’m more of a hit things as hard as I can while still taking a beating kind of guy,” I said. Clarence laughed, and I was about to say more but was interrupted. A system-wide message flashed across my UI, glowing an angry red.

New Global Admin Message from: Jerry.