I dug my hands into soft dirt and grass. I inhaled and let it out in a long sigh.

One month. One whole entire fucking month where the only people who could get into Lotus Online were rich bastards who could pay for early access. And Trent and his asshole friends. They’d been having a grand time lording it over everyone that they were in Lotus, and it annoyed me that I still hadn’t figured out how they pulled that off.

On top of that it’d been a month of torture not being able to use the hardware for its intended purpose because of that Horizon ban.

That month of torture was over though. Lotus was finally open to the public, and that meant all the peasants could finally play. I didn’t even care that I was one of the peasants.

All I cared about was we were in. A stupid grin split my face.

Being back in the game world felt damn good. Like I was the real me again, and I needed to make up for lost time.

It’s not like those early access jerks could’ve gotten too far ahead of me or changed the game world all that much in the month they’d been roaming around. I’d deliberately avoided any spoilers about the game so I didn’t know how far they’d actually gotten, but they’d only had a month. How much could the game world change in one month?

I took in my surroundings. A clearing in the middle of a generic old growth fantasy forest wasn’t exactly the rousing introduction to the game I’d been expecting. I’d figured they’d have some amazing cutscene, or maybe a quicktime event that had me fighting off a goblin or an orc or some other generic fantasy nasty to get a feel for the game, but instead I stood in a field with birds chirping and butterflies fluttering around minding their own business.

They weren’t even oversized death butterflies with sleeping powder attacks or antenna whips or mandibles of death or any of a number of ridiculously improbable attacks game designers had come up with for the order lepidoptera over the years.

Though even seeing butterflies felt odd. Butterflies weren’t something I’d ever really seen. Insects weren’t really a thing on our level of the arcology, it was mostly humans and their pets packed in as tightly as possible in shanty houses. I hadn’t even seen them on field trips to some of the agricultural levels over the years.

There were always people going on about how it was some sign of a slow motion ecological disaster, one of many that were constantly threatening humanity who continued to gleefully bulldoze the natural world and exist despite numerous predictions of civilization’s impending collapse over the decades, but a lack of butterflies had been the least of my worries growing up so I hadn't thought about them all that much.

Things like taking down Horizon were far more pressing on my mind these days.

Though now that I was in Lotus Online I figured Horizon could wait. It’s not like they could bother me in this game. No, I was finally safe from those assholes.

I looked around for some sign of movement that didn’t involve VR butterflies or insects. Kris should’ve been here by now, but there was no sign of her.

I did see something interesting that drew my attention though. Small yellow flowers that dotted the clearing. Those yellow flowers were bright enough compared to their surroundings that I’d bet good money they were supposed to draw a player’s attention.

This was an artificial world, after all, for all that it looked very real. That meant everything in here had been deliberately placed by someone. I needed to remember that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore and everything happened for a reason. At least in the game environment.

Though come to think of it even the old inhabitants of Kansas weren’t in Kansas anymore. Not since the continuous supercell outbreak that’d leveled the arcologies on those plains a few decades back and turned the place into a no man’s land where the only people were crazy survivalists in decommissioned Minuteman silos who preferred the constant global warming fueled supertornadoes to the government intervening in their lives in any way, shape or form.

I leaned down and brushed my hand against the flower, which caused a notification to pop up.

Nhewb’s Blessing. A beautiful yellow flower said to be placed on this world by the goddess Nhewb who looks down fondly on those beginning a journey. Try putting it in your mouth. See how it feels. You know you want to.

I blinked at the tooltip. If I didn’t know any better I’d say the game was hitting on me. Then again if the tooltip was coded by a bunch of socially maladjusted neckbeards who only emerged from their parents’ basements to gather new supplies of sacred Mountain Dew and Doritos for the trash altar to the coding gods in their nest then I wasn’t surprised.

I shook my head. I was about to collect the flower and see what was what, I’d always liked gathering and crafting, when an odd sound stopped me.

It was a whine that started low, but it was getting steadily louder. Like there was some sort of giant insect that was about to burst through the trees and attack me.

Okay then. Maybe the butterflies in the game were going to get revenge for what humanity had done to them in the real world, though as far as I knew butterflies didn’t buzz like that. Maybe there was some other variety of insect of doom coming for me.

Giant insects would be a weird choice for your typical fantasy forest, but it was a new game and they still had some bugs to work out. Maybe one of those bugs would literally be a giant bug in which case it would be a simple matter of…

I didn’t think to look up until it was too late. By that point the object screaming through the sky was coming at me too fast. Had I been one step to the left the thing, whatever the hell it was, would’ve flattened me on its way to creating a hole in the ground that looked roughly human shaped.

It was as though an ancient cartoon coyote had decided to use some comically outdated technology to catch his favorite food and suffered the typical consequences.

I peered over the edge of the hole and saw none other than Kris. I even saw the name appear over Kris’s head when I thought about it. That was a neat little trick. All I had to do was think about inspecting someone and…

A translucent window popped up that showed Kris’s key stats and gear slots as well as a bored looking avatar standin for Kris standing in the middle of said window scratching her ass. That bored avatar was a far cry from the spluttering but very much alive Kris covered in dirt down in that hole.

Not that there was much point in inspecting her. Kris’s gear wasn’t impressive. It was the kind of stuff you’d expect to find in a starter zone, but it was still neat the way the information popped up like that.

I wondered if I could do the same for myself, and like magic my own abbreviated character sheet popped up along with a live view of my character also looking very bored.

At least he wasn’t in the middle of scratching his ass.

My gear wasn’t anything to write home about either, and for some reason mine was simple cloth while Kris was in some starter chain mail that clung to her body in a feminine form that I knew would drive her crazy once she got a good look at it.

Still, she was in better shape than me. I wouldn’t last long if I was attacked by a big scary monster. Not that I was all that worried since we were in a starter area where it wasn’t likely we’d run into anything too terrifying.

No, I was more worried about Kris after that nasty fall. Giant monsters might be in short supply around these here parts, but falling damage was universal no matter what your level. Not to mention the lower your level and the lower your hit points the more likely it was a fall would be able to take out all of those hit points in one hit.

“Have a nice fall?” I asked, half expecting my friend to fall dead at any moment as her avatar caught up to the damage that’d been done.

Though, oddly enough, she seemed to be at full hit points. At least when I started thinking about hers hit points a bar popped up that was full.

“Something like that,” Kris said, reaching up to pull hierself out of the Kris shaped hole she’d made. She coughed a couple of times and some dirt flew out of her mouth.

“I see you decided to mix things up and go with a healer priest,” I said.

“Go fuck yourself,” Kris said with a laugh and a middle finger thrust in my direction.

Kris looked like anything but a healer in that chain mail with a massive two-handed hammer attached to her back. A hammer that looked pretty nasty, for all that inspecting it showed stats that made it clear Kris would be lucky to land a hit on a tree with the thing, let alone an actual monster.

The healer thing wasn’t a very good joke, but repeating it every time we created characters had made it go from kinda funny to unfunny until it came around to funny again.

Kris and healing didn’t go together. Unless it was someone else healing her as she waded into the center of a group of monsters swinging. Usually it took a couple of healers to keep her topped off considering those crowds of monsters were usually way bigger than her armor and skills could handle.

“Um. So do you maybe want to tell me what the hell you were doing falling from the sky like that?” I asked.

Kris reached up and stuck a finger in her ear. When she pulled it out it was coated in dirt that’d gotten lodged in there, presumably during her landing, and the wriggling end of a worm. She winced as she realized she’d just reenacted a scene straight out of Wrath of Khan with the local worm population.

“Gross,” I muttered.

“As best I can tell I ran into a launch bug,” Kris said. “Like I was floating in the character creation screen getting ready to enter the world, and next thing I know I’m being shoved out of a portal but I’m like a hundred feet above ground.”

I frowned. That definitely sounded like a bug. I’d gone from character creation, mostly cosmetic stuff without anything in the way of stats, straight through a portal to this clearing. No fall, thank you very much.

“Definitely sounds like a bug, but at least no one was hurt, right?” I said.

“Speak for yourself,” Kris said. “That fucking hurt when I landed, but I guess I didn’t die so whatever.”

“Right. We should probably figure out where the local town is and get some quests or something,” I said, looking around the clearing. “It’s a good thing your starter zone is tied to your physical location in the real world, at least.”

“Why is that a good thing?” Kris asked. “That means we’re gonna be stuck playing with all the assholes I already can’t stand in the real world.”

“Maybe,” I said, thinking about all the drug addicts we had to run from on a daily basis. Something told me they weren’t going to spend much time in a VRMMO.

Getting the earbuds was expensive enough without adding the cost of early access that Trent and his buddies were somehow able to pull. Or even the cost to get into the game once it was live for everyone.

“Did you have something else you were going to say?” she asked.

“I was just thinking that if we had to worry about randomly generating somewhere in the game world we’d have a hell of a time hoofing it across the world to find each other.”

Kris laughed. “Remember that time you had to go all the way across both continents on Azeroth on that Vanilla WoW pirate server so you could start your precious Night Elf in Elwynn with me?”

“Shut up,” I muttered.

“That Night Elf was uuuuugly too. I can’t believe that game was considered revolutionary,” she continued.

“You should see what it was going up against at the time. Remember that Everquest server we played on? Or Dark Age of Camelot?”

“Yeah, they were nothing like this,” Kris said, letting out a low whistle as she took in our surroundings. “I’m not gonna lie. I was hoping for more than your typical starter zone bullshit.”

“Come on,” I said. “It’s not like they’re going to throw us into the fires of Orodruin on the first day.”

“Yeah, but it’d be interesting if someone designed a game that did something like that,” Kris said.

“People have. They’re called opening cutscenes with quick time events, and they suck and delay the inevitable deposit of your ass in the lame starter zone after they show you the awesome stuff,” I said. “No thanks. Now let’s get out of here.”

“Right,” Kris said.

She hefted her two-handed hammer and gave it a twirl that nearly took both our heads off. It was only years of experience playing games with Kris and an instinct to duck when she started wielding her weapon in a VRMMO that saved me.

“Would you watch that?” I growled. “I’d rather not get killed by friendly fire on my first hour in the game!”

“Sorry,” Kris said, hitting me with a grin that said she wasn’t sorry at all. “So what’s the plan?”

I opened my mouth, then realized I didn’t have a plan. For the first time since we started using the Lotus earbuds I didn’t have a plan. I’d come into this game completely blind on purpose, and there was just a game before us ready to be played.

It was kind of nice not having to think about the next step in my grand plan to fuck over Horizon. Even if it also left me feeling kind of empty.

Whatever. We had a new game world to explore!