I didn’t stop picking flowers as I had a look at the Gathering skill tree. It was easy enough to keep tapping the yellow flowers on autopilot in the background behind the translucent skill tree screen that I could see through easily enough.

I’d unlocked Gathering:Herbs, but there was also a skill tree for Gathering:Mining. Which was a delightfully unoriginal way for the game to tell me that armor and weapon crafting were also available skills in the game that I couldn’t see yet because I hadn’t unlocked any of the skills by sitting down at a forge and figuring out how the hell that kind of crafting worked in this game.

I imagined someone out there was going to start doing a brisk business at some point compiling all the different skill trees and telling players how to unlock them. It was very old school of Lotus to throw players to the metaphorical wolves and not hold their hands all the way to skill mastery, but I kind of liked it like that.

It made me feel like I was in the Wild West days of the late 1990s and early 2000s when the Internet and MMOs had been new and anything went because nothing had been solidified into rules designed to help companies Hoover the greatest amount of money possible from their player base.

“It’s not telling me much,” I said.

“Sounds about right,” Kris said. “This game is old school. Now if you’re done picking flowers we might want to get a move on before those two assholes catch up to us?”

The window showing me the skill tree for Gathering:Herbs disappeared with a wave and I was back in the forest staring at a path that didn’t have nearly as many Nhewb’s Blessing flowers as it had moments ago. Huh. I’d really gone to town grabbing those things on autopilot while I was reading up on skill trees.

“Yeah, I guess I’m done picking flowers for now,” I said. “I don’t think there’s much more I can pick on this stretch of trail.”

“Then let’s get going,” Kris said. “We already ran into a goblin and a couple of player killers and that hottie with the disembodied voice, and I’m not in the mood to run into anything else that could kill us.”

“A hottie who you have no idea what she looks like, I might add,” I said with a smirk.

“Whatever. She sounded hot,” Kris said. “Now come on. We need to get a move on.”

I looked at the few remaining flowers. They had a faint glowing outline around them. Almost as though once I'd picked one flower the game was pointing them out to me.

That’d be helpful. Or it could be my imagination.

We picked a path through the forest in silence for a little while, but that silence didn’t last long. Kris kept glancing into the trees around us like she thought they were hiding more monsters. Or maybe more players who’d try to kill us.

Which wasn’t an unreasonable assumption. This was a game, after all, and one of the hallmarks of MMOs was there was plenty of stuff to kill and plenty of stuff looking to kill players. Monsters and players alike.

I didn’t figure that dynamic would be much different in the most advanced persistent online world ever created, though I did get the feeling that the methods for killing and being killed were going to be a hell of a lot more intense in Lotus than in previous games.

For all that those assholes hadn’t actually attacked us. Sure we’d been rescued, but Gregor had hesitated with his bow and arrow for some reason. There was something to that if I could just reason it out, but there was a missing piece to that puzzle.

“I really hope there aren’t any more griefer assholes lurking out there,” Kris said.

I peered into the woods. The forest seemed like a pretty idyllic place. Like if we hadn’t been attacked by those player killers back in that clearing I would’ve thought we were going on a pleasant stroll through a wooded park in a richer part of the arcology where they could afford to waste money on things like putting together wooded parks and all the infrastructure that was required for maintaining a forest on a skyscraper that reached into the upper atmosphere.

Basically this was the kind of thing I was never going to see in the real world. Not when I lived in one of the poorest levels on the arcology in a cramped shanty with my parents. For now. Until graduation at the end of this school year when they’d made it clear I was going to be out on my own, which was something I tried not to think about too much considering I didn’t have much hope of moving onto higher education.

I’d wasted most of my study time playing games. Oops.

I focused on the game to distract myself from thoughts of the unpleasantness the future held for me in just a few months if I didn’t figure out something to save my ass when my parents kicked me out.

“I’m not that worried about griefers,” I said.

There was plenty of existential dread to go around, and compared to that a couple of wannabe player killers barely registered.

“You aren’t?” Kris asked.

“Nah,” I said. “Maybe those guys came back, but this is a thick forest.”

“And we’re walking along an obvious path leading from the starter area to the biggest town nearby,” Kris pointed out. “Doesn’t take a tracking genius to figure out the most likely path we’re taking.”

“Yeah, but it just feels like if they were going to attack us they would’ve done it already,” I said.

Again there was that feeling that there was something I was missing. Some game system or something that was keeping them from coming after us. I really should’ve spent more time reading up on the game’s mechanics and less time reading up on loot tables, but it was too late for that now.

It’s not like I was going to log out of the game to try and figure out why those assholes might’ve given up the chase before it started.

“Whatever. What we really have to worry about are creatures our level like that wolf,” I said, leaning down to tap a new group of Nhewb’s Blessing flowers and add them to my inventory. “I’m pretty sure those dudes and that goblin and your alleged hot chick were a fluke.”

“Right, and the last thing we need to do if we’re worried about a low level wolf taking a bite out of our ass is bend over and present an easy target because we’re picking flowers,” Kris said.

“Whatever,” I muttered.

I couldn’t help myself. I was hooked, which made sense considering the whole point of a game like this was to get players addicted so they kept paying their monthly subscription.

I was getting one hell of a shot of brain pleasure juices every time I tapped a yellow flower and got a notification that I'd added a new cluster of petals to my inventory. I'd even gained enough points in Gathering: Herbs to raise my overall gathering skill by a single point, which sent another shot straight to the pleasure centers in my brain.

“This is going to take awhile, isn’t it?” Kris asked. “Like there’s no way I’m going to convince you not to stop and smell the flowers at this point, is there?”

I grunted. Kris would understand the meaning behind that grunt. It was a grunt she’d heard often enough. The way she rolled her eyes when she heard that grunt was something I’d seen often enough, for that matter.

What can I say? I’d always enjoyed gathering things in a game world and making things out of the things I gathered, and Kris was used to it for all that she liked to grouse. It was the same as how I liked to grouse about how the only thing she liked doing was smashing things with her hammer, for all that her desire to smash things with her hammer usually dovetailed nicely with my desire to gather materials from the game world since those material nodes were usually surrounded by monsters.

It was my thing. While other people were off killing monsters in NuWoW I'd dug up an ancient mod that took maps of all the ore and herb nodes in a zone and created a path so I could fly around and gather to my heart’s content. There was something zen about zoning out and gathering while a podcast or a show played in the background.

I didn’t have a podcast or a show playing in the background in Lotus, but it was still entrancing. It felt all too real, but with the addictive overlay of a video game and leveling up a skill tree to really drive home the addiction.

It was enough to make me wonder about the other skills that were on offer. I wondered what it would take to get into mining skill, or to craft some potions from the flower petals I was gathering. I’d need a lot of this stuff if I wanted to level my Alchemy, or whatever the fuck they called potion creation in this game.

“Are you seriously going to pick all these flowers?” Kris asked.

“Hey, I’ve only picked a few of the damn things,” I said. “Besides. You never know. These things could be worth some money. I bet they have an auction house or something we can use to make some coin.”

“You and your obsession with in-game money,” Kris said.

“Forgive me for wanting to make some extra scratch,” I said. “Extra money means we’ll have funds if we need to pull a job.”

“You think we’ll need to pull a job in Lotus?” Kris asked, sounding incredulous.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Why the fuck is the Horizon name all over that armor? And why is that guild called Horizon Dawn? It smells.”

I kept thinking about that gear I'd seen on those two assholes. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something going on with Horizon in this game, and we were going to run into those corporate pricks sooner rather than later.

Assuming we hadn’t already run into those corporate pricks in the person of those two wannabe player killer assholes trying and failing to kill that goblin.

“Yeah, right,” Kris said. “If you want some money in the game world to make up for not having jack shit in the real world that’s your business.”

I ignored the jab. It helped that Kris was just as dirt poor as me and everyone else on our level.

Everyone but Trent and his friends. It still bothered me that I hadn’t been able to figure out how the fuck they managed to get early access, but I pushed those thoughts away. I had new thoughts to occupy my mind now for the first time since we pulled that job on the Horizon Gamemaster, and it felt good to be dusting off the cobwebs.

Gathering herbs was opening my mind to a world of potential gaming commerce waiting for us to seize the opportunity, and I found myself hoping against hope that this game actually encouraged players to craft interesting things rather than making crafting nothing more than a lame add-on to the raiding experience like other popular juggernaut MMOs that may or may not look like MoM when the letters for its acronym were flipped upside down.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Kris said. “And it’s not going to work. You’ve been chasing that dream in every MMO we’ve played from pirate Vanilla WoW servers to NeoSWG to NuWoW and you’re always disappointed. The closest we ever came was that pirate DAoC server running Shrouded Isles. You know the most the Lotus people are going to let you do is make some interesting armor for leveling or some potions that give raiders an edge.”

I looked down at the flowers in my inventory and thought of all the games we’d played together. All the times I’d hoped and prayed this game would be the one to deliver on the “anything goes” promise that a good MMO, not one of those on-rails theme parks that’d become the norm since WoW solidified the template and killed it, should be.

“No,” I said. “I refuse to believe that. Everything else about this game is so amazing and immersive and open. They’re not going to fuck up crafting.”

“Yeah, we’ll see when we get to Nilbog and have a look around,” Kris said, taking a couple of steps and then turning to see if I was following and not picking more little yellow flowers.

It was at that moment that a wolf leapt out of the trees and landed on Kris with a muted thump and a snarl. I started and reached for my puny starter sword, but Kris seemed to have things in hand so I let the thing dematerialize back into my inventory as soon as it appeared.

At least she had her hammer up and the wolf was biting down on the handle rather than biting down on Kris’s neck. Kris tossed the wolf and stood, her chest heaving as she held her hammer out in front of her and grinned with a crazed madness she always had when digital bloodlust got the better of her.

“Now this is more like it,” she growled as she advanced on the wolf. “Way better than picking flowers!”

Meanwhile I went back to picking my flowers, relieved that Kris finally had something to occupy her attention that wasn’t bitching at me for gathering shit.