As Tripper, ZmantS, XRae and Jaggernaut walked towards the forest’s edge, Tripper looked across the party he was with. His best friend, a joker and his quiet sibling.

Jaggernaut was definitely a joker.

“Hey man, heard you, like, don’t like new things. That true?” Jag asked Tripper.

“It just made me nervous. Fiction gave some pretty clear warnings back in the first few surges of VR becoming a thing, I don’t wanna end up like that dude from the show with the swords. Just sounds like a bunch of mess,” Tripper explained.

XRae giggled as he finished, then caught him looking at her for laughing and rushed ahead into the forest.

“Rae wait!” Z shouted, running after his sister, “You’ve never played a game like this before, or any really! You don’t know what to do yet!”

“So you like to keep it old school OG?” Jag said.

“Yeah, I guess. I was comfortable with computers and joysticks. Now it’s like, I don’t know, I’m the joystick?”

A roar came from the trees.

“Well man, guess we better rock this party then, huh?” said Jag, laughing. The two players then ran into the trees after the rest of their party.

As they run, Jag pulls out two crossbows while Trip gets a fireball ready, floating it over his hand. In the trees, an enormous boar is chasing Z, Rae is chasing the boar and slashing at it with her sword. A healing spell flows to Z as he takes some damage from the boar.

Trip and Jag laugh as the scene unfolds. Finally, they launch some attacks at the boar, switching its attention and giving Z and Rae a chance to catch their breath. The boar’s ID tag shows it at Level 3, while Z and Jag are at Level 5, keeping some XP from the beta.

Trip and Rae are still at Level 1.

The group farms boars and other creatures in the forest, such as wolves and a strange bird called a Swillbeak.

Collecting some minor crafting ingredients like feathers, hides and tusks, a few hours pass and the initial hype from playing begins to wind down.

The next few fights with boars go more smoothly, with Z and Rae baiting the creatures and Tripper and Jag finishing them off. This method gets them all leveling up pretty quickly so they start to range farther out and looking for different types of creatures.

“We should look for mineral veins too, so we can get some crafting material,” Jag said.

“Good plan dude,” Tripper said. He begins looking at the forest floor as he walks and nearly stumbles into Rae because he stopped watching where he was walking.

As he walks into her, they both wobble, almost falling but catching each other and ending inches apart. A blush creeps up on both of their faces, turning them several shades of red darker than normal.

Z busts out laughing at the sight of the two, flustered and holding each other up from falling to the ground. They quickly broke apart, jumping back several feet.

“I’m sorry—” they stammer to each other, “No, it was my—.”

Rae huffs and runs to catch up to where Z was standing, he and Jag still cracking up at the situation.

As they continue through the forest, the party decides to explore instead of just farming the different boars and creatures they find. As they explore, they come across the moss-covered remains of what seems to be an ancient stone court.

“Hey guys, we’re almost at Level 5, maybe we should take a break?” said Rae.

“Yeah, I’ve got some major need for pizza. I’ll log out for a bit and eat, then get back in,” said Jag.

He went through his game menu on the HUD and hit the log-out button. His character flickers out with an electronic whine and where he stood returns to simple empty space.

The three friends sit in the court for a few minutes, simply enjoying the richness of the world they were in. the individual stones appeared hand carved, with each piece smooth and sanded as if by individual artisans.

A cold wind blew softly through the courtyard as Tripper stood up and dusted his clothes off. He went to inspect the walls of the ruins, noting the texturing, dust and grit on the stone.

Small veins of ivy drifted up the wall from the ground, adding layers of texture and color. The beauty of the simple scene and the fullness of the world.

“Hey Z,” Tripper said, “come check out this section over here.”

Z walked over, pretending to jaunt as if a character from an old movie, a pep in his step that didn’t quite fit in the world they were playing in.

“What’s up man?” Z asked.

“This wall, it’s just –I don’t know man, it just looks so real. I can’t believe it,” said Tripper.

“Yeah, that’s why it’s so cool. I loved exploring all of these ruins and woods and shit during beta. Hey Rae,” Z called, “come here and look at this stuff with us.”

“Hold on, I’m checking out some rooms on the other side,” Rae shouted from outside of the courtyard.

Tripper and Z continued following the edge of the stone walls, looking for any signs of copy and pasted imagery or code to break up the realism of the environment, but they couldn’t find anything.

Suddenly they heard Rae scream from where she was exploring the inner rooms the ruin and ran over to see what had happened.

The two friends burst into the corridor that all of the rooms were attached to and saw Rae running towards them, a shadowy figure chasing her. Rae kept casting a fire spell behind her but missed, striking the ground and walls but missing the creature itself.

As they got closer, the creature’s ID popped up over its head, [Wraith, Level 7].

“You good sis?” Z asked. He took a step forward toward her and raised his sword in his hand with a loose grip.

“Help!” she cried, darting past Z and colliding with Tripper. He caught her and pulled her out of the way as Z stuck his sword out to catch the Wraith, a golden light forming on the edge of his blade.

An unearthly shriek poured out of the creature, filling the small space and echoing off of the stone. A similar sound responded from further down the hall, and two more Wraiths glided toward the party.

“You two ready for this?” Z asked, slipping into a fighter stance with his small shield up and his sword point held behind him, handle backwards.

“I think so, let me just pop a buff real fast,” Tripper said.

Rae raised her sword and in her left hand, conjured a small spell with blue light pulsing in her palm. The wraiths close in on the party and Z attacks first, swinging his sword. An arc of holy light follows the blade and as he slashes the first Wraith, a wall of fire rises up between the players and the monsters.

The wall shrinks as the seconds tick by, but Rae manages to shoot her spell [Arcane Orb], unleashing a torrent of arcane energy between the three enemies, reducing their speed and dealing some damage.

Behind the brother and sister, Tripper readied two fireballs, flinging them at the collected Wraiths and setting them on fire, causing damage over time and making them weaker to other sources of damage.

Rae and Z hopped forward, slashing with their swords. Z also bashes a Wraith with his shield, dealing a final blow and making it disappear in a cloud of ash.

The two remaining creatures attacked with fury, shrieking and causing a status effect, [Torpor] that slowed the party down. Struggling against their attacks as they focused on Tripper now, Z tried to block one with his shield as Rae got flung against the wall by the other. Tripper activated his [Arcane Arrow] and shot through the first Wraith and into the second, killing the first and wounding the other.

Forcing herself to stand, Rae stabbed the last one with her sword and turned it into dust.

The corridor brightened slightly and the three players flopped to the ground. Z’s armor clanked as he landed and then he burped.

“Talk about getting fed,” he laughed.

Rae and Tripper sat on opposite walls next to him breathing heavily from the fight.

“Anyone get any decent drops?” Tripper asks.

“I got some weird bowl of dust,” Rae says, pulling a small cup out of her inventory.

Z popped up and scooted over to look at it.

“That’s Wraith Dust,” he said, “It’s a crafting ingredient for potions. If you decide to do alchemy as a trade you can use it to make stealth potions or special poison debuffs.”

“Neat,” Rae said, putting the bowl away again.

“I got this soul fragment,” Z said, “Here Trip.”

Tripper takes the small piece of grey shell and puts it in his inventory.

“Thanks man, I’ll look at it later,” Tripper said.

After a few more minutes’ rest, the trio stood up and dusted off their clothes, then heads back outside into the courtyard.

“I think it’s about that time guys,” Tripper said, yawning.

“Yeah, we should probably get going. We good to get back on tomorrow night?” Z asks.

Rae blushes and nods, Tripper gives a thumbs up and then everyone begins the journey back to Karis to be in the starting location again before logging out.

On the way back, the three are playing a small game of tag. Every time Tripper or Rae are it, they both go for Z, avoiding each other as much as possible. Eventually, Z got tired of it and they stopped playing, then finished the walk back to town. At the edge of the gate, they gather around in a circle.

“Alright dude, see you tomorrow?” Z asked.

“Totally, this is a pretty sick game, Z,” Tripper said.

“Cool, come on Rae,” Z said.

“Bye Trip,” Rae said quietly, then the brother and sister went to their menus to log out. Tripper does the same, and they all hit their buttons around the same time.

A whining noise like when Jag logged out filters through and they disappear in a flash of blue light. As the light covers Tripper, he notices a weird set of black lines flickering across his field of vision, similar to pixels not displaying properly on a computer screen, then everything turns black.