Jordan left soon to begin making his character, so Sera made her way back to the training grounds to start proper training as he advised. Part of her felt a little insulted that Monica had thought she’d need so much help in the game that she’d roped Jordan into taking care of her, but another part of her felt a little relieved and comforted at the thought of having a friendly face in the game.

She was on her way back to the training grounds when she noticed several notifications vying for her attention. With a sigh, she decided to clean up her user interface (UI) and decide on her notification options before she did anything further in the game. If she waited too long, she might forget what Jordan had told her. So without further ado, she set to work with her notifications first.

Friend request

Incinderfella wants to add you to his friends list. Accept/Decline.

“All righty, Mr. Princess,” Sera said, selecting ‘Accept’. She opened the second notification.

Mail

New message from Monanica (2.48 p.m. June 18). Read/Ignore.

Monanica? Was that meant to refer to the Mona Lisa? Wow. Sera struggled not to burst into laughter. Looked like the penchant for weird usernames ran in the family. She opened the message. It unrolled with a crisp sound, like a real scroll unfolding, and spread across her vision in the shape of an aged piece of parchment with a round, wax red seal imprinted with Monica’s face.

Hi Sera, please don’t be mad! I sent Jordan to help you in-game. He’s probably tracked you down by now. I’m not doing this because I don’t have faith in you. I do, really! It’s just that I want you to have the best time of your life in the game, and I want you to be safe. Just indulge in my micro-managing craziness. One thing I’ve learned after joining Daddy’s company is how many pervs are out there. If you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself joining a harem without even noticing. Don’t roll your eyes, it’s happened before, I swear it! Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being in a harem, if that’s your thing! *shifty eyes*

I better shut up now. Enjoy the game!

“Augggh!” Sera groaned out loud, startling a nearby pigeon into a sudden poop as it took off in a flurry of feathers. Her friend just drove her crazy sometimes. She had no idea whether to be pleased or angry at the woman! Her face flooding with embarrassment, Sera sent the message into her clutter folder and ignored the ‘add a friend’ option beside Monanica’s username.

That was it for the notifications, so Sera spent the next few hours cleaning up her UI. There were a lot of interesting options there. Perhaps it was due to Monica’s allusions to harems, but Sera decided she wanted to find out just how realistic the game could be.

She hid behind a tree, then after a quick scan to see if anyone was watching her, pinched her top away from her chest and looked down.

Whoa.

That looked… somewhat familiar.

Quickly, Sera tweaked her settings from one extreme to the next. At 100% she felt almost totally herself, and another glance down her front confirmed that her body had enough details for her to feel at home in it. At 0% everything was so fuzzy, all she could make out was the vague possibility of boobs amid all the pixels. Finally, Sera settled at a nice tame (in her opinion) 80%, like her pain threshold. Enough to feel and look right but not enough for any serious hanky panky. Absently, she wondered if there was a possibility for bras and underwear being sold at Elysia’s vendors. She didn’t seem to need one with the shirt she was wearing, but such real-life issues did tend to make one curious. Perhaps she would come across a Viking Brassiere for Separation and Support, with +50 armour, ideal for busy pillagers and conquering vixens!

Sera stifled a burst of giggles and turned her mind to more serious business. She made sure to customise when notifications were allowed to bother her during combat, and how realistic the game environment should be. For example, there was an option to make each and every NPC appear with a jewel above their heads to signify they were NPCs, with different colours indicating whether they were a merchant, an NPC with a quest, or just a normal NPC. Sera disable that—but added a shortcut to turn it on whenever she wanted—and proceeded to set the graphics to the most realistic environment the game could support, because it made everything look almost life-like. Unless she squinted at leaf or cloud patterns and purposely tried to pick out repetitions, she could almost forget she was in a game and immerse herself in Elysia’s beauty.

She also looked into setting up an account in the nearby bank—this required a physical visit to the bank, which was near the fountain square—and deposited her last copper into it. Then she brought up her UI again to take a look at her statistics. Jordan had told her she could eventually assign points when she leveled up to improve her capabilities and direct herself towards a particular class, since she had not pre-selected one. Sadly, her user stats and skills were very underwhelming at the moment.

Name

Serares

Level

1

Gender

Female

Experience to next level

200/1000

Class

No class

Race

Human

Health

107 (equipment: +7)

Vitality

(health regeneration)

10

Stamina

100

Endurance

(stamina regeneration)

10

Mana (Locked)

N/A (100)

Willpower

(mana regeneration)

10

Constitution

(contributes to total health)

10

Strength

(contributes to total stamina)

10

Fame

0

Wisdom

(contributes to total mana)

10

Infamy

0

Dexterity

10

Alignment (Light/Dark/Neutral)

1% Dark

Perception

10

Luck

10

Relationships

+10 with Farmer’s Guild

Charisma

11

General Skills

Progress to next level

Subskills

Progress to next level

Herbology Level 2

10%

None

Swordsmanship Level 1

5%

None

Subterfuge Level 1

1%

Deception

1%

Dodge Level 1

30%

None

Sprint Level 1

50%

None

Class Specific Skills and/or Spells

N/A

None

Yikes! Sera closed the panel after skimming through the stats. It looked dismal, but she reassured herself that this was Serares’s performance and not her own. Though in the game, they seemed to be one and the same thing.

Sera sighed.

Oh well, at least now she knew that wearing equipment with attributes like armour helped increase her stats—though, the amount of armour a plain linen shirt and trousers afforded her was quite pathetic. Also somehow, she had to find a way to unlock her mana if she wanted to use magic. It figured that choosing to be human meant that spells didn’t come naturally to her. Sera spared a moment to wonder what the stats might have been like for an undead like Jordan, or an elf, like that girl she had seen when she had first come into Elysia. No doubt they had been born into this world with magic shooting out of every orifice.

She shook her head and told herself to stop being so crass and crazy, then opened her eyes to gaze into the cute blue eyes of a little boy who was almost nose-to-nose at her.

“Are you a crazy lady? Is that why they’re looking for you?”

“Huh?” Sera backed away so fast, she nearly cracked the back of her head against the wall behind her. She turned to face the little boy standing on the bench beside her.

“What are you—oh!” She had just realised how silly she must have looked with her hands making random movements in the air while she adjusted her settings. “No, I’m not crazy, I’m just a journeywoman.”

The boy stared at her. Perhaps that wasn’t the right word to use, though several NPCs had called her that already.

“Uh, you know… a traveler? A visitor? I’m not local here. I was just… handling some personal matters. This is normal for us, you see.” She made some random movements with her hands to show him what she was talking about and grinned like a maniac to show she was harmless.

The boy just frowned harder and kept looking at her with huge, quizzical eyes as if he expected the answer to the secrets of the universe to fall out of her nose like a booger. Sera restrained the urge to check if something was indeed poking out of her nostrils. The boy was scrutinising her with the intense curiosity that only a child with absolutely no idea of anything could muster and she felt quite uncomfortable.

“Where’s your mother?” she finally asked. “She’ll explain what I am to you.”

Somehow, Sera didn’t feel that it was right to explain to the child that he was an NPC and that he and his reality did not really exist, while she was a player and did. It seem to be a bit of a traumatic worldview to drop onto a child, even a virtual one, especially after what Jordan had told her about not calling the locals NPCs. Also, perhaps in this world, it was her who was unreal, not him.

“She’s right over there,” the boy said calmly, pointing towards a woman who was buying something at a nearby shop.

“Oh,” Sera said slowly. “Well then why are you speaking to me…” Sera trailed off when she realised what this must be about. It was probably a quest! She concentrated while looking above the boy’s head, hoping she’d see a purple jewel, which indicated a quest giver. But the jewel that appeared upon her analysis was a simple blue one. He was nothing but a bystander.

Wait a minute.

Sera spotted something else above the boy’s head.

It looked like a rough sketch of someone. Sera stood up to take a better look at it. The face was rendered in clumsy charcoal lines on yellowed and spotted parchment nailed to the wall. It wasn’t a very good drawing, but Sera thought it looked kind of like a female version of Wallace from Wallace and Gromit, except that it had actually had hair. Above the image were the words ‘WANTED’, printed in big letters right above the face and the words ‘Reward’ below it with 10 coppers listed as the bounty. The chicken scrawl writing squeezed near the bottom of the page was indecipherable. Sera frowned and tilted her head to get a better look. There was something oddly familiar about that face…

“I wonder what on earth a person has to do to—”

A shriek split the air. Sera spun around at the hurried patter of shoes on cobblestones, her hands reaching for her daggers.

“Don’t you dare hurt my darling Tomas!” The boy’s mother dashed over in a flurry of skirts, one hand holding her bonnet to her head. The other held a large basket, full to the brim with groceries. It slammed into her, knocking her back onto the bench as the woman scooped her son around his waist and carried him off, scurrying away from her as if she were some kind of criminal.

Sera had a lightbulb moment.

She whirled back to look at the poster.

If she squinted and turned her head just so, the bulbous nose, too small forehead and bulging eyes almost resembled her own face. What the hell?

“Hey!” Sera called after the duo. The son turned and waved at her, still dangling from his mother’s arm. “That isn’t me! It’s a misunderstanding!”

It had to be a mistake. She hadn’t done anything wrong!

Feeling miffed, Sera ripped the poster off the wall, gazed at it for another second or two, then wadded it up. She threw it over her shoulder and stalked off in a huff towards the training grounds. How could those NPCs have made such a silly mistake?

This game was weird.

***

Thunk! Thunk!

Sera gazed at her daggers buried deep into the abdomen of the training dummy and smiled. She was getting pretty good at this. All she had to do was follow the prompts that appeared when she drew a weapon within the training grounds.

It seemed like the game could detect exactly which weapon she was holding and adapt to choose the best method to guide her to use it correctly. All she had to do was hold up her weapon and stand in front of a dummy. Almost immediately, a shadowy figure of exactly the same height and stature as her would appear with highlighted hands and fingers to demonstrate how she should hold the knife. When she got into position within the outline, the highlighted shadow appendages flared red around her limbs until she got her grip exactly right, before changing to a nice golden glow. The outline then darted forward and threw its intangible dagger forward, even going so far as to leave behind footprints to show her any required footwork. All she had to do was take her turn to mimic it.

Granted, it hadn’t worked the first few times. Her daggers had flown wide and buried themselves into the earth around the dummy. But as soon as she stepped back, both her shadow guide and her own outline appeared side by side to replay what had just happened, with glows to contrast and highlight the movements she’d gotten wrong so she could see exactly what she needed to do to improve. It made for very easy learning, and as soon as she got it right, she could choose to try a variation on the technique at a similar or higher level of difficulty.

By the time the sun was setting, Sera had a good grasp of how to use a bow and arrows, and daggers, though she did have room to improve on her aim. As a result, she’d gained Archery and Dagger skills—as seen by the heavily abbreviated notifications that transiently flashed across her vision—but it seemed a little pointless to keep practicing. After all, she had more or less mastered all the steps the beginner’s training grounds could offer. Unfortunately, her dedication had decimated quite a few dummies to the point that their heads and limbs were falling off. Perhaps she should have switched to the supplied training daggers which were blunter than her own brand new ones, Sera mused. After all, she had used the training ground bow and arrows since her own set were too high level for her use.

“Oy!”

Sera ignored the yell. Several other players had appeared in the training grounds recently. Work or school in the real world must have ended. She decided that she was done training. She sheathed her daggers, gathered up the spent arrows and began arranging them in the quiver they’d come in.

“Oy, you there! You! Are you deaf? I’m talking to you!”

The actual trainers here were so aggressive! Thank goodness she had come when they were hardly any around. What was their use anyway, when the game had such a great method for demonstrating weapons techniques to players. Were they just meant to shout at you and give you the impression you were in a real military school or something?

“You there! The broad in the blue blouse! Oy!”

The last ear-splitting bellow caught her attention. For one, it was quite specific, she was the only woman wearing blue in the area, plus, it came from somewhere close by, like right in her ear.

Sera whipped around to face the same portly trainer she had met the other day. He was red in the face and wore an expression of deep annoyance. Sweat dripped from his hairline and he blinked a few drops away, trying his best to glare at her despite the sting of sweat in his eyes.

“I’ve been looking all over for you! You never came back with that sword! And look what you’ve done now!” he gestured at the eviscerated dummies.

“Oh hello there,” Sera said a little nervously. Surely those dummies were meant to be beaten up? “I was just doing some training and got a little carried away—”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about your training! You damn journeycrappers! You keep losing my swords and trashing my dummies! You think these come from thin air? I have to buy them! Every sword is ten coppers. Every dummy is fifteen! You owe me…” he turned and counted the dummies. “You owe me a solid fifty five coppers! Hand it over!”

“Are you kidding me?” Sera said. “This is for new recruits isn’t it? Isn’t it paid by your… town… fund… or something? Your army resources?” She had no idea how anything like that might work.

“Recruits! Recruits?” the man swelled up like an indignant bullfrog. “You lot aren’t in our army! And this is a private enterprise! Normally you train with blunt swords and you leave them here after you’re gone! No dummies get hurt and I get paid a commission from the folks who send you here to train before you take your first quest! But you didn’t take a quest did you? And you didn’t bring my sword back either! And on top of that, you thrashed my property! Have you no respect for other people’s businesses? Now pay up, or I’ll be forced to sic the guards on you.”

Sera stared at the fleshy palm of his hand as it jiggled in front of her.

“I… uh… I only have a copper,” she said, feeling guilty. “But I can definitely get more money, plus interest… if you give me a day, I’ll—”

“Guards!”

Okay. Now she knew where the Wanted poster had come from. This man had no idea how to restrain himself.

“It’s just fifty five coppers,” she said, trying to sound reasonable. “I had the money this morning, I just didn’t know I had to pay you back for the sword, I’m new you see, but—”

“I’ve heard it all before! You think you can fool me? I know you’re not going to stick around. The minute I turn my back you’re going to gallivant off and I’ll be left in the red! Everyone knows you have to pay for services and goods!” The man yelled at her. “Being new is no excuse for being dumb!”

“Wow. There’s no cause for saying that,” Sera began, but that was as far as she got.

“Ma’am, you’re under arrest for vandalism and theft,” two armour clad guards with halberds had appeared on either side of her. One of them slapped heavy iron handcuffs around her wrists. “You’ll have to spend a night in jail, then a day doing community service to pay back this man.”

Hang on. This was ridiculous, how could this happen in a game without any warning? What happened to all her notifications and… Sera checked her notifications. A couple had come in during the last few hours since she’d checked her UI. She had given them a very cursory glance without expanding them, thinking it had been about unimportant stuff like her fighting skills leveling up and experience gain while training.

You’re a wanted woman!

After waiting days for his beloved sword’s return, Lowrin the trainer has declared you a thief! Tch, tch, tch. Your efforts at stealing are pathetic. Either level up in Theft (too late!), produce the sword, or pay the poor man back. If you possess the skill, Sneak, now might be a good time to skip town! Cool down period for hitting the local wanted list is one in-game week unless your reward has hit four figures or your infamy has spread to another community.

Effect: 100 local infamy in Hearthwilde.

Alignment: 2% Dark

New Skill: Archery Level 1

You have discovered Archery! Keep that back straight and that forearm strong! With increased practice you’ll be able to shoot out a dragon’s eye while yawning. Related subskills and spells may be unlocked with increased practice and mastery!

Effect: Ability to perform beginner level archery.

Status: 70% progress to next level.

New Skill: Daggers Level 1

You have discovered Daggers! Now you can julienne and skewer your enemies with the best of them. Related subskills and spells may be unlocked with increased practice and mastery!

Effect: Ability to perform beginner level dagger-work.

Status: 80% progress to next level.

As she read through the notifications, one more popped up.

You’ve been arrested!

Congratulation on embarking on your life of crime! The Hearthwilde community is suitably scandalised by your miserable efforts in theft and vandalism, and not impressed with your ineptitude in evading the guards! You have been clapped in irons and will be escorted to jail. Visit your new abode nine more times to earn the achievement, Jailbird!

Effect: 100 local infamy in Hearthwilde.

Sera groaned and hung her head as she was hustled off by the guards, wishing she had bothered to check her notifications after seeing the poster. It looked like her UI settings required yet more tweaking.