Harry had provided my items. Knowing that softened a shadow I hadn’t noticed looming over me. Taking the day to get more acquainted with the world was a good call, and as I placed the last of the washed dishes in the drainer, double checked that all of the doors and windows to my apartment were secured, and laid down in my bed, I felt much more prepared to return to UNDR.

Harry’s eyes had lit up while he was talking about the items, how he’d earned them, the stories behind each of them. The entire time, I could see the strain in his face, his desire to log back in and guide me in the world that had become a second home for him. Of course, seeing he and I together would blow any potential cover I had, and his logging in might have unforseen consequences.

No, I needed to get to the bottom of whatever was going on before Harry could rejoin the world of UNDR Online.

I moved through the virtual copy of my apartment quickly, my desire to get back to Raul relegating the novelty of it all to flashy background scenery. Once I stepped on top of the manhole cover in my simulated living space, it deposited me not at the place it had left me the night before, but outside of the familiar plate glass windows of The Shop.

Stepping inside, I realized I had absolutely no idea how to find my way back to Raul’s study. Clenching my jaw, I silently cursed myself for not paying better attention the night before. I’d been so caught up in everything going on around me, all of the beautifully impossible things going on, that I lost my sense of direction.

I made my way down the wide stairway, below the windowed balconies that ringed the interior of the building, to the teleportation pad. A man leaned against the wall to my left, eyes closed as if in a trance, but I was unable to get his attention. He stood like a statue solidly immobile even when I tried to shake his shoulder.

I really needed to start asking more questions.

Having no better plan, I stepped atop the pad.

Roughly an hour later, I was standing in the access hallway leading to Raul’s study. Understanding that any one of the rooms could be his, I just stood there like a noob, waiting for him to respond to the message that I sent a moment after stepping off the teleport pad. .

A door clicked open ahead of me, and Raul entered the hallway, closing the door behind himself with what felt to me like unnecessary haste. I was about to ask him what was wrong, but just then another door burst open, and a young woman wearing a form fitting outfit stepped through it quickly. With similar urgency, she closed the door behind her and quickly made her way down the hall away from us.

“Uhh, Raul? What’s going on?”

He looked up at me, mild panic in his eyes. I started to turn back to look at the woman walking away from us, and his voice came out in a rush, clearly meant to get my attention.

“Q, there you are. You, uhh...haven’t had your first job yet, have you?”

My turn back to the woman halted, I focused on him.

“No. And you know that. Seriously, what’s going on?”

Raul’s eyes became distant, and a moment later a prompt swung into the center of my field of view.

Mission Alert

Raul has offered you the following quest:

Locate the criminal Reef in The Gallow Sprawl and recover the blueprints he stole from Raul.

Reward:

200 EXP-Street Cred

175 EXP-Dexterity

250 EXP-Aptitude

100 Credits

Choice (1) of recovered blueprints.

Accept?

YES NO

I looked at him suspiciously. The prompt blurred and became more transparent, allowing me a relatively unimpeded look at Raul. I didn’t appreciate being brushed off.

“Dude, you haven’t even shown me how to use my powers yet. How am I supposed to defend myself? I’m not getting my ass kicked because you’re in a hurry.”

Raul took a deep breath and stepped closer.

“Sure I did. Yesterday. The process is the same for any other construct. Just make sure that whatever you create has less than 20 polygons, that’s the current max for your level.”

I was unconvinced.

“Yeah, I understand it in theory, but I’m not ready to go out and fight off thugs in the..what’s it called...The Gallow Sprawl?. I don’t even know where that is.”

Raul tilted his head, his expression one of an exhausted teacher recovering old material.

“Once you accept the mission, your in-sim navigation system will kick in and show you where you need to go. Well, it will get you to the Sprawl, you’ll have to do a little legwork after that to track down Reef and recover the blueprints.”

I stared at the prompt, which resolved into focus and grew more opaque as the system registered my focus. I reminded myself that the absolute worst thing that could happen would be that I would die and wake up with my alarm in the morning. It was easy for me to forget that the incredibly tactile and realistic world around me was little more than a bunch of code run through an incredibly powerful quantum server farm.

“And what are these blueprints that I’m supposed to retrieve?”

Raul smirked.

“That, my friend, is the fun part. Each of these initial missions are meant to get you up to speed quickly. Sure, at higher levels grinding is a necessity in order to give value to the effort of gaining strength for your avatar, but initially, I’m allowed a fair amount of leeway in granting you mission rewards that exceed your current power level. Blueprints are plans for advanced, highly efficient constructs.”

“But if I can build anything I can imagine, why would I need plans?”

I could tell by the way Raul closed his eyes and smiled that I had just asked a dumb question, so I hurried to elaborate.

“I mean, I’m sure that the plans are a time saver, shortcutting a bunch of trial and error, but I still don’t understand what you mean by advanced, highly efficient constructs.”

Raul let me finish before responding, his level of patience increasing greatly now that the woman he had been trying to keep out of my sight had left the access hallway.

“Construct efficiency has to do with the strength to poly ratio of whatever you are building. Unless you’re a brilliant mechanical engineer in the real, you’re not going to know enough about structural integrity, material tensile and shear strength, and load distribution to create constructs that are much more than temporary distractions for an enemy.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but he cut me off.

“Without a lot of trial and error. Sure, you can make a cube, and it was a pretty cube, but creating the constructs you’ll need to be powerful will require a huge amount of time to get right. Blueprints are like cheat codes for that process, saved designs crafted by much more talented Renders that will perform perfectly every time.”

I didn’t like the way he was thrusting this entire mission on me as a way to cover his ass, but I could tell he wasn’t going to do anything else for me until I at least tried to give it a shot. I really didn’t want to waste time on a fetch quest that I could be spending investigating Harry’s blackmailers, but I knew that I would need Raul’s help down the line, and to keep the relationship rolling along, I needed to play ball.

“Fine.”

I said it as I mentally focused on the “YES” option on the prompt. The panel blurred into nothingness, and a green thread raced away from me along the floor. It ran the length of the hallway, back where the woman had escaped to, and up the staircase at the end of the hall, pulsing green tracer light it’s entire length, as before. I followed it with my eyes until it rose out of view, then turned back to Raul.

“So, who was that that just ran off? Someone you didn’t want me to see, no doubt?”

Recovered from his earlier panic, he didn’t take the bait.

“Sorry, Q, you haven’t unlocked that information yet. Come back to me once you’ve reached a higher level.”

I couldn't help but laugh.

“So it’s like that, then. Alright. I’ll go get your damn blueprints.”

I didn’t need the navigation beacon to tell me how to get out of the building, but I couldn’t figure out how to turn the damn thing off without cancelling the entire quest, so I rolled with it. Once I stepped through the front door of The Shop, the green line ran to the nearest jump pad and arced across to an adjacent building. The smog-like atmosphere made seeing any more than that far ahead difficult, and I could only follow it that far because the green phosphorescent pulse of the thread cut through the fog like Rudolph's nose on a Christmas Eve storm.

I could only have been walking for around a half an hour, but the quality of the architecture dropped off precipitously in that time. Around The Shop, near the starting zone, most of the streets were clean, the windows unblemished, every surface appearing to have been freshly painted. As I neared the Sprawl, as indicated by helpful signs that slid smoothly away from the green navigation line when I paused for too long, the streets became more and more clogged with refuse, the windows, when still there at all, were often cracked or festooned with cobwebs or boarded up.

I toyed with my powers, absorbing metal and wood from whatever garbage and detritus I happened across, but it wasn’t much. I made a few primitive objects-a knife, a club, a...stick? The more I fought with the system, the more I came to regret my class choice and appreciate the offer of blueprints after the mission.

Burned out husks of cars, none of which appeared to have been driven in my lifetime, grew in prevalence. I followed the winding navigation line as it led me unerringly around larger and larger piles of garbage, disabled machinery, and in more than one occasion, toppled buildings. One of those buildings had been tall enough to reach from one tower to another, creating a perilous bridge of twisted wood and steel to the adjacent tower.

Of course, the green line indicated that I should climb across it to continue my journey, because...why not?

Perhaps the hardest thing about full immersion simulated reality is when you have to do something that every one of your senses are screaming at you not to do. Traversing this rickety bridge of half demolished building, with the green nav line tracing confidently across it, was one of those times.

I could visualize this thing falling apart, dropping me to my death just as I crossed the point of no return. I didn’t even know how far down I would have to fall before hitting something, but my mind drummed up a series of incredibly horrific possibilities, none of which help my confidence. As I looked down into the drop, I couldn’t see a bottom, only a narrowing of perspective between the buildings, which did wonders for my confidence.

My overactive imagination pictured me pinballing between buildings as I fell, eventually catching one of the jutting platforms with my face as my body underwent a rapid phase change from solid to liquid. Shaking myself free from the vision, I double checked that my gear was secured and took my first tentative step out onto the makeshift bridge, muttering to myself as my first handhold broke away from the structure.

“Fuck my life.”

As predicted, the next twenty or so feet passed uneventfully. I fought against the natural inclination to grow passive, complacent, double checking and load testing each step as much as I could before trusting it to hold my weight. The process was painstakingly slow, but I knew that if I got impatient and rushed things, I’d misstep and would have to come back tomorrow.

I had to maintain my focus. The simple constructs I had conjured were pretty pathetic, breaking apart easily on the chunks of concrete I tested them against. My confidence level in melee combat was essentially zero until I could get some blueprints and generate something more structurally sound than a wrapping paper tube. I needed those plans. I wasn’t interested in power levelling or making a passtime out of this new world, but I had no doubt that the type of people that made a living off of blackmail and crime would hit a lot harder than I could at the moment. I needed to get stronger.

On cue, a prompt popped up in front of my vision, blocking my line of sight and causing me to lose my balance.

NEW SKILL GAINED

Passive: Climbing Level 1

Boost: +1 Dexterity when Climbing

I waved the prompt away with a frantic gesture of my hand, which, if I’m being honest, totally looked alot like someone spastically trying to fight off a swarm of angry bees and not at all the nonchalant gesture I would try to convince Harry of later on. I’d prepared myself, been entirely focused on the task at hand, but the notification had arisen at the most inopportune time, reminding me that expecting something to go wrong and knowing exactly what would go wrong are two entirely different things.

My weight shifted, disturbing my carefully balanced equilibrium, and the increased weight placed on my left foot caused it to punch through a cracked piece of sheathing. This caused my position to further shift, and a last second grasp at a mangled aluminum window frame only slowed my descent. The metal twisted, drawn out of shape by my weight, and what had been a quick promise of death became even worse.

Jagged glass shards, the remainder of large double pane windows, bit into my palm, coaxing a slow but steady stream of blood flowing down my arm that I barely noticed. The pain seared the nerve endings in my palm, but by some feat of will I managed to hang on. Struggling, I tried to reach the frame with my other hand, but the sharp tug required to lever my body closer caused the frame to buckle further. My hand slid along the jagged glass, leaving a staccato smear of blood along the metal window frame as the bones in my palm begrudgingly jumped each shard.

I screamed. Or, rather, I continued to scream. I hadn’t noticed the strain on my vocal cords before, which goes a long way toward explaining the amount of focus it took to maintain my grip and avoid plummeting to the smog filled abyss below. My foot strained against the backside of the plywood it had punched through, the growing crack in its surface flexing with each effort to improve my position. I was stuck, and a quick glance up to the new menu that popped into the upper right of my field of view showed that my typically green stamina bar had begun to blink an angry shade of red. I recognized the menu as the “Combat” menu, which cycled into view when significant changes happened to any of the three main attributes that it displayed-Hit Points (HP, Stamina Points (SP), and Magic Points (MP). In my case, Magic Points had changed to “Max Polys” (still MP) the instant I had chosen my character class of Render, and totalled the grand sum of polygons that I had absorbed, that I could use, measured against my maximum allowed.

Render.

Seeing the bar with only the slightest sliver of remaining polygons left gave me an idea. With an exertion of will, the simple sliders disappeared, replaced with much more useful numeric values. The Max Polys figure told me that any chance of escape would hinge upon the 17 polys left at my disposal, limited to triangles due to my low level. Focusing further on the menu caused it to expand vertically, informing me that one of the polys was wood, and the other 16 something called “unrefined metal”. I reached to my right with my free hand, trying to absorb more metal polys to aid my plan, but the first poly that flew towards me destabilized the entire bridge, causing it to wobble and causing me to realize that any further attempt to pull material from the bridge was a very bad idea.

I cursed myself for not having put more time into practicing my new ability. With my free hand, I spent the remaining 16 metal polys and fashioned the ugliest hook shape I had ever seen, sparing two triangular polys to extrude a square detent at the base of the handle that would hopefully keep my hand from sliding off the end.

During the entire four or five seconds it took me to conjure the pathetic looking hook, the aluminum window frame continued to buckle. My mangled hand, still clinging for dear life at what had previously been the upper left corner of the window, shook and continued to slip free.

Wasting no time, I swung the hook forward and plunged it through the nearest surface that looked like it would hold, the sheet of plywood that still trapped my ankle.

Flicking my eyes to my stamina gauge, I knew I only had precious seconds before my remaining seven Stamina Points fell to zero.