PART TWO

The Next Day

I didn't log in the next day.

A Few Days Later

My reader buddies suggested I delete a bunch of whiny, angsty entries which can be summarised as me regressing to the mental state of a teenager singing 'life's so unfair' while inexpertly strumming an unplugged electric guitar. Let's just say that I didn't feel like playing BV and I took a break. Went for walks, tried a new cafe. It was actually chill and refreshing. The pile of plastic and wires that sat on my comfy chair became just that - some electronics - instead of being the most important item in my home.

At some point I felt reset enough to pop back in to Auster (my home city in the land of Gargantua) and potter around for a bit.

For a few minutes it was stressful being back in the game. I felt like people were looking at me, judging me for my failings. But they weren't. How would they know, anyway? Plus people get kicked out of teams all the time. Even the best players get kicked out if they hiss off the rest of their team or want to go in a different direction because they're big shots now. The NPCs either ignored me or tried to offer me quests. A couple of players ran up asking for directions. Just totally normal.

Some merchant tried to sell me some magic beans and I was back to having a lovely old time. The magic bean quest was well-known - you'd buy the beans, set off to some radiant location (to force you to explore the region) and then you'd plant the seeds and defend them for a time based on your level. One would fail, one would grow into something the equivalent value of what you paid for the seeds, and the third would be some random drop that could be lame or awesome or anywhere inbetween.

I didn't do the quest but it was just nice to be offered it. It's like when you're having a bad time and you go home for the holidays and your family are doing their old banter and their old jokes and you feel at ease.

It was in that kind of frame of mind that I remembered my new skill book and went to one of Auster's parks to lie on the grass and read it. Even better, someone had strung up some very modern-looking hammocks, so I was jiggling around in one of those when I took the book out of my inventory and turned to page one.

The skill was called Woke Up, and the book was the most extraordinary document I'd ever encountered in the BetterVerse.

Skill Books 101

If you're the aunt who bought this book and you're giving it a quick read before handing it over to your nephew, then I'll describe a normal skill book as a point of comparison. And by the way, congrats on buying the curse-free version. There will be a 'real' version one day with all the swears put back in. Director’s Edition. Dungeon Park Redux.

So imagine this. You get a skill book called ‘Heal’. You open it and it says:

This book teaches the Heal Skill:

Heal 5 Hit Points per level.

Cost: 20 Mana Points.

Cooldown: 1 minute.

Do you wish to learn this Skill Y/N?

Right? You get that, right? You use some magic to restore some health. ‘Cooldown’ means you can only use it once per minute. Easy.

Or you get a skill book called 'Superior Shield Bash'. This one’s a bit more detailed, but trust me, only a few nerds really know what it means.

This book modifies and improves the Shield Bash Skill:

Enemies are easier to knock down. [CHANCE = (base DEX * (1+shieldqual%+shieldencht%+noflank%)+est ATT) * 1.5 (STR) * .5 (IF STAM 30% greater in mass) ]

Stamina cost is reduced.

Graphical effect is bigger and impact is noisier.

Do you wish to learn this Skill Y/N?

Right? Apart from the math, it’s really sort of basic. Sometimes the descriptions are a bit more flowery. Sometimes you get weird equations, or partial equations. That seems to be for skills that people complain are broken. If you’re not having good results from Shield Bash you might work out from the equation that the quality of the shield is pretty important and that's why it isn't working well for you.

Books Written by Angry Spiders

Getting back to Woke Up. I opened it and it was massive. Just page after page of text. I skipped to the end just to check that there WAS an end, then went back to the start and read through it. After a few minutes my head hurt.

What I think happened was that in a team meeting, some senior developer at ThetanSoft suggested adding 'woke' as a skill and everyone laughed thinking it'd be a weird, funny thing to joke about at parties. Then when no-one was looking, the dude (and it was definitely a dude) copy pasted his 50,000 word rant about ‘wokeness and cancel culture’ into the game.

If you're thinking 'I bet it read like the Unabomber wrote it' then YOU go to the top of the class. Because holy ship! The guy has ALL his screws loose. At this point in the story, meaning now on the hammock in the park, I am probably the one person who's ever read it. But I'm pretty sure it would infuriate and terrify people on both sides of the political spectrum.

There I was, reading the demented ramblings of the killer from Seven, sometimes pausing to look around the magnificent world that this madman had helped create, and I just felt good. Humanity is weird and messed up and that's okay. I started to doze off a bit, which as you know leads to you getting logged out after a quick countdown. The numbers 5,4,3, are flashing up in front of my eyes and I start and say 'No, I'm awake!'

And I look at the page and it says 'Do you wish to learn this Skill Y/N?'

That confuses me, because it's a rant, not a skill. So I look at the end a little more closely and there's a one-sentence description of the skill tucked into the final paragraph (which I think is about eugenics).

This Skill allows the player to communicate with sentient beings where this is otherwise impossible, e.g. evolved animals, Elder Trees, core-powered monsters such as golems.

I accepted the skill, of course. There was rarely a downside to learning a new skill. Unlike in other games, the books didn't disintegrate after being read. The only catch was that you had to sell them at their market price, so you couldn't just give a Shield Bash book to your party's tank. He had to buy it for full price. No big deal - he could sell it on, too, if he could find a buyer.

Consent

There is a lot of speculation about why skills have to be accepted. The theory I go with is that the developers really just want to drive home the importance of consent, starting with little things like skills and going all the way up to bigger things like 'do you want to fight this other player?' or 'are you sure you want to allow this ogre lady to stick a [noun] into your [you get the picture].'

So I had accepted a new skill. My first thought was 'oh I can talk to the animals!' And I went to find some. At a stable I found that the horses didn't say anything. I ran out to a farm and the cows and chickens were just that. So what was an evolved animal? Probably some rare creatures like a Queen Spider. If that were the case then the skill could actually be useful - if you were on a big quest to rid some forest of hordes of spiders and you got to the boss battle against the Queen, you could talk to her and maybe avoid the fight. Of course, I’d need to be in a team to benefit from that, because only with a team could I survive to the final battle.

Another possibility was that I'd bump into some unicorn and she'd give me a quest to find the source of the polluted water or some such - a quest that would only be open to me because I'd be the only one who could talk to it.

Then I remembered that this wasn't a serious skill and wasn't intended to ever be used so they probably hadn’t even programmed talking unicorns, spiders, or anything of the sort. So when I logged off that night, it was as though all memory of the skill was removed from my brain forever.

Three Days Later

I'd taken to watching people stream BV. Two reasons. One, because I was a bit ashamed that my group had been so much more serious than me and I’d been so smug about solving all the riddles. Two, because some of these streamers were making ten, twenty thousand dollars a month. And let’s just say that I could have REALLY used 20k. And they were getting that every month. The mind just boggles thinking about it. Even now.

I didn't find any of them very entertaining, though some had great taste in low-cut tops. I was just kind of channel-surfing looking for someone who was playing the game in an interesting way that I could maybe emulate. Almost everyone was doing the basic combat route, grinding their way to higher levels, better gear, scrambling for every like and subscribe. It was all a bit repetitive. Even if the game was amazing and visceral, surely it was designed for more than combat? I needed a niche.

There were a few good channels about crafting and one that was a sort of BBC wildlife documentary. The host was going for an all-stealth build and was sneaking around trying to capture shots of rare animals while doing funny voice-overs. Every now and then he'd get torn to shreds by some bear or man-eating turtle, but that just made his channel more popular. He was making low six-figures a month. I had no intention of setting up a rival channel, though. It’s hard enough getting to sleep without getting PTSD about being chased by snakipedes.

The most compelling was a guy who went dungeon diving on his own.

For all the aunts out there, a dungeon is a special cave in a hill or mountain and inside there are traps and monsters. If you survive you get gold and treasure. The fun part is that the dungeon is alive - kind of. It's run by a dedicated AI instance just like all the NPCs. So you might get a dungeon where there's loads of traps, or no traps, or a variety of weak monsters or a handful of powerful ones. And if you beat the dungeon and go back six months later it might be totally different because the dungeon is learning all the time.

This streamer, who was pleased to call himself Beaumont Cattington, took challenges from his viewers. Do a dungeon using only cold magic! Do a dungeon with no killing! Do a dungeon using only one-inch punches! He was really good, which ironically made me less interested in his content. I was looking for someone close to my skill level! I was half watching Cattington, half scrolling through Reddit, half listening to a podcast about Star Trek, and half ironing my laundry when I saw it. Cattington was trying to do a 'throw voice' run in a random dungeon. Throw Voice is a skill that makes enemies look over their shoulder while you sneak past them. He was doing well until he got to - and this is a key moment, dear reader, so give this sentence your maximum concentration - until he got to the GOLEMS. Big, carved humanoids made out of stone or wood brought to life by a monster core.

Monster core! Remember, I had that new skill and it mentioned monster cores.

Cattington was using Throw Voice on them but they weren't buying it. They were either too smart or too stupid for it to work. One of them got him and started bludgeoning him to a pulp. "Don't tase me, bro!" was Cattington’s catchphrase and he used it now. The golem paused as though he'd sort of understood, but then carried on beating the intruder to death.

That, I can tell you, got me thinking.

Gargantua

Gargantua is huge. It's BV's version of the USA. The capital is, controversially, called Ankh-Morpork, in a rare collaboration between BV and a pre-existing intellectual property. There are plans for a dozen second-cities vaguely based on Seattle, San Fran, Miami, and so on, but so far only Chicago, New Orleans, and Baltimore are available for players to enter. (Baltimore is called Milone and is overrun by gangs called Raiders. New Orleans is called Bad Juju and is wild. Strictly over 21s only.) Chicago is Auster, which is the Roman god of wind, so that's a little bit of culture for ya. It's pretty vanilla, which means it's a good place for noobs to start. Guess where I chose to start? What's astonishing about all the starting cities is the sheer population. There's said to be a million NPCs in Auster alone. Think of that! Think of the computing power involved in having a million NPCs.

There are 1,000 dungeons across the entire BetterVerse. Or at least, plans for 1,000. There are 7 within an hour of Auster. I looked it up and found that adventurers had spotted Golems in one of our local dungeons, number 386. The wiki entry for 386 hadn't been updated in months, and it seemed pretty defunct.

Still, it wouldn't take me long to get there, have a peek around, and attempt my plan.

I was going to seduce a golem.