—The scan on your iris and vein has determined that you are an unregistered user. Do you want to create a new account?— A feminine voice asked.

“Yes”

—Select the name of your avatar—

I have always used my nickname as my name for avatars and this isn't going to be different. 1

“Jinx”

— Select your gender from male, female or neutral—

“Male”

— Royal Road has forty-nine races. You may select your race from the primary twenty-nine­—

“Human”

— Please feel free to choose the appearance of your avatar—

"As it is."

Joe had better have made his character a bit uglier or girls will be stalking us on our adventure for sure.

— Your account has been activated. Your stats and class shall be determined while you are playing Royal Road. Please select a city and kingdom you want to start.

“Capital of Junad”

They decided on this place as it was just on the outskirts of the Rosenheim Kingdom and near Grave Mountains which was a fantastic grinding spot.

— Welcome to Royal. A tutorial is available if you would like —

“Pass”

— Your account has been created. We wish you all the best in your adventures. Good luck! —

Suddenly the space before me shone brightly and I was teleported to what seemed like a town square.

"Hey there he is! Jinx over here!"

I recognised the voice being that of Zack's and looked at his direction. He was sitting down at a fountain near the middle of the town square about 10 meters away with Joe and I started walking in the direction towards them, trying to feel how virtual reality felt like.

It was a wonderful feeling. It felt like all I did was use some strange machine to teleport to another world. I felt exactly like I did in real life; Swallowing my own saliva, walking, jogging running, blinking. Everything felt so natural i wonder how much effort had gone in the research and development of RR to make it so realistic.

"So Anthony is as late as usual huh?"

"That's the one thing you can count on him to do other than being absolutely retarded."

And as if to answer to our calling, Anthony appeared from what seemed to be a magic circle conjured from thin air. Newbies seem to attract a lot of attention as everyone will notice when a newbie appears in the middle of the town. Some of them like me just experimented with their bodies abit while some would look lost. Anthony however proved to be an extreme case of the prior.

He punched himself in the face with all his strength.

"OW! I thought pain thresholds limits were like 2% or something!"

And I realised I could differentiate between the players and NPCs at that point as all the players laughed but the NPC's just stood there puzzled at what was going on with the guy who seemingly punched himself in the face for no apparent reason. The AI of this game was so well made that the NPC's themselves knew what sort of behaviour was classified as weird and queer. The level of human psychology implemented in the AI must have been extremely advanced. I was absolutely marveled at the sheer intricacy of this virtual world.

"Oh there you guys are! I hope you didn't see that!" Exclaimed Anthony after looking in our direction.

"Your facepalm? I mean facefist? No we did not."

"Shut up i bet it didn't even occur to you guys to try that out."

And Anthony was right. It was because of his way of thinking that enabled him to do all these seemingly reckless things which no normal person would. Thus we concluded that although the pain threshold for RR was set at 2% for everyone, this does not include intentional harm to your own body caused by yourself. This could be a bug that no one else has found and reported yet and we decided there were possibilities for it to be exploited later on in the game.

"Alright guys we're finally here. Lets get down to business. Friend requests sent to all of you." I said

"Ditto." Joe replied

"Yupz." Zack acknowledged

"I have no friends ): "

"Shut up and accept Anthony."

"Im not Anthony here. I'm Breadtalk and its a cool name so use it."

"..... Anyone else changed their name?"

"I'm called Beathoven..." said Zack

"My name is Soup." said Joe

Jinx, Soup, Breadtalk and Beathoven..... Yup sounds like our clique alright. Loads of help required.

You have 3 new friend requests from Soup, Breadtalk and Beathoven. Do you accept?

Yes|No

Everyone accepted the friend requests and we completed all the preliminary work.

"Alright guys. We've done all our research. We have 1 month of in game time to set ourselves apart from each other. Lets do our best." I said as i looked at their excited faces.

"Lowest level after one month treats the rest of us to a meal both in game and out!" said Soup who looked confident as hell.

"You're not getting that bet you grinder." retorted Beathoven who seemed to know exactly what he was going to do as well.

"Well, i'm going to get a head start first so.. SUCK MY DICK IN ONE MONTH'S TIME GUYS." And Breadtalk dashed off.

The three of us looked at each other with a smile and shortly after dashed off in three opposite directions.

"Till we meet again." I whispered to all of them, dashing to my first location which based on my research was the third biggest building in Junad. The Grand Library.

End of Chapter 1

1.All first person thoughts shall be represented in italics for users to understand Jinx more by what’s going on through his head.