My real name is unimportant, but my in-game one is. I, the player known as Vaile, was the best Tamer in the whole of Neon Genesis Fantasia and had the most powerful and dangerous creatures from the game on my side. One-off bosses, limited time exclusive mobs and even raid bosses made up my sizable horde of companions. None of this would have been possible without one specific attribute that I chose early on when I began as a Beta tester.

That skill was ‘Reversed Attractiveness’. On the surface, the skill was absolute garbage, as it meant that no matter how many points you put into boosting your Charisma, all you would do is go deeper into the negative and make the NPCs hate and despise you just that much more. This at the very least increased shop prices and at most made it practically impossible to enter any town without getting ganked by the entire NPC populace.

There was a rather broken upside to this skill that made it well worth it for someone looking to min-max their tamer build. ‘Reversed Attractiveness’ did indeed make the Civilized NPC races hate you, but it also made the random mobs, bosses and creatures in the game love you. The way I played, I was better off alone, and with my chosen skills and attributes being what they were there were always bounties on my character’s head from the ‘civilized races’ due to my ‘hideous visage’. What made it ironic was that I had painstakingly worked on my in-game avatar to make him look as physically attractive as possible.

Interestingly enough, anyone that wasn’t a player or Civilized NPC (such as a vendor, quest-giver, town guard, etc.) counted as something I could capture and tame, so I became hated by even more people and even a few human rights groups for ‘enslaving’ bandits, humanoid mobs and the like. I kept quiet about all of this, as it was just being blown out of proportion. It was a game, after all, and it wasn’t like I was doing this kind of stuff in reality. I didn’t actually want to enslave anyone, but they were just ones and zeroes, not real people!

The whole of my time in the game was a blast; there was nothing like the thrill of shadowing a raid party from a while away and then swooping in like a devil and making all their hard work against the raid-bosses worthless due to me Taming them. I became a bane for everyone in the game who wanted to be the first to do a new dungeon, encounter or raid as I would always be there, just waiting for the foe to get weak enough for me to capture and thereby keep the precious loot out of everyone’s hands. Their only joy was that once I got the creatures that I wanted I would never enter that raid, dungeon or encounter again unless something new was added.

I wasn’t in the game for loot and I was certainly not in it for social interactions, after all, a half a year into the Beta and I was already despised by Players and Civilized NPCs alike. Nope, I was a collector, and I was heedless to the anger and hatred that was rising with each boss I snatched and each unique mob I pilfered. However, all is fair in love, war and Full Dive Virtual Reality Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games! By the time the game was reaching its last year of service, I was universally despised by everyone in game and by many outside of it. Not that I cared, the game was going to shut down and everyone would have to find something else to play.

I was so hated by this point that the entire server I was on decided to let past grievances between players and guilds be set aside for one last in-game event of their own making. I was given an ultimatum by every guild on the server.

“Release all of your Tamed Beings or face a year of ganking.”

What else was I to do? I informed them that I would indeed ‘release’ all of my Tamed entities. The next day I appeared before the leaders of the guilds and about 50% of the total players in the servers. We were far from the nearest town, so far in fact that we were more than 30 real-world minutes from being within teleport range to enter it.

“Where are’st thine creatures, scoundrel? Thou has’t said to meet thine pox-ridden, misshapen and villainous form upon this far location, so’st thou could’st release them a’fore our own eyes. Should’st we come to the belief that thou has’t decid’d to face our righteous wrath instead?”

The first to speak was ThoughtSlayer. ThoughtSlayer was the leader of the largest guild in the server, a guild he named after himself.

“Relax, man! He is just one guy, we could kill him right now!”

Chair Lampson was the leader of the fourth largest guild, mostly made of low-level players who made up most of the 50% of players who didn’t follow the gank-squad here to PK me.

“Easy! Easy!” I said, trying to look scared before I pulled out a surprise question, “Do you remember the precise wording that your ultimatum had?”

No one seemed to notice what I was going on about.

“You guys distinctly told me to ‘Release all my Tamed Beings’, right? You do know that there is a better way of saying that that would have actually had the desired effect?”

Chair Lampson and a few of his guildmates didn’t seem to understand what the rest of the gank-squad were now fully aware of. I had indeed ‘released’ my creatures and mobs, just not in the way they wanted. As we stood out in the middle of nowhere, far away from being able to reach anyone or anything, my massive number of monsters and miscreants were running roughshod over the whole of the server. I had ‘released’ them in the same way Zeus had released the Kraken. I still had complete control over them, but they were ‘released’ now, weren’t they?

“You focking wanker! You call them off, right now! I swear on me mum that if you don’t, I’ll focking snap you in half like a focking twig, you bellend!” ThoughtSlayer had abandoned his in-game persona and had begun cursing me out in his native dialect. While some of the gank-squad were arguing over whether to simply PK me, others were desperately trying to get me to call off the boss-rush that was ravaging the server while still others were taking the time to summon their flying mounts (a process that required their mount to travel an in-game distance to reach them first, usually from their guild hall) so they could try and fight off the army of raid-bosses that were likely annihilating the towns and NPCs.

While everyone was deliberating over what to do, I tried to sneak away. ‘Tried’ being the correct word, as I was caught by what I assumed to be a kind of Trap Spell designed to keep me from escaping the murderous players who wanted my head. Light engulfed me, and I assumed that I was going to be kicked out of the game for a few hours after I was killed, but much to my surprise the light slowly fell away, and I found myself in the middle of a throne room.

I got up and looked around, only to see the faces of people who looked like they were going to empty their stomachs. I heard the sound of vomit hitting the floor and saw a girl with yellow drill-curls voiding her guts onto the red carpet that was under her feet. As she finished vomiting, she cried out in a shrill voice that gave the impression of nails on a chalkboard.

“It…. It’s HIDEOUS! IT’S REPULSIVE! GET RID OF IT! GET IT OUT OF HERE! GUARDS!”