[Solo] Fresh New Start

[Ryuuketsu]

The following is the first of many "flashback quests" that will level a character in the time before the Apocalypse began. Reader discretion is advised. :P

This Is A Wonderful World

Fresh New Start

It was always odd how the last thing people thought about when they moved was setting up their internet connection. With the increasing importance of having that around in this day and age, one would think that it would be the first part of getting settled in a new home. Still, it always seemed to fall by the wayside in favor of kitchen utensils being organized or making sure the clothes in closets and dressers were sorted. When you were a particularly internet-dependent teenager, the handful of days your new home can be without internet could be insanity-inducing.

So, when the call finally came in from Ryan’s parents that the internet should be set up and ready to go, he quickly fired up his desktop and checked to make sure everything was in order. Unfortunately it seemed that the connection was a little bit slower than back home, but that problem would likely fix itself with time. Well, Ryan hoped it did.

Regardless, Ryan had gone what felt like months without access to the internet, and he was ready to hop on Elder Tale the second it became an option. He figured he might as well hop on the English servers to check out what exactly he was supposed to expect. He knew that the makers of the game ventured to recreate a real world composed of half the surface area of the original, so he figured he’d go sightseeing now that he’d be in a new country. If he was going to be located here from now on, he might as well get to know the locals.

With practiced ease, Ryan went through the character creation process. The character wasn’t anything impressive in terms of a self-portrait. Similar hair style, hair and eye colors, similar height and build. Class? Why not a Swashbuckler? They were agile DPS with a few fun abilities. Subclasses? Scribe would do fine, and if he was going to play an agile build he might as well pick Acrobat as a subclass.

Everything looked to be in decent enough order. The only thing left to do was hit start and wait.

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Word Count: 356

[Ryuuketsu]

This Is A Wonderful World

Fresh New Start

What was it with MMOs and long opening cutscenes these days? The storytelling aspects in MMOs were their weak points as far as he was concerned. People only played because of the challenge behind the mechanics and to do something with a group of friends. Too many storylines tried to pull off the hero’s journey or just rip off the Final Fantasy “chosen group” thing, and the very concept of millions of “main characters” just didn’t mesh well with those. Others tried to break people up into important factions fighting over resources, but that inevitably crumbled to people playing for the side most likely to win or with the look that just seemed the coolest out of the three and balance just fell apart.

Still, the introduction went by at its own rate without so much as an option to skip as far as Ryan knew, and soon he found himself finally in control of his character. Finally, some action.

As far as tutorial quest chains went, Elder Tale worked on just about the same principles as anyone else. You’d start out in the first town of the game talking to some character automatically. This one was a stern-looking male in heavy armor – probably a Guardian despite being an NPC.

Ryan only picked up on a few words every now and then as he gazed through the quest. The minimap would flash with a marker showing him where he had to go once he accepted this quest anyways. The game had given him his choice of basic starter equipment available to his class, so he probably wouldn’t be heading to the weapon or armor vendor. Still, he’d probably be sent around town in the typical mechanic of forcing him to move through geography that he had a map available to him in the bottom right corner of his screen.

Some days he wondered why he even bothered with this sort of thing.

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Word Count: 322

[Ryuuketsu]

This Is A Wonderful World

Fresh New Start

Going through town was an arduous task, but Ryan eventually got it done. Finally, he’d gone back to the Guardian from before and had been directed out into the fields for his first combat related quest. If Ryan wasn’t privy to game mechanics, he’s think he was being rewarded for his patience in speeding through dialogue windows. Still, this was just a long execution of psychological tricks that were all designed to make the player keep performing repetitive tasks with the reward of bigger numbers assigned to the character with cooler looking armor and equipment.

He’d just have to find a guild to join or find some frequenters of this area to make a party with if he wanted the experience to be enjoyable. That was easy enough. People were everywhere, and becoming their “friend” was easy enough. If you were useful to someone and made the bore that was playing this game alone go away, you would be put on a list of people that the ones you’d helped would go to if they ever got desperate for company. Eventually they’d find a group they liked, and they’d leave you behind. Catch and release; such was the life of a solo player in a game where guilds reigned supreme.

Well, perhaps not supreme. The game was a pastime for Ryan, but that didn’t mean it was his entire life. One guild or one party wasn’t going to affect his life so much that he could even say they would “reign.” Besides, MMOs were fluid things. Patches would come, popularity would die out, people would leave, and any kind of power that anyone felt they had over a niche of the world would slowly crumble to dust in the typical Ozymandian fashion.

But that was enough Nihilism for one day. The only thing that should have mattered to Ryan right now was taking care of the first combat quest. After that, he could try to figure out how he was supposed to set up some way to port over to the US servers and meet up with his friends. They’d been bothering him about starting up a raid at some point, and he needed to make sure that he could actually hold a stable connection if he wanted to be of any use to them.

The quest called for the execution of – surprise, surprise – ten of the lowest level enemies in the game. Hardly a surprise by any means. It wasn’t like the Young Pittered Boar Hides weren’t going to collect themselves, though. Ryan navigated Ryuuketsu through the rest of the town and out into the grassy fields that were supposed to hold the creatures he was searching for.

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Word Count: 449

[Ryuuketsu]

This Is A Wonderful World

Fresh New Start

Ryuuketsu was a character that had been designed from the start as a solo duelist. With skills that would focus on one target while allowing him to move around more freely and make good use of his passive attack speed buff as a Swashbuckler, Ryan was fairly certain his character would be strong enough early on to take care of a few low level boars.

Taking aim on the closest of the creatures to Ryuuketsu, Ryan watched the cooldown timer for his auto-attack tick by. Ryuuketsu cycled through his twin auto-attack animations with practiced ease unbecoming of a level one character, but that hardly mattered at the moment. It was time to test out exactly how these skills meshed together.

Elder Tale wasn’t your typical MMO. Sure, it had stats, items, dungeon raids, and the like. The difference here was that you were capable of dodging enemy attacks and enemies were capable of avoiding yours. This system enabled the most neurotic of players to take on challenges far above their recommended levels at times, but that was a testament to their ability to play the game.

Ryan was never much for the competitive side of Elder Tale. Sure, he’d engaged his friends in duels from time to time, but as for the more intense side of the game – guild wars, servers designed for pvp, and the like – he only had moderate experience.

His practiced abilities seemed to be paying off, however. The Young Pittered Boar whom he’d drawn the aggression of attempted to make a charging attack with a long windup time and relatively slow charging speed, and Ryan prompted Ryuuketsu to deal the finishing blow.

The average human reaction time to visual stimulus was a quarter of a second. There existed, however, a more elite group to draw numbers from in player of high intensity, competitive games. These were the kind of people who could see something and react to it in a fifth, or even a tenth of a second. The difference in time wasn’t that big of a deal in your everyday life, but in the world of games that .05 second difference could be the one that drew the line between life and death.

While killing the boar just before it would have been allowed to touch Ryuuketsu with Mirage Dealer may not have been any crowning feat, the familiar rush of endorphins that came with a well-deserved kill was enough for Ryan as he turned his attention to the fields once more in search of further prey to hunt.

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Word Count: 424

[Ryuuketsu]

This Is A Wonderful World

Fresh New Start

The thing about MMOs that Ryan found strange was that the more time you spent playing one, the less likely you were to realize exactly how long you were playing. It was for that reason he’d taken to placing his alarm clock on his desk next to his computer. Having the time staring him right in the face helped him keep track of it better.

He felt like he’d only been playing for about fifteen minutes, and in all reality he probably had been. Still, the time taken up by character creation and boring introductory quests had matched that fifteen minutes and made it a half an hour. It looked like he wouldn’t have time to do much more than this quest if things kept going this way. He still had a few things to finish unpacking, and his parents were pretty hard on him about how much time he spent on games, after all.

The notion that time was running out made him a bit hasty, but that didn’t mean he was so rushed he was making mistakes. It was more like the seconds that counted away at the cooldowns for Ryuuketsu’s abilities seemed to drag on for longer than they should, and the animations seemed stretched out and slow. Were attacks supposed to be as weightless and low impact as that? Ryan got the feeling that if he were to mimic a sword swing from Ryuuketsu, he’d hardly be able to cut through a sheet of printer paper, let alone the flesh of a boar.

Well, damage was still racking up. That was all that mattered, Ryan supposed. Even if it was slower than a snail on its way up Kilimanjaro.

Another boar fell to auto-attacks and careful positioning of the hitbox that was Ryuuketsu, and a third and fourth creature charged at him as another Mirage Dealer finished off their brother. The short ranged teleport on that ability could be dangerous if you didn’t know or care about proper zoning and management of agro, but two boars was something that Ryuuketsu was more than equipped to deal with.

Leaping, dodging, and rolling out of the way with all the grace available to a level one Acrobat, Ryuuketsu was managing his opponents easily. Their health bars dropped another chunk with every attack, and soon the two of them were dead in spite of their most noble efforts to shoot the Swashbuckler straight back to the sanctuary.

Ryan rolled his neck, the audible popping noises that it created were music to his ears as stiff muscles stretched out. So far, this computer seemed to run the game with relatively little lag. He could pull off some basic maneuvers with his limited skill kit to good effectiveness as well. Maybe when he wasn’t hanging out with his friends he’d level this character up and use it to play with people he met here some.

Yeah, like that would ever happen. The chances of him making lasting friendships anywhere in the world were negligible. The friends he did have online were good people, but he didn’t feel particularly close to any of them. It would probably be the same here.

Having a wide circle of acquaintances really didn’t interest him. He’d rather just have a circle of two or three really close friends.

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Word Count: 552

[Ryuuketsu]

This Is A Wonderful World

Fresh New Start

Thoughts of friends he wouldn’t be getting were pushed aside by the fact that he just needed to kill three more of these little bastards in order to finish the quest. Of course, he’d probably have to get off after that and in doing so his chain of raising numbers to a certain point before turning those numbers in for a new set of numbers would be broken and hard to get back into the swing of, but if he was going to proxy over to the US servers then that didn’t really matter anyway.

Still, a boar with a price on its head was a boar that would soon be dead. Especially if that price was experience points and gold. The last four boars on the list were a bit of a chore to deal with, but only for the fact that they were easy enough that it felt like they should be dead in one hit, not five or six. Ryan was somewhat tempted to keep grinding this character up until he deemed it as usable, but that would mean going through a raid or two in order to obtain good equipment.

Raids were always a chore for solo players. They hardly ever got drafted until a guild absolutely needed extra people, and even then they would usually get the short end of the stick when it came to item distribution simply for the fact that they were a foreign element in a close group of people. They stuck out like sore thumbs and were shooed away when their work was done.

Still, raids were probably the best thing Elder Tale had to offer. They were difficult to be sure, but that difficulty was the fun part. As a solo player, it was about testing your limits when it came to avoiding damage and reading monster attack patterns, as well as making the right call for yourself when it came to supporting whoever it was that bothered to put up with you for the time the raid could take.

Getting into one of those with a Swashbuckler might be fun. They dealt enough damage and had enough agility that they were a high-end class as far as balance of the game was concerned. They could also apply some fairly useful debuffs that a well-structured party should be more than capable of capitalizing on. Still, that was a matter of being able to find a party that could become well-structured in the first place.

While distracted by all of this, Ryan dealt the finishing blow to the final boar without even realizing that it was the last one. The flashing “Quest Complete” logo snapped him out of his reverie, and he happily disengaged from battle as he went back to town to turn in the quest.

The tall, armored Guardian removed the items from his inventory, and a dialogue window came up as he struck what could vaguely be considered an approving pose. Ryan fought the urge to roll his eyes; that had to be the thousandth time he’d seen that sort of animation pop up in the time he’d been playing the game.

While the resulting window congratulated him on his “good work,” Ryan briefly donned the guise of his character, imagining that if he was fully in control of the situation that he wouldn’t be listening to this. He probably wouldn’t bother with taking official quests that belonged to the game itself, either. Were the world of Elder Tale stretched out before him, he’d probably be playing a much different role than simply one face amongst millions of others, all of them playing out the same story in the same order but in slightly different ways.

Rolling his eyes, Ryan logged out of the game and kicked his rolling chair back from his. Getting a proxy set up could wait. His mom would likely kill him if he spent too long in his room, anyways.

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Word Count: 658