Chapter 1: Chapter One: The Journey Begins
'I am so tired' Stumbling through the front door of a small two bedroom apartment was our hero for this tale. Clad in a simple T-shirt and jeans, with a messy ponytail topping off her look, Anna set her backpack down next to the door and headed further inside while slipping off her shoes. Grabbing a quick bite from the kitchen with what her mother left on the counter, she made her way upstairs. Stepping into her room revealed a slightly messy and bland room with a computer desk set up in the corner. Resting on top of this desk was her prize for the night. A sleek pair of what appeared to be black sunglasses with a cushion covered wire box at the back. It was currently plugged into her computer finishing installation for her brand-new game, Heavens Fall. To think that in just a few short minutes she would start on the greatest journey in her life!
Games just wouldn't be the same after this, with a brand-new path for games being paved in virtual reality. Fantasy and reality mixing to form a world straight out of a book, knights and dragons included! A small beep snapped her out of her daze, with her monitor flashing a small window stating that her installation was complete. Excitement swelled as she quickly made hey way to the bathroom and finished preparing for a few hours of gaming into the night. Just a short ten minutes later, a freshly showered Anna sat on her bed holding the glasses like they were a family heirloom. Tracing the sides of the glasses she felt out the etched in name, N - O - R - A. On the box she remembered the name explained to mean neural operations and reality adjuster. While she was not sure how the device worked in full detail, she knew that it regulated the neural network of the body to prevent movement that would cause harm to the body. Due to this feature it took an additional three years of development and testing before it was allowed to allow public testing during the Beta phase of Heavens fall.
Fidgeting while watching her clock, Anna was waiting for the game to officially release at 4:00pm, so she could log in. At 3:59pm she could no longer bear the wait, so she slipped her device over her head and laid down in her bed. Seeing the digital clock in the corner of her vision she felt a bit silly to have watched her clock before. Shortly after this discovery the last minute ticked over and with a small beep the glasses slowly lit up, including a display across the lens. With the light came a scrolling bar with small boxes attached to it, and at the end was a slightly larger green square. When her gaze drifted to it, it expanded slightly and displayed the cover art for Heavens Fall. The shadowy back of several figures stood in front of a setting sun, with diversity being the striking feature.
For Anna, the most noticeable of the figures would be three giant figures with different shapes. The first was a large hunched over shadow of what seemed to be a bear, with comically large ears. Standing next to it was a large jagged humanoid figure that appeared to be shards of something? It was a bit hard to discern details due to them being shadows, but it clearly had jagged edges and large crevasses running through it. The third and last of the giant figures was the smallest of the giants, but making up for its lack of height was a pair of giant wings. Perched atop its broad shoulders was a large head of a cobra facing to the side, casting a distinct silhouette. Most of the other figures seemed to be standard fantasy races, with a few short beings and humanoid races. Although her personal favorite had to be the very clear elf with large ears and flowing hair, but that was mostly due to her love for fantasy elves.
Underneath the art was a small line of text reading "Heavens Fall - Start", which as Anna read in the manual was the start command for the games on the Nora gear. Trying, and failing, to settle her nerves Anna gave in to her childish excitement and quickly whispered "Heavens Fall - Start". She thought her entrance to her new distraction would be filled with flashing lights and excessive particle effects. Instead, she felt herself slowly slip into a relaxing sleep as her vision darkened.
A queasy feeling overtook Anna as she suddenly fell to her knees inside of a bright white space and fought to keep herself from vomiting. As she was suffering from nausea she heard the soft ring of a bell, and as the sound faded the nausea left with it. Glancing upwards from the strange white floor she noticed a new feature of the room, a large blue holographic display. While a form of holographic displays had been created decades prior, the sci-fi holographic computers were never invented. But hovering in front of her was just that, a floating blue screen with a single circle in the middle. Deciding to forsake caution she reached forwards and tapped the screen, which felt like she pressed her finger to a cool pane of glass. Rapidly expanding the circle let out a slight ding and revealed a painting small green dragon with golden accents with tiny wings. With ripples of silver light the painting came to life, and the dragon leapt straight out of it and landing in front of her!
Anna fell backwards in shock, despite preparing herself for a world of fantasy having a dragon, albeit a small one, jump out at her was crazy. Yet it was also so cool! Anna spent most of her time in school fantasizing about books she had read, or movies she had seen. Before she could lose herself in another tangent however, the small dragon spoke, it sounded like a young child with no discernible gender and yet it also sounded like an old man at the same time.
"Greetings Annabel, I am the Artificial Intelligence Virtual Assistant, also known as Aiva, designated to provide assistance during the time you spend playing Heavens Fall. Would you like to ask any questions, or would you prefer to jump straight into the character creation and tutorial?"
After taking a few seconds to process that the Dragon was speaking, she remembered that this was a fantasy game after all. Despite racking her brain trying to think of questions to ask this artificial intelligence, she was drawing a blank. Previously while she daydreamed about fantastical adventures she would always have a question or cool sounding remark at the tip of her tongue. But now that the moment finally arrived, she had nothing.
Seconds later Anna lamely said "I don't have any questions at the moment. . . wait, how do you know my name?"
A hearty chuckle came from the dragon, before it started to give a small speech to Anna. "It is all right, you can ask more questions later if you need to. To answer how I know your name, your account name is used to personalize the experience for the player. You can set a nickname for systems to refer to you as, should using your name prove to be a problem. Would you care for me to stop?" After thinking about it Anna shook her head since she didn't care much about it, it was just a bit surprising.
"Excellent, Hopefully my next explanation will shed light on the unanswered questions lurking within your mind. The world you are about to enter is named Lesprana, given the name of the goddess of life due to the rich and diverse life found on the planet Speaking of her, she is part of twelves gods which are called the gods of realms. This is because each one commands a separate realm, from which other powers stem. In this reality, most gods were formed from excess energy released by these twelve gods. Once the power entered the planes of existence they would be considered minor deities. Entities on the various planes of existence would often unknowingly shape these deities into the forms they believe each god would fit. If two separate cultures worshiped a god of fire, they would each form an aspect of fire into their form of that deity.
Under the gods of realms sit the Parthenon, where major gods are placed due to their power and position within different cultures. These major gods are more specialized in their powers compared to the twelve gods above them. The god of Fire or the god of Earth would be some examples. The gods are then divided into Parthenon based on the cultures that have faith within them, an example would be the Greeks and the Romans in the real world. The Greek Parthenon existed beforehand, however due to the spreading influence of Rome, when they decided to change the forms of the gods, it worked. Hades became Pluto, and all his traits and powers changed to match the new belief of him.
Sitting at the bottom of true deities are the minor gods, these are numerous and some barely have form and exist more as a rough idea than anything. This category is the most specific of all gods, with the god of Deer or Wine fitting in well. While they can not hold a candle to the power of higher deities, these gods are vital for the world to operate normally. Each one a cog in a much grander machine, one that they do not fully understand.
Finally you have the formless deities, also known as false deities, or according to some mortal researchers, the eggs of the divine. A silly name right? Well they were not entirely wrong with their guess, these beings are not conscious in the way we associate with the word. Instead, they operate on faith and the orders of higher beings. Zones were created to channel these unguided beings towards a purpose of achieving godhood through maintaining the physical plane and interactions with mortals.
Enough about the gods already then, I went on a bit of a rant there which I must apologize for. Let us both take a deep breath. In. . . and out. . . Perfect. Now that we are ready to continue, let us talk about what you will be dealing with, the rest can be found by exploring and playing! Besides the gods there are a few general categories of beings that exist. The group you will join at the start of your adventure are the mortals. These include the fantasy staples of humans, dwarves, elves, and more! At the start of the game only mortal races will be available for character selection. Opportunities are there for you to earn blood rights to other races, however these are rare or offer only portions of the power within.
The second and quite a common category are known as monsters. These have further categories that are irrelevant at the moment, however think of griffins and dragons and you will have the main idea. Most of these races came about from magic corrupting and twisting a normal creature into a strong and cunning monster.
Swapping over to the creatures of this world, they are similar to your world! You have wolves and deer or prairie dogs and weasels. These are still dangerous despite how trivial they might sound because of the surrounding monsters.
The final topic for right now that you need to know is how the system is set up. Just like other games you have stats and attributes, all of which will be displayed in your character page. Oh! right, first you should know about that, you can open your menu by thinking of "Open Menu". This is a highly advanced system, it uses the Nora virtual reality glasses to track your brain's activity to detect if you are thinking about activating the menu. Once the menu is open you can simply look and think of changes and it will occur. Otherwise, just in case you would prefer a more hands on approach, you can touch one of your starting gifts "Character Crystal" which will open a holographic display such as the one I was displayed within.
My apologizes, I got sidetracked once again there. In your menu you can select your character page and it will open to four separate tabs named as the status page, attribute page, equipment page, and the proficiency page. The status tab will show you your current health, mana, stamina, and any negative or positive effects on your character. Attributes will show you the six main attributes and any additional attributes you discover, as well as the effects of your attributes. The equipment page is self-explanatory, it will show you any equipment you have, but it also has a shortcut to the inventory and allows you to create sets of equipment to swap between. The final tab will be the proficiency page, which is where you will see your progress in any skill that can gain proficiency. This is more complicated than the others tabs, because most attacks, equipment, and spells in the game have profiencies so it will be large. As such we have tried to allow personalized sorting to allow you to ensure that you can find whichever ones you want quickly.
Well, this is the basic information given to players before character customization. You will learn more about the playable races and classes during the next phase. After that you will enter the tutorial where any relevant information will be explained and how to seek knowledge for yourself is opened. Do you have any questions before we send you off to your creation phase? The dragon finally finished his long-winded explanation, and Anna was still reeling trying to understand everything that he had said. Before she could try to think of a question to ask the dragon smacked a claw into his head and suddenly spoke up once again, "My apologizes, I forgot that you can ask an assistant in the game for questions, and they will answer if they are able. They are unable to answer questions about specific quests, locations, entities, or anything in that nature. Instead, they will answer broad subjects or information that you have previously assessed." Now finally finished he laid down on the floor and watched her.
"Um, I think that I can ask my questions later than?" Anna decided with the newest information to think of her questions for later instead of rushing one out now.
"Excellent! Let us have you on your way now, enjoy your new world and remember to sto - - -" Starting off with a smiling face, the dragon suddenly shifted to a grave expression as he issued what sounded like an ominous warning to her! Unfortunately as he started talking the white space was slowly filled with black triangles that meshed together turning the white world black and he vanished. Before a small blue light appeared in front of her with three words written in a cyan color.
Initiate [Character Customization]?
[Yes] [No]
CREATORS' THOUGHTS 
WhiteBaron03
WhiteBaron03 Hope you enjoyed this chapter, and have a nice day. If you have any suggestions or if you notice an error please let me know.
More chapters will be coming out soon, but I am going to take my time with this version of the story and try to make sure the details are correct.
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