章 1: Boot up: I
Selene Cordel never thought she was amazing or incredible. She thought she was pretty, and smart, but never thought she was the best at what she did. Her colleagues felt otherwise. To them, she was the golden dev, the one who made her mark on the gaming community. She was, according them, invaluable as a developer. If she was on the team, you knew the game was going to be a fantastic hit.
Her official title was General Development and Improvement Programmer. She wasn't technically an official employee for any one company and enjoyed her freedom to work in all departments as a contractor for any game project. The few areas she didn't touch were mainly the Storyboard Writing, Art and Design, Public Relations and Marketing. Beyond those, she had helped with everything else for multiple projects, hence being considered a prodigy in the field of videogame development. Her approach to creating new engines, AI, Net Code, Feature Programming, UI Development and even Rigging and Animation was a huge boon to whatever company acquired her contract. She never had a problem with finding a job. They were practically beating down her door to work on the next big thing in the gaming community.
Selene didn't exactly need to work much anymore, as her main accolade was the reason everyone thought she was incredible. She had developed, on her own free time, a world creation tool that took multiple features and requirements of buildings and resources to create a random generation map that any team could use and considered all available space and restrictions. All someone had to do was pick all available buildings they needed in each village or even something larger like a city, the different needs to make the world feel livelier like blacksmiths or glassblowers, and it would build a breathtaking world with advanced topography and placement with advanced city planning and roads as well as points of interest like a cliff near a waterfall. There were no odd "rings" or flat terrain issues under the buildings, it settled everything without sunken polygons or clipping, with hills and roads being in perfect sync. Due to this, the tool was used in almost all MMO games, and she received royalties from its uses. It revolutionized game development from then on.
This tool made it infinitely faster for design teams to work on fine tuning and working on other facets of the game without any issue with holes in the world, allowing patches and expansions to be quickly rolled out for many popular games. This wasn't her only feat, as she had helped design multiple features for quite a few games that won her many entertainment development awards. However, despite what everyone thought, she wasn't effortlessly creating these incredible features and tools. She wasn't just waking up in the morning and knocking out an incredible feature for a dev team in a day. She had many sleepless nights, or nights she fell asleep still wearing Dive Gear or lying with her face smashed against a keyboard or desk. She tended to work from home half the time, the remainder being at whatever company hired her. Each time she showed up, they provided a VIP office especially set up for her. She hated them. She was almost never in them due to needing to talk to the project leads in other parts of the building and would rather have a small station to sit at near them to throw ideas their way.
She also remembered not all the features she had helped develop had worked perfectly. Some had been purposefully scrapped in exchange for something else due to the difficulty of implementation. She remembered a few that were so frustrating she got up and stomped around the room with everyone else noticing. If she threw a temper tantrum, it meant there was no chance of getting it to work and her patience had ended. It didn't mean they wouldn't try and create a replacement.
Selene had just finished one more project, a first-person shooter with some sort of disease that took over humans as hosts. It wasn't classified as an alien shooter or a zombie shooter, but something entirely new. You never knew if your allies would suddenly turn on you due to a defective gas mask or some other issue and was an immediate hit as soon as it was released. It was just more money to shove in the bank and try and retire early.
After the release of the project, she decided to take a plane home to California, San Diego. She didn't have any plants or pets as she was worried none of her neighbors would help water or feed them. As she picked up her luggage from a carousel and got into an auto taxi, she received a phone call. The young woman tried to shift in her seat to reach over her purse and bag to find her phone, but it was barely out of reach in a pocket on her backpack. Just as she was moving her long Auburn hair to unbuckle her seat belt to make a second attempt, the auto taxi barked a loud warning.
"PLEASE KEEP YOUR SEATBELT FASTENED UNTIL THE VEHICLE HAS COME TO A COMPLETE STOP." She was cupping her ears immediately, worried she was going to get tinnitus.
"Ow, that is really… oh, I'm going to have to give a complaint about that." She stopped attempting and simply waited. The call went to voicemail and that was that. Once she was at home, she'd check to see who had tried to communicate with her and return the call. Until then, it was brooding time about the loud taxi ride. She crossed her arms over her ample bosom and frowned.
Once the taxi had stopped on the side of the road to her condo, she removed all her baggage, closed the door and pulled out her phone. Before she could hit one button, the taxi started to pull away quickly, nearly running her foot over before she could get back on the sidewalk.
"Hey! Watch it!" She snapped at the automated vehicle as it sped away. The dev unlocked her phone and touched the app to request the ride, auto pay being provided by the previous company to get her home. She placed a scathing review and complaint for the ride, telling others to avoid them. As she dragged her luggage up the stairs and unlocked her front door, she listened to the voicemail via her ear piece. It was a request to call back an old friend of hers who lived in Japan.
Selene dropped her bags off in her bedroom and went to take a shower. She'd call him back after she had a chance to relax a little bit, as the flight had given her at least some jet lag. Once she was out and felt clean, she checked her refrigerator for food, which clearly was empty. She wasn't one of those people that left things to rot while she was away, she bought what was needed for the week and that was that. She remembered she had some pasta in the cupboards and tomato sauce, as well as some meatballs in the freezer. Now felt like the best time for Spaghetti.
After she had eaten and sat down on her couch to watch a little tv, she turned to a news channel while using her phone to return her call to Suchi, another developer.
"In tonight's news, record sales of the new game "Biotic Revolution" reaches well over fifty million in less than twenty-four hours. This has broken- "
"Hello? Selene?" Suchi Kazagawa answered on the other side, his heavy accent bleeding through the receiver.
"Hey there, I'm returning your call." She looked down at the floor as there was no one to look directly at.
"Hey, I'm glad to hear from you again. How are you doing?" Suchi sounded pretty happy to hear from his old friend. He remembered taking a few international courses with her in college.
"I'm doing well, yourself?" a small smile crept on her mouth as her eyes flicked to the ceiling and roamed her living room.
"You already know how well I'm doing after your help with our little project. See how well it exploded in popularity now?"
"Yeah he he, I can see that." Suchi was referring to Yggdrasil, the DMMO-RPG game that had become the most played MMO in Japan. No one didn't know about it, as there were also servers set up in the U.S., Europe, Russia and China. India and Australia for some reason banned sale of it, though oddly the Middle Eastern countries welcomed it with open arms.
"So, I know you just finished with that project that's all over the news." His statement seemed to allude to a question just after.
"Yeah, I'm just relaxing now for a bit. Barely even looked at my mail or emails." Her slim laptop was still stuck in her backpack, she hadn't even pulled it out. A tablet sat on top of her coffee table, and her phone she just didn't like replying to emails due to the finicky touch screen. She really needed to buy a new one.
"Ah, I see. So, now probably wouldn't be a good time to ask for a favor." There was the request she was expecting.
"It depends on the favor, what did you have in mind?" She didn't want to walk into a mess she might not be able to get out of, despite Suchi being an old friend.
"You know what? I'm sorry, I should really let you just settle back in. You've been in Texas for what, five, six months straight trying to get that project finished? This can wait a little bit I think. How often do you get to go home these days?"
"I fly back at least once every two to three weeks. Also, stop that. You always do that. I'm not one to rest on my laurels here. Is this a contract?"
"Well, not exactly." She furrowed her eyebrows. Was he in trouble? If this wasn't a contract, could he need help outside of development?
"So, this isn't work?" Selene crossed her legs and laid back a bit, flipping through the channels to a tv show or movie. She didn't really feel the need to watch the news focus on a videogame instead of something more interesting.
"Well, it is and isn't." She hated that. Suchi needed to get to the point. She was tired of people dancing around questions these past few days.
"I'm confused. What is this about?" Suchi sighed on the other side of the call.
"You see, Yggdrasil has reached the end of its lifespan, after twelve years. It's been a great run, but now we're moving on to another project."
"O…k, so this is what, an offer for a contract?" she asked. He seemed to be dancing about what he really wanted to ask her.
"No, well, sort of."
"Spit it out Suchi, I know all I'm going to do is snap at you and you'll blurt out everything smushed together in one sentence" she chuckled out.
"Ok. Would you be willing to do a log dump read for me on Yggdrasil? I've got my hands full right now and- "
"So, this is work."
"Look, I'm sorry! I'm sorry, I know this should be official, but the shutdown is tonight and I'm not asking you to look through every log and report. Just feature usage and do a little analytic review, that's all. We want to try and implement some features that were major hits, but things have changed a bit throughout the expansions and patches that we don't… well…"
"You don't know what was popular from what people used because it was the only thing available."
"Right."
"Don't you have people that do that stuff anyways? Why me?"
"Because you helped create some of those features, and I already know those alone increased the player count by over five million."
"Bullshit, you're just trying to stroke my ego" she laughed out. Her eyes rolled as she heard him chuckle.
"I'm serious! Look, I'd much rather have someone who actually knows what they're talking about vs some suits above thinking this and that are what the gaming community want. We've got a good reputation, and I'd rather have you with your amazing credit do this."
"And, what, you want me to do it right at midnight and call you after?"
"What? No! No no no, I'm just hoping you could maybe log in as an admin before midnight and download the logs after the servers would shutdown, brush through them and tell me what you think, maybe tomorrow? Or the next day? It doesn't have to be immediately. I just want your opinion."
"Well, I'm kind of tired as its 6 am here and I just got off a jet… this is a little too close to the dead line too given you're seventeen hours ahead… but… well, I'll think about it."
"Please?" Selene sighed and brushed her bangs back. She would much rather catch some ZZZs, but she did want to help her friend get their next project rolling in the right direction.
"Alright, alright. I'll log on."
"Fantastic! Great, I'll send you the admin authentication access." She would need that just to make sure it didn't consider her a hacker trying to cause chaos. Even GMs would register her log on and leave her alone.
"Ok, well, I'll talk to you later then. Expect a call sometime this week."
"Sure thing! Good bye Selene and thank you. I really appreciate this."
"Of course. Good bye, say hi to your wife for me."
"I definitely will. Hopefully we'll see you out here soon." She hung up the phone and groaned. She would much rather climb into bed and get some sleep already, but once the game servers did shutdown she wasn't going to have as complete data due to the end of life "parties" that would be happening in the game. There usually weren't just a few players feeling nostalgic, there were usually entire guilds throwing massive bashes with everyone just to enjoy the friends they made and to reminisce on old times and adventures. There would be quite a few that stay up until they were forcefully logged off.
The young woman looked at the digital clock on her wall. 6 am. This meant it was 11 pm in Tokyo. She grumbled a little as she got up and went into her office, decked out with some of the latest in high tech gear. Top of the line personal server, spare air conditioning, two laptops, two desktops and a main terminal on one side of the room, a wall size tv and multiple consoles connected on the other side, including the Dive system. She even had a developer command suite hidden inside the desk. She sat down in her gaming chair and pulled the handle on the side, lifting the footrest and reached for the headset. As she grabbed it, she pulled off her earrings and took off her necklace she always wore, as it got in the way of the wiring and hurt her ears as she put the straps on for the earphones.
She activated the system and downloaded Yggdrasil. She didn't play the game at all, though she remembered each feature in it as she had helped create almost everything. This was so long ago and with so many other games that caught her interest, she just wasn't an MMO type of gamer anymore once she was out of high school. She just didn't really have the time. While in high school, she would raid often.
Once the game was downloaded and installed, she logged in as a special custom admin. It asked if she wanted to use her personal avatar, a custom angelic being that seemed almost entirely asymmetrical in all facets of the body. The wings were made of fractured crystal disconnected and floating from the back, with the rest of the extremities hovering away from the torso. There was no face, just a pair of white eyes and flowing silver hair. Despite how it looked, no one seemed scared of it. It didn't exude any sort of evil or inherent goodness, it just seemed to fit for a general avatar to use to test multiple games without having to create a new avatar each time.
"No, I think I'll just go straight drop in" she spoke aloud to her mic. The system acknowledged and loaded her in as just a representation of herself, albeit without any clothes. She seemed to be wearing a skin-tight glowing bodysuit as a replacement for her body textures, though it hardly mattered as no one could possibly see her with admin status. As she loaded into the game and looked around, she was floating in the sky with a broad view of the surrounding landscape. It was night time in the world, with small lights twinkling both below her and above, the stars shining brightly one last time. A few shooting stars flew by the moon, disappearing after a second or two.
The woman floated down to a rooftop and watched players enjoying their last night together, trying to get personal information to stay in contact with guildmates or talking about dungeon crawls. Food and drink would be free right now until the shutdown, so people were just dropping kegs of alcohol everywhere, feasts were laid out and large parties were flourishing. Some were crying that they would lose their friends they had made throughout these years, which most likely referred to the players that simply weren't on anymore. As time continued forward, she leapt from the rooftop and teleported to different parts of the world instantly, checking on dungeons to see if there were still players doing crawls, guild meetings in their fortresses or hunting of monsters. There might even still be pvp engagements still happening.
She checked through a small list of the most recent features that everyone was using, but then quickly stopped. It wouldn't provide accurate data as in the end of the service life of the game, of course people wouldn't be using the features the same way as normal. Crafting would be all but useless, so there was no point in checking on that for sure. Her logs needed to exclude what she was seeing right now to some degree. As Selene went through the process of setting up downloads of the logs and in-depth checks, she loaded her list with the required restrictions and timelines needed, with recordings of errors and tweaks made to fix any of them.
"Four hours? Oh, you've got to… fine, I'll be asleep by the time that's done and logged out." She knew by the time the logs had finished compiling and downloaded for her to really look at them, the servers would be long since shutdown. The best she could do right now was Macro usage, messaging and how communications was holding up for the remaining players.
"Remember that time we- "
"How many were there? We must have taken out a whole army!"
"Sorry to do this Momonga, but I just don't have the energy anymore- "
"So here we were, stuck in this tunnel, right? And- "
She slipped through chats quickly, not really caring about what they were saying as how they were sending it. More than half were using face to face communication with other avatars, with very few using long range messaging. They wanted to see their friends one last time. The dev pulled up time in the upper right-hand corner. Fifteen minutes to shutdown.
"I'll miss you all!"
"This is the end!"
"I don't wanna go out like this!"
"We will find each other! In the next game we will rebuild our guild! Are you with me?"
Selene was tired, and before she knew it, she was falling asleep before the shutdown had completed. She already knew what was going to happen, she'd wake up with the logged out blank system screen showing into her eyes, skin indentation from the helmet on her face and chin and the need to pee. There was always a very light beep noise that came from the shutdown of a server, she knew it from a few forced shutdowns of previous test builds for other games to sift through error reports.
Oddly, this never sounded off in her ears.
What happened next for her was something she never would have expected to ever happen in her wildest dreams.
Eight Hours Later
Selene woke up to the rough feeling of dirt on her shoulder as well as grass. She looked around, blinking and confused as she slowly moved to a sitting position. That was when she panicked. The woman bolted to standing on her feet as quickly as she could, stumbling a little bit as she surveyed where she was. What was in front of her eyes was not her office, it was not the log out system screen, and she had no idea how she got here.
Surrounding her was an open field, with a forest further off to her left, a small pond to her right, and further up in front of her was a sea of small hills with a mountain range in the far distance. She turned around to look behind her and saw a good twenty-five miles behind was another mountain range curving off to the North and South.
"What the… where… wha… how…" she spun around quickly in all directions, looking for a road or a sign, something to tell her where she might be. As she did so and looked down at her feet, she noticed something very important. She was completely naked.
"Where the fuck are my clothes. Who the… no way… no no no no… this can't be happening this can't be happening…" she started to repeat. Selene tried to calm herself down as she looked up at the sky.
"This is a dream, it has to be a dream, I'm dreaming. All I have to do is wake up." She pinched herself on her left arm and Winced. She felt pain. Games could not allow direct pain ever, they would have law suits immediately for causing a form of torture in all courts everywhere. The amount of griefing and trolls that would cause adrenaline spikes, heart palpitations, dizziness and other issues would spike. The list went on for medical conditions it could exacerbate. Even Yggdrasil only allowed limited touch sensation. She might be really here.
"Did someone…" she was scared now. Someone could have broken into her home, potentially raped her and thrown her off in some rural area with no clothes. Some crazed fan? Some angry rival in the development community? She checked her body over and trembled. Nothing was out of the ordinary, no scratches or issues. She was just completely nude. It could have been a really bad prank, but she doubted it.
"Hello? Anyone out there? I need help" She yelled out in all directions. There was no response from anyone, and frankly she didn't see any signs of civilization. That should be impossible. Getting out of San Diego would be extremely difficult with traffic at the time she fell asleep, and after eight hours there should still be some sign of roads or buildings nearby. The only way there would be no signs was if she was dropped off somewhere in Arizona, somewhere in the desert. This was clearly not a desert.
She was almost at her breaking point and ready to fall to her knees and cry, but every sensible thought going through her head told her to start walking. Maybe if she followed the mountain range, she'd find a town or a Sheriff, maybe a road she could follow. Heading towards the hills seemed like a sure-fire way of getting lost, and so did the forest. Unfortunately for her, the forest was somewhat in the way near the mountains. She had to go somewhere, and hopefully someone could help her.
As she dropped her hands from cupping her mouth, a small sparkle shimmered in front of her. She was surprised and moved her arms again up to her mouth, seeing the shimmer happen a second time. Nothing seemed to appear or try and harm her, but it was very odd, as her eyes widened, and her feet started to back pedal. She tripped and fell on her butt, looking towards where the sparkle had faded away. She had to start moving, or whatever it was could get a chance to manifest, and she wasn't about to stick around for that.
Selene got up and stumbled a bit, then ran for the mountains until she was out of breath, and nothing seemed to follow her. She could hear birds and crickets chirping throughout the area as she walked, not really noticing anything else besides wildlife and nature. She tried to cover herself as best she could, though there didn't seem to be much of a reason right now given that there was no one to see her buck naked. She felt a breeze and shivered a bit, trying to rub her arms to keep away the cold. In the distance she could see a small black dot on the bottom of the mountain she was heading towards. It would slowly get bigger and turn into a cave entrance. By the time she reached it, twenty-five miles had been crossed and the day was almost over. She was exhausted after walking for so many hours. There was no chance of finding civilization right now that her legs felt like jelly. To compound issues, she was hungry and thirsty.
As she reached the cave, she checked to make sure no predators were living inside of it, whether it was a bear or wolf pack. If there was, she probably would be killed instantly. Luckily, there wasn't a single living creature inside. The woman walked in and sat down with her back to the end of the cave, her knees pulled up to her chest. She was alone, naked, out in the middle of nowhere, and she had no idea how she got there. There were no signs of civilization yet anywhere which made no sense, and that sparkle happened back when she was near that pond. She really did feel like crying now, as tears welled up in her eyes. Her hand moved up to try and brush them away and as it did so, she saw the shimmer again. She backed up as far as she could against the cave wall and stared. After a few seconds she moved her arm again, and the shimmer appeared for the fourth time. This time, however, she saw a slight image appear inside the shimmer.
"That's it, I'm in a new game, maybe they put me in a holding server. Those assholes!" She was pissed now, at least for the single minute she thought about what the image might have entailed. She moved her hand again, waving it about in front of her. The image focused a bit here and there, but ultimately, she barely made any sense of anything she saw. She also realized if she was in a game, she wouldn't have felt pain. Something was wrong beyond the obvious. She tried to think logically.
"I was wearing the Dive gear and was in Yggdrasil. I fell asleep. I wake up out here, in the middle of nowhere, with no clothes, and I see this odd hallucination. I can't find any signs of civilization… where am I?" she speaks to herself as she tries to bullet point the facts by word of mouth. Selene looked at the cave wall and put her right hand to it, feeling the intricacy of the rough stone. She then balled her hand into a fist and slammed the bottom of it sideways like a hammer. It hurt. It hurt just like the pinch. She was here, physically, in wherever this was. Continuing to physically harm herself wouldn't change that.
"Aliens? No, maybe, possibly. Magic? That thing keeps popping up when I move my arm. Supernatural? WHY AM I ASKING THESE QUESTIONS! I WANT TO GO HOME! SEND ME HOME! PLEASE!" She started to scream, tears pouring from her eyes as she just sat there with a bruised hand. A small thought popped up in the back of her head that she was asking herself these questions to keep her sanity. She just dropped her head against her knees and sat there, crying for a few minutes. After what felt like an hour, it started to get dark outside. Here she was, naked and alone huddling in a cave. She couldn't just sit and die out here. She needed at least some answers to what was happening.
The young developer looked up and sat on her knees and waved her hand around in front of her. The shimmering kept happening, with slight image appearance at certain spots. She was starting to get annoyed as she couldn't really make out anything she was seeing, a few letters here and there but that was it. She finally was fed up and punched her fist at the air. The image became crystal clear for an instant then faded away. It looked like a character sheet. That surprised her greatly. She tried to bring it back but kept getting more shimmers. She didn't want to punch at air again to bring it back, as each time she did that it would take energy she needed to conserve. She did remember she focused hard on it when that happened and tried to concentrate on what she saw.
It took a minute or two, but it slowly stayed for longer and longer until it didn't go away. Once she had it staying, she tried to turn it off, which took a bit of time to figure that out and "send it away." What she saw was very interesting.
Written on the sheet were stats and skills, along with resistance percentages and what seemed to be a full body view of herself. To the top left was her level, one.
"I'm not in a game, or am I?" She whispered. She noticed a name for the location she was in, "New World. Second Continent. Artinia." That slightly confused her and at the same time explained things a bit. She wasn't on Earth anymore. This made her blood run cold.
[transfering this with a phone is facking thedius]
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