1 Genesis

"Tch… not even top 500."

"Hey-hey, cheer up Alex—you may not be top 500, but you're still damn good."

"Ah, thanks… I guess"

"Oh come on, getting from zero to here in under three years? I can't name a single other player who's been able to do something so impressive."

"Mhn… Hey Mike, lets head back; my head hurts after that tourney."

"Ah- fine."

Disgruntled, the pair headed back to their dorm. It'd been four hours from beginning to end for the Monotoria tourney, and even though Alex had been practicing non-stop for the past month, he still couldn't even scratch the top rankers. There was no room for failure with such high stakes, but Alex still threw his chances by accidentally activating his absolute defense CD right after the round started. He had made it through the first few stages of the prelim, but his nerves eventually got the better of him. Though Mike tried to console him, there was little effect; Alex was shown absolute skill—skill that he couldn't match. Pouting, he muttered to himself while walking down the street, causing Mike to crack a smile at the sight. Although Mike wasn't at the level Alex was, he'd been playing for just as long and knew just how impressive Alex's performance was. Although he still lost, his execution of skills and movement was near perfect. Unable to cheer him up, all he could do was chuckle and walk back home.

Opening the door, Alex immediately jumped for his bed, seemingly falling asleep midair.

"Hah, can't blame him. I don't think he's slept at all in the past three days… Whatever, I guess I'll get some sleep in too. Alex was talking about that new game he wanted to try yesterday… guess we can give it a go tomorrow."

***

"Mike! Mike wake up!"

"Wha-? It's the crack of dawn what on earth could you want?"

"Huh!? Seriously? Edessa comes out today!"

"Eh? Cool, but why'd you wake me up at 6 in the morning?"

"The game releases at 6:30 AM! We need to go buy copies now!

Shaking with excitement, Alex was too anxious and ran out the door on his own, leaving Mike utterly confused. Too groggy to reason, Mike promptly fell asleep right after.

*Bwam*

A loud sound was heard as Alex slammed the doors of his building open as fast as he could. A trot could be heard from adjacent streets, causing people to stare at the speeding college student. Seriously, how could someone even run that fast?

It took about ten minutes to run down to the local electronics store, but as expected, the line was longer than reason. Wrapping around the entire store, the line was atleast 1000 people long. Thinking about how long it would take to sit in the line, Alex's vision went fuzzy.

"Ugh, what a pain. Too bad, time to wait in a line for 10 hours haha!"

Turning their heads, the people near him in line saw the sleep deprived and overly caffeinated Alex laughing like a psychopath.

"Don't look… pretend he's not there."

***

Overhearing the other people in line talking about what early reviewers were saying about the game, Alex immediately checked his phone.

'Edessa brings a new perspective to the VRMMORPG genre.'

'Edessa flips gaming on its head.'

'Edessa is like sex, but better.'

Letting out a mild chuckle, he was intrigued into just what the reviews were talking about. In the trailers of the game leading up to this point, all that Sojourner Corp. would show was character customization and a handful of combat scenes. It was rumored that the game was much more than that, but no official news had been let out, leading to a much smaller than expected launch. Furthermore, it required that you bought the $5000 full dive capsule, choking launch even further. The full dive capsule, appropriately called Full Dive, wasn't made by SC, but instead by Meta, the world's leading social media provider. Alex originally got his Full Dive three years ago, in order to play the newly released VRMMO Monotoria. The way the hardware worked was by scanning for the electrical impulses sent by your brain to your spinal cord, interpreting the movements and converting them to movements in the virtual world. The reason you didn't move after it was activated was because you were asleep. Once the user had fallen asleep within the capsule, the AI would attempt a linkage and would start to intercept the signals your brain sends to your body, and similarly send signals to your brain. Most people didn't know the exact science behind it, but the world had come to trust it after its mass adoption a few years ago.

Checking the official Edessa website, everything had changed. He had checked it every day before the game released, but nothing changed; until today. There was a new forum page as well as a beginners guide tab. Interested, Alex started by clicking on the forum and started to read into the experiences some of the first players were having. Surprisingly, even though the game was only out for 30 minutes, there were over 5000 messages. Some of the top posts were discussions on where the best place to start was, but something caught Alex's eye. Scrolling down some, he saw a post asking which class was the best to start with. It hadn't crossed his mind! He realized that he needed to choose a class! There was rampant speculation within the comments, with a majority thinking that a swordsman would be the strongest, or that an assassin would easily dominate. There was still no publicly released list of classes, but it seemed that some were already being discovered by players. He had always played magic heavy classes—being a warlock main in Monotoria—and loved the idea of being a glass cannon. While he wasn't even sure this was possible in Edessa, he fantasized nonetheless.

Lost in thought, the line seemed to move faster than he expected. By noon he could see the front entrance, but he didn't particularly care how long it took anymore. Around then is when Mike finally woke up and called Alex, wondering if he was still waiting for the game.

"Yo, you still waiting in line?"

"Haha, yeah. I should be inside in like 30 minutes. Are you gonna come out here by the way? I'm not paying for your copy."

"Hyek—I'm coming right now!"

"lol. By the way, check the Edessa website on the way over, they finally updated it."

"Alright, see you in 10."

*Beep*

…

Thirty minutes later, Mike came running over faster than he had ever seen. With a trip and a tumble, he found his spot next to Alex at the front of the line. There were less than five people ahead of them at this point, leaving the people behind them jealous of Mike who didn't have to wait.

"Alex!"

"About time…"

"Ah? Haha, I'm here though, right?"

Rolling his eyes, Alex couldn't help but chuckle. The storefront was finally here, and he was finally going to have a chance to play. Walking in, the pair immediately grabbed one copy each of the storage drive that was required to play the game. The reason they needed to go in person in the first place instead of just ordering the game online was because of the abysmal internet at their dorm. The game was over a three terabytes in size, and although increases in storage technology and cost had made this almost negligible, what hadn't increased was the University's internet bandwidth. Waiting seven hours in line was a lot better than waiting almost 15 hours for their potato internet to download the game. After paying, the pair ran home from what seemed like a bank heist, running literally as fast as an Olympic runner, baffling pedestrians. Slamming the doors open again to the anger of the doorkeeper, an angry yell was heard. Seemingly deaf, the two ran, completely ignoring the manager. Confused yet uncaring, she sat back down and continued her lunch. Catching their breath, Alex and Mike opened the door to their room and collected themselves. While Alex wanted to get in as quick as he could, Mike reminded him of the new beginner's guide posted on the website. Excitedly, Alex pulled up the guide on his computer and read over the basics.

***

Welcome to Edessa | New Player Guide

Character Creation

Although Edessa offers a wide variety of customization, your initial model will be your real-life body scanned in via the Full Dive. You can offset your look by up to 25% to protect your identity.

Choosing a Starting Location

Edessa is a world as big and wide as it's real counterpart—feel free to start in any of the Six Countries of the Western Continent's starter cities. Depending on your area of interest, you can choose any city you'd like, with each Country offering a different Combat and Artisan specialization.

Accepting Your First Quest

Each and every quest in Edessa is created entirely as the world sees fit. Our AI system creates and removes quests depending on conflicts and events that happen in Edessa. To find your first quest, try talking to any NPC in your starting city. They should help guide you on your way.

Leveling

Leveling in Edessa works in similar ways to most MMOs. Killing an enemy, completing quests and challenges, and other forms of task completion will give you experience. The amount you receive will be dependent on the difficulty of the task.

Socials

Edessa provides a social manager where you can add, remove, and block contacts and friends, talk to and message other users, and form parties and guilds.

The Rest is Yours to Discover. Good Luck!

***

"Huh… This is really a basic beginners guide."

To be blunt, Alex was really expecting more, but it looks like it'll be up to him to figure things out for himself. Somewhat confused, he turned to Mike and told him of the situation. He had a similar reaction to Alex, also somewhat weirded out about the lack of information there seemed to be. What's more, checking the forums again, although there were close to 30,000 posts, there was still not much information on classes or quests or item rarity; just how big is this game?

"I installed the memory unit in both of our Full Dive's, you should be good to hop in whenever."

"Thanks. I'll add you to my party when I get in game. We can decide where to start from there."

Hearing that, Mike entered his capsule while Alex shut down the computer and entered his capsule.

In order to dive, the user had to lay down so that their neck was completely held by the neck brace installed inside the pod. This is what allowed the machine to work, but Alex could never get used to it. When ready, the user would press the button on the side of the machine, prompting the machine to go on standby. When the device detected that the user had fallen asleep, it would make its connection. Partially regaining his consciousness, Alex woke up to a big menu in front of him. He selected Edessa and hit play, promptly being transported to a new area.

"Welcome to Edessa."

A woman's voice played seemingly out of nowhere.

"Would you like to enter?"

"Uh, yeah. Please."

"Please choose a username"

'A username…'

"How about… no wait hold on."

He was torn on what to name himself. He could choose the ID he uses for Monotoria, 'Star Eater', but he always regretted that name as it was too cliché.

'Hmm… when in doubt, there's always Latin!'

Pulling up the overlay menu for Meta, he opened the web browser and looked up Latin names. Almaak, too holy sounding; Merga, too weird; Ruchba, eh. Everything sounded pretty weird to him, but after searching, Alex eventually landed upon a perfect name; Lupus.

"I choose the name Lupus."

"Welcome, Lupus."

'Oh-ho? that sounds cool.'

"Please customize your character next."

What appeared before him was a new menu with his body on the left and customization options on the right. While he likes to think he's pretty good looking, Alex is actually overweight and not the best looking. His eyes are normally droopy and he doesn't comb his hair. A side effect of playing games so often. The options to customize his character weren't too drastic, with there being hair color, weight, height, and facial structure to change. What's more, the customizability was limited as there was a big '0/25%' on the screen indicating how much he could customize his character. At the bottom, there was also text that said that 'changes in your real life body would be reflected in game.' Although he didn't normally admit it, he did feel that maybe he could shave off a few pounds here and there. Moving the slider, he looked like he instantly lost 30 pounds, but the customizability percentage meter went up to 10% with it.

'Strict!'

Dismayed that he couldn't make himself look like a model, he shaved some more weight off and decided to change his height from 5'8" to 5'10". This maxed out his customizability, leaving Alex looking better than real life, but still in need of work. Satisfied with his new appearance, he selected complete and waited for the next audio message.

"You have completed character completion. Next, please select your preferences:"

A menu then popped up, displaying a number of settings like 'Auto Logout Timer: 45 Minutes ', 'Pain Transfer Rate: 1-10', and 'Auto Logout Pain Level: 1-10'. While things like the timer seemed reasonable, pain transfer rate? Some recent games for Meta had been experimenting with sensation transfer, but it had never gone beyond touch. Pain? And 1 through 10? Does that mean that you would feel that level of pain if I set it to that?

"System, what does pain transfer rate mean?"

"Pain transfer rate is the amount of pain sensation you will feel for the equivalent injury. It is recommended that you set this to level three."

Level three? What if I get cut up with a sword, wont that hurt like hell even at a three?

"Ah, whatever. Configure to whatever is recommended."

"Understood. Continue to town selection?"

'Finally!'

"Continue."

As the menu went by, the first inkling of the world of Edessa finally was shown. The system showed a map of a continent, along with the location of six countries.

"This is the Western Continent, Ala. There are six countries that exist within the Ala. To the north is Gallia. Gallia is most proficient in magic. To the West is Dania, most well known for their crafting abilities. To the East is Pontus, the strongest nation on the continent, most renowned for their swordsmanship. To the south-east is Raetia, the country with the biggest economy in Ala, mainly focused on trade. To the south-west is Dacia, an agrarian country focused on hunting and gathering. Finally, in the far north-east is the most secluded of the countries, Anglia. Anglia, while having the smallest population has the largest collection of proficiencies, being strong in both smithing and mining. These are your options, please select a starting country."