1 Gargantua Online

I looked at the clock anxiously awaiting the interface to read 18:00 so I could leave my job at the museum and head home. I, Tess Cartwright, worked in the Museum of World History as a procurement specialist, but today my sleep capsule was being updated and I needed to leave quickly to meet the technician at 19:00. If I was late by even a minute, the robot technician would leave. That was the biggest problem with robots, the lack of flexibility.

I killed time and rewatched the ad for Gargantua Online, the virtual reality expansion releasing today on my holowrist. The adventure of a lifetime awaits for those intrepid souls journeying forth on Gargantua sounded the tagline for the commercial when the clock finally changed to 18:00.

I did a quick scan for anything left in disorder before exiting the cubicle in the office area of the museum. Jogging to the door, I headed to the nearest portal for my neighborhood. Joining the que to be ported to the Sunny Villa area, I looked at the ads for Gargantua Online in the holoboards on route to the portal station. With all the advertising for the game, I fully expect to see almost a billion people signing in to try the game in their sleep capsules tonight.

Finally at the start of the que, I stepped into my portal for Sunny Villa, quickly moving aside to prevent accidents with people bumping into me if they were also coming to Sunny Villa. I lived in a relatively small apartment complex of 1,000 or so rooms. For a single person in their twenties, I could afford a decently sized place.

It had about 32 square feet which held my sleep capsule, nutrient pack preserver, clothes closet, and a washroom. There wasn't any space to entertain, but considering nowadays everyone did virtual visits, my virtual space was a lot better equipped for entertainment purposes. I had just loaded in the nutrient solution for 14 hours when the technician came.

I let in the robot tech promptly and waited patiently while it uploaded the firmware which held the synapse ports for the brain to be connected to the virtual interface. It took the robot barely 10 minutes to complete the tedious replacement of 128 electrodes.

I thanked the robot, though it was unnecessary, and visited the washroom before heading to the sleep chamber and connecting to my personal virtual space.

An entire wall of a large room, equivalent in size to a football field showed a galaxy print wallpaper as a feature wall in an otherwise sky blue room. An outdoor space featuring a swimming pool with comfy Adirondack style chairs and magnificent library terrace with cushy wingback chairs were the common spaces where I allowed guests.

Everywhere else was encrypted for no access without express permission. In my home base area, I reviewed the literature on Gargantua before selecting the character creation interface for the game.

I looked at the countless race creation options for Gargantua. A person could choose to be a robot, elf, ghost, zombie, vampire, skeleton, human, merfolk, orc, goblin, golem, kobold, troll, halfling, gnome, dwarf, dragonkin, centaur, angel, demon, or ent.

I went through the roster of trying each race to see which would best show my most attractive figure. I naturally had light brown hair and fair skin, but my figure was a little stocky. The best choice was between the gnome and the dragonkin and I finally went with the dragonkin, choosing a blue skin tone which could be upgraded later for a price.

Next up was the class selection which actually had fewer options than the race. Classes were simple for character creation and included physical user, magic user, faith user, science user, and crafter which then also gave options for close combat user, ranged combat user.

A person was not limited to a class they chose in the beginning according to the game guide, but the choices at the beginning helped narrow down the skill selection tree as a person could select 5 skills to start their journey and hold only 25 skills total for their character.

The virtual avatars would not be limited to doing actions within the 25 skills. For instance, swimming as a skill would mean that the game assisted the avatars with the actions, but anyone who knew how to swim could skip that skill without consequences as long as their virtual race did not impede their abilities.

For instance, the Ent race was a tree people. They were fairly slow and lacked mobility for easy swimming motions. A person playing an Ent may have to invest in swimming skill for water movements even if they knew how to swim because their bodies were too different in game versus in the real world. That was why few people chose to play non-humanoid characters. Some entertainers would play those characters for a fun show though in previous games of this type.

I elected magic user, sub selected close combat user and watched the skill list pop up. I took two-handed sword skill, accelerated magic mastering, accelerated hp recovery, accelerated mp recovery, and appraisal from the list of available skills before trying to name my character Draconia...yep, that name was already created. The screen to select new ID appeared. After trying about 14 different combinations I settled for DarkWingAspirations82.

It was finally time to step into the game.

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