12 Margo

Gray returned to the Pilot's Quarters, where his incubator pod had been moved to in-game. After the pod is laid down and opened up completely, it resembles a relatively normal bed aside from the steel glass lid that can be closed on it. Gray laid down as instructed earlier, treating it like a regular bed, and logged out of the game.

"Still find it odd we have to log out in our pods like that." said Gray.

Time passed on a 1:1 scale in-game so 1 hour in-game was 1 hour in real life. Gray climbed out of the VR bed and expected himself to be hungry but was surprised that he didn't feel hungry despite gaming for about 4 hours straight.

"Well, calling it gaming would be a stretch as all of us were still basically doing the tutorial with the initial NPC. I wonder what the few hundred or so other players did in game."

Gray logged in to the game forums to check out what other Diamond-Tier players thought of the game so far. Unsurprisingly most complained that it was too realistic and that they really wanted to just get in and blow up mechs like most mech games. The other complaint was that it was too hard to pilot mechs as the neural links in the game didn't seem to be tuned the same way their VR beds were.

A few Alterra Corporation developers responded to these complaints, but their replies were not met with much positive feedback. They stated that the game was working as intended, aiming for ultimate realism. As for the complaints about having difficulty moving the mechs in-game, they had said this would be addressed the next game day. Separate tuning for the mechs and simulator would be conducted since the VR bed tuning was only for the players.

"Well, at least they're paying attention to the complaints instead of just ignoring them and blaming it on early access from Diamond-Tier players. Usually developers would apply Quality of Life fixes only during major releases and only do major patching just before the full release."

Gray started poking around and wanted to see what military camp everyone ended up in. It seemed every other player was also in an Alterra Alliance Military Camp. Most games that had a major military campaign against NPCs alone would usually lump all players together on one side. Gray decided to get his snack on at least, catch up on his other games, then get to bed early so he could start his vacation from work and have plenty of time to play!

__________

Edward Teach, the CEO of Alterra Corporation, looked at the player activity log for the Diamond-Tier players. At the same time, his AI assistant, Margo, briefed him on what the general thoughts of the game from the player's point of view.

Margo was Edward Teach's custom AI. She was completely sentient unlike every other known AI; thus would be cause for alarm if her sentience ever became known publicly. Edward had her avatar designed after a mid-20th century actress, Julie Newmar (Catwoman from the 1960s Batman series). Margo could pick out several different outfits for herself and was fascinated with royalty. Hence, she favored long beautiful silk dresses, tiaras, and long silk gloves. Her current outfit was a sleeveless long pale chiffon dress. The dress was long enough to hide all of her legs and only reveal her silver high heels when she walked but never would drag on the ground. Margo added a large diamond pendant and matching dangling diamond earrings to go with it all.

Margo gave off an air of authority that made one think she might actually have been royalty if it were possible. Edward was used to her presence, so it was nothing special to him. However, he still appreciated that she kept up appearances even if he was the only one to see her.

"Sir, only three players died in game on the first day, all 3 were ones that left their camps early." said Margo to Edward while highlighting a set of numbers on his holo board.

"That is much fewer than we anticipated, what of those that left their camps?"

"Excluding the 3 that died, all but 4 returned giving us a total of 793 players in our initial Diamond-Tier prelaunch that are staying with the program."

Edward smiled. "Excellent, this is much better than anticipated! Of the ones that tried the simulators, how was their responses?"

"It was as expected. Syncing the mind to the physical body was easy, but syncing the mind to the physical body and then again to the mech, even in the simulators, proved to be difficult."

"Indeed we did expect that..." Edward thought to himself for a moment. "Well, we aren't unprepared, do we have enough keys ready for them?"

"Yes sir, enough were developed that we can build a neural profile for every player."

"Good, see to it that each player has one in the morning!" said Edward

"Yes sir!"

Edward pondered for a moment. "Out of curiousity, how did the three players die?"

"One of them died from a wild animal while climbing out of their mech to search for food. The other two appear to have been killed by a rebel faction when they thought they could use their force to grind experience. At least that is what their last words were."

"What animal killed the one player?" said Edward a little surprised.

"It was a bunny rabbit sir."

"Show me!"

A satellite feed showed the location of the player who got killed by a rabbit was using. In front of it was a large ominous cave with a pile of bones and a single white rabbit sitting on a pile of bones.

"Is that the cave of Caerbannog?" said Edward. "I thought I had instructed the team to remove it along with that killer rodent."

"They tried sir, but he's got huge, sharp..." said Margo while using two fingers to make it look like she has fangs.

"Did they forget the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch? Nevermind, just blast it with whatever we have available and recover the mech seeing as it is undamaged."

"Yes sir"

__________

Gray woke up refreshed the next day and was super excited to get back into Alterra Online. He admitted that the game was not as fun as he expected but being one of only eight hundred players in the world able to play it was also very exciting.

A notification appeared on his HUD, and he glanced at it and saw it was a message from Jono.

"Hey, tell me how it is sometime, butt munch, I'll be joining in 6 more days when the general launch happens!" said a recorded message from Jono.

"Oh, I don't know if I will have time, I'm going to be so far ahead of you by the time you join that you won't be able to even breath the same air as me!" said Gray with a smug expression in a recording back to Jono.

Gray knew this would rile his friend up, and frankly, both Jono and Gray seemed to feed off of this as they spent more time name-calling and insulting each other than actually talking. It's a guy thing...

Gray wolfed down a quick breakfast and quickly got back into his VR bed to dive back into the game.