Apocalypse: Part 1

I woke to see that it was ten. Two hours until the launch. I dropped to my belly and slid out of my door. I crawled as silently as I could to the kitchen, where I grabbed a ration. I downed it and threw away the bottle, still as silent as a ghost. I slipped back toward my room, and stopped. There were a pair of pink slippers in front of my face. "Scared of Mommy, huh?" she asked. I couldn't tell from her voice how hung over she was. I glanced at her face to see her squinting at me. Her eyes didn't seem too bloodshot. I gave in to the inevitable as I stood up. "That's really mean, you know." Oh, so it was one of those days. Tears started pouring down her face. "Why are you so mean to me? You're always hiding and flinching whenever I come around. What did I ever do to you?" she choked. I hated these days. She acted like a real mom, which made the majority of the time that much worse. I knew she could be a nice person. If I thought she didn't have any good qualities, I could hate her in peace. And then she pulled this on me. So unfair. "Let me make you breakfast." Oh, well. That was the end of that. As soon as she stepped into the kitchen, her hand gripped a bottle of booze. Her shoulders slouched and her feet started dragging. "The kitchen? Fuck, Elizabeth. We get rations for a god-damn reason!" I scurried to my room as fast as I could go without making noise to alert her to my presence. I slid into my closet and dropped onto my VRI. One hour fifty seven minutes. It was the weekend, so I could stay in the game for days at a time. Once it opened, that is.

I decided to surf a bit. I pulled up the manual for WWO, just so I could freshen up on a few details I hadn't used in the beta. Or hadn't been able to use effectively in the beta. Exhibit A: real estate. It would definitely pay off to buy a lot of real estate since the server wouldn't restart again. Hopefully. At least there wasn't any resets on the roadmap they released. I flipped into the real estate menu to check out my options. Houses, shops, vendor stands, streets, walls, the bank, the temple, and even the keep itself were for sale. Then I noticed something I'd never have dreamed of; you could buy the crown of a race. I could become the Dark Elf King! But you had to own the entire capital and every city ruled by the species as well as be one of them. Well, it was a nice dream when it lasted. I'd never be able to buy all of Zezhria before anyone else was able to get a piece of the pie.

Players that chose to be traitor species tended to know what they were doing. Or at least they had a higher bar for entry. If you could call selecting a sub-race a bar. You had to go pretty in depth into the manual to figure out that Dark Elves were everywhere, so there was at least one shop in every city that was manned by a Dark Elf. The majority of black market shops were manned by Dark Elves, so that made evil classes want to be Dark Elves just for the discount.

WWO was so realistic they had racism as a common factor. Shops gave an eight percent bonus to anyone of their own species. Though, even planning to take advantage of the racial makeup of the average shopkeepers was a bit deep. You could piss off a shopkeeper and get the bonus removed, but that was a rare occasion. According to the lore, Dark Elves were the most prone of all races to be thieves, so they went everywhere and were the most willing to become fences even if they ran legitimate shops. Some Dark Elf venders would even give better deals to their own race than normal shopkeepers because they were such a common minority. Not to mention the fact that Zezhria was completely closed to all other races while other traitor races were more accommodating. The monsters that surrounded it were so plentiful and powerful that armies didn't even dare try to take Zezhria by force, no matter how big they were. For a Dark Elf, Zezhria was a utopia. And it was stuffed full of fences, so it was a thief's heaven as well. No way I'd be able to buy all of the real estate in Zezhria before anyone else bought so much as a house.

Then I noticed that the city was a different purchase from every other building. It was a purchase that held no purpose apart from getting the crown. Hell, I'd still buy it. Eventually. King Voidslayer58008 had a nice ring to it. On second thought, maybe just King Void. More regal, that way. The manual said that each crown cost trillions of gold. The Dark Elf crown was the most expensive one! Except the crowns of the humans, heavenly monsters, and hellish monsters. The other ones made sense. Humans had twice as many cities as anyone else and the monster species were designed to be difficult to infiltrate. Damn. You could buy the crown of the enemy empires. The power…just the thought had me salivating pretty hard. 

You could start and stop wars. The crown meant that every npc of that race obeyed you like a king. Every npc that owed loyalty to the city, anyway. Bandits and other marauders didn't listen to the crown, so being king didn't matter to them. It also started npc based assassination attempts as well as other political machinations. That was interesting. Would the assassins be from your own camp or from others? If it was everyone else, the Dark Elf king wouldn't need to worry about it. If it was their own, Dark Elf assassins were far from rare. Would they all take contracts out on the king? The lore had them more conniving than brutal or vicious, that right belonged to orcs, but maybe that would just mean their assassins didn't walk up to the castle doors and demand a challenge for kingship. Dark Elf assassins would be more effective, given their racial characteristics. 

The manual made it seem like the npcs were another sort of player. Then I noticed something. Npcs could buy crowns too. That was definitely new. I didn't even think npcs could own property, as everything was available for purchase in the bank. Maybe you could get the property cheaper if you did some quests for the current occupants, or something. That could be fun. I flipped to the beginning and found that it was a new manual. It was also twice as thick as the beta manual. Were they changing that much? I did a quick search for what else was new and found something that I'd heard was in development, but for the 1.2 or 1.3 patches of the game, not the launch. Monsters. Actual monsters. 

In the beta, there were none. It was all npcs and players with a few supernatural beasts that could be hunted for their meat or pelts, but they were hard to find. They were giving every geographical area a population of monsters! It would help, since the population of players would rise exponentially from the beta to the launch. Having enough bandits roaming around to satisfy that massive demand for xp would make the world swarm with armies of bandits large enough to destroy cities. Bandits were also unpredictable if you ran into them by chance. Some were weak, but all the strong bandits were mixed in with the weak ones, making attacking a bandit horde a bit of a gamble for weaker players.

An alarm rang off and I switched to WWO at record speed. The prick at the back of my neck signaled my entrance into the game. "Welcome back Voidslayer58008, would you like to keep your username?"

"No." Voidslayer58008 was awesome, but it didn't sound kingly. I was intending to be a king. I was more Voidslayer58008 than I'd ever been Nathan Turner, though, so parting with it was a little difficult. "Change it to 'Void' if it's available. If not, just keep it." After a second, a nice little affirmation sounded and I saw my username change. The white mist turned around me as I dropped to the character creation section. I input the exact same information that I'd used for the Assassin so recently. My first real character! As I possessed the falling body, I couldn't help doing a little jig. It was really happening! And they hadn't even wanted my money information! Since it was Teen, it didn't need a credit card for sign up either, so I didn't have to pay anything or worry about someone stealing the number. I couldn't hope for an easier start! "Finish."

"Do you walk the path of righteousness and self-sacrifice or blood-lust and greed?" It was good to know that there were still some things that would remain constant in this world. No matter how much larger the manual was.

I walked to the Assassin and noticed the first major difference. The Warlord next to him wasn't the stock level sixty. It was my level sixty Warlord. The gear was completely different. And ten times better. What the fuck? I noticed as I grabbed the Assassin's hand.

"You have selected the class Assassin. Touch his shoulder to confirm selection." That was new. I grabbed his shoulder and twin red lights lit up behind the eyeholes in his mask that had just been shadows before. "You have confirmed class Assassin. Please walk to the center to choose starting location." What the hell was going on? No automatic movement? I moved to the Warlord and he raised his gauntlet just like the Assassin. What was going on? I grabbed his hand. "You have already selected a class. Would you like to switch classes, or purchase this class for five gold?" I had gold? Or would I go in debt? Oh well, I'd pay a lot more than five gold for an extra class.

I grabbed his shoulder and felt the gold being extracted, just like if I was in a shop. I had gold to lose? I checked, as if I was already in the game, and noticed that I had all of my old money. I had to pull out the interface to make sure I wasn't just hallucinating or something. My translucent menu showed the whole ocean that had been in the bank vault. So much money it was enough to drown in. An ocean of gold to rival the Pacific. I walked to the next one, my Executioner. I grabbed his shoulder, feeling the texture of the shiny black armor I'd gotten from a dragon's hoard. This one cost ten gold. How many would it let me buy? I skipped the other way and grabbed the Shadow's shoulder. Twenty gold. Next to him was the Destroyer. Forty gold. Cultist, eighty gold. It doubled every time. I repeated the process for every class. I was skipping with joy by the time I finished the circuit. And all it cost was eighty five billion and some change. It was worth it. 

Even if I leveled up thirty six times slower, it was still an amazingly potent level of power. At level two, I'd be equal to a level seventy two, almost. Not even close, actually, but I would be way more powerful than any other level two. And I'd have all of the abilities. A stealth tank. No, a stealth, power, tank, archer, mage super-being! I walked to the center of the ring, smug as all Hell. I would be unstoppable! Dragons would fall like chaff before me! I'd be able to solo raid bosses! Cities! Anything I wanted, it would be mine!

The power fantasy was becoming a problem. It was already so hard to care about real life when the game was so good…what would it be like if I was a god in the game? Be a god while sleeping only to wake up to flip burgers? What would the point even be? No, bad train of thought. I'd need a job or I couldn't be a god while I slept. I needed to keep that at the forefront, otherwise I'd get too poor and trade real godhood for some drug or something.

I dropped to the overview of the map. It was different. Very different. Gone was the simple circle containing all of the glowing dots of cities. Most of it was coated in fog of war, too. "The world is different from the beta, isn't it? Hardly recognizable, actually. I like it better this way. A circle is so boring. See how it almost resembles your planet? One continent does, at least. The other was just too complicated for me to remember when I was laying out the geography." was the omnipresent voice talking to me? I knew it was way more sultry than before, but is it actually interactive? More than just question and answer? "It's polite to look at someone when they talk to you."