Character Creation

A little girl with messy hair rubbed her eyes as she came down the stairs holding a stuffed bunny. Their mother immediately went over to Anna, "Baby you should be in bed why are you up?"

Anna hugged her mom, "I wanted to see you mama, can I sleep with you tonight?"

Their mother sighed and hugged her daughter with a few tears welling up in her eyes.

"You smell like chicken mama. heh." Anna added, causing their mother to laugh. Their mother broke off the hug and said, "Go on to bed first, I'll be there soon, Bubbie wants to talk to me."

Anna turned to Jax and gave him a hug as well. As she climbed the stairs, she said, "Mama, Bubbie is gonna earn tons of money shooting bad guys!" She moved the bunny's arms and made "pew pew" sounds like it was holding a gun.

Jax held the bridge of his nose while his mother's eyes widened. 'She needs to not butt in so much.' Jax thought. His sister really was good at reading the room. His mother turned to him, "Care to explain?" She crossed her arms like she was going to lecture him, but he did the same.

"That's what I wanted to talk to you about, I wasn't going to harp on you again. I know you are doing this for us." His mother gave him a hug and cried a bit more. After her shower, they went to her room to talk. The room was for his mother, since Anna usually slept with the twins, but found Anna in the room, so they talked outside.

Jax explained to her his plans for making money in game, and that it wasn't just for fun anymore. This way, he could make money, and his mother could quit one of her jobs, the Wac job most likely, and then she could be a bigger part of Anna's life.

It looked like his mother had something else to say, so he asked.

"It's about your father Jaxton, and that game you said you were going to play." She trailed off towards the end, second-guessing herself about whether she wanted to talk about it now. However, Jax was the one to stop her.

"I think I know what you are going to say, I want to talk about 'that' as well. But we don't have to right now. Anna is waiting for you, and Sunday is the one day you have off so spend it with her. We can find another time to talk about it."

His mother nodded and he hugged her again. Jax knew his mother would never ask for help, especially from her own son. That was like a slap to a parent's face, saying they couldn't even take care of themselves, lest their own children.

Jax left and went home to his crappy apartment. On the way there, he calculated how much time he would get to play. The helmet used dilated time to be 1:5, real-world to virtual world, meaning he would get 40 hours of game time for every 8 hours. The helmet had a max time of 16 hours for one sitting, and if he didn't log out to eat or anything, that meant he had about 80 hours to get himself to the top and find a good spot for himself.

However he was now behind. It would be around 1:15 ish by the time he got home, which meant he was almost 6 hours behind everyone in game. For the pro players and people sponsored, that was a huge gap. They could already be at level 5 or even level 10, both said to be major milestones. This all depended on the leveling curve, but he assumed somewhere in between would be where all the top people are.

He had been keeping an eye on the forums to make sure nothing important was mentioned. Something like dungeons or big chain quests, or the main quest. Those were big-ticket items that he needed to have but he assumed the first two might have already been discovered, since the big bosses and young masters would never openly talk about their golden geese.

He quickly opened the door to his apartment, making it before 1:10 (don't speed kids) and not bothering to change his clothes or take his shoes off. He flopped on the couch with the helmet already on and loading the game up. It would be a really rough day for him if he found out later he missed the couch.

[Welcome to Sentinel's Rising!]

[Please name your Character!]

Jax quickly put in a joke name he had ready, one he always used. Luckily no one else had it and sped through the player edit screen opting for the "copy real-life features" instead.

[Please choose a starting Class]

[Tank]

[Warrior]

[Marksman]

[Priest]

[Rogue]

[Mage]

These were the 6 basic classes that every class fell under in some way. They were the starting classes, and depending on how your stats, titles, skills, etc. were by the time you reached level 10, you could choose various specialized classes.

Examples from the forums were Tanks becoming a Paladin if they focused on healing more, or a Tank becoming a Guardian if they focused their stats on defense mostly rather than health. There were lots of combinations but only a few had been mentioned because of the beta testers, who got punished of course but the damage was already done.

After glancing over them, Jax immediately chose [Marksman]. It was the class he always used, as it was one of the easiest to use when it came to Pking other than an assassin. He didn't like being cliché though since most Pkers chose to be assassins. Nobody apparently liked to actually have skill and aim, they just wanted to spam abilities and burst down targets and running away when they were caught.

[All players who log in within 10 hours of in-game time will receive a gift package at level 10 congratulations! The rewards will include one armor, one weapon, one cosmetic and one mystery item along with a random amount of in-game currency. Look forward to it!]

As the starting screen faded Jax thought, "people may be at level 10 already if something like this is waiting for them." It was a way to potentially give everyone an even playing field, but if top players got even more op items, it would make it virtually impossible to pass them until late into the game.

'This'll be harder than I thought.'

When Jax's vision returned, he was staring at grass below him, with his toes wiggling in the dirt. He grasped his hands into fists multiple times. "This feels way too real." He spoke aloud. He looked around and found himself on the edge of a forest with a starting town right in front of him.

No longer paying attention to how real this all felt, he quickly made his way into the starting town. He could see multiple players there already, as they were constantly surrounding and talking to other people like their lives depended on it.

The devs didn't want to give a specific way for players to be identified just by looks, so they made a skill for identifying them, which could be obtained through a quest in the beginner villages. Jax didn't care too much about that but was organizing his thoughts from when his father talked about his game.

He remembered his old man mentioning that each beginner village had multiple repeatable quests for gold or common items, there were also one or 2 chain quests, which he didn't know meant big chain quests or smaller ones for specific items. One of the biggest items was the presence of at least 1 dungeon per village, it was out of the way and had to be discovered by the players and there were no system notifications for those things unless the dungeon was completed.

So he was safe for now, as he heard no notification, and even when asking another player who started at midnight, they didn't hear any as well. That didn't mean that dungeons were not found, they most certainly were since pros were power leveling right now. The person at the top was already level 8, with many level 7s and a few 6s in the top 20.

The other big item was a hidden field boss, this one, Jax was hesitant about, mostly because his class wouldn't do well against something with high health and attack, and he would need a party to take it on. However, it was a different story if he could steal it.

Jax smirked as he made his way through the village asking multiple villagers for quests, compiling a bunch to do at once. None of the beginner villager quests seemed to have time limits, which was good for most, but he was timing himself to get it all done within a few hours.

"Alright, first one, kill 5 rabid rabbits."

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Current Character info

[ID: KENNYYYYYYY]

[titles: none]

[class: Marksman]

[stats:

Health - 10/10

Mana - 10/10

Attack - 5

Defense - 5

Speed - 5

Magic Power - 5]

[items equipped:

old flintlock pistol

starter shirt

starter pants]

[Inventory - empty]

[Unique - N/A]