Sheesh; the way the Old Lady was knocking back the wine, you’d think she’d been the one bleeding out on the floor an hour ago instead of me…
Still, it was kinda understandable when the Old Lady took the wine she’d ordered off the server’s tray and chugged it in a few gulps before sending it back for a refill at the Chilly’s restaurant we’d stopped at. I wasn’t worried about being recorded(pretty much all technology that’s not specially warded like my phone goes kaput in a Breach), but I made the Old Lady grab all the paperwork with our name’s on it just in case while I called for a Luber cab to meet us on the street behind the bank. The 20-something year old probably had seen too many stranger sights to be bothered by the sight of an exhausted adult male and a very shaken looking older woman getting into his car. After he dropped us off, I shredded the paperwork and tossed it in the dumpster behind the restaurant before joining the Old Lady inside.
I’d chosen to come here for the food and need for some privacy to discuss what had just happened. The noise of the too-loud music would keep our conversation from being heard by anybody more than a booth or so away if their attention wasn’t already preoccupied with the other people they were with or their phones. Our waitress was the only one who might hear anything weird, and judging from some of the stories I’ve read about how people act in restaurants, the conversation we were about to have wouldn’t be much weirder than the average restaurant customer. I had been planning to wait for her to start asking questions, but decided to take the initiative myself when she started knocking back the second glass of wine.
“Realms of Fantasy, or RoF for short, is a MMORPG that debuted alongside the Dream Machine 3 years ago, the first of its kind in direct neural interface entertainment.” The Old Lady set down her glass as I started to speak. “Before then, the closest thing a player got to really being in the world was through some combination of glasses and controllers that just made you look ridiculous to anyone watching from the outside. The Dream Machine, by contrast, used a combination of a wireless helmet and state of the art computing hardware that allowed the user to simply lay back in their bed and truly immerse themselves in the world. They’d truly feel like everything they experienced in the world was real, without the consequences of actual injury or death they’d experience in the game.”
“After choosing your beginning race and class, players would start in one of Realm of Fantasy’s three major hub worlds. At first blush, the game was pretty much the same as most MMORPG’s. Getting quests, leveling up, joining up with groups to take on dungeons were all things pretty much copied and pasted from other games. Realms added some unique touches on it, but for the most part it was largely ignored when it first came out by diehard gamers. Many people were wary of the brand new technology that fully admitted it was interacting directly with your brain, fearing it would melt your mind if you got disconnected mid-session or leave you unable to tell the difference between the game and real world. The game’s heavy emphasis on anthropomorphized women didn’t help it much, either.”
“You mean women with cat ears and tails? Like the one’s you had earlier?” The Old Lady asked.
I nodded. “A lot of players thought it was just focused on those with a furry fetish…and while that’s not exactly true, there are some things players can do that suggest it’s not exactly untrue, either.”
I couldn’t help but blush a little. While I’m perfectly happy with my furry status, it wasn’t exactly something I advertised. The Old Lady would have had to been blind to not notice something based off my selections of manga’s, comics and various other media to not notice it was something I obviously liked, but that still didn’t make it easy to sit down and talk with her about even in the light of recent events.
“A-Anyway!” I tried to steer the conversation back on topic. “Like I said, it was a slow start, but earlier adapters to the game really spoke highly of it, saying how there was much more to it than first blush and that the immersion of the Dream Machine really enhanced the experience. After a year on the market without any major incidents with the Dream Machine technology, people started flocking to it in droves, and Realms of Fantasy got a huge boost as a result.”
“It did so well, that a little under a year ago they released the first major expansion, called Forgotten Lands. New quests, new areas to explore, harder bosses and dungeons. Again, so far, so every other MMORPG out there. But a few weeks after the expansions release, weird things started happening. Not in Realms, but in the real world.”
“I’m guessing those weird things involve those… Breaches, you called them?” I nodded in confirmation. “But why wouldn’t something like that be on the news? Surely monsters falling out of the sky would catch somebody’s attention.”
“That’s what you would think, but there’s a couple of factors there. Breaches have always occurred before in isolated areas and mostly late at night; forests, abandoned buildings, dark alleyways, and other places people just don’t go normally. We don’t know exactly what it looks like from the outside, but it seems like people almost subconsciously avoid a Breach when it occurs. And since most technology short circuits in one, the running theory being that the magic of the Breach messes with it somehow, the few people who’ve wandered into one don’t have proof to back up their wild stories.”
In the meantime, odd questions had begun to pop up on forums dedicated to RoF. Players were claiming that they would receive phone calls from a strange caller I.D. that only read in some script that no one could replicate on their phones. When they answered what would become commonly referred to as the Call(and hence be identified as being Called), their phones would spring to life and form a portal like the one I’d created during the Breach, and when they stepped through they suddenly found themselves not just in the body of their RoF characters, but with all their abilities and powers as well.
“At first, those people were written off as crazy, or worse, some sort of meta-level fan fiction writers. Eventually the surge of complaints died down, but there’s always a few stories that crop up now and then. Honestly, I didn’t know about any of this myself until I was Called about six months ago; I found the rest out doing research after the fact. Beyond that, there’s not much else I can say.” I shrugged. “Why this happening, what decides who gets Called, is there any way to stop this… the few of us who seem to be actively looking for answers are only finding more questions.”
I paused as the waitress bought out our food, a country fried steak for myself and a clam strip basket for the Old Lady. I was glossing over a whole lot of details, but I think I gave her a pretty solid crash course in what’s been going on. She’d probably need a minute to digest everything she just heard so she could ask some more questions. After today’s events, I had more than a few of my own.
I’d meant it before when I said that Breaches had always occurred in areas and at times when people generally aren’t present; having one occur in a business in the middle of the day was a new and very disturbing development. Thanks to the Old Lady making me keep the phone on silent I didn’t catch the usual half-hour warning until it was too late, but even then I would’ve had to get creative about trying to evacuate everyone. I’d have to make sure to talk about this with the other Called later to give them some heads up and see if they’ve had any similar reactions. I hadn’t gone over what happens if a Breach isn’t properly closed, but long story short; nothing good. A quick image of a dragon getting loose from a failed Breach closure near a nuclear power plant flashed through my mind as a possible worst case scenario.
And what about the developer of RoF, Other World Games? They’ve never come out and said anything about all of this in any sort of official capacity(I even read through the EULA just to be sure. That’s an hour of my life I’d like back…). At the same time, they are offering support to those of us who’ve been called while seemingly disguising it as helpful game features. Since you can’t use your phone while playing, the Breach Predictor app only helps those of us who have to handle real-world Breaches. The character and inventory manager seems equally silly to the average gamer; no normal person’s going to have a reason to mess around with their inventory unless they’re actually in the game. For those of us who’ve been Called, though, it’s a potential life saver; it gives us one last chance to replace those lost potions or review how exactly an ability works before we leap into a potential life or death battle.
“I have a LOT of questions, don’t get me wrong.” The Old Lady speaking up snapped me out of my thoughts as she set her fork down. “But the only one I can keep coming back right now is… what’s it like for you? Being Aerilla, I mean.”
“Being her? As opposed to being Xavier, you mean?” The Old Lady nodded. “It is weird, but you want to know what hit me the first time I became Aerilla for real? It wasn’t that I was part cat, or that I had breasts or didn’t have a penis anymore. It was the feeling of magic I felt coursing through my body.”
“When I stepped through that portal for the first time, my body felt like it was plugged directly into a generator. I was practically bursting with energy that I could use to manipulate the elements, and even the fabric of reality itself to my will. As Xavier, I couldn’t explain how saying the right words or making certain movements with my hands and staff allows me to shoot fireballs or create magic runes. Aerilla couldn’t explain it to you either for different reasons; she’d have to struggle to dumb it down, for lack of a better term, to a point where you’d be able to understand how it worked. That’s not say I don’t notice the physical changes at all, but they tend to go on the backburner when you’ve only got a couple of minutes and things are actively trying to kill you during it.”
“I see…” The Old Lady didn’t say anything for a minute, then started going through her purse. I arched an eyebrow when she pulled out her wallet and started counting out cash, way more than was necessary for the bill. “We passed a GameShop on the way here; they sell those Dream Machines, right?”
“Um, yeah…” It was slowly dawning on me what she wanted to do. “Wait, are you?...”
“Yes; I’m going to play Realms of Fantasy.” The Old Lady noticed the look on my face that was torn between rejection and confusion, taking a deep breath before explaining herself.
“As your mother, I want to tell you to stop this. It’s too dangerous, you could get hurt or killed; you almost DID die today. But, as much as I don’t want to admit it sometimes, you are an adult and you can make your own decisions. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed it, and some part of me still wonders if I didn’t just imagine the whole thing, but if you hadn’t done what you did, people could’ve gotten hurt or worse.”
“Like I said, you’re an adult and you can make your own decisions. But I’m an adult too, and I’m still your mother. I can’t stop you from doing this, but you can’t stop me either from buying my own system and playing this game on my own. Maybe I won’t get Called like you, and maybe I won’t be able to help you, but I can’t just sit back and watch you throw yourself into these situations without at least knowing more about it.”
“Um…” I really wanted to argue with her, but she had a point. I was in no more of a position to stop her than she was to stop me. Part of the reason I hadn’t told her about what was happening(besides from how insane the whole concept sounded) was to try and protect her, thinking what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her. Now that she’d be thrust into the middle of it, that was no longer an option. The only thing I could do in good conscience was to give her the knowledge and maybe the tools necessary to help herself.
“Good. Now, let’s go. I’m guessing I’ve got a lot to learn about this game.” She stood up a little too fast and wobbled a bit; those glasses of wine were catching up with her. Good thing we’d taken a Luber. She shook her head when I reached over to help her. “I’m fine; I’m an adult too. I can take care of myself.”
“Um, that having been said…” The Old Lady looked a little sheepish as she continued. “You’ll help me set up the Dream Machine, right? And maybe show me how to play?...”
A quick image flashed to mind of the last time the Old Lady touched a game controller, way back in the olden days when consoles didn’t even have motion controls. You would’ve thought they did if you watched her, given how she’d try and raise the controller up when jumping in a platformer in a desperate attempt to give her character an extra boost.
Yeah; she was gonna need some help…
