The light blinds me. I'm standing on a promontory rock. It's opening day and the crowd streams forth from Fliegel's utility umbilical. Passers-by jostle me. I guess I'm no longer in my own private shard.
I can smell salt water spray. I can hear the cry of gulls. Well, gull-like things. Below me stretches a crawling collection of corrugated huts. A huddle of hovels that Fliegel labeled on my map as Junk Town. It smells of rust, corruption, decay, and desperation. I hear yelling and see someone waving.
"Old man!" yells Brian. He waves again. I blink-click him. I see that here and now he is Miles, Massacr3 Mil3s. All as expected. I make my way down the slope. The chatter of the crowd blends with the chatter of gull-things.
We clasp each other's shoulders. I enjoy the novelty of standing with my friend for a spell. Even surrounded by an ideal gas of strangers in Brownian motion, we have a bubble of privacy. Because at that moment, nothing else matters.
"No problems getting here?" Asks Miles.
"Just some pesky roaches and my own lasgun melting my hands," I reply. "But what was with that cryobay sequence?"
"Hahaha, yeah," replies Miles. "The devs sure leaned into that M rating," "Wait till you see the gore. Oh, the over-heat on the photon guns balances the line-of-sight hit-scan mechanic. Never mind that. Let's get you into town and kit you out."
We bullshit our way into town. Fuck it feels good to just walk and talk. We're two diddy-bopping shit-bags on shore-leave. Our first stop is a stall that squats beside the cart track leading into town. Cart-wheel ruts in the dust do not a road make. The beragged, withered, and hunched mutie with missing teeth and open sores sells lizard-on-a-stick and warm fungus beer. It is surprisingly refreshing.
"Food and drink in here ain't real, obviously," says Miles. "But the devs paid way more attention to implementing taste and texture than they had to. And not eating and drinking lead to bad stacking debuffs from hunger and thirst conditions. So just do what you would do IRL and you'll be fine. Player-crafted food can even grant buffs."
"I've played an MMO before, Miles," I say.
"Alright, alright," he says, holding up his hands in mock surrender. "Just watch out for the hunger and thirst mechanics. I've seen players get tripped up by that, even game-heads. Everyone here is on hardcore survival. Even if they don't know it."
We enter the walled town. I get a peek inside the wall's frameworks of corrugated iron and beams. The space between metal sheets and bars is filled with rubble and rammed earth. I nod in satisfied professional interest.
Behind the wall itself, which is about as deep as a Hesco barrier, and the height of two men, there's a firing platform resting on a makeshift scaffolding of pipes and boards or the roofs of huts built against the wall. I note the city fathers have neglected to dig a ditch in front of the wall. Lazy fuckers.
Two hunchbacked muties with rat-like faces slouch a guard mount. No one is stopped or questioned. I wonder why they bother. It's just a game, I remind myself. Local color. Relax and enjoy.
We visit a cutler, armorsmith, and tailor. We trade much of my starter kit for upgrades. In the end, I am a man of new cloth. Over my skin suit, coveralls, and boots, I wear a buff coat of wax-boiled leather layers and steel plates brigandined between. And over that a poncho-smock of waxed duck canvas to keep rain off. Atop my head rests a cured leather bump in the classic fritz shape. A leather H-harness rides under the poncho but above the buff-coat. It holds pouches of crossbow bolts, a dagger cum camp knife, a machete cum falchion, a two-part collapsing spear, a metal soup-plate like buckler, two canteens, and a haversack with bed-roll, blocks of pemmican, bags of hard-tack, salt, rice, and beans on my behind. A car-jack-based lever action pump-crossbow slung across my back completes the kit.
"Why not any of the fire or wheel locks?" I ask Miles who is adjusting the fit of his mirror image kit.
"Because," he replies. "Then we couldn't afford bicycles, and with those, we can get out ahead of everyone else in the race for level-cap."
"Ah-hah, one-to-one time and distance with no fast travel."
"There are teleporter gates in the major towns of each floor, but they only go from town to town they don't work until a player opens the far side destination gate."
We're in the central square of Junk Town. Such as it is. Slightly less rusted and corrupt huts and hovels surround us. The cinder-block walls here have ratty stucco and paint covering them, even.
A vile-looking rat-faced mutie in a dingy off-white apron leads a human girl into the square by the hand. A player, I assume. She looks maybe eighteen or so. Her face is contorted in a mix of anger and annoyance.
It is framed with dirty poison-frog red hair. God is good. He colors red the things that are bad for us. As a warning.
"Thief! Thief!" The rodent-man cries. "I demand justice, yes!"
"Khaosandra?" Miles mutters. "Already grinding her thief skills I see."
A massive ogre of a mutant rat man arises out from the shade of a lean-to decorated in skulls and bones. It carries a wicked-looking cleaver of inhuman proportion. It wields it like a butterfly trick knife. A pus-leaking stump of a tail twitches.
"Human meat!" It cries. "You take, we take. Hand for a hand!"
"Hand for hand," chant the gathering crowd of pustulent, pestilent mutants. "Hand for hand!"
"Let's go," says Miles. "No reason to watch. She was a beta-tester. She knew the risks."
We walk away. Behind us, a girlish voice screams in pain and terror. This is a game, right? I shake off the bad vibes. We pass through a gate of rusty corrugated irons. I take a breath of fresh air. Uncontaminated by rat things and rust.
In the sulfurous rocky hills just outside Junk-Town, we hunt minor roaches. They are slightly larger and tougher than the lesser kind. I'm prone behind some juniper-like scrub. I track a dog-sized roach with my crossbow. I try not to gag from the rotten eggs smell.
I've already zeroed at twenty-five meters on some discarded cans. Now I'm putting that to the test at maybe fifty. I put the front sight post under the thing's main body. Like underlining a word. Thorax? Is that right? I center the front post in the rear notch. Breath in. Breath out. Pause. The crossbow twangs, jumps, and vibrates with a hum of the wire.
"Good shot," says Miles. "Now let's learn about field dressing a rad roach."
"You're kidding," I say.
"It's mostly just for the harvesting practice," replies Miles. "But you can eat the meat to restore HP if you don't mind taking the rad hits. If you invest in survival and or cooking skills you can clean the rads out."
"That's disgusting," I say.
"We can sell it for glimmer back at Junk-Town," says Miles. "Welcome to Dasein old man!"
This is Part IV.
Stay away from bright red things!
Sage advice a wise man once gave me.