Trials of a VRMMO Healer

Chapter 22 - Shades

I clambered out of the ocean and onto the shore. It was surprisingly difficult. Not only was I wearing my full armor and gear, but the waves knocked me around and my feet had trouble finding their footing on the sand. Or Din had been underwater, yes, but the lake's shore was far rockier and the waves minuscule compared to those outside Holdfast. When scuba divers dove, they often jumped in backwards from a boat and climbed out with a ladder. I had no such help. Aria was busy playing fetch with Arti and Rufus was with her. He turned to face me.
"I've been meaning to ask this but... just what, exactly, are you doing? I've watched you do this for the past three days and I can't figure it out," he asked.
"It's training."
"I mean, I figured, but what Tier are you?"
"I'm Tier 3... pretty close to 4."
"The monsters like sharks and giant crabs around the shore are all tier 1, 2 at best. You can't be getting much experience from them. Are you training to fight underwater? Don't you have a spell for that?"
"I do have a water-breathing technique, but I'm still slowed by the physics of the water. But that's not it, either. I'm training to fight with pain enabled."
"The hell?! Why?"
"I guess it's to get closer to the game?"
By default, EO had a pain reduction setting. Say you, oh, get repeatedly stabbed by giant scorpions. Most people wouldn't come back for more, much less pay for it. That was bad for business. There was another problem, too. The sleep that you got from hypnagogic induction wasn't the deep sleep you got from, say, anesthesia. It was light sleep with your brain very active — that was how it worked, after all. The first time I got bitten by a shark with no pain reduction on, I woke in a cold sweat. My heart was racing and I couldn't get back to sleep, even with VR's help. Which made sense. Some animal part of my brain was screaming at the rational part that I was insane to go and expose myself to that kind of danger, even though I knew perfectly well I was fine. It had taken three days of intense training to get to the point where I was now. I was able to fight, though not to the same extent as before. I wanted to, but my instincts kept telling me no. After all, I'm an office worker, not some kind of elite soldier. I can play a game like this for fun, but getting mangled and injured was... frankly really difficult to deal with, even if it was a game. One might wonder why I'm bothering with all this. Well, it has to do with trying to establish contact with the Serpentine.
Not long after we arrived in Holdfast, I took a small boat out to the Anchor Islands to try to observe our enemies. I had a suspicion what the key might be to being able to communicate with them. See, snakes—the real life kind—can't really hear, exactly. They can detect vibrations in the ground, which travel to their jaws and the vestigial bits of their ears. Since the Serpentine were communicating, but we couldn't hear or see anything, that meant, logically, that they were communicating in a way that we couldn't hear or see. Subsonic vibrations in the ground, for instance. And I just so happened to have a skill that let me understand waves. After all, I'd made my Spiritism breakthrough looking at waves on a lake. So far so good.
The good thing about low frequency vibrations in the ground is that they travel long distances. I was able to locate and trail the Serpentine easily, but if I messed up at all, I got surrounded. I even died a few times. That wasn't the problem, though. The problem is that my Spiritism skill just wasn't high enough. But I had no idea how to raise it. While you generally had to use a skill to increase it, skills almost always had hidden requirements. For instance, combat-related skills aren't JUST about hitting things, otherwise you could slash a rock all day and max it out. You actually have to fight reasonably challenging enemies. The greater the difference in tier, the slower you gained skill levels. I used Spiritism constantly, especially spirit vision, but my level never seemed to go up. In all my time tracking and fighting the Serpentine I was only able to pick out vague words and ideas. Their word for 'humans' meant something literally like, 'two-legs'. However, for me, they used another one, one that had the connotation of 'hollow' or 'empty', or even 'ghost'. I've chosen to translate it as Shades. We, players, that is, are not entirely present in ways that the others are. Humans have souls, but we Shades, do not. That's as far as I could gather.
So, my training is to immerse myself deeper in EO. When I had fought them earlier, I was willing to impale myself in order to take out my enemy. Even if they kill us, we come back. It's no wonder they see us as monsters. This is the stuff of nightmares. With a higher Spiritism level, I could probably figure out more of their words and phrases, and maybe even find a way to respond.
"Your unique skill is something," Rufus noted later, as we sat in the common room of The Kelpie.
"Is it? I don't really have a frame of reference for something like that. I hadn't played MMORPGs in ages, not since the days they had first come out."
"EO's control AIs are far more sophisticated than in previous games. They manage the overall systems and work to help the developers, but they allow for a huge degree of freedom. My understanding is that they have their own personalities and competing goals, too, though. It might be fair to say that EO is the first game of its type to leverage AIs in this way."
"I've wondered about that. Sometimes it seems like they come right up against the limits of technoethics laws." I managed to avoid a meaningful glance at Aria, but she had been listening intently and spoke up, which was rare for her.
"In order for an AI to do its job right it has to be able to learn. Once you give it enough capacity to learn, you take your hands off the reins. Humans think they're unique, but the truth is, most day-to-day interactions can be simulated with minimal intelligence. People just don't think that much about the people around them. But if you put enough people out there, unexpected things can happen, and if you create an AI that can handle unexpected events that humans create, then that AI will behave in unexpected ways."
I blinked. "It sounds like you've thought about this a lot."
"I have," Aria responded.
"Anyway," Rufus continued, clearing his throat in an attempt to clear the air. "I thought my [Akimbo] skill was pretty cool, especially with how hard it was to get guns working."
"Yeah, I noticed that you used those but like I said, I didn't know it was unique."
"Oh, really? Well, I'm not the only player who uses guns, I'm sure, but it took forever for us to figure out how to make them."
"How come?"
"Well, see, it's easy enough to make a piece of metal that looks like a gun. You can even make the mechanisms work just fine. But the game doesn't simulate literally every molecule, right? That means chemistry doesn't really work like it does in the real world. The best you can get is alchemy. And even if you think, 'Well, why not just use fire magic and set off explosions in the chamber?', that doesn't work either. The game might be able to simulate the feeling of swimming in water, or currents, but it doesn't simulate every level of fluid dynamics, so even the explosions don't work right. It's stuff you don't see unless you're pushing the boundaries of what the game can do."
"Ah, yeah, that makes sense. EO's so good at letting you go off the rails that I never considered there's stuff that just doesn't work."
"Right. Well, see, that's the thing. It DIDN'T work. But a bunch of alchemy crafters got together and made a huge board on the forums and one day, they figured it out. But the weird thing is that it shouldn't have worked. Like, it's stuff that didn't work before but does now."
"Like, a hidden system?"
"Yeah, or like the control AIs were watching and decided to include it. Mechanics and explosives and stuff like that is all very, very simplistic right now, but it works, and that's why we've got cannons and stuff."
"And your unique skill lets you use them."
"Sort of. Normally you get penalties for dual wielding, and dual wielding pistols is pretty unrealistic so you really need to lean on the skill system."
"I get it. I heard the same thing about magic. How in-game skills and spells were basically just training wheels for understanding what magic really was."
"Yeah. But 'real' magic in here is incredibly complex. If you look on the forums, it's ridiculous. There are literal physicists and rocket scientists out there putting their knowledge to use figuring out how magic works in EO. It's wild. Anyway, I got the [Akimbo] skill as my unique reward for the goliath event. I figured it'd go with the whole swashbuckling theme."
I nodded.
"But your skill is wilder than that? It's like another system entirely."
"Hm... when I learned it it kind of felt like it was more like... like you said with magic, how it was about learning not to use the training wheels. But it's not the same as the magic system, either. You're right that it's mysterious. The most that I can tell is that it kind of is what it says on the tin: It's about connecting with the world and energies flowing within it."
I looked over at Aria again, hoping that she might fill in some of the gaps, but she had gone back to playing with Arti and feeding him scraps of food and otherwise ignoring our conversation.
Suddenly, Arti's head shot up and he stared out the window. I looked as well. I could make out dark spots against the horizon.
"We in for another event?" Rufus asked.
"Yeah. Better alert the guards—wait, what's that?"
"What? I can barely see it at this distance."
There, amidst the longboats that the Serpentine used was a figure, just barely visible in the water. It blended in with the island on the horizon, but if you looked closely, you could see that it alone was as tall as the mast of any of our ships.