Auntie toasts the VRMMORPG

2.9 Building a Training Facility - Boxes

Eddie sent Flora some links about what he found to evade the pain of training. The feature was called CommunityHub. You could log into it via a nock or magical binding and arrive at a shared area. It sounded so great that Flora asked herself why even have clan compounds when such a thing was available.

When she read the disadvantages, she understood the reason. You couldn't access your inventory or even take your clothes with you. Everything in the area had to be either bought from the Cetviwos shop or "imported" with hefty fees.

"How about 10k? I can make the retreat nice with 10k VirDias." Eddie seemed pained. "But nice is another word for insufficient in the awesomeness department."

Flora shook her head. She was too old for the prices these days. A scoop of ice cream should cost 50 pennies and not 5 Euros, and a virtual space should be free and not cost 1000 Euros.

"How about 20k, and it'll count as Robby's birthday present?"

Eddie laughed and gave her a thumbs up. Flora gave him access to 30k VirDias from her account but didn't tell him about the extra money. That guy was unable to stay on budget, and Aidan would notify him about the extra money when he ran out.

Flora finished the construction of the hut. After she did a quick check, she ordered the printer to churn out the parts. An idle printer was a wasted printer. Normally, she would have waited until everything was ready and do a few more checks, but it would take all of the night to print out the generators. The project was more rushed than she would have liked, but the PVP match loomed over them. She hoped the two additional days of training for the team would make a difference for the outcome.

"Any change in the simulation grounds, Aidan?" Flora inspected the generators. All the lambs glowed. "How long are we in?"

"No changes and two years and 293 days, Milady."

"The time is already sufficient. Who knows when Robby will move to a bigger compound. I bet product cycles are insane in the virtual world. Double the time dilation just for science because we'll print the generators as soon as the printer is free."

Flora started the design of the boxes from scratch. The training coffin, she had experimentally thrown together. Since then, she had learned a lot of things from modifying it. For the boxes, she preferred to start with a clean slate on the workbench.

A simple cuboid shape, 1.2mx2.5m x1.2m, with a telescopic sliding door built into the base. She added a vibration plate at the bottom for Balancing. No belts, if the Riverstones wanted to train movement skills, they had to crash into the wall. Therefore she added a panel with training dummy rune-schemes. This box would be able to endure the punishment.

Flora drew footprints on the vibration plate perpendicular to the door and defined two areas for the damaging rune-schemes. She didn't add the runes yet because they would differ for each box. Last but not least, she installed a healing turret on the ceiling.

Both the turret and the affinity schemes would be fast discharging, but with a lower amount of effect, about 5 damage or healing. This way it was easier to reduce the health pool to lower than 10 percent. A 10 damage effect, like Flora used in the past, could easily crit for 20 damage, so you had to leave a high margin of error if you don't want to end up dead. The goal was to toast the users and not to burn them.

Flora's AIs controlled her old training coffins, but she couldn't count on everybody having an AI, and the number of boxes would exceed the capacity of the clan AI. Though Flora implemented access for AIs, they had to work for users without them as well.

After researching her options, Flora decided on a control system guided by the pool values. She found modules were people logged in via their badge and gave the system information about their current status.