It just before four-o-clock on the second day since the apocalypse, and Roebuck's public forges were the quietest they had been since the game's release. Normally this was the busiest part of the city, with scores of players scrambling to repair their gear, and small armies of blacksmiths trying to negotiate the highest prices for repairs. Today, however, it was mostly silent. With the exception of some veteran players repairing their gear from yesterday's PvP brawl, the forges were empty- if no players were venturing outside the city, then no arms or armour had to be repaired.
One of the few adventurers working in the forge was Renaissance- a level-90 guardian making good use of her blacksmith subclass. She was working away on a grinding wheel; just a few percentage points away from making her longsword like new again.
It had taken a little while to get the hang of making repairs, after all, they don't teach blacksmithing in most high schools. Thankfully, the game seemed to know this. Her hands had a mind of their own once she stepped up to the equipment, putting years of in-game blacksmithing experience to good use.
Lying at her feet was a flawlessly repaired and brilliantly polished set of jet-black plate armour. Lying just behind her, and bored out of her mind, was a level-90 sorcerer who had been accompanying her for the last several years of in-game adventures. Her name was Chaco.
The plan hadn't been for her to sit around and watch Renee work- normally they would have had the armour insta-repaired by an NPC- but all the People of the Land seemed just as baffled by the apocalypse as the adventurers were, so, waiting it was. Chaco was lying flat on her back, wearing an archmage's cloak that was almost comically big on her. In-game she was only 5 feet tall, but that was still taller than she was in real life. Sensing that Renee was almost finished, Chaco decided it was time to start bugging her.
"Honey!" She began in her best (but still objectively terrible) Samuel L. Jackson impersonation, "Where's my super-suit!?"
Renee knew the drill. "Why do you need to know!?"
"You tell me where my suit is woman-" Chaco continued, skipping a few lines, "We are talking about the greater good!"
"Greater good?" Renee spun around with as snap, her hip thrust out to one side, "I am your wife. I am the greatest good you are ever gonna get." She recited flawlessly.
Both girls laughed at themselves as Renee started to strap on her armour.
"How do you do that?" Chaco could barely stop herself from laughing.
"One of the perks of being a black woman." Renee threw back with a shrug.
"-and the other perks?"
"That's a good question..." Renee muttered under her breath.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Oh, I know." Chaco raised an eyebrow and patted her chest.
"Pfft, what're you talking about?"
"You know what I'm talking about." Chaco shot back with a wink.
Renee rolled her eyes- she had intentionally made a flat-chested character after it became obvious that the game developers had no idea how to make plate armour look good on women. More often than not, high-level armour would look like spandex on the exaggerated female models, and while that was fine- or even preferred- among certain elements of the playerbase, Renee couldn't take herself seriously when her character was pulled out of a Dead or Alive game.
"I think that's just because you were comparing them to yourself." Renee added with a smirk.
Chaco gasped in mock-dejection. "Renee, how could you? I'm very sensitive about that kind of thing."
"Bullshit."
"Shut up-" Chaco switched back into overacting mode: "My whole life… My whole life I've struggled with my disability- But yesterday I got a fresh start."
"I don't think that counts as a disability."
"Maybe not." Chaco shrugged, apparently finished with the histrionics "But now you can move me to Milford and call me Team 67 'cause I am –H- -O- -T- HOT!" Chaco spun around in her comically oversized cloak and stuck the corniest pose she could.
Renee did all she could to keep herself from laughing; Chaco looked more like a kid wearing an adult's costume than a proper adventurer. She shook her head as she tightened the straps on her cuirass. "Even when we're living in Elder Tale, we still can't escape the FRC jokes…"
"Robotics is love; Robotics is life." Chaco echoed with a grin.
"Right…" Renee muttered, trying to figure out how the metal plates for her arms attached over her chainmail sleeves. Putting on armour is a lot easier in theory than it is in practice.
"You know…" Chaco began, tapping her foot, "Most people would wear something a little more comfortable than armour when wandering around town."
"Well, I'm not most people." Renee traded a smirk with Chaco. "Face it, if you had some Phantasm armour you'd show it off everywhere too."
She wanted to argue, but frankly, Renee was right. Renee's Armour of the Last Crusade (as it was called in-game) looked fantastic. It wasn't the over-the top ornamental armour you normally found in fantasy games: black chainmail was visible in the sizable gaps between the plates of armour, and the whole set was unadorned except for a faint silver trim tracing the edge of the cuirass and spaulders. There was a sort of minimalist beauty to it; the polished black plates shone like obsidian, and the blood-red logo of The East Roebuck Company blended in as if the devs had put it there themselves.
A guardian couldn't ask for a better companion- the armour gave excellent defensive stats to its wearer, but without the cost to offensive abilities that normally comes along with heavy armour. Renee capitalized on the extra offense by investing heavily in skills that granted knockbacks and stuns as a function of damage dealt. This gave her some pretty ridiculous crowd-control abilities in large fights since displacement abilities both pushed enemies away from allies and pulled them towards Renee thanks to their massive aggro values.
Normally, such a game-breaking armour set would have fetched a massive price on the market, but the developers had different ideas. The armour became locked to Renee after she picked it up- making it untradeable and unequipable on anyone else. Everyone found that a little ironic, given that the flavour text said that there was a fanatical cult hunting for it.
"Chaco? … Chaco!" Renee snapped twice to get her attention, almost done putting the armour on. "You've been standing there staring at me for like five minutes."
"Huh? Oh, sorry." Chaco shrugged, "Just spaced out for a sec there… kinda wish I had some phantasm gear as well."
"It's not that big of a deal. Besides, level-100 production gear is probably going to have better stats than this- once we start getting level-cap blacksmiths and materials that is..." Renee smirked as she pulled the last strap on her greaves taut. "Even then, Kat'll probably still make me wear it- free advertising and all."
Chaco stuck her tongue out at Renee. Phantasm-class items were one-of-a-kind and extremely rare. Only about 5,000 had been released on the North American Server in the game's 20-year history- and most of them were either on inactive accounts or too low-leveled to be useful- so wearing one was sure to turn heads. So of course The Company made sure that its logo was plastered for all those onlookers to see.
"Well, whatever." Chaco stretched her legs after several hours of sitting. "You good to go? Might as well get back to the Guild Hall a bit early and see if Miggy's back."
"You just want to sample K's food before he's finished-"
"-Before he burns it." Chaco corrected. "That rice-thing he tried to do yesterday was actually pretty good… About ten minutes before he served it…"
Renee chuckled, starting the walk back to The Guild Hall. "You know, all things considered you can do a lot worse than having a culinary student for a Chef. Hell, half the city still hasn't realized that you can cook real food."
"That must be why everyone's so down." Chirped Chaco with a smile.
Yeah, being stuck in a video game has nothing to do with it… "Right. That's definitely it."
"I'm serious you know." It was like a switch had flipped- Chaco went into full-on MBA mode, and added a bit of a skip to her walk. "We're sitting at the start of what economists call a virtuous cycle. Given that Chef is a fairly unpopular subclass, demand for good food will far exceed the supply, driving up the price of food. Once that happens, people will be forced to forage for more gold in order to purchase proper food. That'll wear down their equipment, and all sorts of crafting classes will get work in order to repair that equipment- leading to more spending power- leading to more food, to more demand, and on and on."
"Easy now Chaco-" Renee stifled a laugh. "I'm not even an engineer yet, don't start with all this econ stuff."
Chaco groaned and spun around to face Renee. "This isn't even proper econ, it's just high school stuff- besides- Kettering makes you guys take econ too right?"
"They do, just remember that freshman econ was three years ago for me; it was only last year for you."
"Sounds like an excuse to me…" Chaco pouted. "All I'm saying is that it doesn't have to be this way…"
"Is that your head or your heart talking?"
"It can be both you know." The two girls rounded the block and headed towards the gardens that took the place of Millennium Park.
Whatever. Renee thought to herself. That's a problem for Kat, my job is just to keep you guys alive.
Renee was debating how to lighten the mood when she noticed a cluster of familiar-looking players walking the path from The Cathedral to The Guild Building. "That's… That's Karl, isn't it?" She already knew the answer when she asked. Between the massive two-handed battleaxe, head-to-toe chainmail, and flowing green cape, there wasn't much of a question.
Chaco squinted off at the distant group of matching green capes. "Y- Yeah… What the hell?" Chaco spun around to face Renee "I thought they were having a guild leader meeting. They can't do it without Karl- The Hussars are one of the biggest guilds in the city."
Karl was the bombastic leader of The Huron Hussars- The only all-Michigan guild in Elder Tale, and the one that took charge of organizing the state's players for PvP events. Prior to the 2014 expansion, guilds in Elder Tale had been fairly ad hoc; small groups would gradually merge into larger and larger guilds. However, with the release of state-vs.-state competitions, the whole guild scene changed as high-level players wanted to get as competitive as possible in the new PvP events. Combat guilds (or at least the large ones) shifted from being a hodgepodge of players with common goals to large, geographically-segregated armies.
There were certainly some problems with that model- the state nationalism (whether ironic or unironic) led to a lot of unnecessary animosity between players when there was an event coming up. But on the other hand, lumping people together almost at random had its upsides. New players had an easy time connecting with older players since they were going to be fighting on the same side at some point anyways, and a lot of the elitism and exclusivity that accompanied high-level guilds disappeared. Also, since being in a combat guild only really mattered once a month, guild members would regularly reach out and form parties or raid teams with members outside their guild- a rare sight in pre-2014 Elder Tale.
Renee ran over the raid again in her head. "Karl was leading the dungeon team… The Emperor has a lot of health, but I don't think Karl died in the fight-"
"Pfft- That's a first." Chaco scoffed. Karl's kamikaze Pirate build was notorious for its short life-expectancy. "…Think we should tell Kat and Chaucer that he's back in town?"
Renee shrugged. "No reason to interrupt their meeting." Besides- Karl probably came back on their request. "It's almost four-o-clock anyways. I doubt they'll get anything done that they haven't already."
Actually, they probably planned that. Renee thought to herself as she started the long walk to The Guild Building. No one could make decisions without Karl, but it gave everyone a chance to figure out who was calling the conference and why. Renee smiled to herself. Typical Kat…
"What're you so smiley about?" Chaco asked with a smirk of her own.
"Nothing- I'm just looking forward to dinner."
"I know right." Chaco's eyes lit up and she started to do a little half-skip as she walked. It was way too easy to get the girl exited. "It's gonna be dinner of the champions; celebrating victory over the corpses of our slaughtered enemies." Chaco gave her best mock-maniacal laugh.
"It's not their corpses we're celebrating over- if anything it's ours." Renee had to do a quick double-take. "…That is the strangest thing I have ever said."
Chaco laughed "Get used to it. Something tells me we're only getting started."
She was right.