It was a bit surreal, finding myself suddenly in a gentle white room with no idea how I got there. I looked around. Wherever here is, seems to be a fairly nice room with white paneled walls and a decorated white cieling, the only non-white part of the room was the carpetted floor, which was just an off white.
Having finished looking around the room, I spotted movement out of the corner of my eye and turned to it, only to see it's just blue lit letters appearing on the far wall's panel, glowing with illumination that made it easy to see.
Welcome Dreamer, to the Dream Dive system. We are detecting that this is your first time joining us. Congratulations on purchasing The Aurora VR Headest! May all your dreams come true!
I tried really hard not to gag, reading that last line. It was the tagline for the Aurura and the company team that made it, Aurora Borealis. It was so cheesy, especially considering what the headset does. I shook my head and continued reading.
For your safety and peace of mind, it is recommended at this point to get a feel for controlling both your body and your dream avatar before continuing. Please focus on the feeling of the surface you were laying on before joining the Dream Dive. Once you have the feeling fixed, concentrate on that feeling and move it to your arms. Then down to your fingers. Now try to twitch your finger. It's ok if your dream avatar finger moves as well. It may take a few tries and practice before you can move one independently of the other.
I followed the instructions and, after a moment, felt a sensation that was vaguely familiar, in that I sort of recalled feeling this in previous dreams. It felt... Well it felt almost exactly like the description said it would. What I wasn't expecting was for the feeling to make me freeze up and start panicking as flashbacks of feeling unable to move or breathe hit me like a sledgehammer and I started to freak and force my body to jerk and move and breathe again, only for my body to move... easily?
That threw me out of what I was pretty sure had been the start of a panic attack as I could suddenly move my body and my dream body both as easily as breathing. It was an unusual sensation, almost like moving a ghost, but it was my body and my dream self is more the ghost, but it still felt the other way around.
It took me a bit for my heartbeat to calm down as I moved my body and avatar around at the same time to get used to it. It was weird as hell and more than a little difficult, but after the scare earlier I had more than enough motivation to keep practicing until it became easy. That took a while.
I then focused back on the wall, only as soon as I did so, the previous message disappeared, and was replaced by a new one.
Congratulations! You have mastered the skill to control your body and dream self at the same! Tutorial complete! Please enjoy Aurora Borealis' Dream Dive experience!
I blinked. Wait, that was all that was involved with the tutorial?! I cast back to the playthroughs I'd seen. I could've sworn they took longer... Oh wait, now I remember, pretty much everything involving the basic tutorial revolved around working you up to controlling your body at the same time as your avatar, doing so in several stages. Since I went ahead and did it myself, I guess I accidentally skipped the tutorial. Oops?
After a few moments, the message on the wall disappeared, and sliver of light appeared on the wall. I stared as it spread open, revealing a doorway of light.
Taking a moment to contain my grin of anticipation, I stepped through.
I was engulfed in light for what seemed like only a second before it faded, the previous tutorial room no where to be seen.
Now? Now I was in a new room. I took a look around curiously. This would be the hub room available to each individual player. It started out as one of the random default builds but you could change every aspect of it that you wanted, or leave it alone and move on to doing other things in the space, or accessing a dream ie. game or movie to enter.
It seems the default hub room I'd gotten was the mountain cabin one. It was basically a decent sized log cabin with a modern twist. One wall was almost all glass with an opening to a balcony that revealed a rather astounding view of the hills, valleys, and mountains arrayed far below and in the distance. A cheery fire crackled, pushing back the cold from this high up, leaving the place warm, but with a nice breeze.
This was... really nice, I thought, as I stepped out onto the balcony to take a look around. After drinking in the view for a time, and getting a bit nippy, I stepped back inside closer to the fire and warmth. How odd, to feel the need to get warm! That had to be a first for me. Usually my body temp ran too hot so I never really ever felt cool or cold in the first place. The inverse of that though is that even just slightly warm weather is practically unbearable, which is kinda awful for a Floridian like me. But this mountain... this is nice. I may just leave it like this for the time being.
More importantly, came figuring out the interface here so I could head into Battle Arts Online.
That part actually turned out to be easy. Sitting on the ottoman in front of the couch near the fire was a touchpad. Picking it up, it immediately lit up, giving me a menu with options to access my library, the shop, social page, and settings.
A quick browse of each showed them to be exactly what I expected. Everything I could possibly want to do for changing this hub world and plenty more were in settings, the social page... was powered by facebook (ugh), the shop would give me access to just about anything I could think of, and the library page had a list of everything I'd bought in the shop.
Already, everything I'd gotten through the headset's hud access to the shop was available in the library, including BAO, so I quickly selected it. Immediately everything around me shimmered into white light with particles the color of an aurora, while a blue ring circled my person with the word loading above it that stayed in my field of view regardless of where I turned to look around.
The whole thing kind of reminded me of the animus loading screens from Assassin's Creed. Which seems appropriate now that I think about it. Eventually it finished, the blue ring disappearing, and a town faded into view around me.
There were a few people here and there as I looked around and found myself in a plaza that looked extremely similar to the Town of Beginnings from SAO, though here there was a sign welcoming new players and seemed to give directions to various starter shops to pick any avatar changes and gear in case I wanted to change my looks from baseline. I could've done the same from my hub if I'd wanted, but decided against it for now. Maybe I'll change my hair a bit later though.
Wondering if you could see the next floor up from here, I looked up... and stared. There is a ceiling. I'd expected that. What I hadn't expected was for it to be so far up into the sky that it appeared tinged blue as clouds rolled beneath it, making it look as though the sky itself had a ceiling! I knew the floating castle would be huge, but somehow it never really hit me just how big it was until that moment. If something similar were to be on earth, it wouldn't surprise me if the next floor up had an altitude that would be roughly even with the orbit of the International Space Station!
I was startled from my looking around by the sound of the town bell starting to ring and a window appearing in front of me while the sky was covered by blue hexagons with white letters big enough to be read from the ground. They said 'System Announcement'.
After a few seconds the ringing stopped and the holographic window with the words system announcement on it switched to a video of a man in a red robe with the hood up, his face obscured by darkness.
"Hello everyone. My name is Kayaba Akihiko. Or Akihiko Kayaba for those of a western persuasion. Obviously that's not my name, but I thought it might be appropriate due to the nature of the announcement I had today."
A sense of forboding filled me at that statement.
"I'm currently broadcasting to you all, not only to those connected to the Aurora VR Headset, but also every television, smartphone, and even the radio! Would you believe it? Even the radio! As you may have guessed, I am a hacker. Probably the best one if I'm going to toot my own horn, but that's neither here nor there. What is important, is that as of this moment, there are now one hundred million users of the Aurora VR Headset! Congratulations!"
An image of confetti popping from the bottom of the screen along with the sound of a noise maker going off for a second appeared. It was an overlay, and a pretty cheesy one for certain.
"Due to this milestone event, I am now activating a little program I devised that takes advantage of a certain exploit within the Aurora VR headset. Well, I say 'activating' but in truth, I already activated it and it has been running the second our one hundred millionth user entered the Dream Dive! What does it do? Well, due to how the Aurora headset works, I've basically used a combination of electrical impulses, lights, and sounds to basically program you all! But I'm no monster. Rather than have an army of mindless slaves to do my bidding, which I totally could have done by the way, I simply made it so that you cannot take off your Aurora headset!"
Ah crap...
"Now, I'm sure some of you have heard of Sword Art Online, the anime that this character I'm portraying is from. For those that haven't, I would highly recommend looking it up after this. But for those who are familiar, don't worry! I'm not a monster. You will not die if you take off the headset, nor will you die in real life if you die in the game. However, as it would ruin the point if others could take the headset off for you, you will slip into something like a coma and be unresponsive if the headset is taken off. But it's not permanent, as putting the headset back on and activating the dream dive will return you back to your current conscious state! Oh, and I've also closed off the exploit as well. You can no longer be hypnotized, not only by the headset exploit I used, but any other form of hypnosis as well! You're welcome!"
"There is no win state though. No release from this by doing something like beating the hundred floors of Castle Aincrad- oh sorry, the nameless floating castle that is totally not Aincrad,in Battle Arts Online. You just have to live with it! Now I'm sure some of you are wondering, why would I do such a thing? Well my answer to that is... let's just say I'm a fan of SAO and leave it at that. Most of you wouldn't get it anyway. Well, it seems I gotta go now. My allotted time before one of the many government agencies would find me through this broadcast is nearly up. Enjoy your new lives! Tata!"
With that, the window snapped closed, the sky cleared, and everything seemingly went back to normal. There was quiet for a few moments...
Then the screaming started.