Episode 2.5
Unlocked: 17
Location: Calpheon City, Calpheon
Server: Serendia 4
Party
RedNGold LV. 45
Heirlomes LV. 29
Draco is an absolute disaster. He finally has pets now that loot for him, so there's that. Of course, he splurged and now has the highest tier possible, but at least he's not boasting about that too much. Now that he knows what is useful and what isn't, he doesn't seem to care about funds. Harry's sure he bought most of the outfits available for some reason—it's not like he can wear more than one at a time, although in the most recent update they added the ability to mix and match. Important.
Once more they're at the premium shop, because Draco's convinced he wants to upgrade his mace from a +10 to +11. Each failed attempt lowers the max durability, from 100 all the way down to 0, and Draco wants to cheese it by buying repair stones. They drop in-game as well so they're on the player market but with how many you need you're better off buying them in the premium store if you can afford it.
Lord knows Malfoy can afford it.
"I'm just—going to grab some logs," Harry says, watching Draco flit around the store, looking like he's very much in his element.
"Okay."
"Okay," Harry repeats tonelessly, and then he leaves him to it. With how happy Draco is buying everything under the sun, he'll have to be careful not to mention his own rather low durability on his gear.
Unlike Draco, he has to grind for them and save up funds to repair his gear, especially his weapon. It's at +15 finally, and he's sure he's one of the few with a weapon at that level, but it's sitting at a meagre 20/100 durability. It'll be a while before he'll attempt a +16 upgrade. Well, he won't be upgrading it himself. He'll bring the materials to a blacksmith and ask them, as they have a higher chance of success, and the same goes for repairing a piece.
His cat pet runs ahead and meows at a diorite rock that Harry's too lazy to grab his pickaxe for. It lights up slightly red. He passes it, and the cat stares at him as he does, but Harry ignores it easily. Warehouse Square is packed as usual, the front entrance to the building blocked by two carriages. He goes left, following the curve of the road south east onto what players have taken to calling Stall Street; it's a long street with a lot of market stalls and NPCs selling wares.
Instead of following Stall Street, however, he crosses the bridge to go further south. He probably should've taken a horse, because it's quite the walk from Calpheon Market all the way in the north to the stables in the south. He raises his hand to greet a few passersby, recognising them from the grinding spots he frequents.
Once he has his horse, he decides to continue on foot. He's already where he wants to be, which is the North Kaia forest. He wants fir logs and planks, and while there are other spots to grab it, most people prefer to go to the Balenos region, Harry has come here enough to develop a rotation. The horse is for when he has to go back to Warehouse Square.
For some reasons, fir is one of the more expensive types of wood. It has something to do with a trade skill but Harry doesn't have time to look into that, so he sticks to gathering logs and planks, among a myriad of other things, for the higher guilds.
Unlocked: 17
Location: Southern Neutral Zone, Serendia
Server: Serendia 4
Party
RedNGold LV. 45
Heirlomes LV. 30
When Harry first powered up the NerveGear, it asked him for his preferred language and gave him a warning that he had to log out in order to change it again. The list wasn't incredibly long, only the usual suspects present. Naturally, he chose English, and so the NPCs speak to him in English and his menu is in English, perfect.
But it didn't take long to sink in that not everyone speaks English or the little bit of German he can understand—High School does not prepare you for a native speaker in an informal setting, thanks—and it makes communicating difficult, especially if you need something from them.
"You're in our spot!" Draco yells, waving his arms around while the player in front of them just looks confused and a little bit angry. "Mobs!" He points at the newly spawned Red Orcs to their left. "Ours!" He points at himself. "Not yours!" He shakes his fist at the three teenagers.
Harry shakes his head and leans heavily on his glaive. "This isn't going to work," he tells Draco, "and screaming at him isn't going to make him understand you any better. To him you're only a moron flailing around."
"Either get your arse off the bench and do your magic thing here or shut up," Draco says.
"Try Spanish?" Harry suggests, highly amused. Privately he thinks they should just let the kids have this spawning site, but Draco's indignation is a pretty damn funny thing to watch.
Draco huffs, gives a few halting words, and the larger kid unleashes a torrent of what does sound a lot like Spanish upon them. Harry's skills don't extend past greetings, basic pronouns, sorry, thanks, kill, die and being able to count to ten, unless they use other obvious cognates like 'monster' and 'quest'.
"I think they're on a quest," Harry comments idly. "Seriously, though, look at their gear."
"No one took pity on me when I was walking around like that," Draco says.
Harry straightens and stretches. "I took pity on you. C'mon, Draco, let's go. Maybe in another month they'll find themselves in a reversed situation and take the high road, too."
Draco rolls his eyes. "Pay it forward, huh? Finally found your heart?" he snarks.
Harry pushes him toward the dirt path with a quick goodbye thrown over his shoulder at the bemused teens. "Something like that," he says dismissively. More like not discouraging players from levelling because there will never be too many high level players around. "We should be getting back anyway, Helga is waiting."
"She's the one who wears her cape like a headscarf, right?"
Harry says, "No, that's Rowena," and waits tensely for Draco to showcase once again how much insensitive arseholery there is hidden underneath his pretty exterior. Harry might have considered him attractive if he wasn't also acutely aware of the guy's shortcomings.
(No, that wasn't quite true.)
Draco surprises him for now. "Okay. That's cool, I suppose."
Apparently it's cool.
Unlocked: 17
Location: Keplan, Calpheon
Server: Calpheon 8
Party
RedNGold LV. 45
Heirlomes LV. 30
It takes them an hour to get to Keplan, a smallish village in the middle of Calpheon, just below Calpheon City. It's a bit of a hilly area and the safe-zones don't extend further than the boundaries of towns. Rowena is one of about twenty players living in Keplan on the server. They don't get much traffic since there generally isn't a reason to visit the place, so it's quiet, and Harry can see why they'd want to stay here.
The first time Draco met Rowena, he stuck his foot pretty far up his mouth by saying, "I didn't know women were allowed to game." Harry had slunk away in shame and proceeded to deny knowing him for the three hours they were there, one of which Draco spent listening—attentively, Harry has to give credit where it's due—to a very patient but firm lecture about stereotypes.
Harry had offered to leave him behind next time, but Rowena said something about re-education being a process that took time and tears and they had nothing but, so Harry drags Draco with him this week too. Rowena hasn't been around a lot lately, though, but she's waiting for them in front of the inn, waving at them—or at Harry, at least, she's still not too keen on Draco—when she spots them.
"If I didn't know better, I'd say you were a trader," Rowena chuckles as they shake hands.
Harry grimaces, offended. He supports the front line guilds because it's the right thing to do, not because of profit, but even though he only takes minimum payment, he's still one of the wealthiest players. Connections and reputation helped him a lot in acquiring bulk deals for them. Being called a trader is insulting, it implies he does it only to fill his own pockets, as though he doesn't fund projects left and right.
Rowena knows it too. "Yes, that's why I said if I didn't know better."
She leads them through to the back of the inn and out onto a courtyard where a group of nine players sit in a circle on the grass. They're all hooded, with only their guild emblems blazing next to their cursor that tells them apart.
Despite the hoods, they don't seem too concerned with keeping their identities a secret. Harry knows their IGNs, he'd be pretty useless without those. According to Helga, they keep their hoods up because, "It's almost like we're spies, like we have secret identities."
Helga, Rowena and Salazar are the only guild leaders at these meetings, the rest all regular members of the higher guilds. Sometimes Fawkes, guild leader of Hogwarts, sends Hedwig but usually she's too busy so he sends a random person. Dumbledore, guild leader of the Order, usually sends one of his newest recruits.
Harry sits close to Draco, hand planted in the grass behind him as a quiet gesture of support and to hopefully keep him calm long enough to get through this part. It's interesting how their roles have switched. Harry used to be the hotheaded of the two, easily baited by Draco, and now Draco's positively flammable.
"Orange!" Helga greets happily without looking up from the block of wood in her lap. She blows on it gently, scattering the wood shavings, and continues working on it with what Harry thinks is a scalpel but might be something else entirely. Woodcarving isn't an official skill as far as they know, but it's interesting that the game has certain things built in anyway.
Harry has to reach across with his left hand to open his menu. "Oh, by the way, have you heard about this guild down on Balenos 1? They call themselves Pixies? They've started charging people for entering Heidel. They won't let you in if you're not paying up."
Helga looks up at that. "I heard about that, yes. Have you tried it, entering without paying?"
"We didn't personally," Draco replies, "but we've heard others who did. They said those Pixies players have stationed guards around the entrances and they just force you outside the green-zone if you're unwilling to pay up."
"Is he serious?" Dumbledore's representative speaks up, looking at Harry.
Draco balls his fists, instantly on the defensive. "Are you asking me if I'm lying?"
Harry leans in and presses his fingers into Draco's skin as a warning, tips disappearing underneath the hem of his dark shirt.
"I'm sure he's just expressing surprise at the news," Rowena says sharply. "We're aware of the Pixies. General consensus is that if they stay on the Balenos servers, no one's got a problem with them. They can have them."
"Yeah, except the players stuck with them," someone else mutters.
Salazar rolls his eyes. "Please, Wood, they're non-players. It was their decision to hang out in Balenos and Serendia indefinitely. Remember, the Pixies only hold Olvia, Velia and Heidel hostage. They just sit there, doing nothing. They made their bed, now they gotta lie in it. Are you concerned?"
It's a trick question.
Draco grabs Harry's thigh and holds on tight. Harry silently wraps his fingers around Draco's and prays the guy has the sense to keep quiet. Badmouthing non-players is a great bonding experience according to the high levelled players and sticking up for them is considered pretty bad form. Harry used to take part in it, used to agree with it, until Draco told him a bit of what it was like, and that shut him up pretty quick.
Doesn't mean he doesn't still resent them for their inaction.
Wood snorts. "Of course not, I just don't want us to miss out on non-players who've had a change of heart," he says.
"You're way ahead of the facts, Wood," Rowena says. "They aren't some totalitarian force keeping anyone from exiting the region. The Pixies robbing players by forcing them to pay doesn't mean they'll become one, either. It's just a bunch of greedy non-players bullying their own kind."
Harry sucks on his upper lip to keep from chuckling despite himself, squeezes Draco's hand instead.
"I'd say good riddance and leave the arseholes contained to the earlier regions," Davis says. "Council knows what's up."
"Hear hear," someone laughs.
Helga looks unhappy with all of them but keeps quiet. She's the only one who won't badmouth them, but she never calls them out on it either. Then again, neither does Harry. It seems only Draco's frustrated with them enough to open his mouth, although luckily enough he's not saying anything now.
"So! Does anyone want to hear what Heirlooms and I brought for you or are we going to keep pissing on non-players?" Harry interrupts before someone else can jump in, because they will keep going, a never ending source of entertainment.
Rowena coughs. "Of course. By all means, Orange."
The fact that the higher guilds consider themselves either too busy or too important to go resource hunting works out as a blessing for Harry. It makes them part with money they could've spent otherwise, but Harry's not complaining. He's also not telling them where the money goes, thanks. If they ascribe the influx of mid-level players willing to help out the mob lines to the arrival of the Pixies, he's not going to correct them.
Harry divides the resources he set apart for them by nine while Draco opens his own inventory tab to check. "Alright. Smithies first."
Davis sends him a trade request.
XXX
Dealing with the high guilds' representatives reminds Harry that Draco's brand of cultural unawareness isn't the only brand of insensitivity to be found in H:CoS. When all the other hang-ups ceased to matter in the face of a common enemy, the players invented something else to be exclusive and prissy about: non-players.
In the beginning it only encompassed the players who kept to their cheap rooms in Olvia and Velia, so far removed from the front lines that they might as well be dead. And then it extended to include the players who only skilled cooking and fishing and hiding, but never smithing, though, because smithing was useful.
And now.
Well, Harry and Draco aren't directly involved with the front lines, or members of any of the guilds represented in front of them, for that matter. In fact, Harry stays far away from them. Before Harry threw a whole lot of money at him, Draco was the very essence of a non-player. The difference is that now he's a high-levelled non-player who's hiding in plain sight.
Harry is just glad the high guilds haven't yet realised that they've been treating him as an equal.
Now he's waiting for that to change.
XXX
Level Unlocked: 18
The message pops up less than a minute after he sets foot within the Calpheon City green-zone. It makes him slightly uncomfortable, to know that while they were sitting there on the grass laughing at and with each other, other players had been risking their lives. Some of them probably died, too. Was he laughing when that happened? Or maybe he was reversing a trade that went wrong, taking the jokes about counting not being a recognised skill in stride. Maybe they were already on their way back to the main settlement.
When he looks to the side, Draco doesn't seem too concerned with it, dismissing the window and pulling Harry along toward the plaza when he takes too long to move on his own. He's humming a song, one Harry doesn't recognise. but the tune sounds melancholic.
Harry misses music.
He misses being able to taste his food.
He misses home.