Title: Gamer
Theme: #22: Zombies
Claim: Zoro
(Words:) 5,026
Rating: PG
Warnings: A few swears, a few gross gaming descriptions. Modern day college AU although only for the sake of the gaming setting. Note that Chopper and Brook are human due to the aforementioned setting. Finally, will probably be a lot funnier if you're familiar with MMORPG terms, although I've tried to explain them as best as possible.
Disclaimer(s): I do not own, or pretend to own, One Piece or any of its subsequent characters, plots or other ideas. That right belongs solely to Eiichiro Oda. I do not own the prompts either—those are assigned by 30_OnePiece.
Zoro arrives at Usopp's dorm room earlier than expected—amazingly, the doors don't seem to do their usual swap—and knocks on the door. "It's open!" he hears the junior yell loudly, and he lets himself into the apartment-dorm. Usopp rooms here with two other guys, Oimo and Kashi, who look much larger and meaner than they actually are—a fact that the long-nose is quite happy about, since he's sort of a coward.
Zoro expects to see Usopp sitting in the combined living room and kitchenette, but the couches are empty. Puzzled, he heads for Usopp's room, and is surprised to see the engineering major glued to his computer, clicking the mouse frantically with one hand while tapping keys with the other.
"Oh, Zoro," he says, glancing over just briefly before returning his gaze to the computer. "Hey, what's up? I didn't realize you were going to be here so early."
"Neither did I," the college senior answers with a shrug. "What are you doing?" Computers normally don't impress him—Zoro has one, but only to check his email and write papers—yet despite himself he leans over Usopp's shoulder to watch. Usopp appears to be playing some sort of video game, and his character on-screen seems to be stabbing a number of zombies with a sword and dagger, surrounded by an array of colorful buttons and to the tune of classic clanging sound effects. The little digital sword actually looks sort of similar to the katana Zoro has hanging over his bed back in his own apartment in the same building (illegal, but he stows it under the bed every time the RA's pull a quick check), and he's impressed despite himself. That's quite a lot of detail on that little game thing.
"It's a new video game, Onion back home got me into it," Usopp says enthusiastically. "It's called Zombie Dungeon Wars, it's a fantasy game, an MMO."
"MMO?" Zoro asks, skeptical.
"Geez, Zoro, do you ever pay attention to anything related to technology? It's an MMORPG—a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game."
"Oh," Zoro says, because that's about all he can think of to say.
"It's pretty neat, there's a whole bunch of classes you can choose from—"
"Classes?"
"Uh, like jobs, professions—you know, assassin, warrior, mage—and you build characters and do questing and stuff. You can even get together with a whole bunch of other people and do more difficult content, like dungeons and things."
"Sounds like a big time waster."
"Well, it's fun," Usopp says defensively. "I just have to figure out what class fits me best, is all. But I'm sure I'll get it at some point. I bet it'd be more fun to play with other people though...I play with Onion online sometimes, but he's dealing with his senior year of high school right now and they're just starting SAT's and stuff so he's swamped and I'm kinda outdistancing him—"
Usopp stops stabbing zombies in the game and suddenly fixes Zoro with a rather hopeful look. Zoro backs up immediately, knowing what's coming next, but it doesn't help him any. "Zoro, wanna play?"
He grits his teeth, and is just thankful that Usopp can't pull the big teddybear eyes the way Chopper can, or he'd already be sunk. "No," he says flatly. "You know I'm not really a video game player, Usopp."
"Oh, come on, I bet you'd be good at this! I know you hate first person shooters, but this is all swords and stuff, I know how much you like those."
"Oh, please. This isn't anything like using actual swords. It's still a video game."
"C'mon, look, just try it." Usopp wriggles out of his rolling computer chair and tries to push Zoro down into it, which is difficult since Zoro is taller and has way more muscle than his friend does, allowing him to resist Usopp's ropy arms. In the end he sits anyway, mostly to stop Usopp's yammering.
"Alright. Fine. What do I do?"
"You control with the mouse, like this, and you use these keys to move. These buttons are all your moves, see, this one lets you sneak around, and this one lets you backstab—this is an assassin, by the way—and this one..."
It takes a good ten minutes to get the hang of the interface—Zoro has never been that good with computers, and this game is infinitely more complicated than it needs to be. But once he gets a hold of that, the game falls into a sort of steady rhythm, and he's stabbing zombies easily, figuring out patterns for combat to instruct Usopp's character without even needing his friend's suggestions. He's taken kendo and fencing classes before, and the same sort of combat rhythm is oddly applicable here, just like it is on the floor; it's all about action and reaction, knowing what moves to make, knowing how to turn a situation to his best advantage.
Okay, Zoro privately admits to himself. This is sort of relaxing, in a really weird way.
Usopp starts screeching without warning. "Oh, crap, run him away, Zoro! Mass aggro, you just aggro'd all those mobs at once! Run run run, you can't take them all on!"
"What the hell is an aggro? And a mob?" Zoro yells in surprise, even as he spots the swarm of digital zombies heading in his general direction. He pounds on the keys and the mice frantically to try and run Usopp's assassin away.
"Aggro...attracting enemies, catching their attention," Usopp explains. "And mobs—monsters. Oh, crap...if you get far enough they'll run back into place, but I don't think you can get away fast enough—"
"Why are these zombies so fast," Zoro grouses, but he slides the assassin to a stop and turns to face the zombies. If he can't run away, he might as well start killing stuff before the stuff kills him, right?
"Zoro, what are you doing, you're going to get my guy killed—"
Zoro doesn't listen. Instead, he acts. Uses the assassin's stun ability to keep one zombie from attacking him for a short period of time; activates a special power-up in order to do critical damage to a second, wiping it out. Targets a third and poofs behind it, all ninja-like, to stab it in the back. A fourth goes down, and a fifth, but then all his move buttons are used up and he's got to wait the time limits before he can use those abilities again. He stabs futilely at another zombie, taunts it away, and is amazed when it goes down, and then another, and another. By then his abilities are back up, and he uses them again, desperate—
But it's too late, and the poor assassin gets overrun. The character drops to the ground with a screech of pain, and Zoro shrugs, taking his hands off the controls. "Oops. That sucks."
Usopp stares at him in wide-eyed surprise. "Holy crap Zoro. You sure you've never played this game before?"
Zoro shrugs again. "Nope. Why?"
"It's just...I mean, you took down half the swarm, even with them all attacking you like that. That's way better than I could do, and I've been leveling this guy for days now. How'd you do it?"
"Hell if I know. Instinct?"
"C'mon, Zoro. I told you you'd be good at this. You should play with me."
"Look, Usopp, I don't exactly have the money to buy a video game right now, and—"
"I'll buy it for you!" Usopp says, enthusiastic. "I'll install it on your computer and everything, too. I'll even roll a new character and play alongside you, it'll be fun! It's so much cooler when you've got a friend to play with." He looks hopeful.
Zoro sighs, and has a feeling he might regret this. But why the hell not, right? He actually had sort of enjoyed playing it, and if Usopp was gonna buy... "Alright, fine."
Usopp grins. "Deal!" He glances at the clock, and adds, "Shoot, we should probably get going or we're going to miss Luffy and the others. Nami'll be furious if we miss the party because of late arrivals."
Zoro snorts. "Whatever. I still don't know how I managed to end up owing her so many drinks. I think she's lying somehow."
Usopp laughs and closes the game program before grabbing his coat. "Well, let's go already," he says, and they head out the door.
True to his word, Usopp shows up at Zoro's apartment a week and a half later with several small game boxes and hijacks his computer for hours, installing the game and what looks like half a dozen expansions to boot. Shit, that was a lot of game.
Usopp brings with him Luffy, Chopper, and Sanji (the last much to Zoro's disgust). No one is quite sure how Luffy managed to get into college, or stay in it for that matter; his grades are abysmal and he never seems to show up to class, so it's always something of a mystery. Chopper's still technically of high school age, but is something of a prodigy, attending the medical program here at the university. Sanji is only a part-time student—he actually works at a gourmet restaurant downtown, and is supposedly a first class chef, but he came to the university for a few business classes in the meantime. He seems to be interested in starting up his own restaurant sometime in the future, as far as Zoro can tell.
Zoro greets Sanji with a flurry of exchanged curses and banter, and then the chef promptly takes over his apartment's kitchenette, barring anyone from entry until he can make something out of the meager offerings in the fridge. Thank fuck Zoro's room-mates have been appeased with some of Sanji's appetizers in the past, otherwise they'd likely throw more of a fit at their food getting used against their will. Luffy and Chopper promptly plant themselves on the couch and start watching TV while chatting with Zoro.
The topic of the video game comes around at some point, and Usopp explains enthusiastically about the different features of Zombie Dungeon Wars as he installs the discs on Zoro's computer (and complains about Zoro's poor maintenance of it as well, but that's what Usopp is for, so he doesn't really listen). Luffy and Chopper seem excited about it, and ask for some of Usopp's in-game stories; the engineering major is all too happy to oblige. Sanji seems disinterested at first, but when he learns cooking is a skill in the game he seems to perk up a little, and asks with faked lack of caring what sorts of things can be made and what they do.
In the end, it turns out that Usopp's got several new converts, and everyone agrees to play together.
The popularity of the game in their little group spreads like wildfire, and much to Zoro's surprise within weeks all nine of them have not only obtained it, but play it with surprisingly regularity. Usopp makes them a guild, the Straw Hat Pirates (named so mostly at Luffy's insistence and obsession with pirates, and, well, it's sort of deserved, seeing as Luffy's the one that brought them all together in the first place), and it makes it even easier for them to work together playing through the game.
Luffy plays a barbarian, known for their classic rages and extreme bursts of power for short durations. He's not exactly the best player, although he seems to enjoy it, and his character is sort of a powerhouse. Luffy laughs when he messes something up and doesn't really worry about digital dangers so much, mostly since he's proven time and time again that he can beat up the real dangers for them. He's content to let them do what they like in the games, as long as he's with them and they're having fun.
Nami plays a thief, and Zoro is entirely unsurprised by this choice—she likes real life money far too much, so of course she'd play a class that excels at obtaining fake money as well. She insists on being allowed to pickpocket every single mob they fight before they kill it, and charges them real money every time they make a kill prematurely (it's a wonder what zombies will carry around in their pockets). As if that isn't enough, she's also managed to seize full control of the server-wide auction house, where players can trade items and weapons, and makes a bank off of the things she sells after dominating individual markets. Nami's already maxed out her gold cap on her first character, and has to make a second to take some of the spillover—she's handy if you want to buy something in game, but the witch charges interest like a fiend. Zoro owes her almost thirty thousand gold coins somehow, and he still hasn't figured out how.
Usopp rotates through several different classes before finding one comfortable to his playstyle: a ranger. Zoro had picked up from his first encounter with the game that Usopp wasn't particularly comfortable with close-combat fighting. But when he discovers the ranged class he becomes invaluable, sniping things from afar with guns and bows and helping to wear down, redirect, or stun opponents so that attacking mobs become more manageable. He's not as heavy a damage dealer as some of the other members of the Straw Hat guild, but his character is quite versatile, and responsible for getting them out of a number of scrapes (a fact that Usopp refuses to ever let them forget).
Sanji chooses a monk, after a little fiddling around with the classes. It's the only class that focuses primarily on combat without weaponry, and instead focuses on martial arts, so it appeals to Sanji, who has his own kickboxing style that he practices. Despite initially feigning disinterest, Sanji rapidly becomes one of the top damage-dealers of the Guild. He's also obsessive with leveling additional skills, namely the fishing and cooking professions, especially after learning that high-level foods can boost character stats depending on what's made. He almost always has several full stacks of food to boost Strength, Agility, Magic, and Defense, and is fastidious about keeping food-related buffs up. (If Zoro is honest he'll admit he's come to rely on that more than he realizes, since he frequently forgets when to reapply buffs, but at least he never loses the food ones).
Chopper, being a doctor, elects to become the group's primary healer. It's a very important job and he takes it very seriously, always keeping everybody's health bars nice and full to prevent their deaths, curing poisons and curses, and providing buffs as necessary. Initially, Chopper intends to be a priest healer, the priest class being the most efficient at healing. But he falls in love with the Druid class after playing with it for a little while, due to the shape-changing animal nature of the magic-users. Healing with a druid is more difficult, but Chopper is dead set on playing one now, and after a lot of practice he manages to become an extremely efficient one. When he takes his first class quest, he elects to join the Druids of the Stag; deer have always been his favorite animals, and now he has a powerful deer form for running and battling as well.
Robin plays a mage. Zoro is actually quite surprised that Robin elected to play at all; she is possibly the most sophisticated member of their little gang, recently graduated from college with a Master's degree in archaeology and history, and video gaming seems a little beneath her. But at Luffy's cajoling she agrees to play, and promptly picks the class most steeped in knowledge. Robin is usually the one that formulates the group's strategies against tough opponents, and she is frequently responsible for downing difficult ones as well, or providing other unusual benefits—like buffs, or teleportation spells, or conjuring water and bread to replenish magic and health in order to save Sanji's buff foods for later. Robin is essential to the Guild at this point, although she doesn't always have time to play. But they always wait for her when she can, and help her catch up in level when she falls behind (which is still miraculously rare, all things considered).
Franky plays a fighter, and insists his character is a cyborg. Actually there are cyborgs in the game, in one mechanized city that is almost completely closed off from the outside in order to protect against zombies (you need to take a special high-rise train to get to it). Franky insists his character originates from here, and gets quite heavily into the story, but he's a decent player all the same and brings a lot of combat skills to the group. Of course, he's most valuable for his intense leveling of the Engineering skills, which allow his character to manufacture explosives, guns, and other useful combat trinkets to help protect the entire guild.
Brook plays a bard, and paid extra for exclusive content in order to play the rare undead race. Undead aren't particularly suited to being bards. Most undead are enemies in the game, although there is a small city of 'neutral' undead smack in the middle of the main continent, and even those have a tendency to lean towards warlocks and death knight. But Brook enjoys the oddly quirky combination, and insists it is entirely worth it. Zoro honestly isn't that surprised, as Brook himself is a very quirky sort of guy, and a musician himself. And he can't deny that the bard is definitely an oddly useful class: it has decent combat abilities as a minor swordsman, while more impressively providing massive short-term song-buffs to the entire group, or stunning and misdirecting enemies in order to keep massive attacks under control. (Nami also loves another feature of Brook's class, which is its passive ability to make Non-Player Characters like them more, and—potentially—subsequently charge them less for things).
And Zoro...
Zoro plays a warrior. As soon as he sees the class option when he rolls his character, he's hooked immediately, and sticks with it from beginning to level cap. He's specced his warrior to max out on damage, sacrificing Defense in favor of pouring still more points into Strength, so that his enemies die very, very fast. He's even taken points in dual-wielding and strength boosting talents, allowing him to use not one but two super-heavy, normally two-handed weapons to maximize damage even further. Zoro is the powerhouse of the Guild, and everyone knows it—even most of Robin's strategies usually revolve around throwing Zoro at the Biggest Bad and hoping things work out. (Luffy is the only one with a character that can potentially out-damage Zoro, but he lacks the finesse and the coordination to skillfully utilize these abilities in the game).
So they level together as a group, help each other with special class quests, and thoroughly trounce pretty much anything dangerous that comes at them. Usopp and Franky hook them up with special headsets and their own voice chat server, so that they can talk to each other while leveling together even when half of them are in different dorm buildings and Robin and Franky and Brook are at their houses and Sanji is at his flat near the restaurant he works at. Zoro and Sanji vehemently curse each other every time the other fucks up and costs somebody their life, Nami squeals every time they manage to come across some valuable equipment (and she always seems to win the loot rolls, that cheating witch), and since the in-game bard never actually plays music, Brook takes it upon himself to make up a little stat-boosting ditty every time he uses a song-spell (sometimes that's funny, and sometimes Zoro thinks Brook is damn lucky he's across the city or he'd be clobbered).
Soon they reach the level cap, and things start to feel a little too easy, too redundant. So they decide to take a step up: they decide to try the dungeons.
Dungeons, Zoro soon realizes, are way tougher than the regular content. Dungeons have inevitably huge swarms of much tougher zombies, and vampire overlords, and ghouls and death knights and necromancers and werewolves and demons and dozens of other things that are quite desperate to feast on digital heroes' digital flesh and blood. The Straw Hat Guild takes it in stride though, and with Robin researching the dungeons and making the plans, they start to do decently well with them. Franky takes on the job of Tanking—holding the attention of all of the monsters, making sure they all beat on him while everyone else beats on the mobs, so that no one else gets hurt or killed—and although he says it's difficult, he does an okay job. Chopper takes on healing, and Sanji occasionally helps out with his monk's few minor healing spells and his own buffing meals, and everyone else takes care of crowd control and D.P.S.—damage per second.
Zoro is very good at Damage Per Second, and he likes it. He likes it a lot.
So they plow through dungeon after dungeon, collecting extraordinarily rare gear from the bosses to power themselves up even further and do even more damage and better healing. And when even Nami starts complaining about the fifth time the Staff of Asteria drops (warlock-class only, but worth quite a damned bundle on the Auction House) they realize that it's time to move on even more.
So then they move up to raids—super powerful dungeons with way more bosses that take ten or more people to wipe out. And they're tackling it with nine. And that's where the trouble starts.
They've downed the first two bosses at the Necrom Gauntlet, and are attempting to remember all of Robin's extremely detailed instructions on how to beat the third. Luffy is no help, really; he gets antsy, especially since the battles can take upwards of eight or nine minutes or more, and frequently forgets the simple things (like don't stand in the fire). He usually dies early, unless they can use his berserking skills at the last moment, or simplify the fight enough that he can follow along relatively easily. So effectively a boss fight that should be twelve-on-one is eight-on-one, which means they've got to do everything just right or things won't turn out well at all.
And things don't go well at all. They've got the boss down to only fifty percent of his health when Franky unexpectedly goes down, and suddenly the monster aberration thing, this bizarre giant zombie-corpse construct, is going crazy attacking the rest of the crew. Robin, normally so skilled at keeping her threat down compared to Franky's, is the next to go down—as a mage she's a glass cannon, and can barely take a few hits before dying. Brook is next, valiantly casting one last powerful buff before the construct smacks him across the room and the skeletal avatar sprawls out in death (although, as Brook points out on the headset, it's already dead—yohohoho!)
The construct goes for Chopper next—healers draw a lot of aggro, and Chopper is desperately trying to keep everyone else topped up so they don't die at the giant zombie's mismatched hands now. If Chopper goes down, they're totally screwed—Sanji's got a few minor healing spells, but not enough to keep up with demand. Everyone is yelling in their headsets now, swearing frantically, trying to recover the situation even though it's looking quite bad now.
Unexpectedly, it comes to Zoro that he's the only one left equipped to handle that monster even remotely. As a warrior with heavy armor he's got the best chance of absorbing the creature's attacks, and he can take more damage than anybody else still alive. He's definitely not specced for defense—he's meant to do damage, and his character's talents all revolve around that—but he's got a shot, and he knows it.
So with surprising calm he says over the headset, "I'm gonna tank it," and charges his warrior towards the construct.
Almost instantly they all tell him he's crazy. Which he knows, but really, what else can they do? He has no idea how to tank, but he knows he can do enough damage to keep it off the others, and maybe with luck he'll live long enough for them to burn the creature down.
And stunningly, it works. He just keeps attacking, and attacking, and attacking, and popping every single distract-the-monster technique that he doesn't think he's ever used once in all his months of gameplay—taunts and challenges, mostly, and the end result is that the construct turns on him and decides he's going to be the next meal. Nami and Usopp help by popping misdirects on him, effectively making all of their pissing off of the zombie attract it to him instead of them—a really nasty move, now that he thinks about it, if that existed in real life. But he holds steady, and the thing just keeps beating at him, over and over. It fills his entire computer screen, big, jagged teeth and dripping ichor, and shit, did the game developers really spend that long designing disgusting warts and pustules all over the undead thing's flesh, because if that was the case, they needed to get a life.
The construct just keeps beating on him, and beating on him, and beating on him, but he doesn't relent, pops every single skill he has to hold its attention. Twice it manages to break free of his hold, when Sanji and Luffy (miraculously still alive) manage to hit it with massive damage, but Zoro manages to reel it back just in time, hold its attention again. Three times he almost dies; once he's even at a bare one hit point left, and Chopper comes through just in the nick of time, popping his last magic potion frantically in order to have enough energy left to fuel his healing spells. The creature is at incredibly low health now, just a little more, just a little longer—
"I'm out of magic," Chopper wails over the voice chat, and suddenly Zoro's entire screen goes gray as his character dies and crashes to the ground. The thing immediately turns on Luffy, the next highest damage-dealer, and Luffy can only take a few hits with his class before—
But then the behemoth of a zombie slowly rears up, with a wild screaming noise, and finally collapses to the ground as its health bar reaches zero. Sparkles start to rise from the creature a moment later, indicating the creature is dead and ready to be looted. The voice chat goes dead silent for a moment, and then without warning everybody starts whooping delightedly, congratulating each other on the shocking kill in the face of overwhelming defeat.
Sanji's monk trades Chopper's druid some magic-restoring drinks, and after his magic bar is refilled he sets to resurrecting the characters that died, starting with Zoro. Nami is already enthusiastically inspecting the loot, an Epic-level shield with amazing defensive stats, perfect for any warrior or paladin tank.
"I can't believe you did that, Zoro!" Usopp is yammering over the voice chat now. "That was amazing, and you're DPS-specced, too! How did you manage to tank that thing for so long?"
"I dunno, instinct?" Zoro says. Really, everyone else was treating it like a moment of panic, but when the heat was on in the game he'd felt remarkably calm, knew exactly what he was doing, how to play his moves and when. "It was mostly Chopper's win, anyway. He kept me healed long enough to last or I'd have been dead in five hits."
"That's not true at all, Zoro!" Chopper says delightedly. "I don't need your compliments, you asshole!"
"Still, Chopper would have had to generate quite a bit of aggro in order to keep your health sustained, Zoro," Robin says calmly over the link. "It's quite amazing that you managed to hold its attention for so long."
"You should take that shield, Zoro-bro," Franky adds enthusiastically. "You deserve it! You're a way better tank than me."
Zoro frowns. "I wouldn't say that. You just got unlucky, Franky."
"No way, bro! Tanking's tough, but you made it look easy, and you've never done it before. That's super skill, man. You should totally be our main tank from now on."
"If you want, that is," Chopper adds hastily.
Zoro considers. Truth be told, while he loves DPS with a passion, there had been a sort of thrill when he was tanking...it was a rush, knowing he was the only thing standing between himself and the entire rest of the guild. And that was without even being specced for it. If he got the proper defensive gear, changed his specs, got new weaponry...he'd be like a wall between his team and the rest of the monsters out there. Nothing would get through to them.
He likes the sound of that challenge.
"Okay," he says after a moment. "If Franky doesn't mind swapping to DPS, then sure, I'll be the tank. No arguments if I loot the shield then?"
There are no arguments, not even from Nami, who is busy muttering over the link about how the switch of tanks, once properly geared, will increase their loot intake percentage by twenty percent due to increased speed in dungeon runs. Zoro rolls his eyes, and takes the shield, the first of many changes for his character.
It's nice to be the heaviest damage dealer of the Straw Hat Guild, he thinks, but it's even better to be the defender—it feels like much more solid a place for him, video game or no.
Dude I don't even know...I miss WoW like woah, can you tell?
(Ten bucks says Luffy and Zoro have both pulled a Leeroy Jenkins at least once...)
~VelkynKarma