Heroes of Veritas: Crafting Bonus (Book 1)

Chapter Two: Early Access

As soon as Elise agreed to the prompt, her vision faded to white. Her body shifted without her willing it, moving into the light, which suddenly flashed. Then, she felt as if she was floating on a pillowy cloud. That feeling changed as she rolled, and found the edge of the bed. She tumbled right over the edge and onto the hardwood floor with an unceremonious thump. Disoriented, Elise flailed out from the tangle of covers, grunting from the effort. 

“Whngh-argh!”

As her vision cleared of sleep, Elise grew quiet and still. Her surroundings were completely unfamiliar, but had the feel of an old tavern inn with stucco textured walls, wooden beams, and rough but clean scrubbed wooden floors. A city dweller her whole life, Elise had only seen this type of building in the movies.

The sun was peeking in through the cracks in the shutters over the small window, and Elise had a feeling it was early morning. Aside from the sting in her hip from falling out of the bed, she felt well rested. She rolled her head back and forth, stretching her neck; even the normal soreness she experienced from spending an overabundant amount of time in a computer chair was absent.

She frowned a bit, one eyebrow lifting in question at her strange surroundings, “Wellp…I guess I should figure out what’s going on?”

Elise got up. In doing so, she found that her body moved with significantly more power and grace than it normally could. Instead of pushing herself into a sitting position with her arm and levering herself back up into a standing position with a bit of a roll, she instead tucked her knees to her chest, and threw herself into a standing position in one smooth motion.

“Alllll right…” Elise said, drawing the syllables out a bit as she twisted back and forth from the hips, then leaned side to side, stretching with her arm over her head. As she tested her range of motion, she also noted that even her clothing was unfamiliar. Instead of an old ratty oversize t-shirt she got as swag from a convention, and a pair of fuzzy pajama pants whose matching top she’d lost track of ages ago, she was wearing a matched set of cream colored linen undergarments – shorts and a camisole. They were plain, but functional, similar to what she would expect a toon to wear on a new character building screen.

She shook her head a bit, snorting to herself. She was playing too much Veritas; maybe it was time that she took a real vacation instead of just taking time off whenever an expansion dropped. Was that what she had done? Was she in Europe right now? She didn’t think she’d drank enough the night before to fly across the ocean in a blacked out stupor.

Elise went to the closet after finishing her morning stretches and mild calisthenics. They didn’t feel entirely necessary, since she wasn’t particularly sore, but they were part of her routine. She had gained weight after university and had grown soft in the middle; stretching wouldn’t reverse that, but she felt that if she didn’t do at least the bare minimum amount of exercise she’d eventually become rooted permanently to her computer chair.

In the closet, instead of finding a suitcase hastily stuffed with t-shirts and jeans she found a mannequin decked with unnervingly familiar clothing. A white shirt with a deep red vest, and bright red velvet riding jacket. On the top of a dresser was a pair reddish brown leather pants and matching bracers. In the corner of the closet behind the mannequin was a longbow and a quiver full of arrows with fletchings in different colors. Some of the arrows glowed faintly with a yellowish, pulsing light. Her hand shaking, Elise slowly reached out to finger the edges of the riding jacket; her riding jacket? It was soft on her fingers, which she found were a bit rougher than those of a lifelong computer nerd with a distinct aversion to manual labor.

“No way!” Elise cried out, hopping back – then she rushed forward again into the small walk in closet, her eyes alight with excitement. Maybe this was a dream, but even if it was a dream she was going to make the most of it.

She emerged from the room ten minutes later fully decked out in her red ranger gear. She would have been out sooner, but she found that even in a game, or dream-game, she had to struggle to get tight leather pants on. After a few minutes of fruitless shimmying and unsteady hopping in the closet, she finally gave in and laid down on the bed. The joy she felt once the pants were on and buttoned up was greater than the situation should have called for, but Elise didn’t care – she was in Veritas! She didn’t have time to be embarrassed about her ridiculous tight-pants-struggle, she needed to get out there before she got sucked into some stupid crafting job, and her lovely dream somehow shifted into an annoying nightmare.

Elise was moving with such pep in her step that she was nearly skipping, and quickly descended the stairs into the common room of the inn. The innkeeper greeted her with a foggy smile and a wave from behind the long, polished oak bar.

The innkeeper was a broad, bearded man with mischievous blue eyes who was fond of beer and regaling adventurers with tales of how he had once been an adventurer himself until an injury to his knee caused him to retire. He stifled a yawn with the back of one hand, and waved her over with the other, “Nnnn- good morning Miss Elise. Come, have a seat. Will it be porridge with honey today? We also have bacon, eggs, and toast if you need something more substantial.”

“I think something more substantial for today,” Elise said easily, having already decided that the first thing she wanted to do was try hunting. She wasn’t sure what zone she was in, but if the enemies outside the safe area were tough she wanted to be as confident in her constitution as she could be.

The innkeeper nodded along just as easily.

“That’s a good choice for new adventurers,” he said as he served up her plate. “It might seem like a dear expense when you’re on the road, but I think you’ll find that starting the day off with a healthy breakfast will help you keep your strength up longer. That boost will help you make back more than just your gold in the end.”

Elise frowned slightly at the implication that she was a new adventurer, but decided not to contradict the innkeeper. In the game an NPC was unlikely to have a wide enough range of dialogue options to respond in a way that made sense, but she was hesitant to push him even in this dream – in case it caused her to wake up. She wanted to explore this dreamscape as long as she could; even acknowledging this was a dream could wake her up, so she distracted herself from this dangerous train of thought by digging into her breakfast. It was delicious and filling, and felt far more real to her than a dream ever had before.

As soon as she was done eating Elise made her way gleefully out of the inn, and found that once she was outside she knew exactly where she was. She was in the Ragland Ward of Veritasia City, her character’s home ward in the human starting zone. She rarely visited Ragland Ward, or Veritasia City for that matter, preferring to spend most of her time at the guild base where she had easier access to a centrally located bank and crafting stations.

Perhaps the innkeeper was treating her like a new character because she actually was a new character? Her memory was fuzzy, but she thought she could remember a game prompt that took her into this dream…did it say it was taking her back to the beginning? Maybe that’s what it meant.

Once she made her way past the gates of Ragland Ward and into the city proper, the number of people she ran into increased noticeably. As she passed people negotiating with street vendors and criers announcing the times for the next set of events, she considered her options. Then, she adjusted course and made her way toward the Training Grounds.

It had been four years since Veritas launched, and three since Elise’s friend Mattie talked her into trying the game, but if her memory served her right the first thing she ought to do was find her class trainer. They would give her several easy starting quests that would get her to level ten, when she could unlock her crafting skills.

As much as her guild mates tried to avoid crafting, finding it boring, Elise knew that leveling crafting early would boost her character’s reputation. Not only would crafting allow her to create gear comparable to the best in slot items that would only come from random drops (or from the trading post if you would rather spend gold) but it would also help unlock new zones and quest lines. She didn’t want to level heavily through crafting like she did her first go around, as she wanted to improve her technical combat prowess, but she thought a well-rounded approach would serve her best.

The Training Grounds were a rectangular courtyard with sets of straw dummies arranged in sections around a circular sand-filled sparring ring. Several barracks surrounded the training grounds, where the city guards lived during their training, and class trainers were stationed near their corresponding training apparatus.  The whole area was crowded with what Elise could only assume were other ‘new players’, all trying to accost the class trainers at once.

Since Elise had come into the game late, she had never seen the training grounds this crowded before; she wondered if this was what it had been like at launch, or maybe during early access? She’d heard that the servers were so overloaded at launch that they crashed several times, and had been glad she avoided that mess. Fortunately for Elise, ranger was not a very popular class and she was able to make her way toward the ranger area with only minimal shoving.

Lounging idly against the wall of a barracks, near a set of straw dummies bedecked with various targets, Elise could see Rob - the ranger class trainer. He was watching with a bored expression as a few people took shots at the target dummies.  Rob was a man of medium height, fit but not bulky, with a long greyish-green wool cloak. His hood was back, giving a clear view of his rough, stubble shadowed face and shoulder length, wavy reddish-brown hair. He was lighting a long pipe as Elise approached him, and puffed out smoke with a bit of a cough as she surprised him with a cheerful, “Hi there!”

“Ah,” Rob said, relaxing again, voice smooth with a mellow smoky quality to it, “Hello. Nice bow you’ve got there. Do you need help learning how to use it?”

Elise nodded energetically, “Yes, I would love to learn how to use this bow. Could you show me?”

“Aye, that would be my job,” Rob said as he shifted away from the wall he’d been leaning, walking over to an unoccupied target dummy. Elise followed, unslinging her bow from her shoulder.

Rob nodded approvingly as he watched her string her bow, “So you’re not completely green. That’s good. Go ahead and show me, then. Try taking a shot.”

Elise turned to the side, assuming the position she’d seen her toon take countless times, lifted her bow, and took a shot. She missed, much to her disappointment, her shot going wide of the target and impacting a wooden fence behind it.

Rob nodded again, his expression not approving, but also not disappointed, “Try again, but pause before you shoot.”

She pulled her bow up again, pausing with the arrow down. Robin came behind her, gently touching her elbow to lift it, and putting both hands on her hips to shift them. “You’re too tense. You want to hold yourself firmly, but not tensely. The bow string should twang, not you. Take a few deep breaths. Good. Release the arrow on the exhale.”

She could feel his breath on the back of her neck as he spoke to her, his smooth voice so low that only she could hear it. Her breath released with the arrow she’d been holding as the hair on the back of her neck stood up. She missed again, but it was closer this time – the arrow sticking into the straw on the dummy’s side, just shy of the target.

Rob smiled gently at her, “Better. Keep going. See me once you’ve struck each target three times.”

Elise licked her lips, trying to hide a blush by turning back to the targets and drawing her bow. “Will do.”

Part of the reason she chose the ranger class was because of characters like Strider or Rob; rugged, purpose driven characters who weren’t exactly ‘pretty’, but had strong presence. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to be like him, be with him, or maybe some combination of both, but she hadn’t expected to react so strongly to an NPC. She certainly didn’t remember finding him so attractive during her first play through.

Rob walked away with a quiet purposeful step that Elise would soon come to associate with hunting, and sat on his stool, puffing on his pipe as his students practiced.

It took longer than she had expected, maybe an hour, but once the nervousness left her Elise found that she could consistently hit the targets. This was more involved than the two minutes she normally took on easy starting quests in games, but she was enjoying herself. She stuck with it for a bit more than three shots per target before approaching Rob again.

“Good work, greenwood.” Rob said, nodding at her approvingly. “I don’t know that you’re ready to join the White Hunt, but with practice I think you’ll get there. Speaking of practice, I might have a task for you - if you’re interested. It would be helpful to the city, and I’d make it worth your while.”

“Sure,” Elise replied, feeling a bit nostalgic as he explained her next quest. She was to go to the edge of the White Wood and help cull the jackalope population. The jackalopes had been migrating out of the White Wood and into the fields just outside the city, causing havoc for the farmers who worked those fields.

Elise knew that the jackalopes were actually being driven from the White Wood by corruptive demonic forces that would soon start turning the wood black, but she didn’t want to confuse the NPCs by trying to explain this to them. It’s not like she could skip these quests and go straight to the dungeon boss anyway; she was far too low level. She might as well enjoy the experience of playing through these quests again as a new player.

Before she left, Rob rewarded her for completing her target practice quest.

“Here,” Rob said, offering her a pair of small pouches. “It’s not much, but you impressed me by doing more than what I asked. Dedication deserves recognition.”

“Thank you,” Elise said, then walked away before she became flustered by the minor praise. Elise opened the bags as she walked from the training ground, noting that he had given her a small amount of coin and some smoked jerky. As she headed to the city gate closest to the white wood, she wondered if Rob made the jerky himself. Smoky voice, smoky pipe, smoked jerky…she could definitely sense a theme here.