Chapter 16: “Wayne, Standing in a Prairie”
—First, gotta make a character.
Having returned home from work, he booted up the VR apparatus in his room to let it warm up while he ate, bathed, and took care of other chores. This was the latest VR machine available on the market, so while it may not look the same, it had the same high specs as the machines used in healthcare. It cost many times the amount an average office worker took home each year, but he didn’t have a job that took place in VR, he was required to go on-site to work, and that meant his earnings could easily afford the luxury. In other words, he was very well compensated.
With the propagation of VR technology, people rarely needed to leave their homes, but there were still places that required staff to be there in person. Even though the healthcare industry was integrated with VR, patients still needed to go to healthcare facilities to be hospitalized and for things like surgery, so healthcare workers were needed there as well. He was one of those workers. Due to the nature of this work, compared to a more common occupation like office worker, he had to spend a lot more time commuting. Therefore, the time he could spend on his only hobby, video games, was very limited. Because of that, he spent all his pay on gaming peripherals and premium paid content.
He had purchased this brand new VR apparatus just for the game he was about to log into and play. Since all information about the closed beta test was going to be completely hidden from the public, he had applied to the beta, got in, and spent what little time he had available enjoying the game. He had become so enamored by it that he decided to dip into his savings to pay for this VR apparatus. He was hoping it would arrive before the game’s official launch, and it got delivered just before the open beta was announced. He finished setting it up yesterday, and so it was all ready and waiting for him once he was done with work today.
After creating a character with just about the same build that he had in the closed beta, he named his character [Wayne] and dove into the game world. Having chosen [Handsome] from the new innate characteristic system, he didn’t have enough XP to get everything he wanted, but if he spent a few days grinding he was sure he’d be able to get one or two spells.
—All right, let my otherworld adventure begin.
An hour later, he finally found himself standing in a wide open prairie.
“Why does it take an entire hour to get through the tutorial…? They should have let people who were in the closed beta skip it or something.”
The tutorial support AI kept going on and on about basically the outlook of the world and the game’s ambiance and whatever. Having played hard during the closed beta, he thought this all came way too late. The AI back then was already nearly perfect; he didn’t feel any uneasiness about NPCs acting human. It was pointless for him to now be told that there was no difference between NPCs and PCs.