Chapter 31: “Official Launch”
It was finally time for the full release.
Today was Wayne’s payday. It was also the day before a holiday, so he’d have three days off again. As someone who started playing during the open beta, he didn’t need to worry about the glut of new players; all the ones starting after the official launch would have to compete against each other for all three days of his vacation, or two days for those who didn’t start until tomorrow.
“Yo Wayne, been waitin’ long?”
“No, I just got here too, Rare.”
Two days ago, he met the player Rare, and they promised to explore the forest together on the day of the official launch, today. However, Rare still had the starting armor, so first they had to upgrade it otherwise it’d be too dangerous. Fortunately, Wayne had been able to scrape together enough money for a hatchet and an overcoat, and Rare also hunted enough rabbits to afford new armor and her own overcoat. It helped that the cost of Rabbit Leather was down, too. Since rabbits were also sold for their meat, even if the market was oversaturated with leather, the price per head wouldn’t drop all that much, which was great for beginners.
They only had Wayne’s hatchet between the two of them, but since they didn’t have any more people joining them, as long as Wayne took the lead, it should be fine. Part of him also wanted to look good in front of this newer player.
Since gaming was a special activity for Rare, it seemed she enjoyed the roleplaying aspect a lot. To that end, they didn’t really talk about being players, pretending they were residents here, both with each other and with the NPCs. The game’s NPCs—or the residents of this world—being what they were, Wayne wasn’t opposed to acting the part.
In spite of that, she had a friend who was playing separately, as occasionally she would clearly be using friend chat to talk to them. He wondered why they didn’t play together, since they could friend each other in advance during account creation, before character creation, which would let them spawn together, but they hadn’t known that. When Wayne told the friend this via chat one time, it was comical how shocked they were to find out about it. What an innocent person.
Wayne thought about adding Rare to his friend list, but he wasn’t sure if she trusted him yet, so it was hard for him to ask. That was how things were in this day and age: Even in VR games, it was dangerous to formally connect with people using the system unless you trusted them. In the real world, the criminalization of stalking had finally begun being enforced in earnest, but it was still hard to build a case for victims of VR stalking. Friending someone in a game could be used as a pretext for stalking. But of course, Wayne had no interest in stalking.