Chương 42: Meeting new people

While I'm finishing reading about spell craft and how to improve the speed of what I'm casting, someone sits down across from me. He has a drink in each hand, and extends one of them towards me with a smile.

"Hi," he says.

"I'm John." I look at John. He's an elf, but there's something about him that's a bit off. Not wrong, just like he isn't quite comfortable with himself yet. That alone would be enough to tell me that he's from Earth. But also, after a few seconds his identifier appears over his head. John. Forest Elf Footman, level 21. HP 735/735. I smile at him and accept the drink.

"Hi John," I say.

"I'm Caleb. I take it you came through the tutorial the first time?"

"Yeah, I've been here for about a week. Wait. Does that mean you didn't get through the tutorial the first time?"

"No, we went through it twice. Apparently, we never got the memo about what park to be in."

"So you died?" I nod.

"Sure did. Went to bed one night thinking that the tutorial was about to end, woke up dead instead." So he must have gone through the tutorial just the one time, except - "Did you say you've been here for a week? Like, in this world?"

"Yes," he says.

"That's how I made it to level twenty one. We had the experience buff for being new to the world. It just ended, but I still expect to hit level twenty two tomorrow." A week means that his tutorial period ended before my first one began.

"Was the god of the tutorial still there when you went through it?"

"What do you mean?" he asks.

"When we went through the portal into this world, we were told that the god of the tutorial was missing. Dead, I think. And when we went through the tutorial, we never got any information. We had to figure everything out on our own."

"The tutorial was very thorough," John tells me.

"We had the gradually increasing death penalty, the explanation of monster generators, the difference between day and night, and then that we had to go to the park." I laugh.

"We had none of that. We had to just learn by experience." So the god died before my tutorial even began.

"Did you come from Minneapolis?" I ask him. He shakes his head.

"Philadelphia," he says.

"You're from Minnesota? That's wild. I wonder how many people came over from Earth, all told."

"The warden guy said that there were over two thousand," I say.

"And that's just here; we know there are other places where people might have gone. Our party got split up when we came here, based on what we chose to be."

"You mean the species thing?" he blushes, and it reaches his ears.

"Yeah. There are six types of elves, so at least six places."

"So at least twelve thousand people," I say.

"Probably more. Hopefully more."

"What do you mean? Why hopefully?"

"It was a sort of post apocalypse world," I say.

"Everyone else was pretty much killed, I think. I don't like to think that only twelve thousand people made it over here from our old world."

"You think it was the end of the world?" I shrug.

"It sure seems that way, doesn't it? I don't know how many of us made it out alive, but I hope it's more than a one in a million kind of thing."

"Could mean the end of humanity," John says, the smile draining away from his face.

"And then we come here and most of us aren't even human anymore."

"There might be a lot of humans still around," I say.

"Not everyone will choose to be something other than human. And the humans might be in a seventh place."

"You're kind of a bummer, Caleb. If you don't mind me saying so."

"Sorry," I say.

"I've been in the position of having to figure everything out as I go for a week now. I guess it led me to some dark lines of thought."

"Well, you're here now," John says, shaking off the dour mood that had been settling on him.

"And now that you're in this world, welcome!"

"Thank you," I say, smiling. My eyes glance above his head again and I have to ask "So what level were you when you made it out of the tutorial?"

"Seven," he says.

"I know, fourteen levels is a lot to get in a week. But you understand; you're an even higher level than I am."

"So what is everyone doing now that they're in this new world?" I ask him.

"Are people adjusting well?" This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

"For the most part," John says.

"At least, it seems that way to me. Most people are making guilds, or trying to."

"Guilds? Like the hunters guild or the adventurers guild?"

"No, not like that. More like guilds you'd see in an MMO. Did you play any of those in the old world?" I have played. And I don't like that kind of guild. Some of them are good, don't get me wrong. Some of them are focused on making sure that people don't have to play alone, that there are options for people to do that they probably couldn't do by themselves. They help each other player and help each other succeed. Those are all well and good. But there's another thing that happens when people form guilds.

They fight with each other, they get snooty and they start throwing around their guild membership as if it means something. Being in the best guild somehow makes you a better person, or a more important person, or something like that. They start to treat the guilds like the organization matters, and like being higher ranked in a made up guild in a video game somehow makes you better than others. I hate that.

"I never liked MMOs," I say.

"I preferred to play my games alone, or with a very few close friends. I was playing to relax, not to play politics."

"I can understand that," John says.

"But this world is a different story. We may need guilds to protect us, to keep us safe from exploitation."

"What exploitation?" I hadn't considered this.

"We're an army that essentially never dies," he says.

"Like, we can be killed, but we just come back. We're easier to retrain than a fresh army would be to train, and we come back with more skills than a fresh recruit. We just need levels, and those are easy enough to get."

"Yeah, I can see that."

"So what if Elmspire decided to press us all into their army when they go to war? There are other cities they can go to war with, other nations that are worth fighting. What if they want us to do that? And what if we don't want to go to war? Shouldn't we have a say?"

"I mean, yes. Obviously we should have a say."

"That's what guilds do," he says.

"It's a collective bargaining thing. Think of it like a union. A union makes sure that no one worker gets mistreated. They make sure that we're given considerations and are well compensated for our work. They make sure our work is safe, our conditions acceptable, and our efforts well received. They make sure that no one can take advantage of us."

"I can see the value in that," I say. I'm still hesitant. I don't want to be part of a guild, but I don't want to get press ganged into an army either. Though war is probably going to come with a lot of rewards and a boatload of experience, I'd rather it be my choice to get involved in it.

"That's why we're forming guilds," he says.

"We're still in the stage of gathering money for the cause, of course. We need to buy a guild hall so that we have a centralized location. Other benefit of that, of course, is that it gives all the guild members a place to sleep, quarters to live in, and food to eat."

"Those are all good things," I agree.

"There are probably going to be thirty or forty guilds forming over the next few weeks," he says.

"Then those forty will probably consolidate into twenty or even ten." Consolidate. That sounds like guild wars. No one is going to want to just give up a thing that they've worked hard to create. They'll fight, and that means battle between the outworlders. Which will probably make the natives happy. The one thing that they probably don't want is for us to be united. Not if we're going to be powerful at the same time.

"And let me guess, you want me to join your guild?" I ask. He smiles.

"I'm just offering an option," he says.

"Something to consider. But I can tell you're hesitant. Why don't you think about it for a while, and when you're ready to talk about it, you can drop me a line through the message system."

"Wait," I say.

"Message system?" This could be better than short range telepathy.

"Yeah," he says, as if it should have been obvious.

"You know you can send your friends messages, right? As long as someone is on your friend list, all you have to do is highlight their name and you can send them a message. You can even send out a blast to everyone on your friends list if you want to. Didn't the tutorial teach you about those?" I shake my head.

"I told you, the tutorial didn't teach us anything. We had to figure it out on our own."

"Well, now you know, at least. What do you say? Can I friend you? That way, you can send me a line whenever you want to." I send Gigi and El a message when I leave the inn, telling them to meet me by the hunter's guild. I also promise I'll teach them how to send messages when I see them next. This changes everything. Being able to send messages takes a little while, but it's a form of silent communication. We can probably spread out around an enemy and coordinate our attack by message.

That's way better than being able to read minds or whisper something into someone's head. I wonder why telepathy was even an available talent if we can do this. Maybe because it only works between outworlders, between players. That's a much better way to think of it, I think. Considering everyone from Earth a player makes every native an NPC. And that makes them easier to handle as far as having to kill my enemies like I did at the two bandit camps. The players can die and will come back.

And since an NPC won't come back, they aren't as real as players. Right? Is that a way I can think of them? Or is that just dehumanizing a group of people so that it will be okay to murder them? Am I being rational, or am I being a psychopath? While I'm waiting for the girls at the hunter guild, I decide to see if there are new quests that we qualify for. It doesn't take me long to find them; the guild seems to have an endless number of quests. Spider hunter: Harvest giant spider poison glands. Progress: 0/5.

Reward: 30 renown, 15, 000 experience. Bargheast Pelt: Harvest bargheast pelts. Progress: 0/5. Reward: 50 renown, 25, 000 experience. Those are the only two that sound interesting. The rest of them are for lower level animals and monsters and don't seem like they'd be enough of a challenge to really bother doing. I suppose we could get some extra renown by doing those quests, but I feel like they're better saved for people with lower levels than us. These two quests together are enough for me to level up to 27.

The way I figure it, that makes them quests about fit for my level. Besides, I've never seen a bargheast. They may be a much higher level monster than I've dealt with before, and I want to get used to hunting them before I take on another quest.

"Are you ready to head back out?" El asks me, slapping me on the back and adding her signature to the quest markers.

"I want to go in a different direction and see if there are different monsters."

"I'm ready," I say.

"And I met someone who got here before us. Long before us."

"How long?" she asks.

"Like he completed the tutorial the first time?" I shake my head.

"Like he had a tutorial before ours began. And his had a god."