Trials of a VRMMO Healer

Chapter 14 - Or Din

I decided I would name the scaledog Arti, because when he was curled up, he looked like an artichoke. Upon doing so, I got the [Animal Handling] skill. It seemed like taming a pet was a prerequisite. Normally, you'd take the [Animal Taming] skill first and go out and tame a pet, which would grant you the corresponding skill. But since you could also gain skills by meeting some kind of hidden prerequisites, I had been able to skip doing all that. The [Animal Handling] skill was useful because it let me give Arti commands. He seemed to be able to understand general commands like 'heel' or 'stay', or 'sic', but he wasn't really able to handle more complex commands. I didn't use him much for fighting because, well, he was still a baby. Occasionally I'd let him finish off a monster so that he could at least gain some experience.

Speaking of experience, I had broken my rule about not looking up guides so I could at least get a handle on the basic mechanics of EO. I'll try to break it down simply. EO doesn't have an experience with levels and such. Instead it has skills. That much I knew. What I hadn't realized is that the requirements for leveling a skill were always hidden. For basic skills, it was pretty simple. A requirement might be, "Go fight ten enemies using this weapon". Usually just playing would level a skill. Basic skills usually worked this way. But you couldn't, say, fight a million weak enemies and hope to advance your skills to max level. Most of the requirements for basic skills were mapped out. So far so good. Complex skills, meanwhile, had, well, more complex requirements but, again, they generally required that you use the skill. Most of the requirements for basic skills and the basic-tier complex skills had been worked out, but the requirements for advanced skills had not. Given EO's popularity, one might find that surprising, but it turned out there weren't any set requirements. Instead, the control AIs determined whether or not a player qualified for a skill. They were also in charge of overall balance and even granting unique skills and quests. I had been wondering how much of EO had been designed by its creators. It did, after all, seem far more vast than any game I'd played before.

So, if the game judged your skill level based on how well you had actually mastered the skill, then what were skill points for? Well, skill levels also determined how much the system assisted you. If you had a high, say, marksmanship skill, the game would provide an automatic correction to your aim. So you could use skill points to buy new skills and get started with things you couldn't do otherwise.

In any case, as part of my training, I was exploring Or Din. Yes, the underwater city beneath the lake. Getting in had been an endeavor in and of itself. Diving underwater was no fun and while I had set my bind point to Watch so even if I died, I'd revive here, drowning was really unpleasant. Ingvild had told me that this was the next step and that I would learn more in Or Din, but nothing more than that. It's a good thing I wasn't paying anything for this instruction. I spent a few days trying to learn to go into a trance state. That was the first step. Eventually I found I could do it with a fair amount of consistency but that didn't mean I could still do anything while in that state. It was too fragile. I knew a little about quantum computing and it had a similar problem. You could get a lot of power out of quantum entanglement but the problem with it was that it was so easy to break an entangled state. I'm not saying my trances were quantum in nature, exactly, but it was a reasonable analogy. I could see more and more of the universal wave function but doing so without disturbing anything was next to impossible. Does that make sense or is it too nerdy?

I figured my problem was that I was going too broad. I didn't need to know every wave in the lake, I just needed to know what was around me. I also had mana—the magic source of energy in this world that was provided by the game devs—so I could manipulate things without needing to physically interfere. Thought-based interfaces were fairly common, but most were pretty simple. You'd put a device on behind your ear and you could control your phone and clicks. EO's interface was far more sophisticated. I had wondered how it worked, but from what I understood, it sort of cheated. See, while computers had a hard time parsing human thoughts, human brains were extraordinarily flexible. It was far easier to teach players how to produce thoughts that the system could read than to teach the system to interpret complex commands.