Long Island

Chapter 7: Return

Please Note: Statements between % something in italics % are game system messages. 

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Swamy lifted his head from the test he was writing. They had found that today was a surprise test day. He thought about how to answer the questions, which asked for an opinion or an argument, rather than a correct answer. Virtual reality was a complex and deep subject involving as much of the psychological as the physical aspects. After all it was not only a discussion of how to apply physical laws on to the virtual reality, but it was also a question of how much to limit it by those laws. For example, games allowed people to fly. If you followed physical laws you would need to have hollow bones to make you lighter and a streamlined body structure like a bird. Unless ofcourse you had the ability to turn into a jet plane or a bird using metamorphosis. Which became another argument of limiting the laws.

It was this flexibility that allowed people to separate reality and virtual reality adding imagination in their concept of world creation.

Though if you have open ended questions like, 'describe your feelings' or 'how do you think', it became more of a matter of psychology than science.

Swamy finished writing. He checked his answers for any mistakes and read it again to make sure his point was coming through in the answers. After making a couple of changes, he read it again. Satisfied, he stood up and walked towards the teachers desk with his answer sheet in his hand. He put it on the desk and walked out of the classroom. He breathed a sigh of relief coming out and headed to the cafeteria. They had free period next, as the prof had come down sick, so classes would resume after lunch.

In the loud and noisy cafeteria, he soon found a group talking loudly having four of the loudest people he had met. Even the girls seemed to shout out their opinion across the table at times. Swamy simply took a seat next to them and opened his lunch.

"Ah homemade as always Swamy. Your Aunt must dote on you."

"Yeah, she is really nice too."

And with the short comment they began their loud discussion on the test. That too, soon changed as all of them finally realized that they would have to agree to disagree. And the talk switched to Long Island.

"I finally learned cooking!" said Himali. "It was really hard to impress the old man Goffam, the cook I got the quest from, but I finally succeeded with an apple pie."

"Congrats. Ah I wish I have your luck. I have been trying to learn tailoring but so far no success. Rajan got his quest from a different tailor and he's succeeded already. Maybe it is easier to learn from some people than the others." Sneha complained.

"Could be. I also haven't impressed the blacksmith so far, maybe I will give up and get the quest from some other blacksmith." Manish agreed.

"You can't do that. Didn't you read the posts? I guess you didn't. Once you get a skill quest from one, you cannot get the same skill quest from any other, even if you drop it. They simply don't agree. Ofcourse I don't know if this rule applies to npcs of other locations but in the village, once you start to learn from one, no other blacksmith will allow you to learn from them. You have to go back to the one you started with. Don't know why, but they would like exclusive student teacher relationships, I guess." the information house of our group Rajan spoke.

"Are you serious!! Man that sucks big time!"

"Yeah, this guy learned first hand and posted. It looks like a lot of people were on the verge of dropping and some actually did and were trying at other places, but this post changed everything. Its the most popular post in the forums right now."