108: Evils of Unrelenting Optimism

Evils of Unrelenting Optimism

| Vir-Tech Labs |

*1-Hour Compilation of Nightfury's Best Sighs-REMIX plays in the background*

"REALM FUCKING TWO, VISBY."

"I know, Stacey."

"GUILDS WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO APPEAR UNTIL REALM FUCKING TWO."

"I know, Stacey."

"HOW."

Visby sticks seven Cheetos in his mouth at the same time in answer.

The puffs kind. 

Someone whistles.

Stacey yanks her hoodie strings until her face is completely covered and screams.

Ding Fan wishes he were the one yelling his frustration out into the void right now, but mild, even-keeled Stacey has finally hit her limit and succumbed to her first panicked rage-induced meltdown. 

It's a big moment in any Vir-Tech programmer's career; he doesn't want to steal Stacey's thunder. It's important to let her have this time.

Instead, he steals a puff from Visby and attempts to eat his feelings.

With the clarity only MSG and Yellow #6 can provide, Ding Fan recognizes he doesn't have it all that bad. Stacey has more on the line with this disruption than he does. She was a Team Lead during the initial Guild Protocol creation phase, so she's the first one the Nova AI pinged to help with the current shitstorm of reprogramming.

Even as she screams, she furiously types.

That's the kind of energy Visby and Ding Fan can appreciate.

Unfortunately, not everyone understands. In an effort to be helpful, an intern makes the mistake of interrupting Stacey's tirade with an actual answer. Visby tries to stop him, but he is betrayed by his one true orange love, and chokes on cheese dust.

"There are a lot of reasons guilds are going online early!" Overeager Intern chirps. "Mostly though, I'd say it's Ere—um, I mean, *HIS* broken Fickle Fortune. And, you know, the fact that He's the only person in the entire game who knows how to beat the HinkyPunk."

Overeager Intern may be an idiot, but even he knows better than to speak The Name. 

"BUT HE DOESN'T THOUGH?!" an Enemy Programmer cries, confused yet enraged. (Standard emotional reaction to Erebus's batshittery.) "He only beat it solo, and I specifically changed the Regen requirements so that the Boss needs to be hit by a different attacker every 30s or it regenerates a quarter of its HP. Plus, all 5 Party members have to contribute at least 15% of the total damage output apiece, or when the Boss goes into the Red Zone, it suddenly attacks and one-hit-kills whoever has the highest DPS."

"Besides," someone else chimes in, "He should have been sick of running that stupid dungeon by now! We made him run it over a hundred times in the beta, and all of the drops suck, and it's way too easy to Party Wipe!"

Ding Fan pretends he can't hear the thirsty artists in the corner excitedly debating whether this proves Erebus is a Masochist.

Overeager Intern nods. "The whole thing certainly seems serendipitous!" he exclaims, far too happily considering Erebus fucked the entire development calendar by at least six weeks. "The HinkyPunk Hidden Boss has a super low appearance rate, and the Guild Creation Token has an even lower drop rate, and only drops if all 5 Party members survive. Plus, the Dungeon is in an inconvenient location and drops no useful loot. There's no obvious reason to run the Dungeon now. And there won't be until after the Realm Two update when we release the quest that reveals the clue pointing to the HinkyPunk as the holder of the Guild Creation Token. And even then, Parties should need to coordinate super well to find and then beat the Boss repeatedly before finally earning the token, since the game wants to make sure the groups are strong enough at working together to form a solid guild foundation."

Stacey loosens the hoodie enough to dead-eye stare the intern. "YOU THINK I DON'T FUCKING KNOW THAT? I HELPED DESIGN THAT TEST."

Ding Fan knows he could stop this from devolving any further.

Ding Fan eats another cheese puff.

"You did?!" Overeager Intern's eyes are sparkling. "It's such a great test for teamwork and leadership!" 

'Stop while you're ahead. Stop while you're ahead,' literally everyone silently chants.

(Well, except for Arjun, but no one counts him. He just wants to watch the world burn.

Great Enemy Programmer, though. If he'd been in charge of the HinkyPunk updates, Erebus may have actually failed.

…Which, in retrospect, may be exactly why Arjun didn't volunteer.)

Overeager Intern does not stop while he's ahead. "The D'Raven-Who-Shalt-Not-Be-Named sure is a good leader, wouldn't you say?"

Collectively, the entire development team flinches.

"NO I DO NOT SAY," Stacey shrieks, chewing her frayed hoodie string like a rabid puppy.

No one mentions the "I Code 4 Chaos<3Boy" sticky note still hanging off one of her monitors. This isn't the time for logical reasoning.

This is the time for distraction.

Ding Fan sighs in time with the background music, then loudly says, "Welp, guess the take-away here is that it just couldn't be helped, then."

Stacey actually growls at this, and Ding Fan absently wonders how much more puppy-like she can get.

"None of this would have happened if you'd listened to me!" she denies forcefully. "I warned you all about placing things in Realm One we didn't really want players to have access to until Realm Two or Three. But you were all so worried about late joiners not being able to catch up to the earlier players. Ugh!" she grunts, thunking her head onto her desk. Her next words are a frustrated mumble, but everyone still hears them. "Like, who knows what else we set up that could technically be achieved way too early by these insane gamers, you know?"

It's clearly meant to be rhetorical.

But the devs can't help but think about the answer anyway, as the words seem to echo in the windowless room.

For a moment, no one moves. No one breathes.

Finally, "Oh shit," someone whispers.

Arjun cackles and strolls off to make a pot of tea.

Like a dam bursting, a wave of activity crashes through the office as everyone else furiously checks what other headaches The Nameless and other freak gamers like Him could conceivably cause in the near future.

Someone rolls in a new giant whiteboard, and an art intern with good handwriting starts a bullet-point list as people start shouting possibilities. Visby wrings his now-empty chip bag like he wishes it were Erebus's neck, then hauls himself up to color-code the list based on priority concerns.

Stacey snorts and slows her frantic string chewing, suddenly remembering that others, too, suffer under the rein of the Chaos Gremlin.

Ding Fan sighs, content. His work here is done. He plucks the fresh cuppa out of Arjun's hands on his way back to his station and takes a good, fortifying sip before settling back into the chaos.

----------

| Eric's Apartment Building, Seattle |

I wake to a deluge of neon Aether Alerts filling my vision. I'm in a strange, blank space; or, at least my mind is. I don't have a physical form, but I still feel *here* somehow.

It's disorienting, but before I can get too concerned, one Alert moves front and center to explain my predicament. It seems I'm in some sort of mind-space located outside of Viren's Refuge, a new VR feature that hasn't been completed by Vir-Tech yet and is therefore unavailable to the public. Access was included as one of the updates to my V-Haven.

Yet another thing I'm a guinea pig for.

Yay.

I spend some time reading through the various Alerts. The gist is that the V-Haven put me to sleep for about two hours, and the physical symptoms from the panic attack have completely abated. I'm still required to get out of the V-Haven and walk around in the real world for a bit, like the System requires of people who die in-game, to make certain my mind and body understand I'm not in real danger from Viren's Refuge.

The irony there is that according to another few Alerts, I'm actually in more real-world danger while in-game than I am outside it. My neurotransmitter levels increased dangerously again, especially during my blind-folded battle with the Redcap Boss, and my gaming pod had to employ some of its new medical upgrade features to filter out another nosebleed.

In a bizarre twist, before it could get too bad, getting cursed and losing my AGI actually counteracted the SIINO effects. I guess I couldn't reach the Zone when I was so weakened and my teammates were picking up the slack, so I didn't go through too much S-grade solution, and my brainwave activity lowered to more normal levels.

Well, normal for me, anyway. According to one of the reports, my brain may operate at some weird level on the reg. (I think? Not gonna lie, I maybe understood 1 in 10 words of that particular Alert.)

Anyway, the scientific report that makes the most sense to me says my body needs to run a battery of tests for movement and strength. One of the Vir-Tech docs thinks I can counteract SIINO by constantly reminding my body how it works IRL. Also, the stronger, faster, and more flexible my body becomes in the real world, the less disconnect there will be in-game. Or, at least, my brain will recognize that growth in those categories is "normal," so it won't freak out so much when I grow in those areas with my in-game body as well, even though the growth will be far more extreme than is possible in reality.

Or something. "Makes the most sense to me" is kinda a low bar. I still don't get half the conjectures the doc is making here.2

BUT. As I flop ungracefully out of the V-Haven and wobble like a newborn fawn, I do understand one thing.

Ken.

I'm gonna need mothafucking Ken.

---

"Bro!"

"Ken."

"BRO! So totally rad to see you! The Ken-bro's missed his fave workout buddy!"

'Stick this out or literally probably die, Eric Lieu,' I remind myself.

While I stretch, Ken reads the follow-up email Vir-Tech had sent me with the suggested physiological tests and focus areas. His toothy smile grows impossibly larger as he reads, to the point his excitement for the training ahead makes him almost vibrate out of his neon pink workout tank (that features a creepily jacked unicorn bench-pressing a rainbow? Where does he find these?!)

We start out with 40 minutes of a hardcore HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) workout, and it's impressively awful, and I hate everything, and I'm forcefully reminded that Ken is a gods-damned machine who somehow never sweats or tires or stops smiling with teeth so bright my retinas burn when I look at them.

The worst is the unrelenting positivity, though.

"Bro, you got this bro! You don't need to slow down, do you bro? 'Course not! You're gonna speed up and do 40 push-ups in a minute next round, aren't you bro? Sure you are. 'Cause you rock. Ken believes his man Eric is King Workout Bro!"

Eric believes not-his-man Ken is Perky Gym Doll Satan.

Then Ken decides I need to finish with some stable-body exercises. "Dudebro, Ken's got you. You need to really feel IN your body. Ken knows what to do."

Apparently, what Ken knows is how to be a sadist.

"Be a tree, bro," Ken says. And I stand on one tired leg, struggling to balance while my muscles twitch, and be the saddest excuse for a tree known to yoga. For three full minutes, each leg.

"Be a flying lotus, bro," Ken says. And I drop onto exhausted arms to push with my abused core into a handstand, then barely manage to contort my legs into a facsimile of the lotus position.

Then there's another half-dozen yoga balances that push my muscles and flexibility way past their limits, plus a minute of dead hanging from a pull-up bar, followed by a four-minute wall sit.

By the time I hear, "Be a board, bro," and hit minute five of this plank, my thoughts turn homicidal.

Theoretically, I could hack into one of the automated weight machines Ken is overly fond of, rig it to suddenly increase the bench press setting by 10x on the fourth rep of Ken's final set, when he'd be moving from pure muscle memory and would instinctively let go and trust the Automated Spotter to catch the bar. But I'd have hacked that as well, disabled the safety features, and the bar would crash down and crush even Ken's ludicrously muscled chest. And even if he miraculously survived through the power of his preposterous pectorals, he oils his chest, so the bar would easily slide from the mountainous peaks of his pecs down to his less-protected neck and crush his windpipe (and thereby also destroying his brotastic vocal chords). And since Ken always begins his personal training regimen after I leave, he wouldn't be crushed to death in an unfortunate training accident until I'm long gone, thereby granting me plausible deniability.

HOWEVER, MURDER IS WRONG, SO I WILL NOT BE DOING THAT.

(I remind myself of this over and over, allowing the mantra to drown out Ken long enough I finish my workout and hobble the fuck out the door.)

---

Laying my poor, abused body down onto the soft, cool gel bed of my V-Haven is heavenly. The nanobots immediately massage my muscles, and the bottle of Muscle Mead I downed works its magic. I take a few deep breaths, and try to exhale my desire for bloodthirsty revenge out into the universe.

It only sort of works, but it's good enough. I've been logged out for almost seven in-game hours; the others should have grinded enough by now to keep up with the odd murderous rampage or two, should the opportunity present itself to help me relieve some stress.

They should be stoked to get up to some mischief. It's not like they could have gotten up to anything too chaotic or insane without me, after all.

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