First Quest (Video, username 'westandreamcatcher')

[lightnovelexperiences]

[So.

The camera picks up an idyllic looking sandy Mediterranean beach, near a patch of grass and forest. It shakes a fair bit, like a cell phone cam in an unsteady - or nervous - hand.]

This is... this is uh. Deedee. ...'s player. Don't... if you know my real name from before the Badgernet crash don't throw it around.

I uh.

I'm on the fucking Shores of Awakening. I'm on fucking Mundus.

And taller and y'all hear how high my voice is. I can feel my tails.

I woke up alone face-down on the sand here. Felt it burn. I uh.

Please advise.

Comments

[have_hat_will_travel]

Damn it. This just adds even more case to 'I really wish I knew how to do interplanar moving'.

... The Ethereal plane doesn't count for this purpose.

[And from the trauma in the doctor's tone, she'd probably seen this happen.]

Right now, at least we have one thing - this network lets us bring communication between the worlds. That's. A lot of help, actually? At least potentially.

But you mentioned this is happening everywhere... That makes me think the connections themselves were somehow disrupted. Presumably, the normal failstate would be to kick the entire consciousness back to the original body, so whatever did it did so hard enough that your system couldn't manage that...

[turingcompletionist]

Yeah, that's the thing. Io's supposed to be doing that. We built that failsafe specifically for this scenario, after what happened during--

Well, it doesn't matter when it happened. The point is that Io's supposed to have this in hand. One of my co-founders, Kate, she's trying to get in touch with them to see what fucking happened.

[have_hat_will_travel]

Io being...?

[She's referring to Io as a person. That just adds more terrifying possibilities.]

[turingcompletionist]

Io.tcai. One of the post-singularity Turing-Capable AIs that run the game. Their job, among other thing, is maintaining mind-machine hook-ups and enacting the failsafes so this didn't happen again.

[have_hat_will_travel]

So either they chose to stop for some reason... Or something prevented them from doing so.

[turingcompletionist]

Yeah. Uh. It maybe looks like it was the second. Kate and Claire are on trying to talk to them.

[have_hat_will_travel]

... Some kind of skulldruggery against them, then. You implied there's other AIs for the game; are they reachable?

[turingcompletionist]

Normally yes.

They're not letting us talk to them. They, uh, put up a firewall. The others are trying to get past it.

[Dr Durante is not, because she's always been the worst hacker of the five founders of OWTB.]

[have_hat_will_travel]

... So Io is entirely unavailable, the others have blocked themselves off.

That's not a great combination, to say the least. The kinda thing a demon lord would love to exploit, though I doubt that's your situation.

[turingcompletionist]

Yeah, seriously. I'm hoping, uh, 'Deedee' will get me more info on this from the inside soon. Because right now we're pretty fucked.

[have_hat_will_travel]

If I could cross planes... Well, I'd need to be able to reach both regions to be able to most between them.

That kinda magic would require me finding an Archmage who's willing to help me learn the right magic, in the first place.

[turingcompletionist]

Yeah. Uh. If you get here or to Mundus, let me know and I'll see what I can do to help there.

[have_hat_will_travel]

... Will do. If I find a way, that is.

Of course, pursuing that puts me at its own risks, but...

[turingcompletionist]

Yeah. I kind of figured it might.

Still, I'll do what I can. And if you end up on Mundus, there's people there who I can trust to help all of you. I'm already sending Deedee towards them.