Beyond the Canvas: Part 1

After watching the AoA interview, I felt inspired. Just like when I got an idea for a new painting or sculpture, the muse called to me. I had never been one to play games, but I did have some experience with VR tech. I used it for some design and artistic programs. Those men, one a selfless shield against all who would hurt his friends and the other a pioneer for a new way of life. It just set my mind on fire. The things I could do, the art I could create, the life I could live.

The possibilities seemed endless, and I wanted that. I wanted it so badly I could taste it! Oh, wait. That was a bit of paint from where I licked my brush to get it wet.

I stepped back from my newly completed masterpiece. It was a scene taken from Lazarus’ streaming site, something I had immediately signed up for after his interview. The scene I painted was from their boss fight in the dungeon, a freeze-frame of Lazarus in his rocky form blowing up one of those wooden birds.

There was a ton of speculation on how he did it and what that form was, but so far Lazarus hadn’t made any comments about it.

With my painting done, I took some photos, boxed it up, and stuck it with an Autoshipper tag. Leaving it outside my door and posting it online generated a bidding war. It sold in under ten minutes, with the drone coming to pick up the package shortly after.

With my work done, I went over my plan one more time. I managed to get my hands on Age of Adventure and the RealTek system yesterday, but had to put off diving in until I finished the painting. In the three days since the interview, I had done research, so much research. It amazed me that much of the information I found traced back to Lazarus. Sure, others were documenting classes, getting data on monsters, and figuring out skills and magic, but the best class and beginner information seemed to come from the information packets and the research by players based on them.

I’m an artist, and while some artists just pick up their medium and create, I’m the other kind, I plan. I plan all my art out, from sketching my sculptures and paintings to taking pictures and doing research into things I might want to use in my art. That’s how I encountered the interview, I had seen enough online to decide some scenes from the game might make for interesting works. After the interview, my research had turned from general to personal. I would play this game and discover the wonders for myself.

After combing over everything I could get my hands on, I decided there were three important decisions to make before I dove in. What path I would take, what role I would want, and what body affinity to try for. That part about body affinities in the interview had caught my imagination, attuning your body to the material world to influence your path forward in life. I could imagine all sorts of things that could be interesting, but there was still very little information online about it.

After the interview, people had gone out and tried all sorts of things. There was even a sub-forum dedicated to what people tried and if they got results. It seemed that each body affinity was different, and some could be gotten in multiple ways. The metal affinity had been gotten by eating metal as well as by absorbing metal mana, sadly the one guy that managed to absorb metal mana was both unable to explain how he did it and had lucked into some strange pool full of said mana. Not exactly something replicable.

One guy got the Snow affinity after being immersed in it for over 10 hours due to a nasty paralytic flower he stumbled on and a freak avalanche. He found a ring that let him breathe underwater and it seemed to apply to snow as well, otherwise, he would have suffocated.

The affinity I wanted to get was Paint. I didn’t know exactly how to get it, but I had some ideas. The more material affinities seemed to all have ingestion as a possibility, at least of the ones found so far. That would be the method I attempted first when I logged in tomorrow.

The other two things on my list were easy, I would take the mage path because I had no fighting experience, and I would try for a mid to long-range damage role.

Having gone over my plan for the umpteenth time, I looked at the clock and decided it was time for bed. I had a big day ahead of me tomorrow.

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Logging in had been a piece of cake, character creation was a breeze since I liked my looks and only changed my hair. My naturally spiky hair always made me look like some anime character, so I went all in and made it tie-dye. Unlike hair coloring, this would be natural. The only thing that had me stuck was the name. With all my planning, I had forgotten to pick a name.

I had my normal 5’10 height, my face was the same mildly aristocratic one I had sported for 28 years, and I had a bitchin new hairstyle… but I forgot to pick a damn name!

It threw my timetable off completely since I spent ages trying to come up with one. I took the advice Lazarus gave in one of his videos seriously. He had said to pick a name that you wouldn’t mind a shopkeeper or old lady calling you. NPCs could see your name most of the time due to a high level in the Identify skill, even if you were trying to hide it. Most of the time people just left their names floating above their heads for all to see, and the NPCs would see it that way.

This ruled any of the classically stupid gamer names I had looked up like ‘Hotstuff’ or ‘GodInBed’ right out, just imagining a little old grandma herbalist calling me such things sent a chill down my spine. I feel sorry for the people at the start that didn’t know better and named themselves ‘Murderwagon’, ‘XxDarklordxX’, ‘Stabbitywoo’ or ‘PrivateParts’, I had seen them on forums, and I bet they avoided shops and small children like the plague.

I tried a bunch of different art-themed names, ‘Colorworks’, ‘Pigment’, and even ‘Acrylic’ but I didn’t like any of them. I eventually settled on Fresco; it was close enough to Francisco that I shouldn’t have a hard time learning to respond to it.

Finally, I loaded into the game. Watching the beautiful opening was a treat, and that treat brought me to my destination, the city of Cloudburn. I had to start in the city where my muse was, anything else was unthinkable. Of course, I had studied the maps people posted so I would know the general layout of the city.

After getting my clothes, pack, and starting coin at the Adventurer’s Guild, I made a beeline for the crafter's area. I needed art supplies.

The best I found in my price range was a supply store for crafting hobbies. Anything more specialized was way out of my price range. What I got for my meager funds was some canvas, brushes, charcoal, and paint, lots of paint. I bought the white paint for fences since it was the cheapest way to get a lot of it.

My next stop was outside the city, the very edge of the forest. I needed a stick. I got three just in case.

Making my way to the Mage Quest was easy enough after I reoriented myself at the plaza, I was certainly a bit afraid of getting lost. I had things to do and didn’t want to waste time.

With stick in hand, I beat up slimes; it was fairly easy since I left the leaves and small branches on them. The extra parts helped me remove the core, instantly killing the slime. I did this until I had 30 slime cores.

Handing ten in hurt, but not quite as much as when I had to sell ten more for cash. It was painful enough I actually went back and killed more to get back to 20 cores, I would need them later for my plan.

I went and did the Priest Quest next; it involved drawing symbols. I’m a professional artist, I could have done it drunk and half-blind. With that checked off, I had access to both the blessings list and, more importantly, the affinities list.

On my way back to the mages, I stopped by a general store and picked up a basic mortar and pestle. With half my remaining funds, I joined a class, Intro to Mana. I read up about it and watched Lazarus’ videos, but taking the class seemed to be the best idea to cover anything I might have missed.

After the hour-long class, I could channel mana, barely.

Skill Mana Manipulation 1 Learned

While disappointing, that was still better than about half of the twenty-person class could do. All I could really do was push my mana slowly into something else. Luckily, that’s exactly what I wanted.

I wouldn’t be accepting a class until after I had done all six quests, that was the recommendation after all. Still, I wanted to get my foundation set up right away in case it influenced things earlier than people thought. I never left my sculptures with the minimum support as a precaution, I built wiggle room into all my plans. Some of my friends in school used to say I should quit art and become an engineer.

They didn’t get it; I planned everything so that I could then lose myself in the act of creation, not out of some exacting need. I wanted to maximize the time I could have in that uncertain haze between thought and reality. The details, the colors, the curve of a line becoming the curve of a face. Art was the bridge between dream and reality. Why would I want to spend more time on the boring parts than needed? With a good plan, I could spend more time just… being free.

I headed to the nearest drinking establishment and bought a very low-quality mug and ladle off of them for a few coppers. Then I set myself up at a table and got to grinding my slime cores into a fine powder. It was similar to when I had experimented with making my own dyes and paints. I stored the finished powder in a wooden bowl.

When all twenty cores were powdered, I brought out my buckets of paint. I had two single-gallon buckets of paint. There was some sort of preservation rune burned into the side of the bucket to keep the paint from drying out, even though there was no lid.

After breaking one of my sticks into a suitable paint stirrer, I slowly stirred the core-powder into the paint. While I stirred, I slowly infused mana into the liquid. When I had finished with half my powder, I switched buckets and repeated the process. I managed to shove half my mana into each bucket of paint and snagged 2 levels in Mana Manipulation for my troubles.

I also unlocked the novice levels of the professions Enchanter and Alchemist, which I equipped immediately.

After a few extra minutes of stirring, I used my ladle to fill my cup with the slightly shimmering paint. Being in a tavern of some sort, I did the polite thing and raised my mug, “Cheers!” The rest of the establishment echoed me, and we all drank.

Holy Mary, Zeus, and fucking Ra, that was a headrush. It reminded me of that time in art school I went to a party and accidentally had the Artist’s Dream confection my friend made. The thing was stuffed with a harmless but potent selection of substances that made the world flow and sparkle.

The magical paint I made tasted foul and viscous, it was paint after all, but the mana infusion made it do strange things to my head. The bar was brighter somehow than it had been, and the light seemed… different. While this was objectively fascinating, I had two gallons of magical paint to drink, and it wouldn’t drink itself. If I really wanted to, I could repeat the experience some other time. That was unlikely.

I drank mug after mug of paint, and it started making me loopy. I kept to a slow enough pace that my health would recover after each mug. The game considered the paint some form of magical poison debuff. Luckily the accumulation in my system wasn’t making a damage-over-time effect, although if there was enough, I wouldn’t be surprised if it switched. If that happened, I just hoped I could drink faster than it killed me. As an expert on paint, I can say that it is not good for you, lots of it is toxic in some way, although modern paint is much less harmful. This is fantasy video game paint, I have no idea what it’s made of, so my guess is that it should take a large quantity and a bit of time to kill me. At least, that’s what I was betting on.

My research had revealed that while you do get hungry and thirsty in Age of Adventure, you don’t have to go to the bathroom, so whatever MythArc is doing with simulating bodily functions isn’t perfect. I’m sure this is purposeful. There have also been reports that you can eat and drink much more than would be possible in the real world. When I hatched my plan on how to attune my body to paint, I took this all into account.

I finished off the first bucket, and the room was definitely… flowy. Things in my vision were even starting to change colors randomly. I ignored what my vision told me and felt for the second bucket. After giving it a few stirs, I poured the next round. I was very glad I had the ladle for this because I could just sit the full ladle into the top of the mug and then turn it, there was very little risk of spillage even as impaired as I was. If I started dying, I would have to start drinking from the bucket, but I would cross that bridge if I came to it.

I was starting to experience very strange sensations halfway through the second bucket, and I could feel invisible lightning in the air. The empty bucket was looking at me funny.

In the end, I finished the magical mixture I created, shoved my stuff in my inventory, and managed to pay the tavern owner for a room to rest in. I vaguely remember being carried, but mostly I remember the world melting like one of Dali’s clocks. I was a puddle; the world was a puddle. Life is a puddle. The colors took me.