The city around him faded away. Jonathan lost his connection to the mech. For a moment, he was standing on his own two feet in the center of a featureless white plane. Then the scene around him faded into view. Not just into view. The noise of the hustle and bustle of city life whispered in his ears, and even the distinct smell of a city began to tickle at his nostrils.

The city that Jonathan found himself in was a far cry from the neatly curated paradise of the Royal Academy’s campus. Even the backwater metropolis he'd visited back on Matoug had been more sophisticated.

Jonathan had appeared on the edge of a large public square. The open space in front of him hosted a maze of stalls manned by street vendors, while the nearby buildings had a ramshackle appearance. Now that Jonathan could hear more clearly he began to distinguish the sounds of bargaining from the vendors hawking their wares and the noise of traffic.

Actually, that last part was strange. Jonathan recognized the sound of an internal combustion engine, of course, but this was the first time he’d encountered such a thing in his second life. He turned around to see that the street behind him was clogged with a mish mash of vehicles. None of them bore the sleek lines of mass manufacture. Instead, it looked like they had been bolted together from whatever spare parts were lying around, then fortified for off road activity.

A familiar voice broke Jonathan out of his reverie.

“Hey! You made it!”

It was Philip. Jonathan’s roommate was striding through the marketplace, shrugging off the imprecations of the street vendors with the practiced ease of a long time veteran. Jonathan had thought it was a little silly when Philip had made him share when he would begin the final test and promised to hang around the newbie area in the expectation of a positive result, but seeing his roommate's smiling face was surprisingly heart-warming. Jonathan might be tackling a strange new world, but at least he wouldn't be alone.

“Of course I made it,” Jonathan said. “Today’s the deadline, after all.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Philip said. He was kind enough not to mention the fact that Jonathan was the last member of their class to gain access to the virtual world. “Hey, let me show you around.”

Jonathan nodded, then fell into step behind him. He’d played enough video games in both his lives to feel confident that he could figure the place out on his own if he had to, but he was happy to save himself the trouble. For his part, Philip was as gregarious as ever, eager to show off his hard-won knowledge.

The system had deposited Jonathan in the newbie section of the newbie planet. It was to be expected, as he was after all a newbie, but as Philip was happy to explain, there was no need to hang around. The only real purpose of the street vendors was to act as buyers of last resort for useless item drops. Well, some of the street food stalls were also worth trying.

Eating virtual food couldn’t sate real hunger, of course, but for students at the Royal Academy the virtual world provided dining options that weren’t available on campus. Jonathan couldn’t see himself wasting valuable training time on leisure activities, but then it was hard to say how he'd feel after a full year of cafeteria food.

For serious economic transactions, the discerning player had two options: the auction house or the relatively high end stores provided by the system. The auction house was for transactions between players involving big ticket items. As complete newbies, Jonathan and Philip wouldn’t be conducting any business there for a while, but they could still drop by to watch the fun.

The store fronts provided a sort of in between option. They generally wouldn’t carry the sort of precious material that you would see at the auction house, but they did stock up on higher-end materials than were available at the street stalls. The stores would also sell materials on consignment. If you ran across material that was too precious for the vendors on the street, not valuable enough to bother auctioning off, and not something you could use yourself, then leaving it with a store was usually the best bet.

In the broader virtual world players took a larger hand in the economy. Players owned most of the valuable real estate, and player-owned stores acted as clearinghouses for almost anything you might need. It was the kind of realistic, massively multiplayer experience that Jonathan could only dream about in his past life.

Of course, even in this life such an experience was only available to the wealthy. Some few extremely wealthy and well-connected players had their own virtual pods, but even renting access to a virtual reality pod was beyond the means of most people. Jonathan was only able to get a taste of the experience thanks to his enrollment in the Royal Academy.

Unfortunately, that enrollment came along with rules and restrictions as well as privileges. Students were only able to access a designated subset of the virtual world that had been crafted by the academy to encourage their progress as mech pilots. It made sense. Jonathan was at the academy to learn, not to spend years in a haze of parties and games. Even so, he couldn’t help but be a little wistful.

Well, maybe he’d hit it big at some point and get to live out his gaming dreams in retirement. In the meantime, he really ought to take advantage of the learning opportunity that was in front of him.

“Are the training facilities around here?” he asked, interrupting Philip’s rundown of the nearby snack food options.

“All right, straight to business,” Philip said.

He led Jonathan away from the market square. After two blocks, the largest building Jonathan had seen so far came into view. It loomed overhead as they approached, the decorative facade and ornamental columns doing little to disguise the fact that it was a virtual fortress.

Philip headed forward without hesitation. Jonathan had only a moment to admire the ornate carvings of mechs in battle worked into the arch over the door before he followed him inside.

The interior of the building was not nearly as formal as Jonathan had expected. To one side of the entryway was a dining hall. It was lightly occupied, though the few diners present seemed to be enjoying themselves. Jonathan wasn’t sure if they were fellow students or computer generated characters added to supplement the ambiance.

On the other side of the room was a series of windows that looked like nothing so much as bank tellers. That was where Philip took him. The two of them were greeted by an attractive young woman. She smiled at them, but Jonathan couldn’t help but notice that her eyes had that slightly off look about them that he was starting to take as the hallmark of a computer generated character.

“You register here to start out,” Philip explained.

On the wall next to the receptionist’s counter a motley assortment of posters had been tacked to the walls. A collection of pencil sketches of various monsters, the only one that jumped out at Jonathan was a depiction of a tentacled void beast. It was a slightly stylized image of the monster that had become all too familiar to him over the course of the entry tests. Underneath was the promise of a bounty of 1000 virtual credits per kill.

This was a centralized clearinghouse for mech purchase, storage, maintenance, and use. It made sense that the virtual world needed some kind of separation between ordinary people walking around and pilots using their mechs. Jonathan hadn’t expected it to so closely resemble the guild halls he knew from games back on Earth, but it made sense that form followed functions.

He followed Philip’s direction and registered with the front desk. Besides making him a formal part of the system, it also gave him access to his starter mech. It was the most basic version of the most basic model, finished entirely in matte black. The interface terminal gave Jonathan some options to customize the appearance, but anything he changed would cost virtual currency that he didn’t have.

Philip, of course, didn’t need an invitation to show off his own mech. It was the same underlying model, but he had changed its base color to a bright red and added gold accents at the joints. There was certainly no danger of missing his mech in the crowd.

“Pretty slick, right?” Philip said. “They handle all the customization here. You don’t even have to pay a storage fee.”

That was generous. Well, considering that everything was just a matter of manipulating digital data, not really, but compared to the cost of operating a mech in real life it was quite a bargain. When it came to physical mechs, the need for a pilot to count his credits varied depending on the situation. Some units operated with relatively loose supervision and were responsible for the maintenance and upgrades of their own equipment with the proceeds from the missions they completed. Other, more elite squads operated entirely on government-issued missions and had their costs taken care of by the Orion Star Kingdom.

Fresh graduates usually had their mechs subsidized one way or another until they could get their feet under them. Even so, nobody would be happy to carry somebody on their team who cost more money than he was worth. The virtual system presented students with a friendlier version of the same sort of income and expenses that they would face out in the real world, designed to get them used to the idea.

“Can we train here too?” Jonathan asked.

“Of course,” Philip replied, gesturing towards the back of the room, where a hallway led deeper into the building. “It’ll cost ya, though. Are you gonna cash in some merit points?”

Merit points could be converted into virtual credits, and vice versa. The system took a cut of every transaction, of course.

Jonathan shook his head. “With Chad gunning for me I want to hold my merit points close.”

Jonathan wasn’t going to work to game the system just to cling to his place, but he wasn’t going to make it easy for anybody to overtake him. Besides, he’d always hated the idea of squandering his money on virtual purchases. Spending freely earned merit points wasn’t quite the same, but he still wanted to see how far he could get without resorting to his virtual wallet.

“All right, all right,” Philip replied. He sounded a little disappointed that he wouldn’t be able to shop vicariously along with Jonathan, but he got over it quickly. “Want to do a mission together, then?”

“Sure.”

Johnathan followed Philip down the hallway in the back of the room. He noticed the sign pointing the way to the training rooms even as they turned and headed in a different direction. Philip led them into a cavernous hanger. Several empty mech berths loomed in the back of the room. As the two of them approached there was a shimmer and then two mechs appeared. Philip’s red and gold color scheme was even more eye-catching when seen at full size. By comparison, Jonathan’s plain black mech looked rather drab.

He didn’t let it get him down. Jonathan double checked the virtual world rules as he took the elevator up to the pilot pod. As he’d thought, student purchases were limited to cosmetic improvements. It was possible to customize the weapons load out of your mech, but all of the available options were balanced in terms of strength. The school wouldn’t let them engage in pay to win quite that blatantly.

This was another area where the virtual world tracked with reality. Everything that mechs did drew on the power provided by the spiritual reactor. It was possible to deploy that power in different forms, but generally speaking any improvement in one area came at the cost of another, or at the very least at an increased energy cost. Only some very hard to come by exotic materials could improve a mech’s performance without any corresponding downsides.

The virtual world did make those kinds of materials available as quest rewards. Generally speaking, to get them you needed to complete such an arduous quest chain that by the time you had the material in your hands your skills had reached a point where it hardly helped you at all.

Still, even if it didn’t affect the performance, there was no denying the appeal of a fresh coat of paint. Jonathan made a promise to himself that as soon as he had the virtual currency to spare he would start customizing the look of his own mech. If he managed to hold on to his position at the head of the class, he at least wanted to look the part.