Coming home from another session with Mrs. Wu, I booted up the screen on my wall, hopping into the forums to gather a little more information. Or maybe just look at the gossip people had been spreading, either about me or about anything that was actually interesting to know.

As I had expected when seeing the latest video, things had turned into a mess, though the scope of it surprised even me. Once the video was out there, showing me turning into the black-winged harpy-like monster, anyone who wasn’t completely retarded was able to make the connection between the previous incident, where I had given the Arms of Helios a little push, just in time to let them tumble into the abyss, and my revealed form. And everyone who made the connection had something to say about it, their reactions ranging from anger, to disappointment, some even projecting a feeling of betrayal on me.

The ensuing dumpster-fire, as everyone and their grandmother, argued about my actions flared up to a point that I was reminded of my previous exit from Team Amaranthine, though I wasn’t quite certain why emotions flared as high as they did this time. Part of it was that I had demonstrated the abilities to fly and transform, though I had shown that I could get aerial footage before. The only difference was, now I had shown that I could effectively cast spells and thus fight while flying, which might just be the kicker. Nobody wanted to be earth-bound while a flying enemy was dropping hell down on you.

Sure, there were Valkyries, who had wings from the start, but they needed a blessing from one of their deities to reduce the cost of flying to a manageable level. In addition, the distinct lack of aerial content, suggested that there were further restrictions, especially when it came to fighting within the air. Otherwise, someone would have made a video of challenging a dragon to an aerial dogfight, if only to be the first person to do it. If they could find a dragon, that is.

But none of the rage, the hate really mattered for now, though that likely would change once we moved into more habitated areas and began to run into other Travellers regularly. If that ever happened, after all, there were only so many people who had joined the Beta and they were pretty spread out. There were a few exceptions, like the Arms of Helios around Ladrin and a couple other groups that had formed outside Road to Purgatory and migrated into Mundus with sometimes limited adaptation to the world.

The Arms of Helios were an example that adopted a suitable name, but did nothing more, while the Blades of the Realm, Tobiuno’s group, had done a lot more, seamlessly integrating themselves into the framework of the Human Empire. There were times when I wondered about their success and what it would mean going forward, when the amount of Players were large enough to alter the balance of power on a larger scale, changing the course of political events. So far, the World of Mundus seemed to be alive and thriving, but would that last when we Travellers started to intervene or would it take only one asshole, drunk on their own power, to destroy things for everyone?

Past performance indicated that Pantheon Entertainment would intervene, at least if it could be done in a contained, fitting manner, like the removal of my Blood Magic experimentation that had turned out to work a lot better, or worse, than expected, permanently cursing a Centaur. Back then, a local cleric had received a divine revelation or something along those lines, allowing them to remove my experiment without further incident, something I was reasonably sure wouldn’t normally work. So, would the divine intervene if a Traveller decided to cause large-scale destruction? If so, would such intervention also trigger if the destruction was caused by influence, rather than outright, for example if a Traveller managed to instal themselves as a King or Queen, and wage a conventional war? Or if they managed to become a power behind the Throne? How close did a Traveller need to be to a major event to trigger safeguards?

There wasn’t even a need for actual malice on anyone’s part, simply playing the game as people thought it was meant to be played would change the world of Mundus. Even I was guilty of that, after all, right after I started playing, I had gleefully murdered a den of Snowbolds, creatures I deemed little more important than rats or other vermin, excited at the EXP I gained and the smug feeling of success when what I now considered my first Ritual-Spell worked. And even now, after months of playing, in the warm comfort of my living room, I couldn’t actually say I would do anything differently, that I wouldn’t use abilities others would likely condemn and consider despicable, if it furthered my own interest and research.

Hell, even something as simple as a disagreement on methods or even some stupid, possibly imagined, slight that someone took way too serious could cause serious repercussions. In many ways, Road to Purgatory wouldn’t work long-term as it was at the same time too serious and real, while also having to work as an escape and diversion for the players. Otherwise, if Road to Purgatory wasn’t enjoyable and fun, why bother playing and paying for it? And there was, at least in my thinking, the problem, in a world that had to be enjoyable and fun, you couldn’t have too many consequences for your actions, or things would rapidly cease to be fun. But without consequences for your actions, your actions would lack significance, making things feel meaningless.

Or maybe, Pantheon Entertainment would take an actual hands-off approach, letting Mundus develop as it would, even at the risk of having a few players turn things into a hell-scape, forcing the rest to either quit or try repairing things. Neither of which would be financially advantageous for the company.

Whatever the case, I had a feeling that players, Travellers, would have to be the ones to set up their own rules, to allow the world of Mundus to remain in a state that everyone could enjoy.

Thinking of that video, I pulled up the various fights we had with Manticores, looking at the footage, trying to make a video, something to showcase the entire experience of crossing the White Mountains. Sadly, the more I looked at the footage, the more I realised how difficult that would be. The initial fights had been quite boring, with us crippling the Manticore’s ability to fly, grounding and wounding them before they ever got close enough to retaliate. Once on the ground, it was almost trivial to kill them, at least for a group working together, with Sigmir blocking at the front, while the rest of us further destroyed their mobility.

One such encounter could be made into a short, relatively interesting video, but multiple would just be boring to watch. Hell, in one of those encounters, we hadn’t even bothered to stick around, merely crippling the wing of a flying Manticore before letting gravity do the dirty work. That was amusing, for all the ten seconds it had lasted, but given that it had been night, there was nothing to watch, either.

Which left that last, massive battle. Sadly, the video made by Pantheon was far better than anything I could make, simply due to the limits of the medium. Watching me act in third-person gave better perspective than watching from my own viewpoint, especially as a lot of the spells had been cast indiscriminately, simply targeting the area around us, or using the Blood of the Manticores as anchor. Which was something I would have to try replicating, simply because it opened interesting options but as with most of the spells used in Avatar-form, I doubted I would be able to easily do so.

Unless I misunderstood how that form worked, as my working theory was that the skills only one of us had were retained in their entirety, just with some new applications as they filtered through our combined mind, while the skills we shared gained a boost, though I wasn’t certain just how large that boost was. I doubted it straight-up added our skill-levels, as skill-gain seemed to be almost exponential in difficulty, meaning that a single skill at hundred was far, far more potent than two at fifty, but just how that math worked out, I hadn’t got the slightest idea. As so often, the complexity inherent in the system made it impossible to investigate the underlying mechanics.

Shaking my head, I pulled up yet another thread, this one focusing on a fight near the Snowline, in the Wild Woods, the wilderness covering Northern Aletoma. One of the Travellers involved used Ice-Magic, though in a slightly different way than I did, somehow conjuring walls of Ice far outside their immediate vicinity, creating them some thirty meters away. That seemed like an interesting skill, something I would want to learn myself.