After dinner, Eric quickly made his way back up to his room. Placing the helmet back on his head, he once again found himself in that beautiful room overlooking the ocean.

“Welcome back. May I ask what you’d like to do?” Eleanor asked, materializing next to the giant wallscreen.

“Is there a way to connect with the Strife chat client?” Eric asked.

Eleanor nodded and made a waving motion towards one side of the screen. Instantly, icons began to appear on the screen, including the familiar Strife icon. Turning back towards him, Eleanor launched into a brief explanation: “You can use both touch and voice commands to launch any of these applications. You can also download more off of VirtuNet if you desire. Simply yelling out launch and then the name of the application is enough to launch it; mentally yelling exit then its’ name will bring you back out.”

Eric nodded, “Launch Strife!” he shouted. As he did so, the icon on the wall detached itself and quickly became bigger, before whirling around once and becoming a door similar to the entrance to the synchronization room, only this time marked with the Strife icon. Nodding to Eleanor, Eric quickly entered the room.

“User detected, would you like to synchronize your VirtuNet game console with a VirtuNet user ID?” asked a voice that sounded vaguely like Eleanor’s voice only more robotic. With a nod, Eric quickly keyed in his user information to the transparent holographic keyboard which appeared in front of him.

As the keyboard faded, a virtual representation of Strife’s interface appeared. Spying the familiar avatar for his group’s Strife group, Eric pressed it, instantly joining the ongoing call. As he did so, the Strife interface became transparent and moved up towards the top left portion of his vision, only visible if he focused on it. With a small blur, the room he was in faded and he found himself back inside the oceanview room. His friends’ voices echoing within his ears. Disabling the sound, he quickly turned on voice-to-text, leaning back against the window as he entered the call.

Kyp has joined the room

Mark: Glad to see you could join us Eric. You get everything working okay?

Eric: Yeah, had to go through that synchronization test though. That thing is tougher than I thought it would be.

: lol yeah it took me a while.

Griffin: I really hope you can’t feel pain in Fate. I might switch to a mage if combat is too painful as a tank. ‘Cause doing that test made me ache all over for a decent amount of time in the virtuRoom.

Mark: Hurricane said you can set the pain receptors as low as 1% and as high as 100%. Although why anyone would go that high is beyond me. Sounds dumb as hell.

Ryan: Masochists?

Jun: Probably don’t want to set it too high. I’d imagine there’s a forced logout if you experience too much trauma due to pain. I can’t see them opening themselves up to lawsuits like that.

Ryan: True true.

Eric: Was there anything else we need to do if we want to be able to get a jump on the competition on day one?

Ryan: Nope, that’s all we know about the game.

Mark: Yeah Hurricane’s been super tight lipped. I don’t even think we start off with skills, we have to create our own as we go or learn them somehow.

Eric: The skill system sounds really interesting. It’ll be interesting to see how it’s implemented though.

Jun: Remember I’m making the guild as soon as I make that rare skill. So be ready to join.

Eric: Who said you’d be first to make a rare skill?

Mark: Whoever makes the skill first gets lead. But should we really keep transferring lead once it’s made? Now that we’re playing for cash we might need to be a bit more serious about this.

Ryan: He’s right. But I still like the idea of letting whoever makes the strongest skill create the guild. Gives us a reason to try and improve.

Gio: Right.

Griffin: Maybe have whoever we decide to become leader after we’ve cleared a few dungeons? We could even have two leaders. One for PvE and one for PvP, or one for largescale or stuff like that.

Mark: That’s not a bad idea Griffin.

Griffin: Thanks

Eric: So we keep things as is for now and address them a few weeks in once we have a clearer idea on how the game runs?

Mark: Pretty much.

Eric: Cool. Anything else?

Mark: Nope, we should be good. You guys have anything to add?

Jun: Eric’s gay.

Ryan: lmao

Gio: Nope I’m good.

Mark: Alright, we’ll meet up right before the game goes live on Friday.

You have disconnected from the call.