It took Dylan a moment to orient himself. In particular, he was still thinking of himself as Dylan. He was Kaldalis now. It was going to take some getting used to, but he’d get there. Eventually. But what was more pressing was the timer on the right side of his vision ticking down. It was approaching twenty minutes, and he didn’t just have no idea where he was, he didn’t have any idea which direction the docks were. Surrounded as he was by buildings, he couldn’t see it from here. All he had was Mae’s advice to head downhill. And so he took his first few steps in this new world, hoping he was going the right way.

The city itself was startlingly realistic. For one thing, the size was actually consistent with a capital city, and there was enough housing to support the number of storefronts and businesses he passed. This wasn’t the standard MMO city, where there were three shops and nowhere for these people to sleep at night. But he had a huge problem with the street layout. Most videogame cities of any size had a fairly standard grid to their streets. This city - Baimer, he remembered it was called - was designed like it had grown organically. Streets criss-crossed at odd angles and curved around buildings and terrain.

Eventually, Dylan/Kaldalis found himself in a small square, inhaling the scent of a baker’s morning loaves. It was a picturesque scene, with a gnarled tree stabbing up through the cobbled square. Up ahead, framed by the tree’s branches, was the enormous castle he had seen while he was flying over the city.

Unfortunately, that meant that he was going the wrong direction. Before he could turn around, another block of text appeared on the right side of his vision, and he took a moment to check it, in case it was directions.

Adventurers Wanted!

The call has been put out for adventurers who wish to support the Kingdom of Zara in its hour of need. Present your Adventurer’s Chit to the castle steward to begin your journey!

Trade Adventurer's Chit to Steward Sapani 0/1

After a moment, the description text faded, leaving only the quest name and the objective. Dylan didn’t know what an Adventurer’s Chit was, but he presumed it was on him somewhere. He looked down to confirm that he was indeed wearing clothes. Whatever it was, it had to be in a pocket somewhere. Or maybe his inventory? But for now, he didn’t have time for this quest, or for digging around to figure out how to access any starting gear he’d been given. The quest to catch the boat rolled over to 00:18:00 remaining, and he was stuck running the maze like streets of the city.

With no other option, he turned to the last resort of adventurers on every world. He asked a guard.

He found a human patrolling through the square, dressed in leather armor with an official-looking tabard over his chest, and carrying a pike. It was easy enough to get his attention and flag him down.

“What seems to be the problem?” the guard asked, the question delivered in a tone of bored familiarity.

“I’m a bit lost,” Dylan said, “could you help me find the docks? I can’t tell which way it is from here.”

The guard rolled his eyes. “Don’t waste my time,” he snapped, stepping around him and continuing on his route.

“I don’t want to waste your time,” Dylan said, hurrying to catch up, walking beside the guard. “I just want you to point me in the right direction, that’s all.”

“Stick it in your pointy ear,” the guard snapped again. He shoved Dylan away.

His foot landed on an uneven spot on the cobbled stone, and he found himself abruptly on the ground. It hurt. Like, real pain hurt. Dylan’s first instinct was to scramble to his feet and give the guard a piece of his mind, but the shock of his new body experiencing pain made his head spin.

He wondered why the guard was so aggressive. Was it a race thing? Dylan hadn’t given the narrator voice at the beginning his full attention, and so now he had no idea why a guard would behave in such a way. His expectations from MMOs was already compromised by the size and layout of the city, but finding himself in a kingdom that wasn’t some quasi-utopia where only villains were racists was new.

“Are you alright, um, sir?” someone asked from nearby. Dylan looked up to see a lizard person approach. Their clothes and scales were dirty, and they looked underfed compared to the body shape he’d seen on others in the city, but their concerned expression seemed sincere.

“Yeah, just…” Dylan shook his head, clearing it. “Just confused. I was only asking directions.”

The lizard offered his hand and Dylan took it to let them help him up. “Well, then perhaps I could help you. Where were you looking to go?”

“Thank you. The docks,” Dylan said, “I am in a bit of a rush,” he added quickly, trying not to look directly at the timer he knew was right within his field of view.

“The city can be confusing for out-of-towners,” they said with a raspy chuckle. As they began, they pointed and gestured with their hands as they described the directions. “The easiest way is to go east here, until you get to the street where the buildings are all stone, and the street cobbles are red instead of grey. That’s the main thoroughfare from the north gate all the way down through to the docks. It’s a bit circuitous, but it’s impossible to get lost that way.”

“Thank you,” Dylan said, looking in the direction they were pointing. “You’ve been a great help.”

Reflexively, Dylan reached into his back pocket. But he didn’t have a back pocket. His hand instead brushed against a dangling pouch against his hip. It jingled, revealing itself as a kind of purse. Dylan reached in quickly and pulled out a handful of coins.

The coins themselves were in four different shapes that seemed to mirror the phases of the moon. One was a crescent, one was a semicircle, one was a gibbous shape, and the last was a full disc. He appeared to have a couple of each shape. Having no idea what they were each worth, but not wanting to offer insult, he took three of the full sized coins and offered it to the lizard person, watching their expression carefully.

They tried to disguise their excitement, but failed. Dylan couldn’t read their face - inhuman as it was - but the look in their eyes and the flick of their tail betrayed open hunger for the coins as they accepted them.

“No, sir, thank you,” they said, pausing for just a moment to tuck the money into a pocket. There was a hesitation before they added. “Actually, there is a shortcut I could show you. It’s not so easy as the main road, but it will get you there faster, if you wish to follow.”

“I need all the time I can save,” Dylan said. He could almost feel the seconds slipping away before he would find himself standing on the docks and watching the boat sail over the horizon.

“This way, then, sir.” They turned, breaking into a jog the opposite direction from the way they’d pointed earlier. They stopped to look back, beckoning Dylan to follow.

Dylan had a fearful moment where he thought he was about to be mugged. But he was a mighty adventurer, wasn’t he? All he had to lose was however much coin a new player started with. If he had a king’s ransom on him for some reason, he certainly hadn’t earned it. He broke into a jog himself to match his guide’s pace.

The shortcut was indeed quite complicated. It was barely a block down this road before the lizard person led him down an alley so narrow and dark that Dylan - Kaldalis, not Dylan, Kaldalis - almost didn’t physically fit. Once they emerged into what looked like an urban gardening space, they scurried again through another narrow alley. As the route continued, it became more and more nonsensical, and Dylan understood why they hadn’t even tried to describe it to him. They walked through the open backdoor of a butcher shop to leave through the front. They jumped the fence of some mansion, cutting across the manicured lawn. There was one point where they entered an unseen tunnel by walking under the legs of a massive statue. Dylan couldn’t even begin to remember where they had gone and how they’d gotten there.

It was a relief when they finally burst out of a dark alley and into the bright sunlight with the salty sea air filling Dylan’s lungs. Kaldalis. Filling Kaldalis’s lungs. The relief was partly at the confusing journey being over, but mostly because the timer on the right part of his screen still had five minutes remaining. He looked back and saw the red-cobbled road off to the right. It was an enormous path that cut through the city, but it wound around buildings all the way up into the city, and he knew that if he hadn’t taken this shortcut, he never would have made it.

“Thank you,” Dylan said to the lizard person. “I can’t express my appreciation enough.”

“Don’t worry.” They gave him a toothy grin, patting the part of their dirty clothing where they’d tucked away the coins. “You already have.”

Dylan had to wonder how much money he’d actually just given away. But he didn’t have time for that. He rushed towards the enormous boat still moored at the dock. The teeming crowd was gone now, and he was able to run all the way up to the gangplank.

“Hold up,” the muscular rat-ogre standing at the bottom of the plank called, raising a hand to stop him. Dylan pulled up short. “You can’t just be running on for nothing. Name and league papers, please.”

“Um,” Dylan struggled for a moment. He was about to ask what he was talking about, but stopped himself and tried to figure it out himself first. If this muscular creature rolled his eyes and shoved him away, he was likely to roll all the way off the other side of the dock.

Inventory? he thought, trying to make it a command.

An interface appeared in the bottom left of his vision that looked like a file folder. The tabs were labelled for Gear, Consumables, Materials, and Quest Items. The open tab was the gear tab, and he saw that there was a bunch of starting gear. As he looked at it, little pop-ups appeared, identifying the armor as cosmetic bodyguard gear, and looking at the little jewelry items beside them shows a selection of stats available on them. There were four weapons as well, but he hoped he wouldn’t need those for a while yet. He quickly navigated with his eyes to the Quest Items tab. There were two items there, clearly labelled. One was the Adventurers’ Chit mentioned in the other quest, while the other was labeled Adventurers' League Registration.

By mentally focusing on it, Dylan’s arm - Kaldalis’s arm - reached behind himself as though into a pouch that wasn’t there, and when he brought it back up it was holding a sheaf of papers.

“Kaldalis,” he said. “The name’s Kaldalis.”

“Weird name for a Vathon,” the rat-ogre remarked, taking the papers and looking over them. Despite his burly form, his eyes darted quickly over the papers. “But I guess you survived childhood with it, you get to keep it. Well done, by the way. You’re the only adventurer on the boat smart enough to come out here without your armor on. We almost lost a dozen people over the course of the morning. Getting jostled into the water in full armor is a great way to die.”

“Thanks,” Kaldalis said. He wasn’t about to reveal that the real reason he was in his starter garb was that he had been in too much of a hurry to figure out the inventory system. But if he wanted to keep whatever respect the surreptitious choice had gotten him, he’d have to think critically about when and where to don his armor.

“Come on, then,” the rat-ogre said, hooking a thumb up the gangplank and handing back the papers. “I think you’re likely to be the last one on.”

Dylan mounted the gangplank and headed up to the deck. His quest timer rolled over to the last 60 seconds as he set foot on the deck, and there was a flash on the right side of his vision as he completed the quest.

Board the Adventurers League vessel 1/1

There was a little chime in his head as the quest faded away. He stopped and looked back over the rail, waiting out the last few seconds to see if he really was the last one. As he watched, counting the seconds down in his head, the boat’s crew set about readying to cast off. Kaldalis wasn’t the only adventurer on the deck, but he was reluctant to leave his safe spot on the edge of the boat, because the deck quickly became a flurry of activity. A pair of rat-ogres accompanied by a kender-orc - he was really going to have to remember the races’ actual names - rushed up and grabbed the gangplank, pulling it up. As the crew finished tying off ropes and readying sails, a half-dozen people - decked out in arms and armor - approached the dock and were turned away by the rat-ogre still on the dock. They’d missed the window.

Quest log? He mentally guessed. On the bottom-left of his vision, a pop-up appeared that showed all his quests. There was also a checked checkbox next to the Adventurers Wanted quest. Dylan looked up at the castle peeking up over the rooftops in the distance, and then focused on the quest log, unchecking the box. The quest faded from the right side of his screen.

He wasn’t going to be back to finish that quest. Probably not for a long, long time.