@Jasper slowed down.
There was a long silence between us, and there was nothing but the sound of my owner's agitated breaths.
I was completely still.
I wasn't good at talking, and if anything I didn't know what to say.
It felt so raw. It was like someone had taken a firm grapefruit, shaved the skin off, and pushed it into my hands. The bloody red pulp dripped in between my fingers and left an acidic taste in my mouth. The flesh was squishy and bleeding, and it was terrifying to hold someone else's exposed heart.
My hands trembled a little.
I wasn't used to receiving heavy feelings like this.
In some ways, I had been living in a fantasy. I never asked any questions. @Jasper purchased me and kept me as his pet, and I liked it so much that I didn't want to break the illusion. I was happy and I wanted everything to be real. I wanted to forget about a lot of things. Earth ruined so many peoples' lives, and I resented the fact that it cast a looming shadow over this corner of my individual paradise.
@Jasper was staring at me.
He seemed to be expecting some kind of response.
"Will you sign it?" He asked.
I stared back at him wordlessly.
My owner wanted permadeath1Permadeath: Permanent death. On Vetita, there were various forms of resurrection magic and necromancy (and furthermore respawning), so ordinary suicide was no guarantee that one's soul would be released from the game. "Permadeath" could be achieved through a variety of different methods, and the simplest approximation was to sign a contract that locked one's soul into an inanimate object.
I didn't want this.
Maybe it was selfish, but I didn't want my master to disappear.
Perhaps @Japser knew that if he died, I would have gone through great lengths to bring him back. I would have scoured all over Spawn to find his reincarnation, and even if he chose not to respawn, I might have gone to find a necromancer. My feelings were probably transparent through our telepathic link, and he needed to guarantee I wouldn't try anything ridiculous.
"Fiie." He repeated impatiently. "I will make you sign it."
His brow darkened and his voice carried a threatening tone at the lack of my response.
But I knew it was an empty threat.
I shapeshifted into a cat and slowly climbed into @Jasper's lap.
I felt so sad.
I curled up against my owner.
I wanted to cry, but cats don't shed tears.
⚘ ⚘ ⚘
The morning skies were crimson.
Strong winds flitted across the bow of the Felicity, and the quarterdeck was silent at this early hour. Due to the yesterday's successful operation under the cover of darkness, the mercenaries had celebrated late into the night. They likewise collapsed unconscious in the slave ship's lower deck after drinking themselves merry.
Electricity did not exist in the world of Vetita, so you would think that people would go to bed early and rise at the crack of dawn in this quasi-medieval world. However, certain habits of modern life on Earth were incorrigible. Even though magical lamps were expensive and resource-inefficient, luxury amenities that mimicked Earthly appliances were prevalent. It cost a silly amount of magical energy to power a lightbulb, and oil lamps were unquestionably more economical, but exorbitant and extravagant behavior was widespread in this toxic world where men compared everything from dick sizes to glowing lamp posts.
The early morning hours were quiet.
I hadn't slept very much the previous night.
@Jasper eventually fell asleep after our "conversation". He was incredibly frustrated with me, but he didn't force anything. There's a certain degree of privilege to being a cat familiar, and I am glad I chose my species. Unlike dogs, who are generally expected to be affectionate and energetic, cats are aloof and unfriendly. Since @Jasper owned a cat back on Earth, he was clearly weak to my silent display of disobedience.
I don't think my master had the heart to punish me.
I told him telepathically that I would only sign the contract if he would grant me a wish.
I mainly said that so he wouldn't try to kill himself immediately.
But I have to think of a wish now.
I want to come up with something that would delay his death as long as possible. If I told him that I wished for him to take me to the World Rim, it would take nearly three months of travel by the fastest airship. I would be able to spend three more months with @Jasper, and maybe I would be able to change his mind in the span of that time.
It was a desperate and meaningless request.
Was that good enough?
Did I really understand him as well as I thought I did?
Could I convince him to stay?
I peered over the railing at the edge of the airship. Clouds drifted by below us, and we were high in the sky above the ground. The air was calm, but this world was vast and expansive. Although Vetita was home to griefers for two hundred years, a majority of the server was still empty. Once a player got far enough away from Spawn, it was possible to find stretches of pure nature unsoiled by human hands.
Colloquially, we called those places the Far Lands.
Everyone has dreamed of reaching those wild places at least once or twice.
It is a common naturalistic fantasy that many new players hold when joining this server, but most people give up on those aspirations when they realize that surviving in a hostile world filled with dangerous monsters isn't as easy as it sounds. It's virtually impossible for new players who lack skill levels, and even strong veteran players who have played for years hesitate before venturing into the wilderness where it is possible to lose everything in a blink of an eye.
However, maybe if we left the darkness of human civilization, @Jasper might find life meaningful again?
If we died, I would rather that we faced death together.
⚘ ⚘ ⚘
I sort of figured that it wasn’t “boys love” in the traditional sense, which is one of the reasons why I hadn’t read it until now — although the story seems popular, so I wanted to look into it.
Electricity did not exist in the world of Vetita
I find that hard to believe. It really wouldn't take much to copy the necessary engineering from Earth. Magically driven devices are just much easier to implement.
Is the World Rim suppose to be the edge of the world? Shouldn't it take longer than three months to reach (maybe it's slowly expanding at a continuous rate)? Seems like the world should be bigger.
Redo of a Healer probably would not give the kind of reference material you're looking for. The main character, who was looked upon and abused, gets a chance to return with his memories to an earlier point in his life. He then uses his memories and an OP interpretation of "healing magic" to go on a vengeance filled rampage involving personality altering mind control and forcibly altering the bodies of others.
Ahhh, I’m not an engineer (so idk how wrong this is), but the idea I wanted to go for is that the physical laws on Vetita aren’t 1-to-1 equivalent to those on Earth. For obvious reasons, Vetita is a flat world and therefore various rules of general relativity don’t apply — but I wanted to take it to another level and break electromagnetism, atomic theory, and chemistry as well.
For example, if magnetism as a physical property didn’t exist on Vetita, would it be possible to generate electricity?
Since it is a virtual world (and magic can “exist”), I think there’s a certain degree of arbitrariness that physical laws adhere to those in reality. I’m personally fond of semi-medieval settings with swords and so forth, so I did want to break modern science at certain points. For instance, if the periodic table was different or chemical formulas are different... allowing for weirder quirks like floating islands with solids less dense than air, etc.
I kind of want to avoid players with extensive Earth knowledge being able to walk in and build a nuclear reactor — that kind of situation. Part of the beauty of the game, IMO is it’s differences from Earth.
The World Rim aspects may be retconned depending on the needs of the story/world.
Airships are said to travel at unspecified speeds and they may be room for limited teleportation magic (who knows?!) or speed hacks. The boundary of the world could also be irregular and the stated number is the closest boundary. In short, I don’t know! 
Thanks for your feedback on Redo of Healer! I’m sort of interested in the MC’s psychology — I wonder if it’s a common way to think? Like revenge rape type things? I’ve been trying to research toxicity and other bad things, so I’m looking for almost anything that might exist on Vetita do to its lawless nature.
@uenala Even if you wanted to alter the laws of physics a little, electrical engineering should still be possible, only it's much more practically to just use magic instead. How would lightning magic (and even just normal lightning) work and interact with the world if you don't have electricity. There would be a lot of problems for players if the world did not follow an intuitive set of physical laws. Unless just about all nonmagical ranged forms of attacks are going to be practically useless, then there will be players that will figure out how to create guns. Even if they use magic instead of gunpowder, all it really would take is being able propel a chunk of high density material (such as heavy metals like lead) in a direction at very high speeds. Even if you have some changes to the laws of physics in order to incorporate magic and new materials, commonly understood fundamentals such as electricity (flows through metal and effects and is effected by magnetism) and kinetic energy (the key reason why bows, guns, and catapults can damage a target) should work as expected. It also makes no sense to try to build a nuclear reactor when a magic generator is safer and more practical (not to mention that the powered devices would most likely be designed to run off magical energy in the first place). The question of why oil lamps would provide a cheaper source of light on airships can be explained as lamp oil is very cheap in the first place (the magic generators on the air ships could also run on oil, but the efficiency of the generators compared to oil lamps makes directly burning the oil more efficient for producing light).
The fact that there are airships effectively means that the available technology in Vetitra is closer to basic steampunk levels than it is to medieval levels. You can roughly base the kinds of weapons available to players off of the Monster Hunter series of games which have include a large of melee range weapons, bows, and bowguns (kinda a mix between crossbows and firearms with a large variance in design), all of which are considered viable. When you factor in magical engineering to fill in a lot of the technological gaps, you can still achieve a "fantasy medieval" "atmosphere" while still having equivalents to many modern "conveniences" that we could not imagine living without. There will also be players that would want to have cities that more closely resemble modern Earth, thus those kinds of cities would exist as well. It is also reasonable for the server to be able to create NPCs when needed, though there would be no clear way to tell if the shopkeeper that you just bought food from was an NPC or a player character.
there were various forms of resurrection magic and necromancy
It might be worth retconning resurrection magic and necromancy. There are a lot of problems with theses kinds of magic, especially if they are used after a player has created a new character. It would be pointless to try assassinating another (likely influential or powerful) player if they could just be resurrected. It would also cut into the business model of in game banks. Necromancy could also provide a way to outright magically enslave other players and bind them to the necromancer's will (players would stop synchronizing memories and leave the server if this could happen). The need for Fiie to sign the contract can be explained as to prevent Fiie from trying to save Jasper's life and to stop anyone else from trying to save Jasper's life. Also, binding Fiie's actions with the contract would do absolutely nothing in terms of preventing the theoretically unbound cleric or necromancer from bringing Jasper back to life.
The kinds of abilities that allow the main character of Redo of a Healer to get away with his actions would absolutely not be allowed by the Vetitra server (he can use "healing" to change his body and redistribute his stats however he wants as well as can forcibly make those changes, and personality and memory changes, to others as well). As for his personality, methods, and behavior, he would likely piss off a lot of people very fast, and that would actually be a huge problem on this kind of server. While Vetitra has no laws that protect things such as the right to freedom of speech, that also means that there's no law that says that you can't just murder someone for spreading hate speech or doing something else that your unwilling to tolerate. What do you think would happen if a guild that has large number of high level beastkin mercenaries gets word about the appearance of a new group of human supremist that enslave and slowly torture beastkin players to death? How long do you think it would take to hunt down that group and publicly execute every member for their offense against the livelihood of all beastkin who live on the server? In the absence of actually laws (and rules) to define what players can and cannot do, it will be what can be tolerated by the collective morality of the players that will be the determining factor of what you can get away with.
@UnknownReader I definitely agree that the world should follow a set of intuitive laws that are broadly consistent with people's physical experiences on Earth (i.e. kinetic energy, momentum, Newtonian mechanics). That said, I'm still tempted to break electricity at the point of magnetism.
Frankly, things like lightning (or weather patterns), tides, etc, don't really make that much sense on a flat digital world (since Earth's features are heavily dependent on the fact that we live on a sphere), and to some extent it can be expected that the server adds arbitrary components to simulate these features.
I don't really consider lightning magic to be an accurate representation of electricity. Lightning magic in most fantasy settings (A) can be dodged, (B) can be pointed at a target, (C) travels slower than the speed of light, and (D) can be a short pulse of electricity in the form of a small "bolt" rather than a continuous stream of electrical current that runs from the source to the target. Given these features, I would say that lightning magic in most fantasy settings isn't electricity and instead some form of pseudo-electricity.
I think my current thinking is to break Earth-like laws of electricity such at magnetic objects don't exist on Vetita (making electric generators impossible), yet still have pseudo-electricity that can exist in the form of magic or be part of server weather patterns.
Overall, I just want to avoid the situation where people come to the server and synthesize aminoglycoside antibiotics, sulfuric acid, or ethylene dichloride... to me the theme of the server is to discover a new world, and discovering the physical laws of a new world are more important to me than the prior knowledge that a player arrived with.
Of course, to a lay person, the virtual world on a surface level should appear (and function) very similar to Earth. Like I want to break things at subtle but critical points that would generally only be noticed by scientists.
Yes, you're probably right that steampunk is a better word than quasi-medieval! I still sort of think various limitations on technology are necessary to maintain a "medieval" atmosphere. There are a lot of smart people on Earth, and I wouldn't be surprised if people came to Vetita and immediately started pouring concrete, synthesizing plastic, and erecting steel skyscrapers. All of these construction materials/techniques are superior to wood and brick, so I feel like it's necessary to provide some kind of incentive to promote the "medieval" atmosphere.
Regarding resurrection magic and necromancy -- I wanted to use this as an element of the plot. My thought process was that the existence of renewable souls (as well as the respawn mechanic) is that generally assassination/killing is viewed as inferior to capturing the enemy. Almost all factions are incentivized to keep their prisoners of war alive to prevent them from respawning.
Also, the cost of resurrection magic and necromancy is unspecified. It could be expensive or challenging to perform, or there could be a variety of different misunderstandings about this type of magic. I think you brought up a variety of different points about what types of resurrection magic might be most common, and I agree with that -- although I don't necessarily think that resurrection magic is much more game-breaking than the respawn mechanic itself.
The logic behind the contract is that it binds more than Fiie's actions. It also binds Jasper's soul ("reserving" it in a sense), preventing it from being manipulated by third-party necromancers. In a sense, you could say that Jasper wouldn't totally be dead (just asleep inside an inanimate object), and therefore just be unavailable for soul-manipulating magic.
I think your discussion of collective morality is really interesting! Thanks!
@uenala Stick to resurrection magic being misunderstood. The problems largely only matter when looking at it from the irl player's perspective. At what point should player's give up on/be forced to give up on their dead characters and make new ones? Then there's a philosophical question regarding souls that's similar to the one I brought up with "full synchronization". While "full synchronization" would use a process that establishes that the irl player's soul is transferred into their character (replacing/overwriting the in game character's "copied soul"), how would you be able to determine that the soul in the resurrected character is actually the same one and not just a copy?
@UnknownReader Hmm, I think this delves into the philosophy of what you (or me) consider to be a soul, right?
I mean, I have a personal interest in this subject (from a metaphysical perspective), and I often think about thought experiments like if the server secretly created an identical copy of the soul instances (yet the copy didn't know they were a copy). To me, every copy is still equally valid, so I find it a little peculiar to necessarily call any particular one as dominant.
When we were talking about "safe" vs. "unsafe" MemStash implementations, I'm almost tempted to say that Vetita's design is actually unsafe. If we take the perspective of the IRL player, the MemStash client is literally injecting memories into the IRL player. There is no way to know if those injected memories are malicious, manipulated, or hacked, so the technology is very dangerous. If you inject enough foreign memory content into someone's brain, this inevitably results in personality changes (i.e. pavlog's dog conditioning). IMO, there is no way to guarantee that the player's personality won't change as a consequence of the injected memories.
From the server's perspective, I still think I favor the previous explanation that the server tries to match memory signatures (and attempts to enforce uniqueness of memory signatures). If an IRL player logs on and there is an existing memory signature that matches their own, then those memories are synchronized. If an IRL player logs on and there is no existing memory signature that matches their own, then they are given the option to spawn a new character.
@uenala The problem with the server trying to synchronize player memories with a character that has been resurrected after being dead for a length of time is that the player could have already created another character by then. There needs to be some sort of time limit imposed (the server could force a cooldown on creating a new character during this, also magic that would bind the will of the character to another, such as those found in necromancy, should not work until after this cooldown) otherwise you can easily have players that end up with multiple "active" characters through "legitimate" means. Having a time limit before players are forced to abandon their character also provides a way for the souls of the characters to be free from their "obligations" of "serving" their irl player (including self-sacrifice to make way for "full synchronization") provided that they are resurrected after the time limit, though using your idea of renewable souls, they could also end up reincarnated into the bodies of NPCs (which is likely what eventually happens to the souls anyway).
@UnknownReader I don't know if this works, but my simple explanation is that it's not possible to use necromancy after the player has already respawned/created another character. The "soul" has already traveled to a new body and therefore isn't available for necromancy/resurrection.
@uenala The goal of the system is to incentivize irl players to synchronize their memories, then you don't want to have players not replacing their dead (thus not synchronizing) only to eventually discover their character being reanimated and enslaved by a necromancer, thus leading the irl to stop synchronizing or to use a hacked client to create another account. In my proposed time limit approach, irl players would be given a standardized experience that gives some opportunity for their characters to be brought back from death, but it would force players to move on and start synchronizing with a new character if that takes too long. My proposal also allows the souls of charters to actually have the potential to become meaningful rather than just a tool to serve irl players.
@UnknownReader Hmm, the way I viewed in my headcannon is that the goal of the system is merely to collect MemStash data from as many unique players as possible. In order words, the first time you log in, the game collects your data and the system has already "succeeded" at its goal.
I don't really see it as the system's goal to want to maintain active connections. Future synchronizations only provide a small amount of new data, and the bulk majority of the data is collected the first time a player logs in.
I generally want to avoid situations where there are two people with the same name and same memories walking around on the same server. I feel like your proposal would result in multiple copies of a person existing if there was necromancy utilized on the server, and I would want the server to employ some kind of check to ensure that memory signatures are distinct between every entity on the server.
Personally, I'm okay with IRL players never synchronizing again after they reach a "bad end". I think it's consistent with the nature of this server to be hardcore, and I think death should be scary and strongly undesirable. Allowing players to respawn freely takes away some of the urgency around death, and I don't want players to suicide just because they mildly dislike a particular situation.
I'm aware that it seems unfair that one day you might log in after dying and realize that you were necro'd or shoved into a "bad end", but the hardcore response here is "Don't die!"
Moreover, I kind of also want to work with an idea that there are very few things that are permanent on the server. For instance, if you were turned into a zombie, maybe you might be exorcised one day and then your (in game) soul would be freed, allowing it to respawn.
@uenala Having that kind of "hardcore" approach to respawn mechanics would lead to the used of hacked clients to create multiple accounts. There could even be clients that are set up to passively monitor if a character dies and trigger the character creation process to automatically start (character choices and initial memory sync could be set up before hand if necessary). In terms of memory collection, the server would ideally want players to eventually go through "full synchronization", which would require trying to keep players active. That way the server will be able to collect the raw form of all but the bare minimum memories that a player is willing to permanently forget protect those left behind, rather than the heavily filtered and possibly obfuscated memories that players would normally try to synchronize with. The more pure the memories that are collected, the more useful they would be. Thus the server does benefit a lot from trying to keep players active and without feeing the need to use hacked clients.
@UnknownReader Hmm, I think I'm still ambivalent towards the server wanting "full synchronization".
I think giving the server that kind of motive softens the overall game, and results in a system that is incentivized to cater to the player's desires (which isn't exactly what I want). This is sort of contrary to the way that I understand anarchy servers to be, in the sense that I thought it was critical for the server owner/system to generally not care about anything that happens inside the server.
For that matter, I haven't even decided whether "full synchronization" would be canon, in part because I don't really have any physical explanation about how it work aside from suicide on the IRL player's side. To me, IRL suicide + logging on without memory filters = full synchronization?
The matter of hacked clients also depends on the nature of the technology, which hasn't been explored in the story. Depending on the technology, some of the things that you described may or may not be possible. I was also toying with the idea that this futuristic Earth might also have more complicated/advanced forms of encryption and programming technology. For instance, the client software may just be a program that writes and obfuscates itself (a recursive/dynamic program), making it challenging to reverse engineer or crack. The original idea explaining the existence of Vetitita was that some kind of genius invented it 200 years ago as an engineering marvel, yet to date no one has quite been able to replicate it to the same degree.
@uenala From an external view, you wouldn't be wrong that "full synchronization" would appear to be irl suicide + unfiltered memory synchronization. From an internal perspective, however, the process would deal with the philosophical question of transferring a person's "soul" from their weak, mortal body and into a (hopefully) more durable virtual body. Deciding if the process of transferring the "soul" actually works is more of a philosophical question than one that you can definitively prove since there is no way to tell the difference externally.
There really isn't any reason why "full synchronization" shouldn't exist, only that it would be uncommon among the player population of Vetita and players that use it wouldn't really want to talk about it. Since the story is being told from within the game world, you can largely ignore the issue by simply not having characters bring it up.
Regardless, creating players that are dissatisfied with the Vetita server and not the underlying technology can lead to those players deciding to create their own competing MemStash server.
@UnknownReader
I think I'll probably continue to lean on the fact that the story is told from within the game, and leave the real-world details opaque! I think there are a lot of different ways for the things that you described to exist, and I think it works in favor of the reader's imagination to leave spaces where things can be filled into the blanks!
As a side note, there is a forum thread on SHF which also somewhat captures the philosophical discussion we're discussing here: https://forum.scribblehub.com/threads/would-you-step-into-a-transporter-suicide-booth.4529/
In summary, if a teleporter destroys a person and re-creates them atom-for-atom in another location, is this... "full synchronization" per say? Or are they two separate individuals?
@uenala Getting rid of magnetism, electricity, and electromagnetism in general literally makes things fall apart, you see how your body sticks to itself? How water sticks to you? Electromagnetism, it is stronger than gravity. I get that you are trying to remove fundamental parts of physics, but they are fundamental for a reason. Even if they are replaced with magic, that simply means that it will act the same exact way but be blamed on “magic”.
@GaebolgGT Extra note, magic is basically just anything we can’t understand or replicate. Electricity used to be witchcraft, now it is common place, back then, a gun might be magic, but to us it isn’t. Magic is simply a substitute for the laws of physics and thermodynamics in equations.
@GaebolgGT When thermodynamics doesn’t apply, you alter the laws instead of denying their truth.