Ben Six Hundred and Twenty-One regretted a lot of things. In particular, he regretted his choice of class. Like many people, when he looked at the class list he hadn’t noticed a spelling mistake. When he went to select the class rogue, hoping to live out a fantasy of being a noble thief or a dashing trickster, he had instead selected the rouge class. It was an understandable mistake to make, many people didn’t notice it, and many people who did notice it assumed that it was simply a spelling mistake by the producers, and selected it regardless.
Unfortunately for people like Ben, the rouge class was quite intentional. Like most of the less-than-normal classes that Saviours of the Wild had to offer, the rouge seemed to be entirely illogical. It was essentially a stealth class, with skills like hide and sneak, but it also had some magic like abilities. While spell-sneaks and arcane tricksters weren't uncommon in other games, this one had strange game mechanics. Its spells were mostly mind-effecting, with the spells would charm or enrage, but like most spell users the spells wouldn’t trigger without special conditions. The rouge gained energy to cast its spells by absorbing the happiness of those around them. There were two ways they could go about that, they could make someone really happy and absorb what the game treated as the excess emotion, or simply find someone already happy and use the spell Drain Emotion (Happiness), which didn't require an initial charge.
With the amount of work that was involved in actually making someone truly happy, the majority of rouges simply used the drain, especially when there were NPCs around. Player's might hold a grudge or take it out in the real world, but there was no real reason not to target NPCs, who were only lines of code in a computer game. People who didn't make that distinction, of course, led to the class getting a bad reputation, and the more suspicious minded players would even target rouge characters on the assumption that they would certainly make others miserable for their own gain. That reached the point where some people would simply kill a rouge on site, rather than risk having their emotions played with. Ben had experienced that first hand and was in turn equally unwilling to trust other players.
He had, however, realised that most people didn’t want to deal with complicated things when they were trying to enjoy their free time. He also realised that if he was going to survive the game by himself, he would need to have a broad range of skills. Knowing that, whenever he got a new level, he would select a new class rather than improving an existing one. As such, when he reached level seven, he had five classes; few people would notice his rouge class at a glance like that, and plenty more people would just mistake it for rogue. Anyone that could observe him would see that he was a fighter, rouge, meteorologist, alchemist and loremaster. With that many classes, he felt somewhat safe, and started to spread his levels evenly between them as he continued.
Since they all used different weapons and fighting styles, he found himself with different weapons and items strapped across his body on a variety of belts, pockets, pouches and straps. A longsword on his belt, daggers in both his boots, a bow on his back, a bandoleer of grenades and potions on his chest, a meteorologist’s special weather staff in his hands and assorted ingredients where ever they would fit. To prevent himself from being weighed down, or for the weapons to make noise while he was trying to sneak, Ben strapped the weapons tightly so that they could barely move. That prevented them from being drawn in a hurry, but that suited him, since he preferred to run from any confrontation he wasn’t prepared for.
His short, sandy-blond hair was messy when he woke up at a bar counter. He had been living off the profits he had made by selling some stolen items. A splitting headache was what woke him, a condition that was made far worse by the busy, and loud, morning life of the village he was in. It was a fairly small town, only twenty or so wooden buildings, and it was filled entirely with NPCs. However, it was still the largest village he had come across, and it made him grateful that he had been exploring away from the normal player locations. He was thankful to find they had a working currency system, and seemed to have some kind of trade set up with a group of other villages. The local dealer was more than willing to buy his goods, though he was fairly sure that he had gotten the worse end of the bargain. He didn’t really care that he was cheated; the goods weren’t his to begin with, so it wasn’t possible for him to make a loss.
The money that he made had lasted a few weeks of living in the bar. Though, it might be more accurate to say living on the bar, as he spent very little time away from the tap. The last of his coin had been used up the previous night, and he would need to start working again; a fact that the pain in his head made all the more unfortunate. He didn’t normally get hung-over, but then, he didn’t usually stay sober long enough to fall into that condition. As he left the bar and stumbled across the soft town grass, working his way towards a well, a cold breeze caught the back of his neck. Turning away from the breeze and hunching over, letting his head act as a wind-break, he faced down the main street.
In the centre on the town was a familiar face.
A number of weeks earlier, he had been taking a shortcut across a mountain. As he made the trip, he had met a beautiful woman with black hair and striking green eyes. She was a merchant of some kind, and was carrying a large backpack full of trade goods. She seemed kind, a little skittish, and altogether too willing to trust a stranger. When she was fishing for dinner, through a small hole in an iced over lake, he took the opportunity to betray her. When she was distracted by something on her fishing line, he poured a potion across the ice, thinning and weakening it around where she sat. As she made a heavy pull on the rod, the ice gave out and she was pulled into the water. As she struggled and asked for him to help her out, he convinced her to pass her bag out first, saying that he couldn’t lift both it and her at once. Maybe she was panicking, because she hadn’t doubted him at all. With her bag in his hands, he poured another potion, a potion that caused the water to freeze over in an instant.
To his surprise, the bag was filled with preserved body parts. At first he felt cheated, thinking that the organs and limbs were worthless, but to his surprise the fence that bought the stuff was very excited to see them. He wasn’t sure why the deformed body parts were valuable, but he wasn’t willing to stick around people who sold organs long enough to find out. His organs might have been long injured by his drinking, but that didn't mean he wanted them harvested.
Seeing his victim walking towards him, he felt a new chill; one unrelated to the temperature. Although she seemed unarmed, her figure felt like death itself as she drew ever closer. Her green eyes were focused on him, and he felt his knees buckle. His legs collapsed beneath him, and he lost control of his bowels. As the small woman got closer, never taking her eyes off him, she raised an arm dramatically until it was parallel to the soft, green ground. Her small hand turned a lightless black and stretched and curved into a long, thin, curved blade, seemingly writhing in resistance to its new form.
When she was a meter away, he noticed that he was crying. Tears flooded from his eyes, and his nose dripped shamelessly. He tried to beg for forgiveness, but she moved the black blade through his head before he could make a sound.
Sometime later, a new rumour spread through the game's forum. It was a ghost story about a man who died in the game and died in real life. It wasn’t uncommon as far as ghost stories went; in fact, it might have been the most common. It was such a common story that it only trended for a short while then was swiftly forgotten. The police that investigated the incident used it as an example of the dangers of using the illegal and uncontrolled program, but their warnings fell on deaf ears. With the most rational explanation being an all too familiar one. With the number of people using the hardware, it was purely statistics that every now and then someone would die of natural causes, heart disease and the likes, while they happened to be playing. Considering the obsessive nature of a lot of the players, it was also not unheard of for players to simply play without breaks, starving themselves to death instead of logging out. With warnings ignored, the number of players entering the game continued to grow.
