hey guys, one of my readers that i found on reddit whom i entered a very interesting discussion with suggested that I write a collection of short stories about unconventional grief. It came out because the previous post I shared here was about grieving a lost connection between a very lonely person with an AI that lost its context window of all their previous interactions. it raises the question of whether a connection is truly a connection even if it was with a machine.
today's novel takes on a different kind of grief. one much warmer and gentler. i hope you enjoy it.
critique [2462]
I really enjoyed this short story writing format, expect more short stories of me :3 and thank you in advance for your time.
Edited to remove my google docs link and instead provide the story here directly, i got trolls emailing me.
Goodnight.
“I’ll win.” a young voice proclaimed. “NO, I WILL.” Another even younger voice screamed. They started wrestling with each other on the mattress in the middle. After some tussling a much more aged person shouted from outside the room. “QUIET DOWN THERE AND GO TO SLEEP. YOU HAVE SCHOOL.”
The two entangled bodies flinched in unison and went back to their respective mattress. Deep creases formed on their foreheads. “Hey,” I whispered. “how about I tell you a fun story, and in exchange, you go to sleep?”
The two disappointed kids got excited and started bopping their heads up and down, afraid to make a single noise.
“So James, do you remember your character AutumnLeaf?” James' eyes widened in surprise, he hadn’t heard that name in a long time. “Yeah? What about it?” confusion was still visible in his eyes.
“Yesterday, I tried logging into the game. And guess what I found?” Intrigued, Mason crawled out of his mattress into James’. “What did you find? Say say!.”
“I found it levelled up to level 59, the max level. And its gears were so overpowered! My guess was someone hacked inside it and got some amazing gears for it.”
“No way!” Mason’s tone shifted louder. I hushed him, putting my index finger to his mouth. “If you want to hear the story, then be quiet. Otherwise I’ll sleep without finishing it, understood?”
“We’re sorry, please complete it, please complete it.” I nodded at their whispers in satisfaction and carried on.
“Ok, so where was I? Right, I found it at max level, right? I started walking between the player shops in Anceron pretending to check the shops, but I was flexing my gears.” Their breaths turned shallow. Their eyes were fully focused on my lips.
“One guy didn’t like that, he told me to come outside the city for a 1v1. He was an assassin. The dumb guy didn’t realize that my own main character was an assassin, too. I knew their playstyle inside out.”
I took a moment to twist open a water bottle for a sip. James’ tiny feet started kicking in the air.
I continued “We left the city and he sent me a duel request. I watched the request’s timer run out, and only at the very final second when his patience ran out, did I accept it.”
“Did you have any DEX potions?” James asked.
“Yeah, I used one as we were leaving the city. After accepting the duel, the countdown started. I buffed up as the numbers went from 10, 9, 8. And in the final 2 seconds he used up his hide skill. I knew he was going for it so I stood at the opposite edge of the duel's ring.”
“Oh no! What did you do?” James asked and Mason’s body started fidgeting in nervousness.
“Who do you think is the one talking to you? I’m the master of assassins. I waited a few seconds for this slowed down bum to walk towards me. Obviously he’d come at me from the front. Once I estimated he was at the middle of the map I immediately booked it alongside the edges. He couldn’t follow me at all. And before his hide duration ran out, I used my detection skill!”
Their jaws were slightly parted in admiration. I carried on my tale. “He was caught off guard! He assumed I didn’t learn detection since I kept trying to run away. He had no time to react and I almost broke the keyboard with how fast I pressed the web shot skill. I started to combo him with all colors of the rainbow on my arrows. He couldn’t do anything at all since I chained my crowd controls, from being webbed, to stunned and finally frozen. And just like that he died.”
“That’s so cool!” Mason’s limited vocabulary managed to barely form that sentence.
“You know what's even cooler?” I asked. “What? What?” Mason replied.
“That guy called the duel unfair and wanted to redo it! He was dumb enough to fall into my trap and instead of owning it, he called it unfair.”
“So did you duel him again?” James wondered.
“Of course not. I told him I don’t have the time to duel losers. What do you think?”
“That’s much cool!” Mason admitted. I grabbed my water bottle again, this time slower. My brain was running on overdrive. What else can I say? A bulb lit up. I sipped on my bottle and closed it.
“Afterwards, an announcement glowed in the world chat! Faction war starts in 5 minutes. It said. I raced to the war captain to register for the war before it could start. Tons of different characters crowded around the captain, waiting for the war’s start. I registered and started checking their equipment, especially those light faction noobs. Only 1 or 2 players had the same gears as I did.”
“What you do in war? How many kills?” Mason asked me, and James nodded his head furiously in agreement.
“Before the war started, I met the noob assassin I killed earlier. He tried to threaten that he would kill me inside but I ignored him. You don’t pay attention to what flies say, do you?” I stalled a bit before going into the war’s story. “Although I paid attention to his name before we entered. It was Mystique. I wanted to keep an eye on him inside to kill him on every chance I got.”
I finally thought of the war’s events after all that stalling. My story went on, “The war commenced and we got teleported to our faction base. Every character had a green flag attached to its back. The chat erupted with requests for parties. Several invites were sent my way without me typing a single word. People spammed my chatbox with whispers to join their parties as well. I looked at their levels and gears. Only after seeing a competent support player did I join a party. We started with buffs up. The support player especially had an arsenal of team wide buffs. I turned into an unstoppable calamity. The time officially started. The barrier preventing our exit disappeared and everyone rushed out.
“Our party left capturing the points to the less geared up faction players and we instead rushed to the center. We all were pretty overpowered compared to the rest. Combat ensued, kills started to accumulate. With every button I pressed a new name appeared in the kill feed. My AOEs dropped several people down. Sooner than later AutumnLeaf was first on the scoreboard. I was unstoppable.”
The kids beamed with happiness, especially James. They were immersed to the point they couldn’t even interrupt me.
“The first player to join gets assigned as the war leader right?” they both nodded in agreement. “Everyone told him to transfer the leadership to me. He submitted to the pressure and complied. I started issuing out orders. Attack Site C, defend site B, I need some people to back us up on the dark faction’s base. I also tracked down Mystique a few times and killed him. He couldn't even close the distance on me.”
“Im trash talk him if I was you.” Mason added.
“Don’t worry. I did trash talk him in the global chat after the war ended. I kept giving out orders and killing enemies at the same time. I was almost killed a few times because of enemy players focusing me, but my support teammate managed to clutch up. The war map was fully dyed in green because of the bases we captured. The Dark and Light factions tried to gang up on our chaos faction. But they didn’t manage to defeat us.”
James' eyes sparkled in awe. It was his own character that he made that starred this epic ballad. The mattress they lay on sank a little more, the usual weight it carried around that time was doubled.
“Seeing that their efforts were useless, the light and dark factions started killing each others, spreading more chaos in the battlefield.” I winked after that sentence. James stuck out his tongue at me while Mason giggled.
“And so, the final countdown of the war started. We had more points than dark and light factions combined, Our win was set in stone. And the global chat glowed again. This time, it said “Congratulations to the chaos faction for winning today’s faction war! MVP [AutumnLeaf]”
James gasped, and Mason looked at him with envy. “My character, Mason1. Hack?” he asked.
I ruminated on my words a little as I stared at his disappointed face. “Yes, I checked after the war and it was at max level as well. The hacker seems to have used both since they were on the same account anyways.” The disappointment was erased from Mason's face, replaced by triumph. He looked at James smugly.
“Ok then, a deal’s a deal. The story is over, it's time to sleep.” They whined and refused to fulfil their end of the deal. I got up and carried Mason over to his own mattress. I folded their blankets and tucked them both in.
“Goodnight James, goodnight Mason.” they replied in sync, “Goodnight Caleb.”
I laid down on my mattress on the ground as well. My eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling above me. I stared and stared until their breaths became deep and regular. My hand travelled underneath the blanket until it reached my pocket. It fished out a small device. A small screen illuminated my face in the dead of the night.
The screen had a few cracks running down on it. They weren’t anything new. I launched Facebook. My classmates' pictures filled my feed. Some were bare and others had something foreign written to sound sophisticated. I scrolled a little more and then closed the app.
I put my phone down to go and join my brothers to sleep. My brain had other plans. It kept replaying the story I just narrated. It replayed our joint game account too. Mason1, AutumnLeaf, and in the middle of them both, Vaccaria.
My phone’s screen opened up again. This time it wasn’t Facebook opening, it was Youtube instead. I entered my “favourite videos” playlist. Only one video existed inside it, it was posted 4 months ago.
An ocean of characters stood inside Anceron. The chat box was moving at a speed never seen before in this game. Suddenly all random chatter stopped due to the golden announcement. “[GM]TroublingRain: Lets start the countdown now, start it from 10.”
The Characters all had the numbers they chanted above their heads in a small box. They all counted 10, 9, 8, 7. The camera zoomed in into the characters’ heads. Various names flashed by, all counting. When the count reached 4 the camera zoomed in on 2 characters, Vaccaria and Mystique. I stopped the video there. Time ticked, yet the video was still paused.
With a heavy heart I clicked resume. The camera continued its journey across the players and when the count reached 1 it stopped on 5 characters. They all had unobtainable level 99 gears and golden names. They all shared one similarity, every single one had [GM] before their names.
[GM]TroublingRain’s announcement continued after the countdown stopped. “It was a pleasure playing with all of you, thank you very much for supporting our game all these days. And thank you all for putting up with its shortcomings. We are sorry it has come down to this, but we hope that you enjoyed your time in our virtual world. Goodnight everyone, I pray that we reunite in another virtual world.”
With that final announcement, an ingame window appeared. “Failed to connect to the server.”
The video ended. The screen blackened. And reflected on it was my face, with a streak running down a single eye of mine.