ORK
There it was. A large bulletin board stood off to the side of one ‘Brass Badger Inn.’ The inn was not at all charming, if one were to rely on its outward appearance. There were clear holes in the wall, some unceremoniously stuffed with rubbish and cloth rags. The building leaned in a way no structure should, especially considering it housed a business that aimed to attract people inside. Judging it by its surroundings, however, made The Badger out to be the shiniest penny in the pile. The area looked like it might have once been poor and shoddy, but had since become far less habitable. Nearby houses were crumbling to the point of inaccessibility; people lay—dead or drunk—on the sides of the road, and the whole area was host to a minefield of scattered trash and animal droppings.
“Pleasant.” Dakkon thought he might have a good idea why the bulletin board hadn’t been explored thoroughly by forum goers. Nevertheless, he had to start somewhere. “A job’s a job.”
Dakkon walked up to the bulletin board and his eyes settled on a flashy looking flyer:
[Want to make EASY money? Want to make money FAST?]
“What’s with that formatting?” Dakkon examined the odd, fully-capitalized words written using a different, louder, color of ink.
[Why waste your time earning a few measly coppers when you could be making cold, hard PLATINUM?]
[Wait by the lamp post on Gadwick Bridge at ANY time after noon.]
[I’ll COME to YOU!!!]
Dakkon, in a fit of inspiration, combined the off-colored words into a single sentence and was left with: ‘EASY FAST PLATINUM ANY COME YOU.’ He sighed. “… I suppose I was expecting too much.”
As chance would have it, Dakkon had already passed over Gadwick Bridge while making his way to the message board. The old bridge acted as a sort of barrier between the respectable and disreputable sections of the city.
“I get a feeling this is going to be a waste of my time,” thought Dakkon. In the real world, this type of request would be, at best, a scam. Despite how odd it appeared, he reigned in his suspicions. He was in a game, after all. “This must be some sort of low level quest to get players acclimated to the environment, right?” Dakkon figured it wasn’t worth pondering over too much. If it turned out to be a waste of time he could always try another job. “Right. I’ll check it out.”
After having waited a good 12 minutes underneath the rusted, unlit oil lamp hanging above the center of the half-story-tall, arched bridge, a gangly, beanstalk of a man swayed his way up to Dakkon.
“Hello there, friend!” guffawed the lanky NPC—evident by his lack of nametag—with freshly slicked back hair.
“Ehm—hi?” Dakkon tried.
“You’re here because YOU know how to spot a GREAT DEAL, and have I got an OPPORTUNITY for YOU!” the walking stalk exclaimed.
“Gods. He talks just like he writes. This could get tedious.”
And so, it did.
“I can take your WORTHLESS copper, silver, and gold and turn it into cold, hard PLATINUM.” The greasy pole continued. “All you need to do is invest your spare CHANGE with me, and in only two weeks you’ll get back over DOUBLE or even TRIPLE your money! Now how does THAT sound?”
“Well,” Dakkon said with knitted brows, “setting aside the lack of information that you, a complete stranger, have given me regarding what you’re going to do with my money—and taking into consideration that I’m the very definition of penniless at the moment—THAT sounds GREAT.”
The bamboo shaft replaced his friendly countenance with one of indignation. “Look here ya little pissant—” His tone had lost its feigned joviality, and he advanced a step toward Dakkon before being interrupted by two patrolling guards.
“Barnaby, you lying bastard!” one of the metal-clad guards hollered while barreling towards Dakkon’s potential business partner from one side of the fifteen-meter-long bridge. “You won’t get away from me today!”
By the time the guards were only a stride away from Dakkon, showing no sign of slowing their pace, Dakkon jumped back out of the way and realized that the pulled-taffy man who was just by his side had already fled.
“Where’s my money, damn you!” one of the guards yelled as they clanked away in pursuit of the fleet-footed Barnaby.
“What the hell was that?” Dakkon was befuddled. The scene was entirely irregular. “I’ve been in the game for about an hour, and already someone tried to scam me?” He shook his head. “No. An NPC tried to scam me! And what was with those guards? They didn’t come to lend me a helping hand. They had their own matters to settle with that swindler. Just what kind of game is this?”
It is worth noting that coming from another game to Chronicle was, for anyone, a big leap. In other games, the guards are your sworn protectors providing you aren’t up to no good, and it is practically unheard of to have an NPC attempt to swindle a low-level player who is fresh off the boat. But Chronicle isn’t like other games. There’s no set progression. There is no main objective that everything nudges a player toward. Content is created automatically, and the game evolves. Because of that, the world is alive, and the AI have whole existences outside of player interactions. Dakkon was only beginning to realize what he was getting himself into.
Dakkon walked slowly back towards the not-so-distant bulletin board, pushing the events that had just happened to the back of his mind. Once he had arrived, he pulled the flyer starting with ‘Want to make EASY money? Want to make money FAST?’ off the board, crumpled it into a tight ball, and cast it amongst a heap of fresh droppings. “That’ll be my good deed for today.”
Dakkon wanted to make some money and had learned a valuable lesson. Not just any job will do here. He’d have to be more discerning. Scanning the remaining contents of the board, he saw:
[Looking for the right help]
[Small hands and large eyes preferred]
“Some sort of crafting gig that requires good dexterity, perhaps?” Dakkon wondered.
[Large assets are a plus]
[Pay is negotiable]
[Must be as haughty as you are naughty!!!]
Dakkon promptly began reading a different flyer:
[Lab assistant wanted]
[No experience necessary]
[Hiring immediately]
[Inquire at Pontificus’s Potions (and salves) on Ryne Street]
“A lab assistant sounds about as innocuous as I can hope for, I reckon,” Dakkon thought with a sigh. He had no clue where Ryne Street was, and there didn’t seem to be anyone in the vicinity who would more likely give him directions than stab him for his cloth booties, he suspected, now that he had gained some sense of caution. “I’d better head back across the bridge.”
After a bit of wandering through safer parts of the city—with breaks here and there to ask for an update on where he was versus where he needed to go—Dakkon had traveled much further north into Correndin, the slow way, before arriving outside of a gray stone building with a large sign above the entrance engraved ‘Pontificus’s Potions (and salves).’ From a separate, smaller building constructed of the same gray stone, a door was flung outward and an old man dressed in picture-perfect, stereotypical blue wizard’s robes walked out, coughing, trailed by a cloud of unhealthy looking green smoke.