Mellora’s Quest

I, like millions of people, play online games and have been playing them for a good chunk of my life.  Well, one online game in particular.  I realize that this is escapism, reality just has not been kind to me, it’s not that I think I deserve more, it’s that no matter what I’ve achieved in life it was never as good as I had imagined.  Here I am already speaking of myself in the past tense… Im not depressed, nor am I suicidal, let me make that clear, I will just say that nothing in the real world can provide me with the satisfaction I desire.  It doesn’t need to make sense to anyone else, I’m just getting this out there.  I don’t have a social life to speak of, nor any interest to climb any corporate ladders.  I make enough to be content with my lifestyle.  Yes, it’s a lifestyle, or whatever you want to call it.  I feel like people put labels on things so they can all nod and agree with each other.  Just another way to validate their own choices.  I suppose my obsession could be something like drugs or I dunno waifu body pillows.  What I’m saying is, it could be way more cringey.

Now, I know technology is advancing to places that sci fi writers could only imagine decades ago.  Fusion reactors, warp technology, nanomachines, the list goes on and though discovery and scientific progress is important, we as a culture have prioritized entertainment in ways that previous generations would be shocked by.  We live vicariously through our tv stars and our elected officials.  We exist by association, with no way to really contribute to these mediums save for watching, open mouthed and possibly drooling.

They say the general population is growing less intelligent as our dependencies on intuitive machines do the heavy lifting for us.  Our brains are smoothing out, becoming passive receptors to any and all subversive ideas that penetrate our dulling minds.  

I guess that’s the fear, and I don’t watch the news, or any shows following certain celebrities or what passes for royalty these days… such a waste of time.

No, I prefer to be engaged, challenged.  I go on adventures all the time in this virtual place, you might know what it’s called, who doesn’t?

So I won’t name it here, but yes it’s the one you’re thinking about. 

You could say I know quite a lot about it, and even now as I write this I would much rather be running through vibrant forests killing ratmen for loot, or chatting with people from all over the world about why pineapple on pizza is delicious.  

Except I’m a little freaked out right now, not sure logging in would be such a good idea because I know she is there. I should explain why I guess.

Now as I’ve said, I’ve been playing this game for a long time and am very familiar with the world and its characters.  I like to play in areas that are sort of off the beaten path, enjoying the story and its setting without the pressure of raid times and equipment requirements. Just me and the tasks set for me called quests.  Some of these areas are just neglected for the most part as they tend to be out of the way which leaves the zone largely to myself.  There’s a questline that I like to do sometimes when leveling a new character that has a pretty good reward at the end. Plus I liked the area a lot, the color scheme is lots of cool tones blues and purples with dappled green ground textures. Some people like to listen to their own music or play podcasts while playing but I enjoy the ambient music and sound effects, birds calling in the distance, the crunch of leaves as the character moves through the implied brush.  It just makes it more immersive I guess.  Along a winding path leading to a little valley there is a small cottage with an NPC named Mellora (that’s a non player character if you don’t know already) who starts a quest chain that eventually leads the player to a dungeon along the coastline if you have a specific item in your inventory. In this case it’s a message found in a bottle.  Her story is about her lover lost at sea, presumably captured by a band of hideous fish creatures. I admit the questline is rather tedious having to run back and forth so much, but it’s worth it in the end.  So I ran to the little cottage expecting to see her waiting inside with a big yellow exclamation mark hovering over her, ready to dispense the quest.  Except she wasn’t there.

  “What the hell? Maybe someone killed her? I said aloud, irritably.

As I waited for her to respawn which could be a few minutes I checked my crafting list to see where I was at with my chosen profession, alchemy.  I could busy myself with gathering herbs in the meantime and just as my camera swung around to point out through the door I saw her walking towards the cottage.  

  “Huh, this is new.” 

She was carrying something and upon seeing my avatar standing in the doorway she dropped it, a bundle of flowers scattering and falling to the ground.  I moused over them and saw they were water lilies, something I could use for potions, but for some reason I could not target her.  Very odd, maybe I should let her complete her path, some kind of RP event.

But instead of approaching she drew a longbow and aimed a notched arrow at me. From this angle it seemed like she was aiming right through my monitor and at my face.

White text appeared in a chat bubble over her head.

  “What are you doing in my house?”

Stunned, I just stared in amazement.  This was definitely new, and well beyond what I thought NPCs were capable of. 

  “Answer me or I will drop you where you stand!” She yelled, this time the text was in red.

  “I was looking for you.” I typed out.

  “To what purpose?” She spoke.

The text was white and I swear I could hear the tension in her bow relax a bit with a subtle creaking.

  “Holy shit.” I said out loud, marveling at this entirely new experience in interaction with the game.  

  “I’m here to help you, your lover is missing.”

  “How do you know that? Who are you?” She says as the bow disappears.

Knowing this storyline very well I tell her about the message in a bottle I recovered on the shore to the west.  She then demands to see it and I open my inventory and am not sure how but the item I had found that starts this whole quest had become interactive so I clicked on it. I saw my avatar holding out a scrap of paper which she took from him, almost reverently.

The detail was incredible, I could see her eyes tracking lines written on a page as if she were actually reading it! She then seemed to shrink, and began to cry softly.  Not the scripted sound bite that emotes a dramatic wail that you can do by typing in a command, but quiet, bitter sobs.  By then I was wondering  if I was not hallucinating, or what might have been in that energy drink I had earlier.  After a moment she approached and stopped in front of my character and in white text said:  

  “Could you please move? You are blocking the door.”

Almost everything that moves in this game does not have collision, otherwise you’d have players obstructing things on purpose or if not on purpose then it would just be annoying to navigate a crowded area. So, players just pass through each other like ghosts avoiding such situations entirely.  I accidentally hit the W key that moves my character in the direction he’s facing and collided with her, who responded with an indignant yelp.  Hastily I backed him up into the cottage and she breezed by him with an odd expression on her face. Again, I was astounded by the animations, was this some kind of test or preview for new game mechanics? Mind you this is not a current gen game and generally has pretty low poly count but I swear I could see a furrow  between her eyebrows.  This quest I was doing had undergone some dramatic changes, and it seemed I would have to play along to proceed. 

It took me a while to adjust to this new format of play and though it was so far the most granular quest experience I’ve ever seen, it had me engaged to the point that several hours had passed without me realizing it. The interactivity is what had me wondering if this was really an NPC and not like a game master taking the reins so to speak.  Or, if this was AI it was really good cutting edge AI as our conversation seemed, well, real.  She would comment on my combat skills as we proceeded to the shoreline, battling huge spiders and packs of starving wolves. She laughed when I would stop near their corpses asking what I was going to do with the various things I was collecting from them. One spider had a belt of decent quality and I showed it to her, the response was a mixture of bewilderment and amusement saying:

 “why would a spider have such a thing on it?”  And only nodded when I said maybe the adventurer that it ate must have had it on them.  Now, I’ve never really RP’d before – that’s roleplayed for those that don’t know what that means, and I began to feel like I had been missing out on a very engaging aspect to my beloved game. Mellora’s responses were always in character and not wanting to break that fourth wall I played along  Eventually I realized it had gotten very late and had work the next day, actually in about six hours to be exact, and she seemed genuinely confused when my character sat down as the log out timer ticked down.  Just before the screen dissolved into the login portal I saw her wave, not to my character… but to me.

I sleepwalked through work, did my tasks, sent the emails, ate my lunch and performed everything with a mechanical sort of monotony.  Not that anyone really noticed, as long as my emails ended with a friendly “Best Regards, Kevin” everything was just as it should be.  My mind kept returning to the shaded woods of my game and to Mellora, and the chagrin that most players concerned with high stakes boss battles and pvp rankings would laugh at my experience, call me a weeb or something.  In my downtime I checked out the wiki dedicated to the game and didn’t see any new posts or threads involving Mellora’s questline.  No developer announcements save for server maintenance on its usual scheduled day.   

I checked a few game forums and still nothing confirmed there was anything different.  

Maybe I was the only one who knew about this?

In any case I couldn’t wait to get home and continue the quest with Mellora.

When I logged back in, my character was still sitting on the shore where I had left him, but nearby there was a campfire blazing cheerfully.  As if someone placed it there for my benefit. 

I checked my quest log and saw that the quest I was on was still active, but the description simply said; wait for Mellora to return. Weird, and kind of amazing.  A couple minutes passed and I began to receive private messages from my guild asking why I was still out here.  I replied that I was just enjoying the zone and when I was done I would run a dungeon or two with them.  And then some white text appeared, which indicates speaking distance in the game. Not sure I clarified that earlier, I forget that not everyone plays these games… but anyway, it was Mellora and I saw the quest log update to the next part of her storyline.

The text read:

   “Who are you talking to? Certainly not me?”

  “Oh, I was speaking privately with one of my guild mates.”

  “As in telepathy? Of course, I’m sure they were worried about you.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “How you vanished, and yet I could still sense you somehow, as if you were still there and yet not.”

Of course she would know the exact coordinates of my character’s last position before logging off. 

  “Yes, something like that, not to worry, I’m here to stay for a good long time. And thanks for the fire, very thoughtful of you.”

  “After you had vanished, I was uncertain what to do so I made camp here. You never know what could be prowling near these waters.  She turned to gaze out over the water then, although there was no animation, the sounds of gentle waves breaking and distant seagulls suggested them. I could tell she was thinking about her lover, lost and probably dead… and somehow I think maybe it might be different this time.  Having done this quest a few times before, I knew that Lonus was indeed dead inside the dungeons’ depth nearby, hacked to pieces by fishmen. But this time around, I wonder if that is true.  

As we approached the entrance to what looked like a temple partially buried in sand, covered in corals and clinging sea life, I realized that going in there would mean the death of both of us.  I told her that we needed more help to proceed. She looked at my character appraisingly, saying that she was sure the two of us could do it. 

I won’t bore you with the details but at my character’s level I would be hard pressed to make it past the first few monsters that lurked inside the instance.  Usually these things are intended for five players with special skills to effectively navigate them. 

But inside we went, and it was not what I was expecting at all.  The usual groups of monsters were spread out more and seemed more attentive to would be trespassers, so we had to sneak if such a thing was possible.  It wasn’t just this NPC that had been given this new dynamic upgrade but maybe being on this special questline changed everything around it.  It was quite an experience, and upon seeing the body of her beloved Lonus in one of the many waterlogged chambers she didn’t seem sad, more relieved as the finality was presented to her.  Nonetheless I felt a tug at my heartstrings knowing that she preferred knowing the truth rather than living with ambiguity.  And again time had slipped by without notice and as I logged off again after telling Mellora that I had to, she said something that didn’t hit me until I was looking at my desktop interface.

She called me by name, my real name. She said:

  “Sleep well Kevin.”

I just sat there gaping at my screen, wondering how this was possible.  Either I was just really tired and imagining things or this was a pretty severe security leak.  My account information was not included in the game files, that was separate… I must have told her my name at some point in one of our many conversations but that didn’t track… our conversations rarely broke character and when they did she would just get confused and interpret it into relevant game stuff.  Something I tried very hard to avoid, I’m not sure why but I was really invested in the immersion.  Perhaps this was when I began to think it was not intended functionality.  The next day, thankfully, was Saturday and before I logged on again I pinged some of my guildies from a message service the guild uses to organize raids and such.  I asked them to ride out to Mellora’s cottage and see if they noticed any changes to the questline.  

Of course they wanted to know why, it being so far out of their usual routines, so I offered twenty gold to whoever would go and check it out.

Twenty gold is a fair amount and so I quickly had a response in the affirmative.  I demanded screenshots as proof, and my guild mate did one better. He streamed his journey out to Mellora’s cottage that’s like a real time video of what he was doing in the game.  Once there I saw the old familiar character of Mellora standing in the doorway. 

  “Ah man, I dont have the message in a bottle I need to do this… you gonna make me go get it?

  “Twenty gold is twenty gold man.” I replied.

  “Okay, fair enough.”

I watched as he did the tedious trek from the cottage to the coastline and then back again to see Mellora standing there with a yellow exclamation point hovering over her head, like an NPC, not my Mellora.

  “Huh, interesting.” I said.

  “You want me to do the whole dang quest too?”

  “No man, it’s cool you can drop it, just wanted to see something thanks. Gold will be on its way presently.”

  “Haha nice, thanks.”

I logged in on one of my many other characters to send him his fee then switched over with an odd foreboding.  While the status bar crept across the screen I wasn’t sure what to expect, but sure enough there was a campfire there to greet me as the game resolved.  

My quest log simply read:

“Save Mellora from the tide reavers.” 

  “Shit!” I exclaimed while setting my character off in the direction of the quest indicated.  Tide reavers are the zones free roaming baddies that account for many deaths, myself having died to them several times when going afk for a drink or a bathroom trip only to come back to the ghost screen.  I wished as I ran that I had my higher level character to do this as they had a fast land mount and much better armor to deal with these things.  But I suspected that on any other character this questline would not be active in the way that it was.  And so I ran all the way up the long stretch of shoreline, letting mobs chase after me until they reached the end of their chase protocols or picked off by other players.

I could see a lone figure fending off two massive crablike creatures, her bow was out and she was shooting while moving away from them.  My character dashed in at triple speed when he was close enough to do so and began to hack at them.  Together we made short work of them, as she could unload without having to keep her distance for harder hitting attacks.

This was the last stage in the quest as I recalled, having to bring a keepsake from one of the tide reavers which belonged to Lonus, and sure enough there was a necklace on one of the husks.  I wondered then what would happen once I turned this in to her.  Would she just return to her cottage for the next player like myself or was this something else? There was only one way to find out as my character approached her with the necklace in his inventory. 

There wasn’t an icon hovering over her head but she held out her hand instead and I clicked on the item.  She held it for a moment and clasped a fist around it tightly before kissing her knuckles then promptly cast it into the motionless water.  

  “Goodbye Lonus.” The white text seemed almost a pale gray which I read as a hushed tone, then she turned to my character with another quest prompt.

There was the familiar option of the chainmail shoulder piece I would have normally picked and another thing. The other option was a dialogue option, and forsaking the sweet shield I clicked on that and then her text began to scroll across the chat window.

  “Kevin, you now have a choice to make.  A big choice, and you can take all the time you need to think about it, for it will change your life forever.  I will return to my cottage now and await your answer.  You truly love this world and you are being offered a chance to live here, for as long as the world exists.”

I couldn’t believe what I was reading, was this for real? Can this really happen?  I just typed one word before logging out.

  “Okay.”

So now here I am staring at the log in screen with a mixture of excitement, terror and about a million questions unanswered. I’m not sure if this will work, but I’ve decided to see where this goes. If given the choice to stay in my so-called reality, where I hate my job, my family, no real friends or lovers speak of, or to go where I’ve never felt like an outsider, a place I truly belong, I’d be committing a terrible tragedy if I stayed here.  This being a record of what happened in case it’s real of course, if not, I will just file this away under weird things that happened to me in life and no one else is the wiser… but if it does work, holy crap.  I guess you might see me again, adventuring somewhere in my beloved online world. 

Well, here goes nothing, I’ve got a quest to turn in.