You know those old TV shows, where people get trapped in a video game and couldn't get out unless they beat it? This is going to be a lot like those stories, only a lot stickier. Let me start at the beginning.
When
Vellum Arcana
first launched, it was... Rough. It was called
Hentai MMO VR
and all of the promotional material for it looked almost indistinguishable from those ads that said 'you won't last five minutes playing this game!' or 'don't let your wife catch you playing this!' Still, it was the first crowdfunding project to offer a full-dive virtual sex experience and actually deliver on it, and what they lacked in marketing they made up for with functionality. The initial releases were buggy, but the devs got a lot of leeway and support from horny early adopters, and after a few months, they had done what no one else had yet managed to do: Create a 1:1 Neural Avatar Interface (Navi) for the human body. At least, one that supported all the pathways a game needed to let you fuck in VR.
Fast forward a few years and several hundred posts on the devlog, and the newly-rebranded
Vellum Arcana
is born. By then, the game had already become a fairly robust sex simulator, with a handful of premade environments and props, the ability to invite up to 16 people to a single server, and even some rudimentary AI companions, but this was a literal game changer: A massive, seamless fantasy world, with fully populated kingdoms and wilderness, and classic MMO mechanics layered on top of it. It was a proper game now.
The update was actually fairly controversial. A lot of people had pledged money to the project because they wanted a dedicated sex simulator, and the whole fantasy MMO thing definitely put a couple of extra steps in-between you and proper virtual sex. Many of those that were still okay with the extra hoops they had to jump through felt that the time and energy put into developing the 'game' part of the world should've gone into more creating more erotic props and environments. It wasn't an unreasonable complaint- there was enough normal content out there at the relaunch that you could play
Vellum Arcana
in a totally safe-for-work way.
Still, it was a great move. Popularity for the same surged, and the influx of players let the dev team (Who now called themselves Sigil Studios) scale up and put out update after update. Now,
Vellum Arcana
is one of the most popular full-dive MMOs on the market, despite the fact that it has an Adults Only rating.
And then the thing that we all joked about happened.
It happened quickly and quietly: A new quest popped up in our journals, simply entitled 'Escape!', with the objective line reading: "Find the Vellum Arcana - 0 / 1". Shortly after, we found that we couldn't log out, and that's when the panic set in. There was a lot of disbelief surrounding the whole thing, but people were fairly genre-savvy at this point and no one was really sure if this was going to be one of those 'if you die in the game you die for real' situations, so disbelief was tempered by fear and apprehension.
It's been a few months since then. The players of
Vellum Arcana
have managed to settle into a new routine, weird as it is. A lot of that is thanks to the heads of various large guilds, but that's a political mess that's a bit beyond the scope of this explanation. Long story short: For the most part, you don't die for real, and the Vellum Arcana is, in fact, out there.
Now that we know how we got here, let's talk about me.
I'm a pretty low-level player, as far as my combat class goes. I had only been playing for a little bit when the lockout happened, and spent most of the time afterwards trying to ingratiate myself with some other players so I could have some people to spend time with when I wasn't questing or running dungeons. I actually did make some friends, and they're nice, but they outlevel me by a lot and I can't really help them out directly. I do have a decent [Gathering] skill though, so I thought it'd be good to kill two birds with one stone and get some XP while farming materials that would be a little tedious for them to get themselves.
Which makes all of this a really long-winded, roundabout way of explaining why I'm waist-deep in stagnant water in the center of the Ettinwood. It's a low-level zone, just slightly above my own, and it's one of the earlier locations where rarer materials start to drop from gathering nodes, one of which was directly in front of me. The in-world UI just called it a [Bog Lily], and it looked like a pair of blue-green flowers jutting out of the surface of the water, draped in tendrils of algae. I held my hand over the UI element for gathering- a ring with the icon of a crossed pickaxe and shovel inside of it- and watched as the ring filled over the course of a few seconds. When it was completely full, a popup told me what I had gathered (1x [Common Wetland Herb]), and the process started over.
Three common herbs later, and the node, expended, faded away, leaving me disappointed. Generic common materials
were
needed in bulk, but they were hardly exciting. And aside from the bits of [Raw Frog Meat] I had looted on my way in here, that's all I had managed to find so far. Going back now would be the equivalent of going back empty-handed. So when the Bog Lily faded away and I saw a suspicious patch of mud a few feet ahead, beneath the surface of the water, curiosity fueled hope.
I waded up to it and saw the in-world UI simply read [???]. Which was exciting- this was a unique node. It wasn't necessarily a gathering node, but it was something special, that only I could see. Every player generates unique nodes if they spend enough time in an area, as a sort of reward for exploration. They were usually the equivalent of a treasure chest, but they can contain a lot of different things, and a couple of players have apparently discovered entire settlements of NPCs in the form of unique nodes. I held my hand over the interaction element, and waited.
My world turned black. Not a gathering node, then. Either I had just died (unlikely) or I was moving into an instanced area. The possibilities were endless at this point. I could end up in a tiny treasure room, or at the mouth of a massive dungeon. If it's the latter, I might have to leave and bring my friends back so we can clear it together. The world started to fade back in, the instance having loaded, and I started to fall. It wasn't too far, but I dropped onto a shallow pool with a rough rocky bottom. It hurt. A small chunk of my health bar broke off from the main body and fell out of view.
As I stood up, grunting from the pain, I surveyed my surroundings. The water was about a foot deep, but despite being beneath a bog, it looked crystal clear. It went from wall to wall of the room I was in- what looked like a fairly small cave chamber. There were a few cave formations for show, but the main feature of interest was directly across from me: A large stone door with some sort of rotating mechanism built into it.
I hesitated. This was... Definitely
something
. These unique instances were totally modular. The door looked like it was some sort of puzzle that I needed to solve, but behind it could be treasure, or a monster, or the rest of a dungeon. It could also just be some miscellaneous lore, and it would be a waste of everyone's time if I went back for backup just for that, so, with a sigh, I moved forwards.
In the total absence of an ambient track, the small sound of water moving as I waded across the room filled my ears, reverberating from the acoustics of the chamber. I stopped when I was in arm's reach of the door. It loomed, several feet taller than me, with a completely different texture from the surrounding stone. It somehow felt
older
than the cave I was in, sporting deep pits that were overflowing with moss.
The mechanism in the center looked simple enough. A series of concentric rings with markings evenly spaced along them. The markings formed spokes when aligned with each other and with similar markings on the door proper. The puzzle seemed simple enough- make the markings match going from the edge to the center. The only catch was that, while you could rotate any of the rings, rotating some rings would rotate some of the others, though the reverse wasn't necessarily true. It wasn't a particularly clever puzzle but it took me a frustratingly long time to figure out which rings were connected. Oh well. That's what you get when your puzzles are procedurally generated.
After ten minutes of fiddling, I heard a click and a lighthearted jingle as the last ring slid into place and the puzzle acknowledged that it had been solved. The entire mechanism receded a few inches inwards and began to descend. A gleam of pink made me take a step back. No sooner did a gap appear that something began to squeeze through it.
Shit. Like I said, this game was a lot stickier.
It didn't take long for the mass to completely make its way into the room I was in. A big, quivering, rose-colored slime. Obviously a monster. I quickly made my way underneath the entrance into the instance and tried to interact with it, only to be met with "You cannot do this while in combat." Again, shit.
The odds were bad that I could actually take this thing, but it didn't
look
particularly threatening, so maybe I had a chance. I drew my weapon. My current combat class was Adventurer so I could use most of the basic weapon types. Slimes are usually resistant to slashing and piercing damage, so I chose my mace. The creature responded by jiggling side to side before crawling forward, stretching and contracting like a slug.
Its info popped up in front of me. [???]. Fair enough, it was a special creature in a unique node. I did my due diligence and performed the somatic gestures for a spell.
> You cast [Lore]. Casting check... (3d6 + 4) = 15 vs DC 12, basic success.
The monster's??? was replaced with the information that [Lore] generated for me.
[Cloying Slime]
LVL??
Type -- Ooze
Resists -- Slashing, piercing, fire
Immunity -- Grapple, prone, poison
Weakness-- Water
