The Audience
Otter_44351147 leapt into the classroom and tried to mock a hard style teacher with his good looking entry. He told her he was sitting down and got to his third row seat. He was wearing his white graphic tee shirt, with the GAME DOMAIN logo on it, and he loved to tease his next over seat mate, who was to the right of him. He was talking to Xiaomin when the teacher called for them to be quiet. He asked her later if he got a good grade on the test. She told him not to worry. He had in fact indeed gotten a spectacularly fine seventy two out of one hundred points on his math quiz. He was going to be all right. So they told him he could go just fine. He returned to his humble home in Xiuan, Fengxuan at number nineteen Tiameng Street in the north west of the Democratic Peoples Republic of China. The year was twenty thousand and eighty and he was in the clan Nocturnal for the video game Eve. It is a Chinese virtual reality game and he was using a Facebook Eve headset for the game play viewer. He was using his Facebook Eve joysticks as well for the controllers. He was picking menu options and finished with his view distance set at maximum and his field of view set at a standard sixty nine frame units, which allowed him to hit out of sight monsters and see human players faster than others. He was capable at the game and was ranked first in it, at the top of the death elevator linking order, which meant he had nothing to lose. He could die as many times as he wanted to. When you died in Eve, you lost all of your equipment and your items, but not your statistics, experience points or level score. He was level ninety nine and had a maximum number, signified by the number becoming gold colored, in all of his statistics. He had been greatly pleased by this fact. He was playing in the Lower North Zone called the Otter Farms and he had given himself this user name, otter with a capital O underscore four four three five one one four seven, abbreviated in-game as Otter_44351147, because he saw the otter on the front cover of the main screen of the game and assumed other players would be otters as well. He was wrong. The game had you create a human character and he made a tough man looking character named Otter_44351147, who had black hair, like himself outside of the virtual reality world, and strong arms, and a weird white waistcoat looking tee shirt he wore with ballooned Chinese pants and a sachet emblem hanging stuff. He played him with his remote joysticks and was having fun beating both hostile and good critters. The hostile critters gave you reaper points, which you used to unlock skills and such. The good critters just gave experience points. Some players preferred not to fight the good critters because it was useless to farm experience points when you could not get skills from doing this, but he was what they called a player versus player dash regular and player versus player dash good player. These were abbreviated as PVP-R and PVP-G and virtual reality was abbreviated as VR. But Eve was too short of a name to properly shorten with an abbreviation. So players rarely spoke of it. He was in the game for ninety three seconds just checking his statistics, which he called stats, and such. A player by the name of zero with a capital Z underscore nocturnal with a capital N, abbreviated as Zero_Nocturnal, stepped into the world, sort of. When you spawned in, it gave you a golden colored aura of linking circles and if you stepped in to it, you would die. He did this right on Otter_44351147. Otter_44351147 was furious. This killed him and was impossible to do. This was cheating. You had a spawn zone, and he was not in it. Some players could spawn in the non-spawn zones, but this was for game master's only, he thought. This was not usually how it was allowed, he complained in Chinese in chat. He was in the General chat tab and his clan members spoke with gold text while the other people in the game spoke in black text or sometimes colorful text that bounced around. You could buy text effects in the game's shop. They were expensive, too expensive for most players, but Otter_44351147 had most of them and now they were all gone! They were all locked just like he had not earned them in the past! He had been paying the subscription cost of sixteen ninety nine American United States Dollars, abbreviate as USD and $99 to him to say it was a lot of money, when it was not really, because his parents paid for him to play this game, Eve. Zero_Nocturnal had done something wrong. Otter_44351147 messaged the support staff but they did not reply too soon, and quickly it dawned on him. He would have to climb the death elevator linking order, abbreviated as DELO, again to become number one, the top ranked player in Eve. The top spot was labelled with #1 and he wanted to be there right now, where he should be. He fought good and evil critters and got back to rank number sixty five thousand and three hundred thirty five, but this meant he had lost all his progress. He had to get to rank one to play with his clan at next years PAX Eternal convention, where he would be playing with his clan for a combined total of sixty five million yuan. He had to survive this time to get back to his #1 spot!
His clan had talked amongst itself and they decided he would need to beat the Otter Farms over one thousand times to get back to number one, abbreviated as #1, by itself. He was determined to be victorious. And so started his quest to be #1, when he had already become #1, and Zero_Nocturnal was still out there, somewhere, and might be at PAX Eternal 2081 as well!
The convention, shortened as a con', was held in mainland China. It was a Chinese festival with videogames, kit and more. He had never been there before. He was excited to go. Over sixty-five million yuan, abbreviated in the advertisements as ¥65,000,000, was his prize if he could win. The others shares as well as the top executives could be had as well. He was giggling while fighting monsters. In the distance, a notable player named Auria was fighting good critters and evil ones as well. He was eyeing her and he was not going to close the distance to her fighting spot. He had to be careful. She was a professional player. She knew how to kill her victims. She was a female player in real life, but he was not known to her clan, Fictitious_Roses. Clans in Eve had to be one to sixteen characters long, but if they were longer, people did not notice. It was a Chinese-language only game. So her clan only took up four characters. In the characters he saw that she was above level sixty seven again. Levels were abbreviated with what Xi Huan, the real name of the player playing for Nocturnal, his clan which used real names for their score cards on their website.
Her name was auria with a capital a underscore forty seven, abbreviated as Auria_47, on her clans website. Her score card was blank. They were not using them it seemed to Xi. He was playing faster but not looser. He had gotten to level forty seven, which all numbers in the game were abbreviated, so it was seen as Level 47, written in Chinese characters in the game world of Eve, where he was playing right now. He had homework to do but he was letting it slide. This was dangerous. He would not confuse his mother if he was not with her on this destiny drive.
Auria did not notice him.
He would fight around her.
This was his climb to PAX Eternal 2081.