Overdrive
Amit was astonished.
He had been preparing for PAX Eternal 2081. He had to find a way to get to rank 1, and to the playing zone for the 'con, which was in China. He had his eternal passport, what he termed an infernal thing he would prefer not to own, but it was squandering his lepidopteran philosophy that he said was his major, minor and even eventual habitat, where he might live and play, before molting into something else, the Amit that he preferred to be. He called himself the man of the hour. He was rank 32. He was level 99. All he needed was to get to rank 1 and have his tickets scrutinized as being popular enough to get him what he wanted. He wanted to go to the 'con. The ¥65,000.000 prize was hot on his mind. He had to do it based on his own instincts. He was in his team, not anyone else's. He was in no clan. This was not a clan, it was the lack of being in one. He was system-termed nothing at all under his name. It said nothing there when for others who were in a clan it said their clan name. Like Nocturnal, or Fictitious_Roses, or the others like Jello_Zero and _Ablemightyhardcore, who were also high-level and fastly ranked heroes of the community. Xi and Mitsuru, the players of Otter_44351147 and Auria, who were ready, almost, to go to PAX Eternal 2081. Auria needed to get to rank 1. All she needed was a few hundred more kills. It would take an outburst by her, she considered personally, unbeknownst to others, to get to this rank. Amit considered himself tougher. He could get there this week, if he preferred to hack-time-kill it there. This was his term for working hard. He could get there as long as he had about, he surmised, 100,000 more kills in Eve. He only needed that many. The top ranks were all termed by the community tight and working hard to only get what they needed to not provoke the others, possibly, or were still fighting. Otter_44351147 and Auria were not online right when Amit's character, Zombie_Hunter, was playing right now, right when he needed it most. To kill them too was what he wanted and he termed that in his play style gruesome. If he won against them and could fight to the top and hold it there, he could win the ¥65,000,000 prize from PAX Eternal 2081. They were assuming he would be easier to hunt down. They were wrong. These were his fears, not the communities. He stayed in some areas, like the outer space habitat he habitually returned to, to fight high level players and amass such interests as new net points, which he got as statistics and not full, round numbers, called integers by the community. These partial statistics did not to them mean much at all. It was just having a blast. They were there, the dev team new, to stun new viewers. If you got a full number, it was added, but partial numbers did nothing to help you kill. Still, they were dangerous to add and the early adopters of Eve, who were these fine folks right here, would be amused to find out that there was hidden data on the other side of the fence, termed the great divide of honesty and greed by the dev team. The new numbers had meant nothing. They were just added in to tell the player base that there were new numbers to accrue. In doing it this way, they would have an easier time telling when it was time to open up the stat screen and add new ability points to their menus. The dev community was honest. There was no greed in it. That was the player base, and the price point. Eve was free to play. You had to download it, but there was no cost associated with getting into the game. This was deemed alright by the dev team. They earned money by being a shareholder's corporation, but this was not known to the majority of the community. They were based in China, they called it Mainland China, and Egypta was not a place they considered a high territory financially, as they were only operating on the basis that the players would be Chinese citizens, where they counted themselves as among their numbers. The dev team sometimes as a community stayed out of the game, preferring to just monitor it, or fix issues, and work on the new build versions. 2.0 and 3.0 were big names inside their humongous office. They would be a long way away. There was still stuff like critter demise animations and drinking potions called Faoux, which meant if they were implemented, the animation would have to, or not, be cancelled by taking another action. This meant the instant-use potions would be gone. The term was an in-house one for interesting, as it meant nothing in the current Chinese-language, it was an invented term. Some in the community even termed it inventive. It was an interesting idea they had composed, but when they tried to implement it, it fell under time and budget costs and not sinking into the reality was it ever going to be added, probably not, was their focus tested answer.
Back in the game world of Eve, Zombie_Hunter and its outside player Amit Nefgavari who was a what he termed licensing act away from acting zombie-normal. He was in his house, an apartment complex where he was the ruler and the king. He had to work fast. He had a lot to go off of.
He was working harder than ever on his punch-drunk boxing love, how he stated with his own in-house terminology what he was doing, which was fighting abroad. He was turning couples into locust nests of abusive punishment hoarders, as their kill counts did not climb while his soared. He was using nautical terminology to say he was coming abord of their sort of supposed ship. A player character, Zombie_Hunter's player considered, was a ship, and the player inside of that ship, was the person he was most perturbed by. They were killing his ship, and his crew, and taking away his winning loot drop. They were felled one by one until he was rank 1 as well. He had defeated Otter_44351147 and its player, the captain of the ship of Otter_44351147. This was the dark side of Otter. He said that in Chinese-language characters Otter_44351147's player was over ranked, and now he was, what Amit chose to say as he typed in the game devices cyber world, with his VR gear on his head and the joysticks in his hand, overruled. He said this was a term that he meant to use earlier, but now he was serious, and in the game, for sure to win, as he said he was quite certain he was the one who had already won at PAX Eternal 2081. And it might be forever that he was the victor. Because this consequential victory of his, which was his own, in his own terminology, drive-by terminology for someone who did not speak Chinese very well and was an Egyptain player who was driven to succeed, and this was his game, even, he said, and made the claim that although he was not in the development community, he was the reigning champion of Eve's DELO, and that just meant it was in the current time of events he was succeeding in, as in the future, he could find out just what he had hoped, which he said in his own terminology, meant that he could be facing defeat before he could achieve total victory. Total victory was a term to Amit and the person who played the player character Zombie_Hunter that meant he had achieved what he was going to do, win, at PAX Eternal 2081, as well as win here, in the game world, to get to PAX Eternal, and dethrone and defeat any odds. He admitted his terminology was kind of odd. This was the way he said it. He was just using the code of his mind, he believed. They were talking to him from the viewpoints of losers. He took a driven gamble, he surmised, and continued to fight in Eve. He was not in the tournaments. This was, to him, something of a dissatisfying feature of his life. He did not know these things even existed in the game, Eve. He would soon find them fascinating.
Eve, and the tournaments, were always around. Since 2079, when the game opened its borders to new players, that is when it was surmised that it went live, because it said its release data was the year 2079 on the application supermarket in the VR world where the game devices and joysticks connected you to via your internet connection or WiFi meeting the interfacing code and launching you into the world online, from the world before it, and that you were still in, called the offline world by people some termed too engrossed in the net to see was a scary term to see used by what others called naysayers, and even though it was not a commonly used way to call being offline, or out of the VR world, it stuck around as a cool way to say you were an addict of virtual reality.