Video Game Plotline Tester (The Dark Herbalist Book #1) LitRPG series Read online

  Video Game Plotline Tester

  a novel

  by Michael Atamanov

  Dark Herbalist

  Book#1

  Magic Dome Books

  Video Game Plotline Tester

  Dark Herbalist, Book # 1

  Copyright © M. Atamanov 2017

  Cover Art © V. Manyukhin 2017

  English translation copyright © Andrew Schmitt 2017

  Published by Magic Dome Books, 2017

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is entirely a work of fiction. Any correlation with real people or events is coincidental.

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  Table of Contents:

  Video Game Plotline Tester

  Orcish Galley

  Surviving the Night

  Gray Pack

  Socialization

  Night of Miracles

  A Big Fuss Over an Egg

  Finding Myself

  Green Bride

  Big Plans

  Little Vixen

  A Step Forward

  Night of Blood

  Level Twenty-Five

  Suitor Competition

  Conclusion

  Video Game Plotline Tester

  "Have you ever played Boundless Realm before?" the middle-aged HR employee asked me, starting off the interview with the question I was most dreading.

  In the job posting, there had been a rather unambiguous requirement that I must have: "Never played the game before." I suspect that, if I had answered "yes," the interview would have ended as quickly as it had begun.

  "And have you played any other popular online games, uh... Timothy?" he asked, having finally read my name from the screen in front of him. He was at the end of a long day. He must have been tired.

  "Yes, of course. I've been a gamer for about six years now. I used to be pretty active in Kingdoms of Sword and Magic."

  "Gamer..." he muttered back disdainfully. The slang term, it seemed, was not to his taste. The man furrowed his brow in dismay. "And how did you do in our competitor's game? Where you able to achieve anything noteworthy, Timothy?"

  Should I tell him the truth? Or was it dumb to expose such things to this total stranger? Despite my misgivings, I decided to risk it:

  "For the last five years, it has been my only source of income. I didn't earn enough for a luxury yacht or a villa on a tropical island or anything, of course, but it was more than enough to survive on and pay my way through college."

  "Why do you say, 'of course' there was no yacht?" He inquired. Much to my surprise, the man began laughing. "The top players from Boundless Realm easily make enough for a simple ocean-going vessel. But as far as I know, in KSM, withdrawing game money was against the rules. Would you care to tell me more about that, Timothy?"

  I guess I chose wrong. I shouldn't have said anything. Was this the end? Would I be sent on my way? The man didn't insist on an answer, though. Instead, he asked a different question entirely:

  "Then why did you leave KSM? Although, I guess we can skip that. The answer is obvious. The number of active players has been falling sharply. More and more people have been changing over to Boundless Realm. It’s more entertaining and realistic, after all. The money must have simply dried up."

  I just nodded in silence, as I really didn't have anything to add. Once upon a time, our clan could gather five or even seven thousand players for PvP raids into enemy territory or to take down superbosses. But those times were long gone now. Yesterday, we had barely been able to scrape together fifteen players for an assault on an enemy castle, and three of them were noobs who'd only been in the game for a week. And yet we... took the castle! The only defender from the enemy clan who remained actually seemed glad to be rid of the burden, wishing us the best of luck, and trying to unload his account onto us, as he was preparing to leave for Boundless Realm.

  That was when I decided once and for all that the time had come to ditch that sinking ship before the competition put it on the bottom of the sea. It was a huge shame to see all the money I'd put into the game go down the drain, though. You see, I inherited the family apartment after the tragic death of my parents but I had to sell it to pay off my sister’s medical bills. There was a decent chunk of change left over from that, though, and I decided to invest it in virtual property near one of Kingdom's capital cities. At that time, Kingdoms of Sword and Magic was growing quickly, so the purchase had seemed a sound investment.

  Who could have foreseen that, literally two weeks after my risky acquisition, the previously unknown Boundless Realm corporation would launch their own game servers? And could anyone have predicted that they would then go on to become the largest and richest corporation on Earth in just three years, pulling hundreds of millions of gamers from all over the globe into their extremely realistic world? Now, the value of my virtual property in Kingdoms had fallen so severely that it couldn't even justify the time I had put into building it.

  The HR employee spent a few minutes reading my resume more closely, then raised his eyes to me and said
with a smile:

  "A level-three-hundred-ten human paladin, a level-two-hundred-seventy drow bowman, a level-one-hundred-ninety half-elf mage... Not bad, not bad at all. So Timothy, have you been made aware that, in Boundless Realm, a player can only have one character, and changing or deleting it is not possible? It's the best way to make sure our players truly mesh and sympathize with their characters as we would like. Only then do they perceive the game world as true reality."

  I just nodded in silence. How could I not have known...? That was the thing that had most worried me when I first saw an advertisement for Boundless Realm game tester positions online. The problem was that I had already tried to play Boundless Realm. That was over three years ago, though. At that time, it was still just an open beta, and it had seemed a bit "undercooked" for my tastes. There weren't any training scenarios, guides or in-game hints yet. In the place I started, everything just looked blocky and incomplete. There were no "glorious beckoning horizons," or "enchantingly real sunsets," as their ads now proclaimed. Back then, Boundless Realm had nothing of the sort.

  And what was more, I had only played for seven minutes. I made myself a level-one barbarian, took a two-handed ax, left the starting area and, right next to the village, found myself face-to-face with a group of vampire bats around level-seventy. A second later, I was dead. The game told me I'd have to wait a whole hour to come back at the respawn point, so I just cursed at the half-baked imbalanced game and deleted it from my computer. But now, I was hoping very much that my abortive previous experience would not be hampering my attempt to find work as a "Video Game Plotline Tester," as the official job notice called the position I was now interviewing for.

  "What can I say, Timothy? You really do have a lot of video-game experience, and no physical or mental health issues. I don't see any real obstacles to your employment with our corporation," said the man, smiling at me again and extending a computer tablet with a survey. He told me to find a seat in the small room next door and complete the questionnaire, then wait for the introductory meeting to begin.

  I went into the room, got out my cell phone and, pretending to take a selfie with a sleek poster of a blue water dragon, sent a message:

  "I passed the interview."

  Almost instantly, my phone gave a slight vibration. It was the reply:

  "No rush, but what did they offer? I'll run through the forums."

  Then, I found a chair and started ticking boxes on the tablet. The survey covered many questions about my health, family life, criminal history and bad habits. The second half of the survey turned out to be of a totally different type, clearly aimed at determining the game character best suited to my personality.

  Next to me, there were other job seekers mashing away at their tablets. Most of the men and women were around my age, though some were older, even including a few senior citizens. It didn’t take me long to form an impression of my future work environment. I saw students, who had been expelled for truancy or failing grades, down-sized office workers, down-on-their-luck stock brokers, hopeless gaming addicts, and desperate retirees who hadn’t managed to find more suitable employment... To generalize, the people sitting around me were losers, who hadn't found themselves a place in the real world.

  I didn't consider myself a loser, but I could agree that I fit into the group very organically. I was already twenty-two years old, but I didn't have a job, a girlfriend, money, or even a place of my own. So, it wasn't really clear what separated me from them. I had a good head on my shoulders, I suppose. I graduated from college with a degree in Research Chemistry. I could hold down a conversation, wasn’t especially ugly and had a reasonable talent for sports. Also, I had an easy enough time getting along with women but, for some reason, all my girlfriends had left me for other guys. Usually, when they found out I had to take care of my disabled sister, who couldn't walk, they would run for the hills. It was a shame, but I would never have agreed to trade in my baby sister for some shallow Barbie.

  My sister, Valeria, was eleven at the time of the accident. My father was behind the wheel of the family flying car when it crashed full-speed into a thief trying to evade the police. The impact and resulting thirty-meter fall killed my mother and father instantly. My younger sister, though, lost both her legs and suffered many lacerations and broken bones. The police finding my father not at fault in the crash didn't make it any easier, either. I had to sell our apartment in the good part of town to pay for Val’s treatment and other expenses.

  For my sister's sake, I gave up not only my parents, but also friends, psychologists and the rest of the world. It was hardest of all right after the accident. Valeria was in so much constant pain that she couldn't see a reason to exist. Many times, she asked me to give her a handful of sleeping pills so she would never have to wake up again. I did my best to comfort my sister and convince her not to commit suicide and, day by day, her will to live grew stronger. We tried many things to improve her mood, but the first thing that worked was taking walks. We used to live near a large park, and it was always pleasant there. Unfortunately, not long after that, we were forced to move from the center of the metropolis due to lack of funds, and took up residence in the outskirts of town. Soon after, the walks stopped on Val’s own request. My sister just couldn’t bear the jokes and laughter of the neighborhood kids. They called her a cripple, and even pelted her with rocks. It was just too much.

  But then, she found a new way to forget about her physical handicap. Virtual computer-game worlds allowed her to blow off steam and enjoy beautiful surroundings once again. This new pastime didn't really bring us much money, though. In fact, it was more the other way around. The situation became especially dismal in the last few months, when the game world she'd chosen a few years earlier, Kingdoms of Sword and Magic, began to show obvious signs of giving out...

  I shook my head, chasing away the sad thoughts, and returned to the survey. After breezing through the questions, I stopped at the very last point: "Desired method of payment." There were two options: fixed monthly income or the ability to withdraw game currency and exchange it for real money. In Boundless Realm, as in the majority of MMO's, it was normally only allowed to give money to the company. You could put real money into the game, but there was no way of taking it back out. An exception was made only for employees of the corporation. They were allowed to withdraw virtual currency from the game in lieu of a real salary, if they so chose.

  As for me, that possibility was the very reason I was now so driven to find work at the Boundless Realm corporation. I mean, it was clear that no sane company would ever offer a stable salary to any of the pitiful losers in the room with me today. But with a legal method of turning game money into real money... There was no telling what could happen. My character could get rich in the game, for example. And that would immediately solve my financial problems in real life as well. That said, my sister and I had a perfect understanding that for every person that got lucky, there were thousands of people who made the wrong choice and would just be pouring their blood, sweat and tears into a job that would almost certainly end up giving them less than minimum wage. But we had made our choice, and it was a conscious, shared decision.

  The chubby middle-aged accountant-type woman sitting next to me gave me a nudge. She got to a question about "charisma," and was whispering loudly to everyone around, asking what that word even meant. I couldn't make out what the guy sitting on the other side of her said, but he was clearly trying his best to maintain a serious facial expression. The woman grew a dark shade of crimson and began entering text on her tablet at the speed of a printer, covering what she wrote with her left hand. I shook my head. Well, if this was the caliber of my competition... I marked the option "Withdraw game currency" with determination.

  Alright, decision made. There was no going back now. All the same, I tried to cast off the creeping sensation of dread coming from my empty bank account. And it wasn’t just that I had no money. I also had a past-due loan with interest sl
owly accumulating on top of it. If I couldn't pay off at least part of that loan in the next few weeks, the bank might block my card. Beyond that, my sister and I hadn't paid rent for three months. Our landlady was already threatening to evict us. It would be very, very hard to get by without a stable salary.

  But I still decided to take the risk, just as I had when buying in-game property in Kingdoms of Sword and Magic. But this time, I wasn't just betting a two-bedroom apartment in a prestigious neighborhood, but everything my sister and I had left.

  * * *

  "Alright, everybody. Welcome!" An elegantly dressed swarthy man with dark curly hair walked out onto the small stage. "My name is Alexandro Lavrius. I am Director of Special Projects for the Boundless Realm corporation. And you all have been selected to work under me as videogame plotline testers. What's wrong with the microphone?"

  The microphone was giving off a horrible screeching sound, making my ears ring. The director's young assistant, looking afraid, scurried nimbly out onto the stage, and adjusted the microphone attached to Alexandro's collar. The director cast a very unhappy gaze at his subordinate, promising the girl a chewing out, and continued:

  "Alright, now that's out of the way. So then, first a short introduction. The virtual Boundless Realm you will come to occupy is in fact quite large. It’s not actually boundless, as you might think from the name but, still, it is quite substantial in size. It is already larger than the actual earth, so you can travel around discovering new and interesting locations in a practically limitless way. At present, there are around two hundred forty million players in Boundless Realm, and that number continues to grow by two to three million each month. You'd think our corporation would be proud of that, and simply rest on our laurels and rake in the cash. But, no. Our management is constantly dreaming up newer and more grandiose plans, and the development of the game is still in full swing. However, the planning department saw certain risks in the medium-term future and our directors agreed the threat was real.