Analia
Server shutdown in T-00:27:23…22…21…
It was YGGDRASIL's last day online, and I sat in my
[Hidden Workshop], hunched over my jeweler's station, tinkering away at a monocle, brow lightly furrowed in concentration as I ground my way through YGGDRASIL's crafting mechanic, my Hammer tinking away as my nine vibrantly orange fox tails with white tips slowly waved behind me.
When I'd joined YGGDRASIL, I'd somehow, I blame my bad eyesight, misread first-person as third-person and designed my character accordingly. Because if I'm going to be staring at an ass for God knows how many hours it might as well be a good looking one. Taller than most men, pretty, with long fox-orange hair and fur, shockingly amber slitted eyes, a large but still realistically sized bust, and slender like a swimmer, even after I'd realized my mistake I hadn't cared enough about playing as a female to go through the hassle of having my player profile completely reset. Seeing eye candy whenever I looked in a reflective surface didn't hurt either.
I'd chosen to be a
[Kitsune] for one very important reason…
Fluffy Tails~. Gotta touch them all, right? But where the other kitsune had gone down the mage, wizard, or sorcerer paths – for good reason, the potential synergies with our racial bonuses were unreal – I'd gone down the crafter path, as that was what had drawn me to the game in the first place.
Kitsune crafters had a unique mechanic: we could take multiple crafting disciplines at the cost of multiplying our xp requirements, and that after level 20 I needed to make a masterwork quality item with an item level equal to or higher than my level to advance. Which was quite tricky because item levels were not something that was visible to Players under normal circumstances, especially once you got into the Divine tier which seemed to start at level 85.
Given that non-crafting kitsune needed to go on a multi-boss win streak every ten levels to keep progressing, I felt I had got the better deal as I got really good at making masterworks… even if finding the materials needed to make high level items once I hit level 70 was an
absolute slog. It wasn't until I was able to get ahold of Prismatic Ores that I could reliably make items that would allow me to advance.
Crafting in YGGDRASIL was a bit odd, mainly because any player could shove data crystals into an item skin, negating the traditional need for people with production classes. But those of us with a crafting class? We are far more
efficient, able to get the same result with less, or better with an equal amount, and that's not getting in to how high-level crafters could tweak item abilities during the crafting process.
Once you got into the end game, with Legendary and Divine tier items, whose mat drops were rare on top of only dropping from rare monsters, that crafting efficiency became
irreplaceable. To the point where if the local heteromorph, like me, was the only one who could forge your infinity +1 sword without you having to spend another month, or five, grinding, you plugged your nose and paid them.
And to keep people from stiffing me, I only accepted payment up front, and forwarded notice of the contract to the relevant crafter's guild to keep someone from trying anything funny after the fact.
But I wasn't working on a commission right now. I hadn't had any in almost a month, business having dried up with the announcement of YGGDRASIL's impending shutdown. This project was something I had wondered if I could do for… years now, but hadn't dared before. If it worked, it would call down attention onto me that I would not survive. But that didn't matter now.
Last day. Last chance.
The lens of the monocle was made from a shard of the Bifrost, an ultra-rare divine-tier drop. The frame and chain was made from Divinite, an iridescent metal with no fixed color. A Player-made alloy crafted from the seven Prismatic Ores, and THE rarest material in the game. On their own, that would have guaranteed the end result to be a powerful divine-tier artifact, but I could push it further. My secret? The World Item Forge Hammer of Yggdrasil, which was currently in the shape of a jeweler's chisel, with a Divinite head and a shaft from off-white Yggdrasil heartwood. I'd received it by being the first person to discover Divinite, beating my competition by less than half an hour. To say they were salty was an understatement, I'd wound up having to flee from my workshop in Nidavellir over the fallout from that.
Thing is, crafters have limits. The Hammer allows me to break them.
Anything that a Player can edit,
any Player, under
any circumstances, no matter how rare, the Hammer can edit. No specific data crystals needed.
Equipment, consumables, buildings,
NPCs, possibly even
Guild Bases (though I'd never dared to check that, and the Hammer's description was vague), all could have their data edited by the Hammer. There were restrictions of course. Players were off limits, as were monsters, bosses, and quest/unique NPCs. And while editing items only cost mana, editing NPCs cost xp as well. Also, the base materials an item is made from have a data limit. As an example, you couldn't cram a divine-tier enchantment into an iron sword, iron didn't have enough data space.
I'd taken great care to ensure no one knew I had a World Item.
I'm not useless in a fight, but I'm a crafter, not a PvP specialist. And while I am a member of the Asgard Crafters Guild – guess where I'm set up now – I'm not one of the core members. Both because I'm a Demi-human that was "upgraded" to a Heteromorph when I took
[Nine Tailed Kitsune], and because I just wasn't interested in socializing with them. The feeling was definitely mutual too, what with me being a gaijin as well. But, thanks in no small part to the Hammer, I was one of the best crafters in the game in addition to being one of the very few able to forge and work Divinite, which was why they plugged their collective noses and let me in.
At least Guild Master HammerAndThunder was a good person who didn't subscribe to the bigotry. He even let me buy an NPC to run my shop. It was kind of an open secret that he had an in with the devs, or was one himself, because the guild had a
lot of NPCs, even if they were very low level. Mine didn't stay that way for long, of course.
Then again, maybe he had a World Item like I did, and actively encouraged that rumor to keep it from being stolen.
On my end, while I used the Hammer constantly, I made sure the end result was only a little bit better than what the next best crafter in the guild could do, giving the impression that it was a combination of talent and the racial class
[Kitsune Grandmaster Craftswoman] that let me do it.
But for the monocle, I was going all out. Compared to Divine items which usually had at most three abilities, I'd already added
[Translate],
[Night Vision],
[Heat Vision],
[Farsight],
[Magnification], and was currently adding
[Mana Si-
A wet cough exploded out of me and I quickly put my tools aside so I wouldn't accidentally ruin my project as I descended into another coughing fit.
This one wasn't as bad as the others, bile didn't come up this time at least, but it still left me half curled on the floor blinking tears out of my eyes.
Neural-Interface technology was an amazing thing, but there were some inputs from your flesh and blood body it couldn't, by design, block out.
Respiratory issues was one of those.
Fucking rich pricks dumping toxic waste into drinking water
just to save a couple of fucking –
I forced the thought from my mind. There'd be plenty of time for me to rant later, I wanted to enjoy what was left of YGGDRASIL now.
Why couldn't YGGDRASIL have shut down three months from now? I would have been dead by then. Only had two months of savings left anyways, so after month three I'll OD on sleeping pills rather than be tossed out onto the streets to die. Assuming I last that long.
With a moan I pulled myself back onto the stool in front of my jewelry workstation and rested my head on the table, listening to myself wheeze.
A knock on the doorframe drew my attention to the currently open doors separating the pocket dimension of my
[Hidden Workshop] with my store front. Which admittedly kind of negated the "hidden" part of the skill, but that was what the inner adamantine door, and pseudo airlock it was set in, was for, to keep people out while allowing me to listen in on what was going in my shop through the barred window set in it and pass items through its' mail slot to my NPC shopkeeper. With the rapidly declining player base, and complete dearth of customers, as YGGDRASIL reached its conclusion, I hadn't bothered closing it in the past few days, not wanting do deal with the security enchantments that kept out thieves.
Standing in the doorway was a tall, thin, handsome male kitsune with nine white-tipped tails, the orange of his fur several shades darker than mine.
"VulpineCenturion, we have several potions of
[Divine Disease Cure] in stock," he intoned.
"No thank you, Taro," I rasped tiredly, "please go back to the counter."
I turned back to the monocle as I heard my NPC walk back to the store counter, where he was stationed when he wasn't restocking the store's consumables. Every time I had a coughing fit within his hearing it triggered his "Player is afflicted with a
[Disease]" AI sub-routine and he's remind me that I had various
[Disease Cure] potions in stock. The AI was just trying to be helpful… but it wasn't my character that was dying. Unfortunately.
…I didn't want to die… but the hand I was dealt wasn't giving me a choice in the matter.
And despite my best efforts with the Hammer, I couldn't get Taro to refer to my character by the roleplay name I'd given her, Analia Vulpes. He had a very extensive backstory now though, he and my character were even mates according to the lore I'd given him.
I'd been very depressed when I'd wrote that. I'd just figured out that I wasn't going to survive whatever I've got, and wanted someone, anyone, even if it was a few lines of non-sentient code, to wonder where I was when I didn't come home one day.
Like a lot of people, my parents were dead before I was out of my teens. Both my siblings hadn't survived infancy. No friends. Not even a pet like the rich and some of the less-destitute have.
Just YGGDRASIL, and Taro.
Soon not even that.
I picked up my Hammer, and went back to completing the
[Mana Sight] enchantment.
~~~FOX OF THE FORGE~~~
Taro
T+00:00:00…01…02…
The sudden shift of the view through the shop windows from the eternally lit white and gold of Asgard to the darkness of night caused me to startle, nearly slamming my hand down on the big red button under the counter that would sound alarms and send the shop into lockdown.
After a long, tense minute of me resting my fingers on the button, ready for some thief or assassin to come bursting through the shop door… nothing happened. And nothing continued to happen.
Finally coming to the conclusion that we were not, currently, under attack, I rounded the counter with hurried stride, coming to a stop next to one of the display mannequins as I peered out the display window at our new surroundings.
We were obviously not on Asgard anymore. We weren't even in a city. By the light coming from illumination crystals in the store streaming through the windows I could see where the white marble paving stones just ended in a sheer line several meters in front of the store and a light forest began.
Still cautious, I flipped the sign from open to closed, sealed the adamantine shutters, and stepped outside to take a quick look around, locking the door behind me with my key.
It occurred to me that I couldn't remember the last time I had stepped outside the shop, which was a depressing thought. I'd been on
Asgard for how many years and never saw the sights? That's just shameful.
Casting a wary look around the dark forest, my eyes slowly adjusting to the low light, the 7
th tier spell
[Greater Foxfire Lance] primed in my hand, I sniffed the air to smell what was around us.
The scent of squirrels, birds, a pair of mortal foxes, rodents, deer, and a bear came to my nose, most of them faint enough to be some distance away. Were we on Midgard?
Once my eyes adjusted I turned to inspect the shop front, which was ten meters wide and two stories tall, with a peaked roof that housed an attic. Like all shops in the Golden City it was faced in Asgardian White Marble, which seemed to glow ethereally in the moonlight, with gilded roof tiles and gold trim.
From this base VulpineCent –
Analia, when did I get in the habit of not calling my mate by her
name – had upgraded the windows with Helheim Veilglass, a transparent crystal with a blueish hue with material properties similar to mithril that would likely be used in mid-tier armor were it not for its rarity and expense, added adamantine shutters over the large display windows that framed the door, the dark blue of the metal contrasting with the white and gold façade, and emplaced a pair of three meter tall fox statues forged from adamantine with claws and fangs taken from an Elder Dragon and eyes of Nifilheim Radiant Emeralds on either side of the doorway. A simple sign hung above the door, made from golden wood with her maker's mark seared into the wood, a fox head encircled by nine tails, below the words
Analia's Wares.
The fox statues were golems of course, their Celestial Uranium cores allowing them to be upgraded to divine-tier, and would activate when the store's alarms sounded, on command from Analia, or if they were messed with.
Turning I began to walk around the building, inspecting it for damage. The dark grey Primordial Granite that formed the store's outer walls stretched back thirty meters, intended to allow sufficient space for a crafter to set up their workshop though Analia just used it for storage.
Primordial Granite was incredibly tough stone, to the point the Aesir had gone to great effort to quarry it for use in both the great wall around Asgard and their most important buildings, but to my knowledge it had never been tested against whatever dimensional sheer used on the shop.
Thankfully, whatever had punted the shop into a different world had been bizarrely careful not to damage it. Bits and pieces of the inner walls of neighboring buildings were stuck to the outer walls, but the store itself was, as far as I could tell, completely undamaged. Even the Primordial Granite slab that had replaced the back door that normally opened onto a service alleyway was undisturbed.
Returning to the front I briefly considered exploring the forest to get a better idea of how dangerous the area was but… no. Not with Analia in such poor health. Her cough has been steadily getting worse for the past few months, what if she has a bad fit and needs me? Given how she believes that my
[Disease Cure] potions won't work on it, I'm at a loss how to help her.
I ducked back in to the shop, locking the door behind me, ears flicking to the hallway behind the counter that led to the back rooms and had where the large ornate marble door that led to Analia's
[Hidden Workshop] was merged with the hallway wall. Thanks to the open doors and my keen hearing I could hear her breathing from here which was… strong, deep, and regular.
I blinked, then hurried across the Asgardian Golden Applewood floor, dodging around display stands and racks filled with merchandise with long practice, stopping at the inner door of the workshop.
Analia was still bent over her jewelry workbench tinkering away… and her breathing had no trace of the fell plague that had been ravaging her lungs.
I must have spent several minutes just standing there listening to her breathe, just reveling in that my mate was healthy again. A few tears might have escaped my eyes at the realization that I would never again have to hear her coughing so violently that she couldn't even sit in a chair. Listening to her health decline and being able to do nothing to help had been horrible….
Eventually a pang of hunger reminded me that I had no idea when either of us last ate, so with some reluctance I left the workshop and made my way upstairs to the living quarters. Despite the two of us having lived in the same shop for years now, the upstairs was still quite spartan. Sure, the floor had a thick, soft greyish carpet covering it that was enchanted to be self-cleaning, the walls were clad in a rich vermillion wood, and there was furniture scattered around, but the book and display cases were empty, the walls were unadorned, and there were no decorations to be found.
Entering the kitchen I opened the mithril-clad stasis box. Given how difficult and expensive it is to make stat boosting enchanted food, the meals and drinks in the stasis box should probably be saved for a time when they were truly needed, but there was no other food in the shop, and I had no idea how old a lot of this was, which meant it needed to be eaten before it goes bad.
Grabbing a baking tray I selected a
[Grilled Manticore Liver of Stamina] – that sounded really good – and a bottle of
[Blossom Bee Mead of Regeneration] for Analia and a
[Muspelheimer Bull Liver Pate of Fire Resistance] for me, along with another bottle of the mead. Adding some tableware and a pair of mugs to the loaded tray I took a moment to open the bottles and fill the mugs, and make sure I wasn't drooling over the liver dishes – they smelled so good – I carried the tray back downstairs to the workshop.
Seeing an empty spot I placed the tray next to Analia's right arm, getting a distracted "thank you" from her, and went to grab one of the chairs she had scattered around the workshop so we could eat together. Returning to the table I noticed her lowering her mug back onto the tray, a look of bemusement on her face as she stared at it.
~~~FOX OF THE FORGE~~~
Analia
T+00:37:11…12…13…
Nural-Interface technology is amazing, but there are somethings it just cannot do.
Simulating taste is one. Feeling liquid slide down your esophagus is another.
While Nural-Interface did have access to one's sense of taste, programmed foods were still in the uncanny valley phase, and thus YGGDRASIL foods had no taste. Second, Nural-Interface did not have access to the esophagus' nerves as it was part of the involuntary nervous system, and thus could not send your brain false signals from them.
So when I took a drink of mead from the mug, because it was there and I was getting thirsty, and not only tasted it, but felt it go down my throat, I knew something strange was going on.
In hindsight, my HUD winking out really should have tipped me off.
I stared at the mug as I slowly lowered it back onto the backing tray that had been placed on the workshop table, mind going a mile a minute.
Now that I was looking for discrepancies, I noticed I had full tactile control and proprioception feedback from my tails and ears, which was something else Neural-Interfaces couldn't do. While
humans did have the neural hookups for a, note the singular, tail,
they didn't have the hookups for nine of them, nor for highly mobile ears on top of my head. Neural-Interfaces could only work with what you had.
A breath brought the smells of the workshop to my nose. Ozone from the Celestial Star Forge, some repulsively pungent odors from the tanning agents, heady fumes from metal and wood working oils, the tantalizing aromas from the food on the tray, and Taro's unique scent. Though being able to recognize Taro's scent was a surprise.
Why? We've been living together for years.
Like taste, smell was something YGGDRASIL didn't simulate. If you used an ability to follow a scent trail the game would give you a visible trail to follow.
On top of that, my sense of smell had been fried years ago by exposure to Earth's toxic atmosphere, and it had barely worked before then, so being able to smell at all was a shock.
This was also ignoring that
I could breathe now. There was no crushing tightness in my chest, no rattle in my lungs, no sense of having to keep my breaths shallow to avoid triggering a coughing fit. I took another deep breath just to feel the novelty of air reaching all of my lungs.
A clatter caused me to look to the side where Taro set one of the tail-friendly chairs I had scattered around the place next to me and sat in it, smiling at me as he entangled our tails together.
A sign of affection between kitsune.
Another anomaly. Outside of scripted cut scenes and combat, NPCs
never initiated physical contact with Players. They also couldn't display this level of initiative either.
"I know you were probably saving these," he said, misinterpreting my surprised look, and gesturing at what I now realized was some of the stat-boosting food I had stashed away, "but there's nothing else to eat."
All these pieces of evidence were adding up to a single, inescapable conclusion.
I discreetly made the gesture to summon my control panel, and by now wasn't particularly surprised when it failed to appear. But there was one final test for me to do before I could be confident in my conclusion.
"Emergency Override," I murmured, "Alpha-Theta-Kappa-1-3-8 Eject eject eject."
The emergency shutdown code for my Nural-Interface, something no one used unless it was an absolute emergency because it left you with a screaming headache for hours afterword, did nothing. Not that I expected it to do anything by this point.
In conclusion,
"Huh. The shock of the servers shutting down must have killed me."
AN:
So yeah, new project. Hopefully I'll be able to finish it.
As for why I've been silent for the last… nine months… for those of you who don't know, my grandmother died last December, and my will to write kind of went with her. I do want to get back to The Last Daughter and Northern Renaissance, but my muse has currently grabbed hold of this story and is running away cackling.
As mentioned above, I was heavily inspired by Ten Tailed God's A Vulpine Spanner in the Works, but while I've borrowed several concepts, I strongly suspect I'm going to be going in a very different direction from him. For starters, Analia has a Tinker build, her fully functional workshop, and her NPC got brought along with her to the New World.
In short, all abord the Technological Revolution Train! Though even at level 100 and with a fully stocked workshop it's going to take a while for her to snowball.
Speaking of, Analia is a hyper-specialized crafting build. In a straight fight she'd struggle against Ainz Ooal Gown's Pleiades battle maids despite being level 100.
She's VERY aware of this, and intends to cheat extensively if given time to prepare.
