The Core: The First Guest

43. Into the mound

I was transported to a large room that served as a game lobby. The floor was hard-packed dirt and the walls were designed from a light brown bark material. The ceiling was the coolest-looking ceiling that I had yet to see in VR space. It was made from perfectly flat and slightly shiny yellow palm leaves that were laid out above me. It was almost as though there was a sheet of glass between me and the leaves, letting the greenery lay flat. If I peered through gaps between the lowest leaves I could see another layer of perfectly flat leaves a foot above the first layer and another layer beyond that. It created a strange and interesting optical effect whenever I would move, the light from the installations on the floor would shine through the branches and leaves, yet only so far.

All around the perimeter of the room, there were aliens frozen in various poses standing inside rings of light. The light illuminating the lifelike statues wasn't blinding at all, being more diffused and perfectly tempered to show off each alien's traits. I counted at least fifty if not more different species of aliens as I walked a small tour around the interior of the room. I saw a human in the mix next to a ten-foot-tall creature that looked like a saber tooth tiger and a praying mantis's love child. The most underwhelming of the alien creatures that I saw was an actual Tela. It was just a rolly polly looking creature the size of a baby rhino.

I wandered around for a little bit, admiring the strange and different races available until I noticed that there was a countdown timer getting dangerously close to zero at the edge of my vision. Seems like the other players didn't take forever in the lobby.

I willed my avatar to be a human and changed his clothes to match my earlier setup before the timer expired.

The next thing I knew I was standing at the entrance to a cave looking down from a considerable height at a dense and definitely alien jungle. The trees resembled coconut trees except they branched with thick branches at the top and the fronds hung low, blocking visibility rather than reaching up to absorb sunlight. The heat, I suddenly found, was overwhelming. I felt my pores burst with sweat as my body tried to cool down from the sudden intense and sweltering heat. I stepped back inside the tunnel that I was standing in, hoping that the shade would lessen the overwhelming oppression I was experiencing. Nothing changed inside the shade, the heat seemed to be ambient and the natural temperature of this place. I wasn't going to be able to deal with this for too long. I felt as if I was going to experience heatstroke any minute. It made breathing extremely difficult as well. It was as though I was inhaling straight from a pot of boiling water.

There was a blinking circle in the bottom right-hand corner of my vision so I mentally clicked on it. It brought up some text and several selection boxes.

-Greetings Kevin! The System sees that this is your first time and that you are playing an environmentally disadvantaged species. In order to balance gameplay, there are several options available to you to adjust. Be advised however that your selections change your reward. Welcome to the Haoolla Defender! We await the spectacle of your game!-

There was a reward percentage at the top of the selection boxes. Currently, it was listed at 200%. It might have had something to do with the debilitating heat that I was experiencing. I imagined that if I managed to gain some experience while feeling that I was locked inside an overheating sauna that I would level up very fast. I wiped my face off, trying to keep the salty sweat out of my eyes while I read the options available to me.

There was a slider bar as well as a selection box to the right-hand side of each option.

-Temperature-

-Vision-

-Skin resistance to abrasion-

I slid the temperature bar down until it was bearable for me to imagine moving around. That dropped my experience bonus down to 172%. I wasn't sure about the vision thing or the skin protection but a quick look around showed me that I would definitely either need to make a torch or to learn how to see in the dark inside the cave that I was standing within. I shrugged, the additional experience was nice but I needed to get an understanding of what this game was all about first so I increased all three until my experience bar was down closer to 100%.