More Than A Game (Epic LitRPG adventure)

Chapter 1: A frolicking Mammoth Part 3

If I was logical about it, Mammoth's stream of consciousness should have sent me off to drink my sorrows away with a drooping head—if only to maintain my reputation. Hey, if you say I'm an alcoholic, that's what I'll be. But I wasn't in the mood for booze. Instead, I quickly gathered the papers on my desk, stuffed them into a drawer, and announced to my officemates, "Ciao, suckers. Mammoth sent me on a work trip for a month, so you all are welcome to turn green with envy."

"I hope you're on your way to Chechnya or Antarctica," Kaleria Georgievna chimed in sarcastically. She wrote the "Our Little Friends" column about pets. We all called her the Rat, thanks to her toothy face, gray hair, and gnawing personality.

"The perfect place for you!" she declared.

"Nope." I shook my head. "It's Sochi for a month to write about life on the beach. The velvet season is coming up, so everyone who's anyone is there!"

"Son of a bi-i-itch!" groaned half the office,and I ran out with a wave of my briefcase. Everyone was about to go jump

down Mammoth's throat about how he paid the annoying kid to spend the month of June in Sochi instead of someone better or more decorated, and I wasn't about to stick around for him to make life miserable for me. But really, what business did he have bringing up my drunken adventure or giving me jeans assignments? And without offering me even a tiny cut!

On my way out of the building, I contemplated my profession. The work of a journalist is something like that of a detective. First, you collect information, then you mull it over for a while, and then... Well, then you finish the job. Detectives use the information they gain secretly against a specific person or group of people, so long as they had an agreement ahead of time. For journalists, the opposite is true. We put the information before the public, and in so doing, earn ourselves a reputation and enough money to put food on the table.

Although, hold on a second, I thought, maybe "reputation" wasn't the right word. From then on, I'd talk about the "experience" or "XP" I got from beating quests, killing monsters, or going through whatever else there was to do in the game.

I'm a gamer now. Phew boy! Although, maybe you have a reputation in the game, too? That doesn't matter now. Time to collect information.

On my way home, my mind wandered back to the RPGs and MMORPGs I'd played umpteen years before. I hadn't been hardcore or anything. I had been a normal kid growing up in the age of computers, so I spent plenty of time browsing social networks, paging through forums, and sometimes even looking up porn. (And don't give me that "only perverts look up porn" nonsense—everyone does...it's just that not everyone admits it.) And, of course, I played games. Shooters had taken up most of my time, though I played enough RPGs to know my way around them. Everything was different now: capsules and virtual reality that felt, well, real.

Incidentally, let me take a moment to introducemyself. I haven't told you anything, which isn't right, though there isn't muchto tell... I'm 36 years old from Moscow. I'm divorced and don't have any kids. Ilive alone, and I've spent my 36 years much as anyone else my age has. I'm atypical big-city guy, who grew up in a typical home, and I have a typical lifeahead of me.

I was born, went to school, went to college, and enlisted in the army. (Okay, so it's a little out of the ordinary to enroll in the army after getting a degree...) I served out my contract, found a job, got married, got divorced, and here we are.

I joined the army because I had nothing better to do. You know, sometimes that's how it goes. You're living a full, satisfying life, and then one day, something happens, and you're left with nothing. That's how it was for me. I had a degree, a girl, KVN, a sweet ride (it may not have been new, but at least it was a Chrysler), and a best friend. Then I graduated, my KVN fell apart, the chassis broke on the Chrysler, and it would have been cheaper just to buy a new car. Then I caught my girlfriend with the guy I thought was my best friend. So that's how it went, almost like in a movie—one minute I was on top of the world, and the next I had nothing.

Then I did something I'd never done before: I unloaded the whole mess to my dad, who downed a shot of rum and said, "Go join the army. That'll clear your head. When you spend all your time hungry, people yell at you all day long, and you wonder if you'll be given a rag or your toothbrush when it comes time to clean the toilet, you stop caring about everything else. It's just in the movies that soldiers think about their girlfriend back home. There, you just care about finding more food and getting out of extra work. Well, and you try to get hit as little as possible. Or you could join the navy—they'll make your life look like a fairytale. It's brutal."

So, I headed over to our local recruiting office, where the shocked blockhead of a recruiter almost signed me up for the psychology division. From Moscow? With a degree? Wants to join the army? Came and volunteered because he wanted to learn something useful? The poor guy's head almost exploded.

Off I went for a year and a half. Marines? Paratroopers? Nope. I went for the military engineers. And wouldn't you know, my old man was right; when you're always hungry, your most valued possession is a roll of toilet paper (newspapers make your butt itch), and your ribs are sore from the punch Sergeant Poletaev gave you the day before (those hillbillies sure do love city people, and especially Muscovites...they love them straight into the hospital sometimes), everything else takes on a different perspective. My KVN fell apart—no problem, we were never all that close to begin with. The car broke down—no worries, the subway was built to weather a nuclear war, so it would be there until the end of days. Your girl ran off with your ex-friend—is that really that big a loss? Ah, though a helping of mom's borscht and a few of her tiny cupcakes...

Still, six months in, it got a lot easier, and nothing lasts forever; everyone's contract is up sooner or later. Eventually, I was back home, bedecked in ribbons, commendations, and a shiny service record. My dad took one look at me, told me I was a man now, and handed me the key to the apartment he had gotten from my grandfather. I celebrated with a healthy helping of vodka, made the night better for a healthy helping of girls, and heard the good news that my ex-friend had already had time to both marry and divorce my ex-girlfriend three months after the wedding when he caught her under a neighbor.

I spent some time wondering if she was then passed on to the neighbor like just another hand-me-down. Then, I dug up my old journalism diploma, blew the dust off it, looked for a job, and found one at a newspaper called the Capital Herald. And so, there I was, waiting for the capsule. Actually, I did more than just sit there; I also collected information. The day before, after I left work, I had decided to just grab some food and hit the sack, but today, I dove into the game forums.

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