Entry Ten

  Westvael

  I crested the hill, angling to enter the village via a low, wide gate that cut a tunnel through the town’s six-foot-thick defensive wall. There didn’t seem to be any guards around; no one stopped me or questioned me. Emerging from the short tunnel, I stepped into daylight and into the most incredible town I’d ever seen in all my gaming life.

  Dozens of quaint shops and houses flanked a cobblestoned main drag that was paved with flat, individually painted stones. The pink, blue, yellow, purple, violet and green pastel-hued bricks formed large, swirling patterns and artsy, almost Aztecan spirals in the roadway.

  The surrounding buildings were mostly two or three stories tall and were made of stone and large, heavy-looking timber. Every building was at least partially draped with flowering ivy that made me wonder if Thomas Kincade’s ghost had been this place’s level designer. Ornate patterns and even entire nature scenes covered wooden doors, lintels, and other wooden surfaces and the area’s stone walls were similarly adorned with etched masterworks.

  I approached one large etching on the side of a tall building, and my eyes went wide when the nature scene depicted on the stones started moving. The etched trees began to sway back and forth majestically. An artfully rendered horse galloped into the scene, navigating through the trees, and a moment later, a spindly-legged colt appeared and chased after the larger horse. This was amazing! I backed away from the building and looked around. Sure enough, there were other scenes, some larger and some smaller, and most were smoothly animated. Quasi-bunnies frolicked, deer leaped and horses grazed. Dainty flowers bloomed, spreading their petals and ejecting seeds that floated away in the “air.”

  I continued through the town, shaking my head in wonderment, and soon realized that the game engine was rendering smells too. The ivy smelled green and alive. I caught a whiff of lavender when a young lady walked by, and there was a faint, powdery odor of dust coming up from the cobblestones, probably kicked up by the morning’s bustling activity. A sour, acrid stench emanating from what was obviously a tanner’s shop briefly stung my nose and then faded away as I moved further from the shop. Talk about total olfactory immersion!

  A couple dozen townsfolk were going about their medieval business, pretty much ignoring me. They were all well dressed, even those who wore smocks and aprons over their other attire. The women wore pretty, intricate dresses with laced and flowery hems, while the men wore loose-fitting cotton shirts or supple leathers that were artfully branded with complex designs.

  Oddly, the 3D models used for each of the NPCs (non-player characters) were also unique. I know that might sound weird to shruggles (non-gamer folk) out there, but all RPG players can attest to the fact that NPCs repeat—sometimes hilariously so. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been attacked by three or four completely identical zombies. The simple fact was that no game studio had the time or willingness to pay its 3D modelers to generate truly distinct 3D models for every single NPC in a game. No game studio except for this one, apparently.

  Four little elven kids ran past me, bumping into me and laughing as they chased one another. They reminded me of one of my fav RPGs of all time – Bethesda’s Skyrim. In that game, most of the towns had kids that you could interact with and even play simple games with. As in nearly all video games, the kids were also immortal. The player couldn’t hurt them no matter what he tried—blades, fireballs, electrocution, paralysis, you name it. Not that I attempted to hurt any innocent Skyrimian children. I read about it online.

  On my left, judging by the smell, was a bakery. The aroma, and I don’t use that word lightly, was a heavenly mashup of fresh-out-of-the-oven bread, cocoa, and peanut butter cookie dough. Oh, magnifique! More than curious, I decided to go there first. In a lot of games, food and drink items could heal you and even give you temporary stat boosts. They were super handy in the early game before you had enough gold to buy legit potions and unlock defensive buff spells.

  I stepped into the cozy, well-lit shop and watched as a small, elven girl dashed out of sight, her long, chestnut-brown hair flying out behind her. She returned a moment later, towing an older elven woman by the cuff of her blouse. The baker saw me, and then her eyes went wide in surprise. Her hands dropped to her disheveled apron, and she straightened it.

  She quickly gathered her composure and said, “Hail, sire. Pardon me, Westvael doesn’t receive many visitors. Are you interested in my wares?” The woman waved a hand toward the wide display case between us. It was loaded with several different kinds of bread and mouthwateringly rendered sweets.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  I stood there, waiting for the dialogue tree to pop up. RPGs tended to handle the dialogue in one of two ways—the game would prescribe your answers with some B-list voice actor answering for you, or the game would display a list of response choices for you to pick from. Based on what you chose, the computer-controlled NPC would continue the conversation. Since I was in a shop, I knew I’d be given a prompt to start the process of reviewing and potentially purchasing items from the shop’s inventory.

  Or, I thought I knew that. I waited, staring at the lady. She lifted an eyebrow, glanced nervously down at the child next to her, and then looked back at me.

  “Where’s the stupid prompt?” I said, glancing around at the periphery of my vision. It was possible that the HUD was glitching and fell offscreen somewhere. I’d seen such things happen in very new games.

  “The prompit?” the lady asked, startling me.

  “The dialogue prompt. I want to buy something. I mean, maybe, but first, I want to check out the stats and…” I froze, staring at the NPC.

  “Sire, I do not know what a stats is, or a prompit, but if you have recipes, Cella and I can try to bake them for you.” She sounded flustered.

  “Dang! That is so cool!” I blurted out, making the lady jump. “You can actually parse what I’m saying with some limited AI or something, can’t you? Like Siri, but in-game. Sweet! I have never seen that before!”

  Blush rendered on the woman’s copper-toned cheeks, turning them a shade of light bronze. “I… I… Your manner of speaking is confusing to me. My name is not Siri. I am Kalia.”

  The NPC’s AI wasn’t coping well with my ad-libbed speech, although I gave the game devs credit—this level of interaction was leaps and bounds beyond anything I’d ever seen before. Still, if I wanted to get anything done, I obviously needed to stick to more basic, straightforward nouns and such with this Alexa wannabe. I decided to experiment. I pointed to something that looked sorta like a chocolate-drizzled croissant thingy. “One,” I said, then I pointed to my avatar’s chest. “Me. Price?”

  The NPC smiled, obviously now in its decision tree comfort zone. “Ah! That is called a twilla. It has coba syrup on top.” She mimed drizzling something on the pastry.

  “Uh-huh,” I mumbled, watching her very smooth animation loop.

  “The bun is light and flakey, made of fermented cad milk. Very tasty.” The lady took one out of the display case and began wrapping it in a sheet of thin cloth.

  “Mmm. Fermented cad milk? Unleash the yum!” I said, rubbing my tummy. The NPC smiled up at me, looking vaguely confused again. NPCs never appreciated a good bit of sarcasm, much to their loss.

  Kalia the Baker handed me the small package, still smiling. I instinctively reached for the wallet in my back pocket. Except… no back pocket. No front pocket either, nor did I have a coin purse hanging from my fancy leather belt. Oh well. I turned and left the shop without saying another word to the NPC.

  Some explanation. One of the first things I liked to do in a new game was to figure out the JM, the Justice Mechanic. In some games, stealing from shops simply wasn’t allowed. In others, the game determined whether the player had been observed by an NPC while stealing, and if so, the player would be confronted by city guards the moment he or she left the shop. The guards would zap in out of nowhere as if they happened to be walking by.

  In this case, nothing happened, nothing at all. I strode back out onto the street to a musical “Farewell, sire,” from Cella, the baker’s young daughter. I took a few more steps, waiting for the insta-guards to spawn and confront me. Nope. I turned around and walked back into the bakery, stepped back outside, stepped back inside, outside, inside. Nothing happened. It was a totally broken JM, though Kalia was watching me with one eyebrow raised over a quizzical frown.

  “I didn’t pay you,” I called over to her from the doorway.

  Her head canted to the side. “Pay, sire?”

  I nodded. “Gold, you know? Cashola, greenbacks, dinero.” She continued to frown at me. “Big K, bang-bang, zappo-dappo.” Now I was just making crap up to see what she would say.

  “I… I think you are new to Westvael. I need no payment for the sweets. There is no charge here nor in shops anywhere in the bounds of Westvael, so far as I know.”

  “Really?” I asked, surprised. What a stupid game mechanic! How the hell would the game designers play balance that? My next thought was, I can’t wait to get to the blacksmith’s place! If I could cash in on this glitch before the game devs caught it and patched the bug, boo-yah!

  “Truly,” the baker lady answered. “We work together, aid each other, and value kindness and diligent, hard work above all.”

  Gag me with a spoon. I walked up to the display case and picked up another twilla, then another, then another, and another. This was great. I could rob this lady blind, and she wouldn’t care.

  A squeak came from behind the counter. Cella was staring at the diminishing twilla inventory, her big, brown eyes welling up with tears. Her mother’s hand was across her chest, holding her gently in place.

  “Cella labored from sunrise on those, but if you are in need, sire, you may have them,” Kalia said, not exactly sounding genuine.

  Well, hell. I looked at Kalia, then down at her kid again and heaved a heavy-hearted sigh. “Uh, I thought I did, but I just remembered I brought some other provisions with me.”

  I put the other twillas back, noticing the tension ease from the baker’s face. Her daughter had buried her face in her mother’s skirts. “Way to guilt me out of meta-gaming, ladies!” I muttered.

  Nodding to Kalia the Evil Guilt Meister, I left the shop.