Chronicles of Metal: Chapter 1 - Brave New World

Rob Zombie's Beard. No matter how many times he thought back on it, nothing made him cringe like seeing the username displayed above his character profile. He was a metalhead, and pretty sure he was drunk the first time he logged into YGGDRASIL, the hot VRMMO at the time. But god damn did it also make him chuckle. He mostly went by Rob to a lot of his acquaintances, Beard to his closer friends. It was a nice in-joke for their guild, the Church of Metal. Partly because the building they used looked like a church, and partly because they all loved metal music. Each of their usernames held some reference to a band, or album, or hell, even a single song lyric. All seven of them had gotten together one day and started up a guild, making the monotony of collage life somewhat bearable.

But, like all things, the good times eventually came to an end. After finishing collage, the guild began to drift apart. The guild master, Mick-of-house-Gordon, got married and had a kid that quickly ate up all of his free time. Teen-Spirit moved into another time-zone, and could never log on the same time as the rest. Hetfield joined the military, and last he heard worked as a navigator in the navy. Wings of Ozbourne had a falling out with a few other members and rage-quit, but the guy was kind of an asshole, so there wasn’t much love lost there. While Stricken and Voice of Tankian jumped into another game together and nobody followed them. Just one of those things that happens with internet friends; real life takes priority.

A few months ago, it was announced that the game servers would be shutting down for good. Hearing that, Beard dug his old VR headset out of storage and decided to log on one last time. One last trip down memory lane as Rob-Zombie’s-Beard.

Logging in for the first time in a while, things at the guild looked... a little different. One or two years of patches had really upped the game’s quality. Beard couldn’t tell if he liked the change, or would’ve preferred it look exactly how he left it. Still though, the graphics looked cleaner and crisper than before, it wasn’t like he could complain.

Scrolling across the HUD, Beard morphed into his Wraith form, an ability he’s had since starting the game. The character creator in YGGDRASIL was, in a word, insane. His character was what was called a Spirit of Decay, basically a shadow monster, but cranked to 11 and leveled to the top. A cross between a ghost, a shapeshifter and, thanks to some clever class building, an immovable object. Not that hard hitting, but a few levels as an Assassin do deal huge critical hits, a few in monk for up close and personal fighting and passive immunities to all but the strongest magic, Soul Killer because it sounded cool. Wasn’t exactly what one would consider a Meta game build, but it was hella fun.

Flying through the halls to the atrium, Beard found himself in the kitchen first. There wasn’t much of a need for one, his character class made it so that eating did next to nothing, but Hetfield had insisted on decorating the place so they all agreed to help out with item gathering. What came of it was a hodgepodge of cookware that would make any actual chef sick. It’d taken them a few months to collect everything though, so it stuck with the guild as a memento.

Standing in the corner like a statue was one of the NCP’s, Isabella Bathory, staring straight into the uncanny valley. She was one of the first NCP’s the guild made, using a few custom scripts to have her organize most of the guild’s inventory whenever they came back from a raid. As such, she quickly became known as the guild’s housekeeper, and was customized to wear a blue maid outfit as such. Later, as the guild grew, she was meant to guard the atrium if the guild were to ever to be raided. Whoever had been here last must’ve left her in the wrong spot. Either that or the game had loaded her incorrectly. Either way, one flick of the HUD brought up a prompt, and Beard spoke in-game for the first time in a while.

"Follow." His voice was low and raspy. He'd forgotten what this character sounded like, but got over it quick enough as Isabella slowly strolled across the floor to stand by his side.

Next up was a library. Beard hadn't spent much time while he played. Most of the stuff here was either logbooks, spell tomes, or scrolls, none of which interested him. He had his own magic, if he needed it, but he preferred fighting up close. Three Years of Tai-quan-dao in high school, a few months in an MMA club in collage, and a lifetime of loving action movies made the opportunity to fight with his fists a hard one to pass up. The library had its own guardian, but he didn't know much about it besides a name, and wanted to revisit as much as he could before the server shut down.

Moving along through the guild, Beard found himself in the treasure vault next. Apart from the literal piles of treasure, chests lining every wall packed to the lid with rare items the guild spent years acquiring, it was also a record of the guild's accolades. Prizes they won in game events, rankings, records. And their guild's prize weapon. Sitting in the center of a room, heled up by a stone statue of a ghostly woman, sat the Sword of Niflheim.

In the game of YGGDRASIL, guilds could be built into raid dungeons that other players could adventure through. At the bottom, apart from the regular gold and item drops that came with defeating monsters, was a treasure that the guild was meant to defend. That being the Guild weapon. Most, if not all, of the strongest weapons in the game where guild items, which made them highly sought after. NCP’s like Isabella where meant to act as bosses to each floor, acting as roadblocks to keep players away from the treasure. A handful of guilds tried, some made it a fair way through too. But nobody was able to brake through every floor. Beard was happy that, even in his absence, that had remained the case.

However, that wasn't the guild's real treasure. Behind the sword, held aloft in a bubble of magic in the palm of an ivory dragon's claw, sat a world class Item, the rarest type you could get in the game. The Ebony Astrodial. An item that, once a day, would lead you towards whatever other item you wanted and, if it came from a monster, give you a one-hundred present drop rate. It made finding super rare items a breeze, many of which were used as materials to craft super powerful weaponry for the guild's players and NCPs. That was probably the reason why, despite being a relatively small guild, nobody had been able to conquer it. Several levels of bosses with top tier equipment proved to be too big of a hurdle.

Thinking about it, Beard had an idea. Before the server shut down, he'd run out and do one last fetch quest with the Ebony Astrodial. But... what to get? The guild already had just about any weapon he'd ever need. Multiples, in fact. Armor too, he hadn't even seen the armoury yet. But knew it'd be just as full as the treasury. Then again, with the game shutting down, it really didn't matter what he chose. All this would be gone in a little while anyway.

Extending his hand, a quick buzz of static shot across his vision just as it passed through the magic bubble. Beard recoiled slightly, not sure what to think. Was his headset buggy? Collected too much dust, and now the connection was going? That would've been a sad way to end things: a blue screen wasn't how he wanted to spend the last few minutes in this game.

"Sir?" A voice called to him, but it wasn't one he recognized. He looked around, half expecting to see one of his old friends, or maybe even another player. Standing behind him. There was nobody though, just him and-. "Sir Rob, is something wrong?" He did a quarter turn to come face to face with Isabella. She was looking at him. Like... directly at him. No more uncanny-valley stare, she was making actual eye contact with him. Slowly, she raised an eyebrow, a tired, somewhat irritated look on her face. "You can hear me, can't you? Sir?"

She added the sir after a short pause, but that was hardly what Beard was caught up on. She spoke. NCP’s didn't speak. Then again, it had been a while since he'd logged on. Maybe it'd been patched in as a feature? No, that didn't make sense either. NCP’s where player made, no programed dialog. Even if there was, it'd be a limited number of lines, fitted to a small handful of situations. She shouldn't be able to react so... genuinely.

"D-did..." Beard stuttered, not sure what to think, let alone say. "Did you just-?"

"AAAAAAAAHHH!" A scream shot through the guild. Beard almost jumped out of his skin. "Master! Something's wrong!"

To say Beard had no idea what was happening was an understatement. Was this some sort of prank? Did the devs loaded some last-minute dialog to have all the NCP's freak out as the server shut down? He was all for a bit of dark humor, but that might've been taking it a little too far.

"What's dragon breath freaking out over now?" Isabella grumbled.

Beard turned to Isabella, again unsettled by how... human she seemed to be. "Dragon?" He had a pretty good idea who Isabella meant. One of the other NCP's was a dragonoid, and seeing as how Isabella was acting more human, it would make sense that the others would too. "Let's go find out." He said in his in-game voice.

"Yes sir." She said with a tired huff, following after him.

Climbing through the floors, Beard began noticing other oddities as well. For starters, the HUD was missing. He performed the usual flick of the wrist to try and bring it up, but there was no response. Secondly, the graphics looked even crisper than he remembered. Little details, how the light cast shadows, the grain in the stone. Little things that hadn't stood out before suddenly caught his attention wherever he looked. What's more, on one of the above ground floors, he began to hear a soft hissing noise like someone had left a faucet on somewhere.

Upon reaching the upper floor though, was the biggest change of all. The top floor of the guild was meant to be a library, a single, enormous repository of game lore, crafting guides, alchemic recipes, walkthroughs, and anything else Hetfield felt like writing. In the real world, she was an aspiring author. The library, and just about everything written in it, was entirely her creation.

However, the enormous bridge clipping through the wall, was not.

Starting at the staircase and running the complete width of the building sat an enormous stone bridge. It sat almost parallel with the floor, but cut into a number of bookcases on its way through the room. Beard absentmindedly followed the bridge through the room, unable to comprehend what was going on. Was the game just completely breaking down? Is that what all this was? One look back at Isabella's increasingly human expression made that theory plausible on its own. But the puzzled way she looked at the bridge was just too genuine to have been made in-game.

"Master! Over here!" The same voice from before broke his trance, drawing his attention to an open window near where the bridge clipped though the wall.

He and Isabella stepped through to the outside, now standing on the bridge itself. The salty smell of seawater hit him like a slap to the face, and the hissing of water was now a full-on roar. What awaited him outside was not the large forest where the guild usually sat. Directly below the bridge sat an enormous river, draining over a waterfall on either side of the guild building. The guild itself sat perched precariously on the edge. A semi-circle cut of land hung out over the falls in-front of what was the guild's front entrance, beardly half a dozen trees remaining of the once gigantic forest that sheltered them before.

"Master!" So transfixed by the scene, Beard had neglected the voice calling to him, only really snapping out of it by her fifth or sixed call. "Master, look at me already!"

His head slowly turned to the person in question, a slender woman waving her arms in circles to attract his attention. She bore striking purple eyes, silver hair, and wearing a matching silver qipao. Her skin was almost a porcelain white, but began to turn a bright crimson from her biceps all the way to the tips of her fingers. A silver snake tail with a red plomb at the end waved back and forth just as franticly as her arms, and small red horns protruded from her hair just above her pointed ears.

"Tao..." It took Beard a moment to recall her name, reminding him that he was probably suffering from a little bit of information overload. "What's-?"

"Master, there's water everywhere!" She interrupted franticly, pointing upstream.

"Yeah, we can see that." Isabella groaned, crossing her arms in disapproval. "Any other keen observations you'd like to make, dragon breath?"

Tao puffed out her cheeks, her eyes glowing with anger. "Oh, shut up you! You're the one who'll have to mop it all up if the guild floods, servant girl!"

Isabella's eye twitched and she took a challenging step forward, but Beard stepped between them before things could escalate further. "Alright, alright, both of you lay off." The two of them fell silent instantly. On top of everything else, now he was playing mediator for two NCP's that suddenly become very human. Well, human acting at least. Tao's tail still twitched with frustration, glairing daggers into Isabella. But he had way more pertinent questions on his mind than figuring out why the two of them could suddenly talk. "I don't suppose either of you recognize any of this?"

Both women shook their heads, but at the same time, Beard became aware of a presence looming over them. "Lord Beard, if I may?" A low, robotic voice droned from the open window, inside which sat a shadowy outline. "I believe we may have been teleported."

Another talking NCP. Sure, at this point, why not? And this one was talking nonsense. "That's used for people, not whole guilds." He argued.

"None-the-less, I detected it not too long ago. And shortly after that, this bridge appeared in my sanctum." The figure replayed in a matter-of-fact tone. A tone that Beard found hard to argue with.

That might explain the new location but it hardly explained everything else that was going on at the moment. Synth..." He muttered, the beginnings of a plan forming in his head. The shadow stepped forth; a metallic face and chest swathed in a dark green cloak. "Notify the other floor guardians. Have them check over their floors for anything like this." He paused a moment, gesturing the bridge. "Then have them gather in the atrium."

"Right away, Lord Beard." The figured bowed slightly, then ducked out of sight.

"You two should do the same." He said, looking to Isabella and Tao. "Tell me if you find anything out of place."

"Yes, Master." Tao did a quick solute, then dashed back through the window. Isabella silently followed her, but much more reserved.

Left alone to ponder, Beard looked out at the surroundings again. The river stretched on for as far as he could see, flanked on either side by endless hills and grasslands. Birds soared overhead in the light of the rising sun and... Wait, rising sun? The game was supposed to shut down at midnight. It’d barely been twenty minutes since Isabella started talking in the treasury.

There's no way... Had he been isekai’d or something? Sent to another world by staying in a VRMMO as the servers shut down? That can actually happen? Just as he began to feel himself beginning to freak out, a sudden calm washed over him. He didn't know where it came from, nor could he discern how it came about. But all at once he accepted that he very well may have been transported to another world.

"Holy shit..." He muttered aloud, dismissing his HUD and looking out at the landscape once more. "I ain't in Kansas anymore..."

**Next Chapter ->**