Welcome to Llathalian! In this chapter, the battle for the fallen pasture has begun: King Astroleides, a videogame streamer, is defending his pasture from a tribe of nearby elves. Meanwhile Kolentus, who is both a streamer and an in-game fitness instructor, is leading his exercise class down a mountain path, which will soon bring them into the zone of battle.
Kolentus was riding high in his saddle; which is to say, both he and his character were. As a trainer he was unique in being able to stream more than one image at at a time. The normal game footage that most players transmitted was just a background for him. One of his cameras was right up in his character's face, showing him riding a horse and directing the herd. A second camera (coming in through the same physical lens) showed his real body on an exercise bike, dressed in black gym-lycra, with his top half covered in the bright white dots that were meant to improve the game's motion capture.
In front of his handlebars, behind the physical camera, were several screens: one showed the game, another was split between his real face and his character's, and, above the camera, a curved widescreen was filled with a grid of sweaty faces. Each of them had a side-on wide-angle too, letting the game track their movements on their stationary bikes in home gyms, spare rooms and garages; each of them a paid member of Kolentus's class.
10 Furlongs to Finish! flashed up on the tiny control-screen between his handlebars. Over the past two hours his class had barely been making five furlongs an hour but still it was time to see who among them needed a final sprint and who needed to start warming down.
As well as the split screen video, as a trainer he could drop out of character and talk to his clients through a private chat, hidden from the general viewers.
'Home, blesséd home!' he said, over both the role-play and class-general channels. 'Ho! For the greenery! Ho! For our journey's end!'
Kolentus, he had decided, spoke like a sea-pirate. Playing RP was part of the game and a pirate captain seemed to fit. He never had to struggle for the right words, at least. Speaking over CG as well as RP made his voice boom out across the empty expanse, over the sound of the bison herd, so that it rang in the ears of his whole class equally.
Muting RP and dropping the pirate affectation, instead he put on his trainer's voice over the CG, and said 'Time to empty the tank!'
On his bike, he could sit, stand, talk, shout and read a dozen screens without varying his pace, if he wanted. When he rose up out of his saddle and deliberately pushed down on one pedal, it was to bring his speed up from 82rpm to 110, and he hit it dead on. Over CG he shouted '110, Come on now!'
Kolentus, on screen, did the same. His tribe of nomads had never invented the stirrup, so standing up from his the saddle involved squeezing his knees. An unmapped animation handled it, since his real self would have fallen off the bike if he tried. Also, his real self was spared from having to mime slapping the horse's side to bring it up to a gallop. All of that was automated. With the gallop achieved though, Kolentus on the horse held his reigns in more or less the same grip as hisself on the bike held his handlebars. He raised up one hand in a fist and both of them made the same gesture. When the Kolentus on the bike spoke to everyone in those short, shouted exclamations through the CG channel, Kolentus on the horse let out a guttural yawp in RP.
The horse's gallop and his pedals' rotation became the music's tempo for a new theme; a woman's voice called out above eternally resampled trumpets and strings, singing a single looping line: rising on, lightning storm, bring me home.
Across the grid, graphs appeared over each client's face, showing the change in their soundtrack. The hope was that, as the new theme took over, they would bring their pedal speeds up to match.
The class would all be listening to some part of his own personal soundscape already, except for the few that brought their own. His soundscape had been made for him by some pseudonymous music student in Uzbekistan and paid for in ETH. Apparently, personalised music was supposed to give his class a unique feel and increase repeat business. All the videos on How To Succeed As a Trainer recommended personalised music as a smart investment. They especially recommended it when bought using the right promo code.
'Alright mate, how you doing?' He said to screen 53, a first-time member who was almost hanging his head below his handlebars. His pedals were moving at 62 rpm and the music was failing to have its effect.
In-game he was at the other side of the bison herd from Kolentus and was supposed to be racing after a sheep that had strayed from the flock. In fact, his horse was walking and he was sat, staring at his saddle's pommel with a kind of glassy, otherworldly expression. The sheep was under so little pressure that it had given up escaping and, since there was no grass nearby, was sniffing at some rocks with a strangely dog-like animation.
'Good, thanks' he said. His next breath cut the words off before the final 's', but he was smiling. The infobox showed his name as Staimeeer_, a bastard account brought into the world from a premium subscription. He displayed no family and would have had to pick a name when signing in. The class was paid for with an introductory coupon and, now that he raised himself up above his maizma of sweat, his face was blown out red from overexercise. Probably it would still be red when he woke up tomorrow.
'Great!' he said. 'You might want to try a lower mission though. The screentips will help.'
Letting his hands fall from his handlebars and drip by his waist, Staimeer_ seemed to be watching the inside of his skull as the thought sank in, then he reached out of camera to grab a keyboard. 'Sorry' he said, while angling the keys towards the camera, either to let Kolentus see him touch-typing with one hand or else just to show off the orange glow coming out through the keycaps.
'I've had screentips switched off for years' he said, in between breaths. He had some other screen where he was pulling up menus, and in a second it seemed like the screentips were back.
'A hardcore gamer! Good to have you here, man. Are you planning on getting involved in the battle?'
Staimeeer_ looked uncertain about how to answer, so Kolentus smiled and said 'Though Kolentus hath not heard news of such distant troubles. Nonetheless, in my soul I need to organise the classes, so sometimes I get a head's-up. You're welcome, anyway.'
Half the class was new, which was a pity. There were horseflies buzzing around the herd - each of them a player who had missed out on booking one of the spots to play as a nomadic herder for this, the final stretch of their trip across a mountain. The horseflies could still ride their bikes and follow along, but apart from taking animated bites out of the cattle, and maybe causing them to respond with their own animated reactions, they had no way of interfering.
Several souls of flies, he knew, had been following the herd right from the beginning; playing as nomad herdsmen when half of the other slots were being run by bots, just like the animals. But the news of the battle at the end of their journey had brought new players into the mix. Those players who were more into the game had been able to snipe the bookings the moment they opened. The casuals cyclists stood no chance.
Already he could see the finish line marked out for him as black and white chequered strip that floated invisibly in front of the melee of literal keyboard warriors who were fighting on the other side of it. Too far. In Llathalian, the fog of war was a literal phenomena. Even with the best eyesight in the game, much of the action would be abstracted away to save on network traffic. Still, the drift of the battle's location told a story. They were too far back from the treeline for this to still be the simple border enforcement that Astroleides had been expecting.
Turning Kolentus's horse he rode against the stream of the herd, yelling out as he did so. 'Clear that line! Cut off those hinds! We'll lose no more this day! Pour out your sweat and show those soft-faced soldiers down below the stout virtue that dwells within the herdsman's heart.'
'This will be a famous journey, cousin.' King Melentus had said to him, before sending him off. 'Do it well and it will be the making of you.'
And, to be fair, the old liar had been telling the truth.
Before becoming a herdsman he had been spending his lives in the cavalry. The name of the war and the species he was fighting hardly mattered. He went wherever the audience was that day. His follower count was a number in the top right corner of his screen and the point of signing in each morning was to make the number increase.
Not that he was, himself, a gamer. He had got into playing by listening to the kind of instagram gurus who sat by pools and told their followers that videogames should be illegal.
Crypto had been in a mini-boom back then; the start of the real boom, as everyone had thought. All of the videos; the great flippening; welcome to the death of fiat; the normies will be slaves of the crypto bros. A dollar earned = 1,000 dollars spent, next year; 10,000,000 dollars, post flippening.
Ever heard of the Zimbabwean Dollar, anon?
After a while he had discovered that mining and staking were more complicated than the whitepapers suggested, and the whitepapers themselves were more complicated than the videos had let on, so he decided to take their other advice instead and start a side-hustle. Although not quite a gym bro, he could happily play one on TV. He had a stationary bike already, but he bought a new one. He started cycling on stream and before he knew it he was cycling for four hours twice a day, morning and night, five days a week.
Ever seen a rickshaw driver, anon? They do the same thing every day and they don't drink pre-workout. If you're getting out-pedalled by some eighty year-old chainsmoking Taiwanese grandpa in flip-flops, maybe you don't deserve to make it.
Progress was slow. There were a lot of underpaid personal trainers. But, yes, over the course of each day's eight hours, they turned into a different set underpaid trainers, except for him. When he had no paying clients he put their streams up in a grid on the big curved screen.
Sort them at random and dip into their content. Ask them how they're doing. Think of a few words of encouragement or advice, but keep it to yourself. Sort them by popularity and count their smiles. Plot the graph. The smiles vanish as the viewer count falls. And don't confuse cause and effect. Smile and the viewers will come.
There were monsters on stream with less than 20 viewers: pumped up speeders, bulked up, bared teeth and veins, screaming motivational slogans for fifty minutes three days a week. There were tour guides with more than 10,000 viewers, chilled out and dressed up in clown wigs and costumes, perched on unicycles with custom treadmills, pointing out the sites as they lead bicycle tours through the famous locations of old battles and wyverns' nests in Llathalian's realm. They ate the latest meme food being popularised on influencer channels while sat in the saddle. They seemed to take a break from working by having casual conversations with their chat.
Playing like that was a tough gig and it took a certain kind of personality to do it consistently.
His own class was different: full immersion. All of his clients could interact with the game. Most of them had steerable handlebars with thumb operated keyboards mounted in the middle. It was a niche hobby and it cost a lot to start.
FINISH LINE BREACHED flashed up, unsuprisingly.
The last time he died, leading a small class of of cavalry fighters in a frantic battle, had been as a man in the service of King Melentus: a major king in the lands of men, with many thralls and viceroys beneath him. It was a punishment mission against a village that had failed to pay its tithes. They had burned it to the ground, but a goblin tribe had been waiting in ambush.
Before they killed him, he had made his way to the village's watchtower and lit their beacon. After the goblin's had appeared, it had been the target with the highest glory. He had taken it instead of running because he had no interest in carrying on playing the same character for the rest of the day, making a boring run back to civilisation.
Officially, there was no way of knowing that it had been him that had lit the fire, since there were no living witnesses, but nonetheless, a previously unknown infant son had been inserted into his dead character's legend, adopted by a minor nobleman and renamed Kolentus in the king's honour. He was given a small living and raised as a part of the court.
At first he had thought it would make good content, but when he saw that the young Kolentus was being raised as a herdsman instead of a soldier, he nearly turned it down.
'We have a special plan for you, my young cousin' Melentus had said. 'You will have your chance to fight, have no worry about it.'
Kolentus, the character had reached the rear of the herd, where two semi-regular players that had managed to get in were hanging at the back to pick up stragglers.
Their names were Sweeney_99 and xXxEmiWigginsxXx. They were in pretty good shape but never worked so hard that they got out of breath. Over the course of the journey he had grown used to hearing them speak about the minutiae of the happenings at the court or on the front lines of various wars, espousing freely as if they were acknowledged experts on it all, even though, in-game, they spent their lives herding bison.
It was a great liberty but the gods had never struck them down. Out here, so far from civilisation, tongues were freer. On long rides it was good to have a little conversation. They could talk about their real families or even non-game events by way of the slightest ciphers - the characters would spend hours discussing ancient myths or distant relations in far-away lands. As long as they kept from name-checking celebrities or recognised trademarks the filters let it pass.
'It's a curious thing, chief' said Emi, after he greeted them. 'We were just discussing how we both were troubled last night by an awful dream.'
'Both the same dream?' he said.
'Or similar' said Sweeney. 'It's a powerful sign, we thought, and we wondered if that same dreambird troubled your sky.'
'I'm too much in the saddle for dreaming' he said. 'And when I do I dream of sleep. But tell me, what saw you? In sight of home as we are, I would ne'er ignore a portent's call.'
'Horror, liege' said Emi. 'Some creeping death amongst the herd the bison, with their eyes lit by the light of some new star, did begin to eat each other's flesh and chase the fowl and beasts away, while we who would command them had no voices to make them stop.'
'Grim indeed' he said. 'But what lesson does it bring?'
'We hoped you'd know' said Sweeney.
Probably something to do with the new expansion. The the devs were always making changes to give the old hands something to complain about.
'From here, above my horse, I rule the world' he said. 'Horrors? Let them come and find me ready.'