To the Interview
A Fresh Install :: Character Creation :: Cinematic :: The Missing Heart :: The Paladin
Welcome to Llathalian! In this chapter our narrator is interviewing for a job with the makers of Llathalian, a multiplayer PC game. They have sent him a collectors edition and told him that the interview will take place in the game itself
Everything was connected. The triple camera rig was clipped around my monitors and plugged into the USB. The security key beside it showed a blinking orange light. Even the statue of the sorcerer skeleton, the one they had sent me in the same box as everything else, was standing on the shelf opposite the desk, in sight of the cameras.
On my main monitor 8-bit screens showed progress bars and lists of filenames, scrolling. The empty system disk repopulated with names and data, reconstructing my last known good. Everything since then was diffed and stored elsewhere. Not in the cloud but on a SAN, in a cabinet, on the other side of the room. The cable to that was out, laying on the carpet. The data disk that housed my works in progress was physically disconnected: little screws untwisted and sat on a mousepad on a shelf, waiting to be replaced when the interview was done.
Not that I had a reason to be suspicious. Or that there was anything anyone could do to me if they tried. But it felt better to know that certain kinds of attack were impossible. Even if it was all a joke and, half way through the interview, they said hey, guess what!? and I realised too late, while they posted my panicked reaction on YouTube.
Prank tech interviews make for boring videos, but there were so many weird niches online.
After a moment of darkness, the main OS came online. The old screen was replaced by rounded corners and smooth shades. Friendly chimes and clicks registered every peripheral reinstalling. The light on the security key changed from orange to flashing green. Connecting the router required me to get up and press a button, but apart from that it was pretty much automatic.
Back at my desktop, and on Llathalian's homepage, I said yes to a request for access to the cameras. Each of the three gimballed lenses lit up with halo LEDS, bright enough to cast shadows on the wall. They focussed on the skull shaped QR code on the postcard from the box that I held up for them to scan, and then the webpage populated a welcome message, including my name.
I clicked through it all: the license and the options. I adjusted the slide until the logo was just visible. I put on my headphones and pointed my finger at where I thought i heard a twanging bowstring sound. I smiled, frowned and looked surprised. I moved the images of my monitors until they matched the real thing. My face on the screen looked like a drawing. I clicked the wheel to switch between types; three types of orc, two types of elf, a single dwarf, five kinds of man.
A pop-up informed me that my invitation expected me to be a human male, and was that ok? It was possible to play against type but that might have an adverse effect on the story. I accepted the defaults and scrolled through the remainder; choosing to be an ulflaander in mixed armour and a longsword.
The camera zoomed out and showed me standing in a frozen forest. A popup said that I should connect any fitness monitors I was wearing. I pressed skip. He started performing an odd dance, holding his hands out, zombie-ways, rolling his shoulders and clicking his fingers while bending his knees in time to a beating drum. It showed a pencil drawing of my torso and told be to find a space where I could copy the movements. Another skip. A popup asked me to pick my athleticism manually. Normal.
Leatherbound books dropped down in a pile on the ulflaander's right hand. Zooming in, he held them up to the camera so I could see the titles. They were real books, from the real world, mostly novels. Hovering over each brought up a precis of the story and a handful of reviews. There was an option to buy them all, or else buy a subscription, or just a selection.
Skip.
A cutscene started: sweeping vistas and fire from the sky, winged monsters at the dawn of the world, silhouetted histories of the birth of different races. Dramatic gestures and fast paced geographic change. A new voice actor took over from the first and the style changed; bird sounds started and the camera moved nearer to the ground. A potted history of King Melentus; a map of his kingdom, growing and shrinking, the narrator slowly building the tone back up to the epic it had been before.
Now was the critical time: would Melentus's kingdom collapse and be replaced or would it spring forth again and reclaim its former glory.
Now came forth a stranger to the land. An ulflaander with mixed armour on his back and a longsword in hand. Could he be the one to sway the fortunes of a kingdom? His name was...
Different options appeared on screen, different syllables rolled up and down in different combinations, attracted and repulsed by invisible currents into forming plausible alternate names. Horu Cabar est ilf oroman Mana unufi atian caladon inigor Fili cabatas. A picture of my real life face appeared in the corner of the screen and flashed with lines of red and green, picking up the microexpressions I made and the movements of my eyes. The namecloud swirled and coalesced until I spoke it out loud. My name was The Galatian.
"A strange name for an ulflaander, but nonetheless it was his, and his story began on the slopes of the Hills of Leartin..."
The camera spun out from my character's face and hovered above. Arrows with letters appeared, WASD. The mouse changed the camera. This was in my main monitor; it was a familiar game. In the second screen, I saw the same game in first person, like a shooter.
A notification appeared on the main screen: --- Quest: Find The Hilltop Church --- Gentle music started and the sound of a swift breeze.
The compass at the top of the screen had no cardinal marks. Instead, there were marks for sunrise and sunset, summer and winter. A mark along the same line showed the direction of The Hilltop Church. It was a little to the right of sunset.
I walked, and then ran, then walked again as my stamina bar started draining. It was detailed enough that my character's breathing got louder as he got tired. Various pop-ups guided me around the controls and eventually I was able to set him to walk at a pace quick enough to spike his exertions but keep his exhaustion below a third.
The sky was filled with birds: big raptors wheeling up high, murmurations of starlings flocking and splitting over trees and valleys below. Dusk was closing in. The sun filled the left hand side of my second screen. By experimentation I realised that the cameras were tracking my head movements, so that my mouse controlled the view of whichever monitor I was looking at. I tried pointing my head towards one while looking out of the corner of my eye at the other, but it seemed like it picked whichever monitor my nose was aiming at.
At semi-random intervals the ulflaander lifted up his hand to shield his eyes, as if searching the horizon. His shadow streamed behind him as he walked and I turned the camera to watch it. The rendering was perfect; growing and shrinking against the contours of the land. On the brow of a ridge I could see the shadow of my head, miles away, along the top of a bank of shadow. I made my character emote. There were preset movements, like waves and dances, and a freehand option where his hands would mirror mine.
He waved and I saw the shadow wave in the distance.
"You would rather play with shadows, traveller?" said a voice behind me. For half a second I turned my actual head, looked round in my chair and saw the wall. There was no-one, just the statue. I turned back and moved the mouse until I saw another character on the hill, walking toward me.
He was dressed in coarse robes and his head was covered. His legs splayed out as he walked and he was hunched over as if carrying something heavy.
Minutes before, tooltips had been hovering around me on my main screen, but now there was nothing. I held `Shift` and `?` to bring up the help, and then `?` again to bring up suggestions: it offered me Fight or Flight.
I picked fight and new tooltips appeared on screen. As I pressed each one, the keys lit up in order: `E` unsheathed my sword, `Tab` locked onto the nearest target. My character adopted a fighting stance. The sword's hilt was by his hip and its tip followed the path of the oncoming stranger, carving out a triangle from my view of him on the second screen. Other options appeared: Quick Attack, Strong Attack, Parry, Block.
"Peace, traveller" the stranger said, holding up his hands. "See, other souls have done your work already."
He raised up his empty hands and what had seemed to be a weight he was holding turned out to be, in fact, a chest wound, gushing blood. It had soaked through his sackcloth robe right down to the floor. Blood was dripping onto the ground, leaving a trail that had either just been rendered or else I had only just noticed.
He fell to his knees and and toppled over backward, groaning. `Shift` + `??` gave me new options. Selecting `i` to inspect made icons appear in a crescent around him: he only had red health left, and he was marked by Profound Bleed damage.
"Come closer!" he said, laying on his back and waving his arms. "Closer, traveller! I have a story to tell."
I sheathed my sword and his face filled my second monitor as my character (`ctrl` + `Down Arrow`) knelt beside him. The resolution of his dying face improved so much that I could see every hair on his beard. How much of it was real and how much was a filter was impossible to say.
From around his neck he pulled a silver talisman which, at its centre, had a crystal, flashing with bursts of multi-coloured light. His brow furrowed in concentration, and for a second I thought I could see the man looking at the screen inside the blood stained character before me.
"Where is your heart?" he said, after a moment, sounding annoyed.
It seemed like a real question; he wanted a response. I checked the cameras but they were lit. The security key was solid green. There was nothing else in the box so I thought perhaps it was a setting. Searching `heart` brought up nothing though, so perhaps it had been rhetorical after all.
"Your heart!" he said, coughing. "Time is brief and I am dying. Open your heart."
His eyes flicked left and right. It was hard to tell if he was feigning a seizure or looking between different menus on screen.
Probably, I thought, this was an interview trick to see how I reacted, so I said "Honestly, I don't know what you mean. But I'm happy to help, if I can."
"Help?" He repeated, half frustrated, half amazed. "What manner of being are you?"
"I'm here for an interview" I said. "Sorry I'm a bit late."
He looked shocked and for a moment I thought he was going to die right there. Instead, he started speaking in what sounded like a made-up language. It was a litany of phrases that he repeated until another player approached us and interrupted.
On my main screen, a knight on foot came towards us. His armour was plate; his sword was sheathed. As he got closer my quest log appeared and a quest that had been greyed out before changed to green: Locate the Paladin.
"Gentle knight!" said the wounded man, clutching his chest and letting out another cough. "Slay this evildoer, I beg thee! And come close, for I am dying and have a tale to tell!"
The knight got within touching distance before I had managed to find the right command to stand. Inspecting him did nothing: the counter clockwise circle swept around him but no information appeared.
The man on the ground held up his flashing talisman again but the knight pulled his shield from where it had been slung on his back and said "Behold my sign."
On front, his shield was decorated with a black dragon. Instead of holding it by the straps, he held the edges and turned it around so that the inside was showing. On its inside there was a another painting. He held it over the man on the ground. Just as he talisman had done, the painting inside the shield lit up with random lights.
"Pardon, your grace." said the wounded man, after the lights had ended. "I am blessed to have my prayers answered in person."
"Indeed" said the knight. "But, to my regret, I am the cause as well as the cure. This fellow was meant not for you, but me."
"This uncouth?" said the raider, pointing a bloodstained hand into my second screen. "This heartless casual? My Lord, you know thy servant's soul. I have spilled my heart's blood!"
"He was already stabbed when I got here." I said.
The knight knelt down and placed his hands on the other man's wound, saying. "Peace, brother. Though it be little, what healing I have to offer is yours."
The inspect arc swept over the knight again but clockwise this time and not from anything I pressed. Weird logos and icons appeared in the air around him. For a moment, in my main monitor, a glow bathed them both. My own character raised up his hands, obscuring my view in the second screen. The music changed from pan pipes and birdsong to a choir.
"You shall live long enough to die elsewhere" he said, rising. "And in another's company, perhaps. I shall mark on your map the souls nearby. In return, I ask that you clip not this, and keep from all talk of it."
Assuming that the light animation had been a healing spell, I triggered another `i` inspect on the fallen man. The Profound Bleed was still in place but the red crystals along icon's the base, which I had thought were just part of its design, had vanished. His main health bar had been replenished half way.
The blood was gone from his robes. He got back to his feet and, although he stayed hunched over, he spoke without coughing.
"I obey, and I thank you. And I shall try to quell the murmurings of my heart. But know that in so doing I can hardly speak when those voices may say that a bleak day has dawned in the land."
He spat - I think it was real spit, behind his microphone - the phlegm landed in front of my character as if it was aimed.
"Right or wrong, may the gods strike me dead!"
He waited for a moment, seeming to expect that it might really happen. But whatever he was anticipating failed to appear. The knight put his hand to the pommel of his sword, which was an emote that I found in the list. Its name was Warn. The wounded man turned and staggered away, mumbling angrily as he went.
"You are the Galatian?" the knight said.
"Yes" I said. "Verily... tis. Should I do the voice? Sorry."
He said his name was Alris and he was a Paladin. He had asked been to meet me at the Hilltop Church. The other player had not been part of the plan.
"It was a great pity to interrupt him though." Alris said. "He was a raider. A class that dwells in places like these, where new players spawn. He would have told you a story to start you on your way."
"He didn't seem to like me." I said. "Something about me not having a heart?"
"He expected you to be a streamer." said Alris. "You have been given a noble life, which in the normal run of things would only happen once you had started to stream. He showed you some strange object? Raiders search the streams sites for their talisman and then, when they die, they link their followers to it. A good raider will spend days or weeks training the baseborn - the NPCs, I mean - to play parts in their tale. He will have buried treasure and sworn innkeepers to secrecy while setting up ways for the secrets to be revealed. They attract followers who want to see the tasks set up and unfolded. They are great servants of... the game."
"I didn't know" I said "I'm sorry. No-one told me to stream."
"Fear not, Galatian" he said. "It is the prophesy. And you have your own path to follow."
He gestured me to come with him and set off towards the Hilltop Church. In my quest log, --- Follow The Paladin --- appeared.