17. Pick A Card. This card. Specifically this card.

  The clothes and jewelry that my sister and Lewis bought was almost identical. [High-Quality Cotton Robes] and various mana-regenerative or storing equipment to increase their casting capabilities. The primary difference was their focus; Lewis had chosen a staff of bronze, while Paula, who had decided upon a ‘life mage’ route of healing, had chosen an oak-staff with a quartz embedded in the tip with copper setting. As it was, she just barely managed to afford it with the money I had given her as a [Greeter].

  Almost like I had planned it or something.

  “What about spells, books and Reagents?” Lewis inquired. “We have clothes and focuses, but you said we needed five things yesterday. We’re almost out of cash with just this.”

  “Spellbooks next,” I agreed. “Fortunately I already thought of this and planned ahead. Paula, you’re certain about the non-religious life-mage healing route?”

  “Yeah. I’d be a surgeon if that were possible, I think,” she laughed, “Or just a regular doctor. But if I have to use superpowers to play this game I want to use them to heal.”

  “Alright then. Take this card, hold it over your head, and say ‘this card reveals my destiny,’” I instructed.

  “Wait, what? This isn’t like the time you tried to convince me that the salt-shaker dispensed pixie-dust and I spent thirty minutes trying to fly, is it?” she demanded.

  “Oh man, you were like three years old,” I said, laughing. “No, that’s really the activation requirement. I’m not spoofing at all. It’s a special item, one that’s intended for a veteran to give to a new player to guide them. It puts you in to a particular path, but it also gives you certain boosts and abilities. This one is one of the fastest ways to turn you into a healer without going down the [Cleric] route. It’s also why I advised you to play an elf; the ‘Nature Maiden’ synergizes with their racial traits. I suppose you could have picked a dryad, but there’s not much difference in game between a dryad and an elf anyway, and this way you don’t have to worry about a specific tree.”

  “This isn’t a religious thing is it?” she questioned, taking the card.

  “No more than fortune telling,” I answered. “Look, if you want, you can earn these abilities the hard way. But you’ll be stuck as a pseudo-mage for a few days if we go that route. Real time days, not game days. The [Card] depicts an ancient [Elfish Queen] renown for her beauty and magic, especially healing magic. A mortal queen who died, not a diety. The card will spawn a spell book in your inventory with a couple of Nature and Life spells. The book will also contain a few extra pages with some lore that will give you a hint about a quest line that will be worth following if you really want to go down this path. I’ve got a card like this for everyone. Multiple, in fact, but you’re the one who’s most certain about what you want to do, and what you don’t want to do, so you’re going first.”

  “Oh, well, if it’s like that, then maybe we should wait until everyone’s together,” she suggested. “If everyone is getting one of these cards, we should either do it all together, or at least talk about it first.”

  I shrugged indifferently. “I’ve got like sixty different cards, and multiple copies of most of them. Like I said, they’re not hard to get, and they’re not anything special. You can buy four of them from the fortune teller in town for five silver. None of the rest are more expensive than that, the hard part is collecting them; they’re sold in specific locations. Yours is just the most obvious fit.”

  “What about me?” Lewis inquired. “I mean, what are the options for mage DPS?”

  “Have you decided which elements you want? Remember, I recommend at least two minimum. The best mages have either two, or they have three. Nobody has one because it’s too easy to counter, and having more than three weakens the rest of your spells.”

  “Is Arcane and Lightning a good combo?” he inquired. “I was thinking as pure wizard as I can go, you know?”

  “How do you feel about Light as a third element?” I inquired. “It will give you illusion abilities, which is actually very useful in a group like this, and can also be used as backup damage.”

  “So, Arcane, Lightning, and Light?”

  “Yeah. It’s a strong combo. Not the strongest, but then, if it was, it would be nerfed until it was in line with everything else. There’s a lot that you can do to go wrong in this game, but if you follow these cards, it gets much harder to screw up your account completely. Most of your damage comes from Lightning, but Arcane slash Light spells are powerful too. One of the spells you’ll be getting from the card is an illusion which creates false-images of a party member. You can cast it on the tanks, or the healers, or whoever you want. It’s pretty damn good, actually. You’ll also get a slow and a paralyze spell for crowd control.”

  “And if I use this card, I’m locked in?” he asked.

  “Not really. The cards are consumable, and you can ‘change your fate’ by burning another one. So if you don’t like this card – they call it a [Thunder Illusionist] by the way - you can change it to a different mage archetype. But this one is pretty strong at all stages in the game. And you can customize your abilities later on, both what abilities you have and what exactly they do. That illusion spell I mentioned earlier? You can, for example, make it cheaper by making the illusions see through, but you can also make it so that there are more of them. The default is two illusions, and I’ve seen someone use up to nine, so that there were ten visible tanks, but only one of them was real. It was actually a really powerful spell that was super useful, even though it was a huge mana hog.”

  “Is it hard to change your abilities?” my sister asked.

  “No. Changing your attunement is harder,” I answered. “Once you reach perfect attunement it’s impossible to use the opposite element at all. I can’t use Ice magic or Light magic, for example, because I’m completely Fire and Shadow oriented. Right now you’ll be attuning your avatars just by using certain abilities, and as mages, both of you can actually reach maximum attunement this way,” I explained. “There are faster ways, but this way is actually pretty good because it gives you time to change your mind. We’ll give it a few days, both real time and subjective, and see if you like it. If not, well, I have other cards you can try, and it’s pretty easy to reset the early stages of [Avatar Attunement]. You just have to sit and meditate in a certain place, and there’s a few different ones we can use in town. They’re harder to find as you get away from the starting zones, but there’s still one in every major city. It’s much harder to find a place to lock in your attunement than it is to reset it before it’s locked.”

  I shrugged as we walked back to the GreenMeadows. “Anyway, don’t worry about it too much. You don’t need to be attuned for these cards to work. They’re just a set of abilities. Mages usually pick their own spells from the library and mix and match when they start out. These cards just provide a cookie-cutter experience to help guide noobs like the two of you. Once you have a bit of experience you can look at customization.”

  “So it’s a way of avoiding mistakes like picking spells from both ice and fire, like Katrine made,” Lewis said as understanding dawned.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  “Picking a card is a way of avoiding mistakes in general,” I answered. “I picked Ninja, back in the day, and never really regretted it. I’m a [Shadow-Flame Assassin] these days, but most of that is attunement and magic added to my physical abilities.”

  “Huh. And doing physical and magic together doesn’t weaken the other?”

  “It strengthens both, if you can hit the right balance,” I answered. “But most people need to master one aspect before incorporating the second into their game play, so don’t worry about it yet. If you pick the card I suggested then you’re on an excellent path all the way to late and end-game.

  We claimed a table in the tavern and discussed exactly what sort of abilities and paths the cards I had selected for them would entail. As their friends, and some of the PUGs, began to return from the market, they got in on the discussion as well.

  For Rick, I had selected the ‘Savage Protector’ card, as it was one of the better tanking cards and he had shown proficiency with the mace I had made him. Kevin was a generic ‘Pikeman’, which, I explained, he could add in enhanced and elemental abilities to after he had chosen which route he wanted to go for attunement. Sam got the ‘Marskwoman’ card, which had been Marksman card the second before I announced my intention to give it to her. That left only Sophie from the core group, but she had Mikael to guide her ability selection, and the NPC had already done a splendid job of it, I determined when she opened her skill list for me to review.

  “This is amazing, Sophie,” I informed her. “Really, you must be extremely talented in order to have unlocked half of these abilities. The only thing I can do to improve your build is to recommend you go to the library and buy a few cheap spells which Mikael can’t teach you. All that’s left to do is for you to practice them, both in combat and out of combat, and especially with Mikael. You can use real-world songs if you want, you just have to register your performance with a Bard-trainer to establish what bonuses they provide when you perform them. You can also learn the ER specific songs if you want to do that, too. Practicing each will increase the bonuses they provide, but those bonuses are already high enough that you would be poached in a heartbeat by a thousand different guilds out there. Seriously, we’re incredibly lucky to have you,” I informed her.

  “But I don’t get a card?” she asked.

  “You have Mikael,” I explained. “He’s like a card but way better.”

  “I don’t suppose you have another one of those ‘Savage Guardian’ cards, do you?” Phil/MrGreen asked. “I mean, I have a build plan and was planning on buying the abilities one by one, so if you don’t—”

  “I have a ‘Stalwart Defender,’ which uses a sword instead of a mace,” I informed him. “And I see that you bought a decent sword with the silver I gave you earlier.”

  “Yeah, [High-Quality Steel Gladius],” He agreed, grinning. “I had just enough after I sold the [Iron] junker that I had with the amount that you gave me.”

  “I wish I could enchant it for you,” I said honestly. “With the right enchant, you could hold on to that sword forever.”

  “But if you did, I might face restrictions,” he guessed.

  “Yeah. Not everything I give you guys is logged and counted, but if I go above a certain limit it’s counted retroactively,” I explained. “And at this stage that’s a perfect sword for you to have. I hope you didn’t go broke buying it.”

  “No, I had enough left over to buy some potions and food,” Phil informed us. “And my armor is good enough for until I switch to a new base. I just haven’t been wearing it. I’ve been playing for a few weeks before you guys showed up so I’m further progressed than you are, even if I’ve only had NPC’s to guide me.”

  “What about you gals?” I asked Lucine and Katrine, who had also joined us. “Do you want to pick a card?”

  “I’m going to cleric route,” Katrine announced. “Except I’m going to be more ‘smite my enemies’ than ‘heal thy wounds.’ I’m thinking Freya or Athena sounds like a good goddess for me, but I haven’t made any decisions on that front yet. The ‘prayers’ I got for free sound awesome, even if they’re a little healing focused for now.”

  “I’m not sure that there’s a card for what I want to do,” Lucine admitted nervously. “Because you know how you advised me about being a ‘blade dancer’, a ‘backup dancer’, and a ‘motion mage’? Well, I want to do all three! Is that possible?”

  “So, a mix of damage and support? Yeah. Possible, but not common. It’s difficult to strike that kind of balance and be useful to a group. I don’t think there’s a card for it, you’d have to mix and match abilities from the Training Hall, Mikael, and the Library. There might be guides out there for other people who have incorporated their real life dancing skills into a viable play style you might want to review, but it sounds like your personal style is going to be extremely specific to yourself, and that it’s going to get that way very quickly. Have you figured out how to start?”

  “I’ve got a [Medium Quality Steel Rapier], [Firebolt], and [Inspiring Presence],” she explained, “And a few other abilities, but I was thinking I could keep up my presence while I dash in to use my [Rapier] or back out to use [Firebolt]. I think it will be a lot of fun, although I’m not sure how much damage I’ll be doing like that.”

  “Probably more than you think,” I said, grinning. “Especially once you factor in how much your presence will increase everyone else’s DPS. It won’t stack with Sophie’s version of the ability, but that might make it easier for her to sing or play her music without worrying about the dancing portion of her buffs until she’s more skilled. Which she will become with practice, I assure you. And I’m not saying that she’s not already skilled, because simply unlocking the abilities she’s unlocked is a testament to that!”

  “I’m really looking forward to playing with you, Sophie,” Lucine provided, sensing that I was attempting to build the girl up. “You’ll sing and I’ll dance, it will be awesome. I love that this game actually allows me to include my ballerina skills in combat!”

  “You’re actually a ballerina?” Paula asked, surprised.

  “Lucine’s been in like twelve professional plays since we graduated high school together,” Katrine explained. “I’m a Nurse. LPN. I told her that she was wasting her money going to school for dance, but she’s actually made more money than I have since we graduated, which seems kind of unfair sometimes. It’s also why I’m sometimes a little protective of her to guys. She’s had some trouble with creeps who like watching videos of her practice.”

  “Wow. You’re both, like, old,” Sam exclaimed. And we all laughed.

  Even though it wasn’t that big of a deal, the players who had decided to accept a card from me made something of a production of actually activating it. Which was actually a good thing; we were synced up with a number of other players because we were in the tavern, and some strangers even approached me to ask if I had extra cards I didn’t mind parting with. Which I did, and they were grateful.

  It was moderately amusing to watch those who hadn’t visited the library have spell books drop on floor nearby them dramatically. They were the cheapest books available, with limited spell slots and only small spaces to add an incantation or modify the suggested cantrip, and the motions involved were extremely simple. The players could buy an upgraded version simply by visiting the Library and asking for their spells to be transcribed into a better book, which would include more details on their spells, but that was a matter for once they’d mastered the basics.

  Because they had more or less gone the route I had expected them to from yesterday, I had also prepared the reagents that Paula and Lewis needed for their spells. I gave Sophie some reagents as well, but she wouldn’t be picking up her spells until she had time to visit the Library later on.

  We were celebrating and hanging out and just generally having a good time being kids in a virtual world when “Mr. Sorry” popped in, looking somewhere between pale and excited.

  “Oh my god, [Luke], you have no idea how much trouble you got me into!” he exclaimed. “Oh man, how could you give me a bribe like that! It was way, way, way too much! You’ve triggered a time limited quest for me and I can’t complete it for myself!”

  “Oh?” I asked, grinning devilishly. “What a coincidence.”

  ?