...online?

Alfheim does not often play games.
She disliked tutorials treating her like a child, and even more the outdated memes newer games would sometimes break the fourth wall with....

But Nouveau was so excited to play it together at some point...
She took her time getting to the tavern, as was customary for her in games. She preferred to wander and not pay attention to the story. She preferred to pick up random things. Wheat? Of course, even if she never used it. Tomatoes and textiles? Yes, yes. Obviously.
Later on she could probably sell them on the auction house. Hopefully there was an auction house, not some stupid other system...

Would there be a tutorial for it? She hoped to the night king there wouldn’t be any more on-the-rails quests.

The NPCs were well-designed, she would give them that. Princess looked sweet, cute enough to make Alfheim blush a little. MMO’s always weakened her a bit with the cuter guide characters.

But she did dislike the fact there was another on-the-rails quest, right after what she’d thought of them. (Cursed, she was.)

Hopefully the quest board would unlock later, properly. And not be lame low-level ones...

She picked egg hunting. Once again, her weakness to cute things struck.
Eggs were cute, right? Because to her, they were too cute. These lovingly-rendered little scaly eggs made her eyes prickle. What sort of cute little thing would hatch from these? Bunnydragons? Oh, please let there be bunnydragon pets in this game....

The air caught and stung her hands as she brushed past the bushes and the glittering spatter of color. It wasn’t real, of course, no matter how much it felt that way. No matter how the air sizzled and broke here, close to it.

... No, she wasn’t going to touch it.

It was day one of the release. Of course there were bugs, there hadn’t even been a bugfix patch yet. She should return to the tavern. Talk to Nouveau about the stupid fetch quests... Complain. Ask the other stygian to party with her later. Maybe they could carry her while she messed around with not-quest things.

And there, it took her moments to realize she’d been spoken to. Glitched npc, no matter how much her skin crawled, or felt slightly ill at the screen tearing. She kept trying to distract herself from it, the way it made her remember something else that stung and tore her vision.

She stepped away. There was no reason to softlock the game by interacting with a glitch. She could file a bug report later. You get extra items for those, don’t you?

She stepped away.
There was- It wasn’t real, so there was no reason to be alarmed.

She nearly tripped over herself stumbling hurriedly back to the tavern.

Empty. Cold. Blue and black and monotone. The door shut behind her and she tried to calm herself. Oh, that quest had been a stupid tutorial about the questing system. That was annoying. At least side quests had unlocked.

She ascended the stairs.

She should save. She should- log out.

Get a drink of water.