Celestial Offering
Burn this effigy to the Celestials to log out of Crematoria Online. When the embers fall to ashes, this world will fade.
I wanted to go outside and scream at the sky. That explained why I couldn't find the gods-damned logout button in my UI. It's because there wasn't one! Ellie was right. I was trapped inside this game, and so was she. The only way I was going to be able to get out was to finish this quest and get my hands on that Celestial Offering!
Well, there was only one viable option. Only one of those quests would let me get out of this death trap. I suddenly wished Ellie had decided to come with me. This was information she needed, but she had said that she would come to find me. Maybe.
I reached out and took the Rotten Heart of Alluria case file in my hand. My quest log updated.
Quest Completed: Langdon Specialist Investigations
You have selected your first case file, Rotten Heart of Alluria.
New Quest: Rotten Heart of Alluria
Investigate the disappearance of John Byrne and return to Edwin E. Langdon once this has been completed.
You are now neutral with Langdon Specialist Investigations.
The cases screen disappeared, and Edwin had something in his hand. A picture of a young boy, with brown hair and big brown eyes. A smattering of freckles covered his cheeks and nose. I took the picture and Edwin clapped his hands together. "Very good! Now, follow me and I'll introduce you to your partner on the case, one Mister James Treborn."
Chapter Eleven
Getting to Know Myself
Edwin rapped his knuckles on the door frame to James's office, then headed into the open door without waiting to be invited.
"Mister Treborn! How do you feel about supervising Mister Hutchins on his very first case with LSI?"
James stood from his desk. He oozed cool. We shook hands. His grip was firm, but not aggressive. He had an easy smile that quirked up to one side. On his handsome stubbled face, it should have felt like a cocky smirk, but it didn't. It was the off-handed amusement of someone who was in on a joke that everyone else was oblivious to.
"You must be the new guy," he said. His voice was warm and musical, and I hadn't expected him to have an American accent like me.
"Lucas Hutchins. Nice to meet you," I said.
"What trouble have you gotten me into?" James asked.
"You'll be escorting Mister Hutchins to the Allurian Orphanage," Edwin said. "We've received an anonymous request, with quite a hefty payment in advance to find a young boy who has gone missing."
"Ah, so that's why you came to me," James said.
"Your knowledge of the institution will prove invaluable, I'm sure."
I looked from James to Edwin and back. I didn't quite follow.
"I was raised there, kid." James couldn't have been all that older than me, but somehow it didn't feel offensive that he called me kid. I got the feeling that he was a guy who'd been around the block a few times.
"I consider myself lucky to have you with me," I said.
"I need a few minutes to gather my things," James said. "I wasn't planning on heading out into the field today, so I need to do some prep work. You get yourself a coffee, then let me know when you're ready to get going."
"Very good," Edwin said. "Very good indeed. I shall leave you both to get on with things. I look forward to some good news later today."
Edwin left, and I followed him out of the room. It was lucky that I had some time to myself before heading out. I hadn't really had a chance to get a handle on my character's statistics yet. If I was heading into a difficult quest at Level 1, I needed a basic understanding of how my class worked.
Actually existing in this avatar felt like I was in a flesh and bone human body, but everything that drove the interactions in this game, just like any video game, was a matter of opposing mathematics, mixed in with a healthy dose of random number generation, or RNG for short. I needed to know how all my underpinning numbers worked before I jumped into a case where the life of a child was on the line.
Even if the kid's life was virtual, finding them was my ticket out of here, and I needed to get serious.
I headed into the waiting room, where a pot of freshly brewed coffee was waiting. I poured some coffee into a ceramic mug, then added a little sugar and cream. I lifted it to my lips and drank.
Delicious. While I sipped my coffee, I opened my Character screen and scanned over the information displayed there.
It looked as though I had two main resources.
Health Points, or HP, were my primary resource, and at Level 1 I had a base of 100 HP. HP was a pretty standard measure of a character's health in any game. And 100 was a nice round number to start with.
I hadn't seen my HP bar displayed in-game yet, but I assumed that it would be like many others. When I became involved in a combat encounter, it would probably appear. I made a mental note to test this theory at the next opportunity that presented itself.
Next up were something called Concentration Points, or CP, which powered my abilities. Unlike HP, CP was displayed as a percentage. At that moment it was sitting at 100%. That made sense with some of the abilities I had seen so far. While focusing on the Concentration Points section, a new piece of information appeared in a pop-out box.
Concentration Points
Concentration Points are the primary resource for Investigators. Your active abilities such as Find Clues and Expose Weakness require a certain amount of concentration in order to be used. Higher ranks in your active abilities will decrease the percentage of Concentration required to activate simultaneously. Concentration Points that are spent to activate burst abilities, such as Precision Strike will recover slowly over time.
Interesting. So, as an Investigator, I did not have a pool of Mana or Magic that I could draw on with a defined point limit. Instead, I had a Concentration Points meter that allowed me to do a limited number of things that related to my character's mental acuity. It sounded as though it acted somewhat like a mana bar, though. I could tap a certain percentage which would recover slowly over time, but I could also have a few passive abilities running in tandem that used the same resource pool. It felt like a hybrid system. Quite fun to use, but important to manage properly.
I could live with that. It might take a little bit of time to get my head around using my resources most efficiently, but I was sure that I would be able to figure it out.
Below my Concentration Points bar, there was a small green + symbol. I concentrated on that to see what it meant.
Caffeinated
CP regeneration is increased by 10% - bonus from drinking Strong Coffee.
Bonuses like that were very nice. I already liked coffee, but now it would actually give a tangible benefit to my character. That was a win in my book.
The next three statistics were fairly standard. Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence.
Similar statistics were the three pillars of pretty much all playable characters in every character-based role-playing game invented since Gygax published the original Dungeons & Dragons in 1974, almost a century ago.
My Intelligence attribute was displayed in bold text, meaning that it was one of my core attributes.
Charisma, Perception, and Endurance were exactly what I expected them to be. I focused on each one in turn and read through the attribute summaries, just to make sure.
Charisma
Fighting your way out of a situation isn't always the best option. Sometimes conflict can be solved with words. Charisma shows the level of influence you can exert over other people, and how easily you will be able to form relationships.
Perception
Crematoria is a world full of secrets. Perception allows you insight into the world around you, uncovering secrets, hidden meanings and sometimes even a peek beyond the veil of reality.
I noticed that Perception was displayed in bold text, which meant that it was also one of my core primary attributes. That made sense for an Investigato
r. If I was an Enforcer, my main traits would probably be Strength and Endurance. If I was a Preacher, my main traits would be Charisma and Intelligence. Each class had their own strengths and weaknesses, just like every other game.
Endurance
Some people like to sit in comfy chairs and read books. Other people like to climb mountains. Those in the latter group would have a high Endurance score. This attribute shows how long you can run, jump, swim, climb and do just about any other physical activity in Crematoria.
Endurance seemed like a very important attribute to nurture. The next two attributes I was a little uncertain of. Resilience had been mentioned earlier in character creation when I was looking at the Hellkin race. Hellkin gained a 20% bonus to Resilience, which I recalled had something to do with resisting sanity-draining effects. I focused on the attribute description and read further.
Resilience
Facing the horrors of Crematoria can take a serious toll on one's psyche. Your Resilience attribute affects how much horror and incomprehensible madness you can take before you begin feeling the effects. The higher your resilience, the less sanity-draining effects affect you, and the more easily you can deal with the horrifying terrors that await.
I didn't like the sound of that at all. My consciousness had been transferred into Crematoria Online, which meant that I experienced this virtual world as though it was real. The feelings and experiences that I thought that I could feel through my avatar's body were just that: feelings. My real body was safely tucked into my Crematoria Chamber back in my apartment. But my conscious mind was here in this world, and if the horrors of Crematoria could really affect my mind, then would those horrors linger after I was able to log out?
I felt like swearing. I should have looked at all these things in Character Creation so I could have asked Empyria about them. Now that I was in the game world, it was too late. If I wanted to go and ask her for assistance, I would have to seek her out in the Halls of Justice, and I simply didn't want to do that right now. I had no choice but to forge ahead if I wanted to get that Celestial Offering. Surely there would be safeguards in place.
My focus shifted to the Fortitude attribute.
Fortitude
Plagues, diseases, and poisons are a fact of life in Crematoria. Fortitude increases your overall level of health in the game, and the strength of your immune system, allowing you to fight off diseases more easily. Your Fortitude score also directly impacts your heat and cold resistance, your poison resistance, and how badly grievous wounds affect you.
Upon seeing a summary of my base primary attributes, I noticed that they were all similar. At level 1, that was usually the case. Most of the time, people started off on a level playing field. I didn't expect anything different, but I did see that a few of my primary attributes were higher than others, which aligned with my two main primary attributes.
Lucas Hutchins
Investigator
Level 1
HP: 100
Strength: 5
Dexterity: 5
Intelligence: 6
Charisma: 5
Perception: 7
Endurance: 5
Resilience: 5
Fortitude: 5
Points available: 5
I hadn't leveled up yet, so those were my absolute starting base attributes. It appeared as though my base score in Intelligence and Perception had been increased from the base score of 5, probably because of my chosen class. My Perception was increased by two, which probably meant that for an Investigator, Perception was the most important attribute. Intelligence trailed slightly after that. Still important, but less so than Perception.
I still had 5 points left to spend however I wanted to. As I was just about to set off on my very first case, I figured it was a good a time as any to allocate my extra 5 starting points. I might need them in the quest to come.
I had played games in many different ways in the past. Once I understood how the statistics system worked, I could make it work for me. I had played other games with min/maxing in mind. Sometimes trying to break a game through stat manipulation was fun, but other times it made for builds which were completely non-viable in the endgame.
It was too early to tell which of the two Crematoria Online would be, and I didn't like the thought of building myself into a corner where I was non-viable in a game like this.
Perception and Intelligence were the two core attributes of my class, so I knew I had to increase them a little. But there were also some utility and survivability attributes that I wanted to increase. Until I had a better understanding of how the system worked in this game, I decided to play it safe.
After allocating my five points, my attributes looked somewhat different.
Lucas Hutchins
Investigator
Level 1
HP: 100
Strength: 5
Dexterity: 5
Intelligence: 7
Charisma: 6
Perception: 8
Endurance: 6
Resilience: 6
Fortitude: 5
Primary Attribute Points available: 0
I dropped one point into Intelligence, Charisma, Perception, Endurance, and Resilience.
I did try and put one point into HP, but the game wouldn't let me. It looked like my Fortitude score had something to do with the calculation of my HP, but I would need to figure out how that worked later.
I finished my coffee, then headed back into James's office.
"You ready, kid?" he asked.
"Ready," I said, even though I wasn't.
That rumor Ellie mentioned about not respawning if I died in the game bubbled up to the surface. Knowing that I couldn't log out until I saw this quest through to completion sat like a heavy weight in my stomach.
All I needed to do was stay alive, and keep moving forward, so that's exactly what I was going to do.
Chapter Twelve
The Allurian Orphanage
"So, are you a player?" I asked. I wasn't sure of the best way to come out and ask the question, so I just decided to forge ahead and hope for the best.
"Of what?" James asked with a sardonic smile. "Luck has always been in my corner, but alas, I have found that favor does not extend to the gambling tables. A player of the game of love though, that may have to be a yes. You see, when you help track down the person who murdered a little housewife's husband and bring them to justice, they tend to be very grateful."
Either James wasn't a player, or he was just getting really into character. Although, his back story didn't really give him the right set-up to be a player character. All the players were considered new faces or new arrivals, and he had apparently been working with Langdon Specialist Investigations for some time.
It was strange to me that there was no easy way to tell who was a player character, who was a non-player character, and who was a hostile character. Most other games had some kind of indicator, like a red or green outline around the target, but Crematoria Online didn't.
"Ah, well, I cannot say I've been very lucky in the gambling stakes myself. Nor have I had much luck in love."
"Why is that, Lucas? If I may be so bold to say so, you seem to be a handsome chap. I would be surprised if you were not the most eligible bachelor in whatever small town you came from. On that note, which town was it that you came from?"
The non-player character was digging for information! I wondered if he was asking out of curiosity - if curiosity could actually exist in an artificial intelligence construct - or whether he was skeptical of my own appearance in Eldin. I decided to play it coy and leave my answer non-committal.
"One that I'd rather forget about," I said.
He grinned. "Ah, one of those. You know, everyone in Eldin that came from somewhere else is running away from something. Could be a town, a family, an ex-lover. Whatever you're running from, your secrets are your own. As long as it doesn't impact your ability to do your duty at LSI, there will be no problems."
"Thank you," I said. "So tell me, where is it that we're going? I'm not familiar with the area, obviously."
I wanted to direct the conversation back to the task at hand and stop him from digging into my back story. Because I hadn't figured out what my back story was yet. I knew I would need to work on that. It seemed as though the people of Crematoria were almost indistinguishable from actual humans. They were curious, and they had questions that I would need to provide answers to eventually. Until I got my hands on that Celestial Offering.
"Lower Hutt. It's on the banks of River Eld. We have to cover some ground, so we'll catch a carriage across the city. Hopefully, this will help orient you to the layout of the city a little better. Eldin can be a little overwhelming to newcomers."
He was correct. The streets around us were filled with people. Player characters or non-player characters, I couldn't really tell. With only ten thousand player characters inhabiting Crematoria Online, I wondered how high the chances were of running into someone else and being able to tell the difference between them and a non-player character.
Every single non-player character I had spoken to so far would have passed the Turing Test.
The Turing Test was the name of a test designed to judge whether an artificial intelligence could pass for human. It involved a series of people from all walks of life talking to someone on the other end of a computer. Sometimes that other person was on the other end was a human, and other times it was an artificial intelligence. If the artificial intelligence successfully fooled the test participants into believing that they were speaking with a real human, it passed the test.
Every single character I had run into so far passed, even though I consciously knew that they were all artificial intelligences.
In a way, that was scarier.
Rise of the Crimson Order: A Crematoria Online LitRPG Novel Page 9
