Chapter 7: Chapter 7
Another schoolday came and went. My parents weren't home when I returned and their car was out of the garage, so I decided to take the opportunity to do something about my work-out area. All the equipment had been shoved against the walls with no rhyme or reason except to get it out of the way once the initial thrill of owning it disappeared.
It took nearly three hours to haul everything around to create a dedicated space at the head of the garage. My parents actually owned everything necessary to build their own home gym. They simply hadn't gotten around to putting it together. There were multiple stacks of interlocking black foam traction tiles in a plastic storage bin. Once they were put together, I had a gym floor. It wasn't a big gym floor, of course. I still had to leave room for my parents to park their car. But it was enough.
I moved the weight bench so it was perpendicular to the wall and possessed enough clearance for the bar to actually rest in the rack. I turned the treadmill so a wall would catch me if I tripped—a better option than being thrown into the other equipment. The multifunction whatchamacallit in the corner was too big to move, so I left it where it was, but I did find a lightweight row machine tucked against the wall behind it. I set that up next to the treadmill.
Leaving a walkway to the garage door, I arranged the other half of the home gym into a yoga-calisthenics area. I arranged all the free weights around the walls, found an unused laundry basket to hold yoga mats and stretch resistance bands, and left a good sized area for doing pushups and other floor activities.
My parents returned home as I was setting up a charging station for one of my older, outdated tablets. It wasn't the same as having a wall-mounted television or surround sound stereo for entertainment, but it would be enough to provide background noise while I worked out.
My parents hesitated to pull their car into the garage when they saw I'd reorganized it, so I waved them inside like an airport flagsman. They slowly rolled in. I wanted to cheer when the whole car fit without hitting anything in my gym area. As I thought, the garage had been made for a much larger gas guzzling SUV or truck—not my parent's little electric car. There was still plenty of room to move around.
"What's all this?" my dad said as he climbed out of the passenger seat.
I shrugged. "I thought it'd make it easier to work out."
"I still don't understand why you've suddenly become such a health nut. When you were growing up, I had to use a prybar to get you to go outside and play. Now look at this place."
"Are you mad?" I asked.
My mom laughed from the rear of her car, which she'd opened to retrieve several bags of groceries. "Honey, he's just confused. He's having trouble acknowledging that a game motivated you when he couldn't." She smiled as my dad arrived at her side and took the shopping bags from her. "I, for one, am very happy to see you becoming more energetic. The reason doesn't matter."
"I'm happy, too," my dad called out as he carried the groceries into the house. "And supportive! If you want us to sign you up for a gym membership or a dojo, just let me know."
I wrinkled my nose as I retrieved my share of the groceries and carried them inside. Jack and Jillian Trent were generous to a fault. Our family wasn't rich. My parents made enough money to cover the bills, but I knew supporting me devastated any attempt they made to build a savings account. They never said anything, yet I knew it wasn't easy for them to find money to buy me new clothes after every growth spurt, pay for my school supplies, and satisfy the black hole every teenage boy had in place of a stomach.
I did my best not to be a burden to them, but instances like this made it hard. I knew they sometimes felt like they'd failed me and they tried to spoil me to make up for it. I could say yes to make them happy, but then I'd feel guilty about adding to our family's financial burden. My parents weren't young and they were definitely overdue to start planning their retirement.
"I have my own gym," I said. "Why do I need to pay to go to someone else's? And a dojo sounds interesting, but that's a long-term commitment. It can wait. It'd be a waste of money to go now when I'm still only doing basic training. And there's no telling if I'll be able to continue playing in a month. The game subscription fee isn't cheap. I've read it's possible to buy game time using in-game coin, but that's something you can only do in a big city. I'm still in a starter area."
My statement distracted my parents from the dojo issue and they spent the next hour reassuring me I could continue playing as long as I wanted. And I believed them. The game's subscription fee wasn't cheap, but it wasn't exactly expensive, either.
Over dinner, I did ask for the one thing I needed to make my nightly playtime more enjoyable. "Do you think I can have twenty dollars to go to the 4D Arena tomorrow? Since I'm using a helmet, the game couldn't scan my whole body. Some of my proportions are off. The Arena has full-size capsules you can rent to update you rendering scans."
My dad had his wallet out before I could blink. I supposed it was the good side of living like a conscientious hermit. If I'd been the type of teenager who asked for twenty dollars every weekend and demanded designer clothes on top of it, they might have asked questions and been more stingy.
After dinner and an hour of watching the news with the family, I showered and laid down in preparation for logging in. Since it was the weekend, I set my helmet's secondary alarm for nine in the morning, giving myself a few extra hours of playtime. Of course, it meant I'd be asleep for almost ten hours instead of only eight, but I didn't think it would harm me as long as I didn't make it a habit.
When I logged in, I didn't immediately load into the game like I usually did. For some reason, I ended up floating in a completely white space.
"Hello, new user," a child-like voice greeted. "Sorry to interrupt, but your game 'Aetherscape' has queued a new update. Would you like to wait in your system lobby while it installs?"
"What's my system lobby?" I asked.
"Thank you for asking. Your system lobby is part of your 4D gaming headset's operating system. You can think of it like a full immersion version of the desktop GUI—that is, graphical user interface—on your phone, tablet, or laptop. In other words, it's what you see when you're not inside an application or program. Would you like to personalize your system lobby? There is a library of free environments provided by the system default or, as an Aetherscape subscriber, you can also select an Aetherscape premium theme."
"Can you show me the Aetherscape themes?"
"Aetherscape theme one is the Holy Cathedral of the Saints." The environment around him morphed into the interior of a large stone Cathedral with light shining through various windows. A nun standing at the front of the church waved at me and said, "Aetherscape theme two is Forest Camp." The scenery morphed again, placing him in a forest clearing with a campfire, a teepee, and a young huntress in leather armor. She gave me a feral grin and said, "Aetherscape theme three is—"
"Stop," I blurted to stop her from going to the next one. The scenery and the huntswoman disappeared, returning me to the original white space. "Those are great and all, but they're a little too immersive for a system lobby. Those kinds of environments will make me think I'm already in the game. Do you have something more minimal? All I really need for this space is access to the system tools."
"Falling Data is a popular theme and meets your specifications," the system AI recommended. The surroundings morphed once again, this time to a solid black with rainbow streams of ones and zeroes appearing at random intervals. They faded out of existence as they fell.
Holographic panels appeared in my immediate environment. One for system tools, one dedicated to Aetherscape, and one dedicated as a generic file explorer.
"This works," I said in satisfaction. I went into system tools first and discovered there were many free applications I could download for my 4D headset. There was a cellphone emulator that allowed me to copy my phone for use in my system space. There was a library emulator that allowed me to turn any digital book I owned into a full immersion copy I could read. I could play music, access video streaming sites, and explore the Net like I was using a regular tablet. The main difference was I could duplicate and resize the screens in the system lobby, making them as big as I wanted.
I didn't have words to describe how it felt to watch anime on a screen big enough to fit a movie theater.
And that didn't even scratch the surface of what was possible. There were also paid minigame apps available and advertisements for companies hiring night shift employees—data analysts, editors, translators, programmers, and so on.
It made it very, very clear it wasn't a waste to purchase the 4D headset without Aetherscape or any other game.
I turned to the Aetherscape main file before I could fall too far down the rabbit hole of exploration. It offered three free apps, three paid apps, a stylized Net browser for their site—including their wiki—and an avatar viewer. I opened the viewer first. A full hologram of my in-game avatar appeared a few feet away, dressed in my Atlantean gear. Surrounding the hologram was the equipment slots and stats I could see in my status screen.
I didn't know the average stats among players, so I had no idea whether mine were any good. I was happy to see most of my equipment slots had something in them. Only a few were empty—some jewelry slots, my shoulder slot, and my offhand weapon slot.
I noticed a weird shadowed slot off to the side. When I touched it, a notice appeared.
[Player's charm is not high enough to do this. 100 charm is required to unlock follower system.]
[Player's level is not high enough to do this. Player must be level three to unlock follower system.]
I used the game browser to look up information on the follower system. It didn't take long to discover it was a cross between a mercenary system and a gacha lottery system. Followers could randomly appear as filler in Guild spaces, housing spaces, and—if a player's charisma was high enough—actually assist them as backup fighters.
For now, it was something I could look forward to using and not something I could currently touch. I closed out of the avatar viewer and searched through the other apps to see if there was anything useful. The three paid apps were obviously meant for Guilds. One was an offline Guild space where players could meet up without actually logging in. Another was a raid assistant. The last one was AetherScan, an interactive map of the entire in-game world that updated twice a day.
As for the free apps, it took a few minutes to understand what they actually did. The first one was a portal to an offline copy of a player's in-game house, making it so they could play and decorate it without actually needing to log in. The second was a practice arena. Unlike in-game arenas, there were no prizes for beating NPCs or monsters. Its only purpose was for practicing moves without taking up valuable in-game real estate.
The last application was a relay. It allowing Aetherscape to connect to the system lobby's copy of my cell phone, which would in turn connect to my actual cell phone. Using it, I would no longer be cut off from the outside world.
Thankfully, I'd left my phone charging on my side table, so I didn't need to log out to pair the applications with my phone. I checked the time on the system clock before deciding to try it out. It was still early enough, my dad shouldn't have gone to bed yet.
He sounded very confused when he answered. "Eh? Jay? Why are you calling me? Aren't you in your room? When did you leave?"
I chuckled at his predictable response. "I'm still in bed asleep. I just learned out how to make calls from inside my headset. Do me a favor and call back. I want to see if the call gets relayed like it should."
He obliged, hanging up and calling me back. A holographic icon appeared to inform me of an incoming call and I only had to press to answer it. "Did it work?" my dad asked.
"It works even better than I expected. You should think about getting a headset for yourself. With this system lobby, you wouldn't have to stay up all night to get your work done. You could pair your headset with your laptop and just do it all in your sleep."
"Your mother would kill me if I came to bed with a gaming helmet on," he replied.
"Not if you get her one, too. I bet if there are more than one headset on the same wifi network, we could create a family lobby. You and mom can set it up to be like a beach retreat. She'd probably love that."
"It's something to consider for her birthday. Tell me more about it tomorrow. Okay?"
"Okay. Goodnight, dad."
CREATORS' THOUGHTS 
Ashpence
Ashpence Many of you might be wondering why this is called 'Deep Sea Party' when Jay is soloing so much. The other party members will show up eventually--promise! You can probably already guess who one of them will be, although your guess is wrong if you say one of Jay's parents. ^_^
Anyway, what's your opinion so far? Do you like the out-of-game chapters or do you want to see more questing? I'm trying my best to provide a balanced mix, but I'm not sure if I have it right yet.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone