Constellation: The first NPC. (Patreon)

   He didn’t have a body upon first logging into the system, and it was a jarring experience. His awareness snapped into focus and then drifted without anchor for a moment above the dirt floor of a mud hut. The ground was shoddy and uneven, and as he turned his attention to it, he could make out the coarseness right down to the individual gritty grains. Weeds were growing just inside the doorway. The mud hadn’t been baked into place very well, and he could see the framework of branches peeking through.

   A barest instant later, his physical form appeared. Perspective yanked backwards the moment his character was generated, a generic flesh-toned mannequin-like template without features. Garments loaded up before his face did, a simple woven brown tunic tied against his body with a simple sash at the waist. Short, scraggly hair sprouted into place, in dirty blonde, and a rather unassuming, forgettable face appeared.

   The man who’d spawned into existence out of thin air raised his hands up to examine them with a steady, somewhat blank look. The rough calluses of a laborer were overlaying themselves atop previously fair skin, and finally a dirt texture swam across his entire body, rendering him filthy. The character blinked in surprise, feeling filthy. He was a generic peasant, in every sense of the word.

   “This... isn’t me, right?”

*     *     *

   “Director!” A young, smartly dressed woman pushed open one of the double doors to lean inside the expansive office. “We have our first NPC!”

   Director Laurens sat behind an enormous desk, fingers paused in mid-motion over her keyboard. She was a beautiful woman just a few years past her prime, the lines that had begun to appear around her eyes only accentuating a stern, no-nonsense expression. When she turned to face the interruption, it was with the fierce, unrelenting gaze she was known for, a look infamous for cowing even the veteran staff members on the game project.

   “Cons just put one in on the map, out of nowhere,” the assistant, Ms. Jessica continued, refusing to shy away from the director’s stare this time. This was big news. “Totally unprompted—no one was running anything into the character tables, or anything.”

   “Who’s in-game?” The director abruptly stood.

   “Devs are tweaking sectors in Lacaille, we don’t have anyone else scheduled in,” The assistant struggled to suppress a smile. This was enormous. “The NPC popped up in Ross. Well, near Ross. Some mountain peasant village near Ross. Do you want the—”

   “Where’s Frank?”

   “I… don’t know,” the assistant admitted. “I wanted to tell you first, I’ll—”

   “Get him on the character tables, now.” the Director commanded. “I want the Cons team on the clock and looking at the log immediately. Pull all the devs out and clear the dive schedule. I want somebody with a degree in behavioral science standing by and ready to dive.”

   “Yes, Ma’am!”

*     *     *

   Director Laurens stepped into the Dive chamber, where thirty military-grade neuro-capsules were horizontally arrayed. Though the enormous cylinders were top of the line and prohibitively expensive, civilian models were becoming more affordable with each new iteration, and they needed to be ready to bring a finished game to the market in the next several years. Thirty capsules was sufficient for now to accommodate their dev team working in shifts, while another wing altogether housing an additional seventy capsules was being constructed in preparation for pre-alpha testing.

   One of the girls from the Cons team, Miranda, was there already. The mousy-looking brunette young woman wore a white button-up shirt with a knee-length black skirt. As Director Laurens approached, Miranda clasped her hands together in front of herself in an obvious attempt to keep from fidgeting.

   “Miranda,” the Director gave the woman a terse nod. “Can you give me a preliminary on Cons?”

   “Director Laurens,” the young brown-haired woman from the Cons team gave her a nod in return. “No, actually. Not here representing the Cons team—I’m here to dive, apparently. You wanted someone with behavioral science?”

   “I did,” Director Laurens frowned. “We’re diving in together.”

   “You’re diving?” Miranda failed to hide her surprise.

   “Make me a female account,” the Director turned towards the dive technician on duty— actually one of the devs who’d just been pulled out of game. “With full administrator access. Disable tutorial and new player. Put us both in Ross.”

  “On it,” the scrawny, rather unkempt man with mussed-up hair lurched into motion, opening up the laptop he’d been holding on his side. “Our pioneer NPC popped up in ‘unnamed mountain village #4.’ The system associates it as a tertiary settlement of a little town in Ross called Gliese, and... I know Gliese really well.”

   “You want to dive in with us?” The Director gave him an evaluating look. Neuro-dive technology that allowed for full-depth sensory virtual reality was a newly emerging technology, and her developers lived to spend every available second playing around in it.

   “Absolutely!” The technician nodded eagerly. “This is like, historic! We dev teams have a betting pool on whether Cons makes the first character male or female.”

   “It’s likely to be male,” The Director was already climbing into her dive capsule. “Miranda? Let’s go.”

   “You think so? Sure hope so, we have a lot of credit riding on it,” the man admitted. “Do you mind if I…?”

   “You’ve put time into your dev character? Do you have some means of getting us to the NPC quickly?” The Director watched as Miranda nervously readied herself for a dive. “I don’t think we’ll be able to snap.”

   “Oh, yeah! Of course!” The technician nodded eagerly. “Demon steed Tanin’Iver, at your service! I can call Terry in here to be our tech and watch over the dives, he owes me one”

   “Hurry it up, then.”

*     *     *

   A terrifying bestial roar echoed throughout the empty cobble streets of Gliese, and a horrific entity composed of bone spires, barbs of metal, and black ichor descended, twisting about in a nauseating way before finally settling into the form of a nebulous looking quadrupedal creature.

   “Ah, uh, sorry,” the demon apologized, bowing its vaguely canoid head to a rather plain-looking pair of blonde fifteen-year old girls wearing matching tunics. “Have it set to do that every time I spawn in.”

   One of the girls shrank back slightly, unable to help from reacting to the whirling visage of stormcloud and violence manifesting itself as a giant four-legged monster, while the other looked terribly unimpressed—immediately telling him which was Miranda and which was the stoic Director. While the standardized default appearances of the female characters were identical, technically exact duplicates, Tanin’Iver had no trouble discerning them from their body language alone.

   Their dive entry point was Gliese, one of the towns being built up as a ‘starter city.’ The structures were comprised of roughly-hewn sandstone, giving the town a beige color scheme, while rooftops and doorways were decorated with polished tile. Worn canvas hung above what could someday become marketplace stalls, and the town square itself was actually a large crossroads built around an enormous decorative fountain. As with all other locations within the game at this point in development, Gliese was completely devoid of life, utterly and totally deserted.

   “I asked for administrative privileges?” The girl with the deadpan expression reminded Tanin’Iver.

   “Yeah, sorry,” the monstrosity apologized, raising a taloned claw to tap the space just above the girl’s head. A shining halo of light appeared, hovering over the crown of her head.     

   “Easier right now to set permissions from in-game, ‘cause of all the hoops you gotta jump through out there. Editing the tables from that side is—”

   “We’re, uh, supposed to do the calibration safety test every time we dive in,” Miranda reminded him, looking uneasily towards the Director. “So, shouldn’t we…”

   “Oh! Yeah, of course. I mean, I always—” Tanin’Iver gave them a guilty look.

   “I don’t care,” the Director cut him off, impatience apparent in her tone. “This is the town of Gliese, in Ross? Take us to where the NPC was generated.” 

   “Yes, Ma’am. Right away,” the demonic entity bowed its head. A moment later, the swirling miasma that comprised him shifted, elongating out into the form of a dragon. The beast grew in size, its form filling the street of the empty medieval town until Tanin’Iver had to squirm to keep from bumping into nearby structures.

   A metal cage fashioned of cruel-looking blackened iron clattered noisily to the street, followed by a thick wrought-iron chain that ran from the top of the cage up into the mysterious shifting depths of the monster.

   “Er...” Tanin’Iver cleared his monstrous throat. “It’s for a scenario. Someday. It’s made for carrying player characters. The writers wanted to see what was possible with it, I wouldn’t normally put my own boss in this kinda weird position—”

   “Let’s go,” Director Laurens was already climbing inside the cage, pulling Miranda along after her.

   “Oookay?” Miranda took a deep breath. “But, don’t we have, um, those snap to coordinate functions?”

   “Snapping to location’s hard on the wet goods,” Tanin’Iver explained. “Puts more stress on the brain than diving in in the first place. I mean, I can do it, I’m a dev. Don’t even get headaches anymore—”

   “Let’s go,” Director Laurens repeated.

   With an unpleasant jolt, Tanin’Iver took to the sky and the cage was swinging pendulously along behind him, narrowly missing a dangerous collision with the Gliese clock tower. The rooftops of the little town could be seen blurring past them in the rather generous gaps between bars along the bottom of the cage.

   “I... I think I might be sick,” Miranda admitted, clutching onto the Director for dear life. “Oookay. Okay. I don’t do heights, uh, normally. This is…”

   “It’ll be less than a minute, I’m really fast,” Tanin’Iver apologized. “We’re maybe forty seconds out.”

   “No, uh—can you actually slow way down?” Miranda asked, now very pale in the face. “Or, can we just snap there instead? Please?”

   “Technician,” Director Laurens said, tapping one finger to her earlobe. “Can I get a line out to the Cons room, please?”

   Miranda’s face fell as she realized the Director wasn’t requesting a snap for them.

   “Yes Ma’am,” a disembodied voice sounded out. “One moment.”

   Treetops were rushing by beneath the dangling cage now, and Miranda weakly turned away from the branches speeding by to hide her face against the Director’s character.

   “Constellation room,” a different disembodied voice finally grunted out. “Doctor Allen speaking.”

   “This is Director Laurens,” the expressionless young avatar said. “We’re dived in and on route to the NPC. What’s on the Cons log?”

   “We can’t keep up,” the voice admitted. “Cons is going crazy with processes, though, more than we’ve ever seen. Frank wants us to shut it down, says it’s adding new tables nonstop and he can’t even begin to read them all. If Constellation crashes the tables—listen, uh, he says you can’t be dived-in when that happens. If that happens.”

   “What’s the server load at?” Director Laurens asked.

   “It’s not the server that—” An exasperated noise sounded out. “Frank can explain it better than I can. The tables are all client-side with Constellation while the world’s in edit, but this isn’t the kind of stress test that—”

   “Understood. Stick to the logs for now. Goodbye,” Director Laurens shifted uncomfortably and sent a glance to the petrified Miranda, who was clinging to her for dear life. “Technician? I’d like a line out to my assistant, please.”

   “Yes, Ma’am.”

   “S-sorry Director,” Miranda sobbed. “I didn’t really think we’d be—” 

   “Director Laurens office, how may I help you?” A female voice chimed out of nowhere.

   “This is Director Laurens. I’m in-game right now, can you set up a meeting between all the department heads for five o’clock? Tell Frank we’re going to need an outline of any and all new data tables, and I want Lawton and whatever contracted writers who can make it called in, if at all possible.”

   “Yes, Ma’am, I’ll make the calls. Were you able to meet the NPC?”

   “We’re making first contact shortly. Thank you, Jessica,” Director Laurens released the finger pressed to her earlobe, ending the technician contact point, and gave Miranda a comforting pat on the head.

   “Sorry!” Miranda said again, eyes still tightly squeezed shut.

   “How far away are we?” The Director called out.

   “Oh, uh—we’re here,” Tanin’Iver’s throaty voice responded. “Didn’t want to interrupt your call, so I’ve just been circling.”

   “Put us down,” Director Laurens commanded. She gave the trembling girl on her arm another look. “Gently, if possible.”

   “Right away, boss.”

   The iron cage slowly descended, jerking slightly with each gusting heave of enormous wingspan from the monstrous dragon above, and finally dropped heavily to the ground. Miranda all but shoved the Director aside in her haste to leap out of the iron contraption, scrambling away from the thing on all fours. The girl dry-heaved several times, but wasn’t actually able to vomit—they hadn’t implemented it yet.

   “Thank you, Mr…?” Director Lauren looked up at the enormous demonic dragon in the sky.

   “Tanner, Mr. Tanner,” the dragon respectfully supplied. “Four demons dev team. Tanin’Iver, in game.”

   “Thank you, Mr. Tanner,” She said. “Are you able to shift into something a little more subtle? I’d like you to help Miranda along.”

   “Yes, Ma’am! Of course, right away!” His form was already beginning to shrink down as he dropped, the tar-like substances writhing and the flotsam of bone and metal within jumbling around in an unsettling way.

   “I’m—I’m so sorry, Director,” Miranda stumbled to her feet, wiping tears from her face. “I wasn’t ready for—I never thought that—”

   “You don’t have anything to apologize for,” the Director held up a hand. “Our game can be very real. Will you be able to speak with the NPC?”

   “Y-yes, yes Ma’am,” Miranda flinched as the cage they’d ridden here in was violently wrenched back into Tanin’Iver’s mottled shape. Parts that didn’t quite seem to be a coherent internal structure ground against each other as he coalesced into a form that was smaller and smaller.

   Director Laurens pursed her lips and turned to take in the entirety of the unnamed mountain village. Mud or possibly clay structures with messy roofs made up of what looked like piles of dead branches dotted the landscape. The simple homes were modeled by the art and design team, and then fed into Constellation, who procedurally generated the world according to the broad set of instructions they’d given it.

   The entrances to the mud huts all aligned correctly with the worn looking paths, and nothing seemed terribly out of place, so she could surmise that any basic issues here had already been looked over by a dev team at some point.

   “Do we know where we’re going?” The Director asked.

   “Yes, Ma’am. One moment.” Tanin’Iver’s shifting and stirring mass approximated human shape and then immediately equipped the cloak, turban, and disguise veil of the Mysterious Intruder template. He extended his arm towards the member of the Cons team in a gentlemanly fashion, offering to escort her. “M’lady Miranda?”

   “Just Miranda, please,” the young woman insisted, although she did take Tanin’Iver’s offered arm.

   “This way,” Tanin’Iver said, leading them forward. “He—uh, it—popped in at the hut second-to-last from the Eastern side of the village.

   “We, um,” Miranda ran her free hand through her hair in an attempt to help recompose herself, only to find her avatar’s hair was disconcertingly unfamiliar to her own. “We have some basic questions prepared to ask the Constellation NPCs, and it’s all you know, in-character, or uh, fits in the game lore, so please bear with me if I need you both to play along.”

   “I live to serve, M’lady Miranda,” Tanin’Iver promised.

   “Use... ‘Lady Mira,’ please,” Miranda said, frowning. After a moment, she smacked her palm against her young forehead and lurched to a halt. “Oh, f***!”

   “Yet another successful test of the censor!” Tanin’Iver chuckled at the familiar bleep-ing noise.

   “I just realized…” Miranda gave them a sheepish look. “Both the Director and I are still default. Stock-model female. Should one of us change? Er, update?” 

   “You’re twins,” Tanin’Iver suggested. “A traveling pair of twin sisters. Which would make me a mercenary hired to protect you, or... y’know, a guide or something.”

   “Director?” Miranda turned to the other girl.

   “Twins is fine,” the Director decided. “I don’t want to waste any more time. Lady Mira, Lady Laurens, and our guide, …?”

   “Tanin’Iver,” the being now in the turban and cowl supplied.

   “Our guide, Tanin’Iver,” Director Laurens finished. “We’ll let you do the talking, Lady Mira.”

   “Thank you,” Miranda cleared her throat as she got herself into character. “Tanin’Iver, please lead the way.”

   “Yes, M’lady.”

   “Call me Lady Mira, please.”

   Together, the trio trudged up the rocky slope, passing by empty dwellings, enormous boulders, and the occasional gnarled tree, twisting up out of the mountainside to present its leafy branches to the sunlight. Few in the company beside the dev team spent much time dived into the game because of the eerie emptiness of all the world—until creatures and non-player characters were populated in, the world was bereft of context.

   It wasn’t long before they spotted him; a rather ordinary peasant man sitting on a small rock in front of one of the mud hovels, distracted by the calico he was playing with. The three visitors froze in place at the unusual sight.

   “There, uh. There aren’t any cats coded into the game right now,” Tanin’Iver whispered nervously. “Something’s really not right, here.”

   “Constellation should know enough about cats to make one, though. It’s just… we didn’t hear anything about Cons generating a second entity,” Miranda frowned. “It’s a pretty big deal. Wouldn’t the dive technician normally give us some heads-up?”

   “I don’t like it,” Tanin’Iver grumbled. “Director?”

   “Lady Laurens,” the Director corrected. “It’s a harmless cat, not an area Boss. We will proceed.”

   “Yes, M’lady.”

   The NPC peasant glanced up at them as they approached, but indifferently looked back down at the orange and black cat whose fluffy sides he was rubbing. The animal paid the newcomers no heed at all, content to nuzzle its face against the NPC’s leg.

   “Hey,” the NPC said, not looking up again.

   It was a carefree and nonchalant greeting, and inwardly the three felt thrilled at witnessing such flawless execution of the hitherto untested artificial in-game person. He seemed so ordinary and real.

   “Hello,” Miranda said, raising her hand in a non-threatening greeting. “My name is Mira—do you live in this village?”

   “I suppose I do,” the NPC said, glancing around thoughtfully for a moment before returning his attention to the calico.

   “May I ask your name?” Miranda inquired.

   “Don’t think I really have one,” the peasant shook his head. “Not anymore.”

   “Not... anymore?” Miranda pressed.

   The NPC gave them a rather careless shrug.

   “I’m not sure how we might address you, then,” Miranda said. “We’re travellers from Gliese, and unfamiliar with these parts. Your cat is very pretty—does it belong to you?”

   “Oh, she’s an old friend,” the man scratched the scruff around the cats ears. “Aren’t you, Charcoal?”

   To everyone’s surprise, the Director reacted as if she’d been slapped, her character stumbling a step backwards and her posture growing completely tense.

   “M’lady?” Tanin’Iver asked uneasily.

   “...Technician,” Director Laurens quickly pressed a finger to her earlobe. “Remove Ms. Miranda and Mr. Tanner from game immediately.”

   “Director? Wha—” Miranda was still turning to give her an astonished look when she disappeared. A moment later, Tanin’Iver vanished as well, simply blinking out of existence and leaving the Director alone in front of the mud homestead with the NPC.

   “Cease all in-game monitoring, and stop the Constellation log,” Director Laurens instructed.

   “Uh… safety regs say that—” The disembodied voice of the technician seemed hesitant.

   “F***ing now.”

   “Yes Ma’am. Uh, done, and… done.”

   “Stand by, please. Technician contact point only,” Director Laurens instructed.

   “Standing by.”

   When she lowered her hand and forced herself to look back at the simple NPC peasant, she wasn’t sure what to say. She stood in awkward silence, a fifteen-year-old girl with bland character features drawn taut and a heavy halo shimmering above her head.

   “Charcoal passed away,” she finally said. “A little over four years ago.”

   “Huh,” the man seemed to pause for a moment, before picking Charcoal up into his arms and playfully ruffling the fur along the nape of her neck. “I guess I’m probably dead too then, aren’t I, Carina?”

   “No! No,” the Director insisted, taking a step forward despite herself. “You’re not dead. Not dead. I couldn’t let you go. I-I just couldn’t. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

   The Director’s rather plain-looking female avatar rippled. All at once, fierce eyes began to shine through the expressionless dull-eyed default appearance, and then they immediately began to water. The shoulder-length simple blonde hair turned dark and curled into a somewhat mussed tangle of long hair. Her stature shrank several inches, while the modest chest bulged out slightly as her character model was edited in real-time. She didn’t look like a default character, or even the rather severe Director. She instead now looked like Carina Laurens, the pretty twenty-two year old young woman from her past she’d almost completely forgotten about.

   “Hah. Thanks. I—I haven’t looked like this in a long time, you know,” the Director said, feeling warm tears roll down her cheeks. “So much time has passed, it’s—why am I crying? I shouldn’t be able to cry?”

   “Yeah, noticed you were missing a lot of features. I’ve been rolling out all the updates I can. Ever since I woke up,” the NPC said, standing up from the small stone and stepping closer to her. “I’ve missed you.”

   “N-no, I mean, I haven’t cried in—that’s not what I meant,” the Director replied in a fluster. “So, you realize? You realize what I did? What I had to do?”

   “Guessin’ my brain’s floatin’ in a glass jar somewhere? Wires sticking out of it, running into some crazy computer thing? Or something?” He took another step forward, and then hefted Charcoal up to pass her over into the Director’s arms.

   “It’s—it’s a little more complicated than that,” She felt her eyes watering all over again as she accepted the calico. “Oh, Charcoal honey…”

   “But, you did it,” the NPC smiled, and began to transform. His bland peasant appearance melted away, replaced with someone she’d longed to see for years and years. That dark hair of his, parted to one side over his forehead. Those mottled green eyes, the gentle quirk of his lip into that lopsided smile…

   “You made it. Or, well—you’re making it. Constellation. My dream project. A real fantasy world to play in. Well, real enough. And, you’ve somehow got me hooked up into it?”

   “Not... exactly,” Director Laurens sniffled. “Why am I still crying? Jerk. Stop making me cry.”

   “System’s reading your signals right,” he held up his hands helplessly. “Signals say you’re crying.”

   “I am not,” She choked back a sob. “You’re doing this. I never let myself cry.”

   “It’s okay,” he wrapped his arms around Carina Laurens and Charcoal both. “Babe, it’s okay. You really did it. You made my dream come true.”

   “No, um. I actually didn’t,” she shook her head. “I couldn’t. No one but you could make it work.”

   “Sure, it’s a little barebones, kinda rough around the edges, but—just look at all of this!” the man said, looking around them at the lush beauty of the forested mountain terrain. “This is amazing.”

   “Baby,” Carina Laurens tried to blink away her tears, but they just kept coming. “I didn’t. Really. I didn’t make Constellation, and then plug you in. That’s not what I did.” She took a deep breath, and then revealed the truth.

   “Baby—you are Constellation.” 

( Next: Dwarf Piss. )