> Legends of Equestria online
>  by tut895
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Chapter 1: Release day
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

I burst through the door leading to my room, game box in hand, and sprint to the other side where my computer is. I pull out my chair and sit in it, as I hastily open the box that holds the Virtual Reality helmet and game software disc in it.

I turn on my monitor and computer, and while waiting for Windows to load, put on the helmet to make sure it works. Other people have already stated that sometimes the helmet doesn't work, and have had to get a refund at the store. I press theOn button that's parallel with my right ear, and the time and a battery bar show up, indicating that it works.

Once Windows is loaded, I quickly type in my password to my computer, and press the button that opens the disk tray once my desktop appears on the monitor. I put the software download into my computer, and wait for the download to finish.

After around thirty minutes of waiting, the game is finally downloaded and I can play. I lay on my bed as the game manual instructed for when I go into the game world. Yes I'm one of those weird people who actually read the game manuals.

I put on my helmet again, and say the code words that put me into the game.

"Play: Equestria online."

My vision fades to black, and comes back a second later filled with color on the main menu. The button in front of me says 'Log in', and the background is an overview of Canterlot from a distance. The castle looks stunning in this game with how good the graphics are, it looks like the real world, but with tidbits of fake looking things. I put three of my fingers on the button gracefully, and the button flashes white before disappearing.

I input my user name and password, and Canterlot disappears from my vision. I am put in a grey room with a small menu opened in front of me, with the words 'Character Creation' at the top.

Once done creating my character, a green Earth Pony with a slicked black mane and a cutie mark showing off a cloud since I was always a fan of irony, A new menu pops up displaying the two possible classes for my race. The class system is similar to other RPGs where your class choices depend on your race. For earth ponies there is Tank and Archer, for the Pegasi there's Thief and Beast tamer, and for Unicorns there are Mages and Clerics.

I push the button on the tank class, and a warning presents itself. 



"Warning! upon entering this game you will become an anthropomorphic version of your character."

 this is followed by two buttons; one saying OK and another saying NOT OK. I hit the OK button since it's easier to just agree with the game.

My vision flashes white and then returns, as I'm put in the town square of Ponyville, which is the starting point for all races. The town hall in front of me, big and white as it was in the show, and houses line the curbs of the streets around me. 

I look around for any of my other friends who would be signing up and playing today. Then, i hear a voice from behind me

"Oi Jacob, you gonna come over here and get in our party or are you just gonna stand there like the inattentive prick you usually are?" The unmistakeable Australian accent of Will's voice puts a smile on my face as I turn around and greet my friends.

Will, who chose the Unicorn Cleric class since he's most skilled in focusing on the team instead of the enemy, steps towards me and we shake hands. His coat is blue and his spiky mane white, probably to signify a flip flop version of Vinyl Scratch. His cutie mark a holy cross coated in light.

"Kinda weird not being actual ponies, and Anthro ones instead eh?" William asks me.

"I'm guessing they had it like that so it'd be easier for us to learn how to use it." I say, trying horribly to provide an answer.

Matt, who chose the Pegasus Thief since he's by far the best with stealth, comes up and just slaps my hand as his way of greeting me, his black fur and gray mullet like mane showing him as a character whose main focus would be stealth, with a cutie mark of a white ninja mask to compliment it.

"Well I for one am loving these wings." Matt says, glaring at his wings as if he was looking at his first pair of boobs.

Ed, who chose the Earth Pony Archer since in the real world he could probably pin a fly to a tree using a bow and arrow from ten feet away without killing it, walks up staring at his bow, his grass green fur and dark green mane imitating a Ghillie suit, and a sniper scope crosshair as his cutie mark, probably to indicate marksmanship.

"Your wings may be great but this bow is so lightweight, it's as if it were made with feathers." Ed says, making Matt retract his wings and go back to being on the ground, hoping what Ed said wasn't what his bow was actually made of.

Xavier, who chose the Unicorn Mage since he's a part time magician, steps up and casts a Fireball spell Ed's way, making Ed jump and scream in his girly way, causing Xavier to laugh a hearty laugh, his curly brown mane bouncing up and down, and sometimes hitting his tan fur. His cutie mark is a Fireball, probably indicating his skill with fire spells.

"Man, that never gets old at all." Xavier says, after a few seconds of laughing at Ed's scream.

"Well at least I'm not a stump!" Ed retorts, looking at Xavier's tree stump shaped body.

Steven, who chose the Pegasus Beast Tamer because it was the only one that didn't get an immediate dibs, just steps up and eyes his parrot, and his broadsword. His pale purple fur and crew cut electric green mane clashing indefinitely, and making him pop out more than a guy in the girl's bathroom. His cutie mark is three butterflies, very original for somebody who's good with animals right?

"Well I hope you guys are happy with your equipment, all I got is this parrot. I mean it's only skill is to attract the enemy's attention to it for less than three seconds! This is more underpowered than the F2000 from Modern WarFare 2."

I can't help but snicker at Steven's clearly undesirable state with his pet, and almost laugh at Ed when Xavier chucks another Fireball his way.

"So, are ya gonna join our party or do we have to drag you along with us until you learn that the tank isn't always a good solo role." Will asks me, since he didn't get an answer last time.

"Yea yea I'll tag along, but remember our drop rules, If you get it but it's specific to another class, you have to give it to them." I say, giving Ed a glare as I remember the hoarding problem he had when we played Eden Eternal.

"Hey, that game allowed us to change classes whenever we wanted. So, every weapon, armor, and whatnot was fair game." Ed retorts, remembering the incident as well and dodging Fireballs the whole time.

"Anyways that's in the past," Will says, sending me an invite. "Here."

A small hologram like screen appears infront of me. It says: 

William wants you to join a party.

 this is followed by a circle and an X, which I'm guessing indicates accept or decline. I hit the circle, and five other health bars show up under mine, each with the corresponding names of our party to show who's who. It also shows if the have any status effects, such as paralysis or speed (not the drug.) or something similar, and magic bars that indicate how much more magic we can use before we need to wait for it to recharge.

"Oh come on Ed," Xavier says, "You know we're in a safe zone so you can't get hurt right?"

Ed recomposes himself, and I notice Xavier's already half empty magic bar drains a little bit more as I watch him throw another Fireball Ed's way. This one hits Ed square in the chest and gives him a bit of knock back, making him fall.

"Dick." Ed mutters as he gets back up and brushes himself off.

"Well you still weren't hurt now were you?" Xavier says, pointing out what he said was right.

Ed just mutters something about him pushing Xavier off a cliff while he's strapped to a Refrigerator, which is a common threat for him.

"So, should we go hunting so we can level, or should we just walk around Ponyville like a bunch of asshats?" Will says, bringing his Mace up to his chest, battle ready.

We all ready our weapons, and nod in agreement. I twirl my battle axe in my hand to weigh it, which it's surprisingly light for a usually 50 pound two handed axe, but it's best to never question game logic.

I look to see what weapons my other friends have. Matt has two daggers, one in each hand and seems rather proficient with them, and Xavier has a stick, which looks more like a twig. I laugh and everybody stares at me awkwardly. Once I stop laughing I just stare at Xavier with the stupidest grin. Xavier just looks at me more quizzically than the rest.

"What's so funny?" Xavier asks after two minutes of me looking at him like I just saw him shitting in his own mouth.

"The fact that we all have a bunch of serious weapons, and your running around with a twig." I say, maintaining my shit-eating grin.

Everybody else starts laughing while Xavier just looks at the twig, and after a few minutes begins to retort.

"Twigs are awesome man! Don't you be dissing on my murder stick" Xavier replied, brining back to my memorythe picture he found online two days ago about how to fight with a twig.

"Oi idiots," Will says, jumping in, "Let's stick to our plan of trying to level up shall we?"

"All right," I say hoping to discover how great this class could be, "I need to see how to activate my skills anyways."





As my axe delivers a final heavy blow on the Parasprite, a rush of power fills me. I look at the menu that shows the loot I've received and notice that I leveled up again.

"Alright level four." I say enthusiastically. We had been farming the Parasprites at Sweet Apple Acres' northern Orchard for the last few hours hoping to get some leveling in before we start any story missions that could involve us dealing with more than a flying ball with an eating disorder.

A new skill also pops up showing the name, effects, stats, and how to activate. I take a look at it out of curiosity.



Flair: using Flair will stun enemies within a 5 meter radius of you, and dramatically increases malice towards you. To activate, lower your weapon in a position where you will be able to easily preform a spin attack. Once your power has charged, preform a spin attack and the skill will activate automatically



I decide to test it out now, by getting into the position. After a few seconds of standing in this position, my axe glows red and I preform the spin. Unfortunately a Parasprite was in the vicinity of the attack and got stunned. We very quickly disposed of the fly like enemy with a paralyzing shot from Ed's bow, followed by Xavier's now signature Fireball, and finished with me using Bash.

"Alright, this is going great and all but I need to get something to eat," Steven says, holding his stomach and looking rather uncomfortable. "I'm absolutely starving."

"Yea I think we should all sign out and come back tomorrow." Will says, stretching out his arm which has probably tired from wielding his mace for so long.

After we all agree to this, I put my two index fingers side by side, then separate them in a diagonal angle, which opens up the main menu. I press the options button where you would usually find the Log out button. After pressing it and going to the bottom, I notice something strange.

"Oi, anybody else not seeing a Log out button?" Will asks quizzically,

"No, it's as if it never existed." Steven responds, which surprises us. Over the past few months, Steven kinda grew more and more distant from us, and therefore more quiet around us. If he does speak it means something really bad has happened.

I type in Will's question into the world chat, and after a few seconds everybody responds with the same answer: no.

At this time, everybody has started panicking and some have gone caps rage into the world chat. A bell sounds, probably the Ponyville school bell, and we're all teleported to the school yard, along with what could very easily be the other 200,000 Bronies who had gotten this game within it's first week of being out.

"Why was there just a forced teleport of everybody who's online right now?" Matt asks, making us wonder the same thing, until somebody points in front of himself, making us do the same. What I see puzzles me

The word announcement pops up in a screen in front of everybody, and I decide to read the announcement.



Welcome everybody, to the amazing world that is Legends of Equestria Online. By now you have discovered the lack of a Log Out button. That is because you won't be leaving this game.

You may be wondering who is the horrible person behind this. Well, for now you may call me Despair, but if you truly wish to discover my identity, with every major dungeon you complete you will receive a hint to who i really am. If you are worried about starving to death, or some real world thing don't worry, If you eat in this world you will be fine, just as if you were to drink water. Disease will only affect you if it has come from the game.

Now, a lot of you are thinking you could just remove the V.R. helmets. If this is done, your body will still be in the lockdown mode it is in now, essentially turning your body into a potato, so it'd be best not to try that

Many of you are probably thinking of blaming the Moderators for this; however, as you Moderators know, they are trapped in here with you, and will be under the exact same situations as you.

Have a good night in Ponyville everybody, and I sincerely hope you don't die within the first week.

-Despair



"Oi! Despair, what's the big idea trying to trap us in a virtual Equestria like this?" Will shouts at the sky. Which is followed by him receiving a P.M. from a Despair.



If you truly wish to know William, then find the hints in the major dungeons of this version of our beloved Cartoon world, and find me. All of your answers will be there, as I shall explain everything to the first group to confront me. If any of you live to tell the rest of the players, is strictly up to your skill when it comes to this thing. 



"Oi guys," Will says to get our attention, "Follow me wouldja?"





After following Will for two minutes, he stops in a back alley and turns around. Looking more serious than I've ever seen him. He's usually a very laid back individual who cares about others more than himself.

"Listen boys, We need to be the first ones out of this town, now that We've leveled ourselves we should be able to do our main quests, move into the Everfree forest, and be the first to make it to the Old Castle major dungeon. This will allow us to become the only people to know the first hint to Despair's true identity." Will says in the most 'no-bullshit' tone I've ever heard.

"Why would we keep vital information from the rest of Legends of Equestria's players?" Xavier asks quizzically.

"You idiot," Will says maliciously, "We all know information is power, and if we can figure out who our enemy is, we can prepare for his movements and attacks before anybody else manages to even know his motive for doing this to all of us."

"All right," Xavier responds disappointed, "But if anybody asks for the information I'm giving it to them."

Will just waves off his warning and heads over to where the first mission N.P.C. is. He goes to Applejack and begins the dialogue that usually leads to a quest acceptance.

"Hey there pardner," Applejack says, "I need yer' help with a little problem we're having back at the farm."

"All right," Will says, probably forcing us to get ready for an actual mission, "What do we need to do?"

Applejack responds by putting a menu in front of us with the mission and it's objectives.



Saving the Acres

Kill Parasprites  [ ]
Do what must be done [ ]



Will accepts the mission, which forces us all to accept it, and nods at Applejack with a look of pure determination in his eyes.

"Listen," Will says as he comes back to us. "No matter how bad things may seem, we are the best and most competitive party in this game. We leave those behind who are too slow to keep up, we kill those who attack us, and we will survive. No matter the cost." This side of Will that's filled with contemptment for everybody except us is starting to scare me.
> Chapter 2: The fight at the Acres.
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Why can't we just fast travel there?" I say tiredly. We've been walking for ten minutes, as indicated by the clock directly below my mini map in the top right of my screen.

"Because our current objective is to follow Applejack," Will responds, annoyed with me. "Have you not been paying attention to the objective marker?"

"No." I respond, looking at the objective marker on my mini map. The marker is the purple star that we recognize as Twilight's Element of Harmony.

"Alright," Ed says, pointing to the Entrance to Sweet Apple Acres. "we're almost there." We walk through the opening in the fence, and Applejack turns around.

"Are ya'll sure about this?" Applejack asks, looking at the unsure faces most of us are giving. "Most ponies aint exactly keen on doing this."  

Will responds by nodding, a determined look on his face, and Applejack motions for us to follow her.

We go to the Orchards from there, and Applejack points us to where a swarm of Parasprites are chewing through one of her Apple Trees. I ready my axe, since I'll no doubt have to rush blindly in there to start the combat, and Will grabs my shoulder with a firm hand.

"Listen," Will says,  "We're stuck in this game, so they probably took out the pain absorber. Their bites will sting like a bee, so watch out."

"Don't worry," I say confidently "I'm supposed to take a lot of damage in combat anyways. I'll be fine." At this I rush into the swarm of Parasprites, and use Flair to attract them.

Matt flies in, and weakens around half of the Parasprites, and I finish three of them with a heavy swing of my axe. Will uses a blinding spell to keep them stunned, and Steven distracts the ones that aren't stunned with his annoying Parrot. He then makes use of it by slashing a few of the blinded ones to death. Xavier throws a Fireball at a tightly wound group of them, and they all dance around the air as they're set on fire.

I feel a sting coming from behind, and realize the Parasprites are awakening from their stunned status. Slowly, but surely, more Parasprites begin to bite me, and the pain is overwhelming; similar to throwing a rock at a Hornet's nest from point blank. I fall to the ground, because my legs are getting weak from the pain of the stings, and my vision gets cloudy as tears work their way into my eyes. Ed fires a volley of arrows, which take out the Parasprites that were attacking me, and Will uses a healing spell to, well, heal me.

The spell works like a Catalyst through my veins, as all the pain fades and an energy rush buzzes through me, and I attack a small cluster that was especially annoying me with their stinging bites. Xavier and Steven take care of two Parasprites that were about to attack me from behind, and I finish the final bugger (pun) that's left.

"What the bloody hell happened there?" Will asks me angrily, as he walks up to me.

"Well, you were right, and damn those bites sting." I say, rubbing my shoulder since it's gone numb from swinging this heavy axe. I can't wait until I level up enough to become a knight so I can just have a sword and shield.

"I told you to watch out you bloke!" Will hisses, rather maliciously, which scares me. "Those things were about to target us, and you were at half health. Another slip up like that and somebody could die!"

"I'm sorry alright!" I retort, yelling at Will. "Next time, you try throwing your own ass into what might as well be a Hornet's nest you asshole! see how you like it." This serious side of Will irritates me more than scares me, and I guess I let that show a bit too much, because Will's demeanor completely changes, and he gives me a small look of fear.

"Listen," He says, his voice low so nobody else can hear us, "I understand that you hate pain, hell you refused to eat anything but soft food when you had Strup throat, but you're the only person with a health bar big enough to take on a good five enemies of equal level solo. So you better do your job or your out of the party." Will points to the health bars in the top left corner of my vision, indicating I'm still in the party, and he's the leader.

A scream coming from behind the rest of the group startles us, and we turn around to see what the source of the scream was. I look at Applejack, who has a look of panic spread across her face, and notice a yellow arm across her neck. I look to the body the arm belongs to, and my breath catches in my throat.

Applebloom has her arm wrapped around Applejack's neck, and is pointing a knife to her temple, as if ready to pierce it. I look at Applebloom's face, hoping to see why she would do this, and notice that her eyes are remotely different from what they were. Her iris' are red, instead of the soothing brown, and the white of her eyes are green, there's also a purple aura protruding from the sides of her eyes that point outward from her face. After a small amount of time spent staring, Applebloom speaks.

"You have two choices, you or her." She moves the knife from Applejack's temple, and positions it under her chin, as if the slit her throat if we choose not to fight her.

"We will take on the fight." Will says. I knew he would choose that, since Applejack is best pony to him.

Applebloom responds by smirking and, after tossing Applejack aside, runs at Will. Will reacts by using a blinding spell to keep her from closing the distance between them, and I use my rush skill, followed by a Flair, to get Applebloom's attention. Ed uses a kneecap skill to keep her where she is, and Matt swoops in with a couple of dive stabs while I use my axe to keep her distracted on blocking my heavier attacks. Steven jumps in and slashes at Applebloom's stomach. She blocks the attack and I use my axe to deal a heavy blow to her arm. Her health bar has now dropped half way, and I go in for another swing. She parries and thrusts her knife towards my neck.

I leap to the left, and the knife digs into my right shoulder. The cold metal stings the wound, and as Applebloom twists the knife further into my shoulder, maniacally smiling all the while, my health bar begins to drop rapidly.

I lift my left hand to Applebloom's knife, and grab on to the open area of the knife grip. I use my strength to pull out the knife, but her strength overpowers mine, so the knife stays put. I look at her level, and see she's a level 4 boss; equal to our strength but better in some ways. No wonder why I can't just pull out the knife like a bad ass and kill her.

Xavier jumps in, by touching my back and sending an electric bolt through my body. The bolt travels through my body, gets conducted by the knife, and electrocutes Applebloom as well as me. She pulls out the knife, and Will heals me, allowing me to use another Flair attack to stun Applebloom.

I use a bash attack to knock her back, and Ed attacks her with a triple arrow, causing her to gasp in pain. Her health bar is now almost entirely empty, and I finish it by lifting my axe, and decapitating her. Gruesome I know, but it's necessary to get a Critical hit for the final hit on a boss, so that I can get a bonus special item.

Applebloom's body drops to the floor, and a screen pops up in front of me, showing what I had earned. Most of the items are just ordinary items, and could be easily split between the group, except for one item at the bottom of the list



Tank type class upgrade. S rarity.



I double click on the item, knowing it will give me much better armor and the royal guard tank class, and my vision fills with white as my body is enveloped in light. I feel armor generate on my body. My axe disappears and is replaced with a one handed broadsword, and shield. The change in weapons feels much lighter, and easier to wield effectively, however my armor feels heavier, and will be a detriment to my movement in combat.

The light around me fades and I'm surrounded by my friends.

"Damn bro," Xavier reacts, "You found a class upgrade?"

"Yeah," I answer nonchalantly "It's not that big of a deal."

"He's right," Will says, "If this were a big deal, we wouldn't be trapped in a game."

I look at Will, realizing why he's been so serious, and my eyes widen with sympathy.

"That's why you've been so contempt with us," I say, my voice soft so I don't sound threatening. "You've just wanted to keep us protected, so that we can all make it back to the real world."

"Yea," Will drops his head to the ground as his eyes tear up, and then he looks up at us. "I've just wanted to keep us all alive, because if we- even one of us- die, I don't know what I would do."

We all form a huddle, though it feels more like a group man hug, and immediately feel awkward as Applejack speaks up.

"Y'all gonna stand there huggin' each other," She says, confused. "or ah ya gonna accept your reward fer helping me wit' them varmints?"

Will separates himself from the man hug, making us all disperse, and nods his head as he walks up to Applejack. Applejack hands him a bag of bits, and he takes it. We all receive 50 bits each, followed by enough experience points to level us all up again. A screen appears in front of me, showing off another new skill I just earned.



Celestial Strike
Using Celestial Strike heavily damages target enemy, and gives them a small burn effect for five seconds.
To cast Celestial Strike, raise your weapon over your head and, once charged, swing the blade downward, hitting your enemy.



"That's a bad ass sounding skill you got there Jacob." Xavier says, "How come you keep getting the good shit?"

"Hey," I retort. "The class upgrade was a final strike bonus, which increased the chances of a rare weapon from my Critical hit."

Xavier just rolls his eyes, and looks to Will.

"What now?" Xavier asks him.

Will turns to Xavier, and says, "Simple, we gather a raid group and rush the dungeon within the Everfree. Hopefully there are enough level fives, given that this is a major dungeon."

We look to the sky. The clear, endless blue looks as beautiful as the ocean, and more stylish with the puffy white clouds slowly snaking through it's sea of air.

"Let's hope," I say, knowing we can make it through this game. "Let's hope people aren't too scared to help us out.
> Chapter 3: The Celestial Crusaders guild
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Alright," Will says as we enter the town square of Ponyville, which has become a hub for traders of both player and NPC (non playable character) species alike. "Do you think they added a Sports Bar in this game? Or do we have to go wind down on cupcakes and frosting?"

Ed responds first, being the nostalgia geek out of the rest of us he would know the answer to that undoubtedly. "They expanded Sugarcube Corner so it has an area about as close to a sports bar as you can get."

Xavier begins to walk towards where we believe Sugarcube Corner is, until I check my map and notice Xavier is going the wrong way.

"Hey stick boy," I say, knowing he's going to hate my new nickname for him, "wrong way. The place we want to go is north, not south."

Xavier just responds by giving me a glare, followed by using his blink skill (short ranged teleport for complicated terms) to appear behind me and begins scooting the direction I pointed out, typical.

"I knew that." Xavier responds, still inching his way over in a direction that will cause him to bump into another player. Within a few seconds he does just that, sparking an arguement with the random person. Unfortunately, Matt got in between them before it turned into a conflict.




We open the doors to the Corner, and Ed was right in saying that it had been expanded. There's now a full on bar, serving Cider and other products that shouldn't be inside a kid's show or game, and Televisions that serve to announce game news, such as our confinement within this game. So far, the only casualties are those who, shall we say, lost hope.

We find one of those corner booths, that resemble a split tube, and manage to squeeze our bodies into it as a familiar pink waitress walks er… bounces over to us. Her poofy cotton candy like hair being a dead giveaway as to who will be serving us tonight. She's wearing a pink shirt that displays her cutie mark in the front-mid section of it, and she's wearing jeans. 

"Hi there! You guys must be new," she chirruped, "What'syournamewheredidyoucomefromwhatcanIgetyou?"

Simultaneously, our heads swiveled to Ed’s direction, desperately pleading with our eyes for him to make sense from the gibberish that came out of her mouth. I guess that we all had the same idea, since Pinkie Pie is no doubt Ed’s all time favourite pony.

"Let's save the formalities for later," Ed says, seemingly comprehending whatever words that had come out of her mouth. As far as I know, that fanatic might as well have been speaking Klingon. At least that would have made some sense. "For now, we'll have one cider and two cupcakes each."

Pinkie merely nodded, sparing us all from another verbal assault and simply bouncing away to get what we ordered.

"Seriously Ed," Steven says as we all relax, enjoying this reprieve from an otherwise stressful day, "how can you understand that flamingo colored sack of ADD?"

Will and I shout before Ed can answer, not wanting to go through another one of his lectures about how Pinkie Pie is best pony. Ed understands, and leans back in anticipation of the upcoming cupcakes and cider.

"So," Steven says, trying to change the subject, "when we finish our snack, should we go to the Inn and try to figure out how to get a room that fits the six of us?"

I nod, followed by a "Mmhmm.", since the last fight, and this heavy armor, have worn me to the point where I would love to take it off for the day. Will however, wants to start a guild, which means looking presentable, so that we can have a decently sized group to go into the large dungeon with minimal casualties. Normally dungeons in this game only allow a total of six players, but the large dungeons allow a total of fifty players. That may be overkill for the first major dungeon, which is only equipped with level 5 monsters, but, again, Will wants to have as many players as possible.

Speaking of the non-existent guild, Will decides to put that on the subject.

"Alright, what should we name our guild?" Will asks, turning away from Xavier. We all know he would say something stupid like "The Dubstep Parrot Poonies" since I doubt he took his medication before jumping on this god forsaken game.

"Why not something symbolic of both the show and our mission to get out of this game?" Steven asks. Always the Artist type that guy. Not that I'm complaining, of course, because I have trouble drawing a stick figure holding a ruler but, you get the point.

Of course everybody liked that, and a heated brain storming conversation was born. Most of the ideas we couldn't get a majority vote of at least five of us, as our usual voting goes, so none of the options had made the cut.

"Well, seeming that there's no Celestia, why not something to do with our 'god and savior'" Xavier says, mocking the Jehova's witnesses that roam his neighborhood like kids would a candy store that participated in Black Friday. 

"Celestial Crusaders why not?" Will says, grabbing his mug of Cider and drinking the last few drops. We had gotten our cupcakes and drinks a few minutes back, since this conversation seemed like it had taken an hour.

Everybody was too bored to argue this and, hoping to end this, we all raise our hands. Will nods, then goes into his menu to set up the guild.

Once the guild has been created, Will sends us an invitation to join. The message pops up in front of my face, and I read it because that's what I always do.


Will wants you to join the guild: "The Celestial Crusaders"


I hit the circle button, that indicates acceptance of his request, and my normal menu comes up, followed by a short tutorial of how to navigate to the Guild menu, and what you can do in the guild menu.





We walk out of the bar, our mission fulfilled, stomachs full, and tip payed, and begin to walk back to the Ponyville Inn where everybody has decided is the best place to stay right now in this hub. On our way there though, an announcement makes it's way on to a screen in front of us.



I hope you all have enjoyed your first day here in LOEO, as the physical world's beings call it, but I have wonderful news for all of you. A certain group has recently been formed to focus on the escape of this magnificent world. The guild, known as the Celestial Crusaders, will be the perfect spot to have fun fighting the many creatures in this vast, beautiful land.

In honor of someone finally taking initiative and forming a Guild to defeat me, I have set up a special event. Come to the Town Square where all of your lives in this game had begun, and I will give out the first clue to my identity. This, of course, will be different form the one that you will find within the first major dungeon, found in the Everfree Forest.

In summary, thanks to the Celestial Crusaders, you will receive a clue to my identity, and may even be able to reveal it, or at least make some theories. That is what some of you are known for anyways, isn't it?



I look at Will after reading, and closing, the message, and his face is back to the serious, though scary, Will we had encountered at the Acres.

"Will, stop giving that look. We're all gonna go, and we don't need you barking at us." Matt says, clearly seeing what I did just then.

Will nods, eases his face so that it seems normal, then begins to walk towards the Town Square to receive our first clue, and we follow in suite.





We arrive at the town square, along with an enormous group of other players, half of which had applied, and been accepted, for our group. 

I look around at the large team that's already been formed. Some our level, and a couple even higher. If I remember correctly from the Guild roster, our highest level was a guy whose already reached 7. Will wants us to reach 10 before we attempt to fight whatever is in the dungeon, so that none of us are in immediate danger of dying.

The large group that had been formed spots us, and opens up a path for us to walk towards the center so we can get the best view to this event Despair had mentioned, but before we get enough time to even move towards the center, The sky loses it's blue hue and is replaced with a threatening night black. Lights coming from the roof of the town hall illuminate the gap left the recruits to our guild, and a thick smoke condenses in the center of the light. The smoke expands and contracts before shaping itself into the form of a player covered with nothing but a brown cloak, and the area where his face would be is pure black, not revealing any eyeballs or facial feature at all. I look above his head to check his name, but no revealing name tag appears. Just the word Despair.

"Hello residents of this beautiful town," Despair begins, his voice is dark, booming, and has a weird echo like Queen Chrysalis' voice. "You have obviously come here for the hint. Now, if you want it then the six players who created the Celestial Crusaders shall come here, into the center, so that we may chat face to face before I reveal this hint. I must say, it's a rather exciting hint as well. I'm getting shivers just thinking about it."

Will walks forward, followed by the rest of us, and once we all make it to the center, Despair begins talking again.

"So these are the six people who are going to kill me? Well then I must say, it's going to take some time before you're even half way there." Despair's eyes flash so that we can see them, but they're pure yellow. No pupils, irises, or anything. Just yellow balls, and then the teeth. His toothy, maniacal smile makes me uncomfortable, while only making Will's confident smile drop.

"Don't worry Despair," Will taunts, trying to sound unfazed by his threatening appearance. "We'll take our time getting to you. Need to ensure minimal casualties upon going into the first dungeon y'know?"

Despair just laughs. A small laugh, but enough to set the crowd around us on edge. Despair then grabs his cloak, and throws it off of himself. What is revealed is a fit, pure pitch black, body with nothing but the two features I stated about before.

"Woah," Xavier says, taken aback by this sudden appearance, "who left Slenderman out in the sun too long?" This remark makes Despair scowl at him, and the rest of us to give him a glare, though I do hear some snickering coming from the crowd to my left.

"Dammit Xavier," Will responds, clearly annoyed by his joke. "this is supposed to be serious." Xavier just shrugs and begins to look away, hoping Despair will forget him for the time being, which he does.

This is your first hint." Despair states, pointing a dark finger at himself as he begins to turn into smoke again, leaving us with only a few more words. "Use it, and take it wisely." His dark, wispy smoke flies into the sky, before completely disappearing, along with the night time sky and the spotlights on the Town Hall's roof.

"Alright," Will says, addressing the crowd as he turns toward us. "Everybody go home, I will create an intel division within my group to help decipher what this hint could be."

The crowd disperses in a wave of conversations both normal and concerning. Will walks up to us, his face tired, not too sure how, and his voice low so others don't hear us when he speaks.

"Let's go get a room." He says, which we all agree to. The road ahead of us is long, but it will be worth returning to the real world. Even if it means sacrificing my self for others.
> Chapter 4: Everfree's daring trek
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

I wake, and look around the shanty-like hotel room. The velvet rug is barely visible under Matt and Ed’s intertwined body. Their fingers inches away from each other, as if they had been holding hands until they fell asleep.

Will had already woken up, and had brought coffee from whatever coffee stand that was nearest to the Hotel. He puts the cups filled with The nectar of the gods, according to Steven, and points his head to the door, indicating that he wants to speak with me outside the room.

I get up, trying to avoid the two lovers on the rug, and cautiously walk towards the doorway. Hopefully this’ll be quick so I can grab my coffee and start the stretches that the game manual recommends, supposedly to get used to how the game programs character movement.

Will closes the door behind me, and begins to talk quietly, in order to not wake anybody else sleeping within the hotel room.

“Steven has been thinking about leaving the team, and just staying here in Ponyville.” He says, which is followed by me slowly opening the door to glare at steven. He’s still sleeping, but something about him looks troubled, as if the dream he’s having isn’t exactly a dream.

"What do you mean?" I ask, honestly surprised that one of us wouldn't want to help everybody get out of the game.

"He's been asking some of the conversational NPCs about living in Ponyville," He explains, and goes into some hints Steven's shown since we were in here. "and have you noticed him in combat? He has yet to run his blade through anything. All he does is send his bird to distract the enemy, and hopes Matt will come swooping in so he doesn't have to." I'm not sure what, but something about this, or maybe all of it, makes me rethink Steven's loyalty to our Guild's cause.

“We need our Beast Tamer though,” I say, explaining something Will already knows, “his pet is great for distracting the smaller mobs while we attack the big guy in a fight.”  Will turns back with the most level headed response he can give.

“We know that,” he says, giving me some form of compromise “so what I think we could do, is to just let him be here in Ponyville, and try to find a higher level Beast Tamer. He can’t be the only person who had actually picked that class.” Will rolls his eyes as he says that. No matter how calm he tends to be, there’s always something that gives you a hint to how he really feels. From his hand curling into a fist for a second, to a small grin, to even a wink.

“Regardless,” I counter, agreeing with him, but still trying to poke holes in his theory, “if we do end up letting him tell us, what will he do? Is he just going to walk away from the fight shyly, or is he gonna come out about it during some form of party, or is he just going to tell us as soon as we’re all awake?”

Will just shrugs and puts his hand on the door lightly.

“I dunno,” He says, not exactly reassuring me, “but either way, it’s not something we can just put off until somebody’s dead, ya know?”

I nod, and Will opens the door. We both walk into the room, now buzzing with a slurred chatter since everyone’s awake now.

“Awww,” Xavier says, in a weird voice that sounds like a girl giving a pet name to her boyfriend during a dinner date, “Did you two finally come out of the closet to each other?”

Xavier’s question is answered, with a fist instead of words. My knuckles connect with his jaw, and the knock back effect spins him back onto the bed.

“Hey Will,” I say, shaking my fist to get rid of the numbing feeling. “You got me the kind of Coffee I actually like, right?”

Will grabs the tray of Coffee cups, and hands one to me, I grab it and the warmth pricks at my fingertips the longer I hold on to it. He then speaks with a slight tint of annoyance in his voice.

“Yea, yea,” he says, “I got you your Mandolin, or whatever.”

“Mandheling!” I shout, anger in my voice. It’s still surprising that he could mistake a musical Instrument for a type of Coffee.

"Like I could care about your weird sounding coffee," Will retorts, just as annoyed as I am, though for a different reason. "That's why I just drink tea, and add a little bit extra sugar."

I just shrug it off, and begin sipping my drink. Steven and Xavier refuse their drink, since they like to drink it after they've woken up fully, while Matt and Ed just grab their cups and drink them in stride, doing a mixture of chugging and drinking normally.

"So," I say, hoping to fully understand our plan for today. "How exactly are we going to take the dungeon effectively?"

Will, being the plan building leader he is, gives an explanation as detailed as possible without giving too many specifics.

"We'll be in small groups of six, each group in their own respective party, and will be moving with one minute intervals. When a group reaches the boss door, they'll wait for all other groups to make it there as well.

Once we're all at the boss door, we'll split away from the party system and turn into three divisions. Division one will consist of tank classes, thief classes, and beast tamer classes. Division two will be made out of the Unicorn classes, yes both, as they're a good mix of up close and ranged. Division three will be solely made up of archers, to keep them protected completely, since we know they won't be able to survive in any form of close quarters combat."

I nod, now understanding our plan, and get up to go prepare for the shit storm we're about to get ourselves in.





I thrust my blade forward, hoping it'll hit my target. He jumps out of the way though, so the only thing I hit is air. He comes towards my thigh, his body crouched making it harder to dodge, and aims his sword so that it's easier for it to puncture my body.

I jump backwards, but it's to no avail as the blade goes through my side. I feel the sting of metal, similar to the fight at the farm, and wince as my health bar empties and a screen appears, with a message I didn't want to show up.



DUEL OVER: You have lost



Black Star sheaths his blades, and wipes his hands on his pants.

"Well," he says, a smirk on his face and his eyes closed. "that was more of a challenge than I thought. You might be able to beat me one day." I nod, and extend an open hand.

"Yea," I say happily, "but if we weren't doing a 'first to get a hit' duel, I would've beat you easily."

Black Star nods his head, and shakes my hand firmly. He opens his menu, and after a few clicks his menu closes. As his menu closes, mine opens up with a message.



   New Friend Request
Black Star: Level 6 Thief
Y    N



I put my finger on the Y button, and Black Star's blue name tag turns green. Will walks up to us, after a half hour of organizing, and tells me to get into the group I'm assigned to, which consists of Black Star, a healer called Tris, a tag team of Beast Tamers called Rob and Big, and a Mage by the name of Fire Fly. A lot of the other groups have called us the Reference group, as I'm the only person with a username that doesn't reference something.

Will stands in front of the Everfree's entrance, and turns to the rest of us.

"Alright," Will announces to the group, "we all know how this works, and Jake's group is the first one, so we'll let him go first and hope he doesn't get killed." Will looks at me with a slightly twisted smile, commonly used when he gives a twisted joke.

"Alright, Jake if you could get going." Will says, pointing the way to the forest. I walk to the Forest entrance, and wait for the pop up to come.



You are about to enter the Major Dungeon: Everfree Forest.
Confirm



I tap the confirm button, and the pitch dark path lights up just enough to see ahead. I look inside, and the path seems relatively linear, with only a few curves to avoid tree roots and Timber wolf nests. I walk into the forest, and the wind shifts to an icy cold breeze. The change gives me Goosebumps, and I shiver as my group and I press into the forest, breaths hanging in the air due to the sudden freezing temperatures.





The trek through this forest has been excruciating. Surprisingly high level Timber wolves, unexpected large swarms of Parasprites, and plants that give you paralysis simply from touching them. I had to drag Black Star for a good half hour until the second group caught up with us, and a higher level Cleric was able to use one of his skills to remove the paralyzed effect.

I look up, and see the big stone doors marking the old castle, which is where the boss is supposed to be. My heart sinks to my stomach as I see something guarding it. Something that's supposed to be a normal enemy for level forty-or-more players. The creature in front of us, is a red, full grown, very pissed off, Dragon.

The Dragon charges directly at us, with no player, NPC, or mob to provoke it. Typical of Dragon mythology, Territorial, greedy, and very aggressive. 

We all run to the vegetation on the edges of the path, and wait until the Dragon stops it's charge. I jump out, activating my Flair skill in hopes of giving us a chance to run. The attack just give the Dragon a small amount of knock back, and it quickly wheels it's head to face me, blowing smoke into my face. I rush to his feet, making it harder for him to hit me, and rise my blade above my head.

I wait until the Celestial Strike ability is activated, and swing my blade down onto it's left foreleg. The cut is a white light instead of the usual red line, and the Dragon's body ignites into white flames. It gives a short huff, before it's throat lights with an unusual red glow, and within a few seconds it veered it's head toward where the rest of my group was hiding, and spit large balls of fire across the grass. My team ran out from their hiding spot, and began legging it toward the exit again.

"Hey," I shout, getting the attention of the other group that we had met up with. "you guys need to get out of here and tell the other groups to hurry their asses up! I'm not the highest level here by a long shot, so it'll help a lot when we can get the highest level player here."

The group leader, by the name of Nina, nods her head and begins sneaking through the vegetation to get to the other groups without too many fights.

I backstep towards the end of the Dragon's tail, and hop onto the top of the tail. I sprint my way up it until I've reached the base it's neck, and run my sword through the back of it's neck. The dragon gives a wail, as it's health bar drops a miniscule amount.

I bring my blade out of the Dragon's throat, and jump to the ground. Hopefully I can hold it off long enough for the rest of the guild to get over here.
> Chapter 5: A dragon's Flame
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

I raise my shield as the Dragon blasts another ball of fire in my direction. I’d been holding it at bay, waiting for my Guild to come to the rescue, for a while now, and my health has dropped to a quarter of what it should be, the numbers for my health, which I had set up in my options the previous night, are at a startlingly low 500/2,035 and what’s left of the bar is a light orange hue.

The flames hit my shield directly, pushing me back a little, and it explodes leaving small flaming chunks of whatever he had spit out along the ground. I lower my shield only low enough for my eyes to see above it, in order to figure out how much of the Dragon’s health I’d taken out. It’s only lost around a centimeter more than the small amount of it’s health I took out earlier, and the numbers show something I hadn’t expected: 45,000/50,000. Had this been an enemy from even any other dungeon, this thing would’ve been long dead.

I rush the Dragon, and slash my blade across it's right foreleg, dealing a measly thirty-two damage, which is only enough to make it lift the other foreleg and use a stomp attack to keep me away from it's bottom. I jump out from the beast's underbelly, and begin slowly backing away from the creature. It cranes it's neck until it's close enough to breathe smoke in my eyes, but it instead opens it's big mouth. It's mouth is blackened from the ash it's had to breathe, and the teeth have yellowed immensely. It's breath stinks worse than a cigarette, since the ash is mixed in with the usual bad hygiene a Dragon would have.

The monster gives a roar, blowing his breath, and an ashy wind, my way. I look up, only to see the Dragon preparing to bite me. I know I won't be able to take a strong attack like that, but his mouth is also too big for me to dodge. Knowing the fate that's coming to me, that a Dragon's stomach is how I'm going to end up dieing, is embarrassing, but I doubt I'll be the only one to die like this once the other players make it to that point in the game.


I hold my blade so that the tip points forward, in order to damage the Dragon as it sinks it's teeth, and plant my feet in the ground so I don't lose my footing at the worst possible time.

The dragon thrusts his head forward to bite me, but his neck coils back quickly as a flurry of arrows pierce his neck. I look in the direction that the arrows came from, and see that the rest of the Guild had finally caught up to my location, and they'd already set up their Divisions.

The tanks of the first Division began running to the Dragon, in order to take the malice away from the archers who just riddled the Dragon's neck with arrows, and collectively use a Flair attack. The damage not only takes out a good amount of health, but actually stuns the beast. It begins stumbling about, suddenly unsteady on it's feet, and stomps a couple of the other players. A low level thief was in the way of the stomp, and lost most of his health, alongside suffering a Grounded Debuff, forcing him to stick to running about. He was quickly healed, thanks to our large amount of Clerics, alongside me and the others who had suffered damage. I run back into the fray, feeling much better now that I've gotten healed, and assist a couple of Beast Tamers who are trying to make their way up the Dragons back, similar to my first strike.

I use my sword to pin it's tail into the ground, allowing them to easily hop on, and wait until they've made their way up before dragging my sword through the Dragon's tail as I run towards it's neck.

I look at the Dragon's health again, to see how much damage the entire Guild is able to do to something I couldn't even successfully fight on my own, and am surprised to see how quickly it's dropped. The Dragon is now at a very low 12,000/50,000, and is quickly dropping as we continue our assault.

My sword begins to glow the same color it does when I go to activate my Celestial Strike, a bright yellowish-white, and I slash my blade upwards, ripping through it's skin, out of curiosity from what it'll do. The flames from my swords extend, and continue the ripping my sword would've done had I left it in the Dragon's back and kept running.

I look to the top of the screen to see what the hell I had just done, and what appears on the notification puzzles me.



Judgement Acitvated



Judgement had never appeared in front of me as a move I earned from leveling up, and wasn't in my starter's skills when I checked it before beginning our first Parasprite slaughter. I don't even remember seeing it when I looked at my basic class skills after earning my class upgrade.

The Dragon gives a wail of pain, and begins to collapse. It manages to stand it's ground however, and shake itself violently. I fly off, and land on Matt. We hit the ground hard, dealing a small amount of damage to me, and a rather large amount to him.

"Dammit Jake," He says, slightly agitated. "did it have to be me you landed on?"

Matt pushes me off, and smirks as he begins to stand up, aching to get back into the fight.

"Just sit and watch," He continues, his voice now filled with excitement. "lemme show you what a Thief class can truly accomplish."

Matt takes off, his acceleration astronomically fast, and aims both his Daggers at the Dragon's neck. The Dragon wheels it's head around in time to see Matt, and prepares a Fire Blast that would give Xavier an Inferiority Complex. Matt is quicker however, and his daggers pierce the Dragon's neck. The Dragon still attempts a fireball, this time aiming at me, but is countered as Ed it with an arrow storm.

The Dragon goes into another stomping fit, shaking off Matt, and hitting Black Star dead on. I watch as Black Star's health drops like a stone until it hits zero, but somehow Black Star still gets up.

"What the hell's going on?" I ask to nobody in particular, genuinely curious about how Black Star is still up and running as if nothing had happened.

Within seconds Black Star is healed, and he goes back to slashing at the Dragon's feet again. I run to the Dragon, hoping to help Black Star with his assault, and drag my blade across the grass to activate Judgement again. Once I've gotten under the Dragon again, I lift my blade in the upwards motion that I did before, but nothing happens this time.

"Why did you try to activate your Crisis Skill when you're in the green zone?" Black Star asks, making me face palm internally. How could I be so stupid as to not realize that I had used my Crisis Skill.

A Crisis Skill, in short terms, is a powerful ability you can only use if you've reached the red zone, A.K.A. you're low on health. It differs with each person, much like Class Upgrade paths, but some people can get a permanent one like dual wielding swords that would normally be two handed for Thieves, or a Light shield that activates when a battle starts for the Royal Guard class. Guess I got stuck with the offensive one, which Is Judgement.

I shrug as a response to Black Star, and begin slashing away at the Dragon's right foreleg with him. As a response it does another stomping attack, hitting me and sending me reeling over towards it's left foreleg. That foreleg hits me like a car: swiftly, suddenly, and spreading pain throughout my entire body.

Remembering Black Star's endeavor with the stomp attack, I look at my Health Bar. It stops at fifty, thank god, but quickly goes back to full as I get healed by one of the Clerics in the second Division. I get up and begin charging back to the leg that Black Star had been focusing on, and notice that the Dragon's health has dropped drastically to the point where it's in the red zone.

I raise my sword to activate Celestial Strike, but it's interrupted as the Dragon does something unexpected and turns it's head so that I'm in it's eyesight, and breathes fire throughout it's underbelly.

I raise my shield to block as much of the damage as I can, but it proves utterly useless as the flames carry chunks of Fireballs that knock my shield to my side, forcing me to take the full damage of the attack. My health drops at an uncomfortably fast pace until the flames die out. I look at my health, and my Heart catches in my throat as I see the indication 0/2,035. 

I see a notification next to my health, telling me that it isn't all bad.


Realism mode engaged, heal to get out of Realism mode.


I don't know for sure what realism mode is, but I'm guessing it's your last chance to win a fight before you die, and I'm going to do just that.

I leg it to the Dragon's tail again, having full confidence that I can perform Judgement again, and hop onto it. I stick my blade into the Tail's base once I get there, and begin dragging it through the Dragon's spine as I run towards it's head. I see that the sword has begun glowing the indicating glow that I can use Judgement, but wait until I've reached the base of the neck to use it.

The critical version of this skill does a massive amount of damage, more than double the damage that it did before, and kills the Dragon after a couple of hits from the rest of the Guild.

The Dragon fades away, as it's indicator that it's dead, and we all receive enough inventory items and money to donate to the Guild's treasury and still have more than enough to purchase a legendary item at the Pawn Shop, along with the same message for most everybody



LEVEL UP



I wasn't on of the people who got it, but there's no doubt I'll level up after the fight with whatever boss is behind those doors to my left, as all I need is five Experience Points.

"Alright," Will says, giving everybody information on our next move. "we'll each have five minutes to rest, and for whoever got the Class Upgrade, if this was the monster that dropped it, to get accustomed to their new skills."

I flop on my back, arms above my head as if I had lost control of them, and begin to take a short nap to recuperate my Mana and to gain my health back, since I'm still in Realism Mode.
> (End of part one) Chapter 6: A Darkened Entity
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

I sit there, watching as Black Star bends over to let out a breath he'd been holding for a while. He was the one who had received the Class Upgrade, and upgraded to the Spy Class.

Watching Black Star learn his skills was rather entertaining, as he would get frustrated almost any time he'd fail. He had an especially long time trying to master the cloak skill, but he eventually got it. It was similar to watching my little Sister attempt to master her Bicycle without the Training Wheels.

"Oi," Will says, in order to announce the five minutes are over. "five minutes are up, let's get this boos fight over with. All of you, get into your divisions, and be ready to go in as soon as these doors open."

Will taps the Door, and a white light covers the door. The light slowly dissolves the door, until all we see is the open Castle entrance. The room is big and empty, save for a pedestal in the middle, where the Elements of Harmony were found in the Pilot Episode.

Will goes back into the second Division, and I walk with the first Division. We enter the room, slowly and cautiously, and the door closes once the third Division enters the room. The Sun that was up earlier suddenly disappeared, and got replaced with a full moon. I hear something coming directly in front of me, and I suddenly realize who we're about to fight.

The Torches that dot the walls become lit, illuminating the rooms and confirming my fear.

The midnight blue Alicorn gives a menacing cackle, and everybody else is almost frozen in fear, as we stare Nightmare Moon in the face.

Her reptilian eyes look almost scary, and her blue suit of armor show she's well armored. The most noticeable thing about her is her unnatural height, making her seem more intimidating.

Her weapon of choice, a pitch black Scythe, is set in a battle ready position, so that the fight can begin as soon as the first attack has been performed.

"My god," Xavier says, hopefully not to make some stupid pun that would kill the mood. "She's gigantic. Almost like a-"

"Don't you fucking say it!" Will shouts, cutting him off.

"titan" Xavier says, quietly so that not everybody hears.

The tension right before a battle is something I never thought I would have to experience. The air feels stiff and heavy around me, and I hesitate to start the fight. Some of the other Tanks aren't nearly as nervous as I am though, and rush Nightmare Moon as I'm just snapping out of my fear.

I run with the Thieves, since I hesitated a bit too long, and watch as the Tanks begin their assault on Nightmare Moon. She expertly blocks the majority of the attacks, using the Scythe as if it were a Staff, and casts some form of magic smoke around the tanks. The smoke quickly faded, but nothing had changed. The tanks were still where they were, but they were standing still.

They suddenly went flying backwards, hitting the door we entered through, and quickly fell to the floor. I put my focus onto the blade of the Scythe, which is currently level with the ground, and use my sword to pin it to the ground.

She brings a foot to hit me, and I counter by raising my sword to it. Her leg goes through it, dealing a small amount of damage, and she kicks my face with the strength of an Ox. My head swings to the left, and the rest of my body does the same until my face hits to concrete floors.

The cheek she had kicked goes numb as I stand up again, and ready my Flair skill. I know she's a boss, so she won't be stunned as long as a normal enemy, but it still has a stun effect. I spin, activating the skill, but when I turn to see her she's disappeared.

I feel a palm press against the back of my neck, followed by a short burst of lightning being forced into me from the aforementioned palm. I fall to my knees, and I can't move no matter how hard I try. I look up to my health bar, and notice that I'm paralyzed.

One of the Clerics gets rid of the debuff, and I only have time to turn around and raise my shield before Nightmare Moon's Scythe hits my shield. She takes a step back, dodging a couple of the Thieves that were about to hit her with a tag-team attack. Their Daggers hit the ground, with enough force to penetrate the hard Concrete surface.

I get up fully, and run around them to attack Nightmare Moon head on. I bring my blade to the side, and swing it in a stabbing motion once I get close to the Nightmare (pun pun pun). My blade goes through her, stunning her just long enough for a couple of Warriors to hit her with a good amount of their heavy attacks. The same black fog from before spreads throughout a five meter radius of her, and I raise my shield since I know what's about to come my way.

Whatever deals the damage of that attack must be really powerful, because I was dragged a few feet away from Nightmare Moon even with my shield raised and my feet planted in the ground. I lower my shield and run towards her as she turns around.

I swing my blade from left to right and she blocks it, using her Scythe like a Bo Staff. I maintain a steady rhythm of slashes, which distract her as she gets constantly hit by Thieves, Beast Tamers, and Warriors alike from the back. Black Star gets a critical hit with one of his few offensive skills, and Nightmare Moon stumbles toward me. I stab her in the stomach, and I hear her cough as I shove her off my blade.

Before she falls to the ground, she becomes a wisp of the fog that she used as a knock back attack and comes up behind me. She runs her blade through my back, and quickly removes it. The sting that's left becomes unbearable, and I collapse on the floor. I can feel Matt running up to me, and shaking me until I get back up.

"God dammit man," He comments, a grin on his face. "now's not the time for napping just yet."

I get up, and am quickly healed by a Cleric as Matt and I rush towards Nightmare Moon. We split up, he goes right and I go left, to flank her and leave one area open for her to be hit.

I go in first, hoping to get her attention since that's what my class is designed for, and use my Flair attack. She takes a step back, before using her smoke attack to quickly get behind me. I wheel around and raise my shield to block, but the Scythe's blade never hits me. Instead, she uses the back of the handle to sweep the floor, tripping me, and swings the weapon so that I'm going to face plant right on to the blade. I'm quickly saved by one of the Clerics using a light shield, self explanatory, allowing me to simply bounce right off of the blade, and watch as Matt uses his aerial ability to attack Nightmare Moon from a different side every time. She struggles to block him, but is still able to do it rather swiftly.

I get up, and raise my blade to use Celestial Strike. Since she's essentially Darkness incarnate, this skill should be very effective. I run at her, and swing my blade down once I'm about to bump into her. The sword goes straight through her backside, and she screams as white flames coat her body. I look at her health bar, and am very pleased to see that we've almost killed her entirely.



Nightmare Moon: Level 7 Boss
5,000/70,000



Once the flames die down, she uses her black smoke knock back skill again, this time in every direction, and I don't have the time to raise my shield before the force of whatever it is sends me flying. I hit the giant door we entered though, and fall to the floor with a loud thud.

I try to get up, but for some reason, my body won't allow it. Looking at my health bar, I notice that I'm paralyzed. I look over to Nightmare Moon, and notice that almost everybody else had been hit by the same attack. The only two that were out of range are the aggressive fighter, Matt, and the guy who hasn't even gotten close to an enemy, Steven. This is one hell of a time for the whole 'Moment of truth', but what can you do?

Matt begins rushing his way to Nightmare Moon, and continues with his aerial ace style fighting. Steven stays there, occasionally sending out his bird to everybody's dismay. The bird doesn't have much of an effect on Nightmare Moon, only occasionally making her slash at it so that it stops bugging her, and decides to focus primarily on Matt. Their fight seems to be one of the things you'd see in Anime, but it's definitely something to behold. Matt's sheer speed and effectiveness with his wings allow him to get a few heavy hits on Nightmare Moon every few seconds, slowly whittling down her health.

Nightmare Moon finally figures out Matt's flight path, and hits him in the gut with the handle of her weapon. Matt, taken by surprise from the sudden offensive, flies backwards and hits the ground before sliding a couple of feet. He quickly gets up, but is greeted by the blade of Nightmare Moon's Scythe. She sends the blade straight through Matt's stomach, and swings it upward, bringing Matt with it, until it hits the ground that was behind her.

She lets the blade out of Matt, and gives him a roundhouse kick as soon as he stands up. Matt's body spins around in response to the kick, and Nightmare Moon gives a stunning attack as soon as Matt's back is turned to her. Matt falls to his knees, and Nightmare Moon begins to swing her blade back, as a finishing move. Only now to I realize what Matt's health is at, and it scares me.



Matthew: Level 6 Thief
Health:0/1,200 (in realism mode.)



I shout Steven's name, while slowly turning my head to look at him, and see that he's just staring at his blade with a shaky body, contemplating if he should attack Nightmare Moon. He looks over to us, and something in him snaps; his hand tightens around his sword, and his face goes to one of confidence. I give a smile, knowing that he can save Matt, but everything quickly changes when a couple spots of blood splash onto my face.

I look over to Matt, and see that Nightmare Moon's scythe had pierced through his neck. She removes the blade, and Matt falls to the floor, choking on his own blood. I feel a weight lift off of me, and notice that I'm not paralyzed anymore. I get up, but before I can run to attack Nightmare Moon a scream fills the air and draws my attention. I look to see Ed running after Nightmare Moon, anger and hate in his eyes. He pulls out one of his arrows, and begins using it as a melee weapon. He slashes at Nightmare Moon with his arrow, and she easily blocks it. I run after her alongside the rest of the first division, though I'm trying to prevent another death of one of my friends.

I lower my blade, dragging it across the floor, and look at my health bar to make sure I can use Judgement. My health bar has a fiery red hue to it, telling me that I'll be able to use it. I stay back for a minute, allowing the skill to charge more before I run into the fray, and wait until my sword glows white to indicate that I can use the skill before running at her with all my might.

For some reason, I get a speed boost and run straight through the rest of the first Division with my trail of white flame behind me. Nightmare Moon sees me, and begins to swing her blade downward as I get close. I block it with my shield, making it bounce upwards before I send my sword upward to activate Judgement.

I think that charging this skill more allows it to be more effective, because this time it just kills Nightmare Moon entirely, instead of the weaker attack that I had used on the Dragon. She disappears along with the white flames of Judgement, and a screen appears infront of me and everybody.



Everfree Forest major dungeon completed
Please wait a week for the Old Castle to become a Hub for higher level players.



I close my message, and look at the Final hit bonus that I had received.



Night's shield
+5 Parry
+2 Block
+10% Health



I only have enough time to equip the item before I pass out.





I awake to the sound of cheerful voices, and look around to see what's going on. I'm back at Sugarcube corner, and everybody's celebrating the completion of our mission. Everybody but Ed and Steven it seems.

"Oh hey," The sound of Xavier's voice makes me look around to locate him. "the Rat Bastard's awake." I feel a hand slap me from behind, and look to see Will and Xavier.

"Where's Ed and Steven?" I ask, wanting to know most of everything before I get on with the party. Will answers me with a bit too much nonchalance.

"Eh, I think Steven went to mope or something, and Ed's a bit too melancholic right now for a party." Before I even have time to respond, my vision is invaded by a bouncy pink blob.

"What!?" I hear the screech of a pink Party Pony, followed by the surprised shouts coming from her. "How can anypony not be up for a party?"

I look to Will, and he just shrugs as he hands me a slice of cake on a plate. A fork impaling the cake as if it had done some kind of crime.

I grab the cake happily, and take a bite before contemplating if this place really could be so bad. All we have to do is ward off monsters and continue our mission of clearing out the Major Dungeons, and we could have on hell of a time here, right?
> (prologue of part two) Chapter 6.5: One month later
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

The hellish sound of an Alarm clock awakens me, and I tiredly grab the wire powering the aforementioned device before pulling it out. Will stirs in his bed, and I open my eyes to make sure we don't actually have to get up. Will gets off his bed and claps his hands to awaken everybody else. I push my sheets away from me, and equip my armor with a groan.

"When are they gonna add some fuggin' Coffee that actually works in this game?" I hear Xavier speak, his voice still slurred from the eccentric party we had last night celebrating our victory against another Guild of Defilers. We call anybody who kills other players a Defiler since they have a tendency to steal the dead Player's equipment and Defile their body in some Gruesome way.

"If I knew, I would tell you." Will says, answering Xavier's question. "But for now we gotta go see if the Info Corps have thought of anything for the answer to the clue we received after defeating Nightmare Moon." Will has been obsessed with figuring out what the hint we got means, since it doesn't really seem to be something that we would immediately be able to solve with the horrible hint we recieved.

Xavier gets up alongside Steven, who's still half asleep as he doesn't even equip his weapons. All he does is change his expression to something more alert looking, and runs out the door. He's been doing that for the past week, and I've been meaning to ask why. I've never gotten the chance, since Ed gives him the stink eye any time they're together, and that makes Steven more jumpy than a Rabbit.

"I shtill think we shouldn't have to get up so early." Xavier says, leaning his body on the door that leads to the Bathroom. I walk up to him and snap my fingers, a telltale sign for him to wake up. But he just waves his hand in my face. "No, I'm not moving from here until I get my Breakfast." I look over to Will, and he just shrugs as he kneels down to awaken Ed from his troubled slumber.

"If you'd actually move around," I say, continuing my efforts to wake Xavier. "then you'd be able to get your Breakfast and the Shower Water isn't going to be cold." This gets Xavier into a state of alertness, and he equips his cloaks as Ed gets up and we all walk down into the icy Ponyville streets.





Xavier walks out from the Bathroom, his junk covered only by a towel, and begins rummaging through his Backpack to decide what he's going to sell after begin showered with who knows what ungodly things from last night. I open my menu, and a private message pops up in front of me.



From: System
To: All
Subject: EVENT!

Hello faithful players, as you know the new year is almost upon us. In honor of your time and enjoyment being spent in this game, we've set up and event in this game that I believe will help raise some spirits:THE GRAND GALLOPING GALA

For the entirety of Tomorrow night, the Canterlot major dungeon will be re-skinned into a New Years themed party, allowing everybody to dance and enjoy themselves until the next day, were it would be wise to leave before it becomes a Major dungeon again.



I close the message, and look up to see my friends doing the same. Xavier gets a grin, and begins to say something I really wish he wouldn't.

"Aww hell yeah, gonna get even more pu-" Xavier is cut off by Will punching him in the face, sending him into a spin before he collapses onto the floor.

"You guys are okay with me punching him right?" Will says, lowering his fist back to the side of his hip. Xavier stands up, holding his nose, and gives Will a glare.

"Ya know, you should say that BEFORE you punch me." Xavier says, retaliating.

Will shrugs, and gives a smirk.

"Now where's the fun in that?" Will asks, giving Xavier a cocky glare. Xavier flips the bird towards Will, and sends him a duel request. Will looks at it, and hesitantly declines it. He brings his finger up to Xavier's lips before he has a chance to say anything that would make him look dumb.

"Shh, baby..." Will says, creeping out everybody, "it's alright,"

"Will..." Xavier begins to talk, trying to get Will off of him.

"Don't worry, we'll be together forever."

"Will I'm not-"

"It's okay baby, we can go far away." This sentence make Xavier flip out, and he quickly pushes Will away from him. Will just laughs it off, and begins walking out the door. I couldn't say for sure where, but my guess would be to fast travel all the way over to the Lost Castle so we could train for more leveling up before losing ourselves at the Gala.

I look over to the party menu, and can't help but be disappointed we haven't leveled up nearly as much as I thought we would.



	Jake
Royal Guard: LVL 13
HP: 1,569/1,569
MP: 313/313
Celestial Crusaders

Xavier
Mage: LVL 13
HP: 941/941
MP: 1,412/1,412

Will
Cleric: LVL 13
HP: 1,098/1,098
MP: 1,443/1,443

Steven
Beast Tamer: LVL 13
HP: 1,192/1,192
MP: 1,255/1,255

Ed
Archer: LVL13
HP: 1,082/1,082
MP: 627/627










We open the gigantic concrete doors that lead us to the old castle, allowing us to continue to what was once the biggest battle we've fought so far. I look at the round tables we've set up through the seemingly pointless house gimmick that most MMOs have, which I tend to never use unless I've already beaten the game and want to keep playing to help out my friends.

Will walks up to the person who we've put in charge, a guy by the name of Vax, and begins asking him about the clue. Vax adorns a large robe, indicating that he's a mage, and has a spiky slicked back light purple mane. His purple skin allowed him to be easily visible, so that we don't have much trouble finding him, and his cutie mark is an eye which tells us that he should be good with finding things, or solving puzzles, or something along those lines.

"So," Will says, finally finished with his greetings. "have you gotten any breakthroughs with this hint?"

"Well," Vax responds, pushing his glasses further up his nose bridge, "It's apparent that this hint was never meant to be able to help us solve the mystery of Despair's identity on it's own. But we have received one suggestion, as Ludicrous as it is."

I look over to the table where the hint is, and it takes most of my mental ability not to facepalm as I look at the letter G sitting on our examination table. The hint we fought for was the letter G.

"I don't care how unusual it may be, I wanna hear every suggestion possible to expand our ideas." Will says. Vax just sighs and pushes his glasses further up his nose bridge before responding.

"The suggestion," He says. "is that whoever Despair is, he's a straight up G."

Our heads swivel in Xavier's direction, and my hand balls into a fist as I see him suppressing a smile horribly.

"Let's just go to the hunting area and get today's training over with okay?" Will says, leaving his hand on his forehead from a facepalm he must have recently done.





"Dammit Jake behind you!" Ed shouts. I turn to meet the foe that had flanked me and am greeted by a Timberwolf that's about to take a large bite of my face.

I lean backwards and bring my left leg up, activating my new flip kick attack. The wolf is hit in the chin and suffers the stun debuff that comes with using flip kick. Once I land I swing my sword back and slice downwards, effectively getting a critical hit on it's neck. Ed hits it with a kneecap, immobilizing it, and Xavier finishes it off with an icicle spear attack.

The wolf evaporates, as per the norm in this game, and I'm gifted with a new sword that I equip as soon as I read the stats.



Mourning Wood Slayer

+5 attack
-3 accuracy
+2 malice
-5% magic



I make sure Xavier didn't see it, knowing he would give some idiotic pun, and rejoin the group as Xavier struts around in his newest cloak happily.

"What ya got?" I ask as he does a twirl which almost makes his wand hit me in the face. He finishes turning and replies in a laid back tone.

"A new cloak," He replies, "what else would it be? This baby has a +10% magic boost." I nod my head to show my light surprise as Ed changes the subject.

"Where'd Steven go?" He says, looking around to see if Steven is within eyesight. We all begin looking around as well, figuring that he couldn't have gone too far. I open up my map and begin looking around for the green dot that represents a party member.

"Ah ha!" I say, directing my finger to the green dot located at the Old Castle. "He's at the weapons shop, his sword must've been destroyed."

"Speaking of which," Xavier says, twirling his wand as if it were a baton "I need to repair my stuff before we begin 'packing' for the Gala." With a nod from Will we all begin walking towards the old castle to get Xavier's stuff repaired and to take a break before hitting both the fields and our Hotel room in Ponyville in preparation for the Gala.
> (Start of part 2) chapter 7: At the Gala
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

I step onto the newly working train station, and look behind me to see Xavier and Ed carrying behind them a rather large suitcase. This piques my interest as I walk towards them.

"Why the hell do you need a bag?" I ask Ed, "We're literally staying there for one night and anything you get will just be put into your inventory." Rather than answering me though, Ed just tilts his head in Xavier's direction. I sigh as I figure out exactly where this conversation is headed.

"Before you speak..." Xavier says as I walk up to him, "I have all the equipment that wouldn't fit in my inventory in this bag and the one Ed is carrying."

"What the hell is so big that it can't fit in your inventory AND needs two bags?" I retort, half knowing his answer already.

"Everything I need for when I get laid." Xavier responds. I close my eyes and turn to Ed in order to make sure of something.

"Ed, this game is rated E 10+ right?"

"Yeah, why?" After hearing Ed's answer I turn to Xavier and raise my left eyebrow at him, wondering how he found playboy stuff in a game that isn't even rated T.

"Well I really just half-assed the crafting system and made these." Xavier says, opening up one of the bags and showing me a handful of condoms.

"How is that even in the crafting system?" I shout, my question only half answered. Xavier just shrugs and continues dragging his bag into the train car as the telltale blowing of a whistle signals that everybody needs to be on board now.








The train car is well lit with some rather nice leather couches to keep us comfy, and trays sit on our laps from the large amount of food he had due to missing both breakfast and lunch. Honestly I could just sleep here every night.

"Man I thought this train would go faster." Ed says as he glares daggers at Steven yet again. For some reason he's been giving Steven the death glare whenever he thought nobody was looking, and it's clearly been taking it's toll on Steven. He's begun looking paranoid and has attempted to leave whenever he could. Thankfully Will noticed this too and convinced him to stay after he tried to excuse himself again.

"Well you never know what this game would have coded as the speed for mounts, vehicles, and all the whatnot." Xavier says as he, for whatever reason, juggles fireballs with one hand. I would assume that he finds it cool in his twisted mind. "Hey Jake-" He starts before I cut him off quickly.

"Stay away from me you little lust vortex."

"Awh c'mon you know you're jealous."

"No, and I hope I never will be."

With that, he turns his face towards the window and begins thinking about god knows what.

"What's made you grumpy all of a sudden?" Will butts in. I turn to him and watch him dart his eyes to my right. Getting what he's trying to say, I turn my head and witness Steven exit the train car.

"My apologies," I say, "I just need to go to the dinner car and get a drink. You guys want anything?"

After finding a sheet of paper and writing down everybody's "orders" I walk out of the car and begin to pursue Steven to what I would guess would be the caboose. I mumble to myself as I realize that the word caboose sounds rather fun to say. I know, I can have the mind of a grade school kid sometimes.

Upon entering the caboose a chill goes down my spine as I realize how barren it is. The walls aren't even painted so the wood shows. There's no light, save for a swaying roof lamp above my head. 

I swear this place is like the basement of a train; dark, creepy, and something you go out of your way to avoid.

Steven stands on the rail of the car just outside the back door, continuously leaning over the rail more and more. Realizing what he's about to do I rush over towards the back of the train and bust through the door.

"What the hell Steven!" I shout, grabbing his hand to keep him from jumping off of the train. He turns to me and the first thing I notice is his expression. His entire face was contorted in a heavy sob. I trudge him back to the inside of the caboose and sit him down on one of the bags, presumably Xavier's condom keepsake.

"Alright," I say, my voice now lowered to keep from sounding like there's any form of malice in it. "what's been going on that's so bad it made you want to jump off the bridge. Literally." I look back outside the train car and realize that we were over a bridge.

Rather than replying Steven puts his head in his hands and continues to sob harder. I get up from my spot and sit next to him, patting his back and consoling him until he calms down enough to tell me what's wrong. He looks up at me after getting out of the fetal position. What he says next surprises me.

"It's my fault." He says. I turn my head and raise an eyebrow in curiosity. Luckily I don't have to put my thoughts into words as he elaborates right after. "I just stood there as Matt died. I was the only one who could save Ed's husband and I fucked it up." He grabs a stray pebble and chucks it across the train car, "Now Ed hates me more than you could comprehend. I guess I couldn't take the pressure anymore ya know?" He turns to me expectantly and I run as many ideas about what to say as possible. Due to my morality I just pick the honest answer.

"No," I say, "I don't know what that's like, nor do I want to. I understand you feeling guilty and Ed's anger, but sometimes there are things that, no matter how much we want to, we just can't do them." The image of Ed letting is rage out on Nightmare Moon after Matt's death flashes through my head. "Like how Ed wanted to kill Nightmare Moon himself. We all knew that he wouldn't be able to do it and so I rushed in there to make sure he didn't get himself killed."

"That's supposed to make me feel better?" Steven responds. "That just says to me that Ed's anger is justifiable."

"It is. But maybe if you tried to settle things with him and let him know how bad you feel about it he'll be at least a bit less angry."

Steven sniffles before standing up again.

"Alright," He says. "I'll try and mend things with him at the Gala. Let's go back." I stand up with him, and I'm about to follow him until I remember that I need to pick up a bunch of food for everybody.





The train blows it's whistle before coming to a slow stop at the station for Canterlot. I look out the window and notice that it's already evening and the Gala is to start at any minute. Ed seriously wasn't lying when he said that this train was unusually slow.

"Hey Xavier," I say as I realize something. "what are you gonna do with your  bank vault of condoms and whatnot once we actually get to the gala?" Xavier turns to me and puts his finger to his chin in thought. He opens his mouth to reply, but quickly closes it again and begins to twiddle his thumbs.

"Good question." He finally replies. Everybody gives a short laugh before getting up from their seats and exits the train. As we do a sarcastically cheery voice sounds from the loudspeakers adorning the Station play the same message we're probably going to here everywhere we go from using the train. Welcome to Canterlot. Please enjoy your stay.

I see Will roll his eyes at the message as he begins stepping off of the platform with the rest of us following behind him. We find a road with green arrows pointing to our right and follow it with our eyes until we see the castle, and I must say that the Disney castle has nothing on this beauty. Well maybe a little but that's not the point.

"Dayum," Will says, putting on a suggestive look. "That thing's almost as good as the booty." We all just sit and admire the castle a little longer, as it really is a sight to behold in this game, before remembering why we're here and follow the green arrows to the castle.

The entrance to the castle is as grand as the show made it seem, with a plush velvet carpet along the center leading to the stairs that split halfway up and turn into two staircases, one going left and the other going right. The space around the carpet in barren except for some small groups of people clumping around the corners. Celestia stands at the bottom of the staircase, shaking the hand of anypony who comes to her for one.

I walk up to Celestia, and am surprised to see her actually change expression as she sees me. Her regal smile becomes one of joy as she identifies me directly.

"Ah, Jake Wasiner, the most well known member of the Celestial Crusaders. Some believe you're even the leader." My eyes go wide as I marvel at the clearly well written script this game's creators must have created to give an NPC this much personality. It really seems like she's alive.

"Well fortunately that last rumor isn't true, I honestly don't think I'd be cut out for leadership, though I would like to know how you immediately knew my name if it isn't too much to ask?" Rather than responding verbally she gives a small giggle and points to my name tag.

I look up dumbly, before looking back at her and nodding a bit.

"Pardon my idiocy," I say, "I'm still not comfortable with having a bunch of pictures constantly in my face." She nods her head in agreement and turns back towards the visitors who come to shake her hand.

"I'll look for you when I'm done smiling and shaking hands," She says discreetly, "there is something I need to inform you and your guild about."

I nod my head and turn to see Xavier doing something I legitimately never thought possible. He's dancing with a girl.

Xavier. Dancing. With a girl. That's just not natural.

I walk over to Will and realize that everybody is as surprised at this revelation as I am. We all watch in confused unison as Xavier does a perfected ballroom dance with this mysterious girl.

"Who used a decoy spell?" Steven asks, putting a hand over the right side of his mouth so it's harder for others to listen in.

"I hope that's a decoy spell." I respond, "Or else that girl's gonna wake up having nightmares about what's to come."

With a nod, Ed decides to jump in to make sure it isn't the real thing and that this poor woman is actually a decoy. Once Xavier is within arms reach of him, Ed reaches out to grab the supposed decoy. To our horror this is actually the real Xavier and he turns to us as he feels Eds fingers touch his face, before they engage in some discussion I can't hear.

I decide to avoid an awkward conversation tomorrow morning and look at the woman's username.



Tonya



"Oh she's fucked." I whisper, knowing Xavier's history with girls of the same name. Taking a better look at Xavier's new nightly plaything I notice a rather cliche purple wizard cap, tied together with a purple cloak adorned with stars As for skin she chose a dark blue one and a pale white mane that drapes down to her shoulders. She's a mage alongside Xavier and looks both innocent and brash from the body language I'm seeing as Ed and Xavier discuss... things.

Dear god Xavier's trying to bang an anthro version of Trixie.

"Literally," I hear Steven saying as he adds on to my sentence. I look at him and see the grin he has on his face, looking rather pleased with what's going on. Before I can give a reply a message pops up in front of me.



Come meet me in the Gardens.
-Celestia.



I quickly close the message before anybody else and slip away while everybody's  attention is focused on Xavier's new prey. I open my map to figure out where the gardens are, but for some reason they aren't marked. As a matter of fact none o the places I haven't visited yet are even on the map, as though this place wasn't meant to be public just yet.

Rather than message her back I  wander around aimlessly until I find my destination. Leave it to a man to not ask for directions when he most needs it. Anyways, I look around until I see Celestia's name tag appear over a hedge. I decide that just going through the hedge would be a better idea than walking around. I found out that it wasn't as good of an idea as I thought since I walk out the other side with half of my health bar taken and a multitude of thorns stuck in my arm.

As I slowly pick the thorns out of my arm I hear Celestia give a small chuckle. I look up to see her suppressing a smile while holding a hand over her mouth. I roll my eyes and go back to plucking the thorns off of me before she speaks up.

"As I wanted to say back at the entrance, having a guild named after me is rather flattering, even more with the fact that you guys are the biggest guild in the game."

"Thank you." I reply, getting the last thorn out of my arm. "I was unaware that we were the biggest guild. Is that all you wanted to say?"

"No," She replies, "I wanted to warn you. Having your guild be the main contribution to getting out of here is a noble cause, but a multitude of guilds have risen to do just the opposite. They fear that they'll have to leave Equestria and go back to an arguably bad life back in the real world. Some of these guilds you guys have called 'Defilers' since they usually get your attention through murder. But in reality they're dreamers."

I run this through my head, contemplating the last guild of defilers we fought. They had only killed enough to get our attention before completely devoting themselves to war, whereas some of the other Defiler guilds would continue their murder sprees. Could they have been Dreamers, or just trying to conserve their supplies for our battles?

"The current one that's growing bigger and bigger by the hour," She continues. "is known as 'Neverland'. They haven't acted out just yet, but rather have been making sure they're well stocked for an all out war. You better prepare your guild lest you be demolished within the first battle."

I nod my head and turn around so that I can get back to my group but Celestia grabs my arm to stop me.

"One more thing," she says.

"Wha--" I try to say, but my mouth is invaded by a pair of soft, white lips touching mine. Frankly I though there was some kind of personal space mechanic in this, given that both adults and young children were playing this, but I guess not.

She quickly pulls back before anything else can happen and her face turns into one of puzzlement.

"So that's what it's like to kiss a human, Twilight said it was more fulfilling." She says, before going into a series of mumbles and other miscellaneous noises I can't quite decipher. I quickly turn tail and bolt back to the room where most of the players, alongside my friends, are.





When I get back inside I look around for where any of my friends could be, and find them split up around the room. Will is chatting away with Xavier, who has his arm around the back of Tonya's neck, sipping whatever it is they're serving as a drink at the snack tables. Looking around more I see Ed dragging Steven away into a seemingly less populated room.

This could go one of two ways, and I doubt it's the dirty one.

Knowing something's going to happen unless somebody intervenes, I quickly march my way up the stairs leading into that room and stay by the door way. Listening in, my suspicions are confirmed as I hear Ed yelling at Steven.

"Why the fuck did you just sit there as Matt was forced to die right in front of me!?" Ed's voice is filled with anger as I imagine he's using all of his self control to not harm Steven in any way, shape, or form.

"I don't know!" I hear Steven speak up, his voice choked up since he's probably crying. "I just don't know okay? I wasn't under the paralysis effect but I still couldn't move. I guess I was just too scared to do anything."

"Please," Ed retorts, clearly not believing anything Steven is saying. "we all know you could have easily gone in and saved Steven, but you clearly decided not to. You didn't even move until he was in realism mode."

Audible sobs are now coming from Steven, as I hear his voice sound more and more like he's pleading.

"Listen, I'm sorry okay? I don't know how to make it up to you, so please tell me how to show you that I'm sorry!"

I decide to step in before Ed does something too irrational, but I'm too late as Ed gets what he wanted to say out of his mouth before I could interrupt him.

"Leave the guild," he says, "I never want to see your damned face ever again."

Rather than shrugging this off, Steven does just as he was told before running out of the room, bumping my shoulder as he sprints away crying."

"What the hell Ed!" I shout, glaring daggers at him.

"He just sat there and watched as my fucking husband died!" Ed retorts, "You expect me to just shrug it off as though I didn't even know him?"

"No but you shouldn't force one of your best friends, hell anybody to abandon the only group of people he can trust in this literal death game."

Ed's face softens as he realizes what he's done, and quickly pulls up his map to figure out where Steven went. Steven dot, indicating his location, isn't on the map though.

"The hell?" I say, before checking my own map to discover he isn't on my map either. I push a few more buttons in the menu to check my friends list, before realizing that he removed himself from it. I don't go into a complete panic however, until a message pops up in the chat menu.



Guild Admin: Steven has left the Celestial Crusaders.










I sit there, in the middle of the Canterlot Gardens crying my eyes out. As much as I knew Ed hated me I never would have thought that he'd go this far.

"Steven Bonnani," A voice comes form out of nowhere, and I look at the man who said it. I can't make out his facial features because he's hiding in the shadows. "one of the legendary admins of the Celestial Crusaders, now forced out of his own group due to the cruelty of one man."

"What do you want?" I say weakly, trying not to sound like I was just sobbing.

"I want to give you redemption," He replies, "I want to help you become strong so that you never have to go through this again."

With one look at his name tag I nod my head and get up, walking to him in the shadows.



Pyralis
Thief: LVL 15
HP: 2,437/2,437
MP:750/750
Neverland.


> Chapter 8: Aftermath
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Tell me again," Will says through gritted teeth, giving Ed an irritated glace. "why the hell you made Steven leave?"

"I- I don't know." Ed says in response, tears forming at the edge of his eyes. "I wasn't thinking clearly, and my anger just took over. I lost it and blamed Steven for Ed's death."

Will brings a hand up to his head, and begins to massage his eyelids before sighing in thought. He turns around and begins to pace the room we found right behind the snack tables at the entrance of the Gala.

"Alright," Will says after a minute or so of thought. "Did anybody see where he was going?"

Xavier raises his hand and opens his map to show us.

"I didn't know he was running away from us at the time but he ran to what seemed like the Canterlot gardens." He says, putting his finger on a blank spot on the map. I open up my map, and my eyes grow wide as I discover that the spot Xavier is pointing to isn't blank on my map.

"What the hell?" Will says, looking over my shoulder at the anomaly that is the inconsistent map. I look at the title of the map to make sure I didn't miss something, and I realize just how much of an idiot I am when I see exactly what's been going on.



Canterlot Castle: Dungeon area.



Well tickle my anus and call me Samantha, they forgot to change this to an event area.

"That explains it," I say, announcing it to all of us. "I have this area mapped out because the developers who created this event forgot to code it as something other than a dungeon."

After a collective "huh" from everybody, I quickly close my map screen and start heading towards the gardens. Rather than follow me, Will tells everybody to split up and start covering more ground. A surprisingly good tactic as it'll let us have more of this place mapped out before we even begin to combat whatever lays within the recesses of this place.








I walk through the hedge leading to the center of the small maze, and begin looking around the clearing as I decide that it would be a better idea to focus on finding Steven rather than plucking thorns out of my arm, even though the stinging sensation does start to get bothersome.

I see an arm going into a hedge to my right, and begin jogging over to it, hoping the arm belonged to Steven.

"Hey Ste--" I start to say, but my sentence is cut short as somebody appears in front of me, brings out his dagger, and swings it in my direction.

I jump back in surprise, and open my menu to quickly equip my non-social attire. Before I can equip my sword and shield, the mysterious person jumps towards me, forcing me to close my menu, and take another step back to dodge. Being clever, he feigns a slash, before taking a leap forward and activating what I imagine would be a ranged attack.

Kunai flash into his free hand, and he tosses about five in a horizontal line, with no time for me to dodge. Three of the Kunai hit me in the chest, the other two scraping my shoulder before disappearing in the hedge behind me. I open my menu again, and turn to run while equipping my shield.

Once I have my shield, I hurriedly scroll through my weapons menu to find my sword. I don't have the time to find the one I'd prefer to use as the assailant starts running towards me, another fistful of Kunai alongside his right hand which he uses to hold his dagger. I tap the first sword I see, and quickly look up to the notification to tell me which sword I equipped.



Beginner's sword
attack: 5
accuracy: 5
malice: 10
magic: 3



Perfect, a level one sword to deal with a level fourteen enemy. I've practically crippled myself in a serious fight.

I look back down in time to see my assailant bring up his dagger and put more weight on his left leg. He's going to lunge at me and use his close ranged weapons and swift attacks to try and catch me off guard. I quickly bring my shield up as he leaps into the air. He brings up his dagger, ready to stab me with it, and hits my shield. I stumble back a bit, but quickly catch my footing as he goes in for another strike, which I block with less ease than other times.

Shields are a funny thing in this game. Rather than reducing the amount of damage you would take without a shield, it reduces your magic bar, before your ability to block goes down significantly and you become unable to block most attacks. This thought goes through my mind repeatedly as this guy's large amount of swift strikes makes my magic bar deplete at an alarming rate. He's attacking too swiftly for me to be able to try an offensive attack. So, rather than actually attack, I take a leap back and prepare my Flair attack, which should give me enough time to escape.

Once my sword glows, I shift my weight and prepare to spin. My assailant somehow knows exactly what I'm about to use, and jumps backward before tossing his kunai at me. It's too late for cancellation, but on the bright side my attack deflects the kunai. He's at a distance now where I can anticipate his next move and strike before he does.

I crouch my knees and wait patiently for him to lunge at me again. He hesitates for a moment, as if somebody had just told him something, and then goes back to trying to attack me. He shifts his weight for a jump attack again, but decides against it midway through and uses the weight for a quick leap rather than a jump. I move my shield to block, but rather than attack me when he gets in range, he just whispers something to his weapon.

"Four."

Slightly taken aback by this guy's unusual speech, I barely have time to notice that his dagger has lit up in a purple hue. I try to prepare for the oncoming strike, but I didn't react quick enough. The dagger hits my shield, and the impact leaves a purple ring around the impact area, and depletes all of my magic as my shield, alongside the arm that was holding it, fly off to my right, leaving me open.

He wastes no time in getting ready for a followup attack, which I doubt won't be a critical hit, and whispers another number to his weapon.

"Two."

Rather than his dagger lighting up, the man's entire body glows in the purple hue his dagger did. Before I know what's going on, my body is engulfed in smoke.

I cough and sputter as the smoke goes down my throat, before feeling a familiar heat coming through the air. My blurred vision focuses on the light of one of Xavier's fireballs. But something looks different about it, as though the fireball is bigger than what Xavier normally conjures. I look upward as the fireball cuts through the smoke, and see Xavier standing side by side with Tonya, both of them in a post-fireball throwing position. Sucking in a deep breath, which was a bad idea as I'm surrounded in smoke, I leap towards the nearest spot that doesn't have smoke, which ends up being right in front of everybody.

As I get out, coughing and sputtering, Will comes over to me. I trip over a rock, and Will comes to support me as I continue my coughing fit.

After coming down from the deep coughs as the smoke finally leaves me, Will uses a healing spell to get me back to my normal self. The same rush of energy comes through my body, as though I was lightly shocked, and I sit down on a nearby bench as Will begins a flurry of questions.

"Who attacked you? Did you see anything? How the hell does somebody go through PvP in a PvE server without a duel request?"

I hold a hand up to him, still getting my bearings, and look back at the gardens where I just had one hell of a fight. The assassin, as I guess I'll call him from here on, has completely disappeared with nothing to show for our fight except my slowly refilling magic bar and a cloud of smoke that is only now dissipating. I turn back to Will and open my mouth to speak, but Xavier cuts me off instead.

"Holy hell Tonya that was one bitchin' fireball we just did."

"Hell yeah it was!"

I watch as they give each other a high-five, before turning back and realizing that everybody saw them do that. It takes everything I have not to groan as Xavier puts on his fake sheepish smile that Tonya seems to replicate well.

Birds of a feather, I guess.

Will comes back to the topic at hand, and hits me with a question I can't quite answer.

"Jake, did you see anything, you know, besides a cloaked figure slashing his dagger at you?" I look to the ground, and try to recap the past few minutes in my slight daze, and the afterglow of a losing fight.

"Right before I was attacked," I say, "I saw a hand heading into the hedge, one the same color as the fur Steven chose when we first stepped into this game."

Will sighs and pulls open his map, now filled with the lines of the halls in this dungeon, and starts scanning the area around the gardens to see where Steven could have gone.

"Shit," he says, "with how long that fight took, Steven would be well on his way out of Canterlot and stepping off of the train to wherever he's being taken."

After a collective sigh of disappointment from the group, I stand up and start heading towards the train station.

"Whelp," I say, putting my hands on my hips. "I don't think he'll be going anywhere too exotic. So we can just wait until tomorrow to start the hunt for Steven."





> The badlands- Chase: part 1
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

A loud scream rouses me from my sleep, and I look over to Xavier since screams are usually what we hear when he brings somebody home. Xavier looks at me and shrugs before turning and pointing to Ed.

The first thing I notice about Ed is that he's drenched in sweat. Considering the fact that the Gala was supposed to be celebrating New Years, and it's insanely cold down in Ponyville, just the fact that he was sweating in his sleep was clue enough he had a nightmare.

"Oi Ed," Will says, still in his sleeping pose. "Something wrong?"

"Not entirely, just a nightmare is all." Ed has been breathing heavily, at a worrying pace no less, since he woke up. Realizing this, I get up off the bed and walk to the coffee machine.

"No point in that," Ed says, taking a gulp and finally calming himself enough to breathe through his nose. "but thanks for your concern."

I shrug and walk back to the bed, almost tripping on Xavier's leg under his blanket before stumbling onto the mattress I call my bed.

"God dammit Xavier..." I say as I lift my head up and glare at him. Tonya sits up behind him and I'm surprised to see that she hasn't been ravaged by the monster that supposedly lies dormant within Xavier. I don't even know what that's supposed to mean but that's what Xavier tells me, and when you're stuck in a video game where your only option for survival is to not die then I guess most everything is believable right?





"I like trains..." Xavier's voice fills the air right before the train stops right in front of us to take us to the old castle. How it is that the old castle has a train station is beyond my comprehension, but most people just attribute it to video game logic.

The doors open on the train, and I hand the conductor that steps out of said door the five bits it costs to go to the old castle. The rest of my friends do the same and we sit in the car nearest to the dinner car in case we get hungry, which is often in this world.

I look to Ed, who's been slowly ostracizing himself from us, and watch as he fiddles with some kind of potion in his hand. Curious as to what the potion does I scoot closer to him and make it evident that I'm staring at it.

"What's in there?" I ask, pointing to the vial of liquid.

"They were passing out XP boosters at the gala. Apparently it doubles the XP earned form fighting for about an hour." He raises it to his eyes and swirls the liquid around, as if he were debating whether or not he should use it now or later.

I open my inventory to make sure I got one, and find it with ease in a new section of my inventory.

"When did they add a boosters section in the inventory?" I ask, looking around to everyone else. Will speaks before I have time to look in anybody's direction.

"They had an update last night while everybody was either at the gala or sleeping in their hotel room. They added the new inventory section, a PVP specific area, and a raid boss in the Everfree." I can feel my eyes gleam with excitement as Will mentions a raid boss being implemented into the game. Back when we couldn't afford the VR headset, not that any of the VR games back then were interesting, we would stay up nights at a time farming raid bosses in Borderlands and Eden Eternal, the aforementioned MMO in which Ed would hog all the items, for the rarest loot around. Those days were great.

"But," Will says, "our first priority is finding Steven." This cuts my nostalgia buzz as I realize how long finding Steven is gonna take. We'll be way too over leveled for the raid boss by the time we find Steven.

The train's whistle cuts our conversation short as I feel it's wheels comes to a stop. and the doors open to reveal the large stone door that leads to our info team's base of operations and the hub for anybody who normally stays in the Everfree. Will immediately walks over to Vax and catches up on the information they've received since Xavier's "suggestion". I say that with the biggest air quotes possible, as we all know Xavier was just messing with all of us when he said Despair was a straight up G.

I stop at one of the railing blocking off a small stage and watch as a couple of our spies get briefed on their next info snatching mission. Now that we know about the Neverland guild, we don't wanna take any chances. So we're sending in any thieves/spies on reconnaissance missions to see what they're preparing for or planning to do, if anything.

As I observe the group of players, one stands out among the rest. The only character in the group whose reached level fifteen, which gives you a class upgrade once you reach that level, who didn't upgrade to a spy stands at the back. I'm not sure if it's one of the dye packs, or he used the custom paint option and gave himself fur the color of, well, basically army camo. His shaggy brown hair seeming rather misplaced among the rest of his fur.

Besides the unusual choice of colors, the thing that really stands out is the fact that he's joking around with some other player to his left. As expected he gets called out by Black Star, who's giving the briefing, and I decide to butt in.

"Hold up B.S," I say, calling Black Star by his entertaining nickname "I'll take him off of your hands for a bit." B.S. just gives me a confused glance, before tossing his hand in the thief's direction.

"You want this guy? By all means take him. I don't think I could hear another bad pun without having to snap something in half."

I wave the thief over to me, and look at his name tag before having to deal with Will's skepticism about if we should bring him.



Incognito
Thief: LVL 15
HP: 2,347/2,347
MP:476
Clelestial Crusaders



No doubt Will's gonna think a thief who has a higher level than all of us would be a good idea. I turn and walk towards Will, with Incognito following in suite, and tap his shoulder to get his attention.

"Ya think adding this guy to our group for the time being would be beneficial?" I point my thumb behind me to Incognito once Will turns around. He moves his head so he can see Incognito clearly, and gives a whistle of amazement before nodding his head and sending Incognito and invite.

Within seconds his HP and MP are displayed under Tonya and I watch Xavier raise his eyebrows at the sudden new member in our party. He turns to us and I walk over to explain everything. Before I get my chance though, Will sends a message into the party chat telling us to regroup on him. I do as I'm told and listen intently as Will gives a briefing.

"As we know, an update went live while everybody was at the Gala or sleeping. One of the things added in the update was a PVP specific area, since this entire game is a PVE instance, save for the dungeons. This gives a considerable amount of XP for the victors. Which has gotten the attention of many players. Knowing Steven's tendencies when we played normal MMO games, he's gonna be there.

"All of us, save for Incognito over here, are going to go there and see if we can find Steven." Everybody's eyes shift to Incognito in confusion. We put him in the group for the specific task of helping us in this. "Incognito on the other hand," Will says, "will leave our group and go undercover into the Neverland guild."

Our stares concentrate on Incognito even more, knowing that he's probably gonna be going through hell just to help us learn more about the guild that could spring on us at any time. Will motions us to get up, which we do, and starts walking towards the train with us following behind to get to what has been dubbed "the Badlands."





As my shoe touches the compacted sand of the desert, I notice how much hotter this area is compared to the rest of the places we've seen. The temptation to remove my armor increases ten fold as I wait for everybody else to get off of the train.

"Damn," Will says as he puts his hand over his eyes to see more clearly, "it feels like we just stepped into an oven."

"Better than a meat locker." Xavier comments. I nod and turn as Will passes me and motions us to follow him.

Within seconds the PVP area comes into view, and I can see the outlines of two people clashing swords from inside a cage as Will stops us.

"Alright," He says as he turns around, "Incognito, leave the guild and see if you can find a member of Neverland. Jake, try to find a different member and see if you can analyze their fighting style. If they're being trained like a military then knowing how one fights could easily lead to an effective counter attack on an entire platoon. Xavier and Ed will go looking for Steven while I map out the battlefields. Apparently this place also has a guild war area and I intend to find it and figure out how it works."

Before I have time to respond, everybody has split up to do what they were told, and the notification of Incognito's temporary leave has passed through the guild chat, followed by a few members panicking as what I assume was their friend leaving the guild for an unknown reason.



DougDoll:Wait why did Incog just leave?
xXSwagster69Xx:I dnno lol #yoloblazetraitor
DougDoll:Why hasn't this guy been kicked from the guild?
xXSwagster69Xx:Cuz I rek noobz



I immediately regret my decision and pray that there's still hope for humanity.

Regardless of the brain cell killing guild chat, I scope out the crowd to see if there're any members of Neverland here, and see a large amount of them clumped around the entrance of the cage where the players fight. I look at the two fighters in the cage and witness as another member of Neverland flaunts his skills, easily overpowering his hunter opponent.

The Neverland member is a thief who has very good skill with his weapons. I watch as the thief flips away from his opponent, and rushes him again as he lands. He turns clockwise and swings his dagger at an angle where it will pierce his neck if he's caught off guard. The hunter raises his machete and his block his successful, albeit sloppy, and stumbles as the thief brings his off hand back and shoots it back immediately as a cestus appears on it. The cestus connects with the hunter's jaw and takes out what little health he has left, knocking him into the realism mode.

A large screen appears in the center of the cage and appears to be spinning.



Winner:Pyralis



I look at Pyralis and take note of his features. dark grey fur, red mane, sunglasses, looks like a strong silent type.

Before he has a chance to move out of the cage I raise my hand and shout.

"I challenge thee!" Pyralis looks at me, then to his friends, and back to me. He shrugs and says some unspoken command which his friends hear. They open the door to the cage and usher me in. As I walk into the cage a screen pops up.



Cage fight rules and regulations

Don't leave the cage until a winner is decided
Fight goes until the timer is up or until one of the fighters enters realistic mode
Crisis skills are prohibited
So are healing and mana potions
God I hate lists
And irony
Shut up I'm getting paid minimum wage for this job
place bet:

000000000





I decide to put one hundred bits in favor of Pyralis, since I know I'm just here to observe fighting styles.

A countdown pops up in the center of the stage, counting down from ten, as Pyralis and I get into the closest thing to a fighting stance that either of us can make with our lack of experience.

As the timer reaches zero, I tighten my grip on my shield while Pyralis charges me. The same words I heard at the gala flood my ears as Pyralis shouts them.

"Four" I watch as his dagger lights up in an orange hue, rather than a purple one, and take a precautionary step to the left so his dagger flies past me rather than hitting my shield.

Seeing an opening, I remove my shield for just long enough to thrust my sword into the side of his torso. As the blade makes contact with his torso he is knocked away from me, but quickly catches enough traction to come back at me once he lands. Rather than speaking some form of number lingo he just swings his dagger with amazing speed, and I struggle to move my shield in the right position so that I'm using up as little mana as possible with each hit.

"Reflect." I activate one of the newer skills that I'd gotten during our grind to the proper level for the next major dungeon. Wherever it may be.

As the skill's description had said, once Pyralis hit my shield with his dagger, using it to try and stab my neck for a critical this time, my shield lets out a blinding flash and he's is forced into a defenseless state.

As he stumbles backwards, I use the other skill I'd learned over the previous month: parry. Basically parry deals damage double that of what the attacker's previous attack would have done. Normally it would be a counter on it's own, but when combined with reflect it does even more damage.

The big white 1,000 appears above his head is more than enough proof of that as a critical hit appears below it. Pyralis falls on his back and does a sweeping kick as he gets up. He hits my ankles, which trips me up, and is in a stance to hit me before I even hit the ground. He reels his off hand back and balls it into a fist, spawning the cestus. He hits me in the chest, propelling me as I hit the ground fast than I would've.

I don't have time to get up before he places himself on my stomach and punches me in the face repeatedly, chipping away a my health as he goes. By the time I'm close to entering realism mode, my face has gone numb to the point where I can hardly feel his fist.

He reels his fist back and hits my nose bridge this time, putting me into realism mode, and steps off of me. I get up as the spinning screen declaring Pyralis' victory appears above us. He pats my back and helps me walk out of the cage, since I've begun fading out of consciousness now that I'm in realism mode. Once we're out of the cage Xavier and Tonya are there to get me to Will so he can tend to my wounds.

"That's one brutal way of winning." Xavier says with a grimace. Tonya just nods and begins scanning the crowd for Will, who's standing in front of an open field. I hear Ed call out his name and watch as he turns to look to his left. I look as well to see Ed pointing to me. Will turns, sees me, and starts running to me. He frantically casts one of his healing spells on me, and within seconds I feel renewed.

I get my arms off of Xavier and Tonya's shoulders as Will and Ed reach us. By the looks of things Will found the war zone and Ed didn't find Steven.

"Dear god what happened to you Jake?" Will asks

"The fight didn't end too well. my opponent went with a 'punch you in the face until I win' strategy."

Ed whistles and points to something on my cheek. Before I get time to check my face, a figure catches my attention. I can't distinguish any features, since he's wearing a cloak, but I can tell he's been watching us.

"Who's that?" Everybody looks to where the person is. Will grabs his mace, ready to unholster it in case he would need to fight. He begins walking slowly towards the figure, but to no avail as they back away at the same pace.

Getting a bright idea, I make a beeline for him, pushing Ed and Will out of the way in the process. The cloaked figure sees me, and darts into the crowd behind him, while I just keep sprinting. I just need to keep running. If I keep running I can reach him. He's in a crowd, it'll be harder for him to move as fast as I am.

When I reach the crowd, I try to push past as many others as I can. Thankfully the majority of people are just NPCs here to bet if the bidding is too low, So I don't get too much flak from them. I see the cloaked figure, and am close enough to see his username. But there's a player blocking me from seeing the full thing, only the last three letters.



ven



When the player passes, the only thing remaining is a cloud of smoke where the person was. I stop where I am as a thought enters my mind. Ven... the last three letters of Steven's name. That was Steven, and I just let him get away.

I sit down on the sand as the realization sinks in. I could have gotten to him, I could have brought him back. I grab a handful of sand and watch it slowly slip through my fingers, making a small sand cloud as it falls and settles somewhere else.

A message pops up in front of me, and I open it hesitantly.



Come on back to the train quickly. It's about to leave, and the next one won't come for an hour or so. I saw his name too
-Will



I get up and trudge back to the train. Steven didn't want to be caught; that's the only thing running through my head. If Steven didn't want to be caught, then that means he's given up on us. He either hates us or can't be around us. As the thought sinks in and I step on the train, my eyes get blurry with tears. As I sit down Will notices the tears streaming down from my face as my breathing gets shaky.

"Oi Jake what's wrong?" Will sits down next to me.

"Steven ran from us. I don't think he wants to even see us anymore." Will takes a second to contemplate this before answering.

"He ran because he thought Ed's words still stood true. He probably just thought that we were going to harm him."

"I doubt he thinks that. He probably hates us. I think we should just stop looking for-"

"Dammit Jake!" Will grabs the collar of my armor and pulls me close to him. "We will find him. It doesn't matter if he hates us anymore. We're a god damned team, and we will bring Steven back." He releases his grip on me, and leans back on the chair.

"It's okay to be sad Jake," Will stares at the ground as he speaks his favorite quote. "it's okay to be angry, or scared, or even hurting. But no matter what, it is not okay to just give up hope. If you lose hope in yourself, then have hope in others."

I wipe my eyes as everybody else gets on the train, and start thinking about what Will said. I've heard him say it a million times, but this time it feels genuine. As if something just clicked in me when he said that.

If you lose hope in yourself, then have hope in others.
> Initiation- Neverland: part 1
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Hey Steven, time to get up." The sound of my roommate, which I've been forced to stay with until today, calling my name wakes me from my slumber. I sit up from my bed and rub the sleep from my eyes. The mirror across from me showing how unkempt my hair is along with my username and whatnot.



Steven
Beast Tamer: LVL 14
HP:2,463/2,463
MP:420/420
Guild: Neverland



I look to my left and jump as the lime green face of Anita, my roommate, fills my vision. She laughs, then snorts, then gives the same glare she always does after I hear her snort-laugh. I wave it off, knowing how gullible she is, and equip my normal attire before getting out of bed. Looking at Anita's full body, With her long blonde hair and cloth attire that come standard with melee DPS classes, and that threateningly large dagger sheathed on her back at an angle so that she can easily take it out with her dominant hand whenever the urge strikes her, and I mean urge; too many times has she used that dagger to threaten me.

Anita looks at me expectantly, and I sigh as I open my menu and activate my new pet: a vampire fruit bat. When I had found it last week on my way out of the gala, I knew I had to capture it and turn it into my pet, which I did. She smiles warmly before walking up to my bat and scratching behind it's ear lovingly.

"Who's a good bat? I know you would rather be with me wouldn't you?" As usual, the daily indirect degrading of my skill as a player before heading out the door for whatever placement trial she's accepted for the day. For some reason the Neverland guild has these placement things to help better decide what kind of group a player should be in. I'm not too sure why they do it, since they're not building a military. But it's probably just for order or something.

"Y'know today is placement day." She says, looking back to me. My eyes go wide before I rush out the door to the town hall where they're hosting placement day. Basically placement day is the day that me and Tonya get a bigger apartment, alongside getting two other roommates. We're supposed to become a squad and are to be tested while the guild leader, Pyralis, watches from above. If we're deemed unfit then we all leave the guild and are forced out of Appleloosa.





"Oh my god Steven for the last time, go up and help with Anita!" Our designated field operator, by the name of Gearbox, screams into the group chat as I hang back and try to regain health. Luckily my vampire fruit bat has the ability to drain health from enemies so the wait is cut short.

I jump back into the fray as Incognito stuns the skeleton boss we've been fighting for a few minutes, while Anita appears from the bushes behind it and summons three kunai into her hand. As she throws them, an electrical bullet flies through the air and hits the skeleton right on the head, stunning it just before I'm in range to activate my crisis skill.

"Death mark." I run my sword through the skeleton's rib cage and leave it there as it drains health from the enemy and applies a major debuff to it. Alongside losing half of your health, Death mark gives the victim a special effect that doubles any damage they receive from anybody other than the person who used death mark on the enemy. As I pull my sword out from the skeleton, Anita hits it with one final blow to the skull, dealing triple damage since she combined my death mark with a critical hit.

"All right," Gearbox exclaims as he gets up from the bush he was hiding in behind us, "that's the last enemy, and we ran through this dungeon a full minute faster than last time!" I hear Anita howl (She does that for some reason) as a message appears in the guild chat.



Pyralis:Attention initiates, the time has come for your final test. Please gather at the entrance to the Appleloosan woods dungeon in five minutes. Anybody who comes in late will only have half the time to complete the dungeon, so hurry up.



I look at the others, who're reading the message themselves. Incognito is wearing a basic cloth vest, fitting well with his camouflage fur and brown hair somehow, with his dual daggers sheathed around his waist. Gearbox, on the other hand, has a pair of glasses on his eyes, whether or not its just aesthetic I can't tell, with a dark blue full latex suit with pads on his shoulder.

Once they finish reading the message, Gearbox points his thumb towards the exit behind him.

"We might as well get out of here before the others get here, don't wanna be late." We all nod and head out of the exit, leaving the majority of our loot drops on the floor as we enter the semi-barren sands of the mild west.





I stand in a straight line, shoulder-to-shoulder with Anita and Incognito, as Pyralis gives the basic instructions on how this test goes.

"You will invite into your party so that I may hear the party chat," he says as he walks around ahead of the first group, "and you will have to run through this dungeon in less than ten minutes. If you've been training and learning the routes of this dungeon, that should be no problem for you, as I've beaten this dungeon solo in eight minutes. I will be entering the dungeon with you, but won't be attacking any enemies that are there, even if I aggro one; I'm only there to see how well you guys work together, so if I'm forced into realism mode it's immediate failure for the entire team.

"Should you fail, Kenny and I will personally walk you out of the dungeon and give you a half hour to pack your stuff and leave." Kenny is Pyralis' right hand man, so to speak, as he always seems to follow Pyralis around when he's out in public. "Now then, with that said, let the initiation begin." A cheer erupts from the crowd of veterans that surround us, as the initiation test is usually the most exciting thing that happens around here. I watch as the first group, which is around five groups ahead of us, invites Pyralis into their party and enters the dungeon.





As the group ahead of us exits the dungeon, a smile on their face as Pyralis announces their victories, I begin to sweat as anxiety fills my head. The thought of failure has been in the back of my head all day, and as Pyralis walks up to Gearbox, our designated group leader, the thought forces itself to the front of my head. I begin finding it hard to breathe until Incognito puts his hand on my shoulder and calms me down a bit.

Pyralis' stats appear in the party menu, and we're ushered into the dungeon. Thankfully the paths and enemies in the dungeon are still fresh in my mind from the earlier raid. As we enter, we take a left and Gearbox gets down on his stomach at the opening of a large circular room, and Pyralis positions himself next to him as Anita, Incognito, and I cautiously walk into the center. I summon my vampire fruit bat and draw my sword as the enemies spawn. The random spawn system this dungeon has makes predicting the enemy types a bit of a challenge, but thankfully the game decides to be nice and only spawns around five spiders.

As they circle around us, slowly advancing as they do, I wait for the signal for us to attack the mobs around us. I hear the familiar sound of Gearbox firing a shot at the spider closest to him, and promptly attack the two that are in front of me. The first spider falls without a problem, just a simple slash and a critical strike from my bat are all it takes, but the second spider leaps at me. I duck under it as Anita's kunai hit it from the side. I finish it off with a simple stab at it's abdomen, and it fades as it curls up into it's death pose.

I hear Pyralis mumble something in the group chat, before Gearbox walks up to us and signals for us to advance. That fight only took us around ten seconds, so we still have more than nine minutes to finish.

We quickly advance through the next few areas, before the mini-boss that's always given us trouble spawns. Gearbox gets on one knee to aim, and promptly fires a stun round into the naga's chest. I quickly advance, being the pseudo tank of our group, and hit the snake-human hybrid with a skill I'd learned over the course of the week I've spent in Neverland: Flurry. I was told that, as a rather strange class, the beast tamer class type can learn certain moves from melee DPS (thief, spy, etc.) and tank (warrior, royal guard etc.) class types. Using this info, I've managed to spec my character out with the right points to have a good amount of both speed for my melee DPS, and my tank attacks.

As was told in the skill's description, my arm seems to have a mind of it's own as I hit the mini-boss, a giant rat, with roughly twenty hits; a lucky strike for this move, since it normally only does ten to fifteen hits. The monster is stunned as he staggers back and is hit by four of Anita's kunai, before Incognito appears from behind the rat- he was using his cloak skill- and hits the enemy with a critical back stab that takes out roughly half of the rat's health. Gearbox's gun fires and the rest of the rat's health drains as the shot, which I'd imagine was his crisis skill since his health somehow drained to single digits, goes straight through the rat's head.

"Jesus," I say as Gearbox takes a health potion out of his inventory and heals himself. "How did your health get so low?" Gearbox just looks at me with the same deadpan stare and brings his finger up as if he's going to prove a point.

"Something I crafted. For one time only, the user brings his health down to one and can use his crisis skill as soon as the effect takes place. High risk, high reward." The crisis skill in question Gearbox dubbed Kill shot. It supposedly fires a bullet that takes out half of the enemy's current health, and can take off a limb for an hour. If the shot hits you in the head however, that's it. Game over.

I shrug, and turn around to rush into the next room, which is filled with armored bison. Anita quickly rushes forward and uses some form of dash attack to knock the nearest bison back as Incognito erupts in a plume of smoke behind me. I hear Gearbox's gun go off, and I notice a bison that's been stunned. I rush towards it and hit it with my flair attack, stunning the bison and giving me enough time to charge up one of the few skills that's specific to the beast tamer: capture. Capture is a pretty self explanatory skill; it allows me to capture any animal-type mob to become my companion in the same fashion as my fruit bat has.

The bison disappears in a red mist that begins swirling in the air, as the three second countdown to see if the capture was successful begins. I hold my breath as the countdown screen disappears. A screen pops up towards my chest, and I look down to see the results of my capture.



Capture Successful; Bison has been caught.



I pump my fist in the air to celebrate as another bison hits me in the side, knocking me over. I guess I forgot that we were in a fight... oops.

I get back up and summon my new bison as the bison that charged me begins a charge attack. I watch as a blue mist appears to my right and quickly becomes my new pet. I run towards the enemy bison, and stop as it begins charging at me. I take a quick look at my pet's skills, and shout the one that sounds most useful.

"Rush." My bison comes into view almost immediately as he tackles the enemy bison. I watch as my pet digs his left fore-hoof into the ground and lowers his head. I decide that its a good idea to jump on it's back just before it charges. As my bison charges at the enemy bison I take note of my health; which is in the red zone. I activate Death Mark once my bison gets closer to the enemy. I leap off of my pet's back, flying towards the enemy bison at a quicker pace. My blade goes through the bison's armor and straight into it's back. The telltale skull appears over it's head, showing that the death mark landed, and jump away as my bison rams it's horns into the weakened enemy bison, finishing it off.

I look to the others, who've just finished off their bison, as Gearbox speaks into the group chat.

"Alright, the final boss is in the next room, we have about five minutes left, so we'll take a one minute break since we usually only take three to kill the boss. Since Steven just got a powerhouse type pet, we should be even better equipped to fight this boss."





We open the door to the boss room, and I watch as the skeleton we had fought roughly and hour ago appear in front of us. I quickly run towards it, activating Gearbox's Tide changer item. I watch as my health runs down to one, and rush the boss alongside my new pet bison. I successfully implant a death mark on the skeleton, and jump out of the way as my bison rams it, knocking out about 1,000 point of it's health.

I equip a health potion as Anita throws a pair of kunai at the skeleton's ribcage, and Incognito appears in front of it as he uses a sneak attack on it as Anita's kunai strikes it. Gearbox shoots the skeleton in the head, stunning it, and I rush back towards the skeleton alongside my bison. I manage to get around ten hits using my flurry attack, and dodge the skeleton's next hit by jumping around him to his back. I get a critical backslash attack (self explanatory) as my bison rams the skeleton into my blade even more.

Anita appears behind me in a cloud of smoke, and I roll to the right as she uses her backslash attack on the monster. Gearbox gets another successful head shot, and I watch his health drop to one again. The next thing that he does surprises me.

Rather than using his kill shot to end the fight, Gearbox uses it to take off the skeleton's main hand. The arm, alongside the broadsword it was holding, fall to the floor before evaporating into the air. I quickly dash over to the skeleton, and I was about to hit him with another flurry attack until I noticed something weird. The skeleton's head, just the head and nothing else, turns to me. I watch as flames begin to build up in his mouth as a wide red line emanates from it's mouth. The line goes through me, but doesn't do any damage. Which would mean that it's a warning. I duck under the line as the skeleton shoot flames at me. Narrowly dodging it, I charge at it again. I notice it charging the same attack again- it probably can't use any other move since we cut off it's arm- I promptly hop to the right, but the skeleton moves it's head to face me again as it shoots the flames. I didn't have time to dodge this one, and the force knocks me onto the floor.

When I get up, I notice that the notification telling me that I'm in realism mode appears. But that can't be, I was at full health. Is this what that red line was warning me about? Do bosses now have some kind of one-hit-kill type attack? If so then they're really trying to make it hard for us to beat this game.

I grab a health potion, and watch as my bison distracts the skeleton while Anita pelts it with kunai and a few flurry attacks every now and then. Getting an idea, I rush back into the fray even though my health has only regenerated to a quarter of it's maximum. I hear Gearbox yell at me to let myself heal first, but I'm not worried.

The skeleton charges up his fire attack again. If it is a one-hit-kill then it shouldn't kill me unless I'm already in realism mode. As the skeleton shoot it's flames, I bring my sword to my chest and activate my reflect ability. I hear Pyralis make some kind of surprised grunt as the flames bounce back and stun the skeleton. I combine it with my parry attack and the skeleton's health shoots down. The parry skill becomes more powerful when a stronger attack is countered with reflect. As I thought, the one-hit-kill attack deals massive damage even to the caster.

Anita hits the skeleton with one more round of kunai, and the skeleton disperses in an orange mist, as the congratulations screen pops up in front of us. I look at my loot, and notice that I'd gotten a legendary item. My eyes widen, until I see that it's an engineer specific weapon.

"Dammit!" I shout, causing everybody in the dungeon to look at me. Rather than explain, I send Gearbox a trade request. With a sigh, I give him the weapon and close the trade menu.

"Well," Pyralis says, "you guys weren't exactly the fastest team, but I'd say you guys did good enough for us to allow you into the guild." We all cheer, and step out of the dungeon with a smile on our face and legendary loot in Gearbox's hands.





After the festivities, we were all assigned new houses that could fit all four of us in one room. I flop onto the couch that came with the house, and put all the items I won't need until tomorrow into my inventory. As the rest of our group gets into the room, I notice a troubled look on Gearbox's face.

"Hey Gearbox, what's up?"

"Nothing Steven, it's just that something feels rigged about that entry exam. We shouldn't have made it."

"Well aren't you a ray of sunshine right now?" Anita says, butting into the conversation.

"I mean we spent twelve minutes in that dungeon. The maximum amount of time we were allotted was ten." Hearing this news, Anita sits down on a chair adjacent to the coffee table. She puts a troubled look on her face I never thought I'd see somebody as cruel as her have.

"Pyralis," She says with a sigh, "Pyralis has had a rough life, and I may be the reason we're still in this guild."

"What does that mean?" Gearbox asks.

"Before this game, Pyralis's life was a bit of a hellhole, and I was the one thing that kept him from suicide."
> Meeting- chase: part 2
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Damn," Xavier said, holding a flashlight on to his skin and watching as red circles appear on him, "for a household appliance, this thing is one helluva bitch maker."

Will turns away from the mirror and gives me a quizzical glance. I shrug in response and Look at Ed, who's still waking up. I watch as he runs his hand through his hair in an attempt to comb it, and makes smacking sounds with his mouth.

Xavier, on the other hand, has finally put the flashlight down and is now poking the red circles around his arm.

"Dude," I ask him, "what are you doing?"

"I already told you, or at least showed you: I'm experimenting with my new bitch maker."

"And why do you need a 'bitch maker'?" As I move out from under my sheets and rest my feet on the floor, Ed shouts and I look over to see him putting a hand over his left foot (or hoof) in pain. Soon enough the sound of Will giggling draws my attention.

"Man," he says, "if I'd done that a week ago you would've killed me."

"Yeah well the fact that you did it now just gave me the thought." Ed retorts, glaring daggers at Will.

"Oh you're fine. It's not like you took damage from a harmless prank in the safe zone of a PVE server."

"Oh yeah, my shout of pain was strictly from surprise." Ed rolls his eyes and picks up the tacks that he'd stepped on and begins flinging them towards Will, who gets hit by one and give a little shout.

"Yep, those definitely hurt." Will grabs the arm that was hit by the tack's blade and winces.

"Exactly."








We open the doors to the old castle and the sight of the aftereffects of last night's celebration being cleaned up fills my vision. We'd just figured out last night where Neverland's base was, so we decided a celebration was necessary. Surprisingly, Xavier and Tonya were able to keep their shirts on long enough for us to get them out of public eye, but it was a bit of a restless night for three hours afterwards.

Will walks over to what's been dubbed the "Strategy Table", even though it's just a round table with bar stools, and motions us over.

"Alright," he says, "thanks to Incognito going Incognito over at Neverland's base, we found out that they're all camped out in Appleloosa."

"So what? You wanna stage a raid?" I respond, "Wouldn't that be a bit too much for a guild that hasn't done any-,"

"No Jake, I'm an idiot not heartless. What I'm proposing is that, since there are five of us, two people can go to Appleloosa in an attempt to bring Steven back, while the other three check out the dungeons that were announced in last night's patch to see if any of them are the major dungeon we've been searching for." The instant Will stops talking, Ed shoots his hand up.

"I should be one of the people to go over and see Steven. It's my fault he left in the first place, so it only seems right that I go." After hearing this, Will nods his head.

"Jake, you wouldn't mind going with him in case you two are discovered before you make it over there would ya?"

"Nah, I tried to keep Steven in the group when he tried to jump off the train, so I suppose it'd help if I was there."

"Good, you two should move out immediately, while the rest of us will go and check out the possible locations for the major dungeon. We'll all meet back here in two hours. The train's gonna leave this station in a few minutes so you two better get going now."








I grab another doughnut from the food tray I snagged from the dining car earlier and offer it to Ed, who shakes his head. I shrug and bring the doughnut back to me before taking a bite and promptly spitting it out. Of all the flavors, I had to grab the damn jelly-filled one.

"Son of a bitch I got it all over the carpet." I say, bolting upwards and quickly searching for a napkin of some kind. I open my inventory and settle for using a piece of cloth armor, since I won't be using it, and quickly wipe up the mess, before trashing the now dirtied item. Once I sit back down, I notice Ed's nervous appearance.

"Hey Ed, what's wrong?" Ed sighs in response, his breath shaky, and he speaks for the first time since we got on the train.

"Steven's probably gonna be pissed the moment he sees me. Either that, or he's gonna run away and make me feel even worse. I can't see any way that this is gonna end happily. There's no way Steven's just going to accept my apology and come back to the guild with us." I look at him, a bit more seriously now, and sit upwards before putting my hand on his shoulder.

"I know Steven won't just openly accept your apology, he'll completely reject it if anything, but there's no way he'll think that your apology wasn't wholehearted. He'll know for a fact that you just got caught up in the moment, and that you wish you'd never even called him to that room. It'll take some time, but I know that he'll eventually come back to us." Ed eases up a bit, and looks up at me.

"It's not whether or not he'll accept my apology that worries me, it's how he'll react when he sees me. If it weren't for me, he'd still be in this group." Ed's eyes begin to tear up and he begins to choke on his words. "If it weren't for me screwing up and getting within range of Nightmare Moon, Matt might've had the support he needed to still be alive today." After hearing this, I grip his shoulder a bit tighter and look directly into his eyes.

"Matt's death wasn't your fault. Just like it wasn't Steven's. Matt died trying to protect us. You remember Will's favorite saying right?" Ed nod his head before wiping the tears from his face. "'If you lose hope in yourself, then have hope in others.' As much as I don't want it to be true, I think Matt lost hope in himself. He wasn't very talkative since the moment we found out we were trapped here. When I bumped into him while we were fighting that dragon, I noticed something besides the smile he gave me. I don't know why I didn't realize why, but Matt was crying during that fight." I notice Ed's eyes widen, and he looks up at me with a questioning glance.

"So, he had accepted his death from the beginning huh?"

"Unfortunately." I release my grip on Ed, and lean back in my chair. "It seems that hope is all we have these days, and Matt may have lost his." Ed nods his head before lowering it again, and he begins to sink back in his chair.

"I'm gonna try to get what sleep I missed out on thanks to Xavier last night." I nod, and grab another doughnut before looking out the window, watching what few things the desert has to present pass by.








"Well, here we are." I stare at the thicket of apple trees ahead of us as Ed wipes the sleep fro
m his eyes. "The Appleloosan woods. Once we cross through here, all we need to do is find Steven." Ed removes his hand from his eyes, looking up at the forest's entrance. I see a bit of doubt cross his face, but he quickly puts on a smile and begins walking towards the woods.

"C'mon, I wanna find Steven as soon as possible." I nod and follow behind him as he draws his bow, probably in case we run into trouble on our way. I look around at the apples growing on the trees as we enter the forest. It's rather unusual that apples are growing when it's supposed to be winter, but I guess you'd need some form of food right?

Ed and I look around us at the sights of the forest. After seeing so much sand and cacti it really is nice to see some trees for once. I grab one of the lower down apples from a tree to my left and take a bite. Ed hears me and turns around to see the apple in my hand.

"Where did you get that?" Rather than answer him, I just point upwards to the trees above us.

"Oh, right." Ed shakes his head and keeps moving forward.

Soon enough, we come across a cave with the look of a dungeon entrance. I walk up to it, but before I can press the button I notice the usual flash the indicates somebody about to leave the dungeon. I duck behind the bushes where Ed is hiding and watch as a group of four come out of the cave. The first two, a lime green thief with blonde hair and a tan engineer with black hair wearing a full body latex suit. I didn't know they had fetish clothing in this game, but it isn't entirely surprising since Xavier was able to craft condoms.

The two in back however, are Steven and Incognito. I turn away from the group and bring up my message board. I quickly type in a message to Incognito, telling him where we are, and send it off. Within a few seconds Incognito notices the message notification.

"Hold up guys," he says as he opens the message and reads it. "somebody just sent me a message."

"Aww, does somebody have a girlfriend?" The blonde haired one asks before giving a little giggle, followed by a snort.

"Not yet. But if you want me all ya have to do is ask." He winks back at the blonde one, who rolls her eyes.

"Please, I'd date a bison before I'd even think about asking you out."

"Well Steven has a bison. Care to make that a fact?"

"Go fuck yourself."

"Already did." 

"Whatever, I'm gonna go talk to Pyralis."

"I'll join you." The guy in the blue fetish suit follows behind the blonde-haired one, and Incognito turns to Steven once they're out of eyesight.

"Hey Steven, can we talk for a second." Steven gives him a looks at him quizzically before responding.

"Umm, sure?"

"Alright guys, come out." 

We get up from our spot in the bushes as Steven turns his head to us. When he sees us he turns to run, but Incognito grabs his arm to keep him rooted in place. I watch as Steven struggles against his grasp and look to Ed, remembering the conversation on the train. His head is hanging in an attempt to hide the tears that are starting to come from his eyes. I grab his shoulder until he looks at me, and give him the best attempt at a reassuring look I can give right now. He smiles, wipes the tears from his eyes, and looks back at Steven.

"Listen Steven," He says, "I just want to say I'm sorry about what I made you do. I know you probably don't want to see me, hell you probably never wanted to see me since the gala, but I need you to know  that I was in a dark place and have been since Matt died." Steven stops struggling, and looks back at us. His fearful face replaced with a small grin.

"I'm glad to know that you're sorry for what you did." He sits down on the ground. "But if you wanted to bring me back to the guild, I wont be joining you." Ed's expression changes to one of shock, before he responds with a shaky voice.

"Why not? The guild you're in right now isn't much better."

"I'm here because it's where I need to be right now. When I joined this guild, I was told that I could become stronger. Until I am, I won't leave."

"Why would you need to be stronger? Right now you're a higher level than most of our guild members."

"I don't want to be stronger physically. I want to be stronger mentally, so that things like what happened with Matt don't happen again. I don't think I could live with myself if another one of my friends die. So I'm staying here until I can readily throw myself into danger as fearlessly as Jake here." Ed wipes some of the tears that are starting to leak out of his eyes.

"Do you know what they're doing in this guild?" Ed's voice takes on a more menacing tone. "They're killing players and recruiting others for war! They want to eradicate the Celestial Crusaders, us, just so that they can stay in this god forsaken game!" Steven looks at him with a questioning glance, before leaning back and laying down on the floor.

"Doubt it, so far the only thing that's happened around here is the celebration for a whole new group of new guys. Besides, if they wanted to assault you guys, they would've already done it. You remember the fight Jake and Pyralis had in the badlands?"

"So you were there!"

"Yeah, I was. Jake even chased me for a bit. But that's besides the point." he leans back up and stares Ed straight in the eyes. "I'm not leaving this guild until I get stronger. But if you are right, and Pyralis is secretly planning for war, then I'll leave the minute I find proof. Otherwise, I'm staying right where I am." 

Ed balls up his hands, rage clearly getting the better of him. I try to grab him before he does something, but I'm too late. A fist flies at Steven, and hits him directly in the jaw. Steven looks at Ed in shock, and gets up before opening his menu.

"Alright," he says, "if a fight's what you want, I'll gladly oblige. Hell, I'll even come back to you guys if you win." Ed draws his bow, standing rigid as he waits for the duel invitation.

"But," Steven continues as the duel request is sent and Ed hits the accept button. "If you lose, I never want to see your damned face ever again." Hearing his own words from the gala reiterated and used against him, I notice Ed's demeanor changes dramatically. He goes from anger, to despair, before dawning a rather focused stance as the countdown for the duel begins.



Three...



Incognito and I back away and sit behind the bush again, watching and hoping that nothing too bad will come from this.



Two...



The tension in the air rises as Ed loads his arrow and aims for Steven's knee. Steven takes notice, and prepares to roll out of the way of the arrow. I watch as they poise for an all out battle between former friends.



One...


> The fight- Neverland: part 2
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"If you lose," I say as I watch the timer count down the few seconds left before Ed and I duel. "I never want to see your damned face ever again." Ed's reaction is immediate as his anger turns to sadness for a second, but quickly fades as the timer reaches zero.



FIGHT!



Ed looses the arrow, and it flies straight at me. I flap my wings swiftly and fly upwards, dodging it. I rush straight at Ed, who's prepared another arrow, and ground myself right in front of him. With a swift turn, I swing my blade towards his neck. He leaps backwards and shoots his arrow towards me. I roll under it and begin advancing on Ed again.

Ed pulls out a small knife in anticipation and waits for me to get close enough for him to use it. Rather than rush at him, I take a step to my left and start up my flurry skill. Before I can actually activate it, Ed chucks his knife my way. The blade sticks into my leg, reducing my speed, and readies an arrow. I manage to get to him before he can loose it and activate my flurry attack. The attack only hits ten times, the minimum amount, but I'm able to knock Ed back a bit, and step towards him again before he can recompose himself. I slash his chest, watching as the small -20 appears above his head, and begin to follow up with a stab towards his neck. Before my blade reaches him, he falls down onto the ground. One of the worst moves anybody could do.

I take a quick second to retract my arm and prepare to attack him with another flurry attack, but a pain shoots through my stomach. Looking down, I see an arrow stuck in my stomach with a string attached to the other end. Ed yanks the string, pulling me towards him. He brings up his left foot, which I land on, before kicking me away.

I land on my back roughly three feet away, and we both sprawl to our legs before continuing our fight. As I get up I notice an arrow flying towards my leg. I attempt to dodge it, but it hits me anyways. I watch as the arrow evaporates, leaving behind an immobilized status. I watch on as Ed prepares three arrows and looses them towards me. Once all three hit me, my immobilized status wears off and I use my wings to fly up just a bit before rushing at him.

Waiting for just the right moment, I draw back my sword and wait for him to loose an arrow while I rush at him. Within a few seconds he does just that. As the arrows fly though the air, I immediately retract my wings and slide on the ground. I slide directly under his arrows, and stop right in front of him. I slash my sword diagonally across his chest and prepare another of the attack I'd learned since I joined Neverland




Opportunity

Strike an enemy three times, dealing less damage with each hit. If the enemy is above 50% when the first attack hits, each attack does double damage. If the enemy is below 50% when the first attack hits, the third attack will inflict a bleeding effect.



Once Opportunity lands, Ed's health bar falls into the red zone. I watch as the bleed effect takes place before noticing a grin on Ed's face. Realizing what that grin meant, I take to the sky to increase my evasiveness. If his crisis skill is what I think it is, one hit could mean certain death. I watch as his arrows takes an exceptionally long time to generate, and he aims his bow straight above him.

Good news: he doesn't have kill shot. Bad news: I don't know what he has. Looking at my own health bar, I realize that Ed's arrows are much more damaging than I remember, as my health is just outside of the red zone.

Looking back at Ed, I notice that he'd already shot his arrow into the air. As soon as I look up, I realize what his crisis skill is, and swear under my breath.




Arrow Rain

Send a flurry of arrows into the air, and have them crash down on a wide area.



Realizing I probably have only a second to dodge them, I quickly rush towards Ed. I'm too late though, as four or five arrows hit me in the back. I flinch at each of them, giving Ed enough time to loose another arrow that hits my left wing. I scream as the pain shoots through me, and look at my health bar. I'm still alive, but I'm immobilized.

I start falling to the ground as Ed brings out his knife and runs towards me. A look of determination comes across my face as I grip my sword and wait for the immobility to wear off. The status effect wears off just as we get into each-others' range. I open my wings in an attempt to dodge him, and flap them as hard as I can. I lessen my momentum, but don't stop it fully as Ed's knife comes towards my stomach. I manage to use reflect as Ed's blade connects with mine, and a blinding light flashes as he stumbles backwards, and puts his hand over his eyes. I take advantage of this by using parry, and watch as my sword goes through his neck in a powerful stab.

Once the damage is dealt, Ed flies back as a message comes up in front of us both.



Winner: Steven!



Looking back at Ed's crumpled state, the realization of what had just happened washes over me. Both Jake and Incognito come out from the bushes and run over to him before helping him up. I look down at my hands as a single thought runs through my head over and over again.

I just beat one of my friends to a pulp.

As much as I shouldn't feel sorry for what I did, considering what Ed has done to me previously, I can't help but feel guilt consume me. Ed had tried to apologize to me, and I just attacked him. I ignored his apology like an asshole, and attacked him when he got angry with me.








"So, I overheard that one of your old friends came here. Is that correct?" Pyralis's voice breaks the silence as I sit in his office.

"Yes." I respond. I try not to sound like I was just crying, which I was for a bit, but my voice comes out extremely croaky. "They weren't here to start any conflict, the guy who made me leave the guild just came to apologize for what he did."

"And what did you say?"

"I told him 'I came here to become stronger, and I'm not leaving until it becomes true.'" As much as I tried to hide it, the words still come out laced with a small bit of venom. Pyralis notices this, but chooses to ignore it.

"I'm assuming that you feel you've become stronger, yeah?" I nod my head, the decision to secede from guilds altogether forming. "Alright. I'll inform your squad tomorrow, and you can leave as soon as you have all of your stuff packed."

A small grin forms on my face as I thank Pyralis and walk out of his office with confidence. Now that I'm free of any guild, I suppose I could become stronger on my own. I'm not yet ready to go back to my friends, especially since Ed's probably still pissed at me, but if what he said was true about this guild preparing for war, I don't want to have to fight him again.
> Raid- plague: part 1
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

I open the doors to the old castle and look around to see Will and Xavier standing next to a map they placed on a table, and watch as they use a marker to highlight certain areas as they chat.

"...and so, if we can just figure out what's in this middle section, we might be able to figure out an easy path to take." They're voices come into focus as I walk up to them, and I notice that the map they're marking away at is the map of Canterlot: what's probably the next major dungeon.

"Oh, hey Jake," Xavier looks up and waves to me, before giving a questioning glance as he looks around me. "where'd Ed go?" I look around and notice that Ed isn't with me. Come to think of it, he wasn't with me when we got off of the train either.

"Ahh balls," I say, pulling up my friends' list and looking for Ed. "He went back to Ponyville. He wasn't exactly feeling good after the, we'll say talk, he had with Steven." I turn my eyes away from them as I examine the map. The only areas that aren't just a shaded blob are the entrance to the dungeon, and the areas we discovered during the Gala. Which, compared to the big gray blob of undiscovered territory, isn't a whole lot.

"so," I say, trying to change the subject, "what info do we have on the enemy types?" Will doesn't miss a beat as he begins describing what enemies he was able to uncover.

"Changelings. Based on what bit of field experience we could gather they're extremely weak individually, but tend to stay in groups. They have a strong preference for ranged attacks, but they're melee attack seems to inflict some kind of status effect similar to that of a poison effect from Pokemon, where the effect doesn't go away, even after they leave the dungeon.

"Alongside this, as you can see by the map, the dungeon is pretty massive, so we're going to need to mount a large-scale offensive, roughly double that of what we did with the Everfree forest, and we'll have to go altogether instead of in groups. Our main source of damage is gonna come from magic and ranged D.P.S. classes, primarily they're A.O.E. attacks, and a lot of stun effects to keep our melee classes, which will need to focus on defense rather than offense, safe."

I nod repeatedly as Will explains every possible angle they have so far, and look down at the map again as he points to the chokepoints and potential safe areas he has marked with an X. He goes on about his plan so far, involving melee classes acting as more of a distraction than a source of damage dealing, and how any melee attack from the changelings could easily take somebody out of the fight.

"Alright!" Will finally claps his hands and looks toward me, "That's everything we were able to plan out from our short time in there. Our main goal for this raid isn't to complete it, though that would be nice. Our main goal is to figure out what's in the center, and to figure out where any bosses may be in that area, alongside the location of the dungeon's boss, which I'm guessing will be Chrysalis. I'll go get Ed. Jake and Xavier, you guys get the raid party ready and inform them of everything I just told you. We'll meet at the train station in front of the dungeon and divide the guild into our raid form there."

I nod, and turn back to call the rest of the guild to action. But Xavier gets to it first, unfortunately, and shouts at any guild members in earshot.

"Alright bum buddies! We got our raid party ready so let's go before Despair releases another bullshit update and screws us over."

"Bum buddies?" I look at Xavier and raise an eyebrow.

"I found a couple of them frick-fracking in the bathroom, and the nickname just kinda grew to include the entire guild." I shrug and go to repair my armor before the raid, and watch as Xavier begins to almost literally shove people onto the train.








I hear the train whistle blow, and look over to see Will, looking a bit more stressed, stepping off of the train alone.

"Where's-" I begin to say, until he brings a hand up to my face.

"-He's in pretty bad shape right now. We're gonna need somebody to go cheer him up once this is all through." He tromped over to the gates of the city, covered entirely by some kind of green barrier that's encasing the city, and he splits us all into groups.

Once we're all split up he addresses us all.

"Alright," he gives a slight groan before saying his next words disgustedly, "bum buddies, you've all been briefed on-"

"We were supposed to be briefed?" One of the archers raises his hand and shouts his question.

"Yes. You were. Did Xavier not tell you what you need to know?"

"I dunno, did we need to know his favorite position in bed?"

"No. You needed to know that melee characters will act as more of a distraction, and that you need to avoid being hit by the changeling's melee attacks at all costs."

"Oh. Then no, he didn't tell us that." Will looks at Xavier angrily, but he just shrugs and slowly scoots away from us and attempts to sneak into the crowd.

"Eh forget it. Let's just go." Will waves his hand as he turns around and enters the dungeon. I watch as he appears to evaporate once he enters the barrier, and I walk in after him.

Within seconds, almost the entire guild is through and I'm looking at a sea of changelings. Almost everything is covered in black, from the walls of buildings, to the road, and even the sky.

"You sure weren't lying about strength in numbers, huh?" I look over to Will as he sits down and begins calculating... something.

"Yeah, no shit. They can easily be killed with a one-shot though, so numbers are the only strength they have. You'll see when the fight begins."

"So, what are we waiting for?"

"Me to figure out a good starting strategy before we begin. All I can think of right now is to use the ranged classes to clear out an area that we can use to form a defensive circle and take out the next area. Yeah, that's what we'll do." He gets up and turns to the rest of the guild, calling them into order before telling each class where to stay. 

By the end of it, the defense classes have formed a defensive circle around the others. with a layer of pegasi behind us. Behind them lay the archers and mages, with the healers in the center. To be honest, if you looked at us from above we'd probably be the world's most boring kaleidoscope, but if it works, it works.

"Oi guys," Will raises his voice above the small whispers of the crowd, and signals to the ranged attackers to begin the fight, "Let's go."

Within seconds The area above my head is filled with arrows, bullets, and spells. They fly over towards a large group of changelings, and almost all of them die from the initial impact. Will was definitely right about they're lack of fighting ability, since some of the spells were seriously under leveled and dealt only 100 damage. The changelings fly in all directions, some of them comically smacking against buildings and other changelings, but the gap left is almost instantly filled back up as the changelings are drawn in by our aggro, and begin to come towards us. 

While our ranged attacks are doing a good job at swiftly killing most of them, we aren't killing enough to keep them entirely away from us, and I'm quickly doing my best to block the ranged attacks while either quickly jabbing or shield bashing any changelings that get too close. Another changeling, this one being covered with more armor than any of the others, comes my way, and I quickly stab it in the chest. He manages to survive this though, and even pushes into my blade menacingly while hissing.

I bash a few of the other changelings away before thrusting my knee into the changeling, forcing it off of my blade before a fireball whizzes past me and explodes in it's face, killing it for good. The next few changelings come at us, and I look down to my guild chat as a message from Will, telling us to push up whenever possible, distracts me briefly. Unfortunately, it's long enough for one of the changelings to slip past me and go after one of the people I'm supposed to be defending.

I try to ignore it and begin slowly moving forward, but eventually a large pang of guilt hits me as I hear Xavier let out a small yelp in pain. I can't look back to see if he was hit by one of the melee attacks, but I quickly try to keep the thought out of my head as another dozen changelings rush towards me.

I quickly activate Flair, it's surprising that that skill is still useful, and take the small amount of time to slash away at the stunned enemies in front of me. We're able to take small shuffle steps whenever any opening prevents itself, but the small ones that do don't last long enough for us to decide on if the risk is worth taking, and because of that the changelings manage to slip through every now and again, leading to more and more people in the center shouting as they're hit by one of them.

Thankfully, we manage to make it to the first safe zone without any casualties, but I hear Will give a groan as we all take a rest and check on our guild. He comes to me, sits down, and gives the hair on his head a hard tug as he gives a small shout.

"I can't get the exact numbers," he says, letting go of his hair and looking at me with a slightly depressed look. "but we have way too many people who've been hit by the melee attacks we stressed so hard to avoid. I got a message from the people who were monitoring the one guy who got hit by the melee effect during our scouting mission, and he's in pretty rough shape. He's been stuck in realism mode, with no way of getting him out, and he's been going in and out of blackouts and coughing his lungs up, blood and disturbing sounds included. So far it doesn't look like a major problem, but if it happens to the people who're with us right now, we'll be in a pit. our best bet right now is retreating and figuring out a new strategy. We didn't come prepared."

I perk my head up at this, and turn to him with a confused glance.

"But we came at this dungeon with every player we had available at the time. How could we do any better?" Will gives a large sigh and lays on his back before responding.

"We'll probably have to get some support from another guild, or maybe get better gear and try again. Since these dungeons have an unlimited player count, so long as you're in the same party or guild, we'll have to find the perfect balance between player count and enemy scaling to do  a proper raid."

I nod my head and disappointedly shuffle back towards the train. As people look at me with confusion, Will gets up and informs them that we're retreating. They follow in suite and begin walking back towards the train with me.








"Well, that could've gone better." Xavier sits down on the train's chair as Will closes our car's door and slowly places a tray on the table in between the two rows of train seats.

"It might have," He says as he flops onto his own seat. "but based on the way things were going, we couldn't take that risk. By the way, I saw you get hit by one of the changelings, so how're you doing?" Xavier just shrugs and takes a piece of Watermelon from the tray before he responds.

"I mean the bite area is still a bit numb but-"

"-You got bitten!?" Will and I bolt up and immediately start looking for any source of where the bite could've been.

"Yeah. I'll be fi-" Before Xavier can finish his sentence, he begins to cough heavily and falls to the floor in his coughing fit. Will  goes straight to the guild menu and looks at each guild member's statistics before slamming his fist on the ground as a bunch of health bars slowly drop from their full bar.

"Ah Jesus," He says, frustration and rage blanketing any other possible emotion he could be feeling right now. "we have about 300 people who are affected by this damn thing right now. How the hell did so many of them manage to punch through?"

I look to the floor as guilt begins to sink into me, and I'm stuck to doing nothing but watch as Xavier struggles to inhale due to his endless coughing.
> Making Amends- Steven: part 1
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

I stare up at the sky as the train begins to start moving behind me. The clouds are scattered around in curvy, wispy lines. Back in the real world staring up at the clouds was one of my favorite pastimes, but now it seems like a stupid idea.

I let out a long, shaky breath as I look around at the village ahead of me. The thatch roofed cottages that're painted in bright colors make this place seem almost welcoming, even though I'm probably about to get into a fight. If Will has heard anything about what happened between Ed and I, he'd slaughter me.

I begin walking towards the center of town with a bit less confidence now that I put hat thought in my head, and look around at the place. Every player in the village seems to be a lot more cheerful than when I was last here. Back then, most people where either panicking, too focused on survival to relax, or were grieving their losses. Now it seems like everybody has a friend or two, and are eagerly chatting away with them, laughing and chatting along. It reminds me of how life was before this game. Ed and I were inseparable back then. If there was something to do, we'd be doing it together. I can't help but wish those days could've lasted, but I messed it up for both of us when I let Matt die.

I ball my left hand up in a fist and try to focus on something besides the past. Eventually I see the bar we first went in to after everybody found out that we were trapped in this world. If Ed feels the same way I do about our fight this morning, that's where he'll be.

I take a second for my eyes to adjust to the lighting before I look around the bar. The first thing I notice is the huge difference in player attitude around the place. The area is filled with a bunch of people who're either dealing with an addiction, or trying to get over something that's depressed them. Almost everybody is hanging their head, staring at whatever table they're sitting on, or just trying to keep tears from streaming down their face as they try to force the image of lost loved ones out of their head.

The dim lighting and overpowering stench of alcohol almost makes me cough (I never was a fan of the stuff) as I start to look around at the name tags, until I find the person I'm looking for.

"I'm such a waste of space," I stand on the other side of the table that Ed's sitting at, and listen as he mumbles to himself. "How could I even hope to bring back my oldest friend if I'm too stupid to let him state his own thoughts. I'm not even worth his apology." He lifts his head and stares at his mug, not noticing me at all.

"Well," I say as I sit down across from him, "that's where you're wrong." He looks up at me in surprise, and almost sputters as he tries to make himself look presentable. I lift my hand and signal him to stop, which he does, and let out a small sigh. "I think we should apologize to each other. I didn't realize how much telling you I wanted to stay would hurt you. But the truth is, Neverland was actually a really nice guild. They helped me forget about how I let Matt d-"

"-you didn't let Matt die. Jake told me that he had accepted his death since the dragon fight. He just saw that everybody else was paralyzed, besides you, and decided to go out in what seemed like a blaze of glory, when it was really an assisted suicide." 

This time I'm the one looking at him in shock. This whole time, I've been thinking that Matt's death was my fault, when Matt was just going in with the plan to kill himself. I rest my head on my hand and let out a long sigh, both relief and a new sense of grief filling my soul.

"I still want to apologize for my unacceptable behavior in Appleloosa. I shouldn't have acted like such an asshole."

"No. You just told me that the members of Neverland treated you nicely. I was the one who lashed out at you. If it weren't for my stupidity, you'd still be with us, as a member of the Celestial Crusaders."

"If it weren't for your stupidity," I give him a small smile as I attempt to lighten the mood. "we wouldn't have become as close as we are." He gives a small chuckle as he recalls that day.

"Yeah, that Kool-Aid incident was probably the best time in home-ec. I've had." I let out a small laugh as well, remembering the practically sugar powder that was supposed to be our Kool-Aid pitcher after we just poured the majority of the bag of sugar in the pitcher to see what would happen.

"That was such a dumb idea." I look up at the ceiling, reminiscing on our times together. "Though I don't think any memory will beat the time when you took me to senior prom just to make me happy. You really made my year that night." Ed looks up at me with a large smile on his face and tears in his eyes, threatening to go down his face.

"Well, cheering me up at a time like this just returned the favor. Thank you." He reaches across the table to give me a hug. I pat his back as he begins sniffling over my shoulder, going entirely into a catharsis as he buries his face in my shoulder. I let out some tears too, but not nearly to the same amount as Ed, since most of my tears were shed the night he evicted me from the group.

Before we're able to let everything out, a small notification appears in front of Ed, and he tries to wipe away his tears as he opens up his menu and reads a message. His eyes go wide with fear, and he hurriedly gets up to go and run to wherever it is he needs to go.

"I gotta get back to Jake and all them." he starts to run out the door shouting back at me. "Let's finish this chat when I'm done."

I just sit there with a puzzled look, wondering what could be so urgent that it'd turn Ed from a sappy, crying mess into a person completely focused on something in a matter of seconds. My question is almost immediately answered as a message notification pops up in front of everybody. I open mine and begin reading. As I do though, my eyes go wide with the same fear that Ed probably has right now.



As some of you (namely the Celestial Crusaders) know, a recent plague status effect has been spread by the changelings in Canterlot, our newest major dungeon. As these people also know, the plague effect puts people into realism mode until the status effect expires. There's nothing you can do to heal it without the cure.

Now it would be too simple to assume the cure is at the end of the major dungeon, that is the structure of a game after all. You would be both correct and incorrect in thinking this. The cure will, in fact, be at the end of the major dungeon, but there's a catch. The cure will only appear in two days. Failure to finish the major dungeon in that day will result in the death of anybody and everybody who has the plague status effect. 

since it's only three hundred or so of you who're infected that may not be the biggest problem. At least, it wouldn't be if I hadn't decided to let some of the changeling swarms roam free in multiple areas. So, anybody who wants to go farming for loot, have fun with that risk.

-Despair, Don't shoot the messenger

P.S. The armored, more beefy changelings may or may not be able to attack people in safe zones. ;)



I quickly stumble out of the chair and run towards the train station, hoping to get to the old castle to make sure none of my friends are infected. Despair's cruel game has just taken an even bigger turn for the worst, and the only thought running through my head is whether or not I'll even be able to help, or if I'll just freeze up again when it really matters.
> Discussions- Steven: part 2
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

A small bit of doubt runs through my head as I hop off of the train and rush through the doors of the old castle. Once inside, I look around frantically for any familiar faces. I quickly find Will and Jake discussing something together, and begin running towards them.

Will notices me once my footsteps are within earshot and rests his head on his left hand as Jake turns around and looks at me. He gives me a questioning glance before shouting over to me.

"Hey, long time no see dude. What brings you here?" I stop as I reach the table where they were discussing something and quickly look into Jake's eyes. He's obviously scared about something, since his pupils are shrunken slightly, but he's trying to play it off. Within seconds of observing the area around us, I notice the lack of people that should be here.

"Where're Ed and Xavier?!" I practically shout, surprising myself as I take a second to recompose myself and then ask the question again. I hear Will sigh as Jake looks away and turns to face the table as he leans on it and hangs his head.

"Xavier's over in the infirmary we had to set up due to this plague. Ed's there with him, trying to see if he can figure out what's wrong with him." I give Jake a questioning glance as Will raises his head and glares at me with a scowl on his face.

"Why are you here anyways?" I look over to Will in confusion before responding.

"I came here because I heard about the plague and got worried."

"Oh, so you do care, huh?" Will's voice is filled with sarcasm as he stares daggers straight through me.

"What do you mean 'I do care'? Of course I care! I've been friends with all of you since who knows how long." I hear Jake mutter something about four years, but choose to ignore it for the moment.

"Well considering the fact that you attacked one of our guild members, and admin and one of your friends no less, it could be easy to tell that you wouldn't really care about us. If it weren't for you seceding from Neverland right after that, we would have had one hell of a mess on our hands, which isn't something we need with a plague running rampant throughout this game."

"Look, I get it. I fucked up, and I'm sorry alright? I just came to help you, and now you're attacking me."

"I'm attacking you because you almost caused us to attack the Neverland guild because you can't control your temper." Both of our voices are above a shout at this point, and most of the passersby quicken their pace and keep their hands in their pockets.

"I don't think you realize this, but Ed was the one who provoked me. He was the one who struck first, and I don't think you gave him this treatment."

"I didn't give him this treatment because he-"

"Because he's on your side!? Is that it? You treat me like shit because I was kicked out and fought Ed?"

"You left the guild. You weren't kicked out!"

"Tell that to Ed!" I turn around and begin stomping towards what seems like the infirmary, where Jake said Ed and Xavier were.








Nausea runs through me as the massive amount of cots and diseased bodies come into view. The entirety of the throne room is filled with people, leaving seemingly no room for people who were injured while they were in realism mode. The stench coming from these bodies is appalling, almost making me gag, and i can't believe that people could actually stand to be in here to help the sick.

A loud scream fills the air, and I look over to see two clerics trying their best to heal one of the sick people who seems to be in more pain than the others. I look on as they sweat and begin panting from overexertion. It seems like they've been doing this with every patient that screams all day. And it's clear that it's wearing on them, as they have gigantic bags under their eyes.

I turn my eyes away from them, and notice Ed sitting down next to a brown mass. As I walk over to Ed, a blue blur pushes past me, almost knocking me over, and it stops and crumples next to Xavier. Once I get closer, I notice that it's the girl Xavier was dancing with. Since I forgot her name, I decide to open up my menu and inspect her.



Tonya
Archmage: LVL 12
HP: 684/684
Mana: 1,600/1,600
Celestial Crusaders



Archmage? That wasn't on the class list. It wasn't even a class available at a higher level to the magic DPS users. I'll ask her about it later, since now isn't the right time.

I sit down next to Ed and stare the the brown mass he's been accompanying, and notice that it's Xavier.

"So," I say a bit depressingly, "Xavier really was sick, huh?" Ed turns his head to look at me, before slowly turning back and staring at Xavier. I watch him tense up and close his eyes as he puts his head in his hands.

"God I'm so useless." He says, slowly balling his hands up as tears begin to stream down his face. "I punch you for wanting to stay somewhere where you're treated right, and now I was so caught up in myself that I just let this happen." Seeing the pain he's in, I grab him and put him into a deep embrace.

"No, you're not useless. You remember when Matt just gave his life?" I wait until I hear him make some form of a "yes", before continuing. "The instant you were out of your paralysis, you ran up and fought Nightmare Moon almost on your own. Meanwhile I wasn't even paralyzed, yet I just stood there and watched it all happen. Even if he wanted to die, I could have saved him."

I loosen my grip on Ed a bit and look down at him. Soon enough, he notices and looks up at me with his tear-stricken face.

"No matter what you think of yourself, you're no coward." I wipe one of his tears that has managed to drip down the side of his cheek, "You are one of, if not the, bravest person I've ever known. I know that because, even when you thought of me as nothing more than a monster when Matt died, you immediately remembered how much our friendship mean to us right afterwards, and you even had the balls to come to Neverland's base to apologize. I don't know how you would explain that, but I can't find that anything short of courageous." I bring Ed in for one last hug before letting him go.

Once Ed wipes away the rest of his tears, I look towards Xavier. His eyes are closed and his breath is very heavy. He's almost panting, and his body is nearly drenched in sweat. I take out one of the cloth armor pieces from my inventory, cut it up a bit with my machete, and place one of the rags on his forehead to soak up some of the sweat. As I do, Xavier gives a small moan of pain before his eyes shoot open, a small trickle of blood coming out of both of them, and he begins screaming.

Soon enough the healers take notice and rush over to do what they can with him. They do everything in their power, but all that it seems to do is put Xavier in only slightly less agony. His screaming dies down in roughly five minutes, leaving him in another state is dormancy. This plague really is something horrible.

I couldn't imagine being sick like that for an hour, let alone the two days that he'll have to suffer. I can't just stand by and let this happen to him, or any members of this guild for that matter. But I'm just one guy, how could I do anything that any other person in my position couldn't?

"Times were so much easier when we were just kids, huh?" Ed looks over to me with a morbid face, before staring back at Xavier. "It would be easier if we could've just, never grown up."

"Wait," I look back at him. "did you just say 'never grow up'?"

"Yeah, so?" Ed looks at me quizzically as I jump out of my seat and begin running out of the room.

"You just gave me a great idea of how I could help." I get up quickly, wave goodbye to him and begin running, until he calls out my name and I turn to face him.

"You will come to see me again, right?" His eyes, still moist from the tears, look desperately into mine for some kind of answer.

"Of course," I give him a grin and a thumbs up, "I wouldn't miss you, our talks, or our friends for the world."

Ed's face lights up with joy as I turn and run out of the door, determined to reach the train.








I jump out of the train at the Appleloosa station and begin sprinting towards the town hall, where Pyralis typically hangs out. As I reach the gates, I trip over something and tumble to the ground. I look back to see what tripped me, and fear runs through me as I see a dead changeling lying on the ground. They couldn't have possibly been overrun, could they? I get back up and begin sprinting towards the town hall.

I rush through the double doors, practically charging them down, and try not to look at the large amount of changelings and bodies mixed together. From what I can tell in the short few seconds I can look at them until they're behind me, everybody seems to be okay, but the plague effects are taking place. Some are going through coughing fits, while others seem to be in the comatose state already, and the rest are just sitting there completely fine and are grieving over the others.

As I burst into Pyralis's room, I see him standing over an armored changeling and punching it endlessly with his cestus. I wait until he finishes the changeling off and notices me before asking if I can talk to him. He agrees and sits at his table, casually wiping the pixelated changeling blood off of it and motioning for me to sit down. I do, and the conversation starts immediately.

"So I visited my friends from the Celestial Crusaders today, and they gave me a great idea." I look him directly in the eyes and use the most official voice I can use.

"Go on," Pyralis puts his sunglasses on the table, and rests his elbows on the table as he puts his hand together to cover his mouth. His red eyes bore into me, possibly in an attempt to intimidate me, and he waits for me to continue my suggestion.

"Well," I try to keep my eyes on his, but his glare makes it rather challenging. "Both you and the Celestial Crusaders are struggling with this plague problem-"

"We're not dealing with a plague problem. Those changelings weren't much more than a training exercise."

"Trust me, more than a few of your guys have this plague. Anyways, since both of you are suffering in numbers from the plague, I thought it would be a good idea if you were to reach out to Will, the leader of the Celestial Crusaders, and join forces with him." Pyralis sighs, and puts his shades back on before getting up and walking towards the door.

"Come back to the guild, join your old squad, and prove to me that you're a worthwhile ally, and I'll consider it." I turn to look at him and give him a quizzical look.

"And how will I prove that?"

"Simple, there's a dungeon close to us known as Griffonstone. Take your squad through there and come back alive, with boss loot, and you'll have proved your worth." I nod, and begin walking out. He grabs my arm as I reach for the door, and forces me to look at him. "But if you lose, we'll be going for that cure without the Celestial Crusader's help, and leave them to suffer whatever Despair has planned. Good luck." With that, he gives me a devious grin and sends me on the way to go see Anita, Incognito, and Gearbox once again.