VR RPG

Date: 10/9/2018

The thing I remember most clearly about this dream is that the plot revolved around a VR game. In normal mode, you played as a young child in a society that was generally less technologically advanced than ours. They had some of our modern conveniences and social rules, like modern-looking clothing and the concept of fashion for instance, but for the most part they gave off the impression of being kinda like a barbarian village. They solved most things through combat, and would readily discard technology altogether when survival or honor were on the line. Your main character was a kid whose gender automatically matched the players’ upon character creation. The game opened on you waking up as this kid, confused and with a ringing in your ears. You, as this character, possessed no concrete memories of who you were or where you lived. You only knew that you had once lived with your parents — whoever and wherever those were; you couldn’t remember their faces even when you tried — and things had been peaceful up until they weren’t. Everything else, the game kept hidden from you. This setup did allow you to pick your character’s name and get some immersive exploration of your surroundings, so it worked fairly well. Until the game forced you into its actual opening event: a battle between two groups of people from the two sides of the impending civil war. You end up fighting for your life. Whichever person you defend yourself against first is the side of the war everyone perceived you to be fighting against ever since. In other words: your punches determined your affiliation. The side you didn’t punch left you alone, and sometimes even cane to your aid in the fight. During this combat, your sole weapons are your hands. You can use them as fists to punch people, as palms to slap people, or as tools to literally grab your enemies and toss their bodies over the side of a cliff to watch them vanish in the thick fog below. The player I was following in this dream felt a real sense of urgency as they played, genuinely afraid of their character dying. They chose to throw people off the cliff. A lot. Their side considered them brutal and heartless for it, but also admired their strength and conviction and appreciated their help in the fight. After all, not many little kids could throw full grown adults off of cliffs. Not many adults could keep doing it in succession. Your character was quickly becoming a legend. Then the spores showed up. The enemy left behind some kind of magical/natural plant bomb that hooked into bushes on the cliff side. They went off after the fighting was over. Your character was close to one when it burst into a million spores. Somehow, there was a power in the spores. They affected your character’s mind, or maybe just their sense of balance. The world swam and a few vague memories started to come back. One last enemy showed up and pushed you. You fell down the cliff, just as your victims had before you. The dream then cut to a scene where the main character was taking shelter in some kind of orphanage. This character had made two friends, both seemingly in some kind of shapeshifter training. You talked with them in a library, insistent that your people existed and the land above the clouds was real. As skeptical as your friends were when helping you find books on the subject, they did help you and they were far less skeptical than anyone else in this strange, waterlogged city where you’d apparently fallen. The city was some kind of steampunk/gearpunk society which had been flooded. The floods had happened long enough in the past that everyone became accustomed to them and simply lived their lives on the water. Books floated past in the library like little boats, water-resistant enough to be read easily if you just plucked them from the water that splashed around your little kid shins. Your friends avoided the water by shapeshifting into rats and riding on your shoulders. Doubtful but eager to help, they discussed old legends and actually managed to find a book elaborating on them. The legends were like your own fragmented memories: accurate and nostalgic, but lacking anything genuinely helpful. You started to get frustrated, but also hopeful. Maybe in this city — amidst magic and water and mist and steam and the perpetual sound of turning gears, you could find a way to recover your memories and go home. At least you were safe from the war here, after all, giving you time to formulate and test theories to move you forward. Or so you thought. The game provided a separate cut scene, where you could see people who looked very much like the ones you’d thrown from the cliff. There weren’t many of them, but they skulked around in the water and kept a watch on you. They were planning something. It was at this point that the game glitched or the player accidentally drowned their character or something, and promptly discovered that they had not saved even once since starting. They rebooted the game and got sent to the character creation screen. They cursed and whined, but eventually went ahead with the game anyway... redoing everything exactly the same. Except, this time, you spotted an animal just before going into the opening fight scene. Blue and slightly ethereal, the young stag stared at you for a long moment before dashing off into the unknown. One of the player’s companions in the place where they’re playing, who might actually have been my irl brother showing up in the dream, said he’d heard about this event. He’d heard that if you spit the young stag enough times throughout the game, you get the option to start a separate save where you play mostly the same storyline, but AS the stag. Excited to try it out, the player promptly saved and started a separate file to play as the stag. They had more experience at the game this time, so they were certain they’d do well. Until their hand controllers stopped working. Deer, the game runners explained, did not have hands. The game had to be played with the headset and the headset only. It was ridiculously challenging to use just their head, but also extremely satisfying to fling their enemies off the cliff using their antlers. They were really getting into playing... except that their stag character kept dying in kind of ridiculous ways because the controls were difficult. Falling onto spiky things. Ramming into solid things too many times. Getting shot with arrows cause they were a deer. Falling from high places. The player was really starting to get frustrated, and switched back to their original save. In this, the game character was learning to shapeshift and use magic like the friends from the library. You successfully became a rat, sailing on a book in your room this time. You couldn't seem to get any other spells to work, however. You were trying your hardest, not knowing (except through cut scenes and game meta) that you'd need these spells in moments when your enemies would creep up on you in the night. But that was where the dream ended. Never with anything conclusive. Just hints of drama and intrigue and conflict and an ACTUAL plot the game would have followed. No resolution of any of it. I want to play this game in real life now, just to see where it goes and how it ends. I feel cheated out of a full story.