Party Formation

"Do you smell that, Morgana?" Leo asked as he took in a second deep breath. "Come on, breathe it in with me!"

Morgana rolled her eyes at him, but she did as he suggested and joined him in breathing in the air from the square.

"I smell… the stink of too many contracted souls pressed together," she said laughing. "I like it."

"Get used to it. That's the smell of a successful event launch," Leo said.

He raised his hand up looking for a high-five, and after several moments of her looking cluelessly back at him, she finally managed to respond with an awkward fist-bump.

"O~~okay, we're going to workshop that," Leo laughed.

It had been mere hours since the event announcement but town square was still packed with players recruiting others to join their hastily formed parties.

"Hook up with me and get a signing deal of twenty low-grade SS!" A blonde-haired player in a resplendent fel iron plate yelled over the cacophony of noise around the square.

"We're looking for a healer to complete our party of six!" A buzz-cut Asian woman called to the small crowd gathered around the bulletin board.

Speaking of the bulletin board, it had never before looked so full to bursting with postings that were all so similar in content. And almost every second, a new ping would sound to signal the arrival of a new flier appearing on top of old ones.

"Buff caster looking for a group," one posting wrote.

"Tank wanted for a four-man team with two DPS and one Healer," A second posting wrote.

"That board's piqued my interest… I want to see," Morgana said just before she snapped her fingers.

Her body, which was already invisible to the masses, suddenly became transparent as well. In this ghostly form, Morgana left the safety of the shadowy corner she and Leo had been hiding in. Then she moved across the square while passing harmlessly through people who were in her way.

Half-way through the square, Morgana turned around briefly to wave back at Leo and yell, "Aren't you coming?"

"Easy for you to say," Leo shrugged. "I can't turn intangible…"

He raised the hand that held his Deathly Ring forward and assumed the form of Maestro, Trainer of Heroes. Disguised, he walked out onto the square and waded through the mass of bodies so he could join Morgana who was standing at the right corner of the bulletin board.

"They keep popping up," Morgana noted as another ping vibrated on the bulletin board. "I'm curious as to how this whole party thing works."

"It's all part of the web of mechanics joined together by our one [SOCIAL] feature," Leo ripped a flier off the board and brushed his hand against the yellowing paper while admiring how coarse the papyrus felt in his fingers. "You were at McCloud's briefing, right? Don't you remember the details discussed then?"

"I shouldn't have asked…" Morgana frowned. "You're about to start another feature lecture, aren't you?"

"You are wise beyond your years, kid," Leo chuckled as he passed her the flyer.

"I'm two-hundred-and-seventy-eight-years older than you, silly" she reminded Leo as she browsed the flyer he'd passed her. "This is a message, isn't it?"

"Correct," Leo nodded enthusiastically. "The [MESSAGE] option is the first mechanic of [SOCIAL]. It allows a player to contact other players who are in the Abyss. It can be done in two ways, a notification like that flyer in your hand or…"

Leo swiped open his administrator's menu and tapped on [SOCIAL]. From there, he chose [MESSAGE] and then [WHISPER].

A puff of white smoke appeared in front of him only to be replaced by a crow flapping in the air.

"Morgana, for someone who claims to be three-hundred-and-three-years-old, you still act like a kid," Leo whispered to the crow.

After he finished whispering in its ear, the crow flapped over to Morgana and leaned on her shoulder so it could whisper Leo's message word-for-word to her in his voice.

"This feels intrusive," Morgana commented as she shooed away the crow from her shoulder.

"It kind of is" Leo agreed. "Which is why you can only use [MESSAGE] on players you're friends or allied with."

Leo pointed to two players close by who'd shaken each other's hands while spelling out their names to each other.

"Those two are now in each other's friend list," Leo explained.

"Interesting," she nodded approvingly. "By the way, just how far does a whisper reach?"

"Unknown… we haven't had the chance to test its range yet since tonight's the first time it went live," Leo admitted.

Leo noticed that several players close to him were giving Maestro weird looks, and he guessed it was because they couldn't see Morgana and assumed an NPC was talking to himself. Although there were others who were paying attention to what he'd said like he'd just given them a tutorial.

That's when the game master decided that he might as well keep it up since he'd gotten such a captive audience.

"Now, let's discuss the [PARTY] option," Leo said in a voice that carried over to the other bystanders.

"You're talking really loudly, silly," Morgana rolled her eyes at him a second time just before she noticed that they were surrounded by players now.

"As everyone knows, a virtual online game is the very definition of a social experience, and there's nothing more social than being in a party," Leo mansplained to the crowd. "The [PARTY] system allows two or more substitute reapers to join forces and take on the threats not a single one of them could take on alone…"

"I understand the need to fight together, but what about the spoils?" Morgana asked.

Sadly for Leo, only he could hear her which meant he had to rephrase his answer in a way that didn't make him look like some lunatic talking to ghosts.

"An interesting phenomenon happens when a party defeats a shadow beast, actually," Leo addressed the crowd instead of Morgana. "Can anyone guess what that is?"

Several headshakes and nervous looks later, and one player — a dark-skinned girl with dreadlocks — finally raised her skinny hand.

"The shadow beast's essence is divided into more than one soul stone?" she guessed.

Maestro gave her three slow claps as part of Leo's persona to seem condescending, but deep down, Leo was very impressed she'd guessed it right.

"A shadow beast's soul essence does split into pieces that equal the number of members in a party so that everyone earns at least one soul stone, however, that does mean less essence for everyone," he admitted.

The dreadlocks girl asked the follow-up question. "I can understand that working for a high-grade SS, but how would you split off a low-grade SS?"

"You can't… what you'd get would be a soul stone shard," Maestro answered. "Shards are worthless because you can't consume its essence until you combine enough shards into one soul stone."

"I already know this bit, Leo… so I'm leaving and you can enjoy your chat with these players," Morgana said, waving her hand in farewell.

Maestro raised a finger to stop her without drawing attention to the fact that she was there.

"There's actually one more social feature I wanted to discuss," Maestro said quickly. "But I think it's best to just show it to you guys."

Maestro pointed behind Morgana and toward the very center of the town square where a crowd was packed tightly together in a circle.

"I believe we're about to witness the very first [DUEL] in Adventour," Maestro guessed.

Two gamer tags were floating above the crowd gathered at the center of the square. And to a gamer eye, one could almost imagine they were lined up side by side in exactly the kind of interface one saw in a fighting game.

Maestro chuckled when he read the names aloud, "Ath3na versus Black Howler, huh? I wonder how that happened…"