~Chapter 6~

  Marissa

  Marissa might have been laying on her bed, fully stretched out, but she was absolutely buzzing with excitement.

  Mag Mell had been live for nine months, and the developers had just had their first major update stream. The endgame content so far - which had consisted predominantly of overworld bosses, several dungeons, PvP, and events - was fun but it had been slowing down. And the developers had been playing their plans close to the chest, not wanting to ‘spoil’ the new content too far ahead of time.

  Evidently, that approach hadn’t been working very well for them. The game was popular, but the lack of a clear gameplan being known to the public, despite so many frequent updates, seemed to cause stagnating player counts, which DanuSoft didn’t seem to like very much.

  The whole situation led to DanuSoft holding a big stream event, in which they went over all kinds of things, including their upcoming plans and a rather detailed roadmap of things to come. And even better, they showed very brief sneak peeks of what they were working on, and what they showed looked near completion.

  All in all, Marissa left the stream feeling very positive of everything they had in the pipeline. New dungeons, bosses, and all kinds of other stuff to do were coming in the next few months. DanuSoft had been true to their original word so far with new updates every month, and it looked like they had no plans on slowing down. If anything, they appeared to be speeding up.

  But what had Marissa practically vibrating with excitement was the very last announcement of the stream, and as was tradition, the biggest hitter was always saved for last.

  Raids.

  Mag Mell was finally getting true blue raids.

  They did give some basics on how they were being put together, and roughly what to expect out of them without spoiling anything.

  They would be built for groups of eight, made up of two tanks, two healers, and four DPS. A fairly classic MMO party set up, all things considered.

  But that also meant that Marissa was now on a timer and had some stuff to do.

  She flung herself off her bed and to her computer room. It was still only 8 p.m., so she had a little bit of time before she needed to go to bed. And Kieran should be online around now on a Friday.

  She quickly got her computer turned on and hopped into the voice chat while pinging Kieran with a DM. Sure enough, he was online and playing - probably watched the whole stream while just AFK’ing in game.

  “Yo.” He said, his voice overlapping with the chime denoting he joined. “What’s up?”

  “You know what’s up.” Marissa said, and Kieran just chuckled.

  “I wasn’t sure you would watch the whole thing, to be honest.” He said. “It was starting to run up close to your bedtime. For all I knew, maybe you called it quits early for a shower.”

  “You know I don’t shower at night. I can’t go to bed with my hair wet. But anyway - fucking raids.”

  Kieran laughed again. “I know. I’m literally sitting in front of Ion right now, looking over my skills to see what my options are gonna be in the future.”

  [Ion the Tyrant] was the skill trainer for [Tyrants], the [Slayer] [Dedication] focused on two handed great weapons. Marissa grinned, knowing how often in the last few months Kieran had parked Caoimhe - his character - right there while playing with all of the editable parts of her skills.

  “Kieran, you’ve spent so many hours in there already. You know every single option in there like the back of your hand, don’t you?”

  “...perhaps.” He said, shiftily. “But now I need to consider how I would - or could - function in a raid. It’s exciting.”

  Marissa shook her head with a smile. “You do realize that before any of that, we’re going to need to do something else first, right?”

  “Hm?”

  “They said that we can’t do the raid through the Auto-Party System.”

  The [Auto-Party System], or [A-P System], was Mag Mell’s version of a Raid Finder or Party Finder. Players could pick the content they wanted to do from a list, click a button, and be matched automatically with other people looking to do the same content. It was convenient, but also meant that many players could get away with playing nearly solo.

  While choosing not to allow grouping up for the raids through the [A-P System] would be a very contentious one, DanuSoft did, at least, have some basic logic behind the decision.

  Evidently, they felt that the content was too difficult for random Pick-Up Groups, or PUGs, to regularly complete without causing significantly more anger, resentment, and toxicity. Instead, they felt it best to require people to find their groups more naturally, and hopefully meet up with friends, who would be less likely to cause too much friction in the community.

  It was…fair, Marissa figured. It may not have ended in so much vitriol, but she could understand not wanting to take that chance.

  “True. What are you thinking then? Time to find a Clan?” Kieran asked.

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  “Or make one.” Marissa said, thinking it over. “We’d need a party of eight for this, which isn’t too bad. We could probably get eight people together easily enough, right?”

  “Me, You, Jazz, Ash, and maybe Evan is an easy five, assuming everyone is up for it.”

  “As long as we set a good time, Jazz and Ash would be, definitely.” Marissa said. “They’ve raided in other games before, so I’m sure they’re just as -”

  Two rapid fire chimes sounded before Jasmine immediately shouted, “You guys better not be planning stuff without us, assholes!”

  Marissa and Kieran laughed. “We were considering what we wanted to do. But I promise we wouldn’t have gotten far without you!” Marissa said.

  “So what’s the plan?” Ash asked, his voice much more calm than his wife’s. “We have a tank, a healer, and two DPS between us, so that’s half the group. Or is Evan interested, too?”

  “I’d have to ask him.” Kieran said. Evan was his childhood friend after all. “I imagine he’ll be down, so long as schedules all line up.”

  “You sure? He’s been absolutely wiped out with the baby.” Jasmine asked.

  “Yeah, no doubt Eli has been a handful.” Kieran said. “So I suppose he’ll be up in the air. They said that the raids are coming basically for a one year anniversary, so if we assume mid November, Eli will be four months old. There’s a chance that Evan will be most of a person by then.”

  “I suppose you would know best, there. Maybe we get a group of nine for an alternate?” Ash asked.

  “We’d basically need eleven, so we’d have a fill for each Trinity role.” Marissa said. “Though, I imagine if we just need to fill a single slot we can find randos to fill in. It’s just a matter of whether Evan feels like he can commit more often than not.”

  “What do we think is fair?” Kieran asked. “I’ll let him know when I ask so he can think it over.”

  “Say…like 70 or 80% attendance?” Jasmine put forward.

  “I think that’s fair. Of course, emergencies and the like don’t count toward that because shit happens, but if he needs like a day off because he’s exhausted every other week, it may be too much. Once a month is probably fine.” Marissa agreed.

  “Cool. Let me message him about it then. It doesn’t look like he’s online right now, but it’s already after 11 in Jersey so he’s probably in bed.”

  “Just get him tomorrow then, and let the poor new dad sleep. No need to ping his phone.” Ash said. “We’ve got plenty of time. Besides, we’ll still need to find three other people minimum anyway.”

  “Right, right.” Kieran nodded. “So…reconvene tomorrow to discuss?”

  “Sure. I should get ready for bed anyway.” Marissa said. “I’ll be on tomorrow after work. Should be like…I dunno, around three or four here?”

  “Okay, so let’s say 8 Eastern? Gives you an extra hour if you need it. And it’s Saturday so no one over on our end should be working.” Jasmine said.

  “Works for me.”

  “Same.”

  “Same.”

  “Good. Tomorrow then. Get some sleep, Rissa.”

  “Will do. Have a good night, y’all.”

  “Night.”

  “Good night!”

  “Later!”

  Marissa left the call with a big grin on her face. They had three months to prepare, which was plenty of time. She was sure there was plenty of stuff to do in the meantime - not to mention all of the other content that was supposedly on the way before the raids hit.

  Recruiting for a new Clan was probably the way to go. Surely they could gather a party of eight easily enough. And given how prevalent it was to play without a Clan right now because the A-P System was so easy to use, finding friendly solo players that would be trying to get into a group for raids should be easy enough.

  Marissa’s thoughts wandered the entire time she was preparing for bed. By the time her head hit the pillow, she was pretty set in what ideas she would be bringing up the next day at their little impromptu meeting. Make a Clan, recruit a team of eight, do the upcoming content together wherever possible for some team building, then tackle the raids on release.

  She had no illusions that they would be cutting-edge raiders or fighting for world firsts or anything like that. But just getting in there on day 1, before knowledge really got out there and guides started popping up was still a special feeling.

  The important thing was tackling new, difficult content together with friends and having a good time.

  She fell asleep in a good mood, which carried all the way through the night and into the following morning when she got up at three to get ready for her day at work.

  Marissa considered herself pretty lucky in life. She may not have thought so seven years ago when she was laid off from her San Francisco tech job, but apparently that led her to where she wanted to be.

  When she had first moved across the country to start her job in the city, she had ended up renting her small apartment from the owner of the bakery on the first floor. As luck would have it, when she was laid off, the owner was looking for some help with the bakery because the woman was getting old - and Marissa actually loved to bake. The gentle scent of fresh bread and pastries had been one of the reasons she rented the place, in fact.

  Now, seven years later, she was something like a co-owner of the place and she still lived above it. Shaina, the old owner, had decided she’d had enough when she hit 65 years old and decided to move to Tennessee. And she left Marissa, who had been her right-hand-woman for several years at that point, 50% of the bakery’s ownership as well as the position of manager.

  Shaina kept in touch and helped out with the bakery’s financials and things, but was mostly hands off. And that suited Marissa just fine, who had put her NYU Bachelor’s in Communications to good use through social media.

  The Flour Basket had been doing remarkably well in the last few years thanks to her hard work. And she planned to keep it that way.

  As usual, Marissa was downstairs and elbow deep in flour by the time Julie knocked on the back kitchen door. That was fine - the woman was still on time.

  “Morning.” Julie said. The bell on the back door jingled as Marissa deftly opened the door with her elbow. The kitchen doors had crooked door handles for a reason.

  “Morning!” Marissa said, her good mood still plain to see. She locked the door behind Julie as it was still only 5 a.m. “I’ve got most of the first batch ready to go in the oven if you want to get started there.”

  “Got it.” Julie said as she threw on her apron and got straight to work. “You’re unusually chipper today. Have a good morning?”

  “It’s leftovers from last night.” Marissa said idly. When Julie snickered she sighed. “Not like that. New announcements for the game I’ve been playing.”

  “Girl.” Julie said, exasperated. “Really?”

  “Yes, really.” Marissa laughed. “Sorry to disappoint, but I happen to like my life the way it is.”

  Julie smiled, in that way that people do when they don’t believe you but don’t want to argue or call you out on it. Marissa had seen that same smile so many times from so many people.

  “Of course, Riss.”

  “Get back to work.” Marissa shot back, waving Julie off with mock annoyance. She wasn’t really mad - she’d been dealing with people like that her entire adult life. And really, it was fine. As long as she didn’t talk about her favorite leisure activity and hobbies.

  Marissa sighed, pouring her frustrations into kneading the bread dough.