Marissa

  Once the cutscene ended, Marissa leaned back in her chair to relax for a moment until the party all returned to chat once they finished up their work. She was curious to see what would come next, given the situation they were in but also knew that they probably wouldn’t be able to realistically get much more done before everyone needed to log off for the night.

  It didn’t take very long for the party to all return to chat, but even just the short little break to stretch her back was enough for Marissa. She’d just been sitting still for too long.

  “Okay! So…we’ve got flight now?” Jazz said as soon as she returned.

  “According to the game’s story, I guess. But I don’t see any new skills or anything.” Kieran said.

  “I didn’t either. And you better believe I checked.” Marissa said. And she had, but like Kieran, found nothing new. She had expected a tooltip about how the controls worked or something, but there was simply nothing.

  “áine has the quest marker over her head, so I guess we’re not quite done with her yet, either.” Marissa said, moving her camera around the room that they were still basically trapped in.

  “True. Maybe she’ll teach us how it works before sending us back to the other side.” Evan offered. “Just gotta push forward then.”

  “Everyone still good on time?” Marissa asked.

  “Girl, we’ve got more than a half hour left. Let’s keep going.” Evie said with a laugh.

  “It’s fine, she’s just nervous,” Kieran said. Marissa took a deep breath - the man knew her well, after their years of playing together. “We’re so close to getting flying that now she’s hesitant to get it and wants to put it off.”

  “Shut up.” Marissa said quickly, even though he was right. She was excited to see what flying in the game would be like, but also nervous that it wouldn’t be fun or interesting. Or, even worse, it would be actively bad. Like having to fight monsters underwater with bad controls, for instance.

  “Hit the button, and let’s get it. C’mon.” Nyx said. And when more prompting from the group followed, Marissa just went and clicked on [áine] to move things forward.

  “Right then. Now that the [Contract] is made, I suppose we should get you out of here, yes?” [áine] asked as the scene rolled into a short cutscene.

  Marissa was given a prompt for Hibiscus to respond.

  “Tell her we don’t know how to fly.” Evan said.

  “You can see the prompts in this one?” Marissa asked.

  “Yup.”

  “Given that the option says “see tutorial” next to it, I guess they want everyone to weigh in on this one.” Evie said.

  When a little number one popped up next to the response, and then a two, Marissa guessed this prompt was more like a vote than anything else. They could skip the flight tutorial if they wanted, but it would require consensus.

  Marissa added her vote to “Sorry, [Queen áine], we don’t know how to fly, yet. Could you teach us? [Play Flight Tutorial]”

  And it seemed like it would be unanimous in favor of seeing the tutorial, until a little number one popped up next to, “Yes, we really should return to the [Human World] quickly.”

  “Alright, who did it? Who wanted to skip flight lessons with my queen?” Evan asked, full of mock anger.

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  “Me. I’m the problem child,” Nyx said. “Someone had to hit the other option. I wasn’t about to let us be unanimous, you kidding me?”

  Marissa could picture Evan’s eyes comically narrowing at Nyx through the screen in the charged silence that followed.

  “Oh! Right. We should fix that, shouldn’t we?” [áine] said with a clap. “Let’s return to the courtyard, then. We can play a few games to get you familiar with it. Don’t want you all dying to some wyverns after we just changed the very fabric of reality and all that, right?” She snickered and waved a hand to unblock and open the door back to the hallway.

  It wasn’t long before the party - led by [áine] once again - was back in the open, grassy space. The lack of a ceiling honestly made the location ideal for flight training. Or at least, Marissa thought it would.

  [áine] floated over to the center of the courtyard, where there was a tree and a few scattered plants, and then the quest marker appeared over her head again.

  Once Marissa interacted with her, the training for flying began. There were a short few boxes of dialogue that were unvoiced of [áine] preparing the players for flying, and then the rest was done mostly through actual tutorial screens and windows, explaining how the whole control scheme and everything worked.

  As Marissa and her team each flipped through the various pages separately, she felt more and more sure that the dev team in charge of flight for Mag Mell did things right. Or, at least, not wrong.

  They seemed to use what was most common among most games Marissa had played. Left shift or the space bar could be used to ascend. The left ctrl button would have the player descend. The W-A-S-D keys - or whatever the player used for general movement - was still used for forward, backward, and so on.

  The main thing was the camera control. Thankfully, it seemed like aiming the camera up or down and moving forward would move the character in that direction, and moving up and down wasn’t entirely dependent on their own specific keys. That helped the movement feel much more natural. Furthermore, the ascend and descend movement tied to shift and ctrl were based upon the camera's facing.

  Finally, the last two pages of the tutorial information went over some character build specific things. For Marissa, that meant showing her how flight would interact with her [Arrow] skills and general gameplay. She smiled as she read over the page.

  Generally speaking, nothing would change for her. Flying would add a slight shake to her aiming reticle, to account for Hibiscus’ difficulty aiming while flying, and to avoid making flying simply too strong for an [Arrow]. That was a drawback she was more than willing to accept, given that the aim wobble didn’t seem to be overbearing - it was just enough that she would need to be conscientious of it while using flight.

  The second page went over how her choice of playing a winged Fae would alter her flight abilities. It was while reading that page that she finally felt vindicated for making the choices she did during character creation.

  Generally speaking, any characters with physical wings - whether it was a Fae, Corvus, or other race that had access to wings, they would have almost free access to flight.

  Winged characters would be able to fly up to a certain distance from the ground at all times as long as they were not in combat. It also gave them all access to a new movement style that defaulted to floating in the same way that [áine] did in general. It even came with a few different hovering animation cycles, like the carefree style that [áine] employed, or a more purposeful flight style, which Marissa thought was neat.

  However, for full-on flight, characters would need to use the [Take Wing] or [Take Flight] skill, which would allow them access to unfettered flight for a short period of time with an associated cooldown. [Take Wing] was the skill for any winged character, while [Take Flight] was for those without wings.

  [Take Wing] had a slightly shorter duration, but also a shorter cooldown - lasting for a full minute, with a thirty second cooldown. The timers made Marissa incredibly excited, as she would be able to basically be in the air for more than half of any given encounter.

  [Take Flight], in contrast, lasted for a minute and a half with an equally long long cool down. While it was definitely a downgrade in comparison, Marissa wasn’t sure exactly how much the game would require flight for any mechanics. And even then, most [Dedications] wouldn’t even really gain all that much from flight anyway.

  Melee [Paths] would still need to engage at melee range to hit things, so the ability to freely fly around wouldn’t really change much for them. Admittedly, it would be cool to harry an enemy with a melee weapon from the air, she figured, but it wouldn’t be the strong option it was for ranged [Paths].

  She didn’t see any information regarding how flight affected spell casting types, though. If it drastically changed how spells were cast while flying, it could make flight very good or very bad for casters. She assumed it would be a net gain though, as it would seem unfair for only [Arrows] to really get a ton from flight.

  Once she was finished reading the tutorials, she was actually given the [Take Wing] skill, and was left to play around in the courtyard for a bit while waiting for everyone else to finish reading through their own tutorials.

  “Yo, this is super fun.” Evan said as Fiona moved through the air while holding her shield up in front of her and test swinging her weapon around.

  “I really want to see how it’ll go in live combat…” Keiran said, testing how Caoimhe moved about as well. Watching the little Fae dance around in the air while whipping her massive sword around looked simultaneously hilarious and dangerous to Marissa.

  “Hang on, how are you making your turns so tight?” Evan asked, pausing to watch Caoimhe flip about in the air.

  “Uh…I’m not doing anything specific? Maybe it’s another wing-based bonus?”

  “I think so.” Marissa said. “I think they limited the tightly controlled maneuverability for non-winged characters a bit.”

  “Aw man. I want to fly in a spiral like that, too.” Evan whined. “I don’t think it’ll actually make any real difference when we’re not just flying around like this though.”

  “We’ll have to see what flying combat looks like. I don’t suspect hair-pin turns will be all that important.” Evan said. “I basically control the same way I do on the ground, just in the air. It feels like I’m walking on an invisible plane instead of flying.”

  “Huh. I don’t feel that way at all, though?” Evie said, as she did twirls in the air. “Maybe it’s a control setup issue? What kind of control scheme do you use?”

  “The classic one.”

  “Oh, dude. You need to swap back to the default. The way the camera and the movement keys interact with the default settings is way smoother, that’s probably why things feel a little off for you.” Evie said.

  Evie’s Cait-Sidhe moved closer to Caoimhe and danced around in the air with very similar movements. She couldn’t copy Caoimhe exactly as she was swinging her sword about and incorporating skills that moved her around, but Evie’s movements were no less graceful.

  “See?”

  “Yeah. Huh. I’ll have to see about that and practice, I guess.” Evan said.

  “So, who’s still reading their stuff?”

  “Me.” Firo said. “It looks like Corvus gets a few weird mechanics with flight, and added to playing [Invoker], I think I have a lot of learning to do.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Marissa asked, immediately interested.

  “Yeah. Corvus have a glide and wing-flapping mechanic that apparently lets me hover longer than other races, but it requires some actual input to use. And, apparently, I can use that while casting in the air - I think - to basically never touch the ground.”

  “Say what?”

  “Yeah. Apparently, if you start casting a spell in the air, you’ll hover until you’re done casting. The downside being if I get interrupted by anything - even my own movement - the flight skill ends and I fall.”

  “Oh. That’s brutal.” Marissa said.

  “Yeah. It’ll be an interesting mechanic to play around, I think.” Firo said.

  He must have finally closed his tutorial pages because as he began to join the rest of the party in the air, [áine] began moving again.

  “Right then! Now that you all have some of the basics down, why don’t we play some games?”

  [áine] waved a hand and created some targets, all floating around in the air. They looked like they were made out of the same silvery-white magic effects that had accompanied her Fae spells. The targets, once they fully formed, basically looked like medium sized floating bubbles. In an attempt to make it actually helpful, though, [áine] was actively making them move about and dance in the air.

  Experimentally, Marissa took aim and let an arrow go at one of the bubbles. The arrow flew straight through it, and the sphere took on a red tint in response to being hit.

  “Nice shot!” [áine] said, delighted. “You’re free to practice as you see fit - but let me know if you’d like to do time trials with the targets, or perhaps a maneuver-based racing course? You may not have an abundance of time, but the quicker you understand how to fly, the better.”

  “What do we think? Wanna hit the course?” Marissa asked, excited.

  Kieran snorted. “Damn, that reminds me of the high school ropes course.”

  “Oof. Don’t remind me of that,” Evan said, “I was terrible at it. I have a negative sense of balance.”

  “Me too.” Kieran said. “But that said - Bisky. I bet you a mil that I trash your time on the race.”

  Marissa laughed. “Don’t wanna try me at the target course, huh?”

  “If it’s the same course for everyone, then you’ll win every time.” He said. “But you’ve been looking forward to flying for so long; I’m gonna show you that I’m better at it than you.” He snarked.

  Before Marissa could even respond, the rest of the party was placing bets. Marissa took a moment, listening - the group was pretty split on who would win, which lit a fire in her. She was gonna destroy him in the race.

  “You’re on, bitch.”