Chapter Text
Emily sprawled across her alchemy bench, face resting on her forearms, surrounded by an organized chaos of tinctures, scrolls, and bubbling flasks. Despite spending a month obsessively decorating her quarters like a medieval Pinterest board of both alchemical props and the like, this gritty, cluttered NPC workshop felt more like home. That was always her curse—every hobby started with passion, spiraled into perfectionism, then fizzled into boredom. Home decorating, nursing, streaming... None of it ever stuck. But alchemy? Alchemy still held an allure to her.
Technically speaking, there was a finite amount of potions, but due to the rarity of some ingredients, barely any self-respecting alchemist would waste components with potentially pointless outcomes when there were already known recipes out there. YGGDRASIL's alchemical system offered near-endless permutations, especially when rare drops or unique materials were involved. Sure, her guildmates groaned when a brew fizzled into mush, but every failure was a step closer to inventing something no player had ever seen.
Today, though, there was no brewing. No discovery. No fun. Just... waiting. She could play one of her retro games gathering dust nearby in her room, but this Dive title—this world—was the only world she ever truly cared about. It didn’t force her into clunky swordplay or mind-numbing city management. It just let her be her: a potion maker. An alchemist. One of the unsung classes that everyone overlooked.
And yet, she’d just unlocked the prestige path to Potion Grand Master, an elusive tier in the Alchemical Job Tree, one that had only been confirmed by data miners. She had to join a raiding party to a rare Druidic Dungeon just to gain the chance of having it appear on her available job list. The catch? Brew 25,000 high-tier potions. She barely scraped past 11,000 in that category. That was after four years and 90,053 total brews, most of which were (thankfully) automated processes. No wonder no one's ever unlocked the PGM class. It was absurd.
She sighed. Pouting was the most productive thing she’d done all day. Her last chat with Sand- err, 'Undisclosed', one of the oldheads who decided to pass up the mantle of Guildmaster, didn’t exactly go great either. They didn't exactly vibe.
14:59:35
Still, Guild Master of United Front did have a ring to it. They were the only humanoid-aligned guild that didn't fly the banner of xenophobic purity on Midgard. They even welcomed non-humanoids into their ranks; well, one slime and a few quirky beastfolk, but it was the principle that mattered.
14:59:55
“Oh well…” she whispered, bracing herself for the disorienting transition as logout approached.
14:59:59… 00.
“…Huh?” Her lips smacked with an odd aftertaste, something between burnt paper and forest moss. She blinked. The workbench was still there. Her arms were still cradling her face.
“Bit of a lag spike, huh?” she mumbled, pushing off the desk. Something pulled oddly in her chest, like vertigo without movement. It passed.
She went to the door, pulling it inwards towards the room before stepping out into the hall. She was met with the traditional brick hallway; the entire guild structure had been made years before she had even joined, and has barely changed since with relatively minor alterations to each level, usually just reusing an old player’s room to make into a miscellaneous room for RP or to turn into a workshop that one player or another wanted to try out. Most of their workshop rooms have been left to NPCs at this point, and there was technically one for the alchemy lab itself, but she was taken to the ‘Medical Bay’ to be used as a nurse.
Again, she felt like something was wrong. Specifically, one of her senses, but she simply couldn’t understand why. Something smelled like… burnt wood? Kind of, but different. She just couldn’t understand why that was an issue.
“Excuse me, Guildmaster,” a meek voice broke through her internal musings. “I have these for you; mixing bottles from inventory. You requested them, if I’m not mistaken… uh, ma’am.” The voice came from a young freckled woman with short, orange hair who appeared to be a squire, without any of the bulky armor. A simple tunic, breeches, and a tourney sword at her side.
“Oh, thank you-” Wait, what?
Mistaking her cut off for trying to fish for a name, the squire provided, “Alyssa Felhorn, Madam. I work in inventory when I’m not training with Instructors Remi and Gerbs, so it's understandable that you wouldn’t recognize me. By your leave, Madam.” She then left with a slight jog.
“I… uh…” Did that NPC just… talk? Not only did no one in this guild even attempt to program their NPCs to have dialogue, but nothing a player could do should allow their NPCs to have proper voice acting; usually, it was just reactionary text at best. They definitely didn’t deliver items like this.
She quickly went back inside the lab, placing the crate of empty bottles on a nearby table, before promptly spinning right back into the hallway.
‘I need to… I need to get out of here! Something is definitely wrong, and I need to breathe.’ Trying to control her breathing, she made her way to ascend to the next floor, before remembering she had a Guild Teleportation Ring. “Teleport: Guild Courtyard!”
The open air she had been expecting came, both to her satisfaction and disbelief. She kept breathing in and out, in through her mouth, out through her nose. She bent over to face at the brick-laid path, closing her eyes to block it all out. Looking up, eyes once again open, she once again went into a small panic attack, albeit one that she had already silently been expecting. While her courtyard and center tower remained, they were now surrounded by a thick forest. Trees thicker than a party of players combined, and there were hundreds of them, surrounded by thousands of their slightly smaller variants. And the smell.
It simply gave an ‘earthly’ odor; not unpleasant, but also not artificial. She didn’t know if she wanted to cry or laugh at her situation.
“Uh… who are you?”
Milk looked up to see a redhead wearing one of those cowboy dusters with a thick chestplate partially concealed by the coat that, frankly, was too humid for their surroundings. “Who am I? Who are…” She remembered what Undisclosed had told her only a few minutes ago. “You’re Undisclosed NPC, right? I never caught your name. Oh, right! I, uh, my name’s Milk. Don’t worry, I’m supposed to be here.”
“Oh, that’s good.” The so far unnamed NPC said, she looked briefly confused, before lighting up in recognition from something behind her. “Oh, hey, Dad!”
She turned around to see Undisclosed’s player, a bearded, broad-shouldered old man in retro-militaristic tan and green fatigues, gawked at the NPC with an aloof expression of a hung open mouth and rosy cheeks. “I- What?” Came his gruff and bewildered reply, much different than his real voice, but one that seemed to fit well for his character, before checking himself. “Sorry, good afternoon, Ms... Steele. Could I borrow Milk for a moment?”
“Sure thing! What do you want me to do now?” The redhead asked innocently.
“Go ahead and visit the Guild Hall’s Staff Break Room. Introduce yourself as… my daughter, and you’ll be fine.” The old man reluctantly allowed, followed by a squeak from the NPC.
“Oh, alright then. See you, Dad!”
“...”
“...”
“... Did you end up giving her a bio after all?”
“No.” Undisclosed answered as he gritted his teeth and combed his hand through his uncombable hair, which he promptly discovered when he pulled his hand back to look at it.
“So,” Emily began as she realized that Undisclosed wasn’t going to start a conversation after that embarrassing display, “what do you think happened?”
The gruff-looking man looked at her, brows furrowing before evening out. “I don’t know. It’s too early in the day for me to have fallen asleep, so I doubt it's a hyper-realistic dream. Unless my entire day’s been a dream, then I have no idea. Dive Gear doesn’t allow you to use your senses, so that already tells me this has nothing to do with the Dive Chair itself, unless everyone involved plans on getting sued. I tried contacting the Game Masters, but the call function seems to be barely functioning. I thought I was going to be able to get a call out to Dalglish, but it simply didn’t connect.”
“Dalglish?” She repeated.
“A GM who was overseeing the Midgard Event this evening. I was able to remember his name, but it didn’t yield any results. I was able to raise the K-Man on the Vault Floor, so I guess the NPCs can be called using that function.”
“Okay, so maybe a dream that made us think an entire day had gone by, or…” Emily prompted.
“I’m not even going to breathe that idea, because we’re both thinking it. I plan on taking everything in safely; don’t get me wrong, experiencing YGGDRASIL as a living thing sounds great, but this? There are no rules, Milk. Look around us; we’re not in Midgard anymore. Maybe Alfeim, but… I doubt it. We are in unfamiliar territory, with an unknown world for us. I would rather not have my journey cut short because of a mistake. And I'm not dumb enough to assume we would just 'respawn' if we die.”
“So you’re going to act like this is all real?” Emily summed up. She was kind of on the same boat; what's the worst that happens? They get disappointed? Sure, she thought that Undisclosed was acting weird about it, but that was probably the safest bet to go with.
“Until I wake up or something else happens to change my mind? Yeah.”
They both looked at their surroundings, fully taking them in. “We should probably try to cast an AOE Illusion spell to keep things from stumbling on us. And some warding spells to keep animals from accidentally walking through the mirage.” Her companion said out loud.
“Hmm,” she replied, before realizing that he was directly suggesting it. “Oh, uh, sure. Yeah. Are you asking me, or telling me?”
“You’re still the Guild Leader, Milk. I’m not sure how the NPCs will react to all of this, and I ultimately think you should try and organize things until I can tell if we’re on equal footing with the rest of the NPCs yet. From what I could tell, they were respectful enough to me on my way topside, but I’d rather not test my luck.”
“Right…”
----
“Aemon, could you assist me with something?”
The bespectacled man looked up from his tome, the light catching his lenses in a self-important glint, jaw locked into an intense mewing streak—until he saw who had spoken. He fumbled to adjust his glasses, his posture snapping upright in a practiced, theatrical flourish. “Councilor Milk! Commander Undisclosed! It is an honor to serve High Councilors of the United Front!”
Emily and Undisclosed exchanged a brief glance—equal parts amusement and confusion. Aemon was one of Traveler’s more, lorewise, eccentric creations: a support-focused NPC with layers of scholarly flavor and (near) zero combat application. Traveler never assigned him a formal role, so Aemon had spent most of his artificial life lounging in the Guild Library, organizing tomes and offering unsolicited lectures through scrolling texts when a player happened to walk too close to him. Emily barely remembered his existence. She rarely visited any of the RP Rooms that didn’t serve her alchemical needs.
“Ah, that's... good. Do you think you have what it takes to set up wards and blend in with the Ground Floor with its surroundings?”
Aemon raised a hand to his narrow chin and nodded gravely, as though weighing some unseen variable. “I will need to examine the perimeter to see what exactly I need to work with, but I believe it will be well within my arcane capabilities, Madam.”
“Good- that's good. Get to it when you’re able, Aemon.”
As she left the library, Undisclosed fell into step beside her, his arms folded contemplatively across his chest.
“Titles, huh?” he muttered. “So they’re calling you ‘Councilor’ and me ‘Commander’? Makes sense, I suppose. ‘Commander’ is technically one of my Jobs. And ‘Councilor’ could refer to the highest position they can recognize, besides the whole ‘Guildmaster’ business.”
Emily smirked. “Still better than ‘Mommy.’”
He shot her a withering look.
She raised her hands innocently. “Hey, not my NPC.”
Undisclosed let out a huff of air through his nose, then his tone grew sober. “We should host a meeting. If the NPCs are truly acting on their own now, thinking, interpreting, then they’re likely capable of morale. Rumors spread. Doubts fester. If they get the sense that we don’t have control over the situation…”
He trailed off, jaw likely tensing beneath his bearded face.
Emily finished the thought for him. “...then they might act on their own, whether to leave or take over. And we have no clue what that might look like.”
He nodded.
“How do you think we should do this? Call all of them, from Guardian to random NPC busybee, just to have them reassert loyalty? Tell them what, exactly?” Emily asked.
“No, I wouldn’t group them all together. I would call the Floor Guardians, including the Treasury Guardian. They can then relay our message.” Undisclosed confided.
“Alright…” Emily replied, propping her back against a wall when they finally got to the Meeting Room. Unfortunately, she forgot that the Four Floor Guardians of the Second Floor also resided there.
The Royal Guard Twins clicked their heels together to stand at attention, their arms keeping their weapons in check and to the side. Luna was similar to the twins but slightly more lax, and finally, Raziel, the angel, had his arms behind his back, reminiscent of an ‘at ease’ stance.
“Guardians,” both Emily and Undisclosed greeted before the two players looked at each other. Undisclosed simply nodded to her to take the lead. “Could you gather your fellow Floor Guardians for me? We will be hosting a meeting here tonight in… two hours, if that is good enough for everyone.”
They bowed in compliance, but otherwise said nothing. The twins marched with the pace of soldiers on a mission, Luna simply walked with a slight bounce to her step, providing a small wave at the two of them, while Laziel similarly went at his own pace, though instead of greeting the two of them, he went back to reading a book; not the transparent tome that his NPC model often gave him.
“The werewolf girl and the angel acted like they didn’t take my command to heart,” Emily confided her worries to Undisclosed.
“It's a part of their Biographies. Luna was written to have been favored by her Instructors and Council Members, so she never received proper discipline and just coasted when it came to etiquette. Laziel simply does not understand the grasp of time and manners due to his divine nature; ‘on God’s time’ and all that.”
“How much did you have to skip to get that from their bios?” she asked.
“Way too much. And that was just what I could remember from when I was reading the Floor Guardian’s Bios from a few months back,” he admitted.
“Anyone else you think might give us trouble?” Emily asked.
“Hmm. I think I read that the First Floor Guardians are loyal to their trainees and to the Council, so to be safe, I wouldn’t dissolve the idea of the Council, despite there being only two players. If you wanted to involve the NPCs, we could invite the Floor Guardians to be Council Members, but that is something that we should carefully consider due to potential loopholes in their biography logic. Honestly, we should probably investigate the world before making a decision like that. The Vault Floor Guardian, Kurt, didn’t have any flavor text that screamed ‘traitor’, so I think he’s a loyal one as well; probably more edgy than comfortable, but harmless to Guild members. I haven’t read any of the miscellaneous NPCs, though, so it might be best to keep an open eye. Depending on how the meeting goes with the Floor Guardians, we might be able to have them inspect those within our ranks as well.”
Emily slowly nodded as she found her seat at the head of the table, a chair made of fine brown leather, which was noticeably taller than the others. Undisclosed sat nearby, in his assigned seating from the YGGDRASIL days, nearly three seats down to her left. The table itself had a long tablecloth, similar to the black and gold banners that surrounded the meeting room, excluding the sword itself.
“Your username is annoying, especially now that this is practically real life.” Milk confided, followed by a groan made by Undisclosed.
----
Emily and Undisclosed stood at the head of the table when the Seven Floor Guardians and, strangely, fourteen other NPCs, which Emily recognized to be a variety of non-combat oriented custom NPCs. One of whom was Aemon, so it was likely he either finished with his task or had something to say. She also spied Steele tucked into the crowd, who had packed in with the other NPCs behind the Guardians.
“Good Evening, my friends and allies,” Undisclosed began, as they had agreed. It would show unity by allowing someone who is not the Guild Leader to start the briefing, while later reinforcing that she was still in command, “as many of you know, I am the UF Branch Overseer of External Guild Affairs, Commander Undisclosed. We of the High Council have called upon you to ensure transparency going forward. You may have heard of our current… situation.”
A few in the crowd exchanged looks, while most maintained strict postures as expected from a military-esque faction.
“We are currently located in an unknown region, surrounded by forest as far as the enchanted eye can see. Assistant Researcher Aemon has been working to ensure our secrecy from outside forces, but we will need to begin scouting missions in the future, and such enchantments require round-the-clock maintenance, so starting today, we will be sending patrols out that will be required to police the border. We plan on working with all of you to ensure those plans bear fruit.” Aemon gave a deep nod to the sentence that was directed at him, but otherwise said nothing. The Scout and Knight trainers gave a slight nod when he referred to scouting missions; this would be a good opportunity to use their trainees for low-risk threat assessments, assuming that the ward boundaries worked well.
“In addition to setting patrols on the Ground Level, we will also have permanent residents in the Upper Tower as well; lodgings are already set up, so make sure there is a rotating eight-person team manning the tower. Guardian Remi will need to share responsibilities between guarding the First Floor, training, and maintaining watch over the Ground Floor. I assume that will be no issue.” It was not a question, so the Elf Archer simply nodded.
“Several of you will be displaced in our time of need; I trust you all to confide in us if problems arise. I will now turn this meeting over to Guild Master Milk, who wishes to request something from all of you.”
Milk nodded to Undisclosed before continuing. “As Commander Undisclosed stated, I am Guildmaster Milk. My request is simple: Do you pledge to faithfully serve the United Front, now and always? In matters political or martial, in triumph and defeat? Can I count on you for your continued loyalty?”
Each of the gathered placed their right hand over their heart, hand made into a fist. “Now, and Always, Guildmaster.”
“Very well. Henceforth, you shall address me within these grounds as Guildmaster Blackwell. Commander Undisclosed shall be known as Commander Sand.”
“Guildmaster Blackwell! Commander Sand! For the United Front!”
----
Explorer
Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.
Each footfall ricocheted in her skull, thunderous beneath the oppressive canopy. The breathless hush of the ancient forest did nothing to shield her; every twig crushed underfoot, every gasp of air, screamed her presence. They were closing in.
The ambush had unraveled in moments—a bloom of firelight, screams torn from throats, and the gleam of the Elf King's war sigils through the smoke. Now the rebels were scattered or dead. And she... she was prey.
Thwump—
The arrow sliced through the dusk, embedding deep in her shoulder. Pain seared down her arm, but she bit back the scream and staggered into a dead sprint.
ARWOOOOOOO.
The trail sniffers’ howl split the woods with uncanny precision, a beast that was half wolf and half beast. The King’s favorite bloodhounds. A second hunt had begun.
Thwump—
This one punctured her calf with cruel intent. Her legs buckled, the world tipping sideways as the forest floor rushed up to meet her. Twigs clawed at her skin. Her chest heaved, her pulse louder than thought. She could not allow her to become one of the Elf King’s playthings.
She unlatched the iron dagger from her belt. She pressed its bite to her throat.
But a hand clamped around her wrist, unyielding as iron. A knee was placed on her back to keep her from attempting to stand.
“NO! Please, don’t- please,” Her plea fractured with desperation as she fought to drive the blade home.
“Stop resisting, Rebel. The King requires you to be intact.”
The voice was not one of contempt or enjoyment, but a simple, dead voice. She knew that most of the Elf King’s men were not evil people, but they still did and allowed evil things. Then—darkness. A blow to the skull, sharp and ringing, turned the world to shards.
Pain became distance. Pressure lifted. Something shifted.
‘Was he… gone?’
No. Not gone; limp.
She crawled, blind, bloody fingers digging into the earth as the forest fell silent behind her. Something had changed. Her breath hitched as mossy wood and green grass gave way to something that should definitely not be in the forest: man-polished stone. The elf looked up to see a tower that rose high above her, but still much smaller than the surrounding trees. A grey obelisk of brick that appeared long-standing and martial, where no outsider could be. Despite the alarms going off in her head, she recognized this to be a temporary salvation from capture at the hands of the Elf King.
Her head hit the brick-laid ground, and she was met with true darkness.