Skylair Online

Episode 4

The mountaintop was replaced with a large circular room with a large screen mounted on the wall in front of Leo. On the screen was a picture of a chest that was slowly bobbing up and down.

“Leo!” said a voice to his right.

He turned to see a blond haired boy in a blue robe walking towards him.

“Ben?” Leo asked.

“That’s right, this is what my character looks like in game, pretty cool right?”

“Yeah.”

“So anyway, how’d the tutorial go?”

“Okay I think.”

“You should have a new content pack unlocked, if you press on the screen there you should get the option to unlock some new perks.”

Leo nodded and pressed the screen. The chest opened and he was presented with four choices: Explorer, mage, archer and warrior.

“Which one should I pick?” Leo asked.

“Well, that depends what class you want to play. But the first content pack is a little unhelpful to be honest, to play assassin you need the perks from both explorer and warrior, none of the choices are helpful to guardian players, mage is pretty good but I picked that. You could pick archer and try and play artillery but you don’t get the increased range perk yet or you could pick explorer and play scout. Don’t worry too much about it, as you play more you’ll get more content packs unlocked.”

Leo thought for a moment and then picked the explorer pack. It glowed gold and then four perks popped up on screen: Cartographer, Scout, Sentry Sphere and Swift.

“What did you get?”

“Explorer.”

“Okay, nice, so are you going to play scout?”

“What does a scout actually do though?”

“Oh, right. Um, so, the five roles are assassin, guardian, artillery, scout and mage. As a scout your job is basically to provide information to the team and make the calls. You take the cartography perk which gives you a map that sort of floats on your arm, if you drop a Sentry Sphere down and then an enemy walks over it they will show up on your map. So you basically scout out where the enemy is, what they are doing and then order the rest of the team around to set up ambushes or avoid the enemy team. The rest of the perks they get varies from scout to scout, some like traps and other disruption stuff others like to take some damage things and become a second, weaker version of an Artillery player. A couple might even take utility spells like a mage to enhance their team’s abilities.”

“Okay, so if I’ve just got the basic perks what do I do?”

“I’d go into your loadout and equip a bow as well, just scope out where the enemy is and then join the rest of the team for the fight.”

“Right.”

“I play as a mage, so my job is generally to add enhancements to our team and disrupt the enemy team. I’ve got a whole host of ice magic equipped so I tend to focus on the disrupting the enemy part of the job. I create walls of ice, summon storms and turn the ground into sheet ice so that they slip. It is really funny seeing people trying to stand up in VR, like, you don’t really think about it when you do it and suddenly you have to do it only by thinking how to do it.”

“I hope that I won’t get hit by that.”

“It’s fine, allies aren’t affected by it. What you should be worried about is the enemy assassin. The assassin’s job is to do one of two things, kill the enemy scout or kill the enemy artillery. The artillery is the main source of damage on the team, these are the players that have only taken perks that increase their damage output and if left alone will shred through teams. But, because they don’t have any defences they need the guardian to protect them. If you manage to kill the enemy scout the enemy team is effectively wandering around blind and you can set ambushes for them or just avoid them and take everything from under their noses. If you manage to kill the enemy artillery they won’t be able to win a straight five on five fight.”

“Alright, so I put down sentry spheres and look out for the enemy assassin, got it.”

Ben smiled.

“So, we want to set you up with an auto equip set. Before each game you can set up a new set of equipment and perks to use but  the auto equip set is what your out of game avatar will look like and what you will go into game with if you forget to set anything. Just hit that button there and equip all your perks and then a bow. You have a maximum of 30 points to spend on perks, unfortunately the four perks you have add up to 10 points so you are going to be feeling a bit week until you’ve played more and unlocked some more perks.”

Leo nodded and selected his four perks. Cartographer gives the hero access to the map feature. Scout lets the hero leave the deploy zone 30 seconds early. Sentry Sphere allows the hero to drop sentry spheres that make a noise when enemy heroes pass by, unless the hero has the Cartographer perk, in which case there will be no sound and the enemy will appear on the hero’s map. Swift increases the hero’s movement speed.

As he selected the bow and pressed accept, three glass spheres appeared hanging from his belt and bow appeared, strapped to his back.

“Try making the motion to draw a bow,” Ben suggested.

When Leo tried making the motion, the bow appeared in his hands, an arrow on the string. Then when he slowly released the tension on the string, they disappeared again.

“You don’t have to draw weapons in the game, you just have to think about using them and they snap to your hands, you will have to touch the sentry sphere’s on your belt though. You don’t have to undo them, if you just touch them they will snap to your hand.”

Leo experimentally touched one of the blue spheres on his waste and it did indeed jump into his hand. Touching the belt again snapped it back on.

“To win the game you need to defeat the Titan on top of the mountain, but you can’t really fight it straight off unless your team is specially equipped to do so, so what you do is you run around collecting shrines, or you can head into the desert and kill the monsters there. Each time you kill a monster you get a little bit stronger and if you manage to kill a dragon you get a LOT stronger. There are two dragons, one in each area of desert. The bonuses from the shrines are decreasing the cooldown time on your abilities from the soul shrine, increased damage from the sky shrine, increased defences from the heart shrine and increased healing and mana regeneration from the earth shrine. The shrine bonuses are easy to get and strong but only last for three minutes. The bonus from monsters are hard to get because the monsters fight back and slightly weaker than shrine buffs, but the benefits last for the whole game.”

Leo nodded again.

“So, ready to get in a game with actual people?”

“Sure, I guess.”

Ben smiled wickedly and made a few motions with his hands, then a message popped up in front of Leo.

‘Cryoarts has invited you to a game’

“Oh, and from now on, I’m Cryo and your Gambit.”

Leo nodded and hit accept.