In memory of Lola Salines 1986 2015 founder of 404 éditions and editor of this series who lost her life in the November 2015 attacks on Paris Thank you for believing in me Cube Kid
SATURDAY UPDATE 21 We set out for Owl’s Reach the monsters mysteries and musty passages of the Tomb of the Forgotten King now behind us As I fiddled with the squishy glowmoss my mind wandered to Urf to the advanced crafting table and to the bizarre chain of events that had just occurred Who could have guessed when I left Villagetown that I’d be fighting bosses with Breeze Pebble and some mysterious human Speaking of which I bombarded S with questions during the whole way back to town He seemed to know just about everything so why not Sadly this little interview didn’t go as well as I’d planned His answers were from a human’s perspective which was confusing to a villager like me Why is the sky blue Because Earth’s sky is blue The original game would have looked strange with say a purple sky Oh Why do villager boys have big noses while villager girls have small ones 1
Entity was responsible for that I think He and a few others were working on a new server mod to make villagers more lifelike This included villagers with different personalities outfits and genders But after that many of the players said the girl villagers looked strange so Entity made their noses smaller and gave them hair Then the Scribes a handful of players tasked with writing the history of the game world added a paragraph about how villager boys shave their heads as a tradition And after the server crash every last word the Scribes originally wrote became real You lost me What’s this about the crash What happened He went on to tell me that in the Earth year 2039 their world was facing imminent destruction As the final hour approached some of them chose to flee into VR or virtual reality Apparently all they had to do was throw on a helmet to be transported to another world But that was just imaginary an illusion The world they had escaped to was this one once known as the Aetheria server After having spent thousands of hours in this virtual world most of them had made countless friends and they wanted to say goodbye They were all the most hardcore of game addicts and 2
they’d spent more time in Aetheria than their own reality Not many of them even had friends in the real world Some didn’t even have family So it was only fitting for them to spend their last moments in a world they cherished surrounded by virtual friends So what happened I asked Your world didn’t end The real one I mean We have no way of knowing With the countdown approaching zero those logged in lost consciousness and eventually woke up in a different area still logged in to the game And the game was different somehow Real We couldn’t quit or exit To this day we’re still able to access the original main menu system but it’s unresponsive Oh I stared ahead blankly until something caught my eye Hey look A coal vein Let’s stop for a bit and mine S looked at me and sighed 3
