Launch

When Julian finally returned home with bags of groceries and other supplies, the sun was already setting and the day was about to end. Entering his apartment, he discovered that the game company had already delivered the capsule at his doorstep. The sheer size of the compartmental object was intimidating, filling out the size of a king sized bed all replete with complicated looking tubes and flaring fluorescent lights giving it a typical gamer's look. The sleek black metallic gradient of the capsule made it look like a futuristic cryo-hibernation chamber and was aesthetically pleasing to look at.

Julian's own memories were replete with constant interactions with this complicated gadget and he wasn't fazed by the sleek looking capsule. He pressed a button hidden underneath a hatch on the corner to activate the capsule's transportation protocol which caused the bottom to spawn wheels. He then casually and knowingly dragged the object into his apartment. Massive Dynamic, the company behind Mandate of Heaven had a complementary servicing protocol to calibrate the capsule and mount it according to the wishes of the customer, however, Julian rejected this offer and opted for the self assembly option instead.

Leaving his bags of groceries on the table, he immediately set out to assembling the capsule and calibrating the software settings to his own perceived tastes. Few knew it at this point, but Mandate of Heaven was a hyper realistic world with detail and accuracy hitherto unseen in any virtual technology before this. However, every person's brain's interactions with their sensory system had slight differences due to genetics, mutations and just general biological diversity. In the later stages of Mandate of Heaven, self calibrating the capsule to perfectly optimize the experience at an individual level had become a new meta. At this moment, Julian was precisely tweaking those settings.

It took an entire hour before Julian could be satisfied. This was one specific issue he was very particular about. After an hour of intense tweaking, he decided to cook and eat up some food before he lay down in the capsule to wait for the global launch of the game. While eating his dinner, Julian scrolled through social media to see if there was any buzz about the game and found that there was a muted expectation among a small inner circle of aficionados, however, Mandate of Heaven was largely flying under the radar for most people. Julian wasn't too worried about that since he knew the real potential of the game and how the discoveries of the new players would naturally lead to a dramatic explosion in the popularity of the game.

Mandate of Heaven, unlike other games could only be played at night and in a sleep state. The capsule intentionally sedated the player using a hypnosis effect before the player's perceptions were brought into the world of Eianna, the world of Mandate of Heaven. The game would begin every night at twelve midnight and freeze again at six am in the morning. This in itself was a peculiar restriction, but the stakes at play would quickly be understood when players would begin to discover the intricacies of the world.

After having dinner and having a final scroll through the internet, Julian finally stepped into the capsule and allowed the hatch to shut over him. A feeling of familiarity and nostalgia hit him at the same time as a few dull red lights suddenly began to put his consciousness into a subconscious altered state of sleep and suspended animation. The darkness around his eyes began to fade away and give in to a blooming light that gloriously enveloped him in layers of ecstasy. Julian could not just see himself being transported to a new world, he could smell and touch it. Feel it. It was too real and yet it seemed to fantastical to be true at the same time.

A peculiar feeling emerged from within his mind as he floated in a blank white ethereal space, without any sign of wind or any other entity for that matter. That feeling seemed to ask him to assign himself a name for his avatar within this reality. Julian didn't blink and thought of a single word, the name he had chosen in his previous life and one he intended to stake a claim to this time around as well. "Zephyr." He gently mumbled and the peculiar feeling within his mind sent its acknowledgement that the name had been adapted as one belonging to his new avatar.

Unlike other games, one could not alter their avatar at the beginning of the game. It would be a scanned replica in all its beautiful or ugly glory of the real body. As for whether the features could be later modified in the game, no information was available from Massive Dynamic and probably with the exception of Julian, aka, Zephyr, no one would discover for a long time.

Once the naming process was completed the world began to blur again from the ethereal formless white blankness and color, smell and sounds began to fill the environment. An unfamiliar collection of voices that appeared to be talking in an unrecognizable language first greeted Julian's ears. He turned around wildly to find himself suddenly spawning into a large praying hall in front of an altar. He wasn't the only one.

Around him, he observed hordes of other players with bewildered expressions spawning and moving their bodies around in surprise and confusion. Sever tried to take off their clothes and were immediately able to do so, leading to some gasps and curses. Others tried yelling for their status or inventory multiple times to no avail. Most were still bewildered with how realistic and beautiful everything looked.

Julian rotated his arm in a practiced maneuver and subtly nodded to himself, satisfied with his calibration. He did not even waste time attempting to call out a status or to look at his own personal stats. This wasn't a traditional game. It was essentially a simulated reality. Those things were merely fantastical enticements that just didn't belong to a player's tool kit within this game. His eyes carefully turned towards his surroundings in an effort to place himself. He discovered that this group of players had spawned in some sort of underground temple. One look at the altar deigned towards a statue of the moon told him that he had spawned in a difficult initial condition.