The Intermission Pt3

Only an hour later, I found myself sitting off to the side of the living room enjoying watching my character rush through various occurrences and interactions as a form of censorship. On the screen was a silent but subtitled event early on in my gaming where I acquired the Peddling skill while talking to the coach worker. On my head was a small Augmented Reality visor that I was using to monitor multiple forum threads and talk in a group chat with my reality group.

I was honestly a little perturbed with how much of my gameplay was accessible, but at least my thoughts were my own.

The last thing I wanted was for my family to hear the jokes about Lana that I repeatedly told myself!

Even though I did not have any posts of my own there was still plenty to keep myself busy with while coordinating the different posts altogether. There were some posts doing better than other but there was not exactly a lot of people commenting and questioning overall. Even though we did not set our posts up as pompously as the 'update panel' threads so that only so many people could be involved in general, we just were not very popular it seemed.

All of our posts were titled with the clan name of Tragedy's Travelers and covered a variety of topics from magic to cooking to primitive crafting. The clan name drew some attention by itself thanks to recent activity and publicity on the forums from the other clans involved in our server's territory raid but few people actually seemed interested in our advice.

Most of the people who popped up to post on our threads just wanted to ask about the raid itself to verify this or that aspect as well as heckle us in some way. These hecklers also mostly belonged to a few select clans and it was fairly easy to just reply by asking how their clan is doing outside the territory. Only a few still had the face to reply after those mentions and even then it was just to emptily threaten us.

Threats were good for publicity, though, because they caught attention with drama and people loved drama.

For the few people who actually came to take part in discussions or seek advice I did my best to make sure they received vague but relevant information about the properties of alloy components or the free manipulation of elements. Our most popular posts were actually the cooking post under the guise of 'primitive medicine' but the people there seemed much more focused on cooking itself. However, I did learn how to make noodle dough in the process of co-producing a medicinal ramen recipe.

Among the people who came to our posts were a few familiar clan names above their player identities and forum profile pictures. Little Thirteenth himself made an appearance early on in our primitive medicine post to talk about how effective our food was in granting normal players a serious edge in combat. He even included one of his own recipes while seeking advice on what tasty herbs would be good to augment the dish with exceptional buffs.

We even received support from Mistress' clan who made public some aspects of their own equipment designs in order to compare with the designs we posted as conversation pieces. When I read things like this I realized how nice it was to actually have some friends who were using their names and clans to bring us more attention. Still, there were only a handful of people who were willing to donate money to our posts and even then it was usually just a few of the new silver coins at a time.

In the end, we had to make a new post pertaining to the raid itself with several hidden videos that could only be revealed after a person donated to their posts. Even though I had a sponsor who basically owned most of my content for me, all I needed to do was include and advertisement link to my dad's gym's business site.

At first I worried that this might reveal too much of my own personal information but remember that my identity as the gym's in-game mascot was protected on several levels. It would be impossible to get my relation to the gym from the game's servers without physical access so the only route left was to go to the gym itself. But, the get the information from there then people would have to go through my father.

This was the man who taught me most of what I knew about using my hands and still had several aspects of the family styles that I was supposedly not allowed to learn after becoming a disappointment to society. These aspects were the weapons tactics, things I had to figure out for myself in video games and self-study. However, I was pretty sure that I could take him in a fight.

By the time my character on the TV made it to Sierra all of my clan's threads together had managed to secure several gold in income. The current conversion rate of grandfather gold in the forums was fifty percent, making two old gold worth one new gold. This was a great deal less than I had originally expected but it was still something that I could work with.

Just taking one million gold that I had made off of other clans, that was not five hundred thousand new gold. Divide this by one hundred and you have five thousand platinum which multiples by ten to fifty thousand dollars. Most of the million gold that I made had already been turned in to the clan or divided among the party, but even then it equaled some hundreds or a few thousand dollars apiece to the members of my Tragedy's Travelers.

Even though all of us had accumulated quite a bit of wealth just from farming mobs on the way to the territory, the only money I let them convert currently were the direct profits I had made and distributed during the territory. Ivana, Agnes, and Conan had already converted this into dollars in their own or Conan's parents' bank accounts.

The others, though, were somewhat wisely holding on to their gold to further invest in the game to make new currency in the game which would be worth more in conversion.

Conan had a good excuse for it, at least, because he needed to prove to his parents that his recently overwhelming amount of gameplay was profitable. Having several thousand extra dollars appear in the accounts was just the way to do so. Now, even if they complained about it there was not much they could ethically do about it because of both his intelligence and the fact they are spending the money he made.

Our youngest teammate was also responsible for putting out new character builds, focusing his attention magic warrior classes and classless players because they shared similar aspects. His posts lacked some popularity because people did not think much of some unknown player disputing the opinions of 'professionals'. However, there were still a number of people with enough brains to see the quality differences in his classless builds and those being used to misguide new players.

I mean, he had one of the best classless players to base his builds off of so all he really had to argue with people who tried to discredit his work was for them to fight his classless clan founder and then try to argue with him again.

Albeit, I was probably the most broken classless player in the public view so there were few who would actually think of fighting me after paying to view our fights with different bosses or waves of trolls.

By the time I was finally getting bored with running these posts from the shadows the pay-per-view posts we had released on several different topics started to gain momentum and brought in more people and attention to our efforts. At this point I had already helped enough answers that my teammates could handle most issues on their own, as well.

Heaving a tired sigh and leaning back in my seat while simply skimming the slowly but steadily growing activity on our posts, I look over at my family who were still absorbed in their own 'studies'. I was honestly a little upset that they were paying more attention to their devices than to my gameplay on the television as my character finally returned to the Elder Oak Passage with Ivana, Go, Lil, and Papi.

Watching myself fighting with my previous variety of weapons and tactics while I looked for something that worked I could not help but cringe a little. While the fighting itself was not displeasing to the eye, the excessive effort and energy I put into it was downright wasteful. However, farming those lesser skills for spare experience was well worth it in the end.

Thinking of the few hundred thousand gold that I kept for myself, I cannot help but shake my head and say, "I can't believe that's what a ten-thousand-dollar noob looks like."

Without even looking up from his tablet my father asks, "Oh? Did you finally manage to make some money from this game? You should take your family out to dinner to celebrate!"

Thinking about all of the meals I had missed recently despite the high caloric intake I had sustained through protein bars and other healthy snack foods, I feel my stomach growling angrily and realize that I was actually VERY hungry right now. I had already eaten before even doing my workout but that did not seem to matter much. I felt like I could Devour right there in reality from how hungry I was.

Unable to resist the enchanting call of different foods suddenly filling my mind, I go back on my own words and convert ten thousand old gold into five thousand new gold that automatically becomes listed as five hundred platinum. A single button later, a five-grand notification appears on my visor telling me the account tied to my character just made money for the first time.

"I want sushi!" I exclaim excitedly, deciding on a food that was not only healthy but relatively safe for someone like me to eat in bulk.

At the mention of Asian cuisine, my siblings quickly forgot about their own devices and became just as excited as I was to go out and have fun. My parents, who both received the same notification that I did about money in my account, were not only surprised but equally as excited as the rest of us. There was a clear difference between the idea of making money in a video game and the actual income of money from said game.

How the company itself was actually making money I was uncertain, something to do with the numbers of places versus reality-named locations for a timely advertisement income on top of what the players actually spent on the game. On the other hand, the starting race of Infected Mortal that I accidentally created would be released after the update and I would start making actual money. Even the game company would profit from my own content in this way.

Not to mention, there was a ten-percent conversion fee that took some of the money players made but this was acceptable in my opinion. If the game company kept on paying out more and more money then the game would eventually shut itself down. Luckily, most of the money that came out of the game originally came from the players and investors so the company itself only stood to profit in most cases.

Only a few minutes later, my family and I were piled up in my mother's car and our parents were loudly debating with my siblings on how to celebrate my money by spending my money. Sushi was non-negotiable since it was what I specifically wanted, but everything else was up for debate. In the end they decided to go out to the cinema to catch a recently released movie after dinner before spending the rest of the evening just shopping.

This was a bit more than I had anticipated, preferring to go home right after eating so that I could comfortably slip into a food coma, but it was not unappreciated. I had barely gotten to spend any real time with my family recently because of how dedicated to the game I became. With this, at least, I could enjoy my little brother and sister until I was sick of hearing them.

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