Chapter 37 - Spirit Seeker

Now that Saachi had one part of the quest item, it was time to go deep into forest in search of NPCs in settlements there. They are not called aboriginal or tribe or anything like that. Just a bunch of people who live close to nature, away from money and temptation. As they had settled long ago, they knew more things than village people. From those NPCs he had to get information about void seed and how to procure it.

The chances of getting one more quest while that NPC checks his power or whether he can even try to get it was more. He just hoped it won't take much time because the last part of quests are always doozy and wacky.

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In the building housing the support staff and GMs of the game,

The veteran in charge of the novice villages in sector xxxx-xxxx had come back after his lunch break. He asked his junior, " Anything I missed?"

The junior was still in impressionable age.

"I have marked 5 seedlings today."

Veteran could only smile at that. Not even a month old game, promotions still going strong, new players coming daily in hundreds of thousands, and this kid had started marking players with 'great' future.

"How many players in your list now?"

" Just 937, including the ones I chose today." His mood turned down at the number. His roommates had over 1600, nearly 2000 potential great players in their sectors. He did not even have thousand players. Would his sector would lag behind much when town segment opens up? Would he have to suffer a lot of teasing later?

If the veteran had any inkling of ideas moving in junior's head, he would have smacked him down.

The tagging of players is an art. All would start at basic level where even 1% better activity looks great and get tagged. As one progresses and learns details of avatar and the player, bias would being and many would stop being tagged.

But the look of it, his junior would take years to learn the knack of it. Compared to junior or other members in his team, he had tagged only around 500 players and specially marked over 200 of them. These 200 would get extra monitoring.

The number is very less when total number of players under his monitoring are taken to account (over 15,000 presently). Not even 5% of them, according to him, would reach higher position, whether it's rankings, guild posts or others.

The constant monitoring was necessary evil to find bugs and correct them promptly. So, even the programmers assigned to each group sat quietly watching monitors, playing guessing games silently. The exuberance of launch of game was no longer visible. No more constant screaming when newbie packs were opened. Occasionally bursts still happened, just like the one that very moment.

"Is this even a gift?" Someone screamed out loud. Soon people surrounded the exclaimed person. Anything to break the tediousness of watching monitors all day. Once, someone read the gift, he could not stop laughing. It was skill called 'Arnold's gluttony'( which programmer had watched that cartoon show while writing program?). The person had to eat constantly to play. His would get hungry 50% faster. His satiety would never reach 100%. This started a wave of talk about sub class he can choose or party member composition.....Post lunch sessions have to be loud to prevent sleepiness.

While talks were going on, Mr Mevin Haufmann, ( the veteran) got a call. With a surprised look, he went out to answer it. Miss Sonja of legal affairs department wanted daily updates on avatar xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx and all the details of that avatar had to be scrambled and encrypted and dummy avatar details are to be set to satisfy whoever comes in search of it. Miss Sonja was more proactive than she promised Saachi.

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Saachi found a 'spirit seeker' native after running around level 10 maps. Void seed was much revered object for them too. After some exaggerated stories, he agreed that 'puny villagers' needed it more and agreed to help.

Before that, obligatory quest. Spirit seeker are type of summoners but the summone won't be seperate entity. Instead, the power of summons would enter the seeker. In simple way of explaining, this is way of having hundreds of options to choose attributes and skills every time. The limitations are obvious - the monster or the spirit should not be of higher level than player (the consciousness of player would be swallowed by monster), the monster or spirit must be captured and stored in specific way and some of these spirits would have limited usage. After learning some details, Saachi quickly sent a note to Bree about the hidden class change option. He was not worried about the delay in the messaging ( he is still fulfilling secret quest).

The natives around here believed that a Great Deer spirit was guarding this region. That was the reason why so many villages and towns had 'deer' or 'stag' in their name.

The deers around the settlement were sort of tame and they liked green paradise grass. So Niyam had to pick some 10 or more green paradise grass and come to settlement. Higher number of grass and faster quest completion meant more support by NPC.