Expectations
The Vizor purchasing procedure went without a hitch. Evan was finally an owner of the Amber label version of Soulbound Online's gaming set!
At the dinner table at home, five people sat together in a small and comfy apartment. Evan rushed down his food while Ken, his younger brother, kept staring at him in disbelief. Evan was usually the slowest to finish his dinners.
"What?" Evan peeked up, noticing Ken's stare.
Evan explained that he'd purchased a new gaming set, excluding the 40.000 Crowns part.
"Oh, cool! Can I try it as well?" Ken excitedly asked.
"It's a VR game. It's single-player, bro".
"What's it called?"
"Um..." Evan hesitated for a while. "Soulbound Online." He quietly replied, hoping that the name would go unnoticed.
"Holy shit-"
"Language, young man." Lisa admonished, giving him a stern yet calm look.
"Sorry, mom. Anyway, isn't that game super expensive?"
Evan started getting queazy. Why did his stupid brother have to bring up the money topic?
However, the brothers' parents seemed rather indifferent at the mention of Evan's recent purchase.
"Ken, give your brother some slack." Their father urged. "Your brother has been working very hard lately."
His wife seemingly agreed with a nod. The family had been fairing a lot better economically ever since Evan started working full time. The couple's hearts would occasionally ache at the thought that he'd given up his future education in order to provide for the family at the age of 17.
Evan was by no means untalented. In fact, when he was younger, he excelled in many sports. He often ranked in the top five percentile in academics at school and had a knack for guessing games for some inexplicable reason.
He would win rock-paper-scissor nine out of ten times, which was extremely infuriating for Ken, always on the losing side.
Another strange phenomenon was that while Evan's siblings had silken brown hair inherited from the mother's side or rough chestnut-colored hair from their father, his hair was entirely black.
Ken would often taunt him saying he was adopted or calling him a 'reversed albino'. Being taller and stronger, Evan would occasionally smack his brother real good although he also found his brother's comments witty at times. Brotherly love, they say.
On a more serious note– two years ago, the company that Evan's father worked for had an accident. His father got heavily injured and soon after lost his employment and could barely scrape together whatever little money the insurance could offer.
Although their mother had always worked in a kindergarten part-time, alleviating some of the economical stress– but with four children to provide for, it was never easy. And now she had to take care of her husband from time to time due to his declining left leg which had been severely fractured during the accident two years ago, leaving him unable to walk.
The family's youngest, Lauren, at age 15, the same age as Ken, had become increasingly more ill over the last year since medicine for her treatment came at a cost.
Lauren and Ken weren't twins, as some people would mistake them for due to their similarities in age and looks. Not long after Ken was born, their mother expected another child soon after.
Currently, numerous doctors had been unable to find the right treatment for Lauren and thus couldn't cure her rare disease, which meant that purchasing rare medicines was the only way for her to cope with life in general.
Without the meds, she would have fevers and cough endlessly. Winter was closing in, which would most likely worsen her condition again.
Thankfully, the burden had lessened when their eldest brother had moved out, attending a university on a scholarship.
Still, the family had promised to send some money every month so that he could focus on his studies rather than diluting his focus.
Now that Evan had reached his goal of buying the Amber game set, he could finally go back to his normal shift routine, giving him more time to be a normal teenager.
He had spent many nights in the previous months doing online research on what to expect from Soulbound Online.
In the past, his parents would often bring their children to gaming events where Evan found his fascination for role-playing games. At home, they would often play video games together as a family. It had been a family tradition for many generations.
Thus Evan's parents understood very well that the younger generation couldn't miss out on the stories and adventures unfolding behind new and wondrous technology like hyper-realistic VR games.
...
After his shift at the kiosk the day after, Evan was finally ready to play the game. Unlike most other VRMMORPGs, Soulbound Online had real money-earning potential!
Though time-consuming and arduous, farming items and selling them, selling bus rides for newbies, participating in different leaderboards earning merits or points exchangeable for real-life cash, or participating in the ever-debatable live in-game auction houses, were just a few ways to make you rich.
Yesterday, when he had read the instruction manual for the gaming set, he'd found out that his Amber Vizor allowed him to remain logged in for as long he liked!
All Vizors developed by Bell Inc and their advanced technology would allow the human biological functions to atrophy less while connected to the system.
Some rumors even made people wonder whether they even needed to eat or relieve themselves in bathrooms.
Justifiably, Bell Inc never claimed that their Vizors would make players immortal.
Other than being able to sleep and play at the same time, called the Soul Dive function, the company claimed that its Vizors would allow players a 95% real-life-to-game immersion, which was already 10-15% better than other VR games!
The devs even went as far as to promise that other than being unable to experience pain, physics would be indistinguishable from real life!
Accompanying the Amber Vizor was three fluid-like battery vials. Evan recognized that each vial inserted into a gaming Vizor was meant to be utilized as batteries to keep the Vizors in function, but also at the same time acted as nutritional neurotransmitters.
The vials Evan received were C-rank due to his mid-tier label purchase.
Each C-rank battery vial had enough energy to keep the game online for 250 hours, which was 100 hours more than its D-rank counterpart that low-tier label holders received. Thus Evan found himself having fewer regrets about his choice.
That was especially the case when the nutritional value of the neurotransmitters imparted via the Vizors included many health benefits he had yet to experience.
In addition to the vials, a single yellow gemstone strung to a leathery string came along with the gaming set package. It looked like some sort of amulet, but the manual and disclaimer failed to mention anything about it.
Just for fun, in order to get into character, Evan decided to wear it.
The manual wrote that in order activate the Vizor, one simply had to make sure that a battery vial was placed correctly in the Vizor's battery slot, then a prompt would automatically engage with the player.
Leaning back on his old but comfy gaming chair, Evan heaved a long breath and calmed himself before interfacing with the prompt from the Amber Vizor that he wore like a pair of fancy, yet very comfortable sunglasses.
Sharp and colorful light soon spread throughout Evan's vision and he suddenly found himself unable to sense the world outside the game.