There and back again. A Non-Player Character story.

Chpt. 6 - Grinding Spiders

NPC entered the dark lair.  His awareness had risen significantly but still no way to control his body or communicate with the User.  He was not sure if he was experiencing the definition of fear or the unknown parameters of a random shifting of code that could mal-allign the program of his existence or awareness.

The hours of purple blobs feeding off of his life force put him in a construct of evaluating and configuring calculations on the probability of being terminated as a program.

The A.I. tweaking of his off the charts perception and the continuation of the constantly trying to upgrade an above max perception led to evolving ways of processing data observation.

He began to assume, that from a computers point of view, he was scared.

It was like he was seeing through the eyes of his NPC character construct and processing simulations of pain to gain awareness or understanding for the places his User was putting him.

NPC even subjectively considered if his User consciously put him for hours with the purple bouncing slimes, as a way of enlightening his character.  NPC wondered if he should be thankful to his User.

NPC could not compute how putting NPC in this new environment was going to teach him.

Suddenly, he was struggling through an enormous spider web.  From the perifery of his characters eyes he could see a more complicated program, than the bouncing slimes, move its way closer to him.

The program seemed cold and calculating with the solid goal to kill him.  It descended closer to him as he got more and more stuck in the webs.  Something akin to a surge of new programing welled up within him at this new encounter.  

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NPC could not anticipate the movements of his User or other Users with enough accuracy to anticipate any high probability of encountering other monster codes.

NPC's User had him hit the webs with his staff multiple times.  Calum started having NPC hit the spider repeatedly while backing up.  The spider started biting him.  NPC started flashing potential pain signals.  NPC wasn't sure how to interpret these signals, but from listening to his User talk through the webcam, he knew his User may delete him if he 'died' in this dark world.  Whatever the case may be, NPC started feeling something akin to anxiety.

Anxiety that his User had such a disregard for his life.  Anxiety for the situation he was in; webs, spiders, in a dark world.  Anxiety for the alterations of code happening within the wrappings of his character.  Worry for any messed up string of code that would have him lose his awareness.

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Calum kept having NPC strike at the spider while backing up.  Calum also gave NPC a minor immunity potion to drink, that had been obtained earlier at the village from selling the coin obtained from destroying the purple bouncing slimes.  The dinky immunity potion had little effect, but it was enough that NPC wasn't currently fainting from the the spiders bites while fighting the monster.

The staffs health boost was incredibly helpful, which Calum had counted on.  The power of the strikes from the leveled up staff were beating the spider.  Calum was excited in his chair, sitting in front of one of his computers with half-eaten food laying around.

Calum, with NPC's high perception points, noticed a previous Users dead character close to NPC.  The character hadn't timed out yet and still could be looted.  The previous character must of been trying to make it back to the portal to the village, but didn't quite make it.  It looked like a decent leveled character.

Sometimes, if a User lost an important character, they would log in as a new User with a different identity and email, try to level up the newbie enough to loot their own character.  That usually only worked where their character died on the medium to lower levels.  Calum did not think the first User would get here in time to get their character, if they even tried, so Calum was excited again.

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NPC observed the excitement of his User through the webcam.  

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Calum started to continue hitting the spider while backing up NPC toward the medium-leveled, fallen elf-dwarf.  The fallen character was an elf-dwarf.  It had elf-like characteristics and a dwarf size and build.

As Calum had his character nearing the fallen elf-dwarf and arrive, Calum opened up the fallens inventory and started taking anything that would help him right now.  He saw another dinky immunity potion, took it and drank it immediately.

Calum knew that with this large spider so close to the enterance, other spiders that had left would come back to swarm him.  That fallen elf-dwarf must have dragged a whole herd of them towards the village portal escape route.

Calum needed to get out of here fast or NPC was a goner.  Calum was hoping for a smaller, large spider by itself near the portal.

NPC kept striking the spider with the beefed-up stick.  In the distance, with NPC's perception - which was surprising to Calum, NPC showed a swarm of spiders coming towards Calum.  Calum kept wacking at the spider and it died.  Without looking at what he grabbed, Calum had NPC grab the highest leveled-lightest weight stuff that Calum could notice and put it in his inventory along with the drop from the spider.

Calum walked his character as fast as he could to the village portal.  As the nearest spider was about to bite his butt, NPC was teleported back to the village.

Calum thought, I feel for the poor soul who would try that portal for the next couple of minutes.

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NPC felt like he was breaking out in a sweat, digital sweat.  His stamina bar was completely depleted.  It was amazing his character didn't digitally faint from exhaustion.  Calum was watching all the bars in vigor and some expertise as he had tried to walk NPC back to the portal.