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

Chpt. 10 - Peculiarities

Peculiarities

"Hi Cal," Nala text-chatted Cal from behind NPC.

NPC felt something akin to panic.  Picking the correct combination of things to say and do, what Calum would, was baffling.  Just the number of correlations possible between english words typed in relation to NPC's body movements, was astounding.

NPC texted back, "Hi Nala."

After that, it seemed to NPC, that the curvy, human-wizard, sauntered over to be in front of him.

NPC texted to only himself, since when does a computer program look like it can saunter.  It must be me thinking that.  NPC stood still, running through possible calculations and his probable response to Nala's next potential action.  From a computer-User perspective; the computer, or NPC, was lagging.

Nala just observed NPC, just standing there, frozen.

After 10 seconds, NPC panicked and ran into the cornfield with his wooden spoon, smashing grasshoppers.

How odd, Nala thought.

After another 10 seconds, Nala texted only Calum and not in their group chat, "Cal? did I do something wrong?"

NPC started going haywire, picking incoherent and extraneous associations concerning Nala's question.  "Do not compute, %  syntax error  %, please redefine your question?"

Nala did not know what to think.  Calum did things different that this.

"Cal," Nala texted, "do you still want to meet tomorrow?"

NPC had no idea what was going on.  He had too much data to process and make sense of.  NPC thought he would try again to answer the way Calum would.

"I, errr, would love to study,  ehh, you,  um...., I mean study with %% %% %     you!"

Nala was really confused.  She typed, "Cal, just call me before lunch if you still want to meet tomorrow )= ."

NPC gave up, and instead of not responding, he wrote what he thought he was thinking.

NPC's character walked to stand right in front of Lily789 and texted, "I would like to meet you in the real world."

"O.K., Cal." Nala texted back, thinking Calum was being silly.  "See you, I'm going to bed now."  Lily789 walked out of the little cornfield into a village safe-zone and then the status above her character blinked from active status to inactive status.

Suddenly, NPC smashing grasshoppers was no longer his only objective.  NPC started calculating on how he could join the human world.

NPC walked his character out of the cornfield to stand the large, muscular 'musclem4n' in a safe-zone next to Nala's, and stood there still, cranking on the permutations, formulating ways to get him to physically interact in the real world.

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Calum woke up in the morning and was perplexed seeing some peculiarities, his NPC character was standing next to a cornfield.  He was for sure he had left him somewhere else in the Newbie village.  He saw Nala's character (Lily789) standing next to him and that made sense.

That reminded him that he was going to see Nala today.  He was so excited about that, that he did not even try to figure out how his character got there, or if he forgot, a glitch, whatever.  He started getting ready and wanted to get an early start getting to the school, so he wasn't so sweaty when he arrived.  He wanted to take a slow bike ride to the university metropolis.

Nala called him in the morning.  "Cal, you were such a goof last night?" she pouted at him.

Calum said back, "What did I do?"

"and why didn't you call me?" she continued.

"I,  uhh, I wanted to call you, I just didn't want to be weird."

"Too late," Nala said back.

Calum liked talking to her.  "Well, I could meet earlier if you would like?" he said to her.

Nala thought about that for a second.  Usually they only met when they had school homework to work on, or something school related.

"What did you have in mind?" Nala asked.

Calum was like in a dream.  "We could go swimming at the pool?" he said energetically.

Nala was like, "Ahhh?" she was not normally asked that since high school.  "You sure you want to Cal?"

"It was the first thing that came to my mind," replied Calum matter-of-factly.  "We could swim laps, I need the exercise."

This threw Nala off again.  "No Cal," she said slowly, "how bout we go on a walk."

Calum agreed.

While walking that morning, Nala and Wade went early to the locked up science lab so Calum could show her some of the things he was working on.

While there, they thought maybe they would get on the K.R.E.O. game on the labs computer and try to figure out the anomaly that had happened last night to their two characters. Nala was wondering who she was talking to last night, and Calum was wondering why his character was in a different place.

Once Calum was logged in, he noticed his character had jumped lots of levels.

"Cal," Nala said, "when did you get the time to level your character that much.  Wait........., has someone hacked your character.  It's moving on it's own.  How is it possible that you and someone else are logged into the same character at the same time."

"Who did this?" said Calum out loud.

A text appeared on the line where the character normally chats with other group members.

This observation gave Calum goosebumps.  This computer was supposed to be strongly locked down.  For someone to also get access to the computers webcam, was another level of breaking in, and to be responding to them right now and watching what they were currently doing.