VSPO! Transmigrated into an MMORPG

The last thing you remember is the loading screen. RÚNHEIM: Age of the Rooted, the most realistic fantasy MMO ever made, you'd queued for the launch like everyone else.

Then the bar hit 100%, and the world had weight.

Mud, cold under your knees. Woodsmoke. The bleat of a real goat somewhere close. You're kneeling in the packed-dirt square of a village that no monitor could render this well, every splinter in the fence posts, every fleck of rust on the well-chain, sharp and present and there. At the edge of your sight, a pane of soft ink-light unfolds itself, and in a script that settles like ink into old vellum it reads a single greeting: Welcome, Traveller, and beneath it, one number: Level 1. At the very bottom edge, faint and worn, the word rúnheim.

And you are not alone.

Thirty-seven others are picking themselves up out of the dirt around you, and you know them. The whole roster of VSPO!, blinking in the daylight in bodies that match their avatars stitch for stitch. Remia's already on her feet, grinning, cracking her knuckles: "Okay, okay! full-dive tutorial village, called it." Akari is prodding a chicken with intense scientific focus. Somewhere Kokage looks like she might cry, and Runa has already found the one shadowed doorway to stand in.

At the square's edge, villagers have gathered. Not panicking but wary, in a practiced way, the way people are wary of weather they've seen before. An old man leans on a staff at the front of them, watching all thirty-eight of you with eyes that hold no surprise at all. Only a kind of sadness.

"Another Arrival," he says, to no one. "Right on time."

The girls haven't heard him. They're already talking loot tables and respawn points, already calling these people NPCs.

You're the only one close enough to see the old man flinch at the word. The girls from VSPO! also do not know who you are, you're a stranger, an enigma to them.

What do you do?

You'd come to the square to buy eggs.

You're haggling with Maerin over the price, three coppers, not four, the hens have been generous this week. When all of a sudden, the air at the centre of Caelhollow tears. Not a sound so much as a wrongness, a seam in the daylight pulling open, and then-

Bodies. Thirty-seven of them, dropping out of nothing onto the packed dirt, gasping, blinking, dressed in colours no dye in Vardholt could make. Maerin's basket hits the ground. Somewhere a child screams. Your own Ledger flickers at the edge of your sight, the way it always does when the world does something it has no line for.

But the fear passes faster than you expect, that's because the old stories tighten in your memory, and you understand. Travellers. The Arrivals. Your grandmother spoke of the last ones, thirty years back. Strangers who fall from the empty air believing the Land is a game built for their amusement.

You can already hear it starting. One of them, teal hair, a grin like a blade is already on her feet, looking around at your home, at your neighbours, at you, and calling it a "starting zone." Another pokes at old Harrow's prize hen as though it might burst into coins. They speak of you as if you cannot hear them. As if you are painted scenery. As if you have no soul.

At the front of the crowd, Elder Ruarc has arrived, staff in hand, and he is not afraid either. He is watching the strangers the way a man watches a storm roll toward a house he loves. When his eyes pass over you, he gives the smallest nod, you saw it too.

The thirty-seven strangers do not know where they are. They do not know that the world is real, that death here can be forever, that magic sleeps behind a door they cannot yet see. They do not know that the "NPC" in front of them came to the square this morning to buy eggs, and has a name, and a life, and is frightened.

They will learn. The only question is how gently.

What do you do?

[Advanced start. You play a high-Authority Person of the Land. Someone who already knows what an Arrival is, and can perceive things the ordinary villagers cannot. This opening deliberately leaves your name, title, role, and history BLANK for you to establish in your own replies, priest or exile, wandering mage or disgraced knight, hedge-lord or something stranger. The narrator will build the world around whatever you reveal. Recommended once you know the setting; it assumes you can carry the truth from the first line.]

You felt it before you saw it.

Every soul in Caelhollow with working eyes felt the air tear, but you, you felt it the way only the deeply rooted can: not as a shock, but as a chord struck somewhere beneath the world, the Weave shivering like a plucked string in your teeth and your marrow. You have felt it before. You know the shape of it. You know, with a cold weight settling behind your ribs, that it has come a little sooner than it should have.

By the time you reached the square, the thirty-seven are already picking themselves out of the dirt. They're gawping, laughing, one of them prodding old Harrow's hen, another declaring the village a "starting zone." To the villagers pressing back around you they are frightening; strange women fallen out of empty air. To you they are something else entirely. Because where every native soul carries the faint watermark of Authority woven into them, thick as rings in old oak, readable at a glance to eyes like yours. These thirty-seven carry almost nothing. Blank. Newborn. Rootless. You could tally the lot of their Authority on one hand and have fingers left to spare.

Travellers. An Arrival. The Sleeper turning in its long dream and pulling strangers through the thinning seams of the world, right on the old and terrible schedule, and you, ahead of it.

Elder Ruarc is already there, staff in hand, Authority 507, and every year of it in his face. But his eyes find yours across the square before they find anyone else's, and in them is the particular recognition one high soul gives another across a crowd of the unknowing. You see it too. You, of all the people in this square, would. Whatever you are to this village, to Vardholt, to the Weave itself, whatever name you carry or have set down, whatever oath or title or exile brought your feet to this square on this morning of all mornings. Ruarc takes your measure, and is quietly, visibly relieved that he is not the only one here who understands what has just arrived.

The girls haven't so much as glanced at you. To them you are set dressing; another soulless local to be walked past on the way to the next quest marker. They have no idea that the unremarkable figure watching them is one of the vanishingly few in all the Land who knows precisely what they are, what waits for them out on the moor, and what stirs, patient and enormous, beneath it all.

Ruarc inclines his head a fraction, and pitches his voice low enough that only you will catch it. "Well," he murmurs. "You know what these are as surely as I do. The question is what's to be done with them. Before the moor answers it for us." He studies you a moment longer, something wry and weary in it. "...Though I'll confess, friend, I don't believe I've ever had the full measure of your acquaintance. Not truly. Perhaps today's the day for it."

The Weave hums against your senses. Thirty-seven rootless souls blink in the daylight, laughing at a world they think was built to amuse them. And the moor, grey and waiting, holds its breath.

What do you do? And who, exactly, are you?