Chapter 1: New Beginnings and Bad Ends

Morgan looked on in horror, paralyzed with fear, as he witnessed the rusty blade of a goblin spear burst forth from his comrade’s throat. The young elven fighter’s knees went weak, and he struggled to fight the rising surge of vomit threatening to explode from his churning stomach at the sight of all that blood pouring like a fountain out of the young mage’s ruined throat. Jeremiah’s soft brown eyes bulged in pain and terror, realizing that his life was pouring out down the front of his robes.

“N-No!” Morgan cried out in vain, tears rimming his almond shaped green eyes, while he stood by helplessly as his fellow adventurer bled out in front of him.

With a final shuddering cough, sending a spray of red mist that coated the petrified elf, the light behind those eyes went out forever. Jeremiah’s body hung limply from the end of the goblin’s spear, blood continuing to flow freely from the weapon’s rusty tip to pool on the ground beneath the young mage’s blue robes. His staff, the only weapon the mage had carried, fell from his grip as the strength went out of his hands, clattering noisily to the stone floor at his feet.

“I-I’m so s-sorry!” the elf wailed as tears streamed down his delicate elven cheekbones, shaking his shaggy mop of pastel blue hair in disbelief at how poorly his impromptu party’s first adventure was turning out.

The fighter, small and delicately built even for an elf, quaked in his soft leather boots, barely able to hold his short sword and wooden buckler aloft. His bright green tunic and tan trousers visibly quivered as Morgan’s entire body shook from the waves of fear and nausea threatening to overwhelm him. A grim laugh came from behind Jeremiah’s corpse, as the goblin yanked his spear free from the mage’s ruined throat, dropping the broken body into a heap in the pool of its own blood that the goblin had just spilled.

“I ... I didn’t mean ... I didn’t want any of this!” Morgan cried in anguish, sniffling back sobs between each sputter of words.

His words fell upon dear ears. The goblin who stood before him grinned viciously, the child-sized green creature bearing a mouthful of sharp little teeth. From the start all three of the party members, and Morgan in particular, had taken the goblins for granted. Barely standing taller than four feet, the inexperienced elven fighter had immediately struggled to think of the creatures as being anything other than a pack of little green children.

Needless to say, the illusion had been shattered as soon as he got his first look into the pitiless depths of their eyes. These windows into the souls of the goblins gave Morgan a glimpse into the seemingly bottomless pools of evil that lay within the creatures. When the three adventurers had initially burst into the goblin’s chamber within the ruined castle they had been exploring, the ten sets of eyes that met theirs made it clear to each of them that these goblins would give them no quarter — and so, the party had attacked.

“This is so not what I signed up for,” Morgan had mumbled to himself when the other two members of his freshly constituted party both looked to him to lead the charge.

Marilyn, a freshly minted paladin, had drawn her two-handed long sword, but took up a position decidedly behind Morgan — despite the fact that, as a human woman, she was actually a bit taller and more muscular than the slender elf. As would be expected of a mage, Jeremiah had stayed back behind the two sword wielding adventurers, hoping to cast whatever offensive spells he had prepared from behind a wall of steel. With no small amount of trepidation in his heart, Morgan had led the charge forward, clashing alongside Marilyn with several of the small goblins.

It was still his first day as a new player character within Fantasy Adventure Quest, and as soon as the melee began, Morgan had begun to wonder if he had perhaps bitten of more than he was prepared to chew. The nineteen year-old college sophomore had been a lifelong devotee of lighthearted fantasy RPGs like Dragon Quest and The Legend of Zelda, and was expecting that Aeternia would end up being something akin to an erotically charged version of those kinds of games. From the very beginning, however, the battle showed Morgan that the world into which he had been cast was as far from lighthearted as it possibly could be.

Initially, Morgan had been thrilled to see that the system administrators had given him a character that so strongly resembled his childhood hero, Link. And, Morgan would have been lying to himself if he tried for a minute to say that he had not reveled in every minute of the erotic “combat” sparring that he had engaged in with the faerie during his orientation that morning. After such a promising start, the young elven warrior had stepped out into Aeternia wide-eyed and full of wonder, truly believing that he was in for a fun a playful adventure that would hopefully be peppered with some more sexual encounters — something distinctly lacking in his old life.

The “chance” encounter in the woods with Jeremiah and Marilyn, which Morgan had at the outset seen as an obvious setup by the game, had only served to reinforce this rose colored vision of Fantasy Adventure Quest in his mind. And, after perfunctory introductions, the two adventurers had invited Morgan to join them on a quest they had undertaken to clean out a nest of goblins believed to be inhabiting a the nearby ruins of an old tower. Based on years of fantasy RPG experience, Morgan immediately assumed that any quest involving goblins would be the kind of typically easy adventure that first level player characters would run through to orient them to the game, and that this would be a fun way to dip his feet into the world that Fantasy Adventure Quest had to offer.

The reality of the situation was, however, further from his suppositions than Morgan could have ever believed.

A second year student in his university’s accounting program, it would come as no surprise that Morgan had never had much aptitude or inclination towards contact sports as a teen. In fact, one of the reason that he spent so much time playing video games was because he disliked the kinds of outdoor activities that left you feeling all sweaty and gross. And although the sheer physicality of the fully immersive nature of Fantasy Adventure Quest being an alternate-reality multiplayer role-playing game (ARMRPG) had been staggeringly amazing for the nineteen year old boy when he had lost his virginity between the exquisitely tight folds of a petite little faerie during his orientation to the game, the same level of intense realism applied to a combat scenario was incredibly far from what Morgan was hoping to find in this new world.