Continue Online (Part 4, Crash) (57 page)

One woman, who had remained quiet throughout the entire event, ordered dinner for everyone. It was her sole contribution to the meeting. Her name was Betty Lane.

While they were eating the woman who ordered pizza pointed at the last few pages.

“It says here, that the program self-destructing everything will still complete, that we only need to wait,” Betty said.

“I see. So do you agree?” Leon asked.

“That we should do nothing? No.” Betty’s head shook. Her hair was the oddest in the room, being dyed in multiple colors. Technically it wasn’t against the dress code, and were it not for meeting in person, no one would ever know. “I intend to help these AIs you’re so afraid of.”

“Really?” Thomas asked while frowning.

“I don’t know about the rest of you but I actually play Continue Online, I certainly didn’t agree to shut down my favorite pastime or threaten the people I’ve helped. If it’s going to crash, I want to help until the servers go down.”

People started talking again. The woman at the end calmly closed the stack of papers and sat back to finish her meal. Betty planned on getting home to see what had changed since the wedding.

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The afterword will be broken down into sections roughly talking about the following:

Book 3’s ‘game’ change

Book 4 post writing feelings

The long awaited professional editing

So, going over book three and some of the choices involved—because I knew it would get the response it did. Some may have read the prior afterword, others may have checked out my WordPress where I talked about the storyline. This story has always been about the world at large, Grant, those around him, and not just one slice of virtual reality. It isn’t exploring a fantasy landscape with hidden treasures so much as one person trying to complete the goals before him. His first and foremost goal in life was (and always will be) Xin Yu. That’s his motivator.

Yet, in order to remain true to the characters I have to acknowledge that his sister wouldn’t just stand by and do nothing. Not after scraping her brother off the ground twice as a result of these feelings. If anyone knows the crash which can come after a relationship, it’s Liz. Liz, the single mother who hasn’t ever found a man who’s worth going steady with. Her near technophobic attitude combined with a vague distrust of all things Xin after a lifetime of watching her brother struggle to win the short girl’s affections didn’t help. Luckily I loved Hal Pal as a character, and looked at this supposedly all watching AI called Mother - and realized she couldn’t be narrow minded at all. What sort of crazy machine only bets on one game?

That being said, the story itself has always been about Grant, Xin, Hal Pal, and their close friends and family. Those who watched and read through the end should have noticed that a lot of things in one game were mirrored in the others. Both were reflections of each other in terms of ‘overarching NPC movement’. Continue Online and Advance Online are both named after the same concept.

I could go on, but honestly there were a lot of good points to book three that were needed to make the last few books work correctly. At the end, we saw him reunite with Xin, rather than chasing after a faint version or memory. I enjoyed that moment immensely. However, it’s apparent based on ratings that not everyone found the book worthwhile. I get it, and lesson learned. (As is book one, book two, and so on)

Book four in my mind ended up being a couple of different ideas. First I had to recover from Advance Online, which I fully expected a number of people to be resistant to. Lets all be happy I didn’t go with my original Moon Mice race idea. I am, really, moon mice! I may come back to it one day. Lunar insanity aside, book four provided me an awesome chance to finally start getting Grant in the right direction.

He got to be angry on behalf of a friend. He got to rescue a man and reunite him with a loved one. This book showed him truly achieving what all those RPG games (Not hack and slash, but actual RPG) allow people to do; Grant got to be a hero. How awesome to go from the man we saw in the start of book one, to this? Going all out for love, family, bystanders, and his own validation.

I loved this book, I really did. Even the ending itself which was devoid of a ‘big enemy’ still had urgency, and ended in a happy moment for Grant. The wedding between them is a huge deal in his mind (and mine). It shows that he doesn’t care about what the nature of Xin’s existence is, but who she is. There were a lot of questions in book three and four that were all about the nature of AIs, reincarnated people, and themes I’ve been dancing around since book one. I got to drag back the quartet, and show some of the game elements they stumbled into. I got to pull out the League of Shadows, which is my answer to every other LitRPG’s belief that some League of Assholes will be in charge of entire regions, and so many other topics.

I also enjoy the whole prisoner aspect. Really, how does one game become so awesome that people will just sit in jail and camp other people's bodies? Really, as Grant points out, he can just log out and move on with his life. Nobody should be that invested in a game. Selling game ore in real life shouldn’t be worth dollar signs. It means the game is poorly designed.

Of course, Grant’s chasing his dead wife’s ghost inside the machine while fighting against a system that is threatening to crash. There has to be some reason to keep approaching a game world, right?

Alright, final note, and a very happy one.

Part One of Continue Online has finally received full on professional editing. This should fix 99% of the issues that were ever possible to notice. We’ve reviewed the changes and agreed with nearly every single item pointed out. To that end I would like to thank Cassie and her staff at Joy Editing.

For fans of the LitRPG genre, check out www.RoyalRoadL.com for more amateur stories. They house a very large collection of people across the globe trying their hand at writing fiction. LitRPG and any game elements are a common story type on this site.

I can honestly say that my own works would have never made it this far if it weren’t for such an easy location to start a readership. It’s provided a great place to get feedback from a crowd who actively looks for new LitRPG novels. My own stories are still mirrored there(samples of Book 1, 2, 3, and now 4) in addition to non-published works… in the works.

Thank you for reading!