Start the Game (Galactogon: Book #1) by Vasily Mahanenko Page B

It was as if the dripping walls didn’t physically exist and the place I was in was some kind of febrile dream. No big deal. Judging by the description of jail, if a player ends up in it, then he is even prohibited from studying during his incarceration, whereas I will be able to understand all the basic aspects of life in Galactogon soon enough and from there set out to find that billion-pound check.
    “Recruit Surgeon—step out!” Barely had the incarceration timer reached 00:00 when the door to my cell opened and I was paid a visit by a guard with a rubber club underarm. “Or do you like it so much here that you’ve decided to spend your entire training in isolation?”
    Oh, but this guard has wit! I’m noticing that the developers endowed the locals with a decent intellect—not reserving it simply for the key NPCs. Sometimes in Runlustia , you’d start flirting with some servant girl and she’d just look at you with bovine eyes, totally missing your drift. Even a slight pinch below the waist would hurt her and summon the guards for attacking an NPC. In that game, the developers had not tried too hard to “humanize” each and every NPC, but focused only on the important ones. But here, your ordinary guard was capable of sarcasm—and pulled it off so well that you’d think he was simply created for the purpose. Recalling the local bozo-bully whose job it was to kickstart recruits into moving toward the allocation center, it became clear to me why players were gradually switching more and more to Galactogon . The realism here was an order of magnitude higher than in other games I’d played. In any case, that was my opinion in that moment, and only time would tell whether it was accurate or not.
     
    Mission: Deliver package to Qualian citizen Zaltoman located on the trade planet Shylak XIV (Coordinates: 7446244 х 3366181 х 4642990). Mission deadline: 2 hours.
     
    My emergence from solitary was marked with some news. The first—the good news—was that I only had 10 game days remaining in the Training Sector. My twenty days of solitary had counted after all. Unfortunately, that was it for the good news. It turned out that the thirty days of training were divided into five units—repair, science, harvesting/mining, flight training and assault tactics. Each non-core unit entailed four days of instruction followed by an exam. If the player passed, he would earn a novice rank in that field. The rest of the time was reserved for teaching the player’s core occupation—in my case, flight training. If the player failed his core exam, he had only two ways out—either switch his occupation to one in which he had passed the exam, or start all over and redo the Training Sector—another thirty days. In my situation, Repair, Science and Harvesting/Mining were already off limits—I could no longer get official work in these fields. I could let that go—but the most upsetting thing was that I had missed eight days of learning how to fly a ship! And, as though in deference to Murphy’s Law, from solitary they sent me straight into a pop quiz that the instructors had arranged—cramming a bunch of us into some ship simulators…
    One glance at the constellation of buttons speckling the ship’s navigation panel was enough to bring me into utter despair. I had not the slightest idea of what to do. Any log-out into reality during training was strictly punished with an automatic Fail, so I hadn’t much of a choice but to push anything that I came across, hoping that something would work. Damn! If someone were to ask me, for example, where Shylak XIV was and what role it played in Qualian trade policy, I could have replied without hesitation. But how to pilot this ship …Well, I had purposefully skipped this topic in my time during solitary, naïvely assuming that I would start my training from scratch upon release.
    “Are you sure you wish to engage the Accelerator?” No sooner had I pushed some blue button than the