carl@fire

"Inventory," he called again. He flicked through the pages to the back where he'd put all the cute things his daughter had sent him. And the not-so-cute things, like the head of some weird boss she'd killed. Chip off the ol' block. Carl grinned. Wonder if she'd freak out if I told her all the cool stuff I've done in games. Maybe someday.

He grabbed a pair of well-tailored dark gray pants out of a different page and pulled them out of his inventory. "Uh," he held them up in front of him and paused. "What was it again? Equip?"

Nothing happened.

"Equip item."

Nothing happened.

"Equip Noble's Court Trousers."

Nothing happened.

Carl frowned, but he was not embarrassed.

"Help," he called.

He was a grown man.

He knew it was okay to ask for help when he needed it.

Nothing happened.

Oh, right, I disabled that. "Options." He scrolled through the myriad settings in the resulting panel and tapped to enable the one for voice-activated game help. It remained grayed-out and disabled.

"Ugh, you've gotta be kidding me, Roger." Carl sighed as he recalled a detail from the internal changelog of the recent update. Because of course you'd make that something you aren't allowed to enable once in-game to cut down on load times from all the asset loads. I swear to… Sometimes I have no idea how this thing manages to work at all.

"Dismiss," he said with growing resignation. The options panel vanished. "I guess this is part of the game's immersion…" He draped the dress pants over his shoulder, trying to avoid wrinkling them—if that was even a thing—and then slipped off his…

Are these shoes? Moccasins? Slippers? Boots? Leathery, kinda up over the ankle, straps to hold 'em on… Shoes. Gotta go with what you know.

His feet rested on what was definitely crabgrass. I've got enough of this in my lawn to know. Feels amazingly close to the real thing, too. Not bad, whoever did the work on that.

Next, he untied his…

Are these breeches? Do breeches go all the way down? These go all the way down. Breeches. Pretty sure.

He started working the worn, somewhat ragged breeches down his muscular legs.

Carl Weathers, Director of IT for the most famous gaming company in history, a man who had recently spoken at a major trade conference to give a keynote talk about low-risk IT security policies at the enterprise level, a father who worried constantly about what trouble his daughters might be getting into, and a person who was so cautious that he triple-checked every single command he'd ever made with elevated privileges while in his current role at Fire Entertainment—this same forty nine year-old man now stood naked from the waist down on the edge of a virtual lake looking down at his in-game avatar's genitals.

Huh. Carl felt surprised. Surprisingly accurate. I know it's supposed to default to your mental image of yourself every time you log in, but I didn't think it'd be that accurate. Also… Kinda chilly out with this wind.

Carl pulled the other pair of pants off his shoulder and equipped them. Manually, though, because this was a stupid game with a stupid Engineering department that couldn't even do a single freaking optimization patch without—

Not going to get mad. Carl took a deep breath and let it out as he pulled off his shirt, then reached into his inventory again to pull out a crisp, white dress shirt. Nope, not gonna let Roger ruin this for me. Even if I could probably write better code than his entire department combined. Sit me down with whatever profiler they're using and give me a week or two, tops. Load times? Pfft. What's New Era written in again, Rust? They probably spend most of their time fighting the borrow checker and have to cut corners to meet their timing targets right up against the deadline; no wonder their optimizing is so lazy. Whole codebase is probably one giant unsafe block.

He picked out a dandy-looking, gray, button-down vest with a stylish, light green design of a dragon—Bobby's favorite color and fantasy creature, respectively—stitched on the front. Only reason I even went into IT was because it was so much easier to get a job with it considering how incompetent everyone else is. Half the people are dumb enough to be running systems with policies that let the Director of Engineering grant root permissions to an intern. Like Gary did.

"'Least that's over with," Carl grumbled. He reached into his inventory to pull out the accompanying jacket but stopped short. He looked down. "Sure would be pretty handy to know how to open my character screen," he paused as if waiting for something to happen, "so I could see how I look," he finished in a mutter when nothing did. Too windy and chilly to not wear pants, but too hot to wear a jacket on top of this with both of those suns shining down like that. Game could do with dialing the realism on this kind of stuff down a bit.

His bare feet stood out to him as something that needed resolving. Only…

Carl frowned yet again. He looked at the starter character shoes he'd been wearing. They were worn, clearly with low durability, and… They don't really go with this suit set. Does everyone playing this role-play? Bobby only brings the game up with me when she wants to talk in private about the fish I sent her or something she sent me, or when she's talking at dinner about the latest boss her guild is trying to take down. Maybe she's really like, some super-gruff drill sergeant character.

He snorted. That'd be more adorable to see than anything else. Forget shoes for now. I'll just buy some in town. After tossing his discarded gear into one of the empty pages in his inventory and dismissing the window, he checked the coordinates for the starter town from the file he'd saved in his home directory—suddenly glad that he had done a manual cleanup and left the pruning functionality disabled since this was one of the files that would have been purged—and entered them into a dbadmin-privileged database update.

After typing his sixty four character password, that is.

It might be a little tedious at this point, he acknowledged, but security wasn't something that one could simply ignore due to tedium.

Before pressing Enter on that command, however, he modified the timestamp on the file with the coordinates using his other, user-privileged shell so it wouldn't be purged on a future login once the related functionality was reenabled, just in case he somehow forgot.

Carl grinned smugly.

Nobody was more detail-oriented than Carl.

He picked up his fishing spear and hit the Enter key.

Naturally he'd set the command to execute with a small delay so he would have plenty of time to hit Control+D twice to log out of his new shell and chuck his keyboard away in order to avoid ruining his grand role-playing entrance with an anachronism.

Carl was focused.

His surroundings were instantly replaced. He now stood in front of a large, metal gate that was the only hole in a pretty tall stone wall surrounding the starter town. He looked around. A line of people, carts, and animals stretched out behind him for some distance. Those closest to him stared, seeming to be in shock.

Oops, I didn't think about how it would look if I just popped in like that in the middle of the day. Is this some kind of entering-the-city-toll-inspection role-play thing? Man, everyone's really into the role-playing. I kinda figured it'd just be Ir'alith, but—

"Um," a man on the gate side of him said, his voice cracking before he cleared his throat. "Ho there, Good Sir!" the man said, his voice quavering slightly.

Carl turned, realizing he'd completely overlooked the short, older, mustached man wearing some pretty authentic-looking chain mail with no helmet who stood in front of him. Carl glanced up, spotting a trio of helmeted soldiers looking down over the wall.

Then Carl discovered his greatest mistake and lack of attention to the details that mattered for this new thing that he was focusing on.

I didn't come up with a character to role-play as!

He began to panic, struggling to keep a neutral expression on his face as his mind raced. He imagined he could feel his palms growing sweatier by the second under the judgmental stares of dozens of people waiting in line behind him for their chances at doing the entering-the-city-toll-inspection scene—the line that he'd accidentally cut to the front of. He swept his fishing rod up over his shoulder just to do something other than stand and be anxious.

"What, um, brings you to our fair city?" asked the salt-and-pepper-haired guard who was still standing a little too close. The armored man stepped backwards when he noticed that the distance between them was being observed, his expression one of unease.

Well, of course he'd be uneasy since he's gotta stay in character and some lunatic just appeared here. Not even any light or effects or anything because I didn't use a spell. Okay, think, Carl. Need to tie this all together somehow…

Carl took a breath, fixing his posture to tower over the much shorter man in a way that he usually did his best to avoid. "What brings me here, you ask?" he said, stalling for time and speaking in the slow cadence he used when giving presentations to the bigwigs in management and conferences—a low-level technique known as Speaking Slowly For Effect. He was getting an idea, but it hadn't quite become a plan yet.

The guard gulped and took another small step backwards. "Y-yes?"

Carl had a plan now. He moved forward, looming over the shorter man while keeping the same neutral expression on his face. "Do you really want to know?" he asked in a quiet voice.

The man pressed his lips together and, after a moment's hesitation, began shaking his head back and forth, his eyes fixed over Carl's shoulder. "Um, actually, now that you mention it, Sir, I d-don't think I do?"

Carl harrumphed and loomed for another brief moment before righting himself. "Good man," he said, already congratulating himself in his head.

The guard stepped aside quickly. "W-welcome to Charus City, Sir…" he trailed off expectantly.

The Director of IT, long past his days of learning how the stick-and-carrot game worked, harrumphed again. "Carl," he declared as he walked past, not giving the man another look. Have to give him something. Guy's acting his heart out here! Awesome work, guy. I figured being a gatekeeper like this would be a boring job in a game, but it looks like you're really owning it. Shared Worldbuilding Experience maybe has something to it after all.

After a few more steps, he recalled something and turned back. "One thing," he called out.

The man slowly turned around, managing to really sell the fear that he was showing at the arrival of Carl's over-the-top, mysterious newcomer to the city.

"I'm interested in acquiring some new footwear," Carl said, looking meaningfully down at his bare feet. "Do you have any shops you'd recommend?"

This guy's good. He's gotta be working in show business. Maybe a stage actor? Someone with classical training? Carl wasn't really that knowledgeable about acting, but he imagined this guy had to be somebody in the business for his expression to cycle through so many emotions so quickly and effectively. It was almost to the point where the man attempting to role-play for the first time considered breaking character after only a few minutes to give the first person he talked to a genuine compliment.

No, cut that out. Don't ruin it for him. Carl shut that line of thought down quickly.

"I think that…" the man hesitated. "For someone of your, uh, stature, you'll want to give Old Ingrid's a look. She's, um, a bit pricey? But she's the best in the city. Even the King gets his footwear crafted by her."

Carl nodded. "My thanks," he said, trying to seem more in-character with his wording. And with that, he turned and continued into the city.

He couldn't help himself, however.

"You've done well!" Carl called back, sincerely feeling that the man deserved to know how much he'd enjoyed their encounter.

So this is role-playing.