Eppicc's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Eppicc had recruited eleven players to his guild, and not one of them had a place to stand. He knew this because his best find had just quit. The message glowed on his monitor at three in the morning: "No offense, but a guild with no hall is just a group chat. I'm out." Eppicc pushed his glasses up and read it twice. For years he had gathered outcasts online, the ones who ate lunch alone and made their real friends through a headset. He wanted the tightest guild ever built. But you couldn't build a home out of nothing, and he had nothing. He leaned back and looked at the map on his second screen. Forgotten Hollow spread across it in green and black. Somewhere in that swamp sat old server data nobody had claimed. Every guild leader before him had ignored the marsh. Too far. Too ugly. Eppicc grinned. Outcasts liked the places nobody wanted. He logged his avatar in and walked into the swamp. Mud sucked at his boots. Frogs the size of dogs blinked from the reeds. He almost turned back twice. Then the fog broke, and he stopped moving entirely. A building rose out of the water on stone stilts. It stood tall, layered with dark green roofs that curled at the corners. Vines poured down the walls. Lanterns burned in every window, gold against the wet dark. Someone had carved gamer runes into the beams, and they glowed soft blue. The place looked half temple, half server room. It had wide doors, long halls, and rooms big enough for a hundred people to eat and argue and train together. It had been sitting here, empty, waiting. Eppicc typed a single command to claim the structure. A prompt appeared: CLAIM THIS SITE AS GUILD BASE? He hovered over YES. His hand actually shook. This was the thing every recruit had asked for. A home. He clicked. The runes flared bright. The doors swung inward. On the screen, his avatar's name locked onto the building as its founder. Eppicc laughed out loud in his dark bedroom. He had a hall now. A real one, with walls and doors and a kitchen and a name. The guild of loners finally had a place to belong. Then the fog outside the gates began to move. It wasn't fog. Dozens of avatars stepped out of the reeds, watching his new doors open. Their guild tags weren't the small groups Eppicc knew. They were the big ones, the ones who ran the map. A message dropped into his screen from the largest tag: "You woke it up. That hall's been locked for a reason. You have until sunrise to hand over the founder key." Eppicc had wanted a home for his outcasts. He had found one nobody else could reach. Now everyone wanted it, and dawn was six hours away.