Somnia Online by K.T. Hanna (reading strategies book txt) 📕

what they were hiding, whether they wanted him to or not. Michael’s headgear wasn’t technically on specification for the game as it currently existed. Its previous programming left him options he’d otherwise not have access to. James was going to use everything he could to his advantage.

He glanced down at his arms as he flashed into being. His arms were long and pale, with delicate fingers, and he was pretty sure his ears were pointed. Elf. Fantastic, just what he didn’t want to be. Not that it mattered, as long as the character was powerful. As he moved, the robes swirled around his feet, and he almost tripped more than once as he walked the length of a village he didn’t think he should be in. There didn’t appear to be many other elves in it at all.

He passed a fountain, which seemed mundane and quite boring. The Luna statues within it had water flowing over their limbs in ways he’d have thought impossible. He blinked, unsure why it seemed that way, but it looked like the figures in the fountain had moved.

Shaking his head, he moved past the structure, through to one of the shops that sold armor and around the side. There should be a place quiet enough back there to access his class abilities and figure out just what it was this class could do. Besides the fact that he knew he should have powerful abilities, he was also quite certain there were ways he could dampen his presence should Laria or Shayla actually pay enough attention to figure out what he was doing.

He was fully aware of how busy Laria and Shayla and their team were. They didn’t have time to hunt down exploiters or rogue developer players right now. He should be safe.

Sitting down, between the side of the shop and the wooden log fence, he closed his eyes and accessed the interface. He searched his abilities, frowning slightly. He knew there should be more to it than this. There were a heap of abilities, but so many of them had been greyed out, like he couldn’t use them until certain prerequisites had been finished. The more he tried to fiddle with it, the more it basically poked out its tongue at him. He took a deep breath and continued with his exploration, accessing those abilities that could help him travel faster.

Only a few of the dev available abilities were still available to him. It struck him as odd considering he thought his gear was directly tied to that account. Perhaps there had been a systemwide general sweep of dev accounts, resetting them back to the bare minimum. He wouldn’t have known, as he hadn’t logged in in months.

This headset had been established way back in alpha access, when the game was barely more than a zone. But since he’d killed Ava, James was fairly certain she hadn’t had time to tell anyone about the headset he’d acquired that gave him dev access to the system before her untimely death.

In fact, he was counting on it.

Summer Residence

Home of Laria, David, and Wren

Summer Condo

Real World - Day Twenty-Nine

Laria was, again, trying not to lose her cool. Considering the fact that the more she looked into the headgear readings, the more she realized a lot of the ones in that raid zone were definitely more altered and tweaked than they should be…and the virus was having a field day with the system and the headgear. Not to mention the anti-virus starters weren’t working the way she’d anticipated. She just wanted to delete all the code and start again.

David pushed himself away from the counter he was using as a desk and rolled over to where Laria sat with her head in her hands. He plopped plans in front of her, a wide grin on his face.

Picking them up, Laria blinked away the sleep in her eyes and pushed a strand of hair behind her ears. She looked them over, a small smile creeping onto her face. “You’ve got it. Why the hell didn’t I beg you to help me sooner?” She asked the rhetorical question with a tinge of sadness in her voice.

“It only came to me easier because you’re far too close to the project and to our daughter’s involvement in it.” He placed a hand on each of her shoulders and gave her a brief massage. Laria relaxed, just a tiny bit. It was all she could allow herself.

“We’ve got this, then. All we need to do is program the actual sequence.” She frowned as she looked it over again.

“Theoretically,” David said, allowing himself his own bit of stretching considering they’d both spent the last few hours bent over their desks. It had been a hard day. Taking a breath, Laria smiled at him.

Maybe the expression was a bit tighter than usual, but she was worried about the theoretical part. Naturally, he hadn’t had time to test the anti-viral coding yet, and from what she could see there shouldn’t be a problem with it, but that was rarely ever the case. No matter how good things looked on paper or in spreadsheets, it was often the case that something that should work theoretically didn’t work in actuality. There were even more variables in the world of Somnia.

She sighed. They didn’t have a choice. Glancing at her husband, she flashed him a wan smile. Her energy was flagging, but Wren and Harlow were stuck in the game, unable to log out definitively if they wanted to complete those dungeons. And if they did log out for too long, they wouldn’t be able to get back in. The latter, while it might sound great on the surface, wasn’t. If they couldn’t get back in, the whole system would probably implode. With the way Wren was attached to the system, Laria didn’t even want to contemplate that option.

So she had to do this; she had to access the viral controls and see what she could do.