[Adelie]

Fifteen minutes of fiddling with Ven's laptop later - which she had to admit was very outdated, and for that matter, that it was quite a miracle it could still handle a fairly resource-intensive game like this - Chi had gone through every setting, every config panel, every router option and finally decided to admit defeat.

She wasn't naturally a computer expert, even if her work often overlapped as such - people were often surprised to hear she was a math graduate student, seeing as her mentor was a computer science professor and she often got drafted to help out with those chronically understaffed courses as well - but she worked with them enough to know the basics. Still, she wasn't particularly good at tech support.

"Ah, it's fine," Ven said, frowning at her screen as if that would make the download bar go faster. In fifteen minutes, they had shaved fifteen minutes off the progress bar. "I'll just look over your shoulder when you go through the plot, I guess. Probably would've done that anyways if I'd gotten it downloaded, since I'd rather see it on high settings."

[Adelie]

"Yeah, that's fine," Chi said, returning to her desk with Ven in tow. "Looks like mine's done, so - well, time to see what all this is about."

Moment of truth.

She should really check the news page first - the teaser that went up a few days before new patches usually contained no concrete or logistic information, but once the event went live the news team would usually post all the exact event details - but Ven had sat herself behind her and was now looking quite expectantly at the monitor. Besides, she'd recently developed the habit of going into events blind to begin with just so she could enjoy the plot and lore of them a little better - and she had to say, that had really helped her enjoyment of what she'd previously considered just flavor text.

[Adelie]

She loaded into the game - and was immediately greeted with a rather impressive fullscreen painting depicting one of the game's most popular male NPCs in swimming trunks, holding a surfboard in one hand and a pina colada in the other while waves crashed into the beach behind him. In the background, she could see the blurry figure of one of the other male NPCs - one who was frequently shipped with this one by certain portions of the fanbase - relaxing under a colorful umbrella.

It was so stereotypically "beach event" she had to laugh.

"Oh my god!" Ven blurted out, absolutely exuberant, and Chi suddenly remembered that her friend was certainly a part of the aforementioned certain portions of the fanbase. "I'm so glad they're doing custom loading screens for this event!"

[Adelie]

"Yeah," Chi said. "Remind me later to go see if I can datamine the images."

"That'll be amazing if you can," Ven responded. She started on another comment, but before Chi could make any tangible guesses as to what she was saying she broke it out with a delighted gasp. "Oh! There's a summer-themed UI too! Those fish are adorable."

"Eh, that's all just aesthetic stuff," Chi said, feeling like she had to temper some of the enthusiasm Ven was pouring out; she had to admit that the new user interface, with its little clownfish mascot and the tiny dolphin and whale embellishments, was both really cute and really sleek from a design perspective, but she didn't want to spend too much time just talking about the various little cosmetic changes they'd implemented for the event. "They did this for Valentine's Day, too. I guess it's a trend for the events now. But either way, I'm more interested in the event itself."

[Adelie]

[CLAN] Anastazja: Who's online?
[CLAN] Sagittarius A*: i am!
[CLAN] Chi Squared: Me.
[CLAN] Chi Squared: Ven's here too, she's just having a little trouble getting in-game.
[CLAN] Anastazja: Looked at the event yet?
[CLAN] Chi Squared: No spoilers!
[CLAN] Anastazja: Okay! Tell me when you're done with the starting quest.

"Huh," Ven said. "Wonder what Ana means by that."

Chi shrugged. "I'm guessing it's because it's factions," she said, coming up with the first possible explanation that popped into her head. Sounded more likely than not, honestly. "She probably wants to know which side we're going to pick."

"Yeah, maybe," Ven said. "Guess we should figure that out yet - so we need to get to the port city first before we can participate?"

[Hunt Complete]

[Adelie]

"Sounds about right," Chi said, navigating her character from where she'd parked it - evidently she'd parked her character in a remote location with no easy access to leylines to teleport out, most likely because she'd been too lazy to walk the last time she was online and no had to pay for the error of her ways. "Your game finished downloading yet?"

Ven shot a glance at her laptop. "Looks almost there, but eh, I may as well watch you play through the first missions anyways. You know how my laptop is, and I want to see those sweet, sweet cutscenes with high-quality graphics."

[Adelie]

"Yeah, sure," she said. "Pull up a chair and we can go admire some NPC booty."

Instead of following her instructions, Ven simply burst out in a fit of giggles. "What?"

"Nothing," Ven said, suppressing another bout of laughter. "You just sound so incredibly out-of-character saying that and I love it."

"Sheesh," she said, almost a little regretful already that she'd said that in her excitement. Conveniently, her character had finally made it to the port city so she had some excuse to change the topic. "Okay, we're here. Do you know which NPC we're supposed to talk to?"

"Uhh," Ven said. She'd grabbed her laptop from the coffee table and was typing something into her web browser. "I don't know! It's not on your helpsite!"

[Adelie]

"Ahh, I should really get on that," Chi said. Usually when a new event came out, she'd spend the first few hour or so of release doing research and checking out the update files so she'd have information to share on her help site the moment it was out, but she'd kind of fallen off the wagon on her responsibilities this time around. "Okay, you navigate the game. I'll take notes."

"Sure," Ven said, scooting herself over closer and taking on the responsibility of navigating Chi's character through the bustling streets of the port city. "I'll just follow the crowd, I guess."

"Yeah, it looks like we're supposed to visit some guy called Lord Rewhister or something. New NPC, I think?" Chi said, pulling up some of the Reddit posts on what people had found out about the new event already. "Oh wait, that's the lord of this region, of course."

[Adelie]

"Found him!" Ven said, pointing Chi's character at a dignified-looking older man, surrounded by a hoard of brightly-bedecked player characters. "Oh my god, this person has the new swimsuit outfit set already? Ugh, I'm so jealous."

"Shush," Chi said, leaning over to wrestle control of her laptop back temporarily. With a few quick flicks of the mouse, she turned down the player character display transparency so the bustling crowd was reduced to semi-translucent shadows. "So you don't get distracted by pretty cosmetics."

Ven pouted, but it was a pout entirely in jest. "Okay, okay, I'll talk to him now. Let's see what he has to say."

[Adelie]

Oh, bless you for coming to help us in our hour of need! pronounced Lord Rewhister, stroking his mustache anxiously. Our city has been afflicted with such a plague, and it is only with the help of you great adventurers that we can survive through these trying times.

"This guy is wild," Ven said, stifling a bit of a laugh. "I feel like the writers took every single quest NPC trope and put it into one guy."

"Yeah, this has got to be self-aware," Chi said. "The writing's usually a lot better than this."

Our glorious city, blessed be its name, has been invaded by some unruly ruffians off the high seas. We have tried our best to remove them so they will no longer defile our city, but alas, they are insistent that they cannot leave until their - er, mission, if I may call it that - is complete. Please, I beg you to relieve us of this horror.

"I honestly don't know what to say to this guy," Chi said. "That's a lot of words to say we need to talk to another NPC."

[Adelie]

"He doesn't even have a swimsuit on," Ven said, almost a little vindictive. "Therefore, his opinion is irrelevant."

"I... I don't think you want to see an old man in a speedo," Chi responded, flipping through some of the files she'd downloaded for the patch; she hadn't had time to run her decryption script on them, but she was familiar enough with how the game usually named its files to have a good guess of what assets were included. "Oh god, Ven, you're a prophet."

"Huh? What do you mean?"

"I think he does have swimsuit alt art," she said. "That's... I mean, that really is the ultimate troll, I guess."

Ven took it all in stride. "Wow, so a newly introduced NPC gets swimsuit alt art in their first event? They'd better have some for my favorites or I'm going to call out that they're playing favorites."

[Adelie]

[CLAN] Sagittarius A*: are you guys done yet?
[CLAN] Chi Squared: uhhh
[CLAN] Chi Squared: we just talked to the old man
[CLAN] Chi Squared: There's two NPCs here. Which one do we talk to?
[CLAN] Chi Squared: does it matter
[CLAN] Anastazja: Chi, are you talking to yourself?
[CLAN] Chi Squared: uhhh i'm on her account rn
[CLAN] Chi Squared: i = ven here

"Ana said we can talk to either NPC for the next step," Ven reported back. "But they're supposed to be the faction bosses, so we'll have to pick one to move on after that."

Chi eyed the models of the two NPCs carefully. One was a blue pirate; the other one was an orange pirate. There was, of course, more nuance to their outfits and designs, but the character designers had done a very good job of making them defined by color. "I guess that's our factions this time? Orange and blue?"

"I know Blaze and the others would want to pick orange, just off colors alone," Chi added. "I guess we can talk to her first."

[Adelie]

"Sounds good," Ven said, navigating Chi's character over and opening the dialog box. "Besides, she's definitely the prettier of the two."

"Yeah," Chi said, reading through the orange pirate's dialogue about how she was seeking a crew to enact revenge on a monstrous sea beast who had destroyed her previous ship. "Sounds like this is who we're going with. Blaze will like her because she's orange, you and Zari like her because she's cute, Vers is probably into the whole monstrous kraken behemoth thing."

"I'm going to talk to the other guy too, just to see what he's up to," Ven reported, clicking through frantically as she speed-read the dialogue options for him. "Oh, there's some tentacle monster thing he's hunting."

"Gross," Chi replied. "I'm not really into that."

[Adelie]

[CLAN] Chi Squared: We're going Orange, that okay with you guys?
[CLAN] Anastazja: Yep!
[CLAN] Anastazja: Do you have any information on if the faction matters too much? Or if it's just to split the playerbase?
[CLAN] Chi Squared: Nope!
[CLAN] Sagittarius A*: once you pick a faction, there's a little more information.
[CLAN] Sagittarius A*: think it affects prizes but it's like, cosmetic prizes and so on.
[CLAN] Chi Squared: Cool.

"God," Chi said, looking at the clock. "I can't believe it took us fifteen minutes just to get through all of that."

"Yeah, fifteen minutes and I still haven't seen any cute NPCs in swimsuits," Ven responded, looking pouty. She'd handed back Chi's laptop and was now rushing her character through faction selection, skipping dialogue wherever possible. "I'll be done in a moment, and then let's party up for the first quests."

"What are they again?" Chi asked; she'd been too busy with her write-up to actually read the new quest text. "Oh, we just have to kill a bunch of trash mobs. Fun."

[Adelie]

"Yep!" Ven responded; she'd gotten her character all properly factioned and equipped the faction item already, and now just had to get herself to the correct location. "Meet me at the shallows?"

"Nah, let's get in a party here," Chi said, extending an invite and making sure it showed up on Ven's laptop screen. "There's so many people playing right now - if we meet when we're there, we'll probably end up in different instances."

"Smart," Ven said, then cringed a little before laughing at the error of her ways. "Oh god, I forgot I still had my audio on for party chat. Echo is real."

[Hunt Complete]