Ethinium's Vault (Steam & Aether Book 1) by Jaxon Reed

Author:Jaxon Reed [Reed, Jaxon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

60

Activity swirled through the Venture Society headquarters like a summer storm on the prairie, Rip thought. Everyone had someplace to go, and they all tried to get there at once.

Emergency hearings took place in four separate rooms, involving people from the palace, RVS, the Lyceum, the Royal Army, the Royal Navy and even Parliament.

Rip and Blair found themselves in a waiting room between the grand halls, seated with the others from Bixby’s team and Sharp’s. Even here, the buzz of conversation continued, with people walking in and out and conferring with one another.

Several prominent individuals stopped in to express their concern about the attack on Blair’s house, and she soon had a corner of the room to herself with a constant stream of VIPs going in and out to share a word or two.

Rip found himself on a long bench along the back wall sitting next to the Verez sisters. Everyone avoided the two vampires, either instinctively or because they knew of the girls’ nature.

To his delight, Rip found that by sitting next to them, people avoided him too. He luxuriated in an oasis of calm amidst all the hubbub.

“Tell us more about the puppet battleground on your world, Ripley.”

Liza, sitting closest, smiled at him. Hilda looked interested, too.

“It may be a little hard to understand.”

“Talk to us as if we know everything you’re talking about. We’ll ask questions later, if we don’t understand something. You fought your country’s enemy there, right? It seems so strange to us, to fight in a place where nothing is real.”

He raised his eyebrows at this.

“Yeah, it seemed funny to us, too, in a way.”

He leaned back against the wall and thought about it.

“Why not? I can at least describe it to you. So, in years past, we developed our tabulators, only they were much more advanced than what you are used to. And the input changed, so that we could write and read words directly with the machines. Well, easier than how you can do it. And one of the first things people did was to design games to play with the computers. Uh, tabulators.”

“Oh! That sounds fun.”

“Yeah. College kids made most of the early ones, but then they spread. The first computer games were all text based, because that’s all we had. Later, graphics became part of a computer’s output, and games with moving pictures were developed. They continued to grow in complexity as the power of the machines grew. Eventually, players could join something called a massively multiplayer online role playing game, or MMORPG, and play online with thousands of other people around the world at the same time. You could talk, fight, interact, buy and sell. It was great.”

“A massive electric puppet theater!”

“Exactly. That came about all before I was born. Later, we started getting more and more immersed in the worlds. We called it ‘virtual reality.’ It started with goggles that could block out the real world and show you only the virtual one, or they could be used to layer something on top of the real world.

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