The life of @snakeTime was simple.

  Wake up.

  Brush her teeth.

  Look through her to-do list.

  Do them.

  Brush her teeth.

  Sleep.

  She never opened her eyes, always obfuscating them with her silly glasses. Even though she never opened her eyes, she always kept her lab coat open and her hands embraced by its pockets. Just like how her hands explored the small space of her fabric, She had a tendency to stand perfectly still and look long into, similarly, the pockets of her industry and the world beyond her.

  She didn't eat, she never had to eat. She didn't drink, she never had to drink. Whatever she was thinking in her head was just the same as the photons that traveled amongst the stars, moving through space in a never ending journey to an undefined destination. PLAYERs like her spent much time in solitude; tinkering and craftsmanship was a talent left to those who could control the time required to automate it, and who could control the space needed to regulate it.

  She spent her time and space in her alternate plane. It was a convenient place, if not completely disorganized. Conveyor belts, teleporters, trains, and drones were everywhere in a cosmic void of unending space with a single default tile flooring because she didn't care for decoration. Even the floor was just for superficial balance in the Bought and Assimilated Section of Expansion, a BASE. Her conveyors, a mess of metal and concrete on accelerated transport, all traveled into mysterious alloy boxes which were organized by "quantum" (because there isn't a better word for it) arms that took the contents and rearranged them at various levels of altitudes. The boxes, seemingly fit to a single conveyor belt, would extend upward and outward as the arms deemed necessary, stretching the entire box like an omnidirectional slinky. Where they went, only @snakeTime knew...The entire space looked like the vacuum of, well, space, a distinct deep blue nebular horizon which crossed indefinitely beyond the capacity of a human eye.

  While she called it disorganized, many comments left upon her BASE described it as a formidable blueprint with little competition, only criticizing its pretentious idea of maintaining a single ground that the conveyors would rest on, arguing that a non-euclidean space or, at minimum, usage of zero-g would be more efficient and allow for more placement of the conveyors. Their boasting of a multiple floor highway was completely valid, but it would just make things confusing in the long run.

  In one corner, the conveyor which was tagged "AMMUNITION" would travel and carry generic green cubes along a belt powered by "something" and swung into an incline, passing over another conveyor, "BARREL"; which would run parallel with its own floor with another conveyor "APPLIANCES." To go further into the description of her location would be boring; these conveyors were bundled into pairs, which bundled into lanes, into streets, into a singular highway in which the conveyors will split off with a complicated machine which connected the pairs and split them in alternate direction. "KINETIC", on the far right side, would split and cleanly divide the output in half, one travelling to the right and another traveling forward into the abyss. It was a single-direction highway, fed by various pockets of her reality, her BASE.

  She hated buying BASEs, because it was basically BASILISK’s form of buying a house, if that house was BASILISK's storage, and she's completely certain the game holds an artificially inflated market of them to force people to work wageslave hours for the BUILDSTUFFS needed to purchase them.

  She was a retired speedrunner, and was of the few players to develop the guide for an ending of what is supposed to be an early access MMORPG, making her someone almost legendary.

  SPACETIME players were a rare breed in the server. One not only had to be good at the logistics and automation of BASILISK and its properties, but one also had to be good at its internal components. Trying to understand the game was a fool's errand, but people liked playing the fool.

  @snakeTime liked it. She liked the complexity of it. It felt as if she had BASILISK in her hands, the kind of god sim gameplay that neither EARTH, SPIRIT, nor MIND could match up with.

  To compensate for this, @snakeTime made weapons.

  Weapons would be somewhere at the further end. The only thing behind @snakeTime was her exit point; which would take her into Woodlon, one of BASILISK's titular locations that prided itself on its natural resource abundance, if not hindered by the constant foreign malignances.

  Dealing in the art of war was a simple enough matter: A conflict comes afoot, @snakeTime sells the weapons.

  Most conflicts happened between NPCs rather than the actual PLAYERs. BASILISK had always been a PvE first kind of game, focusing more on the SHADE, the mutated force that assimilated the various races and species into a malignance that PLAYERs and NPCs alike had to band against. PLAYERs were so gung-ho about having something to blow up that anything identified as a Shade was something to wipe off the face of the map. NPCs, however, were never fully unified, hence creating the issue of this Shade that was so efficiently taking care of them. They were originally called Creatures of Darkness, but players found it a bit offensive since some EARTH and SPIRIT players prided themselves on their powers of the dark, so the Shade became the fitting compromise, not that @snakeTime cared. It did, however, make profits subpar as BASE costs and annoyingly low profit margins made her whole system always on tight budgets.

  NPCs and PLAYERS were widely arranged across the board, and it was easy to describe the typical behavior. NPCs bought in bulk and with scraps, and PLAYERs bought singles like kings; loyalty wasn't typically in their deciding factors. There were just more players.

  Players were always in need of weapons. While a class can wield any weapon, there's always a preference based on their style; build for optimized gear, quest for unorthodox and game-breakers, or grind for sheer brute numbers.

  @BrilliantBackBreaker: you ever think about where we'd be if not here?

  @snakeTime: Probably every day.

  @snakeTime: But I don't want to think about what happens if we do leave.

  @BrilliantBackBreaker: what, cuz you think we'd just die?

  @snakeTime: No, because I don't know what happens to this universe if everyone leaves.

  Her first deal was made as a solid. @BrilliantBackBreaker was interested in a simple firearm with a monstrous firepower to it. He had that tribal look to him, a common occurrence in people in Nimoor, one of the off-shore lands sitting an enormous distance of 300 kilometers from Woodlon, 500 from Mycenae. Beyond the ridiculously difficult trek was the fact that Nimoor was an abandoned ruin turned refuge after the SERPENT's CURSE. It was only thanks to people like him that Nimoor maintained a village that prided strength and fortitude for its small size.

  @BrilliantBackBreaker was no different, sporting a dozen of tattoos that acted as accessories that boosted his physical strengths and complemented his look of "tribal barbarian with toys he should not have." With the scarf of a dragon's neck, the furs of a acid-spiting wolf, and the skull of a three-headed wyrm upon his head, the only thing left to supplement his heavy ice-grip boots was a weapon for his large hands. Considering his bulky size and his obvious intention to main HEART, the naive snake made him a simple Ruger Revolver, one of the stubby silver firearms and looked like the kind of revolver one would hide in their pockets. However, he hated the look of it, saying it looked under compensated, whatever that meant to her. In the end, @snakeTime gave him a multi-barrel railgun cannon, constructed from granite and mushrooms which she had been holding in reserve for some time. Unfortunately, mushrooms were no good in much of her recipes so she instead converted it into BS and used it to speed up the creation of less optimized weapons.

  Making was far different from actually selling.

  @JenevaSuggestion: metal?

  @snakeTime: If you're asking if I have it, I do. If you're asking if I can give you something with metal, I can.

  @JenevaSuggestion: min 250 BS value. it's gotta be a lightweight assault weapon that can output about 120 rpm and hold 30 rounds but it has to be within renaissance era technology, otherwise the shade debuffs us.

  @snakeTime: I can give you an arquebus with extra steps.

  @JenevaSuggestion: holy fuck that was literally the last thing i googled back when i was still in apush...okay when

  @snakeTime: Three days.

  @JenevaSuggestion was an interesting individual. She had an armor fashion sense, dressing herself in a lucrative military uniform that belonged to knighthood; paladin's epaulets, a golden cuirass decorated with medals, enough chainmail to wrap around her neck like a balaclava, and a simple helmet with iron bars to stop swords from slamming into her eyes. She was the spitting image of a war hero from the 1600s, but that was just because of the realm she was in. Mycenae was currently stuck in a certain time period, and it was hard to convince the NPCs to pursue technology until it solved a problem with no noticeable downsides.

  While she wasn't popular, @JenevaSuggestion was very skilled, the same way a casual player was simply "talented" in the competitive area. @JenevaSuggestion was the very prospect of spearheading the front lines, maining an EARTHHEART and with great control over the body and the elements around her. This was best represented by her sleeveless arms, which were required to fulfill the somatic components of EARTH's magic, but also to filter an attuned control of her body via the HEART's special quirks. Though she tended to be the one who dies, it was difficult to lose morale due to her overwhelming energy and way of verbal speaking. Supposedly, she was going to go to college for public speech before logging in for the first time.

  Dealing to her was simple enough; @JenevaSuggestion was particularly logistical and valued efficiency, so her requests were easier to fund. One week she could request enough pistols and slug shotguns to arm an entire battalion, the next she would ask for a mounted surface to air missile battery, and then ask for a rotary-barreled ice ejector two months later. Off-raid, she was a loose person.

  @JenevaSuggestion: ugh.

  @JenevaSuggestion: fuck.

  @JenevaSuggestion: lost a friend.

  @snakeTime: Hm.

  @JenevaSuggestion: we were having an altercation outside mycenae and he was chatting about some of the shades looking like dogs.

  @JenevaSuggestion: he's been trying not to think about his dog, but because no one knows what's going on outside, he got worried. tried to talk him out of it, but it's hard to argue against animal negligence.

  @snakeTime: Unfortunate.

  @JenevaSuggestion: he hired a sitter, but...he doubted the sitter would sit any longer than 2 weeks; he only stayed 'cause of me and i guess today's fight finally pushed him.

  @snakeTime: ...Whatever. Think he'll come back?

  @JenevaSuggestion: no. none of them do.

  @snakeTime: What's his user?

  @JenevaSuggestion: @OrangePeelz

  She looks up his username, and she is returned a single window:

  player has given up

  She closes it.

  ...

  And of course, the Snake provided.

  @snakeTime made a lot of mistakes. It was normal. Perfection didn't exist, and it was much easier to avoid flaws than it is to make perfection. Mistakes were a necessary evil to create good product.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  @CamelotSun: what whats this thing

  @snakeTime: Forcefield projector. Switches between kinetic and energy but isn't liminal.

  @CamelotSun: cant you just make it liminal or something

  @snakeTime: Builds. Some people need all energy weapons to get their loadout bonus but they still want to switch between the two.

  The MARKETPLACE was run by the SPACE and TIME players and was the merchant’s guild that every online game had. They run the trade between servers and were the backbone of a lot of people's economic success. @snakeTime was not immune to this.

  @SeveralPoundsMeth: yo. Can i. hit your vape.

  @snakeTime: Just make sure to clean it after.

  @SeveralPoundsMeth: bet

  @SeveralPoundsMeth: can i get a modified ar-15. With a 308 mm gl. I need it to fire 556 aphe. Ill buy the ammo in 60 drum

  @snakeTime: If you want, I'll add a laser sight and an optic.

  @SeveralPoundsMeth: nah i ain't trying to aim with it i just need to let loose. There's a dumb fuck shade house. That spawned near mycenae and the high levels are in a raid

  @snakeTime: I can make you two and slash the price by a quarter. I'll add Adaptive Reserve so you don't need to reload.

  @SeveralPoundsMeth: bet

  @snakeTime lived near the top of a mountain located off the hills just outside the proximity of Woodlon. It's a cozy place. Her favorite part was moving at a 15 degree angle into a specific slope on the Derics Range, the only mountain range Woodlon had and containing Mt. Deric, her home. When she hit it just right, it would transition her character state a weird way and let her float along the skybox. It was a serene walk through the sky and after five minutes, the mountains would hang upside down and the mountains' textures would revert to a geometric mesh so it looked like a giant heat map. When she turned around, the heatmap acted as its own lighting source and illuminated the extensive nonconformity of Woodlon's forest biome, featuring mixtures of all kinds of woodlands, swamps blending into rainforests that fade into taigas and even a desert on occasion. The hanging mountains were a unique sight, as it made the entire land look like it was spiraling into itself.

  There were several things about the cities that helped keep her business afloat.

  Each CITY was universal; each server had the same CITY, so the same respawn points, fast travel points, and all the major questlines. Minor questlines were defined as procedurally generating, and it makes most of the “fetch questing,” which translates into “Things Players Don't Want to Do,” perfect for @snakeTime to exploit. It also makes a great market for people who like helping NPCs on the daily, AND with the bonus of secret items that drop on chance.

  The CITIES acted as gas stations. Everyone would meet there to make deals happen and wouldn't have to worry due to cities' primary function of acting as a safe space, which extended to illegal deals. @snakeTime didn't touch the lawless; it was annoying, vapid, and an obnoxious LARP.

  @SCARLETSAUCE: hi

  @snakeTime: Hi.

  @SCARLETSAUCE: uhm

  @SCARLETSAUCE: can i

  @SCARLETSAUCE: can i get a bow

  @SCARLETSAUCE: but

  @SCARLETSAUCE: i i want it to make it have aimbot

  @snakeTime: Okay. 2k BS. Aimbot's a bit of a long shot with bows.

  She had a lot of appreciation for honest customers. Not everyone knew exactly what they wanted. It was her job as the professional to narrow that down, and it was also her job as seller to make the offer more enticing. Sometimes, people indulged themselves.

  September 2nd. Technically speaking, the year was 0002 ACC, because they spent so much time trying to figure out the proper timeline or the right verbage, the players had divvied it ACC and BCC, After and Before Character Creation. Before and after the first player logged in, who ultimately logged out for a reason no one had found yet.

  It was a light skirmish today. In the neighboring land of Mycenae was its subsidiary and only supplier of organics, the village of Stockrom, with its fancy and very important NPC. Princess Surmiya and her organizing militia frequently dealt with civil affairs with the more anarchic residents who desire independence. Standard procedure was making sure they're unified, as other TIME players reported the difficulty spikes up drastically without it. Without nutrients and fruits to provide to the permanent darkness of Mycenae, all they would have fueling their military force would be fake salt and mushrooms.

  Stockrom was only about a kilometer away. Most people walk there for their second major quest, and Surmiya was the center of most side quests; she looked the part too, thin but determined with that rare set of green eyes and ashen grey hair that Mycenaeans were known for. Princess in name, she hardly dressed the part, almost always in farmer's robes and aprons to try to brute force the never ending famine. Her face was plastered with the mud of mushroom soil and anyone who saw her knees knew that she was only a few weeks away from tearing her ACL. Due to her being half-Mycenaean, she was ultimately looked down upon by Stockrom who believed that a full-blood would resolve the issues, and that a half-breed like her was the reason Mycenae's king was sick.

  “And why should we continue getting leeched off our goods, the ones we labor so hard for! The famine is already as harsh as it is! Even the Otherworlders cannot sustain our people long enough!”

  “We can't keep engaging in hostilities amongst ourselves! I understand that everyone is starving, I know it must be-”

  The princess was a good person. Naivety just happened to be a curse in these lands, and people were getting impatient. People had been living in tough shit way before the PLAYERs came in, and though PLAYERs good and bad try to help in their own unique ways, due to the SERPENT’S CURSE, food didn't last long enough. Hydration faded fast. Every town and village needed substance non-stop, provision usage accelerated the more there was. Farmland would turn to dust, the sun would turn to radiation poisoning, the night would turn into manic. No matter where they would go, the SERPENT’S CURSE would lay its finger upon them.

  @snakeTime understood this as a cheap way to keep players playing, and a way to encourage exploits and systematic loopholes of all kinds. One player, who wore a top hat and was wearing enough fur coats to outpace the bears, groaned in frustration. She had a pretty face, but a resting bitch face.

  They were having a standoff between GUILDs. One had a group of people who donned the badges of their identity on their hearts, their shoulders, whichever seemed to fit their preference based on the outfit. @snakeTime judged a lot of people's outfits; for what's supposed to be a high fantasy scenario, they sure liked to dress gaudy.

  Top Hat with Pigtails shuffled her feet impatiently. "Ugh...Tired of this forest plaza. I see it every damn day."

  The player next to her was dressed in a purple suit and boxer shorts, and was also carrying around a longsword...With another longsword seemingly welded to the back of the pommel. His youthful demeanor was probably a result of a happy childhood and upbringing. He spun his blade around, the armament clumsily going between and around his fingers. "Is it the same in every server? I'm not a TIME player so I dunno how that works. Oops- I dropped it, sorry."

  "Yeah. Same plaza and stuff, but sometimes the NPCs are different depending on which server you're in."

  GUILDs that play a bigger part in influencing the NPCs get bigger rewards, so they're incentivized to spectate or participate in these happenings. The guilds that appeared depended on the level of importance: a single village and its choices, in this circumstance, usually evaded the biggest eyes, but every SERVER had exceptions.

  This sequence happened as follows: players have to get into an ALTERCATION between both factions at once, leading the participating GUILDs to band into an ALLIANCE. Then, they have to work together to convince both factions to unify by representing themselves as several GUILDs harmonizing into a single body. It's pretty corny, evidence of the game’s initial bias to friendship and its lackluster beginning.

  @snakeTime was neutral about it. It was innocent, isolated, and “introductory” as it explained to new players how to fight cooperatively. The numbers were larger and farther and wider and was good onboarding for operational-level fights.

  So why was she here?

  To play a little bit of devil’s advocate. Bad Person #1 represented a small part of this devil.

  “With these brand new weapons, we'll take over Stockrom and rule over ourselves, the way it was meant to be!”

  In the hands of Bad Faction #1, a gang of abused servants and fallen nobles, are Snake-fashioned automatic crossbows, loaded each with arrows by the dozen. A PLAYER can give an NPC anything that can serve as a solution to their problem, and the magnitude of the reward is based on how effective the solution was. One can't bring a low peasant an automatic rifle and expect them to know how to use it, but they'll definitely know how to use a bow and an arrow.

  A crossbow was fairly up there in technological advancement in this area, so an automatic one was basically like handing over an ARTIFACT.

  “Snake, you fucking asshole.”

  @Asdfghjk ran one of the new-player guilds and was basically the reason why Mycenae had a guild hub. NPCs can technically run it, but they actually need a push and the world made more sense for a real PLAYER to do it. He had a reputation for his creative vocabulary and his views of elves and dwarves were unequal at best. Fitting to his reputation, he had leaf-heavy armor, his waistband filled with wood and twine and his chest plastered with wooden plates and decorated etchings on the gambeson underneath. He wore a showy helmet, a wooden carapace with horns that resembled a rhino beetle.

  Leave it to the EARTH player to not like his own class, to be honest.

  @snakeTime got benefits for actually gearing the NPCs. All it did was artificially ramp up the difficulty, and some guilds valued people like her to incite unique rewards by providing unique challenge (what they call Lord of War tactics). The SHADE was constantly evolving and, as such, so do BASILISK’s residents, eliciting the need to constantly push NPCs and PLAYERs alike to evolve and progress.

  They were arguing now. She didn't really know when, but at some point when Bad Faction #1 was going off about Otherworlders and other disciminatory words, the GUILDs were bickering about how to go about @snakeTime's elusively manipulative actions. Because @snakeTime essentially buffed their enemy faction, the GUILDs had to make emergency plans to adapt.

  One player came up to her during this process, who was part of the guild “JAYWALKERS”, all caps.

  “Are we…Supposed to equip the bad guys?”

  @snakeTime snorted with that same expressionless look on her face. “No.”

  There was always at least one person who asks that kind of question.

  Another player wrangled that player, throwing a middle finger at a very straight-faced @snakeTime. “Fucking idiot, fuck is wrong with you? We’re just trying to get a quest done. And now you gotta make shit harder for us. Fuck you.”

  “Coming into a game with that attitude doesn’t do much good,” she replied.

  “And buffing the adds we gotta fuck up isn’t? Eat shit and die.”

  “Calm down, man,” says another, part of the guild “Cheese Cracker.” “Doesn’t that just make this more exciting? I mean, it’s not like we’re doing anything else today.”

  "Yeah? I just wanted to get this done so I can go to sleep."

  The NPCs were supposedly intended to fight each other by this point, but they’re getting slightly more concerned and confused about the players of the guilds, who were initially assigned to either faction based on role, were now arguing amongst each other about @snakeTime’s motions.

  Surmiya was one of them. “Um…Excuse me, Jay Walker, should you really be speaking to them? They’re intending to oppose us,” says she with a look of confusion and wariness towards the snake lady.

  The "Jay Walker," in this case, was another player, though he seemed to have gotten the gesture from @snakeTime. This largely wouldn't amount to much if they just stuck to the plan. “Ehh- uh, agreeing to agree right now. Um- I know! Look at @snakeTime, she’s clearly using you guys like puppets!”

  Surmiya gasped.

  Great acting, Di-Crapio.

  Another Jay Walker. @snakeTime is pretty sure he wasn't really interested in following the guide, he just wanted to voice his frustrations. “Yeah, fuck this bitch, she’s messing with the shit that’s supposed to be our shit.”

  “W-wait- uh- oh! Um, yeah! We should all team up against her!”

  Bad Faction #1 , evil as they were, turned towards her as well. “Hmph!” their leader goes, “You Otherworlders have always been so prickly and above it all. You’re not any different. You just see us like tests for your little weapons, huh? Well, we’re not gonna have it either!” They pointed the crossbows SHE GAVE THEM at her.

  Their smarts, especially in this part of the continent, left a bit to be desired.

  @snakeTime sighed, raising her hands in surrender. “Whatever. If you promise to stop fighting over your dumb territory. Just unify and act as the co-leader with Surmiya and assemble your decisions alongside her. You can start a council and make courtroom debates.”

  …

  Someone amidst the NPCs said it. “Not a bad idea…”

  The GUIDEs say that the GUILDs unify into an ALLIANCE to prove to the two factions the importance of harmony and unification, causing the NPCs to recognize their overreactions and unify Woodlon into a more powerful entity. This was, in particular, an easy mission to accomplish as the AI hadn't been really developed this early on, making their intelligence on the lower end of the deal.

  So in this server, @snakeTime ended up becoming the antagonistic force that forced Woodlon to unite against a greater evil.

  And now, she was going to brush her teeth. She still had a to-do list to follow.

  @Asdfghjk: thanks for playing the bad guy. Ill make sure they forget who you are when the heat dies.

  @snakeTime: Do that, and if you could, I need 20k BS.

  @Asdfghjk: ?

  @snakeTime: Base needs an arrangement.

  @Asdfghjk: if you say so. also, i need some help from you in regards to a new heart player that came in. ill let you know.

  @snakeTime: GG

  @Asdfghjk: gg