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Coral joined the immersive virtual reality video game Travail Online because her waitressing job, like so many other jobs, was automated by a growing robot workforce. She starts as a Seamstress, hoping to craft useful clothing in-game to sell for real life cash. The game, however, has other ideas. What starts off as job replacement quickly launches an adventure of epic proportions through a virtual reality world filled with magic, intrigue, and betrayal.
Can she and her new friends rescue the MMORPG world of Travail from death and defeat before it comes crashing down, taking the world economy with it?
Welcome to Travail, where hard play makes fun work.
Genre: FICTION / Science Fiction / GeneralThe book has generally stayed in the top 20,000 ebooks in Amazon.com. When it launched, it ranked as low as 1,898. In the last four months, I have sold 600 copies, and another 1500 readers have read the book through the Kindle Unlimited subscription service. This is the first book in the series, and when I launched the second book sales of this book picked up again. I expect the same to happen when I release book 3 this summer.
Daniel took his broadsword and stabbed Otto through the chest. As a Level 2 NPC, Otto was a non-player character with low HP, making him easy to kill. A real player would have higher hit points and might live long enough to strike back. A real player might even take offense to being stabbed in the chest. Otto, however, was a good enough sport.
>> Otto takes 132 Damage. Otto dies. You receive 2 XP.
Otto crumpled into a bloody mess on the floor after one hit. He clutched at his chest and looked up at Sal and Sybil with plaintive eyes. Damn, these NPCs are so lifelike. Daniel almost felt bad for killing him! Before long, Otto went limp and his dead body faded from view.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Sal said. “Otto’s a nice guy to people that don’t, you know, kill him. And the way he looks at me and Sybil for help every single time. It ties my stomach up in knots.”
“Otto should know by now to just give me a discount the first time. And I’m pretty sure your stomach is in ‘knots’ because you ate an entire goblin. You have no one to blame for that but yourself.”
“I’m a Gourmand class! Eating is what I do. I wanted to see if there was a buff for finishing all the meat. Turns out, there wasn’t. It did restore the rest of my HP to full though.” Sal beamed at this accomplishment. Daniel knew how high Sal’s Constitution was, which meant his HP was through the roof. It also meant they wouldn’t have to wait around for his HP to regenerate before they entered the raid dungeon that just opened up.
“But I just think,” Sal said, “that if the NPCs are run on artificial intelligence, they might have feelings.”
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Greek
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Translation in progress.
Translated by Stefanos Karampalis and Dimitris Gerasimopoulos
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