Delayed Transfer

The next day after breakfast, Rendira arrived to teach the kids, and Mark went to the internet café to check the situation there. He was surprised at the huge crowd that was gathered at the entrance of the café and saw that they were all young people of age with the two customers who were lucky enough to be selected to test the Star Wars The Old Republic online game.

Mark wondered if Hamil opened the café already but more than likely, these people had learned about the café from the two volunteers who were asked to test the game.

When he entered the café, all of the assigned players, including the circus leaders who committed themselves to testing the game, were already playing. The elven sisters were playing their characters as well. He was surprised that Hamil allowed Toby to play the game so early.

Mark noticed that Monterra activated the program that would run the timer for each computer, which was wise of her, to familiarize themselves with using the net café timer program before the cafe's official opening.

He briefly went to the server room to check the computer servers and everything looked fine. The generator was running fine as well but he would need to remind the elven sisters to check the generator using a schedule they could create to make sure that the machine would not run out of fuel. He would put in gallons of fuel beside the generator to make sure that everything would run smoothly.

Mark was glad that the heavy-duty generator was large and powerful enough to run the café and based on the machine’s manual, even if he added more computers and added something like an air conditioner, it should be able to handle the load easily but the fact the temperature and lighting were being handled by magic was a load off of the machine.

He went back inside the café and interrupted the sister. They followed him to the seats that were placed at one of the café’s corners.

“Did anyone encounter any issues?” Mark asked while he gave the sisters cans of soda.

“There were no issues with the actual gameplay but there were some who encountered issues due to the lack of knowledge of the game but everyone decided to challenge themselves in solving those problems themselves,” Solinae said.

Then three elven women told Mark that the players were now at an average of level seven to ten and they were surprised at everyone’s speed. Mentorra even said that they themselves were a bit slow since they were only at level six.

Mark was surprised at how slow everyone was and knew that it was brought on by everyone’s unfamiliarity with playing computer games as well as their lack of resources about how to solve the game’s mechanics. They didn’t have a wiki that they could consult anytime they encountered any sort of difficulty in solving a game mission and they didn’t even have access to the most basic information that could be seen on the Star Wars The Old Republic website.

Mark knew that that challenge was also part of the reason why everyone was so excited. The fact that they were able to solve a tricky problem by themselves without relying on external help brought forth a burst of dopamine which made them addicted to the game.

The difference between Earth’s gamers and the people in the cafe made Mark miss the old era of gaming where everyone was excited about playing a newly released game and the gamers would try to solve the game’s mission by relying on themselves instead of automatically going to a game forum. Now gamers, especially the old ones were so jaded that they had the attitude of “Oh, we’ve seen that before, can you give us something new?”. There was no more blood-boiling excitement, no more gathering of players to celebrate the mind-blowing excitement of the new game.

He remembered that when Star Wars The Old Republic was released, the developers were shocked at how fast the gamers consumed the game’s content, and in Mark’s opinion it was because the gamers back then were not savoring the game but wanted to reach the end game as soon as possible. Not only that, the gamers were truly experienced since they had experienced a huge amount of different games already.

Mark then provided the sisters some spoilers so they could share them with the gamers to excite everyone like their character receiving their own spaceships and the ability to battle in space, about them owning their own house and the ability to purchase things to decorate their houses, like the ability to join a guild and together with their guildmates perform dungeon raids to get more powerful equipment. He knew that keeping those up programming-wise even though he had all the resources that he would need would be difficult but Mark decided to let future Mark solve it.

“You’ve already experienced the game, how soon do you think can we open the café to the customers?” Mark asked the sisters.

“Two more days of playing the game would let us know,” Solinae said and Mark just nodded.

Mark then informed the sisters that they would need to create a schedule for checking the servers and the generator at least three times a day and the sisters said that they would handle it. He also reminded the sisters to remind everyone to take a break to eat and relieve themselves so the gamers would not encounter any issues with their health and Mentorra said they would.

“I will not be here for a few hours since I will need to go to Narcone to accompany the twins to give out their invitation to their friends for the Star Wars Convention,” Mark said and the sisters smiled and shook their heads but they did tell him that he shouldn’t worry about the net café and would make sure that everything would.

He knew that Mark was indulging the twins too much but he didn’t care.

After that Mark returned to the RV so he could eat lunch with everyone there then they would go to Narcone. The only people in the RV were the twins, Liriel, and Lisa. Milena and the others were busy with the convenience store and Nedertu was somewhere probably helping the others in the circus. After lunch, Mark prepared bento boxes for everyone and asked Lisa to give them to the others.

The twins were so excited but they needed to wait for Mark to print out a new copy of the invitation card to include the date then they had to spend several more minutes to decorate the card. They left the name blank and would be added later once they gave it out to the twin’s friends.

Once the card was finished, Mark stored it in his inventory and immediately replicated tens of the cards then he and the kids headed to the warp gate.

The warp gate was being guarded by four people and based on what he knew two of them were from the circus and two were from Narcone. There was no one there who could activate the gate since there was a schedule of the gate’s opening and since they were past that schedule the gate wasn’t supposed to be active.

Two of the guards walked forward and would have tried to stop Mark if the other two didn’t stop them. Mark could hear the two from the circus telling the two guards from Narcone that Mark was the mage who created the Warp Gate so they let him and the kids near the gate. When Mark activated the portal, the four guards just looked on then Mark and the kids entered the gate.