[ti]open[/ti][002] sakanade

The area around Shalin house seemed rock solid. It was for the best; how many new players, if they encountered something strange in their first few minutes of playing, would cancel their subscriptions and never play the game again? She expected the tutorial zone to be a cleanly-coded affair, but she had to get started somewhere.

Plus, those constant reminders of incomplete tutorials were going to get on the girl's nerves if she didn't clear them away.

The brightness of broad daylight would make it easy for Alkaid to see an unfamiliar face approaching: a female bucket of energy whose Bulbasaur, quite large for her species, bounced about next to her. It seemed she already had the parcel they had been asked to deliver!

The redhead was straightforward, not beating around the bush in the slightest. Shalin liked those kinds of players: ones that got straight to the point. "Thanks! Supposedly it's because of my class," Shalin replied, Saria gently extending one of her vines to shake Alkaid's hand with.

"Alkaid? Did I pronounced your name correctly?" she asked, unsure how accurate her pronunciation was. "Indeed, I do have a delivery quest! But I want to try something. Instead of completing the delivery, I want to see if it's possible to get the package out of bounds." The smile of mischief and chaos on her face was painfully obvious, as though she was already a Beta Tester.

Saria smiled, reflecting Shalin's giddiness as she gently let go of Alkaid's hand. "Wouldn't it be as simple as just aborting and restarting the Quest?" the glitch hunter asked. "No harm, no foul, right?"

However it worked, they would find out soon. It was smooth sailing for a while, Shalin walking into fences occasionally. Whether it was her getting used to the controls or testing for poorly programmed walls was best left as an exercise to Alkaid .

After getting a third of the way to their destination, Shalin pointed toward a sidewalk that turned at a 30 degree angle, then went up some shallow but long steps. "Perfect, this is exactly what I was looking for," she gestured toward the staircase. "See how it's not cardinally aligned?"

Softlocks were indeed a danger of going outside the intended bounds of the game's realms. Even so, it was a danger she was willing to set foot toward. Worst case, she could always log out and restart from the last Shrine she visited instead of the middle of the current Quest.

"No, there's nothing inherently unusual about a staircase being in a direction that isn't cardinally aligned," Shalin explained as she put one foot on the seam between two stairs. "Not to the naked eye, anyway. It's more what variable type the code stores your position data in. A lot of really weird things happen in video games--"

As she lifted her other foot, Shalin fell through the stairs, picking up speed until she landed on the top of a cave ceiling, viewing its tunnels from the outside. Were Alkaid to check their mini-map, they would see that the package was located several thousand units beneath them. Strangely enough, she did not take any fall damage from the impact. Unbeknownst to Alkaid, a Porygon made itself materialized in front of the explorer as she landed out of bounds. And a talking one at that.

It was C0D13 .

"You're a naughty but clever girl for making it here."

The scolding Porygon took Shalin by surprise. "Wait, you can talk?!" she gasped.

"Long as your PokéSpeech settings are on, I can. Could be worth your time to go into the general options menu and take a look at your settings. There are quite a few of them that are important for gameplay."

Fascinating... so Pokémon could talk in this setting. That completely changed her approach to the game. If they could speak, then did that mean they also had personalities? Routing the game would be a lot more complex than she thought, depending on the algorithms the game used for personalities.

"I'll take a look around. For now, how do we get back to town?"

"I'll use my debugging powers to send you back to the surface... this time. Next time, you'll have to log out for long enough to be sent back to the last Shrine you visited." With a flash of pink light, the girl materialized next to Alkaid , not far from where she had fallen between pieces of the town's geometry.

Alkaid looked furious, the redhead spouting all kinds of reiterated warnings at Shalin. She cupped her hand over her mouth and laughed, not at Alkaid, but at the situation. "It's good to know that there are failsafes if someone does manage to get out of bounds," she answered, her voice muffled before she uncovered her mouth. "If I can figure out where in UNOVR I landed on top of when I clipped through the floor, it could be a potentially big time saver." At its floor, it could be a time saver for gaining levels, if not doing the story out of order.

Once he had calmed down, Shalin would lead the way toward their destination, which appeared to be close. There was, however, a small fence in their way. Shalin looked around for a way past it; there seemed to be an alleyway not far from where they were at. "I wonder if the RUNNING SHOES would give me enough speed to just jump it..." she mused.

Shalin reminded Alkaid of one important failsafe that would always be there. "There's one you're forgetting about. Remember, you can always log out and log back in, and you will be warped to the last shrine you visited. That's the plan if I ever get stuck like that." There was a sly smile across the green-haired lass's face. "Remember, I'm a contributor to a few TASes. You have to be able to think outside the box to do that."

Assuming Alkaid has completed the first tutorial, given there was a suggested order to do them in, Shalin would activate her RUNNING SHOES. As the redhead kindly gestured for her to go first, she dashed toward the fence and flexed her legs, gracefully leaping over it. "Whew!" she cried, triumphantly raising her fists. "Now, it's your turn!"