Chapter 3: Requests

After that 200,000 zril mistake, Euki popped open her menu and started perusing the markets. She always had goods moving there on the in-game marketplace. That’s where the big zril was made. The nekojin got to work trying to make back that spent zril as fast as possible.

It didn’t take her long to find some goods below their worth, and she idly swished her tail in tempered delight. Early midday there was less demand for certain goods than later in the day, so prices fell. She snatched up some much used crafting mats and made a note to liquidate them all that evening, when demand was higher as more people got home from work, donned their headsets, and wanted to craft whatever stat food or fancy clothes they desired that day.

While doing that, she sold off a few items she was holding onto which usually peaked in value around this time, and in doing so made back the zril then and there, with more profit to come later atop those from her usual dealings.

Yet, it wasn’t long until her blissful digital money-making was interrupted by a pop-up notification. The players in M-World E3, the third and final world of the coffee table bound megaworld, had sent a special Mentor Request.

A Mentor Request was a special “sentiment” one could opt to make. With enough upvotes, it was sent to the world's mentor to view like any other sentiment. The difference is it asked the mentor to do something, and offered a bonus of mentorship points to the mentor for helping. To prevent abuse, it took a lot of upvotes--which each upvote for a request costing zril--in order to get these requests to the level where a mentor had to view them.

This request was for help defeating a special world boss monster. Despite the name, they were usually regional monsters rather than monsters that challenged an entire game world’s worth of players. Still, the point was that they were big and bad. Most players who hadn’t seen them before simply thought them rather large normal monsters. They would rush in, die, respawn, and then recruit others to try and beat it.

Most higher level players were busy with other stuff though, and didn’t want to help. You still needed a lot of players to take them down. The fights were long and tedious too, but rewarded unique loot tokens. So, all this coupled together made it so that these were by far the most common type of Mentor Requests for a mentor to get.

Players knew such bosses were easy for mentors to cull, and mentors knew that even the toughest foe for the mentees was smaller than their finger. It was a symbiotic exchange really: at least for most.

Euki liked mentorship points, as she couldn’t outright buy them or farm them any way other than this program. She didn’t really like helping others though, unless she had to. In the moment, the catgal wanted to get those points, but like many game players wanted to expend the least amount of effort possible to do so. She still had pages of the market listings to peruse, after all.

She had an idea.

--==--==--==--

Atop one of the many the eastern isles making up the “Jima” region of the game’s third expansion, players level 60-70 were all grouped up and staring down a giant, 50ft tall spider woman. As they were waiting, the ground shook with a fierce tremor. An all too familiar and troublesome sensation, often the harbinger for something much worse.

Sure enough, Euki’s left foot came into their view just about the time she slammed her heel down on the coffee table. The foot pivoted, shadowing the sunny island. It angled such that the pinky toe was hovering in the sky not too far off.

From the tremor, many of the amassed group of players stumbled, and one unlucky fellow stumbled a bit too far forward. This aggro’d the boss monster, who proceeded to attack the group: starting by stamping out the instigating player with her spider-like lower-body. As they were a humble knife wielding dps, and not a more formidable tank, they were KO’d quite fast.

The rest of the group either joined the sudden combat, tried to run from it, or just sort of ran around in circles not doing much of anything: a usual modus operandi even without a toe hanging overhead. As this was going on, a message came over the Mentor-Link onto all the amassed adventurer’s menus which, too, popped up suddenly.

“How’s it looking down there? Is the boss beneath my toe?”

The dynamic requester chat erupted with replies and other activity. There was general chatter on trying to strategize handling the boss monster that was currently attacking. “Please heal me” and “Please turn on your stance!” abounded. However, most messages were in reply to Euki’s.

“Do not step down!!!”
“Please no. Do not!!!”
“Can’t you just poke it with a finger?!?”

“No it’s too far south!”
“No it’s not don’t step please!”
“I just died to the crabs I don’t wanna respawn again.”

But, there was one from a particularly aloof player that read:

“Eh, kind of?”

--==--==--==--

Euki watched the messages roll in. She was looking for confirmation, and eventually found it in that message from the aloof player as well as one or two others.

“Good enough.”, she thought, and moved her left foot down to try and snuff out the threat with pinky toe. All the while, she didn’t even look at what she was doing. Her eyes were on the market board listings still, having moved her gaze from the chat part of her menu to that section to make some more zril. Zril and mentorship points at the same time was her aim.

‘Always good to multitask’, she thought.

--==--==--==--

From high in the sky, Euki’s pinky toe came down. To her credit, she did angle her foot so that only that little toe made contact with the micro game-world. Unfortunately, there were two big problems nonetheless.

Firstly, that pinky toe of hers still dwarfed in-game mountains in size to the mentees.

Secondly, her aim was off. It wasn’t that bad considering she wasn’t even looking, but it was too far south.

The pinky toe came down *behind* the boss monster and the group fighting it. Those players, most of which fell down from the shaking earth, could take a break from the intense scuffle to turn around. There, they could see the big blue pinky toe burrowed deep into the island over what used to be the region’s main settlement.

Though the players fighting the giant spider monster lady were spared contact, those who had run from the world boss were crushed as the pad of the pinky toe came down. Along with them were causalities in the form of swaths of trees and other flora, hundreds of monsters on the island, and many more players just out and about at the time in the various bits of harvesting and leveling areas the island offered.

Lastly, the island’s settlement was gone as well. The small little town was situated atop a hill on the island. Said hill was flattened easier than one could flatten a bulge on a rug. The town itself obviously had no chance, and its wooden buildings crumbled like sand against the might of Euki littlest toe. It more or less detonated on contact, yet was also instantly snuffed out as the toe lightly settled after the descent.

Another message come over the Mentor Link from Euki to the requesters.

“Did I get it? How far off was I?”, it read.

--==--==--==--

Euki was of course aware there was some damage, but that didn’t concern her at the time. What did concern her was that the Mentor Request objective had yet to be completed, and those sweet sweet mentorship points had yet to be rewarded.

The chat erupted with more messages.

“You destroyed Hilltop Haven!”

“They’re all gone. Just gone...”

“Uh, no, you missed!!!”
“My partner was back at the town.”

“How is your stance still off?”

“Heals please.”

But, a few more messages caught her eye. More useful ones, from players a bit less afraid of a KO.

“Too far south, you wrecked the forest.”
“No she was a bit more north.”

Euki noticed them and had a brief “hmm”.

“’She’, must be the giant spider lady. I think I remember her spawn being a bit north. Checks out.”, she thought to herself.

“Alright, one sec.”, she said aloud for all below to here. Shortly after, she slid her foot back towards herself: more ‘north’ in the game world.

--==--==--==--

Still in contact with the island, the monolithic pinky toe tore through the terrain as it slipped northward. It was heading right towards the boss monster this time, and the players still fighting it. The ‘reinforcement’ they had begged from their mentor didn’t discriminate between friend and foe as it slid through the island’s grassy terrain, towards them.

Cleaving through the players, the toe eventually come upon the world boss which, like Euki’s mentees, didn’t last long. The world boss was a rather big spider lady, but its formidable size was completely and utterly trivialized next to even the smallest of Euki’s toes. The nekojin mentor was simply that immense in comparison, and the spider went splat with ease. The boss monster fell under the toe as it carved its path of destruction, and was summarily defeated and destroyed.

Just to be thorough, Euki kept dragging her toe all the way off the northern tip of the island. She stopped when she felt a bit of wetness, which meant ocean of course. It was rather shallow to her, but when her toe splashed into those seas it brought up waves which wracked the surrounding islands as well, causing a bit of damage to most players near the coasts. Indeed, those too close to the coast were simply taken up by the massive waves and drowned.

--==--==--==--

As sad as many players were to be KO’d so inconsiderately, the world boss monster *was* defeated. Euki herself smiled and let out a pleased “nice!” as she saw her stock of mentorship points increase. All the players involved with fighting the monster got their loot tokens and some experience as well--provided, of course, that they hit the enemy at least once.

Euki moved her foot back to the couch, quickly wiping it against the cushion to dry the pinky toe. Her menu was red with all the damage warnings of course, but it was nothing compared to before.

She eyed the zril value to repair everything, and saw that it’d be 50k zril. However, just repairing the raw and rough terrain was a measly 25k zril. So, she did that. That still left the matter of fixing the forest and settlement her pinky toe had destroyed.

Euki hit a few buttons and decided to make it a “Mentor Challenge”. These were special tasks she could assign, with limitations, towards her mentees. The one she assigned was to replant the forest and rebuild the Hilltop Haven settlement.

The zril cost to repair all that herself was trivial. She debated just paying it. Making it a challenge made it so the mentee crafters and material harvesters could work together to repair it themselves. They would be rewarded with experience points and an amount of zril most would call decent but Euki would call pathetic.

By making it a challenge, Euki didn’t get any of that. However, she didn’t need exp. Moreover, she didn’t lose anything either. Cost no zril or, more importantly, time on her part. In fact, she figured she’d gain some time as the mentees would gleefully engage in the tasks for that sweet sweet exp. While they did so, they’d leave her alone for a bit.

Euki wanted to finish her market manipulations for the moment and, thankfully, managed to do so. That done, she just relaxed. A loud sigh left her lips as she closed the menu and half-lidded her eyes. She debated kicking her feet up on the coffee table again. She didn’t, though not for consideration for the micro-scale mentees so much as a desire to rest against the couch cushions in full.

Her bare feet propped up on the other end of the furniture, she shuffled her body against the cushions and just took some time for herself. Head turned towards the table, she took a few moments to reflect on just how huge she was compared to them. There was a certain enticement to it she realized she hadn’t quite appreciated in full. She’d been much too busy chasing those mentorship points.

Euki didn’t get much chance to think on that though. Her menu popped open, disturbing her from her thoughts to grab her attention.

It was another Mentor Request. This time, though, it came from another world in her care. M-World E8 this time.

Euki groaned, as this meant she had to get up.