Into The Vault

If you're going to gain any kind of actual, meaningful power here you need to get out of the main thoroughfare of the Vault. It's true you've gotten high enough level to at least challenge a few players in this area but you're alone, and unguarded. You've seen enough to know a single monster won't last long, and you don't want to subject yourself to killing other monsters to level up; So you need to go where you're not expected, and where you can hide if things come down to it. The Vaults are perfect for it.

If memory serves you correctly, this bridge leads into a smaller off-shoot of the main Vaults, a sort of 'secondary' area meant to be challenging without being as tough as the main Vault. Intended for lower level players to familiarize themselves with the mechanics of the update before diving headfirst into it, which suits you just fine as this bridge is the only chokepoint into it from this side...Or so you think, you've never actually explored here much and even then it was not exactly intensive. So you take a moment to collect yourself, re-opening your stats and trying to hunt out an idea, when you realize you're not just seeing your stats now, you're seeing...Well, a rather interesting menu.

Whatever's happened here, you realize you're looking at an in-depth menu of sorts to the game, similar to what you suspect players must see and interact with. There's no chat function or message function, those are grayed out, as is your inventory, but you do see a map icon and you click it. Instantly your gaze is overwhelmed by a bare bones mini-map and it confirms what you suspect, that you're standing in front of an area with lots of long corridors, dead ends and side rooms that lead to a large antechamber, with it's own branches out into the main area. So if you can get in there and set up shop, you can start your work.

Which, as you realize, you'd never really put into words now...Taking control. That was what you wanted to do. This game was run by players, for players, and meanwhile monsters like you were given thoughts and feelings only to be turned into cannon fodder and farmed. At least have the decency to make you an unfeeling string of numbers if you're going to do that, but no, that wouldn't be immersive enough for today's gamer. Fuck that nonsense. It's time you got your payback and maybe evened the playing field...

Or at least had some fun before you were shut down, somehow.

Either way you turn and begin making your way across the bridge. With your ability to hover and some basic pattern memorization, you make it through the wind traps with almost no difficulty and emerge on the opposite side of the passage to find yourself in the Vaults.

They're like day to the night of the caverns. Gray-white stone meticulously arranged into corridors, ceilings and floors, all lit by crystalline lanterns set in the walls. The air is stale and foreboding, the simplest of sounds resonates deep into it's caverns. It's time to find a home here. You begin hovering down the halls, the winding tunnels making each forward advance feel small and the path enormous even though you realize it can only be a mile, at most, of tunnels. It's quite small in here. As you advance further you come to a passageway, three directions ahead of you. North seems to lead into a small chamber, while east leads into a pathway that seems to spiral upwards, as if stairs of a sort. West leads deeper in.

You could set up a small home here in this northern room, but so close to the entrance is risky. West leads to deeper territory, but less fruitful hunting grounds and east...Well, checking your map, east leads to a connecting tunnel upwards, into the caverns the Vaults extend from. That area would be interesting hunting ground, but likely dangerous without planning and scouting.