Chapter 2
by 
dracone
Which Path Do You Take?
Plant Faction
The Plant faction of RoD also included fungi, which was typical of most Fantasy setting type games. Not that Lisa Antarbor really cared about such things. As the figure known as Mycelia Arbor-Petal, she was ranked six in the global rankings and considered the best Plant faction player there was. Her choice of faction was considered among the 5 worst factions in the game, it was still a few steps above the Beast faction but not by much. She was impressed that ZHM had managed to get to the place they were on the global leader board, the two almost had a match to face off to see what the other was capable of, but something went wonky with the host server for the competition they were both in before the semi-finals, the match that would have had them facing off with each other. The contestants were all given consolation prizes as an apology. The only other member of the Top 10 she had faced before now was, amusingly enough, the number 2 global player, Butterfly Mantis, but that was back when they were both low on the leader boards for their respective nations and had barely met the minimum for global matches, they were both just getting into the strides with their preferred factions.
Lisa felt the most comfortable with the Plant faction, a contributing factor to that was the fact she was an Asexual, which most of her friends and family didn't quite get it. Thankfully, she could reflect this in her advisors; each of them had a form made entirely up of one of the components for her avatar's body. Granted, her naming sense was a bit unorthodox. Regardless, what she made was pretty impressive. She had jumped through the hoops to join the Mature server net when she turned 18, she was 25 now, but that was more a case of wanting to be able to see what everyone else had made without the typical restrictions. She knew the main reasons why most players were on the Mature server nets, almost all of them were pretty obvious. But as a Life Sciences major, she was pretty in the know about quite a few things regarding the natural world.
After making some slight tweaks to her avatar and advisors before the next update, Lisa went to the forums to see if there were any new in-game or out of game fan projects that she should start paying attention to. Just as she was about to click on the tabbed link she set up on the forum pages for herself, Lisa suddenly found herself inhabiting her avatar. Looking around, she noticed there were other players in similar positions. Most of which she knew from the global leader board postings.
Her vision clocked a glowing sphere with symbols, terms, and the like from the game floating about it. It said something about a trial period ending, she really didn't get it. What she did understand is that all the individuals here would be able to pick 2 cards, with the Top 10 players getting access to 4. She spotted the number 1 global player, Draco Conquistador, picking his cards, but her attention quickly turned to everyone else, she wanted to get a read on the room, before she knew it she was being called to pick her cards, she had completely missed what the other 5 in front of her had been doing until then. The number 7 global player, ZHM, was just behind her.
She quickly moved up and began to grab the cards before her. The first card she grabbed gave her access to Mid-game worker units, an interesting bonus she was sure the Bug faction would have gotten in this event gacha type setting. Her second card was quick advancement of her Arbor build tree, which is Faction specific, and in just the way she was needed to go. Mycelia had discovered if she built the Arbor skill tree in a specific way then all the defense of herself, her units, and facilities would jump significantly, in addition to gaining resistances and immunities to the kinds of weaknesses typically associated with the Plant faction. Her third card gave all her advisors an upgrade by advancing them to their mid-game stages. And her fourth card boosted the movement speed of all her units, almost doubling it, which was highly appreciated since most units in the Plant faction had some of the lowest movement speed in the game when you just ran everything on base stats.
Almost as soon as her last card was confirmed, Mycelia was no longer in the void. She had been sent to the world of the game. It was time to see how she really stacked up against the best players of the game.