Chris had spent the last hour in his gaming chair, not playing, not scrolling, just staring at the quest that refused to be ignored, hoping that if he stared at it long enough, it might get uncomfortable and leave. It did not.
[World Quest Assigned: Civic Stabilization]
The very title represented every type of pressure he had spent his entire adult life avoiding. "Civic" implied community. "Stabilization" implied competence. These were concepts were foreign to him. He mentally clicked on the quest.
The detailed window opened, and his stomach immediately clenched. It was a progress report, and it was a failing grade. The window was dominated by two ominous progress bars, both depressing.
[Community Approval: 28/100]
[Infrastructure Integrity: 35/100]
The numbers were a quantifiable measure of how much trouble the town—and by extension, he—was in. His gamer brain immediately translated the stats into a language he understood. The town's health bar was in the red. It was on the verge of a total party wipe. He instinctively used his [INSPECT] ability on the stats themselves, a desperate search for a tooltip that might offer a clue.
[Stat: Community Approval]
[Description: Measures the overall public trust, social cohesion, and general morale of the designated geographic zone. Current level is rated 'Actively Hostile.']
[Active Debuffs: -15% to Local Economy (Small Business), -20% to Civic Engagement, +30% to Angry Posts on Community Forum.]
Chris winced. So the town was suffering from a measurable debuff because everyone was mad at the mayor, who was only mad because of the Pothole Phantom, who only existed because Chris needed scrap metal to fix a lawnmower he only needed to fix because he was an unemployed thirty-year-old living at home. The causal chain of his own failure was a horrifying, tangled mess.
He inspected the second stat.
[Stat: Infrastructure Integrity]
[Description: Measures the physical stability and functionality of public works within the designated geographic zone. Current level is rated 'Critically Neglected.']
[Active Debuffs: +10% Vehicle Maintenance Costs for all residents, -5 to overall town aesthetic, high probability of creating [Frustrated Citizen] NPCs.]
The town itself had a negative aesthetic modifier because of the potholes. He was living in a debuffed zone. And he, somehow, was the only one who could fix it. The weight of the world, or at least the small, neglected corner of it that was Buckhannon, West Virginia, had just been dropped squarely on his slumped shoulders.
His first reaction was instinctual denial. It was a skill he had honed to perfection over three decades. If he did not acknowledge the problem, the problem did not exist. He squeezed his eyes shut, plunging his vision into a self-imposed darkness. The golden-bordered quest was gone. The blue and white progress bars had vanished. There was only the quiet, peaceful blackness. He held it for a long, hopeful ten seconds.
He opened his eyes.
The quest was still there. It pulsed with a gentle, indifferent light, completely unconcerned with his attempts to wish it away.
His denial, having failed its primary function, began to curdle into the hot, acidic burn of anger. A new thought, sharp took root in his mind. This is not my fault.
He shot up from his chair and began to pace the length of his bedroom, his bare feet padding on the worn carpet. He navigated the obstacle course of laundry piles and empty Rocket Riot cans, his movements agitated, his hands clenched into fists.
"This is not my fault!" he said out loud, his voice a harsh whisper in the quiet room. He pointed an accusatory finger at the invisible, omnipresent System. "This is Mayor Thompson's fault for being a corrupt, egotistical idiot! If he hadn't been a jerk to that girl at Kroger's, none of this would have happened!"
He spun around, his righteous indignation growing. "And it's the ModBot's fault! That cosmic asshole with the spectral librarian avatar! If it hadn't glitched out and made the gnomes stare at my house, I wouldn't have had to break into the library and none of this would be happening! I'm the victim here!"
He was a man on trial, and he was presenting his closing argument to a jury of one. He was casting blame in every direction, an attempt to deflect the crushing weight of his own culpability. This wasn't his problem to solve. He was just the guy who had pulled the first thread, not the guy who had woven the whole rotten tapestry.
His anger, having no one to lash out at, began to morph into a different, more desperate strategy: bargaining. He stopped pacing and stood in the center of his room, addressing the silent air as if it were a judge he could somehow persuade.
"Okay, look," he said, his voice taking on a wheedling, negotiator's tone. He held his hands up in a gesture of peace. "Let's be reasonable about this. The pothole part... okay, fine. The pothole part was my fault. I admit that. I was just trying to complete a quest, but I see now that my actions had unforeseen public consequences. I will fix the potholes. I will get the [Infrastructure Integrity] stat back up. I accept that part of the quest."
He took a breath, preparing for his main point. "But the rest of it? The [Community Approval]? That's a social stat. That's a Charisma-based objective. You can't ask me to do that." He began to pace again, now a lawyer pleading his case. "Have you seen my stats? My Charisma is garbage. I have a permanent debuff from years of social avoidance. You need a Bard for this quest, or a Paladin with a high speech skill. You sent a guy who can't even make a phone call to his own sister without getting anxiety. I am fundamentally the wrong spec for this content."
He was trying to argue his case to an unlistening, uncaring System, hoping that if he could just prove, with logic and evidence, that he was under-leveled and poorly specced, the quest would be reassigned. He was appealing to whomever was listening, begging for a new party member.
"Just assign the [Community Approval] part of the quest to someone else!" he pleaded. "Give it to Brenda G.! Her Community Standing has to be maxed out! She'd love it! She could probably fix the whole town's morale with a single, well-placed post about a church bake sale!"
He was in the middle of his one-sided rationalizations, about to make a compelling argument for the superior qualifications of a sixty-something grandmother, when a new, deeply unpleasant notification appeared. It wasn't a pop-up window. It was a subtle, terrifying change to his main HUD.
A small, red, downward-facing arrow materialized next to his [System Standing] stat. A new line of text appeared below it, the font a cold, clinical white.
[System Standing is now decaying due to World Quest inactivity.]
[Current Standing: Valued Contributor (98/100)]
Chris froze mid-rant. He stared at the notification. As he watched, the number flickered.
[Current Standing: Valued Contributor (97/100)]
It was a penalty. A punishment for stalling. The System had answered his plea with a cold, bureaucratic slap in the face. The world quest wasn't just mandatory; it had a soft time limit, enforced by a slow-draining reputation bar. He was losing his hard-earned "Valued Contributor" status, one agonizing point at a time, simply because he was standing in his room, arguing.
He realized with a jolt that he wasn't talking to a person. He was arguing with an algorithm. And the algorithm had just started docking him for taking too long on his lunch break.
The decaying stat was the final straw. The fight went out of him with a rush, like air from a punctured tire. His anger, his denial, his bargaining—it all evaporated, leaving behind an empty feeling of despair. His shoulders slumped. The righteous energy that had fueled his rant was gone, replaced by the crushing weight of reality.
There was no escape. There was no loophole. There was no reassigning the quest. The System had roped him into fixing a problem he had accidentally started, and it was going to punish him until he complied.
A wave of despair, so potent it was almost a physical sensation, washed over him. He was a Level 7 who lived with his mother and whose primary marketable skill was knowing the optimal talent build for a dark fantasy riftwarden. How was he supposed to raise a town's [Community Approval] rating? He didn't even have a consistently positive approval rating with Pete Woody. He was being asked to perform social and political miracles, and he was a man whose greatest social achievement in the last five years was getting a free coffee because the cashier thought his anonymous internet trolling was cool.
He was in way over his head.
He slumped back into his gaming chair, the faux leather groaning in protest. He felt defeated. He felt resigned. He stared at the golden-bordered quest notification, no longer with anger, but with the weary acceptance of a man who has just been handed a life sentence.
It was his problem. And he had to solve it.
But he couldn't do it as he was. His current character build was insufficient for the task at hand. He needed new skills. He needed more power. He needed a plan.