Hearing the door open, Wayne got excited and quickly pulled off the headset to look, only to find it was Goldshire's marshal, Dughan: a middle-aged man with a stubbly face, blond hair sticking straight up, perpetually clad in his Stormwind armor while on duty, and utterly devoid of humor.
Dughan's brows were furrowed deep, like a man arriving to deliver a verdict: "What are you up to, boy?"
Wayne's face fell with disappointment. He pointed at the sign by the door. "Running a shop."
Dughan: "What is all this rubbish?! Your uncle entrusts you with his blacksmith shop and this is what you do with it? What are you hiding in here all day, sneaking around like that?"
Ever since the orcs, aided by demons, tore open the Dark Portal and invaded Azeroth, dark magic had begun spreading secretly among the various races. Official organizations, including Stormwind's own SI:7, were cracking down hard on orc infiltration through dark sorcery. As a result, warlocks practicing the dark arts tended to meet in private and train in locations difficult for outsiders to find.
The straight-laced Dughan was an old friend of the blacksmith Argus, and had watched Wayne grow up. He didn't genuinely believe that Wayne, who, in his eyes, had nothing going for him except brute strength, had the brains to secretly practice the dark arts that supposedly summoned demons.
But he was still the local marshal on the crown's payroll, more or less the head of the town's security force, and he never forgot his duty to uphold justice no matter where he was.
Facing this upright but slightly rigid elder, Wayne said flatly: "I'm seriously running a shop."
"What sorcery is this?!" Before he could finish, Dughan's gaze had already been yanked toward the monitor displaying the game.
"A dragon?! A DRAGON!!!"
Dughan shouted, drawing the two-handed hammer strapped to his back with his right hand and leveling it straight at the screen.
Wayne immediately threw his arms out to block him. This thing was his only shot at changing his fate, he absolutely could not let Dughan smash it.
"It's a screen! This is a game! That's not a real dragon!"
Dughan's face was full of confusion. He hadn't advanced further, but he hadn't put the hammer away either. "What do you mean, screen? I can clearly see a dragon attacking! How is that a game?!"
Wayne scrambled to think of how to explain it in terms he'd understand: "Think of it like a mage's crystal ball for divination, images appear inside the crystal ball, don't they? What's showing up on this screen is nothing more than an illusion, the same idea."
The next half hour was spent with Wayne explaining, in broad strokes, what a "game" was. Where he couldn't quite account for things, he glossed over them.
The power source, for instance, he said the goggles and screen had been infused with magical arcane energy by a powerful mage.
Where it came from, he said he'd made a delivery to Lakeshire recently and encountered an unfamiliar goblin traveling merchant on the road, and bought it from him at a low price.
Dughan wasn't entirely convinced, but having spent his whole life in this one town, he'd seen his share of low-ranking mages, and the high-ranking archmages who teleported between cities were a far rarer sight to him, let alone crystal ball divination, which he'd only ever heard about in rumors.
He had, however, once seen the image of a distant city appear through a mage's portal when it was opened. And traveling merchants did genuinely exist, right there in the region where Goldshire sat...
Dughan remained half-skeptical, but still uneasy. After all, his old friend had entrusted the boy's safety to his care, and he was a man with a deeply ingrained sense of responsibility. He decided he should test this so-called "Virtual Reality Enhanced Game" himself, whatever that mouthful meant.
Dughan: "Right. Put those goggles on me. I want to try it."
In the World of Warcraft, while the word "glasses" existed, most people preferred to call such things "goggles."
Wayne immediately grabbed the notice board from beside the window and pointed to Rule Two:
"Only members of the club may play. Annual membership fee: 5 gold coins. Game time: 1 gold coin per hour; any time under one hour is billed as a full hour."
Dughan: "I'll pay! Just put them on me!"
Wayne still said nothing, and pointed to Rule Three:
"Pay first, play after. All sales are final, no refunds under any circumstances."
Dughan: "You little, I swear I'll beat you on your uncle's behalf, don't think I won't!"
Wayne immediately pointed to Rule Four:
"Any conduct that prevents this establishment from operating normally will result in a permanent ban. Act accordingly."
And added: "A marshal of the crown can't go around making violent threats against a lawfully operating business, now can he."
Dughan had only been speaking in frustration, he had no real intention of hitting him. At this point he had no choice but to swallow his anger and mutter the phrase he used every day when dealing with all manner of strangers passing through:
"For the honor of the King..."
He thought it over. The things inside that "screen" looked utterly alive. If this really was some kind of dangerous forbidden magic, he'd better find out soon so he could report it to Stormwind's chief marshal, and deal with this kid afterward. It wouldn't be too late then.
As for the gold coins...
The frugal and upright Dughan was naturally reluctant to part with that much money. But before leaving, the blacksmith Argus had specifically handed him twelve gold coins he'd painstakingly saved, worried that his nephew Wayne, "missing a screw upstairs," might run the blacksmith shop into the ground and lose his livelihood.
So he had asked Dughan to keep an eye on things, and to give Wayne a bit of money every so often if circumstances changed, just to keep him afloat. If he himself ended up at the front lines and never came back, these coins and the blacksmith shop were to be considered his entire estate, left to the boy who had no one else in the world.
Giving Wayne six gold coins now was simply fulfilling Argus's wishes a little early, as far as Dughan was concerned.
"Here."
Dughan paid up, reluctantly.
Wayne took the six gleaming gold coins. This was the largest sum of money he had ever seen in his life!
He could hardly believe it, a small-town marshal, being this generous?
Could this be the legendary case of "small official, massive corruption"?!
Whatever. He'd been paid, one way or another. His first member had arrived.
Wayne first relieved Dughan of his hammer, setting it on a table out of arm's reach, then deftly fitted the VR headset onto him.
Dughan watched everything appearing inside the goggles with visible tension, while the images he was seeing played out on the monitor in front of Wayne.
Wayne understood his nerves. For someone from a world of swords and magic, this device was essentially alien technology from another star.
Wayne guided him through the basic controls. Dughan selected Monster Hunter G, VR Enhanced Edition, and in an instant, everything went dark before his eyes, then a waterfall scene appeared, followed by the word "Present."
In this world where humans spoke the Common tongue, English letters were incomprehensible to everyone except Wayne, who had crossed over. Dughan assumed they were some kind of special symbolic spell, he mentally noted what they looked like, while simultaneously not daring to stare at them directly, for fear of falling under something like a mind-control curse.
By now it was seven in the evening. The shops around town were closing one by one.
Wayne's blacksmith shop had also closed up. His old colleague Andorwind and the Steely siblings, seeing that Wayne's attention wasn't on the forge at all, left without saying goodbye.
The shop was shut, but that didn't mean Goldshire had fallen into the quiet of night. The Lion's Pride Inn was just beginning to come alive, with the clinking of travelers' cups...
Yet all of that seemed to exist in another world entirely, as far as Dughan was concerned.
Before him, immersive sound filled his ears, and scene after scene unfolded as if he had stepped bodily inside them.
First, a tavern packed with adventurers carrying all manner of weapons, drinking, playing flutes, tearing into meat. Then the scene shifted to a blacksmith's forge staffed by cat-people walking on two legs, forging swords of almost unimaginable size.
Finally, a great dragon descended from the sky and breathed a gout of flame straight at him. Dughan instinctively ducked and threw his hands up over his face, but when the fire dissipated, what appeared was a string of characters:
Monster Hunter
And on that string of characters was unmistakably the image of a dragon.
Dughan immediately tore off the VR headset, the half-helmet attached to it coming with it, because that fire the dragon had just breathed had distinctly given him a wave of heat.
But once the goggles were off, everything around him was exactly as it had always been. Sights, sounds, no different from any ordinary evening in Goldshire.
Now Dughan was beginning to believe this might actually be what Wayne called a "game." But as for what all these illusions were actually for, his curiosity well and truly hooked, he put the headset back on and pressed further.
Wayne wasn't surprised by any of this. What he had here was nothing like the VR experience games he had understood back in his old world, those things merely generated close-range images on the lens of a headset. The setup the transmigrated vending machine had produced was so realistic that even he, a "modern person," had been stunned the first time he played it.
The half-helmet attached to the goggles seemed to interface directly with the brain and nervous system. Not only did a person feel completely and totally present within the game's environment, but surrounding smells, temperature, the hardness or softness of the ground underfoot, all of it could be felt with perfect fidelity.
Put plainly: it was the equivalent of physically entering the game world yourself.
And the graphics were nothing like the chunky, blocky 3D of his old PS2, which looked like oversized pixels in retrospect. The world rendered before you, from a single tree to a single raindrop, was indistinguishable from reality.
If it weren't for the vending machine's quest forcing him to recruit ten members within a week, he'd honestly have been happy to just keep playing by himself forever.
He was feeling rather pleased watching the mixture of tension and excitement on Dughan's face, when Dughan suddenly spoke:
"Why can't I read any of this text? What language is this?"
Oh!
Wayne had a sudden realization.
The game's built-in languages were English and Japanese — naturally incomprehensible to anyone from Azeroth. He immediately activated the "Auto-Translate" function, and in an instant, all text and dialogue appearing before Dughan converted into the Common tongue he used every day.
Monster Hunter G was the second entry in the Monster Hunter series, refining many of the first game's flaws and adding new content, while laying the foundation for all subsequent titles.
The "VR Enhanced Edition" being played now skipped the character creation screen entirely, dropping the player directly into the game's starting area — Kokoto Village — in their own form.
For weapon selection, Dughan naturally wanted to use a greathammer in the game, just as he carried one in real life. But freshly "spawned" in the beginner village, he had no money to buy one, and had to make do with the starter equipment, a "Sword and Shield," meaning a one-handed sword paired with a shield.
Fortunately, this was the VR Enhanced Edition: he could freely choose which hand to hold the sword in, rather than being locked into the game's default left-hand sword, right-hand shield configuration.
Dughan sat in the chair, perfectly still — but on the monitor, Wayne could see him swinging the sword and shield in his hands.
Dughan's inner thoughts were quietly astonished: This is far too real. Not only do the people and objects around me feel like I could reach out and touch them, but even the weight of the weapon in my hand is completely authentic, and after swinging it, I can actually feel fatigue.
He spoke up: "What is this thing?"
Wayne answered: "That's your health bar, your life. When the bar runs out, you die."
Dughan asked sharply: "Die?"
Wayne: "Die in the game... you respawn, it's not real death."
For the next half hour, Wayne explained while Dughan simultaneously listened to the in-game tutorial — "The Village Chief's Guidance" — and by the end of it, Dughan had a reasonable grasp of what was going on.
The more he played, the more astonished Dughan became. Everything he was seeing looked too much like the world he actually lived in.
He pulled the headset off and looked around at his surroundings once more, then asked, still not fully convinced: "This really isn't sorcery?"
Wayne let out a cold laugh and pointed to himself: "If I could do sorcery this impressive, do you think I'd still be sitting in Goldshire minding a blacksmith shop?"
Dughan put the headset back on and began following the beginner quests, learning to hunt Aptonoth and Hornetaur.
Though he had never fought in a full-scale war, the thirty-eight-year-old Dughan was, in every sense, a rigorously trained soldier. Over twenty years of defending Goldshire as a patrol guard, he had fought all manner of creatures — beasts, murlocs, kobolds, gnolls.
On top of that, the standard Stormwind soldier loadout was a one-handed sword and shield, so the Sword and Shield in the game felt like no great adjustment.
If anything, the sensation of hunting monsters made him feel like he'd returned to his younger days in the army, when his chest was full of hot-blooded ambition.
The more he fought, the more skilled he became, and the deeper the hook sank. Soon he'd picked up the pivotal beginner quest: Hunt the Blue Garuga.
Garuga? Dughan thought, could this be the giant fire-breathing dragon from the opening cinematic?
His mind immediately conjured the image of that great dragon, and in the same breath, he thought of all the legends in his own world about the five-colored dragonflights.
Wayne, watching the expectant look on his face, couldn't help but smile inwardly.
He watched Dughan climb hills and crawl through caves, until at last, in a swampy stretch of the map, he found the Blue Yian Garuga.
"...This is just a Raptor."
Dughan looked a little deflated. What he called a "raptor" was a creature that lived in certain regions of Azeroth, not unlike the dinosaurs of another world entirely.
The Blue Yian Garuga before him was simply leaner and taller than the raptors he knew, with a vivid red crest jutting from the top of its head like a rooster's comb.
Dughan: "It's just a raptor. And they're calling this a Garuga?"
He said it, raised his blade, and charged.