Jin stared at Francis as the man emerged from the Outlast Illusion Room with a pallid and constipated look on his face.
"That should be the last of the minor fixes," the older inner disciple muttered and warily backed away from the artefact he'd just been working on as if he were afraid it would bite him.
"So the sound synchronisation is fixed?" Jin asked curiously. There had been a variety of very minor issues present in his Outlast scenario that he hadn't known to look for until Francis joined the team and started pointing them out one by one.
The very first suggestion by the man had been an overall adjustment of the colour saturation and light. Jin had watched the scenario through the light lens the man suggested, had noticed a 1% improvement in the visuals and promptly accepted the critique.
Francis had then gone on to fiddle away at all of the sensory inputs, adding his own rich experience to the already pretty good product. In a way one couldn't add to a scenario what one didn't know, so while Jin had primarily copied the visuals and movement dynamics from the original game, it wasn't like he had lived an interesting and long enough life to know what smells to add where, and which skin sensations could be added to disconcert the experiencer ever more.
This was where Francis shined through; self-proclaimedly not a big picture thinker, he was nonetheless a master of the details.
He'd experimented with all sorts of sensory inputs which could heighten immersion and had masterfully helped Jin apply this to the scenario.
The visuals hadn't needed that much improvement, but when an audio was designed to be perceived through a pair of headphones instead of reality, there was missed context.
There were now way more realistic context audials in the scenario. The walls crumbled when you touched them, the little pieces of plaster plinking onto the floor. The inmates of the asylum dragged their feet, shambled, slurped at their saliva and groaned wretchedly, not a single one repeating any instance of audio.
But the visuals and audio had already been quite good in the original. What Francis improved the most were the senses that Jin didn't have much experience in.
Every room in the asylum now had a distinct smell. Sometimes it would smell like disinfectant, if one was in the surgery room. Sometimes it would smell like shit, sweat, rotting flesh, fresh blood, or even ejaculate in one of the rooms.
Suffice to say that Outlast, for all that nobody had probably asked for it, was now a very olfactory experience. The scene where the experiencer was threatened with genital mutilation now bore a hint of lavender from a perfume alongside the rust of the instruments. Also, well, there was the puss and the rotting flesh, but those smells were somewhat ever-present.
But it was in the bodily sensations that Francis's additions really shone. Jin hadn't experienced that much pain in his life and hadn't done a full deep dive in the information archives on the sect before Elder Flower had whisked him away.
One had to sort of experience a type of pain if one wanted to insert it into the scenario. Now, it didn't matter as much if one really experienced the pain, although some would argue that it did, or if one took the data of how the thing felt from one of the jade slips in the library. But, Jin hadn't done either and had thus not known how it felt like to fall down a floor and have one's finger cut off.
Well, suffice to say, with Francis's help, whoever wanted to experience the wonderful feeling of mutilation, fatigue, scrapes, broken bones, they now could in this wonderful immersive experience!
"Hashimi, you want to play-test it again, see if there's anything we're missing?" Jin asked the girl who was looking at a wide-spread of large papers with architecture designs drawn on them on the floor of his apartment.
The dark-haired girl turned to throw him a disgusted look. "No thanks, you fucking sicko," she said harshly.
Jin might have forgotten to mention all of the unpleasant aspects that she would encounter when she'd first entered the Illusion Room, leading to a somewhat traumatising experience as she checked over the architecture and the visuals of the horror story.
"Then I'd say this one is one," Jin announced happily with a clap of his hands. "One out of three!" he turned to his team. "Which one do we go with next? Dragonslayer Ornstein or The Last of Us?"
Francis looked a bit pale and shared a worried look with Hashimi. "Anything special you want to share about Dragonslayer Ornstein before we dive in?" he asked. "I think it would be beneficial to wait with the zombie one, so we get more of a chronological distance to its contents. We just saw it a few days ago."
"I mean," Jin muttered, rubbing his chin. "There's music, and the guy beats you up pretty well, but I think that's it."
"Are you sure?" Francis prodded. "No genital mutilations, finger-cutting, people with no mouths, people with no foreheads, crazy people, people hanging from the ceiling by their own entrails, stuff like that?" he asked.
Jin crossed his arms. "Do I look like a psychopath to you? Of course not; it's just a guy that beats you up pretty badly if you let him."
Francis breathed an audible sigh of relief. "Alright, if it's just that I think I can handle starting today," he said.
The younger of the two nodded and went to get the Dragonslayer Ornstein Illusion Room. He plopped it onto the table that the two of them had been working on.
Francis stroked his beard and threw a dubious glance to the similarly apprehensive Hashimi. The sunlight coming through the window cast their faces in an even worse pallor through the contrast.
"Ladies first?" he asked slowly, at which the lady in question rapidly shook her head.
"I respect the elderly," she said quickly.
"Being an Illusion Room cultivator is definitely not the easy path people imagine," Francis said, and with a sigh, he placed a hand on the Illusion Room and dived in.
-/-
General Shroud stood in full regalia in front of what used to be the army encampment at the bottom of the Illusion Room sect's mountain.
Now it was just barren ground, free of vegetation with only a few rough patches of grass left where the tents had not been staked and the soldiers hadn't walked too much during their stay.
Before him, spanning relatively far back into the distance, was his army of 30.000 men.
They were divided with military disciples in 30 rows of a thousand, a cultivator sergeant standing at the front with their mortal vice-sergeants gathered behind them.
The air carried a tone of solemnity, and it was obvious from the body language of those present that everybody was going through their own performance psychology rituals.
One could read it from the body because the faces were not visible.
The new armour had been delivered recently, specifically fit to not show a single millimetre of free skin.
The material costs had been immense, and the treasurers and the minister of finance of the empire had balked. But, losing mortals to the infection would undoubtedly end in more financial disaster than the equipment cost, especially if the infection somehow spread.
The labs were saying that a cure was slowly being synthesised, but one could never truly rely on the promises of researchers, considering how difficult it was to estimate progress. Shroud knew very well that a group of researchers could solve 90% of a problem in a week and then be stuck on the last 10% for a year.
But regardless, now was not the time to be thinking about that. He looked to the side, without tilting his head, and drew comfort from his assistant and the highest staff present at his side. There were also the Illusion Room cultivators who would be joining them in this fight. Flower and two more Elders he wasn't familiar with, having left the sect before he would have started interacting with them. Only Flower, with whom he'd been an inner disciple and who had blazed her way to the second-highest rank in the sect.
He turned to his troops. He didn't like speeches, and he didn't think he was that good at them, to be honest. He wasn't the sort of general that usually relied on morale, but rather meticulous training, tactics and preparation.
But well, in times like these, a speech was necessary.
He pooled some qi in his throat to strengthen his voice. "Men!" he shouted. "The forces of darkness once again encroach on the territories of humanity. Nothing but our own bodies and will shall once again stand between the demons, their pawns, and our wives and children. The zombie hoard approaching the border is said to be immense, but our strength of will is insurmountable, our bodies strong, and our senses sharp. The fighting will be brutal, but I don't have a single doubt that we will emerge victorious. Every zombie you slay will be one child you will have protected, and every one of your comrades you protect will be a village saved. This is an opportunity to manifest our convictions and steel our spirits." He slammed his fist on his chest and almost wanted to sigh at the somewhat inflamed looks in his soldier's eyes.
He knew generals who could set an army ablaze with a simple speech, but despite his attempts, those weren't levels he could reach.
Just as he was about to use the Imperial banner flapping behind him to create the portal which would take his army to the border, one of the soldiers in the backline shouted.
"For Ellie!" was the scream. Shroud was just about to frown when another shout followed.
"For Ellie!" "For Ellie!" "For Ellie!" "For Ellie!" Slowly but surely, the entirety of the army camp picked up the shout and began screaming in perfect synchronicity.
Shroud looked on. These were all men, most of them already fathers. They weren't really screaming for Ellie, a fake person in an Illusion scenario, but rather for what Ellie represented. Their own children, their own families.
The earth shook from the shouts to the beat of the odd name inner disciple Jin had given the girl leading the narrative in his creation.
"For Ellie!" "For Ellie!" "For Ellie!" "For Ellie!"
Shroud could see that the cultivators in the front of the columns were somewhat confused. Ellie's scenario had been meant for the mortal troops, so they hadn't gone through it.
"For Ellie!" "For Ellie!" "For Ellie!" "For Ellie!"
He slammed his fist on his chest and joined the chant.
"For Ellie!"
He could see from the corner of his eye an amused smirk alighted on Flower's face, one that she carefully hid behind her left hand, her right resting on the pommel of her sword.
"For Ellie!" "For Ellie!" "For Ellie!" "For Ellie!"
Shroud grasped the banner and swept it out around himself. A large circular black portal opened, showing on the other side a large grey wall as high as any mountain.
There was nothing more that needed to be said. Shroud turned around and walked through the portal with his staff and the Illusion Room cultivators. The sergeants and then the rank and file marched behind them, still screaming their hearts out.
"Morale, huh," Shroud muttered to himself as he emerged on the other side, thousands of miles away at the border between humanity and darkness. He looked up to see cultivators flitting around in the sky, preparing defences, large runic circles alighting on top of the defensive wall. A cacophony of noises, those created by qi and those by people.
His soldiers joined him one rank after another, adding their own voice to the avalanche.
"The first step to fighting well is knowing what you fight for. In war, the morale is to the physical three to one."
-/-
AN: Yes, I based my choice of Last of Us on the moral aspect as well as on the fact that, canonically, more emotional immersion increases the results of combat training in Rooms. But rejoice, the arc is over. Soon, there will be another game, another folly. Read on to continue….
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