“Actually,” 3V says, drumming her glowing fingers on her knee for a moment, “I’m also interested, personally, in a question I’ve been mulling over all day. It ties in to what you suggested just now. What is the [i]value[/i] of climbing a mountain?”

She picks up a strawberry. If she’d bothered, it could have been an incredible experience, her fingers giving her feedback on every ridge and seed, unconscious thought turning every impulse in her arms into a blurred jab of a finger. But if the haptic feedback is too overtuned, it gets distracting; she doesn’t need to know what the pockets of her coat feel like, the shape of bits of fluff, as intimately as she knows her face. That’s always the way of it, isn’t it? The features get slapped on there so that you’ll feel they’re worth buying, better than yours, when really she just needed the split-second APM and perfect keyboard control so that she could focus on all the parts of winning [i]Mythos[/i] that weren’t dependent on her reflexes: fleeting alliances, which realms to tackle in which order, anticipating everyone else’s builds and disrupting the blessing meta. So it’s just a strawberry. Sticky. Wet.

“I have climbed a [i]lot[/i] of mountains. Well, mostly the same mountain, repeatedly. The Weirding Wall keeps contracting over the course of a match, and it’s usually Olympus at the center where the last champions end up. I have clambered up that mountain dodging lightning bolts and [i]astra[/i] and the final minion waves enough times that if I close my eyes, I can see it, more real than real. I have been to the very top at the end, and seen the blue fires licking at its base; I’ve been to the very top at the beginning, even if it meant I was throwing, and seen Elysium and Eden and Tir na nOg and Mictlan stretching out in every direction, Aaru and Yomi and Valhalla. [i]Mythos[/i] swept the last VGAs for design and Graphical Experience. And if [i]Mythos[/i] is too high stress, there’s always [i]Wanderhearth[/i] for just climbing and enjoying the company of characters and listening to the birdsong on the wind, or [i]Hyperborea Online[/i] if you want to play dress-up while climbing a mountain and then probably swordfight and kiss a princess up there.”

She pops the strawberry in her mouth. It does not burst and pop in flavor. It squishes. “There’s no emergent loop in climbing a mountain except for the one where you alternate which leg you’re moving, and you can do that without thinking about it. You have to be lucky for anything interesting to happen, and there’s no achievement or easter egg up at the top. Well. I mean. Other than getting to see [i]Howl,[/i] I suppose. So why’s it worth doing, when I could do that and have an experience someone carefully curated for me, optimized so that I would have a good time?”

She looks Ferris in the eye, signaling: here it is, even if you didn’t get any of that, here’s what I’m building to. “And if I’m not sure what the value is in this big hunk of rock, how am I supposed to convince anyone in Aevum to log off and come out here?” Don’t worry, she hasn’t forgotten, she’s got her own theory formulating, but she wants Ferris’s thoughts.