Myriad Railroads - Preview

Railroads Online... It's this game made by Avion Entertainment, an online game that tries to support as much for player experience as it can.

Customization, social elements, player vs enemy and player vs player matches, you name it, Railroads probably has it.

We'd travel around the world with the trains that were in the game, made to put people from place to place in real time. It took time, but it was definitely faster than walking there with the chance of random encounters.

Avion Entertainment certainly had a way with dealing with the space of the game. Nobody really wondered why, the future's now, right?

Well, when we found out, we didn't even have enough time to be shocked.

"See you tomorrow, Trip!" A girl shouted, walking away from her friend, a short African-American boy with short hair. "Okay, bye!" He responds, picking up his pace now that he was alone. He had a very excited expression on his face, and couldn't wait to get home.

The reason he was in such a rush was because he finally wanted to get to try out Railroads Online, an online game he had signed up for the previous night, but had to come off the computer as he was about to start playing the game. The sooner he got home the better, he thought, then he'd be able to play the game.

Username: Tripshock99

Name: Travis "Trip" Austin

D.O.B: October 20th 1999

P.O.B: Annapolis, U.S.A 

"Railroads, here I come!" Travis shouted, exhibiting all of his energy in his voice alone.

Trip stepped in his his home, not paying enough attention to anything else, his house had a different ambient, and there was no one but him in the house.

Trip set his laptop onto the carpet of his bedroom, sitting down and making sure to log in quickly. A short jingle played as the logo of his operating system displayed onto the screen before asking for a short password. Trip entered the password - it was quick and obvious to him, after all, it was his.

His cursor went to the small icon on his desktop "RRO.exe", it was the program that had installed the previous night. Trip smiled to himself, his inner excitement beginning to show as he finally opened the brightly colored launcher, that sported a blue sky with lush green grass, and train tracks in all directions.

Everything was relatively simple - I make my account and my avatar. My avatar was plain and simple, it wore a blue shirt, yellow wristbands and some sweatpants. I made the hair a mix beween black and yellow and threw on some red sneakers for some good measure - if I got ingame money I could have bought other stuff... But then it all started to happen.

As Trip entered his avatar into the in-game world, a dialog came up:

"Wherever there is something in the universe, something else will always be wasted because of it."

Trip furrowed his brow, "That's weird." he spoke quietly, trying to close the dialog. Thankfully it closed, but then showed up again along with another message underneath.

"Wherever there is something in the universe, something else will always be wasted because of it.

- - -

Unless there is a great or infinite number of such things, no?"

The dialog box had no cross to click, but rather the bottom of the window provided "YES" or "NO", Trip just clicked YES, at this point, he figured the plot was just kicking in.

More dialogs would come up at once, each displaying its own different word. "MULTITUDE" "MASS" "CROWD" "HORDE" "LEGION" "MANY" "UNNUMBERED" "LIMITLESS" "INNUMERABLE" "COUNTLESS". Eventually they'd cover up the screen and everything would lock up...

"RRO.exe has stopped responding

Windows is searching for a solution to the problem..."

The window appeared for very few seconds before closing itself and taking the game with it. Trip was left on his desktop in silence... What was that all about? Is that normal? He had so many questions, but even more were raised when he found a program on his desktop that wasn't there before. No icon, no proper program name - just the original executable name.

"myriad.exe"

Trip gulped to himself, and went to open it. Was this some crazy virus? It couldn't have been. Trip's anti-virus would have been on that straight away if it were the case. But, it wasn't...

With a mighty click on his trackpad, the program started to open. It looked like a command prompt, and it typed by itself, in the same words that had appeared in the "game".

>MULTITUDE 

>MASS

>CROWD

>HORDE

>LEGION

>MANY

>UNNUMBERED

>LIMITLESS

>INNUMERABLE

>COUNTLESS 

It would then leave the typing to Trip. From the looks of it, he couldn't back out anymore. He couldn't click the cross in the corner of the program and ending the task in his command prompt would fail to do anything.

With tightly closed lips, he finally typed in the word that was on the top of his head the entire time.

">MYRIAD", it read. Trip finally hit enter, and the moment he did, all of the technology in his room started to flicker, make noise and strangest of all, spout electricity.

Trip ducked for cover, but that wouldn't stop him from what was about to happen, it seemed that something had enveloped the whole room, a countless amount of bright yellow cubes that looked almost virtual. They would grow brighter and brighter until there was but a bright white light in the room, Trip was confused - Trip was terrified, they dimmed and flashed one more time...

...and then Trip had completely disappeared.

Opening