Different Rules 1 / Pilot

Different Rules

Chapter (Pilot)

-VB-

I met the doctor's unflinching gaze.

"Oh."

What else was I supposed to say?

"Would you like me to give you time to process?" the doctor, who looked even more tired than I was, asked me.

I snorted. "No. I… can accept that I am going to die."

She raised an eyebrow. "Oh? That's unexpectedly mature of you."

I smirked. "Death comes slowly, an everlasting march, I face it with my head held high."

"Was that a short poem just then?" she chuckled.

"Yes. I had it prepared for a while."

She shook her head in amusement. "Well, I have to get going."

"Doctor Henson."

"Yes?"

"So… six months, yes?"

"Six months. Maybe a little more. Maybe a little less." She gave me a nod before she stood up and left me alone in the room.

I smiled at my three children in the room. Well, children would be demeaning when the youngest of them was forty and with five kids of her own.

"I guess it's time for me to go, then," I chuckled.

Tyler, my eldest and only son, bit down on his jaws, and his hands gripped his knees.

I snorted. Tyler never was one for pressure or grief. He went through the same cycle when Martha died three years ago.

It was part of why I was okay with it. My body was not what it once was, and the mind followed in the steps of my body.

It was painful, Stage 4 Lung Cancer, but I was alright. Better a brief painful each than a prolonged decay filled with incontinence, dementia, muscle atrophy, failing organs, and so much more. It afforded a measure of dignity.

I smiled at my kids. "If you want to bring your kids over, then that's just as well. I don't think I'll be leaving this hospital bed any time soon.”

Tyler lost the strength in his shoulders and they drooped weakly. “Okay. Yeah. Jeanne and Michael will love to see you again.” He stood up and left, and I saw Danielle, the girl I initially didn’t want Tyler to see, coming to help him. She glanced at me, and I smiled at her.

She smiled softly and sadly before helping my boy to their car.

I turned to my two other children. “Go on, then. This old man isn’t kek’ing it,” I urged them.

Erica sniffled. She always was the emotional one, so prone to crying. I never understood ow the hell she met a man who was more stoic than a rock.

As my children left, I found myself alone in the room and finally felt my age and reality catch up to me. My eyes felt like they sagged and … I was tired.

Maybe I have been wanting this. Didn’t want to be here when Martha passed on to join God.

… I probably won’t join her, though. Did too much shit in life. Still was before I got hospitalized after collapsing out of nowhere.

“Really should have listened to my little brother,” I grumbled. John nagged at me to get up on my feet and exercise, eat good food, and don’t eat so much junk food. “Honestly thought I was going to get diabetes before I was going to get cancer.”

---

“Grandpa!”

My eyes snapped open, and I looked down.

“Oh. Michael. Jeanne. When did you two get here?”

Their eyes were puffy and teary, and despite being teenagers, they weren’t letting the “cool thing” sway them.

I grinned. “So whatcha two been doin’, mon?”

Michael groaned and chuckled at the same time at my Warcraft Troll accent. Tyler had hated it when I did it to them when his babies were around, but it was something all of my grandkids associated me with. The “grandpa who speaks funny” archetype, you know?

So Michael and Jeanne told me what they did… and what Michael said caught me off by surprise.

“Yggdrasil?” I asked. “Like the Norse mythology world tree?”

“Uh huh, but the developers really liked this Japanimation from when you were watching stuff-”

“Overlord.”

He blinked. “Uh. Yeah. How’d you know?”

“I was into that before it became cool.”

“Cool. Anyway, they decided to make a game based on it!”

I snorted.

There’s been a lot of that, and while a few were of great quality, most were horrible.

“How bad is it?”

“It’s great, actually! Everyone plays it with me!”

“By everyone…?”

“David, Matthew, Jeanne, me, Evelyn, Sarah, Michelle, Eric, Arnold, Benny, and Trevor.”

I frowned. “So all of my grandkids have been playing a fun game, and y’all left your grandpa out? Shame on you.” Then I grinned. “How do I get started?”

“Dad!” Tyler frowned.

I dismissed him with a wave of my hand.

“I’m a dying old man. Why not spend some time with the kids, huh? It’s not like I have a wife to nag me.”

He sighed before he helped me set up the system in the hospital room. The hospital I stayed at was accomodating like that, especially since I was more or less going to be a long-term care patient.

-VB-

Yggdrasil remained more original than faithful, and I rather liked it that way.

The core idea of the YGGDRASIL game mentioned in Maruyama’s Overlord - where there were near limitless combination of races, skills, spells, classes, and more - remained, but the storylines and plots of the game was drawn from all corners of humanity’s cultures and civilizations.

They even took the time to add Sub-Saharan African mythology into one of the zones! Kudos to the developers!

“Grandpa.”

“Hmm?” I hummed as I turned around in this VR digital world to look at Jeanne’s avatar. Jeanne was … not well endowed, which was something she absolutely loathed. Apparently, she took it as a challenge and designed herself an avatar that was “juicy.” Unfortunately, all of that femine lost its appeal to me the moment I recognized her Jeanne, my sweet little granddaughter who used to coo at my shadow puppet shows.

She also decided that outrageously neon purple was the best color for her hair.

She also took to wearing heavy plate armors because her class was “Knight.”

“Why are you a heteromorph?” she asked me while looking down at me.

I blinked. “Why not?” I asked her as I flexed my four arms. Unfortunately, the heteromorph race I chose, Sura, was a peculiar special characteristic to it where the overall level determined the outward age of the character. Because I was just starting out, I was a LvL 1.

This also made me comparable to a six year old.

Good news was that I could change between humanoid and monster form once I hit level 10.

This race was also very unpopular because it had the “child” debuff until they hit level 10; a 75% reduction on all stat will do that to a race’s popularity.

“And that race?”

“I thought it was cute like you.”

She groaned but picked me up, despite my protests. “I’m sending you a guild invite. Accept it. Or else.”

I blinked and saw an alert pop up on my screen. I touched it and there was a letter opening to show me an invite to join my granddaughter’s guild.

“Are all of you in the same guild?” I asked.

She nodded. “Except for Arnold.”

“Arnold always did things by himself much like his grandpa,” I hummed as I accepted the invite.

---

“STOP, GRANDPA!” Trevor, the most responsible of my grandkids, shouted after me as I jumped headlong into a horde of LvL 1 mobs.

“LEEROY JENKINS!”

I cackled as Trevor, a LvL 100 Angel, was forced to keep me safe. Because I engaged the fight, half of the experience from these kills came to me.

“Thanks, kiddo. Let’s do that again.”

Trevor just started to chide me, and I pulled my best “I’m an old man, I don’t know what this youngster is saying” before jumping into the next pack of mobs, this group being LvL 3 on average.

Trevor’s shrieks and regret was delicious.

---

I hit LvL 10 within an hour of abusing Trevor’s good grace, and had to choose my “subrace.”

The race of Sura was actually a term/category rather than a race in and of itself like Angel, Zombie, or Frogman. It covered eight subraces that were linked to each other by mythology, and whose lineages were named after their first kings: Ananta (snake-like), Asura (insectoid), Gandharva (sea creature), Garuda (bird), Kinnara (hooved mammals), Vritra (dragon), Yaksha (mammals without hooves), and Taraka (unspecific/mutants). Each of them had their specialties: max development, defense, adaptability and dexterity, aerial and area of effect combat, speed and max health, burst damage, brusier-style healing and dps, and debuffs.

I chose Vritra.

Aside from the fact that being a dragon was awesome even in my age, it also had to do with how each of these subraces worked. Ananta required a ridiculous amount of time to grow to their full potential. So much so that only one Ananta Sura player in all of Yggdrasil had hit that point out of millions of people who played the game. Asura and Garuda were weak to fire, one of the most common type of elemental spells in-game. Gandharva was weak out of water. Taraka was a subrace that actively took control of your character and tried to do heinous shit. Kinnara could not gain EXP through fighting, only by eating vegetables. Yaksha was the exact opposite of that, where they could only gain EXP by fighting and killing.

Vritra, on the other hand, only had slow growth to concern themselves with.

This, however, wasn’t a problem for me because I was going to be spending a lot of my time playing!

Dragon, it was! This got me two subclasses, actually: Vritra and Mara. Mara was apparently less of a class and more of a Sura’s rank in the Sura hierarchy with Mara being at the bottom. It went Mara, Upani, Rashasa, and Nastika, and every five levels in the rank increased the rank to the next stage. This was what unlocked Vritra subrace’s actual abilities.

It was complicated.

---

I also started streaming.

Call it nostalgia, but streaming was something people started when I was still a teenager.

I called myself [Dying Old Man Plays Yggdrasil] and streamed on Twitch, still the most widely used and respected streaming site (respect they gained after the latest majority shareholder got down to the brass tacks and reformed the entire business from the inside).

Viewers were nice.

I spent a lot of time playing with my grandkids, and I became a little celebrity for being known as “the oldest active player on Yggdrasil.”

I welcomed my first 10 viewers with defeating my first dungeon and getting my first job class, Warrior. It was the basic bitch, but by God, it was my basic bitch.

I danced to the tunes of the 50th viewer’s electro swing recommendation.

I celebrated my first month in Yggdrasil with my 100 viewers and grandkids.

I had on-stream argument with Trevor, an absolute meta-player, about optimization and why I shouldn’t pick Wizard as my second job class after I picked Warrior. I still ended up picking up the Wizard class.

And then into my second month, one of the viewers decided to declare a guild war on us!

Even though I was only a LvL 44 Sura, I joined in on the fun and died absolutely a fuck ton. I went from 44 to 40 over the course of a week of PvP, but my grandkids carried me all the way to victory.

---

The first time that my viewers and my family really understood how serious my condition was and how short my time with all of them were was when I spat out blood in my third month just as I cheered for reaching LvL 70.

It was the first time that I had a physical illness show itself beyond the exhaustion.

After that, my kids and grandkids spent more time.

I actually had to scold Michael for playing the game with me, going so far as to skip school.

---

Four months into the game, I finally reached LvL 100.

Yggdrasil’s dev team actually reached out and gave me a title. It was a joke and an honor at the same time, because they crowned me as “the Elder of Yggdrasil.”

I laughed at the title and went along with it.

Oh, and my grandkids got in on the fun and gave me a brand new position in the guild.

[Grandpa].

Har har har, laugh it up, kids.

---

“Six months was too optimistic, apparently,” I chuckled, but my words came out a little muffled because of the oxygen mask.

I was on death’s door.

I already gave Trevor my Twitch account information, so when it came time for the news to be spread, he would do it in my stead.

Surrounded by my children and my grandchildren, I laid in bed.

I gave them all my one last smile as my heavy eyelids drifted close.

-VB-

And then my eyes snapped open and got greeted by a dirty alley.

I took a deep breath in and let it out.

“Okay. I can breath. How?” I muttered to myself as I looked down at myself. These clothes weren’t mine.

Confused as hell as to what was happening to me (because I should be dead and in hell), I stepped out of the alley and looked around in this rustic old city.

This city was like … a seaside version of Detroit. Maybe a little bit better off.

I noticed a skyscraper in the distance, and the black and yellow crown logo it held.

I had no idea what it was.

“What was I do-?”

And then I remembered.

“Oh crap. I was supposed to get food for Taylor and Annette.”

Even as my legs took off with strength I didn’t remember having for decades and my lungs huffed and puffed with elasticity I relished in, my still confused yet alert self stuttered out a question.

What the fuck was going on?

Because I/Alan/Danny was very confused about this situation.

-VB-

Alan Marris/Danny Hebert
Title: The Elder of Yggdrasil
Guild: Clan Marris
Guild Position: Grandpa

Level 100

*Sura 15
**Vritra 15
**Nastika 15
*Warrior 15
*Cleric 10
*Wizard 15
**Siege Wizard 10
***Castle Breaker 5

Tags: Overlord(Maruyama), Worm, Reincarnated, Early Canon Start, self-insert