Spending My Retirement In A Game

Nataly Klein. There were few people anywhere in the world that didn’t know this name. It belonged to the most famous actress, singer/songwriter, musician and artist in the world at the time.

At a young age, she was found to be a prodigy in a multitude of creative fields, her personal focus always being on music or painting. There weren’t many instruments that she didn’t play wonderfully, but she was most notably talented with string instruments such as the guitar or the bass.

Seeing her immense talented, her parents did everything they could to support her, letting her take private lessons in whatever field she wanted. Soon, she landed a few minor roles as a child actress and rushed up the ladder of starhood so quickly that if there was a movie starring Nataly Klein, it was bound to be a success.

But not only as an actress was she successful at a young age, but also as a musician, making her debut at the young age of 15. She never stuck to a single genre for long, but when she was in a certain scene, she was always an immediate hit.

Many would think that she earned more than enough money to live off of for the rest of her life before even turning 16, and she certainly did, but she nonetheless wanted to follow her passion, and as such chose to dive into painting and Art History, studying this course at college after finishing high-school early. So that she wouldn’t stick out amongst the crowd, she was allowed to simply hand in assignments online and not attend classes, and while she was working diligently in college, she chose to start anew financially as well.

She had her bank accounts locked for the duration of her attending college, and started to make money by selling different artwork online in order to pay for her tuition.

Before she even earned her degree, Prime Industries approached her to have her help with the creation of a game at a level that has never been seen before. Since she did like to play videogames every once in a while, she asked to hear more about it and then ended up accepting, instructing Prime Industries on how different areas of artistry should be handled inside such a complex game.

Now, at the age of 20, she began playing this game a month before release as the ’Original of Artistry’, not changing much about her outer appearance and even her accent was fully exposed to the others that played. Usually, she tried to hide it to an amount because she was embarrassed to have such an incredibly cliché southern accent, but she thought it would be a good chance to get over that while talking to people that didn’t seem to react in any way when seeing her. Either they didn’t care who she was, or they didn’t know, either way Nataly, now known as Evalia, felt comfortable around this small group of people.

When she started playing the game, she found herself in a small human town that was more than heavily focused around any kinds of arts, but before really doing anything, she met an elderly woman that near to immediately discovered that Evalia’s experience was stolen.

She helped Evalia out and made it so that she regained her human racial skill, as well as the title ’Original of Artistry’. For the next one and a half in-game months, she then did a few different things.

First, she learned a few art-related skills, such as sculpting, drawing and singing, as well as some skills related to instruments that ended up one after another combining into skills such as ’String-Instrument Proficiency’, ’Brass-Instrument Proficiency’ or ’Woodwind-Instrument Proficiency’.

In response to her skillful display of what she could do, she gained the occupation ’Heavenly Artist’. There wasn’t anything actually ’Heavenly’ or ’Divine’ about it, it was simply something like a scaling system for artistic occupations.

Once she gained this occupation, she started travelling around nearby towns as a bard, raising her level through doing quests or fighting against monsters, and most importantly raising her Charisma stat, which she managed to push to the 60-range already.

Now, she was currently residing at a large, luxurious Inn in Ornier, the capital of the country she started playing in, Litgern. She managed to earn quite a lot of money already through selling artwork off the street and through donations after simple musical performances, so she had no problem with paying for this Inn.

She was lying on her bed with a scrappy guitar that she bought from a random merchant, trying to play a few songs, but it was working out far worse than she had hoped.

"This guitar is just horrible! The strings are way too stretched out! Why ain’t there any proper instruments in this town?" she yelled out and jumped up from the bed, laying the guitar down behind her.

"Maybe I should visit some shop to have myself some custom ones made." Evalia sighed loudly, grabbing her small backpack and strapping her guitar over her shoulder.

She left her room and locked the door behind herself, stepping down the stairs into the lobby that was already quite busy, despite the early time.

"Good morning, Miss Evalia. Did you have a nice rest?" The young concierge asked her with a smile as he opened the door for her, and she replied with a simple smile.

"Yes I did, thank you very much. Could ya tell me the way to the next art supply store?" Evalia asked before the concierge nodded.

"Of course, Miss Evalia. Simply follow the main street for a few minutes until you get to see a clothing store called ’Mister and Mistress’, and then turn right. It should be on your left side if you keep walking for a few more minutes." He explained, and Evalia listened closely.

"Gotcha! Thanks for that, bud!" She said and waved at the concierge while making her way along the route that was described to her. Immediately, she was greeted by a few people in town, mostly young men, that have seen some of her performances before.

With a soft smile, she waved her hand at them and continued walking. It’s actually been a while that she’s been able to freely move around like this, and even though there were still people that knew her inside this game, it was only to the extent of recognizing someone from your neighborhood and greeting them, instead of hordes of fans running up to you and trying to get pictures and autographs. This was a nice feeling! Although it might change again once the regular playerbase was allowed to join the game.

There already were a few of those ’Omegas’ in town now, and some of them apparently recognized her, but luckily they just stayed away.

Soon enough, Evalia entered the art supply store that she could easily find through the concierge’s instructions and took a look around. She grabbed a few canvases of different sizes and walked up to the counter and quickly bought them, tying all of the canvases together so that she could carry them more easily.

"Do you need an Easel as well?" the employee asked, seeing that it seemed like Evalia was carrying basically all of her belongings with her, and that she didn’t have one such important artistic tool when it came to painting on canvas.

But Evalia shook her head and waved at the employee as she was leaving. "No thank you, I’m fine!" She chuckled as she left the shop and made her way toward the closest town gate, where she would try and find a good spot to paint for a while.

She already checked out the surrounding areas, and the view from that gate was truly beautiful! You could see the giant mountain ranges that shot through the clouds in the distance that seemed like enormous walls, and the forests and rivers below. It was really a perfect scenery to paint.

So, Evalia walked through the large stone gate and looked around to find a nice out-of-the-way spot to start painting. She heard a few of the guards arguing about something, so she thought she would try and listen in to see if there was some kind of quest possibility, but it seemed like they were just arguing about some bees that some old man was carrying with them while entering the town. One of them was saying they shouldn’t have let him in, while the other said that they were tamed beasts, so it was alright.

Evalia figured that it was just some random conversation, and she wasn’t really interested, so she just moved on to finding a nice spot. And it didn’t take too long until she found a nice hill with a good view of everything, that at the same time looked to be somewhat away from the road so that not many people would come and bother her.

She stepped up the Hill and smiled, extending her hand forward as she slowly released mana from her hand as it turned into the shape of an Easel. With a smile, Evalia placed one of the canvases onto the mana easel, before grabbing some of her brushes and placing them into her breast pocket, before pushing out more mana out of her hand that suddenly turned from pure white to a dark grey, while it also seemed to turn into something like a liquid.

Evalia began humming as she dipped one of the first brushes into the liquid above her finger, before slowly moving it over the white canvas.

What Evalia was using right now was her Magic Element, ’Colors of Beauty’. It was really quite useful, since art supplies like paint were some of the most expensive things that one needed as an artist, so having something like this to use instead was definitely perfect, and helped Evalia save a lot of money. Or rather, it saved a lot of trips to art supply stores.

When used on paintings, it would usually give it some kind of effect, for example accelerating mana or health recovery speed, to a person that looked at the painting for a prolonged period of time.

But you couldn’t only use it for regular paintings, as it could also be used as camoflage. Evalia could basically copy what a rock wall looked like, and then apply a layer of her magic element onto herself to make her harder to spot. It only worked when she was holding still, and it needed a certain amount of preparation, but it definitely worked quite well.

This, combined with her momentarily charming and controlling monsters to attack other monsters, she was able to level up relatively easily once she earned this element.

After a while, Evalia was finally finished with her painting of the scenery in front of her, and as she was quite happy with it, she grabbed it once it fully dried, carrying it with her back to town. Another good thing about using her magic element to paint was that it was easily removed from her paint brushes, and didn’t need to be washed out. It was easy to do that in this game anyway, but it was still far quicker to be able to simply ’will’ the color away.

So, after she went back into town, she decided to bring the painting to the marketplace to see if anyone wanted to buy it so that Evalia could make a little bit more money, because it could never hurt to have even more. She already knew a few people from here that bought some paintings of her before, and she knew that they would definitely pay a good price. But there was one thing that took her attention, a large crowd centered around a single person selling items.

"Come one, come all! Buy one of these items, and you will never regret it! We have potions, purses, weapons, and a multitude of Mana Crystals enchanted with whatever you may need!"