Two Dopamine Addicts
Two Dopamine Addicts?
What the hell is that supposed to mean?
I checked the other chat rooms too, and messages had come in not only from the public chat but from Home Protector and T-balnom as well. I only looked at the most recent ones from each.
Even T-balnom was messaging me first?
What happened while I wasn't looking at the chat?
I figured I needed the public chat to make sense of the context behind those two messages, so I left theirs alone and went for the public room first.
"Meursault, I'm going to take a short break."
"What? No— I've only just finished explaining that the operational core is high-efficiency; a break is—"
Leaving Meursault, who was less than thrilled about my sudden recess, I headed for my room and scrolled the chat all the way up. The trouble seemed to have started last night.
I lay down on my bed and started reading carefully from the previous evening's messages.
The first to write had been Druggy, the player from the Cocaine Area.
Oh. The newbie was still alive and kicking.
Self-proclaimed Dopamine Addict?
Impersonating me was something Anjeon8yeok had already tried. Had someone else decided to pull the same stunt?
I kept reading.
The moment Shin—who until then had been playing dumb—admitted to receiving the same message, the quiet players started filtering into the room one by one.
He sounded a little proud of that, for some reason.
Oho. Experience talking—that was a solid deduction.
Come to think of it, neither Druggy nor Ssapasuble had ever sent me a friend request. Had Druggy not friended anyone at all?
That one had a definite edge of snark to it.
That one, on the other hand, wasn't snark. That was just straight-up trash talk. Clear enough.
Hmm. I hadn't gone to the edge of my area yet either, so I hadn't verified it myself. I'd have to make a point of checking during this next subjugation campaign.
But the real problem wasn't the truth of that message.
Scrolling further, I found that at least one other player had figured out what the real problem was.
I agreed that the sender was most likely the Unicorn Area's player. How they'd managed to avoid joining the public chat, and by what means they were running around with the ID "Dopamine Addict," I had no idea.
Unless the fundamental rule—that only the first player to touch each area's meteorite item could unlock the system—had been broken, the only remaining candidate was the still-unaccounted-for player from the Unicorn Area.
But why the Unicorn Area's player would go to the trouble of impersonating me to send a message like that… no matter how I turned it over, I couldn't figure it out. Same with the "except Unicorn" part.
If, unlike the game, inter-area exchange was actually possible, there was no reason to exclude the Unicorn Area. Even if no other zone had the tech to fly up to a floating island, the Unicorn Area wasn't hovering that high off the ground. Flying monsters didn't exist yet either—so in theory, the Cocaine Area sitting right beneath it could just build a tall enough staircase and start trading.
Which meant that message almost felt like…
A warning. Don't approach the Unicorn Area yet.
But then why hadn't they sent me a separate chat?
Come to think of it, hadn't IWontCryThatsCardio from the Chicken Area said he never got one either? Why skip only the two of us?
The question nagged at me—but the message Druggy sent next made it irrelevant.
The messages that followed came after a short pause.
Check the member list?
I opened the list myself and looked at the IDs currently in the public chat.
Dopamine Addict
T-balnom
Shin
Dentist
Ssapasuble
IWontCryThatsCardio
Druggy
Home Protector
Eight people, listed in the order they'd joined the public chat.
Looks completely normal to me…?
What was weird became clear with the next message.
Excluding him… eight?
Listed twice?
Did that mean on everyone else's list, my ID appeared twice?
Eight people excluding himself—and on everyone else's list, my ID written twice…
Does this list not display your own ID?
I calmly clicked the Dopamine Addict ID sitting at the very top of the list. If it was me, my own info window should open.
But instead—
Send a friend request to Dopamine Addict?
What the fuck? What is this?
The ID at the top of the chat list was not me. This was unmistakably another player—someone who was not me.
And that was where the chat ended. As if they'd all gotten sick of something at once, everyone stopped posting in the public room.
I left the public chat myself and checked the private messages the other players had sent me.
First, Home Protector's 1:1.
"……."
I debated what to send, then decided to keep it short.
A flood of messages seemed to pour in from Home Protector after that, but I opened T-balnom's chat first.
I skimmed T-balnom's messages quickly and decided I'd been right to open his first.
Because—