Hard Light Arena

For starters

Those empty square rooms? That's where you die, rookie. Not once, but thousands of times - if all goes well. As a Galactic Gladiator, it's your job to fight your best fight. Try to win. Then you'll receive fame, fortune and of course, Lives. If you lose your head, get shot through the heart, that stuff, you'll be respawned. You're gonna be okay.

Rooms of bad intent

Those empty rooms are called Hard Light Arenas. This space station, The Dungeon, has 4 of these Arenas. Each one looks like a simple square room, but they're not.

The rooms are just the - uhm - literal placeholder. Once a Battle Call is launched, a new environment is loaded in - as if they are movie sets, complete with sounds, props and sometimes even non-playable characters. You're best to pop those bastards first. You'll have to adapt your game plan each time.

I once tried to befriend such a character. It didn't respond to anything I said. But maybe I was coming on too strong?

— Lylith Licht, interrupting Wayde enthusiastically

My daughter here is a little bit naive when it comes to the rules in this Dungeon. You can't break them. They're there for a reason.

The Battle Maps

We call these holographic movie set: Battle Maps. That's because we are meant to fight in these sets - to our bloody deaths. Each Map is completely made out of Hard Light which means we can interact with the surroundings inside. We can shoot holes in the walls, explode whole buildings and throw chairs at each other - and do as we wish.

That reminds me of this one time where I threw a chair from a building and hit Kelita in the head. Gravity is mimicked perfectly if you ask me - her head was bashed in like a smashed pumpkin!

Which Battle Maps exist? There are too many to all list here, dude. There's a scrubby market square, there's a huge ancient Greek temple and even a beach side town, complete with high rises and fake waves crashing on the beach! There's even one we call The Anomaly - Hamlet Battle Map.

Original Purpose - or so it is said

It is said that this technology was once meant to equip med bays and ER rooms for training & experimentation purposes. These empty rooms could be edited so one could perform any medical procedure in them. Just load in a preset situation and you're golden.

Anyone would be able to use them to test new procedures or train for their educations. Idealists! I don't believe a word of it though. It's just a way of showing noble intent - but in the end, we are the OG experiments.

Imagine the possibilities! I wonder if there's actual HLH rooms like this on Earth too, being used for victimless experiments? I sure hope so!

— Lylith Licht, concluding Wayde's lesson

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