The Wonders of Mundus, Volume 2: Out Of Bounds Interactions
It is the Virtual 2040's, and Deedee Yeowoo is still trapped in the milleu of Another World Online, Mundus. Having escaped the tutorial island, the Shores of Awakening, with her guildmates in free company Dungeon-Crawling And Chill, they found that there's a growing refugee camp of player characters outside of the port hub city of Viacruz, in numbers that would dwarf a Roman Legion.
With only the goodwill they earned from fighting for the Mundanes against a group of Player Character slavers, they need to survive in what's becoming a rapidly more expensive city as sellswords, without upsetting the people or the politics of the city too much - or earning the displeasure of her mayor, the Contessa Desolar.
Meanwhile, things about the situation aren't adding up, and the locals are rather more able to pass a Turing test than they were before the disaster that stranded a server full of minds on Mundus. And the answers to the questions Deedee's party are seeking about how the Translation happened might be found in the same place that the Contessa desperately needs a small group of Adventurers to investigate...
This is Volume 2 of The Wonders of Mundus, a queer cyberpunk MMO isekai story about a gamer's journey of transgender discovery in the gameworld of Mundus, Previously named the Isekai/Online series.
The Wonders of Mundus or Isekai/Online is by Talia Belser and the Other Worlds Tourism Bureau, made available under a Creative Commons 4.0 BY-SA-NC license. The cover image is by Studio Snickerdoodle.
This story will always be available for free on Scribblehub through this link, but consider buying the ebook if you enjoy the story or the quest on Sufficient Velocity and want to support my continued writings in this and other worlds.
Thanks to the generosity of my patrons on Patreon, I will occasionally have a limited number of free community copies of the ebook available as well.
10% of the gross sales of this book will go to the Transgender Law Center and their mission of legally protecting trans folks in America.
Now available as an ebook and PDF!
Purchase
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Development log
- Major Editing Pass; Live Readings on TwitchMar 07, 2023
- Book released!Dec 20, 2022
Comments
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So. A lot of SFF I've read in the past tends to get bogged down in trying to juggle presenting its worldbuilding versus presenting the plot and characters, and will often wind up leaning more heavily towards one at the expense of the other. Wonders of Mundus, on the other hand, does a really fantastic job of balancing the two by having its conflicts arise organically out of the consequences of its worldbuilding, and introducing the characters to them as they become relevant.
Someone else described the series as being driven by the question "where does the food come from?" and I have to agree - much thought has been put into the underpinnings of trade and commerce that govern this world, and the demands of the supply chain inform the trouble that arises for our protagonists. This serves to get the reader invested in the world in a way that breathes life into things by way of its familiarity, without all the dryness of a lesser fantasy novel's lore dumps.
(And of course, the loving descriptions of delicious-sounding food is a bonus, too.)