Entry Nine

  Ileria

  Have you ever licked a 9-volt battery and felt that zappy-tingly sensation on your tongue? I felt that sensation on my temples as the metal headset touched them. A second later, the visor part of the headset came to rest above the bridge of my nose, and I felt the zappy tingle everywhere.

  I blinked, and then I was in a forest.

  Bam. Just like that.

  I was so shocked that I stumbled backward, my arms flailing as I reached for a computer desk that wasn’t there. I fell on my butt and bounced. Just as quickly, almost as quickly, I jumped back up to my feet. I did a 360 as I rubbed my backside, gawking at what I saw.

  I was in a small clearing filled with yellow, knee-high grass. Small insects flew around in random directions as honeybees scouted some violet flowers that poked up through the grass. Trees loomed above the clearing, surrounding it, and I saw their tops swaying back and forth.

  And I could smell those violet flowers. There was a heavy fragrance, something like lilac, in the air, with a piney, earthy backdrop that reminded me of how hiking trails smelled after a heavy rain.

  This is going to sound stupid, but it all happened so fast that it took me a while to realize that I was already in-game. There had been no loading screen, no title screen, no menu, no intro music. Nada. At first, I couldn’t speak. I could only stare at the most perfectly rendered 3D world I’d ever seen in my entire life. The sights, the smells—I could even feel the breeze on my cheeks. This place wasn’t photo-realistic—it was reality realistic.

  “It worked!” I whispered. “Florian, this… this is…”

  I reached up and touched my face. I felt my skin and, surprised, pulled my hand back to examine it. It was my hand, which was weird. Plus, I was now wearing leather bracers that covered my hands and lower arms, leaving only my fingertips exposed. Looking down, I saw that I was wearing medieval armor from my chest down to my boot-covered feet.

  Now, any RPG gamer will attest that starting out a game with crappy (aka leather) armor wasn’t strange. Feeling it all over your body, though, that was strange. Whatever tactile feedback system this game used was stunning. It was beyond cutting edge, beyond bleeding edge, it was… beyond!

  “Florian, how is this happening? I’m not wearing any haptic suit or anything. How am I feeling all of this?”

  I remembered the last thing I felt before jumping into the game: the heavy ring around my head, the cold metal pressed against my forehead. With a shock, I realized what must be happening—the headset was transmitting the visual and tactile info directly to my brain. That was crazy, in-freaking-sane! That was… Oh, man, that was dope!

  I walked up to a small, purple-flowered plant and bent to get a better look at it. The lilac smell was even more intense up close. Then it hit me. I had walked. How? I wasn’t holding any controller, and I wasn’t touching the computer’s mouse or keyboard.

  “This thing’s reading my thoughts too? Dude, you gotta be kidding me! Florian? Mr. Rodgers?”

  He didn’t answer, and I had a weird thought—was I talking in-game and not in real life? Did that mean that I couldn’t control my RL body? After all, I couldn’t even feel it. I mean, all video games go for the maximum level of immersion, but this wasn’t immersion. This was subversion.

  “The snozzberries taste like snozzberries,” I mumbled. I looked around for an exit button or a pause button or… a button. There weren’t any. There was no HUD, no graphical user interface of any kind. “Florian? How do I exit this thing? You’re not gonna go all Sword Art Online and leave me trapped in the game world forever, are you? What if I have to take a dump or something?”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Okay, again, no answer. Kinda creepy. But it was also kinda cool in an I-wonder-if-this-thing-will-kill-me kind of way.

  A new smell wafted over me, and I turned to see a thin cloud of white smoke rising above the trees on one side of the clearing. The smoke was roughly opposite from the current position of the sun, so it had to be either to my east or to my west. I wasn’t sure what time of day the simulation was currently in, and again, I couldn’t check the time because no HUD. Thus, like any good, irresponsible, and totally impulsive adventurer, I started in the direction of the smoke.

  I walked through the field of long grass, and I’m ashamed to admit it, but—I pulled a Gladiator. I had to. I started humming that old Enya song from the movie as I reached down and touched the tops of the grass. Epic.

  I reached the edge of the clearing and started through the woods. Luckily, the trees were pretty sparse. I saw a fallen tree in my path and strolled up to it, waiting for the customary tutorial text telling me to “Press Y to Jump” as the game taught me how to perform basic stuff like that. Nothing happened. I kicked it, not sure why, except to see if I could. I could, but nothing happened. The thing was only about two feet high, so I stepped up onto it. The game didn’t pop up anything to tell me how to jump down from the tree trunk, so I just did it, landing effortlessly on the ground again. With such an intuitive movement system, the game designers probably figured that the players would figure it out for themselves. If so, they’d been right.

  With one last glance at the tree trunk, I trudged off toward the smokey smell. There was a vague path or game trail, and I followed it, winding around trees and clumps of bushes. I was approaching another large shrub when the entire thing shook violently. I froze. My heart immediately started beating faster (yes, I could feel that too.) The bush trembled again, and then a third time, and then something large, brown, and furry exploded out of it in a shower of leaves and twigs, heading directly at me.

  In that instant, I realized three uber-important facts. First, I had no weapons. Second, even if I had a weapon, I hadn’t gone through any combat tutorial yet, so I wouldn’t have known how to use it. Third, when I was equal parts startled and scared, I screamed almost exactly like Jan.

  The brown monstrosity bounded toward me from barely ten feet away. It landed, leaped again, and sailed right past me. I spun. Well, in my mind, I was trying to spin. What I actually did was stumble awkwardly sideways while the thing flew on by. It wasn’t like I roll-dodged the attack or anything. It simply wasn’t aiming for me. It landed and turned back to look at me, and I finally got a good look at it.

  The thing was a freakishly large, brown-furred, quasi-bunny rabbit-looking thing with very short ears, long rear legs, and a very flat face that reminded me of a furry orangutan. It gazed up at me.

  “O…kay. Hi, little guy. What’s your name?”

  A chest-rumbling, spittle-inducing growl started up behind me. I turned to see a huge, salivating, dire wolf strolling toward me. It looked very unhappy, which, to be honest, I could understand. It craved a quasi-bunny meal, and I was very literally standing in its way. Recall those three very pivotal, quite salient points that I oh-so-recently realized, those regarding my total lack of combat equipment/ability? Yeah. I stepped aside.

  “By all means, Mr. Big Bad. Bon Appetit,” I said, waving toward the other animal. The bunny thing, seeming to sense my betrayal, let out a deeply offended squeal and bounded rapidly away. “Huh. Fast food.”

  The massive wolf, still padding forward, leveled its red-eyed gaze at me before looking back toward its departing snack. I took two more steps back, making it double-obvious that if the wolf was hungry, I wouldn’t begrudge it the sustenance. The beast gave me a low, warning growl that I had every intention of heeding as it loped past. As soon as it cleared my general vicinity, it broke into a mad dash.

  Now, I did feel bad about sacrificing the breakfast bunny to save my scrawny, Level 1 newbie butt. I did, but the truth was that I had no idea how this game worked. For example, where would my respawn point be if I died? Where was I supposed to find a sword? How many hit points did I have? Could I cast spells? Plus, this game was so off-the-rails different from everything I’d played before, I honestly didn’t know if I could fight, much less how to fight. To summarize—sorry, quasi-bunny tricks are for kids.

  I kept walking, picking up the pace just in case Mr. Big Bad lost track of his prey and remembered spotting the tall, leather-wrapped McNate meal he saw on the forest trail. Pretty soon, the trees thinned out, and the ground sloped slightly upward. I soon reached the top of a low hill and got a better view of the surrounding area. On a slightly taller hill, about a mile away, I saw a small village encircled by a modest stone wall.

  “Yeah, baby! Starter town!”