Wind rustled through the trees of Valor’s Crossing while the sounds of clucking chickens and the occasional hooting of an owl added to the rural ambiance of this artificial place. It was still early evening and I stared at the bright blue illusion superimposed over the world with interest.

  “Iiiiiintersting…..So that was why I couldn’t remember my name. I was supposed to pick one. Although what’s the point? Who uses their real name in game anyway? For that matter, how does it even accomplish anything. You have to figure out your playing a game before you would even think to look at the character sheet to decide on your name.” I mutted to myself as I scanned the boxes. I knew I wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but I got good grades and my test scores were always fairly high. My background as a gamer had let me figure out I was in a game pretty quickly. How long would it take a non-gamer to put it together? Would they ever? How long would I have taken to figure it out if they hadn’t given me something so obvious as a quest. The thoughts swirled one after another, but none of the facts seemed to fit together properly.What was the point of any of it?

  “Oh well, Let’s get it over-with.” I pushed the blue ‘Name’ box. The view shifted and another smaller box popped up over-top of the main one.

  “That’s the million dollar question isn’t it.” I sighed. Brooding over my lost identity wasn’t going to accomplish a lot, I’d done plenty of that the first day. If I was going to figure it out I’d need to play along and cobble together what clues I could.

  But what to pick? Should I go with something funny? Epic? Ridiculous? Or should I be serious…….. Definitely not serious.

  “My Name….. Is Noob Slayer!” I said in the most epic and over-blown voice I could muster.

  Blip

  I smiled. then pushed the Race box.

  The list went on, and on, and on. I scrolled through them in growing astonishment. By the time I got to the end I was in shock There were forty-five playable races. FORTY FIVE. That was more than five times most games and at least three times as many as any game I’d ever heard of.

  They really pulled out all the stops for this didn’t they.

  “Select Human” I replied absently. Best to keep things simple. Besides I didn’t even know what half those races were, what the hell was a Svirfneblin anyway, or a Nyanrian? I didn’t want to grow a bunch of tentacles out of my head.

  Beeeeep

  "Yes” I confirmed.

  Blip

  Class was the next option and this was going to be the important one. If I got stuck with a crappy class it would be a pain to navigate the world and I needed to be powerful to figure out what was going on. Judging by the forty-five playable races, I expected the class list to be absolutely colossal. I pushed the button.

  That’s it? I expected there to be a hundred classes at least. Although the ‘unlocked’ column made me a bit curious. How many locked classes were there? When did I unlock ranger? How did I unlock more? Could I change classes? Too many questions as usual and far too few answers.

  I pressed fighter just to test the waters. If I got stuck with it, it wouldn’t be the end of the world, but I figured there’d be another confirmation box.

  Beeeeep

  “TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY!” I shouted. I’d been expecting it, but honestly it still caught me off-guard. How the hell was I gonna unlock two hundred fifty classes? And I only get one choice and it’s permanent. “What kinda shitty game design is this?” I said incredulously.

  “Cancel” I denied. The pop-up closed leaving me with the class list. “Close Window.” the class window closed and I looked at my updated sheet again. Enough with classes for now. I inspected the rest of the sheet.

  “Hmmmmmmm…. I assume UB and LB are upper body and lower body, but what’s the point of separating that out?” I mused aloud. Everything about this game seems so needlessly complex. I pushed on ‘UBstr’ hoping for a pop-up but nothing happened. Apparently, only the blue buttons were pressable. End was likely endurance, Con was constitution, Agi was agility, and when had agility become my dump stat? I supposed at 6’3, 240 I’d left agile behind 6 inches and a 100 pounds ago. But what was Cord, coordination? Wasn’t that the same as agility? Int was easy. Wis, easy. Res? Faith was likely some sort of stat for priests or clerics, but Res I had no ideas at all for. I supposed it could be resistance but that didn’t really make sense as a main attribute.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  I switched over to the status window. Hp, Mana, and Stam were common enough. Although I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to get mana. Panic was in some old-school games, but I hadn’t ever played one with it. Hunger and Thirst were interesting but It made sense with how detailed the game was.

  The wounds window was pretty telling. That’s why all my injuries had healed but, my abs and back still hurt. I’d regenerated the HP passively, but the actual wounds hadn’t been healed. How did I go about healing them? This game was ludicrous.I was starting to get a headache.

  Blip

  My sheet updated before my eyes and I chuckled darkly after reading the change.

  “Well, at least they are consistent.” I shook my head then continued my self-examination. Deciding to skip the rest I pushed the ‘Inventory’ Link at the bottom of the sheet. The pane had a paper-doll that was blank in all slots but pants. Below that was a large box with one entry ‘Small Rusty Knife’. Again I couldn’t see any specific stats on either item. There had to be a way to pull the information.

  “Help” I said trying to find out some more info.

  Full Immersion Mode eh?

  Then it occurred to me I should have tried something else when I first discovered I was in a game. Typical gamer, ignoring the obvious when something interesting is happening. “Logout” I said although I didn’t think it would work.

  “Who woulda thunk it” It was as I suspected. Again I wondered how I’d ended up in a game that was at least 20 years ahead of anything ever offered before and was apparently trapped here under the guise of ‘Full Immersion Mode’. It was honestly incredible. Had I not been apparently kidnapped, I would have signed up for this. Although, maybe I did sign up for it?

  I again searched my memories. I could remember the days leading up to when I’d arrived here. Nothing I could remeber pointed to me agreeing to anything like this. Although the memory could have been fogged over, but only specific information seemed to be. There weren’t any large obscured spots aside from the night right before I’d woken up here.

  Oh well, I had made progress but In terms of figuring anything out, I was effectively back where I started. I knew WHERE now, but the HOW and WHY still eluded me.

  First things first. I needed to figure out this damn game. “Open Command List” I spoke firmly. Another pop-up window appeared on my screen. Now we're getting somewhere. There was 40 or so commands, most of them were cryptic and a good number were dithered out. But there was a Details command. Which was exactly what I’d been hoping for. Finally, I’d cracked the code. I was honestly starting to run out of Ideas, so it’s a good thing that one had worked. I closed my inventory, and went back to my char sheet. “Details” I commanded. All of the various Subsections of the sheet started to glow with a blue outline. I started with Attributes.

  I was hoping for some actual numbers, but this at least give me some info. Res, must be resonance or something? it was odd seeing a magic stat that wasn’t Int, but I supposed it was for classes like Sorcerer, who didn’t normally use int. I wondered how you learned magic. I’d have to do some testing later.

  I decided to skip the rest of stuff for now. I could look at my skills later and the sun had set so it was getting chilly out here. With my luck I’d catch a cold out here while gawping at my stat sheet. There was one last thing I wanted to check though.

  “Open Log” A single window opened that contained a giant block of text. Every time anything had changed, from my position to my hunger, weather, air pressure, temperature, all of it was listed. There was so much data it was unreal. I’d only been in the game for 3 days, and there must be three hundred pages worth of raw text. At the top was a series of tabs. I quickly touched the ‘Default Filter’ Tab and the window shrank to a few hundred lines. I quickly scanned it.

  The rest of the log had my various fishing and camping attempts as well as the battle with the wolf logged. Turns out I’d dropped to -4 Hp from bleeding, and had nearly died. You apparently passed out at 0 hp. Although I was unsure about how low you had to get before you actually died. It seemed useful knowledge, but I had no real way of finding out without killing myself. Which until I knew exactly what the death penalties in this game were seemed a chance I’d rather not take.

  Time to get moving though. For now though I’d found answers to my most pressing questions, and the rest could wait for tomorrow. I yawned then trudged back to the bar. The common room was less crowded but more lively. Most people had gone home and only the heavily inebriated remained. I walked up to the barkeep to gain permission for a spot on the floor tonight. HE he agreed, and I spent the night getting to know the locals and chatting with the barman. I finally managed to get to sleep sometime in the early morning.

  Tomorrow my first quest awaited.

  _________________________________________________

  Note: The worst part about all those tables was I wrote this in Google Docs originally. So I spent forever making all the tables there, then had to turn around and make them all over again in BBcode.