"So what should we do until then?"<br/><br/>"Try to talk to her on the inside. Keep her in the loop and sane."<br/><br/>"Right. Any of us ca-- Wait, her? He hasn't been warped that much yet has he?"<br/><br/>"I'm still talking about him. He's playing as a female gnome."<br/><br/>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~<br/><br/>"Nice job Nia! That's awesome!"<br/><br/>Several people of various races came running through the trees. These people looked far happier than any of the orcs did, and they were all giving strangely ecstatic compliments to Niada as they ran forward, some stumbling over the orc bodies as though they didn't even care in the slightest about the spurting blood as they did so.<br/><br/>The glad voices were awkwardly contrasted to the dark nature of the clearing.<br/><br/>"Omagash did you see that emm emm on the first one?"<br/><br/>"Dood yeah. But the sleep made me el oh el. Diju see them just like smash face?"<br/><br/>"Fff, man I didn't get nearly as much eksp as I thought I would."<br/><br/>"Not the point. We just needed a better strat for taking these guys out. Nextime Nia won't come with us and well get like a hell ton of eksp."<br/><br/>"An hey Nia, what did you build to get those claws bee tee dubleyu?"<br/><br/>Even a young man with an orc's axe embedded in his leg limped out of the trees. He was grinning and spoke just like the others. Happily. "Frik guys, this thing took like way over half my aych pee. Did we bring heals?"<br/><br/>Niada easily recognized these as the group of, quote - unquote, newbs that she had agreed to show off for. They had already given her three gold each (to be expected for somebody of their level) for the so-called tutorial.<br/><br/>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~<br/><br/>The game is "Empire Dendah", extraordinarily popular for the past six years. It is a pinnacle of achievement for a game company, and looks miraculous since they've only come out with a single game. But a single game is all that you need to become the eleventh megacorp.  Of course, they began as a part of Renraku, a mere moneymaking scheme type project of an elf employee. Then they became a subsidiary and eventually broke off when more than half the world's population started paying forteen nuyen a month to play and Renraku had a few management issues.<br/><br/>Empire Dendah can be described in many ways, but the most accurate would be "A magically induced lucid dream, centrally controlled by a mysterious power and distributed via liquid activated nano chips."<br/><br/>Here's what that means when you break it down: Somewhere on Earth, there is an immensely powerful entity or object (nobody's sure what) that can project a full blown sensory experience into your brain that's better than any SIM movie, because you get to create yourself within the parameters of the game. You feel everything as though it's yours, because it is. You control yourself, but everything else is (not including the other players) controlled by that immensely powerful whatever. You jump into the experience by taking a bath in an air-tight bed full of a breathable liquid capable of channelling the immensely powerful whatever's vision. As long as your nanochip was properly installed into you, the liquid will sedate you for an hour. During that hour, you experience up to one week in the life of your fantasy alter ego.<br/><br/>Of course, you can wake up at any time, but only one hour per day is permitted by the game. There are serious consequences to hacking through the system (involving technological and mystical skill) and staying in longer. Not including what the megacorp will do to you when they find out, these consequences may include nausea, sore throat, excessive sneezing, spontaneous bowel movements, uncontrollable eye movements, physical changes, yellowing of the skin or eyes, thoughts of suicide, dry mouth, powerful urges to drink orange juice, reduction of tusk size, glowing sweat, painful urination, and itching around the ears and wrists.<br/><br/>All of these side effects can be rather easily prevented if you have some good people helping you stay in-game, but there is one side effect that nobody has a sure-fire answer to yet. If you stay in the game long enough, you start to forget who you are in the real world. You will obviously still realize that you're playing a game, but it always begins with a bit of curiosity. You had a grocery list in real life, but you don't remember what you put on it. You remember that you MADE a committment to meet a friend at a coffee shop, but you don't remember the address, or even your friend's name. Eventually, you forget who, what, or where you really are while being fully aware that your new existence is not real and that your real body that you remember nothing about (but you probably modeled your fantasy body off of your real one right?) is floating in a liquid bed and probably wrinkling up. This total, selective amnesia usually takes two days in the waking world (almost a year in-game) to set in.<br/><br/>Niada has been in the game for six days, thirteen hours. Three years and a week.<div class="messageTextEndMarker"> </div>