The digital ghost answered almost immediately,<strong> “Since you have chosen an elf as your race, your starting zone will be in the Roch wood.” </strong>Callie hadn’t ever played the Erosworld Neural Net MMORPG, but she’d done some research on it when she began her journey.  She knew that the Roch would was considered one of the ‘newb’ zones filled with low level creatures that players would start in.  While it was low risk, it was also very low reward.  Not a lot of experience gain and no good loot to speak of.  The borders of the Roch wood were more dangerous, and for players who had gotten their bearings.  But of course, she had to consider that Fireheart had said explicitly that they had modified their normal game world so as to remove any advantage that players of the normal game would have over less informed players like herself.  Still they probably wouldn’t have designed an all new game world from the ground up.  So it was likely that a lot of the same terrain and world layout was similar, just with new challenges.<br/><br/>That meant she couldn’t rely on the research she’d done on the game world, but since she didn’t really know it all that well, it wasn’t a big disadvantage to her.  While it would be a massive disadvantage for anyone who was expecting the tournament world to be like the game world.  Still, if she remembered the geometry of the Erosworld layout correctly, Roch wood was bordered on the east by Nekral forest, home of the evil dark elves.  To the south by the savannah of gold, the west with the great mountain range of World’s spine that bisected the main continent of the game, and to the north with a massive inland lake bordered by mountains.  Each of those areas progressively more and more challenging.  But again, that was assuming the difficulty level was similar to the normal game.<br/><br/><strong>“If you wish, you can request a random spawn point instead of your assigned one,” </strong>the digital specter said,<strong> “Though until you rest at an inn, any death causes you to respawn in this lobby, and there is no way for you to know where your random spawn point will be until you pass through the lobby portal.”</strong><br/><br/>This was an unusual twist.  Certainly she could choose a random spawn location, and maybe start in a more difficult area, but one that offered much higher rewards.  If she died on her first outing after all, it’s not like she could lose points, she’d just lose time and suffer a temporary debuff.  But that might be worth the risk.  Of course, what if the random spawn point was somewhere that she had no chance of surviving?  Maybe it was better to play it safe and start in the newb zone?  Thankfully, as a video game, any items she collected went into a digital ‘inventory’ and never really went away unless they were taken from her while she was wearing them or using them.  Also the starter gear she was wearing now could always be resummoned in this lobby, so if she did die, she’d at least be able to get her sword back.<br/><br/>It was her first real choice since entering the Fireheart servers, and as she looked at the door, a timer appeared over it, starting at 60 seconds and counting down.  The door would open soon, and while she could waste time in this lobby, she knew that gaining as many points as she could in whatever time was allotted was the only real way to win the tournament.  So she’d better decide.