Nocturn Core (Abridged)

Nicole and I were staying with my parents in Texas. Austin was sick, but my parents couldn’t take him to the hospital because the health care infrastructure had been taken over by a group calling themselves (simply enough) the Organization. My mom did her best to take care of him, and his situation seemed stable. We assumed he would be able to wait a few weeks for a military action to sort out this mess with the Organization. As the days wore on, the news reported that the Organization’s reach was spreading. They captured residential lots for use as barracks and weapon storage. What they didn’t capture, they ransacked. All of the food, water, and valuables were stolen from countless homes in the vicinity of the hospitals. It was a terrorist attack on a level the country had never seen. We decided to build a secret basement beneath our home. Although building codes prohibited the construction of basements in Houston, the area beneath our house was suited to that, so we didn’t have to worry about any serious health issues – at least, that’s what my dad thought. I wasn’t so sure. He finished digging it out in two days, and we moved a good portion of our food down there. We left enough food upstairs that the Organization would just take it and ignore the possibility of people hiding under the kitchen tiles. It wasn’t long before the Organization made their rounds… We could only get the news by radio now, and many of the standard broadcast stations had been knocked out, so much of what we listened to came from other people like us living in secret in their own homes. The airports were under the Organization’s control now. Everything seemed to be getting worse, and Austin’s condition wasn’t getting any better.

A few days after the Organization stopped running in and out of our house, my dad and I went outside to check out the area. It was spooky how normal everything looked. The streets were empty, of course, but the houses all looked fine on the outside. We went door to door trying to find anyone who had hidden themselves properly. We found a couple of corpses, but I tried not to dwell on it. I didn’t know any of these people, anyway… We found one family that did the same thing as us. Their basement area was a little larger, so they invited us to come stay with them. My dad wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but we agreed to attend a party. When we got back, we told the rest of the family all about it. We went back to the larger hideout the next evening to try to enjoy ourselves for the first time in a while. Unfortunately, a passing truck under the control of the Organization stopped in front of the house. The driver picked up the music playing in the basement from his vehicle. Before we knew this had happened, the driver called a couple of loading trucks to the scene. They infiltrated the house, broke up the party, and captured everyone as prisoners.

We were loaded one by one onto the trucks with our mouths gagged and our wrists bound. I thought it was dumb of them to leave our ankles untied, but when they closed the back of my truck and locked the door, I realized there wasn’t much we could do to escape. I had to sit in pitch black darkness for the whole ride. I wasn’t even sure where we were going… After the first few turns, I was lost. Maybe in Illinois, I could’ve followed the trail better, but I wasn’t familiar with this area. I knew Nicole wasn’t on the same truck as me… It didn’t seem like they were shipping women anywhere different from the men, so I was relieved at least by that much. I had even less of an idea where she had been sent, though. The truck stopped at another house, and they loaded some more people onto the truck. It was becoming crowded in the cargo area, but they didn’t care. We were just merchandise to them. I supposed we would probably end up doing slave labor for the rest of our lives.

By the time we reached the next stop, I realized the knot binding my wrists was loose enough to wriggle out of. I freed myself and cautiously undid the knots binding the men on my left and right. We left our gags in so the Organization wouldn’t notice we had untied our wrists. It worked like a charm. We could undo the knots just as well in pure darkness as in blinding light, so it didn’t matter that we had to work on them en route. We had most of the prisoners free by the third stop – and that was way more people than they were ready to deal with. We had to leave some of them bound, but we were able to rush the soldiers in charge of the loading process and take their guns from them. Only a few people died. Someone else killed the driver of the truck. We were the only truck on this street, so there was no one else to challenge us. Everyone scattered, and so began my long journey across the country.

I found out they had taken me over the border into Oklahoma. I figured it would be fastest to make my way back to my parents’ house from there. I didn’t have a car, and besides, the roads were dangerous with the Organization about. It seemed they were no longer content with just taking supplies. They needed an army of slaves for something. I didn’t intend to trust my fate to chance again. I walked from Oklahoma back to Houston, sneaking into restaurants when necessary to supply myself with water and food. I kept away from the major roads when I could and made short work of crossing them when I couldn’t. I don’t know how long it took me, but I made it back to my parents’ house. I was a little disappointed to find that I was the only one who made it back… None of my family members were in the same truck as me, so I hadn’t been able to free any of them. I didn’t check the other house to see if those people had made it back. Their hideout had been compromised. Although ours was empty, at least I figured it was secure. I stayed there for about a week to give Nicole time to find me. When she didn’t show up, I put a backpack of supplies together and took to the wilderness again. This time, I headed for Illinois.

Traveling during the summer was rough, so I was grateful when things began to cool down. It meant that I had taken a long time to cross the country, but I hadn’t been counting the days, anyway. I was too worried about what might’ve happened to Nicole and my family to think about something as abstract as time. Eventually, I made it to the edge of Chicago. A big storm blew in from the west, and the whole area quickly flooded. I jumped on the back of an Organization truck when the driver wasn’t looking and rode it into the suburbs so I wouldn’t have to spend so much time in the pouring rain. It pulled off into someone’s backyard, so I took the chance to hop off the truck and continue on foot. As I passed a house, I saw a television on inside. I wondered how long it had been playing… There didn’t seem to be anyone in the room. The TV played an episode of the Fairly Oddparents in which Timmy Turner gained the power of invisibility. He tried to save a girl on a motorcycle from the Organization, but he was unable to do anything. They threw her on a train and took her away. I couldn’t help noticing I was in a similar situation…

I had to wade through three feet of water to get across Nicole’s street. Her house was empty. Her garage was empty. All of the canned food was gone, and it basically looked like no one had been there in ages. I noticed that Cleo was also gone… I figured she had decided to fend for herself if she was still alive. Since there was nothing for me to find in Chicago, I decided I might as well go back home and prepare the house for my family’s return – if they ever returned. The trip back took even longer than the trip there; I had lost much of my motivation. The winter months weren’t so bad since I made it far enough south to avoid most of the snow. The new year arrived, then spring, then summer, and I finally made it back to my parents’ house. When I went inside, my heart sank. There were people everywhere. I immediately assumed they were with the Organization and threw up my hands in surrender. It wasn’t worth fighting anymore, I decided. If they were going to kill me, whatever… I didn’t want to live in fear like this anymore. Then my eyes narrowed. Nomad was with them. Nomad wouldn’t join the Organization. I noticed many of them had weapons strapped to their bodies. Some of them – including Nomad – had war paint on their faces. These were rebels preparing to stand up to the Organization. They laughed at my surrender and pointed me to my mom and sister. I was shocked by how similar Chelsea looked to my mom. It had been a year since I saw them, and Chelsea changed quite a bit. I hugged each of them several times. By this point, I was already in tears. Just finding one of them would’ve been enough to make the past year of running worth it.

I headed straight for the secret room, hoping to find my dad and Austin. My mom grabbed my hand before I could reveal the entrance. She hadn’t told the rebels about it yet, and in case one of them really was working with the Organization, she didn’t want them to know. She said she didn’t know if my dad was awake right now, but he would come talk to me soon. I sat down with them in the kitchen to wait. My mom explained that she and Chelsea had been separated from my dad and Austin early on, but they were reunited at the start of winter when they made it back to the house. She spared few details of their experiences… The Organization was trying to construct something to control the minds of the human race, but the details of this weren’t exactly clear. I made a mental note to ask Nomad about this later. Within half an hour or so, my dad walked into the room. He had a pistol on each side and wore a bulletproof vest. I felt small compared to him. It was obvious he’d been through a lot in the past year. I hugged him several times, too.

Immediately, I asked him about Austin. I hadn’t seen him in the building anywhere. I assumed he had just been in the basement or something. My dad put a hand on my back and led me outside. Because of his silence, I already knew what had happened. The tears started flowing. He took me to a little garden beside the house. The plants were artificial, and they had words written on their leaves. There was a little piano in the back for some reason with certain keys marked. It was a memorial for Austin. I knelt in front of it, wondering what I should do. Praying didn’t seem right, but what else was I supposed to do in this situation? My dad read the memorial leaf by leaf, but I couldn’t understand any of it. The whole thing seemed ridiculous, like he would tell me at any moment that Austin was actually just sleeping in the basement. That was just a hopeless wish, however.

“How long has it been…?” I asked, covering my eyes.

“Since November,” he replied. “We couldn’t get him the help he needed. The winter was too much for him, even here.” I could hardly breathe. My only brother was dead, and I never got to say goodbye. I knew how my dad felt about his brother’s death. Was this normal, I wondered? My thoughts raced out of control. I wondered if I would ever see Austin again… Probably not, I decided. There was nothing left of him. I knelt there for several minutes in grief before I could even move. I knew the Organization could come by at any moment, though, and if they saw us here, they would want to search the house. For the sake of everyone inside, I sucked up my tears and went back inside. I sat down on a bench in the basement to be alone while I tried to grasp everything that had happened. All the time lost, all the families torn apart… It was all because of the Organization. My immediate family gathered in the basement to try to cheer me up.

“When I saw Josh was here, I thought he was going to tell me he brought Nicole and two kids,” my dad joked. Clearly, this didn’t help much.

“I haven’t seen Nicole since the party,” I choked. It took me a few times to get this out. I went through my whole trip in summary, stopping whenever the horror of Austin’s death or the year without Nicole gripped me. When I finished telling the story, everyone seemed to agree that I should try going back to Chicago and finding Phil. He might be doing secret work for someone in the city, my dad suggested. I couldn’t imagine anyone having a stable job with the country in its current state, but it seemed remotely possible that he could be working in secret. In that case, he might have a place for Nicole and her family to hide. Knowing Nicole had to turn up somewhere, I agreed to give their idea a try. They probably wouldn’t see me again… I could come back and find all of them dead. We went outside for some reason and sat in the backyard. The sun was already setting, so it was too late for me to leave. I would have to stay for the night. After I finished talking to my family, I turned back to the house. A number of the rebels were staring at me. As Apheri appeared at my side, I put my hand on her black hilt.

“The Organization will pay,” I whispered.

I was talking to Ben about him visiting us in America and us visiting him in Australia. There was a canyon in Australia that I was particularly interested in seeing, but for some reason, he wouldn’t talk about it. We went through a list of reasons why it was a bad idea – too far away from Brisbane (either twenty-five minutes or five hours, he never specified which), food for the trip, silly things like that which are rarely the biggest factor in planning an international trip. He and another Australian guy debated how well the car would hold up on such a long drive. We were in some kind of virtual reality world. Ben had spent a lot of time converting image data to 3D models of scenic places in Australia, but he wouldn’t let us see them… I was confused, so I pressed this a bit. I finally told Ben flatly that I wanted to see the natural beauty of Australia, and I would see it with or without his help. He wouldn’t talk to me or Nicole after that. We got involved in some kind of weird mind meshing game where we turned Ben’s brain into a marble and rolled it around in our thoughts, making him rethink his decision. He eventually decided he would cooperate with us after all. As we learned, the only reason he had argued was because he thought my request to see the sights in Australia was my way of criticizing his appreciation of nature. Since it was settled, we apologized and settled our disagreement. We missed each other’s company too much to hold out alone anyway. Ben made what was supposed to be a bold statement, then – he would buy a bike in Australia and ride it proudly to show the world how much he loved natural beauty.

The dream jumped. Ben and I were meeting up at a restaurant and hotel. We were all going to stay there together. One of the employees at the restaurant, a woman with blond hair in a sophisticated, black uniform, asked if I needed any help. I declined any assistance; I was waiting for someone, I said. I stood in the middle of the busy restaurant as waitresses zoomed back and forth between tables. I observed that the hotel was separated by a swamp-like stretch of gooey, red organic tissue. I dared not step on it. I asked the blond woman from before how I should cross it. She pointed out a narrow path made of stone that led across. All of this was clearly a reference to Althea’s swamp in the Sword of Truth series. I thanked the woman for her help as Ben appeared in the distance… He was riding a bicycle! When he approached the restaurant, he hopped off the bike. He asked me which coins he was allowed to use as payment in America.

“The American ones,” I laughed.

“The quarters, dimes, and nickels, then…?” he asked, nodding.

“The pennies, too!”

“No…” he said in sincere disbelief. “Really?!” He came into the restaurant after paying some kind of bike fee. Even inside the restaurant, he rode that bike everywhere. He nearly fell in the living swamp water as I was showing it to him. I warned him about it… At best, the water would just creep us out. I didn’t want to find out it was deadly and acidic. Anyway, we went to the winding stone trail. Naturally, Ben had to ride his bicycle over it. He nearly fell in twice; one of the stumbles put most of his weight over the edge, but Ben somehow floated to safety. I asked if he was feeling alright… He was having a lot of trouble with balance. Although he assured me he was fine, he seemed very dizzy… He started coughing and eventually vomiting bile. I invited him to sit on a bench with me and rest before we continued onward. He accepted the offer. I took photographs of the swamp.

The dream jumped. I had a false awakening in Nicole’s bed. The room looked as it did before she rearranged the furniture. I understood that this room was connected to the hotel from before. I kept hearing sounds like a squeaky bike outside. I tuned it out as I relaxed in bed. It was a bright, new morning… Nicole stirred and immediately asked about the strange, periodic bouts of squeaking. I told her I would check it out. The next time we heard it, I saw up and looked out her window. In the street was a metallic figure attached to bike wheels – one big, one small. It cycled freely down the road. I figured out what was going on instantly and ducked out of view.

“You can’t be serious…” I said, mostly to myself. “Get under the bed! Now!” I urged Nicole. She and I managed to squeeze under the bed together. It looked like it would be easy for the robots to detect us if they checked the house; the bed seemed higher up than it actually was from our low vantage point. Anyway, the moment I saw the human-like design in what otherwise could’ve been an interesting vehicle, everything came into place. I knew it was an artificially intelligent robot. The fact that I heard several on the street – but no cars, frighteningly enough – indicated that they were large in number. I suspected they had built up their forces in secret and overwhelmed our society. They hadn’t checked our room while we were sleeping, I decided, or we would be dead. Our robotic overlords had no reason to allow us to live. I explained all of this quietly to Nicole. We watched, terrified, as a robotic sentinel walked past our door on its metallic legs. They didn’t have feet – just long, narrow legs. I wished I had Apheri.

Once the coast was clear, we knew we had to get Ben. Nicole and I went to the bench outside where he stopped to rest the previous day. A fleshy cocoon surrounded it now. I gestured for Nicole to follow me in. It was empty… I didn’t want to imagine what the robots had done to him when they found him. Order is a disturbing foe… We heard the squeaking of metal joints as a robot sentinel approached the cocoon. Nicole told me to hide, but there was nowhere to hide! I prepared myself for a fight. The robot raised its arms when it saw me and opened fire. Bullets filled my body. I tackled the top-heavy machine and tumbled with it into the murky water outside. Nicole gasped, fearing the electricity would kill me as the robot’s body began to crackle. Fortunately, it didn’t. The robot turned into a small bug on my arm. I crushed it with a finger, but like a cockroach, it seemed to come back to life despite seemingly fatal injury. I crushed it again, and it took flight. It bit me, injecting nanobots into my body. I couldn’t destroy it.

“They’re immortal…” I laughed uneasily. What was I going to do? I basically resigned myself to my fate. I couldn’t fight this… I couldn’t imagine how, but the robots had conquered us overnight, and they would exterminate us without fail. I saw them marching toward us. “Go hide, Nicole.”

“What about you?”

“I have something to do… It’s our only chance.” My body was full of bullets. There was no way I would survive – but maybe I could save Nicole.

The dream jumped. I was walking around in tunnels built in a Minecraftian style. I was just above bedrock. Everywhere I looked, I saw robots mounted to the floor or ceiling. When the first one saw me, a white laser trained itself on my forehead. Intense battle music started playing. Inspired by this, I ran for my life as bullets rained on me. I turned away from the few that were shooting me and nearly fell to my knees when I saw hundreds of robots staring at me. There was no escape. They had me trapped. I ran for my life past one of the three in front of me. It shot a boomerang sword at me, cutting off my left arm. Blood spurted out.

“No way…” I choked. It shot the sword again after it returned, taking off my head this time. The bloody head rolled as my body slumped forward. I heard Nicole commenting on how cool the weapon was. I saw her standing by the lighthouse on Sailor’s Isle (Skies of Arcadia). She practiced throwing the sword. It was nearly Apheri’s length and probably just as heavy, but it moved through the air like a phantom.

Nicole and I were playing on a Minecraft server together. We ventured into an unexplored area and found some strange, circular platforms floating in the ocean. They looked like targets. Assuming the administrator had plans for these, I decided building on them was pointless; the buildings would just get destroyed. We walked back in the other direction, and I found an old cabin I had built previously to survive a night. I decided I would stay there until morning. I was glad I found it when I did since skeletons were already patrolling behind it. I looked around the cabin and quickly discovered the basement. I couldn’t remember why I abandoned the cabin… Until I saw the creepers hiding in the basement, that is. There were at least seven of them, and they all noticed me. Only one jumped up to the ground level, though. I backed into a corner to try to force it to blow up where the damage would be minimal. I knew I couldn’t fight a creeper in this small space. Unfortunately, the creeper knocked out nine blocks on the south wall, exposing me to roaming zombies! The open space was three blocks high, so I quickly placed a line of wood across the middle to keep the zombies and creepers at bay. This didn’t protect me from skeletons or spiders, though. I tried to find materials to use without going into the basement. I tried typing “/give Nephanim diamonds” to see if I had operator rights on the server for whatever reason. The dream didn’t seem to care that I typed the command incorrectly. As I worried that someone would see the request for items and complain that I was cheating, I got a red error message back from the server. It said that I had received a warning from the staff, and the item request had been denied. Boo… I decided to brave the basement for some dirt. To my surprise, it was now empty. Dirt was better than nothing… I don’t know why I had thought to put diamond blocks up instead of something less valuable. Anyway, while I was down there, I found these long, skinny lego blocks and put them together to form a red and yellow striped wall. It still wasn’t wide enough. The corners of the hole were still open, and skeletons were shooting me. I saw that my health was empty. I was alive, but not for long. Another arrow hit, and my items burst from my body. Apparently, my spawn point was close tot he cabin even though I expected to have to run across the island. I carefully returned to the building, collected my belongings, and went on my way.

I met up with Nicole again, and we found a water purification plant beside a street. We filled buckets with water from the clean end and sampled it. The water was horrible… On top of that, we were stealing it. We laughed about all of this as we roamed some more. We found a car, I guess… Some people called Nicole and told her to pick things up from Chick-fil-A. We went there, but we didn’t buy anything for these people. Nicole spent $14 on something applicable to her diet. I saw that $5 of it went toward adding extra bacon. That plus my food and two drinks came out to $21.45. I misheard the amount, so I only pulled out a $20 bill. The drive-through was reversed as if we were in Europe, so I had to pay. To my immense surprise, when we pulled up to the window, the cashier handed us $21.45 instead of taking our money. Speechless, I put the money away. She passed our food over and closed the window. As Nicole drove off, we argued about what just happened. Nicole seemed to think she had gone to the wrong service window, but there was only one.

“They just paid us to take their food,” I said. “That’s all there is to it. It’s not really stealing if they don’t ask you for money… They didn’t ask you to pay when you ordered, right?” Of course not – the woman just said the total was $21.45. It really was our lucky day! Free water, free food, free money! As we continued driving, I became aware of another reality overlapping with this one. I was on a modern pirate ship as we sailed away from the coast. The farther away we went, the more I worried about dying and being too far away to retrieve my belongings. I remembered that I could set up to ten warp points, though, so I kept resetting one warp point as we continued south of the shore. My crew mates discovered stitches on my arms just below the elbow. I explained that I cut them off in order to switch my arms with Nicole’s. I would probably have scars for the rest of my life. For some reason, my crew decided this was traitorous, so they dragged me toward the back of the boat. I was shoved overboard. As I flailed in the ocean, I returned to my former reality. I was in the same car, but my mom was driving instead of Nicole. Nicole and I moved from the middle seats to the back and sprawled out on top of a bunch of Chelsea’s stuffed animals. I kept lulling Nicole into sleep so I could carry her. It worked. She almost fell into a sea of stuffed animals behind the seat, but I caught her.

Meanwhile, I swam back to the ship in the pirate reality. I don’t know why I bothered to go back there, but it was the only place I knew to go. Once I was safe, I switched realities again. Nicole stirred. She looked like she had lost all sense of time and place. She wasn’t wearing a shirt, either. I told her about the overlapping realities. She seemed impressed. I tried to have my way with her, but she refused. I kept asking until she suggested something else. She turned me into a child and herself into a babysitter (although we were like small action figures instead of people). We were going to roleplay. While we entangled ourselves together under a thin blanket, I began to wonder where we were going. We had been driving in one direction for a while. I looked at my mom beyond the shadows of the blanket. She made eye contact with me in the rear view mirror. I saw an infinite stretch of interconnected highways in front of us. There were street signs all over the place, and no matter how far we drove, the dream was always able to fill in the space with the same amount of detail. It could continue indefinitely, I realized. We were in a dream. If nothing changed, my mom would keep driving forever! I tried to use my intent to bring us to WritersCube’s canvas void by car so could get out and try teleporting to his Monolith Gardens dreamscape. I didn’t want to bring the car along. Strangely, I lost some time here… That doesn’t happen very often. The next scene I remember was non-lucid, but there wasn’t a rough jump in the dream like there usually is.

I sensed that a police car would pull up beside us on the highway soon. I was lying across the area behind the back seat with all of Chelsea’s stuffed animals. I knew this wasn’t legal – for one, I didn’t have a seat belt on – so I tried to keep still to avoid drawing attention to myself. Sure enough, a cop car merged onto the highway right beside us. My mom ordered me to come sit in the middle seats once we passed the patrol car. She explained where we were going at last: to a mental hospital. I understood immediately that I had been tricked. I grasped at fleeting questions in my head, but I didn’t know how to respond. I would be kept in solitary confinement for my own good, she said.

“This will keep you from polluting your mind on the computer all day,” my mom continued. “Think of it like this: you’re decontaminating your mind and body until you can function like a normal person in society. You don’t need all that bacteria.” I wasn’t sure I agreed (if I even understood what she meant). It didn’t occur to me that I was free to say no. Rather, I wondered how I would finish school… We pulled onto the side of the road beneath an overpass where a bunch of other cars were parked. My mom and dad got out of the car (when did my dad show up?!) and started moving luggage to a man sitting on a white couch. My dad put all of Chelsea’s stuffed animals in a suitcase.

“Do you really need all of this?” he asked me.

“Those are Chelsea’s, not mine. Ask her.” I looked over and saw that the guy on the couch hand his hand on a zipper. I thought he was opening a suitcase to see what was inside. “Don’t screw with my stuff!” I yelled. Everyone stared at me, clearly prepared for me to attack one of them. I realized the guy was just zipping up a compartment in the bag that had been open. “Sorry. I thought you were going through my stuff.”

“Don’t you want these gloves?” my dad asked, showing me a pair of new winter gloves. I saw an old pair of gloves on top of one of my suitcases. “Those old gloves are falling apart… These are flame-resistant, too, so they won’t burn in the summer.” I quietly accepted the gloves. I still felt awkward because of my previous outburst. I walked over to a woman sitting in a chair. She had a computer monitor for a head. She asked if I had any questions about the hospital.

“Yeah, will I have internet access…?” I asked. No response. “Because… Well, that’s how I keep in touch with people… And I keep a dream journal online.” At least one good thing came of this, I realized. I would be able to devote most of my energy to dreaming. I had argued briefly with my mom about this in the car, but the more I thought about it, the less I felt like struggling. If everyone felt I belonged in a mental hospital, I wasn’t going to fight it… The computer woman still didn’t respond to my question, though! I scrolled through a list of frequently asked questions on her screen. It seemed the hospital made every effort to provide patients with internet access, so I was basically content. An IRC window popped up. I saw “Tande” at the top of the chat and thought Kelsey was running the hospital until I scrolled down and saw Nicole’s IRC username in the user list, too. “Oh… IRC just recognized me as Elita.” I closed the chat and walked away from the computer woman.

I heard a girl screaming behind a closed door. When I opened it, I saw a large rat jumping around in a garage. The girl was terrified of it. I grabbed a broom and said I would save her, but I had to wait for the rat to move away from the door so it wouldn’t see me. The rat chased her into the corner. Then, it came back toward me. I slammed the broom down on its back, pinning it to the ground. If I could just hold it there, I could kill it with something… It was a perfect hit, but this rat was tough; a broom wasn’t enough to bash the life out of it. The rat squirmed free of the broom. It went straight to its attacker, jumping onto my chest and sinking its teeth through my clothes. I swatted at it. As I awakened, I sat up frantically in bed to get away from the dream rat. I did this twice before I realized I was in a different reality.

I logged onto a Minecraft server and built a strange bridge. It went in loops and snaked around instead of following the most efficient path. I seemed to be limited to a fairly small area, but the buildings reached much higher into the sky than normally possible. After completing my bridge, I returned to the ground to prepare a new weapon. I wondered if I could make a crossbow… I tried a bunch of combinations of items with no luck. When I arranged five normal bows in the rough shape of a crossbow, I was able to make one. I sensed that, like in Ragnarok, I could refine the weapon if I found the necessary ore. I went looking for phracon to use on it. MadMonkey from Dreamviews walked up to me, and I thought he was going to kill me for my items, so I shot him three times and killed him. He didn’t lose anything, so he didn’t seem to mind. I wandered around a bit and got into a fight with another player. He had diamond armor, but I was still able to kill him. The problem came when his friends teamed up against me… They started using super powers – shooting beams of blue light at me, moving at twice normal speed, and absorbing my health, for example. I tried to activate my own super powers, but it seemed I didn’t have any yet. Lame! I decided I would log off before they killed me rather than lose all of my belongings. Unfortunately, I died just before I disconnected. I saw my stuff spill onto the ground before the client closed.

The dream jumped. I logged back onto the server in a safe area at the top of a gigantic skyscraper. I started jumping to increase my acrobatics skill (as though this was an Elder Scrolls game). I thought that if I leveled up my skills, I would be able to use super powers like the others. One of the guys I fought earlier mentioned my name in the chat.

“Nice fight!” I said to him. The people who killed me seemed friendly. The only one I didn’t get along with was the guy who attacked me in the first place.