After finding an inn and have some personal fun Sam falls into an exhausted sleep. Next morning is a nice new day. Sam is feeling extremely comfortable lying in bed. However the predawn sunlight is just enough to keep her from falling back asleep. Stretching and squirming Sam finally decides to get up.

She feels two heavy lumps on her chest. Looking down Sam sees she still has breasts. Looking around the room Sam sees she is still in the inn room she rented from last night.

Thinking about everything she knows about the game she considers her current state. The game forces users to log off after eight hours of play. At seven hours a warning message appears. It repeats every 15 minutes. At eight hours, no matter the user situation, the game causes the user to pause then see a black screen then the user wakes up.  No exceptions.

Sam logged on yesterday in the early afternoon. Had several hours of questing, then a couple hours of personal play. Even if she fell asleep she should still have been logged out. Once logged out she would not be able to reenter the game for fifteen hours.

Since it’s early morning in game far more than eight hours have passed. Sam tries the system access motion. Still nothing. This could be bad.

She thinks of what to do next. She could panic. Run around naked outside, screaming wildly and talk madness. But she is really not in the mood for that this morning. 

Perhaps try to further hack the system. However she has not heard of and has not seen any bugs in the game. Very odd considering how new and revolutionary the technology is. With no bugs to exploit she doesn’t see how she can hack anything.

Really her only option is to ask for help from others.  But she is unsure of how to convince them she is trapped in game. Even if she can it’s even more uncertain if they can convince the police to come check on her.

Worst part of it all means her hacking will be exposed. Hopefully it will only result in being banned from the game and not criminal charges. 

Hmm. Maybe she can try to convince the game company that she was white hacking and was going to report this issue to them after she confirmed it was a problem.  She hasn’t really caused any harm to others and she just found it yesterday.  That might work.  Regardless she doesn’t want to starve to death even if it means giving up on playing.

With choice made Sam gets dressed. Which takes her some time. Without a guide putting on a bra is far more challenging than she ever thought it could be. She also decided to wear her armor which added even more time to the process. Perhaps it was silly to do so but in her current mental state she didn’t want to go outside without the additional protection the armor provided.

She was also procrastinating because she really didn’t want to ask others for help. It really went against her personality to do so. Sam has always only relied on herself and hated to trust others to do something. Not to mention the possible negative consequences it might have is further making her hesitate.

Finally ready she steps outside her room and heads toward the front of the inn. Entering the common room she sees that it is vacant. Being early morning she is not surprised by the sparse amount of people but it does seem odd that even the NPC inn keeper is gone.

Shrugging she heads outside of the inn into the nice bluish grey sunshine. Blue? The game yesterday had a normal colored sun. Looking up Sam sees the cause of the odd illumination. A massive multi-circle glowing structure stretching across the sky.

Covered in giant cryptic runes, inter woven circles, slowly turning and glowing an ominous blue circle looms overhead. She guesses it’s a huge magic circle but has no idea what it is for.  She also notices it’s not morning but still night time. The magic circle is putting out enough light to mimic predawn.

After staring for a few moments Sam looks around to see what other players are doing. Most are just staring at the magical circle but a few are chatting or obviously just waiting around for something to happen.

Sam walks over to one group chatting and asks, “I just logged on and saw the magical sky circle. Do any of you have any idea what is going on?”

“No idea. It appeared a while ago and other than looking impressive hasn’t done much. Figured it for some in game event that is about to happen.” One says.

Another one, “This is so exciting. So far there have just been static quests.  Everyone has been looking forward to first server wide events.”

“Server wide events? Has there been an announcement?” Sam asks.

“No. No announcement that I know about but every game has big server wide events to draw people in right?”

“Where’d all the NPC’s go?” Sam again asks.

“NPC’s?”

“Look around I don’t see any.” Sam says.

“That’s odd, didn’t even know they disappeared. With the sky thing going on.”

On a hunch Sam asks, “Have you tried logging out?”

“No, why would I?”

“Can you try to just access the system menu please?”

“Sure. Don’t know why you can’t just try yourself. But… what the hell?” The other user tries the system access motion a couple times. Each time getting more panicked.

“What the hell is going on? Hey you try it too” One user asks his companion.

“I can’t access the menu either.” Looking at Sam, “What is going on?”

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“I don’t know either, I just noticed the NPC’s and menu. Hopefully just a glitch?” Sam says.

Sam leaves the now panicking group as she has already discarded the idea of naked screaming madness option. She quickly looks around the beginning village to see if there is anything else odd. Other than missing NPC villagers she finds all the mob spawns are gone as well. Just the players, game world and giant sky magic circle are left.

Being well read Sam is pretty sure this is trapped in game and it becomes death game like scenario. Well if one considers reading manga and web novels as well read at any rate. Even if she is wrong she thinks it best to try to get out of the game any way she can.

She decides to see what happens with the one bug she knows about it is activated.  First looking at the divine job that is in an error state.

lv ??

Asdjj 4823jsd

&*(HJK 2134% $^&DFSA

**???#?? GHjjk sdcv &*&*(#$

Not much happens. So she equips the job and makes it active. Waiting five minutes and still nothing. This does not seem to be a productive use of her remaining time. She had hoped it might cause a game crash or forced log out. In fact this is the very reason she didn’t try equipping it as she wanted to remain anonymous and causing the game server to crash is a great way to not do that.

Regardless she needs a way out of this potential death game. She likes living and even in games never chooses the ironman mode. More opting for save scumming to get 100% completion rates or at least the most optimal paths through games. Yes death game really is the opposite of things she wants to do.

Think brain think. In a game. On a hacked character account. Which uses lucid dreams. Which she couldn’t log out yesterday because of her own lucid dream. Wait she is still in her own lucid dream. That means she might still have some control.

She remembers back to her preteen years. She use to have horrid night terrors. Unable to wake, usually unable to run or move, experiencing the worst events imaginable. Until it became too much then screaming in terror as she wakes. Of course then being unable to go back to sleep for hours, sometimes days at a time.

This is when she started to learn about lucid dreams. She eventually found a way to autosuggest to herself a trigger to wake up before a night terror happened. Often in dreams certain objects don’t work like they do in real life. Try to read a book it’s all garbled. Flick a light switch and no lights come on. Try a door it doesn’t open or opens the wrong way.

Using a light switch she made it so it always appeared in her dreams. If the lights worked then it was a normal dream and she could stay a sleep.  If she flicked the switch and the lights didn’t come on she knew a nightmare or worse was next so she would force herself to wake.

She wakes up with no nightmare experienced then can go right back to sleep. Sam has used it hundreds of times since then and it always wakes her up instantly. She has never experienced a nightmare or night terror since then either. Maybe she can use it to get out of this real life nightmare.

Looking up Sam notices the magic circle has changed while she was thinking of a way out of this game. The circle is brighter and something is happening in the middle of it. A thin blue line goes from one inner edge of the circle to the other inner edge. After it bisects the circles it opens like a giant cat’s iris.

Inside is blackness. No there are some kind of lights in there. Almost like looking at space on a very dark night. However the lights are not stars. Similar but also different. Sam can’t really understand how they are different but on some instinctual level knows those lights are alive and watching the players on the ground.

Quickly finding a wooden board she uses her dagger to carve a 5”x 3” vertical rectangle. Then carves a 1” x .5” smaller rectangle on the inside. She pops out the internal rectangle and puts it back into the hole it just came from at a 45 degree angle. 

One poorly crafted light switch made. Since no light should turn on when used it should mimic her wake up trigger. She focuses on waking up. On not wanting to be in this dream anymore. Flick. The world around her blurs a bit.

She notices the living lights in the circle are done just watching. They begin to extend an uncountable number of blue lines from them towards the ground. Flick. The world again blurs and fades a bit this time.

The blue lines extend toward the ground and start chasing people. Somehow the players unconsciously know they don’t want to be touched by them and run away. Flick. The world fades completely for a moment before coming back into focus.

Its working she thinks. Several people fail at avoiding the blue lines and scream in agony as they are touched by them before disappearing. Sam notices a blue line headed for her. Flick. The world fades and she can make out a helmet and her rooms ceiling before the game world fades back in. 

The blue line is about to touch her. Flick. The game world again fades but this time she hears something. ~Aww don’t leave we were just getting to the good part. Besides you know you liked it as much as I did~ [What the hell] ~Tee-hee~ the game world fades back in and Sam is hit by the blue line of light.