Wow, what a headache. Lance was sure that something had gone wrong because he was still lying in a bed. He opened his eyes and the room swam in and out of focus for a moment before everything suddenly snapped into sharp detail. The ceiling looked wooden to him which caused him to doubt that he was still looking at the facility. But everything felt so real. He could feel every fold of the sheets under him, and the smell of oiled wood was rich in his nose. This was extremely strange, he was sure he was in the game, but everything felt natural like he was in his own body. If this was true, he thrilled at the thought, if this is real this was the dream. Millions of gamers had dreamed of a game they could live in. Lance had always held a small amount of sympathy for Cypher, the character in The Matrix who had betrayed Neo and asked to be plugged back in. He had wanted to be plugged into that system too. Now he was plugged in. It was time to see how deep the rabbit hole went.

The headache he had woken up with was fading fast. He tried to move his hand. It responded smoothly. He put it in front of his eyes and looked at it. That was his own hand and it looked perfect. He looked closer and could see individual hairs on his arm. If he was in the game, then the visuals were absolutely amazing.

A slightly squeaky voice spoke from near his right ear, "Hey, you awake?"

Lance spun his head in the direction of the voice and a small creature came into view. The being had red skin, a Buddha-like potbelly, horns on its bald head, and a tail that could only be described as a devil’s tail. In fact, the entire creature looked like something that might sit on someone’s right shoulder in a cartoon.

"Who... what are you?" Lance blurted.

"I am Cletus, your personal guide to the world of Fantasy Mainline.", it replied in an overly cheery voice. "I am a system that every player can access. My purpose is to answer questions about the game and to some extent guide you."

"Okay then, what is this place?" Lance asked Cletus.

"This is your offline home; warm, comfortable, safe, yours. You can return here any time you are not in combat. But no one else can come here."

"So, Cletus, how do I get into the game?"

"Simple; if you step over here, I can show you."

Lance’s headache was gone, and he felt completely normal, shoot, he felt amazing. 'Healthy' was the word that came to mind. In the real world, Lance had terrible food and environmental allergies, and since he was not very careful with his diet, he always felt a little sick. Here none of that seemed to exist–this felt like the best version of himself.

Lance climbed out of bed. Looking at himself, he noticed that he was dressed exactly as he had been in the real world. After a moment of wonder, he followed Cletus who flew on two tiny bat wings which were way too small to carry his rotund body. The center of one of the walls had four plaques. The first had a sword embossed on it, the second a wand, the third a dagger, and the last a staff.

"Okay, Lance, you start by choosing the archetype of your character. This is pretty normal stuff. Fighter, Mage, Thief, Healer. These grant you class-appropriate skills. But once you get into the game, you can shape your skills in any way you want. You grow your skills by simply doing the things you want to get good at. You will gain new abilities as you level up."

Lance had thought about this in advance and had decided he wanted to play a stealthy character. Stealth was fun, and he also felt that it would be easier to "turn the other cheek" as a thief than as a fighter. He wasn't really sure what that meant, and now that he thought about it, a thief normally did backstab damage, and that didn't seem really very Christian either. On the other hand, he had decided that magic was just part of this world, so playing a mage would be acceptable. Playing a healer would likely mean direct association with an in-game god, and that was not something Lance was willing to do. In the end thief won out.

Lance reached out and touched the dagger.

"Okay, another choice," Cletus said. "Thieves have different specializations."

"Gotcha," Lance said. "Hit me with the options."

"First, you got the super sneaky thief. This version gets extra skill levels in sneak. Then you have the extra stabby thief; they do more damage using weapons. Then you got my favorite thief. Normal sneak, normal damage, but you get traps instead. Freeze em, cook em, shock em, smash em thief is what I like to call them."

"Kind of a long name." Lance smiled at his assistant.

Cletus threw his hands up in the air, "Yah, I know, but I really like this kind, and it needs a cool name. The trappy thief just doesn't sound right. On the flip side, I missed the other half of the elements, so the name is not as long as it could be."

Lance liked the idea of being able to set traps, so he chose that one, which made Cletus very happy.

The wall changed and depicted a three-by-three grid of plaques with religious-looking symbols.

"Now you can choose your god," Cletus announced.

"I am not going to do that," Lance stated flatly.

"There are choices for everyone here. This is the standard alignment grid. Lawful good is at the top left, and chaotic evil is at the bottom right. I can answer questions about any of them."

"I am not interested in having a god. I already have one. His name is..." Lance said in a firm voice.

Lance found himself unable to say "Jesus". He tried again. "He is called…" Lance had tried to say Yahweh this time, but again he could not say the name. "Um, Cletus, are there names that you can’t say here?"

"Yup, the names of any god or goddess from the earth world are forbidden, as well as swear words from thirty-seven languages."

Lance pondered this. He appreciated that the game developers had excluded swear words but wondered at the names of gods being censored as well. "So, why are gods' names forbidden?"

"Religion shapes culture, and the devs wanted this new world to have a new culture. Besides that, most of the large conflicts back in the real world are based on religion; they wanted to be able to shape and create conflicts more directly as well. The gods in Fantasy Mainline will regularly interact with the players, so if you thought you knew what religious zeal looked like, you've got another think coming."

This felt wrong in so many ways to Lance. For now, he filed it away under things to ponder.

"Back to the gods. If you don't choose one, you are giving up on the secondary skills they offer. Most importantly, a basic self-heal spell."

Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

Lance shrugged.

"Okay, back to classes," Cletus brightened up, "When you have reached Level 10, you will be shown the four plaques again, and you can choose your secondary path." Cletus held up his hand to forestall Lance’s next question. "You can modify your class with skills from a second class or deepen your skills in your initial class. For example, if a thief chooses mage for his secondary class, she becomes a trickster, which would add several illusion spells to the already formidable hiding and fighting skills of the thief, not to mention some basic elemental attacks."

Lance had heard of this type of progression before. The four basic classes would fan out into 16 richer and deeper classes. "Okay, another question. How does it work if I die?"

"You mean when you die." The little devil looked at him with a twinkle in his eye. "For now, I am going to give you the broad strokes. Later when it matters, we can talk about the details. You only get three deaths."

"Wait, what?" Lance exclaimed, "Then I really die?"

"No, no. Give me a minute to finish a thought already. You get three deaths to complete the starter area. If you die a third time before completing the area, you are reset to level 1 and sent to a random server to start over."

"Okay, so the servers are not global?"

"No." Cletus answered, "This server we are on now is one of four for Northern California. If you get booted, they will move your body in a stasis state to a randomly chosen server. You might end up somewhere they don't even speak English. It could also take up to a week for the move to happen. The new server will have different AI as well, but yours truly," Cletus slapped his chest, "will be absolutely the same."

"Wow, that's a heavy penalty if you have friends and a lot of progress." Lance said, "Do I come back to where I died the first two times or what?"

"That's details, but yah, mostly back where you died if you are part of a party, but to your most recent registered inn otherwise. And yeah, a heavy penalty. We didn't want people to be jerks on the servers and just go berserk all the time. The developers wanted death to have meaning."

"Okay, so when do I start fighting stuff?"

Cletus brightened and began to say something.

"Oh, hang on." Lance broke in. "I almost forgot. Can I make a call?

"Sure, just think about calling someone on your contact list, and it will happen."

**********

Lance FaceTimed Joe.

Joe answered almost immediately and looked relieved to see Lance. "It is great to see you, Lance. How are things going so far?"

"Well," Lance replied, "really well and really poorly at the same time. I am calling you from my offline home, everything is super real and I am sure the game is going to be amazing. On the other hand, the game is filtering out the name of any god from the real world. Names like Jesus, Yahweh, Shiva, and Allah are just blanked out. Apparently, I can use them on the phone."

Joe's eyes widened. "I have been tracking the launch most of today and have been hearing some rumblings about this, but there is something more important you need to know about. There are reports of people coming out of the game after only a few hours and being unable to walk. Lance, they are wheeling them out of the facility in wheelchairs."

Lance frowned, he had heard of some beta testers claiming an inability to control their real body when they came out of the game. "But beta testers were in for weeks and they only had minor issues at worst, what changed?"

"Some people who were part of the beta and are now in the main game are reporting that the level of reality is significantly higher. People are guessing that this is causing a higher level of disability for people exiting now as opposed to the beta test. Some are saying that people should eject as soon as possible to save themselves. Others are saying that you may be able to stay as long as three days, maybe even a week before the changes will be irreversible."

"So, either an epic waste of money or a lifetime commitment to this place. Sounds like a problem either way," Lance said flatly. "is there any talk about the religious restrictions?"

"Yes," Pastor Joe replied, "There is certainly talk about that. A legal group is preparing to file an injunction soon. The argument they are making is this is not a game, but a place where people live. There is a ton of legal precedence that forbids landlords from denying their tenants the right to practice religion. Beyond that, the rights of prisoners to be accommodated in the way they wish to worship is already established law in the U.S. And there are a ton of inmates coming into the game.

"I am hoping you are ready to eject right now?" Joe continued a worried look on his face.

"Not today," Lance said thoughtfully, "I am not even into the real game yet and I really don't have much that is drawing me out right now. My parents are dead, Julie is dead, my life has descended into depression, and this change of scenery has actually done me a lot of good."

Joe looked hurt.

Lance quickly added, "Of course, I miss you and my other friends. But Joe, this feels like it could be a new life, a new chance to be happy and make a difference."

**********

After finishing the call Lance asked Cletus about getting into the game again.

"A couple of more things to cover before we drop you into the game." Cletus said, "First, let’s go over your starting skills as a thief. First, you can dual-wield and will start with two daggers. Second, you have the sneak skill which will make you nearly silent and harder to see. When you are against a background like a forest, you will be somewhat invisible, but in full daylight against a white wall, you will still be easily seen at lower levels."

"Makes sense, how do I activate sneak?"

Cletus looked around furtively, shrunk down, and began walking on the balls of his feet. He looked a little like Michael Jackson doing a moonwalk since he wasn’t actually moving. "Skills and abilities are intention-based, so when you want to be sneaky, just think about being sneaky and you will activate the skill. Moving faster than a normal walk or attacking anything will break the ability at lower levels. Like any skill, you will need to practice and use sneak to get better at it. Also, don’t be dumb about using this skill, you still need to hide behind things, okay?"

"Sure. So a healer could learn to sneak too?", Lance asked.

"Yup, there are no class limits on skills. If you wanted to learn how to fight using a shield you could, but you would stink at it to start."

"So is that it?"

"Nope, every class starts with one more skill; for the two arcane classes that means a spell; fighters get a shield bash ability or something like that depending on their specialization; for you, it means Set Trap, since you chose the awesomest option."

"Hmm," Lance said, "those sound like skills more than something like a spell."

"The skill to set a trap without any tools or materials is certainly not just a skill. There is a skill called Lay Trap that anyone can learn using the right materials, but your new ability is something special.

"To start you move to a spot where you want to set the trap and touch the surface, then think about what trap you want. You can choose any of the eight elements to set the trap with, and the best part is that you can set the trigger to be just about anything you can imagine."

Lance thought about this, "Okay, that is certainly more than just a normal skill. Anything I can imagine? How about when the moon is full and there is snow on the ground and someone walks over it?"

"Yup"

"When the 15th person crosses over the trap after one of the first three people to have crossed it has died?"

Cletus thought about it for a minute, "Depends, if the people were dying within 100 yards of the trap, then yes. Traps are not omniscient you know."

"Impressive", Lance responded. He considered for a moment, "I always think of the elements being fire, water, earth, and air. What are the elements here?"

"You nailed the first four, but we also have light, dark, order, and chaos," said Cletus. "Since you are so anti-god, borderline atheist I would say, I will mention that the elements are totally unrelated to the pantheon."

"Sounds like you have been asked that question before?", Lance queried.

"Sort of...", Cletus responded. "The Cletus AI controls all of the Cletai."

"Cletai?" Lance broke in incredulously. "Is that seriously the plural for Cletus?"

"Yup. Cletus is the Character Learning Education and Training Universal System, one huge artificial intelligence to learn and process, but individual memories exist for every Cletus. So, my core system is processing data from multiple players and their interactions with the world, but my personal copy is not seeing any of that. But if enough players experience the same thing then I will know about it and can tell you. I also have all of the rules memorized." He materialized the tome he had brought out earlier and tapped it for emphasis, then it imploded out of existence. "But the game itself, I'm just a little less clueless than you are right now. Except… avoid the northwest corner of the market in the town nearest to your starting location. Looks like someone knocked a pickle vendor’s stand over and it is a total mess."

Lance chuckled, "So can other players see you, or can I see their Cletai?"

"Nope, I only appear to you. If you party up with others I can combine to be one avatar with the knowledge of all of the players’ Cletai, but under normal circumstances, it is just you and me buddy."

"Okay, one last thing. Do you have any other forms you can take?"

Cletus looked at Lance sideways, “Maybe…”