Rex was hesitant, unsure what to even think. Everything would feel real if he just put these in his ears? Rex thought.

"AH YES, MY FRIEND, YOU HAVE JUST MADE HISTORY," Gideon said. Rex looked over and saw a Filipino boy passed out in his chair two rows behind him, with the small devices in his ears.

Gideon spoke again, "SEE, KIDS, THERE'S NOTHING TO BE SCARED OF. THESE DEVICES HAVE BEEN TESTED METICULOUSLY, AND I PROMISE NO PROBLEMS WILL OCCUR DURING YOUR TIME OF USE." After Gideon spoke, Rex saw many more kids taking the devices and putting them in their ears. He watched as, the second the devices were in, they passed out cold. Rex looked down at the briefcase again.

He took the devices and held them between his thumb and index finger in both hands. He shook as he brought them up to his ears and hovered them in front of the canal. Before inserting them, he looked to the people in the chairs directly on either side of him; both were out cold. They weren't... dead, were they? Rex swallowed his doubt and put the devices in his ears.

In an instant, everything went dark. A surrounding infinite darkness was cut through by a small light emanating from an object in front of him. He still felt the chair under him as he sat, but there was nothing there. The small object was a loading bar, not made out of pixels on a screen, but a real-life loading bar reading "CALIBRATING." The text above it quickly cycled from "LOADING WORLD MAP" to "LOADING TEXTURES," then "LOAD COMPLETE." Rex watched as the loading bar disappeared and a title screen reading "MANIA" appeared six feet ahead and above him. Suddenly, the darkness dissipated, and expanding out from Rex's feet, a world formed.

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He was standing atop a stone pillar on a small island. Rex stood there, befuddled at the insanity of the world surrounding him. He quickly sprinted to the edge of the stone pillar and looked down to see he was surrounded by water. He gazed into the distance and could make out what looked like islands. It was all so unreal. It was, in fact, exactly how Gideon described it to the crowd; everything felt so real. Rex could not make out reality from this supposed game he was in.

"What do I do first?" Rex reached his hand and grabbed at the thin air around his back. "No sword; no armor?" Rex said to himself. "What kind of game spawns you in the middle of nowhere with no clear objective and no gear of any kind?" Rex asked himself. He noticed a set of stairs winding down the pillar onto the dirt island below. He descended the stairs carefully and planted his two feet on dense dirt before noticing a small rowboat drifting alongside the island, connected to it by a small rope tied around a post dug into the ground.

"Oh yea, a boat!" Rex said. He walked to the small post and began untying it when he noticed something wrong with his hand. Implanted on the top of his hand was a small blue marble.

"What the hell!" Rex gasped as he tried to dig it out of his hand to no avail. "What the hell is this thing even for, and why is it in my hand?" Rex kept his eyes trained on the marble while he finished untying the rope from the post and finally got inside the small rowboat and kicked off from the island.

The waters were dark with a slight green tint, small waves hitting underneath his boat and rocking it back and forth. As Rex felt the sway of the boat, he thought, how is something like this even possible? He closely examined his surroundings and found no defects, no problems with the world around him. The water felt like water and looked the same. He didn't feel any different either. He put his hand to his chest and felt his heartbeat was the same. How did Gideon recreate reality so closely?

"I can't believe it. To think I'm still in that conference room just passed out," Rex said to himself. Suddenly, he felt a vibration on his hand.