If I had to guess, Eunuch was a player-run city judging by the name. I arrived at Eunuch a few hours later and was greeted with this message upon entering the gates of the city:

You have arrived at the Player-run city of Eunuch.

Your elapsed time in the game in real world hours is: 18 hours, 36 minutes. Please leave your capsule now to eat and take a break!

If you do not exit the game in five minutes, you will be booted from the servers and not allowed to log back in for a minimum of three hours. Sigma Studios keeps a running record of people who do not log out on time!

Fuck. I had to exit the game. I probably should have went and made some food, anyway.

I willed the menu to appear and I selected the logout button. The menu disappeared and a 20 second countdown began in front of me in large, embossed and bold letters. Someone ran up to me, however.

“Sir! Someone asked me to give this to you!” A small child, probably a street urchin by the looks of their clothes, held out a clean letter stamped with a wax seal to hold it closed.

“Wha-wha-what?” I stuttered out, my mind already relaxing. I wasn’t prepared to be interrupted. I took the letter from the kid and tossed it into my bag right before I logged out back to the desktop interface of the VRCapsule. I opened my eyes and popped the lid on the capsule and removed the attachments from the capsule that I had attached to me.

I stepped out of the capsule and it struck me: how did my mother stay inside the capsule for those super huge lengths of time? She would be in there for a couple days, sometimes three. A lot of times we had to force the emergency ejection on the capsule so we could pull her from the game and have her eat and drink something, as much as she resented us for it, she knew we meant well.

But now wasn’t the time for thoughts of my mother. She was probably sleeping in some bed in SwordGate right now, with no thoughts of me or her family now to distract her from running her company.

I walked into the kitchen and made myself a turkey sandwich with tomato on a plate with some salt and vinegar chips and sat down at the dining table, which I was accompanied by several empty dining chairs around the large table.

It reminded me of the day she told my father and I there was a chance of her being booted out of the game. I zoned out while chewing a bite of the sandwich and remembered exactly that entire day. I shook myself out of it and I ate my sandwich really quickly, almost inhaling it and hopped stepped to toss the paper plate away and had a knock at the door.

Now, I barely had friends in real life much less anyone who knew me after graduating high school, so I was curious about who it would be. Luckily we had a peephole on the door, so I looked through it.

I couldn’t exactly tell who it was since they were looking away from the door, and tried to decide if I wanted to open the door for this person or not. It could have been an acquaintance from school, but I hadn’t been to a school in quite a while due to graduating early. Stay in school and graduate early, kids.

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I decided to open the door. What was the harm in it anyway? The door swung inwards towards me and immediately the person turned around. The person turned around and turned out to be an old acquaintance from high school, as well I had thought earlier. The guy’s name was Kit. Fair enough guy, and nice enough. Tall, brown hair, blue eyes. Most generic human being you’ll ever see. Never gave me any trouble, hung out with him at school multiple times.

“Zack!” Kit exclaimed. He peered behind me. “Parents gone for the week or something?” I forgot that I had told nobody of my parents’ deaths.

“Uh, yeah, something like that.” I scratched the back of my head. “What’didja need, Kit?” I asked, mildly impatient to hop back into the world of SwordGate. I realized what I was thinking and told myself to relax, spending time with an actual person isn’t going to kill me. I could use a break anyway.

“Mind if I come in?” he asked.

“Oh, ah, no, please.” I stepped aside and he entered the house.

“Damn, man your house is big. Anyway, I came to ask you a question, which is, do you play SwordGate?”

“I actually just started today,” I paused. “I uh… it’s been an interesting time for me in the game, really.”

“Rats. I knew you had a capsule and just wanted to see if I could get a referral to net me a rare mount in the game. Ah well, if only I had shown up a bit sooner today.”

“Actually, I think I played overnight or something. I started, from what the game told me before I logged out a little bit ago, 18 hours ago, just about.” I shrugged.

“Holy-” He thought for a second as if recalling something. “Dude, the in-game maximum time is 5 hours. How did you get around it?”

“Uh, well, long story, but the game actually booted me when I went to Eunuch, or rather, stepped inside the gates and got the welcome message and stuff. I actually don’t know what’s letting me stay in the game that long, and I never actually looked up the time limits, so, I didn’t really care.” We stepped into the living room and sat on separate couches.

“Mind if I take a look at the pod?” I could see his eyes gleaming, but he was kind enough to ask permission.

“Nah, go ahead, I don’t care. I hate the thing anyway.”

“Dude, this is the second-to-latest generation of pod. How can you hate it?”

“Again, long story.” I sighed. “But yeah, feel free to poke around. I’ll get us some drinks.” I walked to the kitchen and grabbed two glasses out of the cup cupboard and grabbed some cola from the fridge and poured some into two glasses, and walked back to him in the living room.

He was inspecting something on the underside of the pod. The pod was slightly lifted up off of the ground, he had moved it himself.

“Dude, what’s this thing?” he gestured at something underneath the pod. I went over and lowered myself onto the floor on the opposite side of the pod.There was a bit of plastic, looking like an old USB flash drive sticking out of the center bottom of the pod, with a blinking red light, breaking the smoothness of the back/bottom of the pod’s pill-like exterior.

“Huh. I never noticed that there. To be honest I never actually looked at the backside of the pod. Let me get in and access the pod’s hard drive and see if I can see what it is.” I got up and in front of the pod and stepped inside and closed the lid so the desktop interface came up. It was a basic PC interface so it was a basic PC desktop really, with a taskbar at the bottom and everything. Some things will never change.

I opened up the Computer Explorer and saw the flash drive in there, next to the pod’s hard drive. This thing had twenty terabytes of space and had blazing fast read and write speeds upon further inspection. I backed out of inspecting it though and opened up the flash drive.

“I see the flash drive, I’m opening it…” Immediately I was prompted with just a blank text box in a window on the screen. “I think it’s passworded.”

“Do you know the password?” Kit asked me. I thought a bit and on a whim decided to try my first name, and it worked.

“Yeah, apparently. One second, let me browse through this thing.” I looked through the files. There were some file folders named “TIME”, “DATE”, “ACCOUNTS”, and a .txt file labeled “Zack.txt”. I opened the file named Zack.txt and it ballooned up into a normal text file, filled with gibberish, or what seemed to be gibberish.

However, at the top of the file on a separate line, was a date. The date was yesterday.