After spending hours reading through the game menu system to refresh myself on what options I had, I finally crashed at about 4 AM.

I woke up a bit after 10, quickly checking out my tower room to assure myself it hadn't all been a dream. Everything was still there. In fact, I noticed there were now a few books on the once-empty shelves. One shelf had 5 books labeled "Light Magic" vol. 1-5, and another had the first two volumes of Nature Magic. Looking them over, it seemed that each contained 10 spells, and that only the first one of each book could be currently researched - I couldn't even read the names of the other spells they contained.

Another shelf had a large book of "Arcane" spells - those that did not require a color aspect, and any of the first 5 of those could be researched. There was also a shelf with small booklets describing in detail the special abilities I had chosen.

Going back to the table and opening menus, I saw that I had a Population of 1/16 with a capacity of 5/50 - which was somewhat confusing, as I seemed to only have 1 elf on hand. As I had glanced at before, under "units", I saw only my own name "Frank Santos", and my stats were "1" in everything except Mana, which was 5, with 3 "unlimited" item/artifact slots (which were empty). But I was still only a level 1 unit, so hopefully I could become a lot stronger. The good surprise in that was that I had a 1 in magic attack, which meant I had a chance to shoot something at range - but if I did, I wouldn't have enough mana left to cast a spell.

Obviously, I wasn't going to be going for any combat! From what I could tell, just one hit from anything the game would register as damage would be enough to kill me!

With that in mind, I gathered up my elf and went out to talk to the neighbors.

Those neighbors I found at home seemed friendly enough, and some of the local kids were really impressed to see an elf. I gave them my "Elven Farmstead" game story, letting them know they'd probably see more little elves working on my land. The folks I met mostly had crafting-based "games", Cooking and Weaving, for example, but Marty Richards had Auto Design, and was already in the garage tinkering with his old Suburban. Vera Jones had a Recycle game, and could compress nearly any recyclable waste material into small, compact disks with just a touch.

I also learned that local schools and many workplaces had closed for an "adjustment day", to basically find out what the hell was going on, and what (if anything) people could or should do about it. I found out that I was still considered "home" for purposes of mana generation so long as I stayed within reasonable distance of my house - it "felt" like I had at lease a mile of leash.

At my final stop, though, I met with Dan Burkle, who was just standing in his yard when I first saw him, but as I approached he started doing a running jump/kick/punch combo into the air, ending with a summersault thrust of some kind. He then just stood up and relaxed. Seeing me, he waved "Hi Frank! Don't mind me - I got something they call a "clicker" ability, and I should be able to get points and advance if I do that dumb stunt every 15 min or so. Sadly, more frequently doesn't give me anything."

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

So I explained my Elven Farmstead to him and left him to it. He hadn't wanted to give me details about his game, so it might be a good one, I thought.

Back on the internet, I found out that "Game Day" was based around 10:36 PM (my West Coast time), and all game effects which were purely time-based seemed to use that as the standard. Of course, the article said, many games were based around sunset, sunrise, midnight, or noon, and those all used local time.

The internet also now featured large ad campaigns for people who could heal, and people who could detect lies. I COULD heal (once a day) and it was tempting, but I didn't want to attract than much attention. Later on, I'd have to see if I could pass it off as an elven herbal effect.

My status screen Population counter was going up by 1 every approximate 3 hours, I determined, and I was hoping I'd see the result when it hit (1/20).

In other internet news, I saw that thefts and carjackings were way up, that many track and field records were being broken, and that science still would barely admit anything was even happening, let alone having any clue about what was causing it all. If it weren't for effects like on my house or Vera's Recycle power (both clearly physically real), they'd be trying to pass it off as mass hallucination.

Religions were obviously going to be a BIG problem - jihads, 2nd comings, and Armageddon stories were everywhere - a couple of people could even seemingly walk on water. Mystics and shaman of every sort were coming out of the woodwork, most looking for donations, but some seemed to have special powers. All of them hated it when laymen referred to their abilities as "game powers".

Many actual mainstream gamers were initially elated, many of them got entirely new sets of "physical stats", but most were then devastated to find they couldn't seem to get any XP that would lead to more levels or improvements. Few were talking, but one prison inmate who killed a fellow prisoner in a "death match" trying to get XP ended up ranking loudly at everyone about how his "glorious victory" had only netted him ONE XP, out of 1000 needed to advance to level 2. Many people sighed in relief at this news - obviously killing humans was NOT an effective way to level up.

Training wasn't much better - a full 8-hour day of training gave about the same result - 0.1% of what was needed to advance. Crafting people did better, if they had the materials they could gain over 1% in an 8-hour day. Indirect builders did even better, but it was hard to quantify, since the PERSON wasn't usually improved along with the infrastructure level of their game.

Time came, and I found that my Population went from 1/19 to 2/19, and I now had a second worker to assign - which I also put into Housing/recruit, so that I wouldn't be limited to 5 "worker elves" as a max. And at 10:36, my first mana entered my Mana Vault, which also opened up an option to convert mana to gold at a 1 to 1 ratio due to my chosen special ability (no need - I want my mana!).

Looking further into my menus, I saw that my house was at 8/10 "food storage" and 1/day was being used, so that was another thing to monitor. There was also a tax rate tab with a tax revenue indicator next to it - but they were both currently at zero and couldn't be changed. Morale was also there, sitting on Neutral.

Time for bed.