“Cameron, open up! You were supposed to meet us an hour ago. Get off your stupid computer and get out here!” His uncle Jimmy shouted as he pounded on the trailer door.

Cameron was in no mood to do what his uncle had bullied him into agreeing to do. He was not the outdoor type and if his uncle and his redneck friends wanted to go hunting, they could do it just fine without his help. It’s not like they really wanted him around, and Cameron definitely didn’t want to be made fun of by them all weekend. His uncle never wanted anything to do with him before, calling him a wimp for wanting to play games instead of trying out for sports.

Cameron tuned out the sound of the door pounding, placing his headset on while he logged into War and Crafting. The MMORPG had been his life since he had been given his computer three years ago. His mother’s boyfriend at the time had been of her rare, nicer boyfriends and even had a good job.

Of course, his mom blew the relationship before too long and that boyfriend disappeared. While he was still around, Cameron found out the guy had been a gamer and was kind enough to give Cameron one of his older PC’s. The machine wasn’t very good but War and Crafting (WAC) didn’t need super high specs to play. A different loading screen appeared instead of the usual one that showed his various toons. This new screen had been there for almost a week, and it was the worst thing that had ever happened to him.

Notice to all our loyal gamers. War and Crafting will be permanently shutting down all servers at the end of the week. Life is changing for us all and we no longer have the subscription base to justify keeping the servers up. Thank you for all your many years of support. Hopefully, some of the gaming skills that you have acquired while playing War and Crafting will be of help to you within our newly Upgraded world. It’s time to finally do in real life what our game allowed you to do in the digital. Be heroes, protect the weak, and grow in power.

This was it, the moment he had dreaded for the last few months, ever since the Upgrade. Yeah sure, the world had changed into an almost video game-like system, but Cameron didn’t care. It was still the real world and he didn’t like it. He wanted to lose himself again in WAC, becoming a wizard or rogue, the character didn’t matter, he only cared that it took him away from his crappy life and even crappier family.

The guild he was a part of had been at the pinnacle of the leader boards for years, now, they and all the others were a shadow of their former glory. Where they once had a dozen raid and PVP group going twenty-four hours a day, now he would be lucky to find a simple party of five guildies to run a normal dungeon.

One by one, his friends had logged off, never to return. Some, especially the first ones to leave, left long and heartfelt messages telling the guild why they were leaving and wishing everyone luck. There was the usual scramble to see who would inherit their gold and gear, but even the allure of getting the loot that a top tier player had gathered over the years had begun to wane.

Today, sadly, was the first day that his friend's list showed zero people active. Today, he was the last remaining member of the once-mighty Light Show guild. All their accomplishments, all the records, all the prestige he had found in this digital world was for nothing. After perusing the guild bank, which was now overflowing with gear and loot, Cameron did one more thing.

/gdisband

/deletechar

He disbanded his guild and deleted his high-level character, the one that he had created with his mom’s boyfriend so long ago. The character that represented the first time that he had connected with a father figure was gone, just as the man that had once dated his mother was gone.

It wasn’t that he was some perfect man, just the opposite, but he was the one adult that had ever shown an interest in what Cameron enjoyed. His mom would shout about the money that he wasted on the games, while the other men that came sniffing around her would either pretend to be his “buddy” or would insult him.

Mom had been gone since last night and who knew when she would show back up. He had twenty-one hours remaining until War and Crafting was gone for good. He intended to play for as many of those hours as he could. Cameron started by deleting all his alts, he wanted to begin with a fresh character and try to recapture the fun of starting from scratch. He deleted all his loot, all the heirloom upgrades, everything that he had gathered over the years. The game was going to do it less than a day, he would beat them to it.

At the character creation screen, he perused his options. Over the years, new races had been added to the game, each expansion coming up with more and more fantastical ones. He considered the Mechaork, an orc subtype that had been augmented by warlock engineering, a race he had worked for over 200 hours to unlock.

But no, his last hurrah shouldn’t be a new race, it should be one of the originals, it should be the first he ever started with. Cameron selected a human warrior. It was his first character type, one that he abandoned when he found out that he really didn’t like playing a tank, not to mention that most of the newer races made for a more optimal tank build than humans. Min-maxing wasn’t the purpose of this final journey, fun was.

The starting cinematic began, and like the first time he ever played, he watched every minute of it, not skipping through to get into the game faster. The camera zoomed over devastated wastelands of the high-level zone, into the dark and spooky undead territory featuring the Tower of Ikbose raid, the first raid he ever went on. Continuing on, the camera swept over the open prairie and the giant beasts roaming it, waiting for a brave hunter to bring them down.

Over the forest, he flew on until, off in the distance, he spotted a familiar small chapel placed in a clearing. It was the Temple of Conflict and Peace, the starting area for the human race. Just as the camera began to zoom in on his character, a muscle-bound human wearing the ripped and dirty starting clothes and wielding a wooden sword, the connection interrupted, and he was kicked from the game.

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At first, he thought the game had shut down early, but then reality set in, it must have been his mom forgetting to pay the internet bill again. They were on some state assistance program that gave them an internet connection for a ridiculously cheap price, but sometimes his mom thought it was more important to have another bottle of vodka or a couple of packs of smokes instead.

Eventually, she’d pony up the money to get in reinstated, but that wouldn’t be until she wanted to get on a dating app or something. There was always the remote chance something could just have been disconnected, so Cameron began to trace the ethernet cable back to the router, looking for any problems.

His efforts were interrupted when the trailer began to shake. Had his uncle done that? Had he somehow buffed his strength with an upgrade skill and was shaking the trailer to get him off the computer? No this was more of a constant rolling motion, like what he thought an earthquake would feel like, not that he had ever been in one.

“Cameron, get out of there! Somethings happening, get out of there, you need to run!” Uncle Jimmy shouted

“It’s just an earthquake or something,” Cameron told himself. Ignoring the screams in the distance and his uncle’s shouts. They rented their place in the less than savory Cozy Cottage Trailer Park and there was always some loser that lived there shouting at someone. Eventually, the police would arrive and make them shut up, or haul someone off to jail. Cameron hated this place and his life, wishing he could log into WAC for one final run.

“Cameron keep yourself locked in and hide, I’ll get some help and come back to get you,” his uncle whispered through the door.

That was weird, his uncle thought of himself as some manly man, but just now he had sounded terrified. Now Cameron was starting to worry, he double-checked that all the doors were locked and made sure all the windows on the trailer were also latched down. He already had the blinds closed, except for the one in the kitchen that was kind of broken and would only go down halfway.

Just as he finished securing everything up, the ground shook even more violently, and the front of the trailer tilted down. Something slammed in the back of the trailer, crushing the walls in as Cameron fell onto the sofa in the front room. As Cameron tried to get up, the trailer went completely vertical and junk from the other rooms came crashed into him, pinning him up against the living room window.

Thankfully, the first thing that hit him was one of the big seat cushions from the couch. Other stuff piled on, keeping him pinned but not hurting him. He had a little trouble breathing from the pressure but felt he would be able to wiggle free on his own. Trying to push the cushion back enough to climb up proved to be a mistake as a fresh avalanche of junk landed on him. He needed to think this through. His plans were interrupted by a scream from outside.

While his left arm remained pinned to his side, his right arm was out, and he was able to push the blinds open a crack to see outside. The entire trailer park had changed! The whole place was now inside an underground cavern, the various trailers were all stacked vertically like pillars holding up the roof of the cavern.

Cameron heard screaming coming from the fat lady across the lot, the one that wore the spandex pants that she really shouldn’t have. She must have been outside on their deck when the earthquake happened. Her leg was pinned to the ground by a sharp piece of the deck railing and blood was everywhere.

Cameron tied to find a way out of his predicament so he could go and help her, someone needed to stop the bleeding and call 911. Hopefully, his uncle had made it out and would be getting help. The lady’s elderly husband had heard the scream and knocked out the bathroom window so he could get out of their trailer.

The old man was holding an old wooden baseball bat and used it to push out the sharp bits of glass before climbing out. Once on the ground, he tried to wrap a towel around his wife’s leg, but it didn’t look like it was doing too much. She kept screaming and the towel was soaking through with blood as Cameron watched helplessly.

Her screaming became even more shrill as she beat on her husband’s shoulder and pointed off into the distance. Cameron couldn’t see where she was pointing but he could see the husband begin to back away, holding up the bat and calling for help. As the husband joined in the shouting, something crawled past the wreckage of the trailer.

It was a kind of giant bug, six feet long with a pair of sharp mandibles. Cameron recognized the creature from science class, but the size was more like something you would find inside a video game. It was a giant centipede, a deadly and efficient hunter, but one that shouldn’t grow past a foot or so long.

The centipede approached, rearing up and lashing forward with several of its sharpened legs. In response, the husband swung the bat he was holding. Even though the screaming, Cameron could hear the dull thunk of the wood bat hitting the hard shell of the centipede. The giant arthropod wasn’t seriously injured by the blow, its exoskeleton proving too dense for the bat to crack open.

A pair of legs thrust forward, impaling the man before the monster scurried out of Cameron’s line of sight, dragging its meal with it. The woman stopped screaming, looking on in shock as another figure emerged from the darkened cavern the trailer park now found itself in.

Standing at over nine feet tall, the giant man-like creature reached down and plucked the woman off the wooden deck she had impaled herself upon. After flicking her in the head to knock the woman unconscious, the giant walked deeper into the cavern, swatting at another giant centipede that kept trying to nip at the unconscious woman. The giant scolded the centipede like a pet before patting it on the head and motioning toward the other trailers. With surprising quickness, the centipede entered the couple’s trailer through the broken window. Cameron could hear it smashing through debris as it sought more prey.

His gamer instincts kicked in at that point, recognizing the giant man as some kind of troglodyte that had skill in controlling the giant arthropods that were even now scouring the trailer park for more victims. The trogg was undoubtedly a hunter type class, able to fight with his pets. While he could think of a dozen ways of defeating this type of creature, Cameron was not the hero he played in his games and had no way of actually using his gaming knowledge for something useful.

For the first time, Cameron began to regret not jumping into creating a build for himself once the Upgrade occurred. All he could do was watch as the giant centipedes slowly made their way through the trailer park, breaking into trailers and occasionally finding victims inside, victims just like him.

While a few had formed off and on since the day the Upgrade started, lairs, like the Troglodyte one that formed under the Cozy Cottage Trailer Park, really exploded in number when the dungeons went live. While less destructive than a dungeon, these smaller lairs can become serious problems if left unchecked.

Given an ample supply of food, the creatures of a lair will increase in number, spreading over the area around their home in their neverending search for more prey. The troglodyte lair that emerged under Cameron’s home was a relatively small one. Of course, if you’re unprepared like Cameron and the residents of the trailer park, a small lair can be a deadly affair.

Cameron represents a strange subtype of gamer that emerged right after the Upgrade, ones that still preferred their digital adventures to the ones now available in the real world. So immersed in their games of choice, these gamers lived in a bubble, refusing to access their personal interface and going on with their lives as they had always done. While this represented a tiny fraction of the gamer population, in the public at large, many refused to acknowledge what was happening. Once the new world slapped them in the face, most of these willfully ignorant people came around...