Mark woke up his head felt like it was full of cotton wool and his eyes were stuck together. He moved his hand to clear his eyes and ran into an obstruction he felt his way around the obstruction and managed to get his eyes cleared after a few moments. What he saw shocked him to his core. It looked like he and his party and all the villages where they stayed were chained to benches and oars were sitting in front of them.

What he saw started his memory of what happened to his friends and himself long-time players of RPG games, VR games and anything else they could play together and logged into a new MMORPG called Reason.

They did the noob thing rats, messages, parcels and trees until they reached level 5, when the mayor of the village where they started approach them and said “There’s a little dungeon outside a little village about 3 km from here, the dungeon is acting strangely and I want you to go there and investigate.” The party agreed and went off to the dungeon and worked their way through it in record time as they were old pros who had crawled dungeons hundreds of times.

When they finished, they went to the little village and stayed in the local in for the night. It was after midnight when a dreadful noise awoke them all from sleep and they and the villages all charged out the houses to see what had happened. The first people out were caught in nets and silently fell to the ground anybody who missed getting caught in the net was clubbed to the ground as well.

When they awoke, they were all chained together in a coffle and additional chains were on their hands and if you’re a magic user those chains had runes to stop you using your magic. They were pushed up into wagons and chained to the walls of the wagons. They were in these wagons for a week and fed on gruel and water and allowed out a couple of times a day.

They were unchained dragged out the wagons and lined up in front of a human, he was richly dressed and likely a noble, and unhappy noble. “Women, I didn’t want women I wanted big healthy men.”

The chief slaver pulled out a document and said “Your order didn’t specify men only so you  are getting what you ordered and please pay for the delivery so we can get on our way.”

The noble threw a bag at the slaver as the feet and turning to a man dressed like a mage he said “get on with it.”

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they were led up a ramp to a boat and lined up again, the mage did something and they all slumped unconscious.

As Mark got over the shock he looked around and saw there were two guards walking up and down the center of the boat they were chained and what looked like a zombie standing behind a kettle drum. The same man who paid the slavers came down the stairs and commenced to speak “Welcome to your new home, you will be staying here for the rest of your life’s, the only way of those benches is to die. You will be fed twice a day and given water when it is deemed necessary. If you won’t work you won’t be fed and you will be beaten. There is only one word in your language anymore and that word is PULL.”

“We are leaving soon so prepare yourselves.”

He walked up the stairs and left; Mark heard the mooring ropes being pulled off and someone pushing the boat away from the wharf, suddenly the zombie started beating the kettle drum and the guards screamed “Pull, pull, pull.”

That was the life for the next three weeks, the back of the head of the person in front of you and the beat of the drum, when the beach stopped you stopped when the beat commenced used commenced failing to do that would get you one of the guards beating you with a stick.

The food was terrible that Mark was a paladin and it didn’t affect him much, Stacey was the rogue and she seemed to be getting thinner and thinner as was Jenny the mage. Brad the barbarian seemed to be getting stronger and stronger regular feeding even if it was not very good is more they ever had in his childhood.

One day Stacey seemed to collapse but as the guard came over to check on her she jumped up and grabbed his dagger and thrust it into these Adam’s apple, she thrusted so hard that severed his spine as well. As he collapsed Stacey grabbed the keys hanging from his belt, Brad grabbed the other guard as he ran past and using the slack in the chains and bashed the other guard on the head then twisting it broke the guards neck.

Mark yelled quietly “keep rowing, if we stop the crew will come down here to find out what’s wrong point.” “Well get you through the chains and then will rush them. Stacey went to work unlocking each row and quietly pulling the chains out, Mark grabbed the guard’s sword and his armor and Brad did the same for the other guard.

The rowing stopped and the people following Brad and Mark rushed up the stairs and burst onto the deck Mark killed the first man in the way. Brad and Mark continued down the deck hacking at anybody who in their way. The rest of the people grabbed whatever thing they could find as a weapon spread out belting the daylights out of anyone they could get near.

Mark charged into the cabin and killed the nobleman and by the lack of sounds, it sounded like the fight was over. Galley slaves are not happy people not one of the people on deck survived.

Mark popped out of the cabin and said “What do we do now?” “Become pirates”, “Clean the decks of this offal”, “become merchants”, “sell the ship”.