The spider expanded as it squeezed out of the toilet hole. This one was definitely bigger than the other had been. About the size of an Italian mastiff. The spider's multi-faceted eyes circled and glowed with an eery greenish light.

You have been restrained by Baby Giant Spider's Paralysis Stare.

The words flashed quickly at the bottom of the screen in the space that the default chat window would be.

I felt all parts of my body just become solidly rigid and I lost feeling to those limbs. I couldn't feel my fingers. I couldn't feel my toes. Vertigo hit as I realised my head felt like it was just floating in the air without any substance beneath.

The spider slowly crawled closer. All the furry limbs moved forward one leg at a time. Panic rose within me. I saw that my circular minimap flashed with a red ring around it, showing the spider as a red dot. Above the spider's head was the name Guilty Baby Giant Spider. The difference between its name and the alert of the petrification gave me a momentary pause from the panic.

Guilty? Why would a creature be guilty? Did that make it intelligent in some way? While I wondered that, the spider turned around sticking its butt end out and began spinning the spider silk around my frozen form. A fast-spinning splurt of sticky silk thread inexplicably wound around my body without the spider having to move from where it stood.

A new line added itself to the little chat window.

You have been paralyzed by Baby Giant Spider silk. 2 minutes until full petrification.

The spinning web of silk grew around my body. I could see it in the peripheral of my vision, getting wider and whiter around my form. I could not actually feel it from the restraint. It was like I was already completely paralyzed.

In my minimap, a blue dot hurtled down the hallway.

"Porra! Oh no you fucking don't!" Suze lunged past, in her hands were two of the metal bars that had been in our rooms. The hangers on them clattered as they twirled around from the whirling movements of their bearer.

The spider lifted its legs and the eyes began to shift a little, the greenish glow about to get brighter.

I shouted, "Don't look at its eyes." and was delighted to know that I could actually talk and make sounds, even though the fact I couldn't move my lips made it almost unintelligible. More like, "Doooo ooo aaaa iii eeeyeee"

"What?" Suze asked.

"No! Eyes! Bad!" I tried and this time it sounded almost like the words. "Oooo eeye aaa."

But the distraction was enough that Suze looked back in consternation just as the greenish glow of the spider's eyes hit its apex.

You have already been hit by Baby Giant Spider's Paralysis Stare. Its duration has increased by 5 minutes. Less than 2 minutes until full petrification.

Suze smashed one of the bars down, the hangers slid along its length and flew off as she swung. She then smashed the other. One hanger just pinged off an eyeball and went flying. Back and forth she connected smashing the spider's head into smithereens. From absolutely nowhere or maybe from Suze herself, the sound of a vaguely 1960s movie musical score faded in. It was then that she began singing very loudly, "Spin your wheels. Then you're gonna know how it feeeeels to spin out!"

Suze lifted both arms above her head, they vibrated and shook the bars. Then both arms wooshed down as she drummed onto the skull of the spider until it splattered out covering everything in the room. The music faded out as if someone turned a volume knob way down into nothing.

Guilty Baby Giant Spider has died.

Suze stood over the spider remains, breathing heavy and holding the two metal bars out. She looked crazed. Her shoulders raised up and down.

Even though it was dead, I still was unable to feel anything in my body so I had some time to look at my HUD. Even though the spider's corpse showed up as an X -- as in X it's dead -- the minimap edge still flashed red. What did that mean? It had been so long since I used a default user interface in any game I played that I barely could remember how things worked.

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"Suze!" I said. Which sounded more like, "Oooo!"

I had to repeat the sound several times before Suze actually looked my way again. Those two metal bars disappeared as Suze stepped over the gore and began tearing away at the silk.

"That's a ton of silk around you. How long were you in here?"

"Iooo oh."

"I'm assuming you said that you don't know. Let's get you out of there." Suze tore at the silk and each chunk that went away disappeared. She was really quick at absorbing things into her inventory. When all the silk was gone, I still stood there unable to move.

My eyes stung from being unable to close my eyelids. Water had begun to pool there and the fact the tears rose somehow behind the user interface really did a number on my head. That meant that the user interface wasn't like a VR headset or something like that. It was actually inside my head.

The lights went out.

"What the fuck?" Suze growled. She was at least near enough to touch.

The globes of light had run out. That had been just 40 seconds of actual action from the moment the spider crawled out to the moment that Suze smashed its head in.

That minimap still blinked red. It was the only light in my vision. Everything else was that oppressive dark that only comes from a stone room in a dark, dark dungeon.

I made noises, but the tsk sound didn't work without the ability to move my mouth and tongue. A massive flaw of that spell.

"We really need a permanent light spell. This is brutal."

Suze pulled and prodded at my limbs, but there was no sensation.

I thought about how it would be easier to understand what was going on if there was some kind of debuff tracker. There had been three debuff sounding words listed in the chat: restrained, paralyzed, and petrification. Clearly the restrained had somehow continued from the spider's stare attack even though it was dead. I was just unsure if the paralyzed and petrification were in effect.

"Kaylee, how did you get me out of it earlier?"

If I could have closed her eyes, I would have, but instead I let out a breath. My lungs were working. That seemed to mean my lungs and probably my heart were moving fine. So I took a deep breath in and let it out.

Activated Calming Breath.

I instantly felt that calmness that I had felt earlier. Suze released a heavy breath of air as whatever Calming Breath was seemed to have affected her as well. "What was that? Your breath smelled of ... lilacs?"

And the minimap stopped blinking.

You have shrugged off restrained. You will not be petrified.

"Oh thank goodness." I sighed and dropped to my knees into the spider goo. "I am going to find out how to download and install interface addons or so help me I'll make my own. Oh yeah. Tsk." Lights flared on.

"Even when angry, still not safadão." Suze was already looting the spider and the goop. Basically anything that she could pick up in some way just disappeared into her inventory.

I wiped the spider goo and guts off myself. Despite how gross it was, Suze looted those bits. Gross, but it kinda tracks because Suze was the type of player who had every grey and white drop in the game stacked in her many alternative bank accounts.

While she looted, I pondered about this place we were in. I spoke out loud to her, "I don't want to be a downer, but this is kinda a bad game." I began to count off on my fingers. "One. It's unclear how to level or even if we're getting experience. Two. There was that initial monologue thing that we can't even pull up in the UI to listen to it again or read it for clarity. Like who puts in a cut scene without a high quality graphics animation and just audio with a black screen? They have the budget for some really great graphics -- look how realistic this all is. But no budget for cut scenes? Come on! Uhh... Where was I?"

"Three." She scooped goop from the ground that disappeared into her inventory.

"Right. Three." I thought for a moment, my rant having been a bit distracted by my own digression.

"Monologue." Suze prompted, still absorbing the spider bits and gunk into inventory as though clean-sweeping the stone bathroom.

"Yes, right. Monologue. Three. Whatever debuff that thing had seemed really powerful for probably the tutorial level of the game. We don't even seem to be level 1 or tier 1 or whatever. I don't know many lives we have."

There was only a grunt of assent from Suze.

"I mean, if this is a MMO, then usually there's a tutorial level or a starting area that's easy combat."

"Starting areas are full of player corpses during the start of an expansion." Suze said and I thought it was kinda unhelpful, but I just breezed onto my list.

"And four. Quests? Have you gotten a quest text? I certainly haven't. I have no idea what purpose there is. Is there a storyline? Is this a complete open-world sandbox?"

Suze answered as if the questions were not rhetorical. "No storyline. Just bad biology. As if whoever built this has never actually seen a spider except in a game like Realms. Also there's no sand."

"Sandbox isn't about sand it's just ... it's like how they made the fifth expansion for Realms. Remember?" The fifth expansion was the worst. It was this open world where you could do almost anything except actually affect the world permanently. There were no quests or quest hubs. And they dropped the Beta and everyone complained so they had to delay launch while they shoehorned in some questlines and like everyone quit their subscription until they finally pushed in the sixth expansion a year early.

"Oh yeah. In Brazil, I stopped to play then."

"I still subscribed but I thought about quitting. I can't stand a game without quests."

"I wonder if there's anything in that toilet hole--" Suze plunged her arm into the toilet hole up to the elbow.

The world froze.

That was the moment we got our first quest text.