After that, Chris pretty much became a spectator of her own life for a few days.

Suerte promised her sister would be placed in an excellent school, far away from any city influences. Chris signed additional papers tying her to Suerte and his mysterious employer for the next ten years. Her trial never took place, Suerte merely showed up telling her everything had been taken care of. Initially she was supposed to be transported to Goldilocks max-sec penitentiary that same day, but she had insisted on the clause that only took her there when she had proof that her sister had been well placed.

On the morning of the second day she got her proof, as well as a phone call from Rin. They had taken her to the other side of the continent, it was at least 4 hours by plane and over 7 by zip-trail. In her heart she knew she wouldn’t be seeing her sister for a long time. Probably at least two years, after she finished high school. Chris knew it was for the best, but she still couldn’t help feeling an immense sense of loss. Rin had been her duty for the last six years, she still was, but now there would be a continent between them and there was nothing she could do about it. After all, she was the one that had asked for it.

Chris could hear the girl’s false bravado through the phone. Apparently she already really liked the mother, even if she wouldn’t shut up, Rin attributed it to their isolated country house. The father she hadn’t had much time to get to know since he spent most of his time working outside. They were real farmers and Rin told her she almost couldn’t believe it, she never thought she would ever get to meet one. She also said the air was much cleaner in the countryside, and blabbed for a good quarter hour about all the positive aspects of living in Jemyo. Chris knew most of it was pretense and said only to appease Chris, she knew her sister still felt like the circumstance was all her fault, no matter how often Chris told her it wasn’t.

Rin was telling her all about how school had already ended for the summer, but how she would be needing some remedial lessons. She had always been a very good student in the city, but she had also gone to a very underfunded public school. Rin was a little worried about how behind in all of the subjects she was, but she promised she would do her best so that Chris didn’t have to worry. Chris had smiled at that, she knew she didn’t have to worry. For all the pretense, Rin was one of the most responsible girls she knew. It had been almost time to hang up when Rin had joyfully announced that she would be seeing her soon. She had been about to ask how, when Rin broke the suspense and told her that Suerte had promised her an access-port and subscription fee to Nova Era. She told her to send her the name of her starting location as soon as she found out so that they could meet up in game.

Chris was speechless, she had resigned herself to not seeing her sister for a long time. She was unsure of whether she should feel happy or worried about something. Before she could decide, her time was cut short and the connection was terminated.

The same indecisive feeling persisted as they transported her to the Goldilocks facility. She had expected it to be a long transfer, instead it only took about half an hour. It wasn’t precisely in the middle of Metropolis, but it was closer to the center than the outskirts. She had expected a heavily guarded place surrounded by tall walls, instead she was led into a normal looking building of three stories.

They took her prints, picture and measurements. She was inspected from every which corner and even X-rayed to guarantee she wasn’t bringing in anything from the outside. They took her tablet away and Chris was glad she had been able to get through most of the information on it over the last couple of days. They continued to search her and Chris was almost afraid they would shave her hair off when they finally gave her a dark blue uniform. It was too big for her, but she suspected it was the smallest size available and remained thankful for the elastic waistband she could pull tight. The last things that were handed to her were a pair of squeaky plastic shoes, a tag that read 5826 and a metallic bracelet that was clamped around her left wrist. Unlike the rest of the uniform that had been handed to her, they looked brand new. They told her to take care of them since they were the only ones that would be given to her. She wasn’t sure what to make of the ominous tone they told it to her in, but followed the next guard to an elevator.

She watched as the guard pressed one of the only two buttons available to her, Goldilocks. For a second she remained confused when the elevator started its rapid descent, then it dawned on her that it was a subterranean prison. Her heartbeat picked up and she almost broke out in cold sweat at the thought of not seeing the sun for ten years.

‘This is inhumane! How can they keep us down here like caged animals!’

She was about to burst, when about two minutes later the elevator finally stopped. Security checks were next on the list it seemed. After more than ten security gates, they finally came to another gate of sorts. Unlike all the previous ones though, it was just an arch with a barrier of blue translucent light. The guard passed through it without any qualms, so she proceeded to do the same when she suddenly felt a painfully high electric current passing through her. She immediately pulled back, causing the guard to look at her in annoyance.

Chris was rubbing at her arm, where most of the voltage had gone through. It was the part of her body that had gone through the barrier. The guard was about to reprimand her but caught sight of her arm and said instead, “Didn’t you turn it on already? Gosh, do we have to do everything for you lot?”

The woman reached for her arm and pressed a button she hadn’t even noticed on her new silver band. It chirped to life and tightened around her wrist to an almost painful degree. A faint blue glow emanated from it, she had no idea what it was for.

“Alright, you’re good now.” The guard said and once again tried guiding her through the arch.

Chris followed a lot more hesitantly but this time she went through without a glitch. A fact she almost didn’t register as she took note of her surroundings. The gray cement walls suddenly gave way to walls covered in pastel wallpaper with massive windows spanning the length on both sides. Chris froze in amazement, she had been so sure she was underground, but she could now see fields and fields of scenery beyond her.

‘This can’t be right.’

She looked at the guard in confusion. The woman looked back at her and rolled her eyes before saying, “They really didn’t tell you anything did they?”

“... I guess not.” Chris said in what she thought was an appeasing tone, all she wanted was a simple answer.

“That bracelet there…” She motioned to Chris’s arm. “Lets you control what you see down here. Don’t delude yourself,

you are almost a kilometer underground, but this lets you see what you choose to.” She continued walking her down the hallway as she spoke. “You can mess with the settings later, that’s not for me to explain to you, they’re pretty fool-proof. All you need to know is, there are ‘windows’...” She motioned to the windows she could see down the hallway. “You chose your scenery. Other than that you also have the choice of your wall color… why they bother I don’t know. As for lighting, all lamps are synthetic solar light. So all you inmates won’t suffer vitamin-D withdrawal and go crazy and all that. If you ask me.... Nova Industries went too far… But this is their project and I’m getting paid so I’m not gonna complain.”

As they were walking, Chris noticed that the sun was setting through the windows and she asked the guard if the time of the sunset was real. She rolled her eyes before saying, “Of course. Isn’t that the point of all this? To keep you guys sane and pretend you’re still living in the real world? Most of you are linked most of the time anyway. Just like a bunch of lined up vegetables…” The woman continued to mutter to herself as she led Chris through a couple of more corridors, finally bringing her to a door that was labeled WING- E / Block 5.

“Remember that, you’re part of E-5.”

Chris was unceremoniously handed off to a new guard that took her down a corridor filled with doors. Each door had two numbers on them 4523/3211 or 3322/1892 and so forth. Finally, the new guard stoically brought her to a door that read 0812 / 5825. Chris quickly looked down at the velcro tag they had instructed she attach to her left chest and realized that the second number was hers. Apparently this was her room.

The guard let her into the room and said, “Count is at 20’00. Lights out at 22’00. Morning call is at 06’00 and breakfast is at 07’00.” Then she looked at the double bunk and nodded to a woman Chris hadn’t even noticed, “Tiny. Be nice.” She said with finality before closing the door in her face.

It was weird to see a window showing the outside world on the door when she knew the guard was standing on the other side locking it as she thought about it. She quickly dismissed the thought and brought her focus to the woman who was rearranging herself on the bunk.

“So you’re the fresh meat huh?” The woman said in a deep gravely voice.

It was sort of incredible that Chris hadn’t immediately noticed her. Even sitting down, Chris could tell she was massive. Not fat, just tall, well built and very toned.

“Yea, I guess I am.” Chris said in what she hoped was a neutral tone. She still hadn’t taken the woman’s measure and if there was one thing she was certain of it was that she didn’t want to upset the woman she was locked in with. Especially not considering the woman was almost twice her size. Maybe not just almost. There was nothing ‘tiny’ about her, if all nicknames were decided like this then Chris was about to be called Giant or Titan.

The woman had the same exact coloring as Chris, with dirty blonde hair and blue eyes, but that was where all the

similarities ended. Her hair was cropped incredibly short and her face was all angles and edges. If Chris had seen her on the streets she would have thought her to be a bodybuilder of some sort, and the laugh lines on her face made her look like someone who liked to enjoy life to the fullest. Chris couldn’t help wondering what she was in for. To get into a max-sec like Goldilocks you had to have done something pretty serious.

“Alright. Well, I’m Arizona Wells but you can call me Tiny.” She smiled self-deprecatingly. “I’m pretty easy going and if you just follow a couple of… agreements we will get along just fine.”

“... Okay.” Chris said when Tiny waited for some sort of acknowledgement.

“One. Don’t mess with my stuff and I won’t mess with yours. Two. Don’t mess with my sleep in any way, shape or manner and I won’t mess with yours. And finally, three. Don’t even try to get all handsy, you’re not my type.”

Chris could tell that the last one was added for her benefit when the large woman winked. The thought had indeed crossed her mind, they were after all in female prison, and she did look like the stereotypical lesbian type.

‘Not that I am an expert on lesbians… Or am homophobic… well. In this case I might be a little homophobic… but I have reason to be! This isn’t about political correctness! It’s about safety! It’s just she could overpower me without even trying to. If she’s for real I at least don’t have to worry about that in my room.’

“Sounds good to me.” Chris said. For a moment she stood there, not knowing what to do next. She didn’t have any possessions, they had told her all of things would be placed on her bed. Looking at it now, she walked over and examined them. A towel, a hand towel, a plastic toothbrush, toothpaste, a pillow, a blanket, a pair of sheets, a bar of soap and a roll of toilet paper.

She took a moment to look at her room. It’s walls were decorated in the same pastel color as the hallway and the staggering total of eight windows all showed the same scenery of a nearly dark landscape. In that moment Chris realized that even the synthetic sunlight was feeling cooler on her skin. It no longer felt like she was outside in the sun.

She continued to look at the room until her eyes came across a little toilet stall in one of the corners. The room wasn’t very big, no more than three meters by three meters, so the toilet took up a considerable chunk of that space. Her eyebrows wrinkled in dissatisfaction.

Suddenly Tiny spoke up from the upper bunk.“You haven’t messed with your settings yet have you?” She asked as she casually rested her hand on one of her hands. . “You should get on that, it makes this place more… bearable.”

Chris merely nodded wordlessly and spent the next hour before the count, messing with the settings. It allowed her to make the toilet partition look like a large trunk in the corner of the room. She set the walls to a moss green and skipped through a couple of sceneries before finally deciding on the rotating option. Looking at the changing window views every five minutes was too much and she changed her interval of rotation to an hour. She figured she could decide later if she wanted to keep a permanent one, and then she would know which one she liked best.

It probably took her longer than it ever took people to go through settings, but Chris hadn’t ever encountered any technology like it before. She had been too poor to have it herself and too busy to visit friends who did have it, not that she had many of those in the first place. Chris wasn’t at all caught up on the latest technologies, so for her, it was a little learning curve. So, unlike other people who just spent seconds looking at the settings, Chris ended up customizing her bracelet to an extent no one else had. In fact, very few ever even tried the rotating option to begin with, and those who did never realized that the scenery itself could be messed with. Mountains added, rivers shifted and houses removed. When going through the weather and wind options she also came across the sound and scent options.

She didn’t believe it at first, didn’t see how a mere bracelet could influence what she could hear, smell or feel but she entered the settings anyway. When less than ten seconds later she began smelling pine trees and feeling a cool mountain air that reflected the current scenery, she could only sit there in shock for a while. Chris was uncertain and maybe a little frightened, not sure how a bracelet could influence her brain, but before she could fret too much about it she pushed the thought aside. There wasn’t anything she could do about it, all prisoners had the bracelets, she wouldn’t get any special treatment, so instead she just laid back and tried to enjoy the sensory bliss for a while. She had always lived in Metropolis, even before her mother married Rin’s father. It was the first time in her life she smelled air so fresh, even if it was fake air. If she thought about it she would have realized the air had been clearer since the second they stepped foot into Goldilocks.

Nodding in satisfaction, she made her bed and laid down. It was weird to be finding things she liked about prison, and Chris wondered if this wasn’t just an aftereffect of her relief concerning Rin. Even if she was convicted of manslaughter, and had to live underground for a good time, her future looked stable for the first time in six years. She wouldn’t have to worry about food, shelter, clothing or anything really for the foreseeable future. All she had to make sure of, was keeping her end of the bargain and not getting on anyone’s bad side in prison. Suerte had warned her about some of the women she was incarcerated with.

Unfortunately her unencumbered thoughts were soon interrupted by her roommate’s gravel like voice.

“Don’t just sit there smiling, you have work to do.”

Chris looked at Tiny, who had moved down from her bunk a while ago to do body strengthening exercises like sit ups and pushups. Currently she was in some sort of modified handstand that had her facing the ground at a weird angle. Chris knew she wouldn’t even be able to attempt the posture seeing as she couldn’t even work out how she had gotten there.

A little part of her wished she had been paying more attention.

“... Work?” Chris asked, uncertain if the woman meant she should be doing exercises with her. She knew she wasn’t the fittest person on earth but she wasn’t really in the mood to bond with a possible murderer over exercises in a tight closed space.

“Lucky said you’ve never played before.”

“Lucky?” Chris asked.

“Castiel Suerte… Our guardian angel?”

For a moment Chris was speechless, then she couldn’t help but snort in amusement. She had never even thought to call her slick and serious lawyer Lucky, it seemed absurd. But when she thought about it, that was exactly what his name meant.

“So, you should be reading up on Era.” Tiny said, as if calling Suerte by Lucky was the most natural thing in the world.

“Era… Nova Era? The game?” Chris asked, trying to follow the conversation as best she could while not laughing about Tiny’s butchering of Suerte’s name.

Tiny lifted a mocking eyebrow. “A game? It’s not just a game…” She smiled. “It’s a whole new world.” Tiny paused a minute while she shifted into a new formation that had her legs open in a split. She made it seem simple, but her feet never touched the floor, Chris could only guess at the strength needed for such a transition. “The you in this universe…” Tiny continued as if she hadn’t just pulled off an olympics-or-at-least-very-talented athlete-worthy movement. “Has nothing to do with the you in that universe. Just like that universe has nothing to do with ours. You have to start from scratch, so if you don’t at least read up on the basics… you’ll be behind before you even begin.”

“What do yo—”

“I don’t know what Lucky told you. But you have a week to impress the warden. With the in-game five times acceleration, that’s a little over a month of in-game time. The warden doesn’t like wasting game time on players that won’t bring him a profit.” Tiny took another moment to shift to another form. “He does realize though that new players have to be given a chance, it’s just not much of a chance. So, in order to succeed, you have to hit the ground running. No training wheels.”

Chris nodded, waiting for further instruction. She had gone through most of what Suerte had supplied her with, but it had mostly been basic introductory information on the game. Statistics about the world and the players in it. There had been a much bigger file concerning prison politics They had taken her tablet away though, so she didn’t have the option of re-reading any of the information on it.

Tiny was looking her straight in the face without any expression for a while and an awkward silence built up until she finally said, “What you looking at me for? Start reading, didn’t anyone show you how to access the library through your b-link?”

Chris gave her a blank look.

“Band-link… that thing on your arm.”

“Oh… No, they just sort of clamped it around my wrist.”

Tiny’s lips tightened into a straight line of annoyance before she said, “Go to where you fixed your settings, there should be an exit option there.” Chris followed her instructions hoping she wasn’t the woman’s source of annoyance. “There should be an icon for the library there. The Warden uploads pretty much all books and guides even remotely applicable to Era.” She smiled grimly. “He wants us to succeed.”

“R-right.” Chris immediately started browsing through the options, until she reached the library. For a moment she was astounded, even stupefied over the amount of data there was on the armband. She was unsure of what to read first, until she realized she could organize the books by topic and level. She set it to absolute beginner in Era. The first book in the list was a manual to the game and before she knew it she was reading up on settings, character creation, race selection, game history and the history of the actual Era Universe. It was incredibly complex and detailed, a lot more detailed than anything Suerte had provided her with. In comparison it looked like child’s play. But Chris was glad he had given it to her nonetheless, feeling quite certain she would have been overwhelmed otherwise. Which was perhaps exactly why he gave it to her. After only a couple of pages Chris was already beginning to understand what Tiny meant by it not being just a game.

When Tiny finally finished her work out some time later, Chris asked, “So if the you here has nothing to do with the you in Era… and I read somewhere that everyone starts out with zero-ed out stats with the same physical condition, no matter how bad or good their real one was in the real world… why do you bother?” Chris gestured at the area she had worked out in.

Tiny smiled brightly, the first real testament to where all those laugh lines on her face came from. “Because, even if it is more than just a game… In the end… It is a game. This is my real body, I need to take care of it. If my mind, the only thing I do take with me to Era, forgets how to communicate with my body here… who is to say it won’t have an effect there?”

She smiled again and jumped up onto her bunk in a fluid motion that seemed gravitationally impossible for a body her size. Chris decided then and there she was going to join in the woman’s exercises beginning the next day. If not for an advantage in the game, then at least for an advantage in prison. She was still afraid of getting her ass handed to her.

They read and researched in silence after that. Even after the lights had been turned off, both of their bunks were under the soft glow of the holoscreens produced by their bands.

Chris was only beginning to understand what a full-time commitment she had signed up for.

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A/N: removed a scene from here. will insert later... way later. don't worry about it if you came after. not important... yet. sorry. :S