The orc warrior roared with rage and charged me, again. His massive footfalls shook the earth and kicked up sprays of sand. His beady eyes shone with hatred and flecks of froth spilled from his open mouth.

I glanced up from my clipboard and sighed. What was even the point? Still, might as well finish what I started. A ball of flame lanced from my hand as I cast Pyroblast. It sizzled like a firework as it rocketed away. My feet shifted in the coarse sand of the arena as the recoil of the spell pushed me back a few inches. The ball of fire exploded against the orc in a violent display of color.

I was proud of the spell. The multicolored explosion expanded beautifully and dynamically based on the environment and target. The spell recoil system felt satisfying and weighty. I had extensively tested both features over the last few months and was proud to see them come together. The art and dev teams at Animated Fire Studios were truly talented.

Full immersion virtual reality games, games where you could really feel with all five senses, were the way of the future. People still made old school games that used controllers or a keyboard and mouse, but the MMORPG genre had been firmly taken over by VR. Our game, SpellSong Online, was never going to dominate the market, but we did have a loyal fan base. What we lacked in polish and popularity, we made up for in original quests and mechanics.

My pride faded back into apprehension as I remembered the coming meeting. Just another — I checked my clipboard — 38 minutes. Just another 38 minutes until I was fired.

The orc staggered back to his feet, sand and ash pouring off him, and resumed his charge. I cast Ice Spike twice, sending long sharp icicles at the orc’s center of mass. When the second Ice Spike landed the orc crashed into the ground and slid a few feet before dying.

The damage log on my clipboard read:

Will’s Pyroblast hits Orc Warrior for 518 fire damage.

Will’s Ice Spike hits Orc Warrior for 52 cold damage.

Will’s Ice Spike hits Orc Warrior for 101 cold damage.

The numbers were good, about what I expected. The first ice spike had done half damage due to the conflicting Element types, but the second was unaffected. Another test case passed... not that it mattered.

Half the QA team had been laid off already. Ever since AFS had been sold, the company was basically being scrapped for parts. The whole situation pissed me off. There is no way we should be losing enough money to warrant liquidation. But here we were, staff being let go, expansions being cancelled, and servers being decommissioned.

I was only doing manual testing because the license for our automated test suite had expired and nobody had bothered to renew it. I liked being a tester, and I was good at it. Getting a job working with virtual reality video games was a dream come true. But now it seemed the dream was over. I would probably have to get a contractor job for some corporation, running manual scripts and doing data entry.

I sighed again and readied an Ice Spike as another Orc Warrior spawned in the arena. If this was going to be the last project I worked on, I might as well do it right. I should have just enough time to finish my test cases before I need to meet with my manager.

Half an hour later I was standing in front of Josh’s small office. Between finishing the test cases and powering down my machine, I was barely in time.

“Will, come on in,” my manager said as he beckoned me to join him. I sat down on one of the two chairs set up across from his desk. I wiped my hands on my pants and tried to ignore the nausea building in my stomach. I had come to terms with losing this job. The video game industry never paid much anyway. I could make more working for a bank or software company. The thought didn’t help the feeling of dread rolling in my stomach. I loved video games, and the thought of working on something else made my heart sink.

“Will, we need to talk about your future,” Josh continued. Here we go, I thought to myself. I actually liked my manager. He was a good guy and tried to get along with everybody. The kind of guy you could talk with at a company event without it getting awkward. But, for lack of a better term, he had no backbone. He would cave to even a small amount of social pressure and could never stand up to defend his team against external demands — which is probably why our team lost more headcount than any other.

“As you know, our department is going through a pretty significant reorg,” he said. Yes, I would call massive layoffs pretty significant, I thought to myself, but I just nodded. “There is no great way to tell you this. Will… you are being transferred to England.”

“Yeah, I kinda figured that wou- wait what? England?” I asked in shock.

“Look, I know this is very sudden and inconvenient to ask you to move across the world like this, but the parent company needs qualified testers there to support a new VR game. They saw that they have the resources here, and they want them diverted there.” My manager stared at me nervously. I just stared back at him. I didn’t know what to say, how to feel. I thought for sure I was fired. The idea of moving to England instead of searching for an entry level data entry job was just too much to process for me at the moment.

“I tried to get them to let you just work from here and virtual conference in for meetings, but they wouldn’t go for it,” my manager said apologetically, misreading my silence. “They said their testing servers are completely isolated from the internet and all work has to be done on campus.”

I thought about it for a moment. Would I rather move to a new country, presumably on some sort of work visa, and work on a game I know nothing about, or stay here and try to find a new job? The answer was fairly obvious. With my parents gone, my friends all online, and my crappy apartment paid month to month, there was really nothing keeping me here.

“When do I start?”

One week later I finished hooking up a VR pod in my new cubicle. It was different moving to a new country, starting a new job, and meeting new people. It was scary, but I was more excited than nervous.

I looked over to Jim in the cubicle next to mine. “Ready to get this show on the road?” I asked. I met Jim when I arrived in the Swindon office. Despite only working here for a week longer than I had, Jim was already the grizzled veteran. We bonded over being two of the very few Americans in the office and he helped me through the mountain of introductory paperwork. We had become friendly acquaintances if not quite friends yet.

“You know it, Will,” Jim replied with a broad grin. I grinned back, excited to finally get to the real work. The other testers and I were finally going to get in the game for the first time. I trembled with the excitement only a new game brought on. It turned out my new job was less quality assurance and more alpha tester, but I didn’t care. I had a job and it was even doing what I loved. They could use me as a guinea pig all they wanted.

I didn’t know how far we would get today with only four hours of the workday left, but I was excited to just get in and do something. The last week of moving and paperwork had been like purgatory. I shot Jim one last thumbs up, and climbed into my pod.

“You may begin,” a quiet voice said over the pod’s internal speakers. I pushed the button to start the dive and watched as the world faded to black.