The stench of disinfectant hit Jake before he even had a chance to open his eyes. It was the smell everyone associated with a hospital, chemicals you could never quite escape from. Like someone in the room over had bathed in bleach, then done jumping jacks in the corner of the room.

His first sight was of the ceiling. It was covered in tiles, each with dozens off small holes drilled through. Some OCD-like tendency to count them kicked in, and Jake realized there were thirteen holes per rows in each direction of each tile. The horizontal rows were offset, causing the holes to sit diagonally from the row below. For reasons he couldn’t quite explain, Jake was angry that there were an odd number of holes in each tile.

He heard the doctor before he saw him. It was the shifty eyed one, the one who’d suggested he enter the game in the first place. He crossed the room with quick quiet footsteps.

“Hi Jake. H-How are you feeling?”

The man’s voice was soft, almost a whisper, but he was standing close enough that Jake could hear him clearly. Jake looked down toward his feet and considered his answer before replying. He couldn’t see them underneath the hospital sheet, but the shape of his feet at the end of the bed didn’t move when he willed them to. The doctor had been wrong, the game hadn’t done anything for him.

“Alright I guess. How long was I playing?”

“A couple of hours. Were you enjoying it?”

“Only a couple? It felt a lot longer.”

“It does. All im—immersion games work that way, in game time passes much faster than real life. You didn’t answer my question”

Jake paused before responding. Truthfully, if it weren’t for the accident he didn't think he would have tried an immersion game. He’d heard of people getting addicted to immersion games, not wanting to live in the real world any more. Jake had always worried that he’d had an addictive personality. He often fixated on a particular hobby for months at a time, almost to the exclusion of all else. He had avoided immersion gaming for the same reason he’d avoided drugs all his life - after the first taste he didn’t think he’d be able to resist their call.

His reservations about playing aside, he had been enjoying the game. There was something incredibly satisfying about seeing prompts announcing he’d gained experience. He had something to work toward. His real life healing was the priority, but progressing the Druid quest line held an allure for him. He wanted to see that level up effect, he wanted to play again.

He’d been right to avoid immersion games until now.

“Yeah, I think I am. How long do you think I’ll have to play it?”

“It’s hard to tell. M-my other patients started showing signs of recovery after a few weeks. Dozens of hours. B-but I don’t want you to think about that, we’ll do it for as long as we need.”

“I can’t log in for another week. Is there something else I can do?”

“Oh.. You died. I-I’m sorry Jake, you’ll have to wait it out.”

Those words hit Jake like a train. He’d assumed he was playing one of many immersion games available, that he’d be able to jump to another one until he could log back in. This game was his lifeline, and now his chance at recovery was on hold because that bastard had tricked him?

Jake wanted to scream.

The doctor must have noticed the rage written across his face.

“There are o-other things you can do for a week. You need to do physical rehab anyway, we’ll focus on it more heavily for the first week.”

Jake bit back an insult. Of course he’d known he’d have to do physical exercises as well. He wasn’t an idiot. But neither was the doctor, he was clearly just trying to do his job. Yelling at him wouldn’t get Jake anywhere.

“Yeah, I guess so. When can I start that?”

Despite all the bad that had happened during the day - the death in game, the boring drudgery of sitting in a hospital bed with no idea how to entertain himself, and the sickening realization that this was possibly his life now - Jake found an upside that afternoon.

He rolled himself into the physio room - it had taken some amount of arguing with the nurses to convince them that he didn’t need to be pushed around the building. He was more than capable of navigating the halls by himself. Truth be told, it was rather exhausting. He’d never had to use his arms like this before, and his shoulders ached after traversing the first few hallways. But he hadn’t been able to back down, he didn’t want anyone looking at him in pity. It was a matter of pride now.

The physio worker assigned to his case was gorgeous. Five and a half feet tall, slim, all long legs and womanly curves. A warm smile combined with bright eyes make a woman that would turn heads anywhere. Unlike a lot of women with her looks she seemed oblivious to her beauty. In the hour that Jake spent with her he quickly realized she’d devoted her life to helping others. Using her beauty to manipulate people would have come as naturally to her as running to a fish.

He also noticed the wedding ring.

By the end of the session Jake’s was exhausted. They’d focused mostly on his shoulders and arms - she hadn’t wanted him to hurt himself pushing the wheelchair around the building. She’d been ecstatic to learn that he could feel the strain in his muscles as she’d moved his legs through the exercises. If he could feel his muscles straining, he should be able to control them sooner or later. She’d been gentle in reminding him that his condition was bad, and that he would be better expecting results later rather than sooner, and for that he was grateful.

Even though it was awful being reminded of his injuries, it helped to know that other people believed he could recover - even if it would take a long time. That gave Jake something that he could focus on when he started to doubt it himself. If the professionals all believed in him, it didn’t really matter what he thought. And he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to work his butt off to get walking again.

The second day was far worse than the first.

Jake didn’t have a physio session today. Instead he had exercises to work through in his own room. Alone. He spent the day browsing the internet, searching for anything to distract him from the chemical smell that lingered in the air, or the echoing clack of administrators in heels walking the halls.

He hated being confined to his bed, but he couldn’t get into the wheelchair unassisted. He was helped into it just twice during the day - once for his exercises, and again later in the afternoon to use the bathroom. Both times he’d been flushed with shame at needing help getting out of bed. The nurses were adamant that it wasn’t a problem, but Jake hated feeling like a burden. After he’d finished his exercises he tried arguing that he should be allowed to roam the halls at will, but the orderly had insisted he spend a few more days in bed before then. The man had struck a deal with Jake. If Jake could maneuver himself into the wheelchair unassisted, he could roam the halls as much as he wanted.

It gave Jake something to work toward.

On the third day, he made it into the wheelchair from his bed by himself. It wasn’t until he was wheeling himself through the halls with a grin plastered from ear to ear that he considered that might have been the orderlies plan all along. Jake had needed a win, and becoming mobile again - even if it wasn’t in the way he really wanted - gave him a strong sense of victory.

Again, he only had his exercises to do that day. The physio ward seemed a lot busier than Jake had thought it would be. They were in a small town, and the hospital wasn’t exactly large. After completing his exercises, Jake explored the halls. He made it most of the way to the other side of the hospital before anyone even questioned his presence, and even then they barely chastised him for terrorizing the halls. Everyone seemed genuinely glad to see a patient grinning as they rolled themselves around the building.

On the fourth day after his game death, Jake had physio again. This time he was disappointed to learn that his therapist was a balding middle aged man. That disappointment quickly faded however as he learned a variety of new exercises, and was pushed to his limits. Matthew - the new therapist - was almost bordering on personal trainer territory as he pushed Jake through several difficult challenges. Matthew seemed to prescribe to the school of thought that if it didn’t hurt it wasn’t working, and by the end of his session Jake could barely wheel himself back to his room. His whole body ached, and he’d been sorely tempted to take Matthew up on his offer to have an orderly push him back.

The last three days of his out-of-game ‘incarceration’ were by far the worst. Jake didn’t have physio appointments to attend, and after his first lot of exercise each day he couldn’t motivate himself to push harder. His muscles still ached from the work he’d done with Matthew. He spent time on the internet, browsing the same sites over and over. He was reading everything that was posted, clearly having more time on his hands than the content creators.

His boredom soon turned to anger again. Anger at the worthless driver who’d sent him here in the first place - the police still hadn’t been able to find him. Anger at Andross for killing him in his only escape from this hospital and it’s chemical stench. Anger at himself; even after almost a week of constant exercises his feet wouldn’t so much as twitch on their own. The shifty eyed doctor had been adamant that more time in-game would help, though Jake wasn’t sure whether he was saying that for Jake or himself. Perhaps the doctor was more concerned with seeing his treatment work than he was in Jake’s prognosis.

Andross was the one that bore the brunt of Jake’s frustration. Perhaps it was because Jake had convinced himself he’d be able to get some sort of revenge for his in-game death. Plotting his revenge gave Jake something to do when the boredom set in. He didn’t understand a great deal about the game, but he was fairly confident he’d be able to track down Andross again.

To aid his scheming, Jake took to scouring the internet for information about the game. The corporation that created it had worked tirelessly to take down sites that leaked secrets for the game, they’d cited copyright and intellectual property concerns; though many forums attributed site outages and hacked servers to the corporation as well. They seemed intent on keeping knowledge of the game out of the public eye, which made Jake’s task of learning incredibly difficult.

In the end, he found the official site of the game to be the most useful. It explained that the game was largely player driven. Players could form Guilds and create their own quests. Almost all industry in-game was now driven by player guilds - in the first few years of the game NPCs had done most of the resource gathering and crafting, but they’d slowly been phased out as more players took on those roles. There was speculation that the corporation was using the game for economic studies, though no official data had been published yet.

What drew Jake’s attention to the guilds however, was the guild wars. PVP (Player Vs Player) combat was restricted to duels between two consenting players - which were a one-off event - in cities, the wilderness, and guild wars. The wilderness seemed to cover the entire world outside of NPC settlements, which all had a relatively large safe zone around them. By the looks of it, players could do almost anything they wanted within the safe zones if they wanted to avoid PVP altogether. The guild wars were where players from opposing guilds could fight each other at any time. They’d been very controversial during their introduction to the game - players had complained a lot about being under threat of other players at any time - but eventually they’d been accepted. Guilds had formed that refused to participate in the wars, and players that weren’t interested in fighting one another tended to flock to these, and keep within the safe zones around settlements. What mattered to Jake though, was that he’d be able to create a guild. With a guild of his own, he’d be able to declare a war on whatever guild Andross was in. Jake would then be free to hunt him all over The World.

All he had to do was wait until he could get back in game.