I walked over to another vein of copper ore while being extremely careful to avoid any of the wild boars that roamed around the spacious fields.

For my effort I received 2x [Copper Ore] from the node of ore. Now I had 5x [Copper Ore] and could use one of my new jewelcrafting skills, [prospect].

[Prospect]: requires 5 raw ore, potential to find a gem within the ore, destroys the ore in the process.

I opened my inventory and clicked on the [Copper Ore], resulting in 5 lumps of reddish-brown ore falling into my hands. I just had to think the word [prospect] and the skill activated. Immediately my hands and the ore began to glow and shine. After 3 seconds a notification window appeared in front of me.

Prospect was not able to find any gems within the ore.

I fell to my knees in dismay; “Just cut me a break already!” I yelled out in frustration, but there was no one around that could hear me. I slowly stood up and went back to hunting for ore.

I scanned the surrounding area and saw a small jagged mountain cutting into a nearby forest. According to video game logic, wherever there was mountains, there was ore to be mined.

As I was jogging over to the side of the mountain, a bush next to me began to rustle. I quickly dashed away and held up my book and prepared to chunk it at the first sign of danger. A cute bunny appeared with a soft white fluffy tail. I paused, and threw the tome at it anyway.

1!

Even with only 1 damage, it was enough to kill it. As the little critter began to fade from existence, a single tear rolled down his cheek. It’s almost as if the poor little rabbit was cursing his cruel luck.

I began yelling, “Who cares, life sucks buckaroo! You can’t be hopping around the forest looking for carrots, this is the real world dangit!” As I vented my anger to the bunny corpse, I realized that I was yelling at a rabbit. Not just a rabbit, a dead rabbit. Heck, it wasn’t even a real rabbit; it was a just a bunch of pixels.

I quickly eyed my surroundings and noticed that there was a player walking by. I made eye contact with him and he suddenly scrambled a different direction. Embarrassed, I picked up my book and began walking toward the mountains.

After a couple minutes I arrived at the edge of the mountain and stopped dead in my tracks. Patrolling around the mountainside was a group of small reptilian creatures approximately 2.5 ft tall. Some of the creatures carried spears and seemed to be protecting something, while others walked around with lanterns and pickaxes.

I started intently at one of the guard-like figures and a small display window appeared in front of me showing his stats.

Lvl 5

Attack: 55-65

Defense: 20

Health: 525

Rage: 100

Skills: [Bleed], [Double Strike]

I let out a silent sob. There was absolutely no way that I could kill this creature. I would be lucky to last 5 seconds! The reptiles were wearing leather armor on their legs and arms, but not their chests. I wondered if this was a weak point for them?

I let out a sigh and began to creep away when something suddenly caught my eye. One of the kobolds seemed to appear out of nowhere pushing a mining cart. The cart was filled to the brim with rocks of various shapes and sizes. I bet there is some copper ore in there.

I was faced with a dilemma. If I got caught, I was most definitely going to be killed and lose the precious experience that I gained from killing my first boar. But, the chance to get an enormous amount of ore was definitely something that I couldn’t pass up.

After a little mental-deliberation, I made up my mind. I got on my belly and began crawling through the forest. The forest that I was sneaking through was lined with hundreds and hundreds of trees.

Within the forest there were various bushes scattered throughout, while the grass itself was almost a foot tall. I took advantage of the landscape and hoped for the best.

My goal was to get closer to the mining cart filled with precious ore and not get killed of course. After crawling for about 50 meters, I heard some branches and leaves being crushed underfoot. As quietly and quickly as I could, I crawled underneath the nearest shrub.

Moments later, two kobold protectors came marching through the forest with their spears held at the ready. They were attentively searching through the forest. They were either making their rounds, or they had heard something, and by something I mean me.

Fear stricken, I held my breath. My legs were partially sticking out of the shrub and I desperately wanted to curl them underneath it along with the rest of my body.

I fought the impulse and didn’t move. Any sort of sound or motion might clue them in to my location. They began to turn away and move deeper within the forest when a familiar rustling sound was heard. I looked over and low and behold, sitting right in front of me was a rabbit.

There was something malicious about this rabbit’s eyes that did not fit his cute exterior. There was some sort of evil glint that should not have been there. It was almost as if this bunny had some sort of cruel plan.

The bunny began to run underneath the shrub that I was in, causing quite a ruckus. This newfound noise caused the roaming guards to quickly turn and point their spears in my direction.

Oh crap! I thought to myself. This bunny was going to get me killed. Once more I looked at the tiny rabbit and a sense of victory flooded across his cute white face.

I sucked in a breath. Oh my goodness, don’t tell me that this is the bunny I killed earlier! Karma was out to get me today.

In video games, monsters/animals will respawn, or come back to life after a certain period of time. The time that it takes for a monster to respawn is wholly dependent upon how the programmers decided to create them.

This little guy must have re-spawned and determined that he was going to get revenge. Normally a cute little critter such as himself would not stand a chance against a strong player like me, even as weak as I am. But he must have been following me and devised this plan while noticing that I was hiding.

The brilliant revenge of a bunny rabbit was about to be inflicted upon me. The two guards ran over to my bush in a flash. They deftly raised their spears and stabbed into the bush that I was hiding in. The first spear missed my face by about 2 inches. But the second one struck its target.

64!

The spear easily penetrated deep into the skin, piercing bone and muscle of the rabbit. There was no chance for escape because it was already too late. Blood began to soak its fluffy white fur. A look of confusion fell upon its face. The bunny, in its last breath, glanced over at me just in time to see me mouthing a few words.

The guards laughed as they pulled out their prize. The rabbit faded from existence as particles floated up towards the sky. The two executioners walked away laughing with pleasure.

----------------------------

Meanwhile in Vice Inc. headquarters, Darrell was staring at his computer screen, quite perplexed. Darrell Mathews was a devilishly handsome man, even for someone at the ripe old age of 42.

Darell’s two favorite things in life were video games and spending time lifting weights. He was one of the head designers of Dreamscape and he had been working hard to make the game a reality for the last 20 years.

Immediately out of college, Darrell was hired as a programmer. He had slowly worked his way up the food chain, and eventually became one of the 20 head designers over the quarter trillion dollar game.

He spent tens of thousands of hours writing different algorithms and various complex tables and formulas for so many aspects of the game. He was a part of the team that had come up with the [undead] [sorcerer], along with other the other complicated class-race combinations.

Currently he was observing thousands of people enthralled by the game that he had helped create. When observing the game from an outside source, such as a computer, conversations between players were extremely fast and the voices sounded like they were on helium.

This is due to the fact that dreamscape had a 2:1 time ratio for those that were within the game, but monitoring the game through a regular computer resulted in everything moving at twice the normal speed.

The Millions of new players all speedily went about their destination and killed various things, and died numerous times.

For the launch of the game, all hands were on deck for the company. This consisted of all the 5000 employees monitoring everything from the players themselves, to the servers that were hosting the game.

He was personally in charge of 250 of the employees that were keeping track of 55 of the starting areas. All 250 of those employees were in a modified version of the dream helmets, so that they could respond and help players as incidents occurred. These 250 employees would be the GM (Game Masters) of the game.

But at this moment, the little bunny rabbit that he had been controlling had died. Before the rabbit had died, he saw Gray Rain mouth something, but it was too fast to see. He went into the administration controls and rewound the footage and played it back in normal speed.

He clearly made out the two words that had been mouthed to him, and it started with an –F-. Darrell burst into laughter and almost fell out of his chair.

Darrell had been specifically monitoring all of the difficult class-race combinations in the 55 starting areas under his control, but Gray Rain was his favorite for a few reasons.

Reason number one, Gray Rain had made the most progress out of any of the other special players. Already there had been 4 players that quit and decided to reroll their classes, regardless of the three-week waiting period. But this difficult situation seemed to fuel players such as Gray Rain to strive to new heights.

Reason number two, Gray Rain was the most hilarious of all to watch. When Gray Rain was killed by a boar piercing his butt, Darrell almost died of laughter.

He had decided to mess with Gray Rain a little bit and took control of a bunny rabbit, but surprisingly Gray Rain mercilessly killed him. Darrell was going to get revenge by causing a commotion so that the Kobold’s could find Gray Rain’s location, but that backfired and resulted in his own demise.

Darrell was quite intrigued and decided that he would keep watching Gray Rain for the remaining time tonight.

----------------------------------------

After twenty minutes of sneaking around, I finally managed to get close to one of the mining carts. This didn’t come easy, because I was almost located by the guards at least a half dozen times which resulted in me almost dying of a heart attack every single time.

There was a row of six carts that were being unloaded by the Kobold Miners.

Lvl 5

Attack: 10-20

Defense: 14

Health: 100

Rage: 100

Skills: [Mining]

While the Kobold Protectors were absurdly strong, the Kobold Miners were absurdly weak. The level 2 boar that I had killed was even stronger than this.

All of the Mining carts were on a track that seemed to lead into the mountain; it must be a cave of some kind. The Kobold Miner’s were unloading the contents of some other mining carts into a large bin. They were all speaking in some kind of gibberish language.

While they were slightly distracted, I quickly darted over to the last mining cart in the row of the six, and began rummaging through it.

Most of the contents of the mining cart were just [Rocks]. But after a couple of seconds, I ended up finding 4x[Copper Ore] and I quickly put them in my inventory.

Suddenly, one of the Kobold Miners was walking towards the cart I was behind. This wasn’t good. Even though they weren’t strong, they would definitely notify the Kobold Protector’s that there was an intruder. I needed a distraction and I need it fast.

I grabbed a [Rock] and chunked it off into a bush to make some noise. Without even looking at the Kobold Miner’s reaction I ran and dove into an empty mine cart and began to pray for my safety.

Everything went into chaos as dozens of Kobolds began shouting and hollering. The sound of foliage being trampled was heard as many of them rushed into the forest.

The mining outpost was on high alert for almost 10 minutes. During this time I was lying in the fetal position waiting to be discovered and mercilessly killed. But it never came. Eventually the row of empty mining carts that I was in began moving.

Oh Crap.

Before long, the bright sunshine and clear blue sky was replaced with darkness and the smell of sulfur and mildew. I was being pushed deep within the cave.