Led was still in a state of shock while walking home from school that day. His head was making and debunking theories at the speed of a supercomputer. So many variables to deal with until he could make a conclusion.

In his hand he held a cardboard box that could fit a motorcycle helmet, with the label “Beyond Illusions INC, World of Damakar BETA HELMET” written in bold captioned letters. Led had not expected to walk home with this, he thought he would get it from Dan at a later time, but Dan had brought it to school with him. This meant something, Led thought. This meant that Dan had the intention of giving it to someone immediately. He did not have enough data, though, to figure out if Dan always had Led in mind for recruitment, or if he just happened to find out that Led was a gamer himself and then asked him.

Led tried to think it all through while walking home, but when he was standing outside his door to his house, he just didn’t have enough information of the situation to analyse it properly. Led hated that thought of something being just dumb luck, everything was almost always connected somehow.

In Leds’ belief, winning the lottery was just a simple statistical normality. People always said that statistically it was nearly impossible to win the lottery, and Led agreed on that and hence never bought a lottery ticket. However, when someone did win and called themselves lucky, Led would not agree. There is always a winner, so in a sense, there a 100% chance that someone is a winner. Since the winner had bought a ticket, they entered a competition that had a 100% winner rate. That didn’t mean that everyone would win, just that there would 100% be a winner. Not 99% or 50%, 100%. If the winner had never bought a ticket, yet somehow still won, that would be lucky yes. Even Led would admit that but when entering something that could lead you to end up with the winning lottery ticket, that wasn’t blind luck, that was just simply a statistical fact that someone had to be the winner. It was targeted luck, you put yourself in a situation where you could win. Led, however, had not put himself in that situation. Which is why he didn’t think he was randomly selected, his history with gaming had a lot to do with this. It had to.

“I’m home!” Led yelled when entering the door. He knew his mother wasn’t home yet, but since it would be more logical to announce his arrival then not to, he always did it. If his mother was home for some reason she would want to know immediately. So Led always announced his arrival. After taking off his clothes he did his homework right away, a task that he always did with vigour yet strictly out of habit. Led always read all of his books the first week of school, and he had a stockpile of finished homework he had gotten from the pamphlet that had most of the homework tasks. Yet, Led knew that repetition was the key to mastering something, so he did it all again.

When he was done with his homework he made dinner for himself, but also enough so that his mother would have something to eat when she came home later. He knew she would probably be too tired to make anything, and she had always appreciated Led’s cooking, so he did it gladly. It also made sense that he had learned cooking by now since he would one day probably live on his own, and bad a bad diet was never good on neither the head nor the body.

Finally, after all this he could go to his room and open the VR helmet box that he had placed on his bed first thing when coming home. Led had of course used a lot of brainpower on the helmet and the game ever since he had come home, but the main server hadn’t started yet as it would later that night. This gave Led some hours of research before he had to take the role of this trickster priest.

Before actually opening the box, he sat down on his computer desk and booted up. Led had always marveled at the tool that was the internet, something that could help him analyse things when he needed more data. Countless hours had been spent on search engines, forums, blogs, tips and tricks sites and even online magazines just to soak up everything he needed in order to make sense of something. This time it was World of Damakar that was now being entered into the white and empty search box.

First of all, I should grasp the game. Led thought. Any other person would probably jump right on the class they were going for and figure it out as they went, but Led liked to know how the building blocks worked before looking at the building.

World of Damakar was a VRMMORPG with a fantasy setting, in it you controlled one avatar that would mimic your own body using brainwaves. Thanks to the new lucid dreaming technology that had been developed by the company DML (Dream More Lucid - who Beyond Illusions Inc had later bought), World of Damakar could actually be played in your sleep. DML had discovered a way to let the part of your brain that could activate when you usually entered at a Lucid dream to take control of a computer. The potential for this was endless, but Beyond Illusions Inc had of course seen the value of implementing this into gaming immediately.

The Helmet was not just there to present the game for you to play, It would work together with your brain so that you actually saw everything crisp and clearly. It would also convince your brain into believing that it was either stronger, faster, agiler, or even just something as trivial as being taller. This was how you could play as an orc if you wanted, or a short but muscular dwarf. Led also read an article of how they had succeeded with convincing brains into thinking they were an animal or something that didn’t even have eyes like a plant or a tree. This had been quickly stopped when the test subjects had said that it was too boring because of the limited movement and senses they had available. Still, though, hybrid human-animals were also a part of the game.

All in all, the leaps in technology within this helmet was nearly endless, but since most of the actual game was stored on a server somewhere in America, you couldn’t really fiddle with the helmet to get a grip on how it all worked.

It was also comforting to know that they had researched how it would affect the rest of the day when you forced the brain to work while the body was sleeping. All the test results just showed that it was perfectly safe and did not at all affect the rest of your waking hours. It was even considered that you could use the game to study for a test during the sleep instead of the day before since the memory leak of dreams had been solved by the technology in the helmet.

Everything you learned or did in the game, you would remember when you woke up. Beyond Illusions had released all of their extensive testings on this for everyone to retest or just read through in case they still had concerns. Of course, the helmet couldn’t help you get smarter or in better shape. Like with all memory it would either fade or be stored deep, but that was what your brain did everyday anyway. No one could remember what they did on a random Thursday 7 years ago, the memory of that day was just discarded by the brain. In 7 years everyone would probably have already discarded what they had done inside the game, simply because the helmet didn’t help with your memory, It just had figured out how not to waste a whole night of being in a coma-like state and replaced it with their fantasy world.

Led was astonished by this, he glanced over to the white box with the print on it with marvelled eyes. So much technology in one helmet he thought to himself, and it’s used for gaming! He suspected that this was a breakthrough of giant proportions, that people could, in theory, live double lives with this thing. Students could get the extra reading hours if they wanted, or people could meet each other if they lived continents from each other. He had known that it was quite a huge game, but he was not prepared for how advanced it was going to be. Of course, you couldn’t bring anything with you into the game. Everything in the game was controlled by Beyond Illusions Inc. So if you were planning to study using a book, then you were in tough luck since you couldn’t bring your book. Unless you had access to the game server, your book would be unreachable in your dreams.

Snapping out of his extensive research he forced himself over to the actual game. He felt he had enough of a grip on how the game and helmet itself worked. The Game, however, was another thing. It was set in the world, or continent as Led could see only one landmass, of Damakar. Damakar had a long and extensive history, but Beyond Illusions had refused to provide any documentation. If the players wanted to document it, they could just play it and discover it for themselves. This was understandable for Led, why bother with providing the story in written form when you could just get it from the world itself.

What Led did not appreciate, however, was that this was how Beyond Illusions treated most of the game. Nothing was documented by them. It was the same on all their pages. First, it said something super general like. “In World of Damakar, you can play as one of our hundred of classes, to discover what you want to enter the game and start your adventure!”. And this was mostly how it all was described, if you wanted to know how something worked, you would need to discover it yourself, by playing it of course.

The scarce documentation Led could find was written by the Beta testers, however, they weren’t allowed to reveal anything either. Only in general how they felt each class was, and since there were literally thousands of branching classes, they couldn’t test them all and write how powerful each class felt. Led could only find a few pages about his class, the trickster priest.

Mostly it just said that it was a healer class with weird mechanics, which they were not allowed to explain. It was one of the strongest early game healers in the game apparently, but when hitting level 20 everyone who had tried it just said that they had swapped away from the class. The class had been weird from the start, but it seemed that the level 20 was the breaking point.

The difficulty was set to S++, or EXTREME, or 10/10 from level 20 and out for some reason. “Do not pick this class!” Was stated by everyone. This class will probably be patched out of the game or reworked before release another had written. And so forth and so forth.

Led scratched his head. So vague information, why such high difficulty levels? And, since Dan knew about the class, why did he want Led to play this one in particular? Led only had more questions now than before he had started his research. Led checked the official World of Damakar site to double check if he had misread the class description, he had checked there first, but all it had said was:

The Trickster Priest. These priests are a holy class devoted to the trickster god of Sha’Cotar. These powerful healers have more than one trick up their sleeves and you never know if you will die slowly or in an instance when facing the followers of Sha’Cotar.

It said nothing about being reworked or changed in the release patch, Led also confirmed there was nothing mentioned in the change-log, so this class was still the class that the beta testers warned about not playing. And also, why did the text focus on killing? Healers rarely had the power to kill anyone.

Led thought about this. Dan wanted him to play this particular class. Not a healer, although he did say that they needed a healer, but it was this particular class that they needed. That could only mean that the class had something that could not be done by any other class, or by any other item or weapons in the game. This meant that it had to be either an item that could only be controlled or used by the trickster priest, or it was related to a skill the priest had that no one else could replace with other class skills.

Led concluded that he was a victim of necessity. Dan and his friends needed this class for something they had discovered in the Beta, but since they weren’t upfront about it, it was probably because the burden of playing the class was too annoying or unforgiving.

Led then suddenly realised, why not just change the class when the task is done? Led returned to his searching and quickly found what he suspected. Aha, it was a locked class. It would literally lock you to a lot of things in the game, and that would mean a one month lock on the game and class. If you wanted to change the class after locking it in, you would need to delete your character and then wait a month. You would be literally a month behind everyone else and could not even play the game in the grace period. Led understood it now, he was being used by Dan and his friends because no one wanted to lock themselves out of the game for a month.

Well, no biggie. Led thought. Dan said I could have the helmet, and if I really can’t figure out the class I can just wait the month. I hardly think Dan will need me after I had done my part, he will probably ditch me for another healer as soon as possible. All that in change for a Beyond Illusions game and helmet on the other hand? Land could only feel that he was on the winning side of the bargain.

Finally the time for Led to get into the game had come. The servers would start at 22:00, it was now 21:30, but he was going to use this time to set up his character since you could do this before entering the server.

Led took out the helmet out of the package box. It did not look like a motorcycle helmet at all, but it had roughly the same size. The dimensions, however, was way off. It looked bullet shaped, but with a more rounded tip. And the whole helmet was tilting to one side, logically as it had to fit a head, and still have room for the mouth and nose to breathe freely. Led didn’t ponder too much on the helmet, other than the fact that it was clearly a beta-version with no paint or finishing. It was good enough for him. He put it on.

“Welcome, to the World of Damakar!” A female voice said with an exhilarating voice.