Opening his eyes and expecting to see the boulder in front of him, he instead saw a familiar place. His work office… ugh. Though it was impressive. The game somehow knew exactly how it looked, down to the football that was sitting next to Matt’s staple. Scary thought, it must somehow have access to his memory. He did agree to the terms but more and more he was regretting not reading them all the way through.

As he heard a noise he slowly began to walk over to where he knew his deck was and sitting there was a man he had never met. The lights flickered ominously as he approached and he cleared his throat before speaking.

“Ahem, uh, excuse me. I believe that’s my desk you’re sitting in.” Indeed it was his. He had hung a bunch of game posters along the walls of his booth when he started there all those years ago and had never bothered taking them down.

Slowly the figure turned towards him and he saw he was in a plain black business suit and his chestnut brown face was blurred somehow. He could see his eyes, nose, and mouth but it was indistinct in a way he couldn’t describe. The figure stood up and spoke to him, “Ah, Danniel. Glad to see you in so late. I’ve been going through your files and noticed there were quite a few errors. Care to explain?”

Looking over the files Dan couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. All the screen was filled with what looked like code… though the code was glitching around the screen and glowing an ethereal green “I-I uh don’t know.”

“Well then don’t just stand there, get to work fixing it. I’m not paying you to stand around.” Dan was steered into the chair in front of the computer and hesitantly hit ‘G’ on the keyboard. Immediately red flashing warning signs appeared as a low wail came from the computer. “Not like that you infernal moron!”

Quickly Dan began to press all the keys. Finally after clicking the ‘B’ button the screen stop flashing red and the text began to slow down. Looking for some kind of pattern, he pressed ‘B’ again and the text began to speed up yet again. His hands flew across the keyboard until ‘0’ fixed it back to what it originally was. Completely dumbfounded Dan looked back behind him to find the man was no longer there. He had a funny feeling that this strange pattern was some kind of challenge so he began to experiment.

What he found was that he wanted to find a chunk of text that contained ‘QWERTY’ mixed up throughout it and then the character after the ‘E’ would be the one to fix whatever issues arose. This was no kind of coding he ever did and had a feeling the system was messing with him for some reason. Finally with one last ‘C’ the text stopped moving all together and the screen slowly cleared of all characters. Sensing someone behind him, Dan quickly turned around to find the distorted faced man behind him.

“Wonder, wonderful. Took you longer then some but you still completed it, which is more than can be said for most. Ready for the next section?” The man asked. Without waiting for an answer he spun Danny’s chair around in a circle and as it stilled, he found himself on a bench overlooking a podium where there was chalkboard at the front. Almost having a panic attack he recognized the classic college lecture hall. On a table in front of him was a stack of papers and the chalkboard simply stated,

Begin

Looking down he saw a series of questions going over the theories and implications behind Gatsby’s fortune in The Great Gatsby. He hadn’t read the book… since well college. But as he looked down the sheet it started to come back as jumbled questions came together to remind him of various aspects of the book. It still took him about two hours to get through several pages worth of questions. He slumped back as the paper’s disappeared and in its place was a line of math problems.

“NOPE! SKIP SKIP!” Cried, Dan as he had little desire to be trapped here for another two hours going over math concepts he had never had to use in his decade out of college. His bench disappeared under him and he fell on his bottom to the ground as a text box flashed saying,

Survive

Knowing the system by now, Dan quickly began to move, not running, but jogging as to conserve his energy. He slowed down after ten minutes, his desk job having deteriorated what little muscles he had in his scrawny arms over the years. When he fully stopped he heard something above him and a vulture-like creature with glowing red eyes and the scales of an alligator began to dive at him. Hearing the creature scream in triumph Dan jumped away out of instinct and terror. Looking back at what had crashed behind him, Dan uttered a single, “Nope,” before jogging again, trying to stay underneath the trees so it had to move slower across the ground to be able to see him.

Stopping under a tree to catch his breath he leaned up against it and nearly fell through as a gaping maw appeared in the trunk and tried to take a bite out of him. Taking that as sufficient motivation he moved away before the mouth could bite down and ran. As he looked back he realized he was no longer under the tree-line. A triumphant caw was all he heard as something tore its way through his rib cage. He did his best to struggle but all he could see was the sky from his point on the ground and soon shock took over as the pain was numbed.

Eventually he looked up at the ceiling of yet another cave and he had two paths laid out before him. One led into a volcanic wasteland and the other led to a nice spring valley in full bloom. Knowing the game rewarded hardship he struggled to his feet and made his way to the wasteland. Almost certain that the valley was a deathtrap. When he moved past the entrance into the wasteland the cave closed behind him and fire spurted from a geiser to his right. Moving away from it, some magma fell on his skin. Though somehow it didn’t burn through him, it stayed there and continued to slowly smolder as pain tore through the arm it landed on. Ignoring the pain he tried to focus on his real body as he knew this pain was but an illusion. As soon as he did he felt a sense of relief, though his body in the game slowly became more unstable and clumsy.

He knew he could never complete this trial by being more in the real world then in the game world so he closed his eyes, took a deep breath and let himself move into the world. Immediately his skin began burning again but he did his best to ignore it. He knew he was likely to be a tank in this world as well and would need to learn to push past the pain. Though slowly the bursting lava formed a thin layer of ash and heat around him until finally he fell to his knees, almost at the exit but knowing he couldn’t go on. He uttered the words, “I give up”.