Everything I was screamed that I should be dying, my heart didn’t beat, my lungs didn’t pump air, and the whole world was silent. The only thing I had to focus on beyond my frozen existence was the box of text hovering in front of my eyes.

This simulation has been sold to eX-Tre Entertainment and will become the basis for ‘Age of Victoria!’, an old school immersive RPG set in the Victorian Age upon a backdrop of a magical apocalypse and the return of the Old Ones.

The Old Ones have found a crack within the Veil. Magic has returned to earth, and the collective unconscious has awoken. Unfiltered and unconstrained magic has engulfed the land, giving rise to Monsters of both Creatures and Men. Can you survive the horrors of the Old Ones?

As an NPC within the beginning of ‘Age of Victoria,’ you will be given limited options of freedom and advancement. Your initial class has been selected by the Overmind AI as ‘Warrior’ due to emotional or significant actions taken within the last twenty-four hours. Your action was:

Protecting NPC ‘Rufus Nye’ by drawing Agro.

Warrior’s are masters of armor and weapons, skilled at protecting their team members and providing defensive buffs through war-cries. The signature skill of the warrior is [Taunt] and its derivatives.

Warriors have no limitation on their weapons or armor.

Warriors can wear cloth, leather, chain, or plate armor, though usually, they wear only the most massive and durable of plate armor.

Warriors are not restricted in weapon selection. Warriors may use the smallest dirk to the greatest two-handed sword.

Warriors can learn all defensive skills.

Warriors do not have mana. Instead, they have Rage, a resource which rises as the warrior takes or delivers damage.

Warriors do not gain many of the damage increasing skills of other melee classes. The signature DPS advantage for warriors is the ability to wield a Two-Handed weapon in the primary weapon slot while also wielding a one-handed weapon or shield in the secondary weapon slot.

Warriors are suggested to work with groups. Warriors are rated as ‘Weak’ soloers.

Currently, ‘Victoria Marrie Blythe’ has been set as a Zone-Locked Combat NPC. Zone-Locked NPCs are restricted from leaving their zone and are predominantly responsible for Quests and Stores. Zone-Locked NPC's have ten days to reach level ten to remove the zone lock restriction. Zone-Locked NPCs have a slow respawn rate, and if the Old Ones encroach on that zone, they no longer respawn. After the tutorial, the event ‘The Great Cleansing’ will start, any NPC who fails to survive the event will be permanently deleted.

Reading the text was odd. I couldn’t move my eyes, but my vision was focused on the next word that I was trying to understand. It was like trying to focus on a bit of text caused it to shift to be in the center of my vision. I had never believed the women who had claimed to suffer from hysteria, the idea of something being so upsetting that it would cause them to scream and nash at the teeth and faint was laughable, but if I could move at this moment, I would be diagnosed with hysteria in a second. Was the world ending? Was the apocalypse at hand? I was no longer a minor noble but was now a warrior? What did that even mean? The last line though was chilling, I didn’t know what 'deleted' meant but not surviving was very clear. Before I could work myself into a tizzy, a new box appeared that was much like the previous one. This box was titled ‘tutorial,’ while the previous was untitled.

In the upper left-hand corner of your vision, three bars should exist. The top red bar is your health when it reaches zero from injury or spells, you die.

Sure enough, three bars appeared. The topmost bar was red and full, inside the bar of red was two numbers with a divider between them; sixty-five and sixty-five. Below that was another bar, but this one had five odd bubbles inside it, none of them were full, and this bar had no numbers. The final bar was yellow and said one-hundred percent.

The second bar is your Rage Meter. Each bubble is a Mark of Rage which a warrior can use for their skills. A Warrior increases their Rage through taking or delivering damage, with skills a warrior can increase the number of Marks of Rage they can have. Currently, you can have a maximum of five Marks of Rage.

The fact that the tutorial felt the need to inform me that I could have only a maximum of five marks was infuriating, something I could easily see with my own eyes. It felt like whoever was writing the text was looking down on me. They were like every tutor who thought that women did not deserve to learn particular subjects, the things I was most eager to learn. Whoever wrote that text would probably be good friends with Ms. Northrop.

The final bar is your stamina. During a battle, stamina regenerates at a slow rate while attacking and a faster pace while defending. Outside of combat, stamina will regenerate at high speed. Running and walking have no stamina cost. Non-standard movements will all experience a stamina cost: swimming, crawling, jumping, climbing, crouch-walking, etc.

That was an intriguing message. The idea of being able to run as long as I wanted without feeling tired was interesting, that is if this entire thing was not a stress-induced hallucination. If this was an apocalypse, and especially one with monsters, then being able to run non-stop without being tired was a good thing.

A moment after I finished the message in the textbox something new floated into view in the upper right-hand corner of my sight. Trying to look at it caused it to swing out into my vision further and ignoring it caused it to swing back above. The same happened with the three bars, something I hadn’t noticed before.

In the upper right-hand corner of your vision are a compass and minimap. Quest markers, areas you have explored and areas of interest will be displayed in this area once you visited them.

The circle of the minimap looked useful. There was a bronze looking loop, marked with an arrow which was pointing off to the North-West, while inside the loop was an image of the layout of the mansion as if seen from the sky. In the very center of the minimap was a blue dot which I thought was supposed to represent me. Far to the North-East on the minimap, almost to the edge of it, was a marker of a cave centered in the clearing in the woods.

Now think ‘character’ to display the character screen.

I was going crazy. I had to be. The content of one's soul and mind was inviolate, yet this message wanted me to think something and command it. The chances of me merely being insane and talking to myself, most likely reduced to paroxysms of tears and gibbering were rising. When I finally broke down and tried to think ‘character’ a new window appeared before me. It had a little model of my body, rotating within my view, and there were slots for each item I was wearing. The knowledge that the creator of this text could see down to my underclothes and likely beyond left me faint.

The tutorial didn’t care how I felt. It waited until I had overcome whatever had delayed me, then it continued. It went on to show me how to open my inventory, assign stat’s (giving only the most basic of descriptions), how to join groups, and send chat messages. It went on and on, but finally, the messages ended. I wanted to take a deep breath, but I was still locked in place. To my horror, everything around me started to fade away. The darkness slipped across, from the edge of my vision until only the smallest dot of light was at the center of my view, and then, it was gone.

The return of the light caused me to blink wildly in confusion before I realized I could blink. More than blink, I could breathe and move and look around. The ground was a flat stone, grey without any distinguishing feature. The sky above me was black, but where I stood was in a circle of light which seemed to cut off at thirty feet leaving a ring of light surrounded by the dark. But the nightmare was not over. The ‘quest window’ opened at that moment and filled in with a simple objective, ‘finish fight tutorial.’ After I read the objective, a bright flash of light covered my body. When the light faded away, I wore a chest plate and was holding a large sword and shield. A chest plate like this would have cost a fortune and been worn only by the strongest of men, but for some reason, I felt comfortable, the armor felt light and easy to move in. Swishing the sword back and forth I could tell that I would be able to wield it effortlessly. I had no skill, but the sword itself felt less like a five-foot-long bar of steel and instead like an umbrella or cane. That is when the squeaking behind me drove me out of my distraction.

Whipping around I crouched slightly, pulling the large plate of the shield in front of my body with the sword held up right next to my chest. I had no experience with the sword, but I had fantasized about being a dashing knight more than once. My favorite daydream was saving a princess from a dragon, then seeing her look of annoyance and outrage when her savior turned out not to be prince charming and had no interest in her and instead wanted the dragon's gold horde.

From out of the darkness a giant black rat slunk into the light. With a head the size of a grapefruit and long black whiskers, the rat’s nose twitched as its beady eyes squinted at me. The claws on the rat's paws were sharp and scratched at the rocky ground, its tail whip-like and trailing into the darkness even as the rat’s body entered the light. Hissing once, the monster charged. The hiss and charge unnerved me, but I only took one step back. From there I tucked the shield in close and raised my sword slightly as I prepared to bring it down and end the rat's life.

At the last moment, the rat jumped and tried to scramble its claws along the metal of my shield and over to attack my face. My sword flew through the air, almost without any effort of my own, and the edge slammed into the side of the rat. The impact threw up a small red five which floated away from the rat. Suddenly in my mind's eye, the combat log window appeared, my awareness being drawn to try and understand the unnatural event.

Victoria [Warrior lvl 1] slashes training_rat_1 for 5 damage.

I smiled as the recognition of my achievement scrolled away within the text, even as my vision was unhampered by the combat log window. Somehow I was reading the log, but not actually seeing it. My distraction caused me to fail to notice the rat had recovered from the injury and was prepared for another attack. The only part of my body with armor protection was my chest and what I could cover with my shield. The rat went for my neck, and it connected perfectly, its outsized incisors latching on to my throat and tearing away without a splash of blood but with my body convulsing in pain.

Traing_rat_1 critically bits Victoria [Warrior lvl 1] for 3 damage.

All damage nullified during the battle tutorial.

The thought that I wouldn’t die from such a wound was uplifting, but the idea that such a critical attack was only three damage and that it felt so horrible that I had feared for my life left me shaky. My distraction cost me again, the rat rushed forward and tried to bite me on the ankle. His teeth grabbed my pants and missed the flesh of my leg, a white zero floated away from the miss. Screaming in a sound of both rage and fear I retaliated, swatting the rat away with my shield.

Victoria [Warrior lvl 1] shield bashes training_rat_1 for 3 damage.

Once I found the rhythm of the fight it was over rather quickly. Another two points of damage had the rat dying shortly. Once the rat died, a golden one hundred floated away from the rat’s corpse and into my body. Another golden fifty appeared from the quest window and drifted through me as well. Finally, a new objective appeared in the quest log that I needed to loot the rat. Reaching down to the rat, the brush of my hand and my intent caused a new window to appear with only rat whiskers on the rat's corpse. When I had the intention to loot the whiskers, they appeared in my inventory, and the window vanished. That finished the final quest objective and another golden fifty filled me. My log said I needed another one thousand eight hundred experience to reach level two. Standing there, the corpse of my enemy slowly fading away, I just breathed deep. My lungs pumping air like a bellows and my heart pounding in my chest, my head covered in sweat. While the entire time, a smile spread from one side of my face to the other.

While I was standing there breathing and recovering from my conquest, my body froze again, then faded away as it had before. When the light bloomed from my chest and expanded again to fill my world, I found myself frozen where I had stood before, in my adventuring clothes, with one hand reaching for the door handle of my room. With a stutter, the world continued, and screams of horror started from downstairs. Spinning around I dashed down the stairs and rushed toward the game room, the entire time a smile spread across my face.