The two continued on with their questing. They helped a mother and her son track down a lost dog, being rewarded with a money pouch containing twenty-five copper coins. A father needed help training his son in combat, where the party was provided with wooden short swords, and shields made from wooden planks. Crude weapons to be sure, but good enough for training. This quest taught them how to perform skills, block, and swing a sword. Being the adventurer class, they only had basic skills that included block, dodge, and first aid.

After being schooled by a child, but helping them gain confidence, the quest was complete. The reward was the sword and shield they had been using, plus a few bandages. With another quest finished and a level gained, the party headed off once more, discussing the skill system it had introduced them to. Given the circumstances of the game, they didn’t have buttons or hotbars to access skills and instead had to say the name of the skill to activate it.

"What did he mean by ‘mind and body activation’ as an alternative to speaking out a skills name?" Lucas asked as they walked along, swinging his new sword through the air a few times.

Tony shrugged his shoulders, his new equipment already stored away. "I took it as some skills can be used by performing a specific action, like swinging a sword from down low to up high, or something."

"And the mind part?" Lucas put his sword away into his bag. "Using a skill by thinking about it? Sounds like it’d be difficult to do."

"Could be. There’s never been a true VR MMO, nothing like what you would play on a computer. There wasn’t a good way to deal with multiple skills, but that was before a VR system like the Nest. They must have figured a way out to deal with lots of skills, and it wouldn’t surprise me if thinking of a skill activated it." Tony pulled out his town map.

"What if you think about a skill by accident? Would it just—" Lucas slowed to a stop and looked up and down the street. "Is it me, or is it kind of quiet?"

Tony came to a stop several paces ahead of Lucas and looked around. Ever since the game had started, the streets had been busy with all the new players traveling around town. What they saw now was a fairly empty street with only the occasional person walking by.

"They probably fixed the log out problem and everyone got off."

"And since we’re in a beta you can’t return to, it’s only going to get more and more quiet." Lucas continued the train of thought. "Maybe the lines for the quests won’t be so bad then." He moved ahead to stand beside his friend. "Where is the next quest, anyway?"

Tony pointed to the last red circle on the map that was in a district they hadn’t gone to yet. "Only one more to go. We have to head through the Plaza again."

Lucas looked at the map Tony held and gave a nod of his head. "Alright, lead the way."

Tony stored his map and sighed. "When did I become the navigator? One of my other friends usually handles that."

"Um, when you took the lead when we first got here." Lucas chuckled and patted Tony’s shoulder as they headed off. "You’re doing a good job so far. I trust you."

Tony shook his head. "I’m usually the one that gets lost. Once we get outside where there aren’t streets to guide me, you’ll see."

Lucas was about to retort until he heard a mass of voices getting louder and louder. His pace quickened as he moved ahead of his friend. Once he was further up the street, he could see into the Plaza, where sizable crowds of people had gathered; voices filled the air.

"Is anyone able to log out?!"

"How do you contact a Game Master?"

"I’m going to be late for my night class!"

"I can’t log out either!"

"Why can’t I pull the headset off?!"

"My mom is gonna ground me for playing this for so long!"

"This doesn’t look good." Lucas mumbled. A lot of the beta players had to have been there, looking half as full compared to when they had loaded in.

"Scratch the idea that people were logging out. I guess we’re stuck here still." Tony said after catching up with Lucas.

"Everyone needs to calm down!" An Orc with sea-green skin and short shaggy black hair stepped up on the fountain edge and roared out. "Even if the game makers can’t fix this right away, someone you live with can turn the headset off for you! Stop panicking, it’ll be alright!"

This quieted the crowds a good amount, but not entirely.

"I locked the door to my room. What about me?!"

"But I live alone!"

"My roommate is staying at her boyfriend's place!"

"My dad won’t know what to do!"

"My grandpa can’t get up the stairs to my room though!"

"Panicking will not help, we need to—" the Orc yelled out once more, but was interrupted by an unknown voice.

"That won’t work."

The Orc narrowed his gaze as he scanned the rows of people looking up at him. "Who said that? What exactly won’t work?"

A young feline beast-woman stepped forward. Her long blonde hair and gray striped ears and tail set her apart from the crowd. "You can’t just turn the headset off. It has safety features preventing that when in a dive."

"Well, whatever! Someone can pull the headset off, same thing!" The Orc retorted.

"No, that won’t work either." She responded. "Did you already forget about the straps the headset makes you secure before even being able to use it? They have locks on them controlled by the headset, and it won’t unlock until you exit from a dive." She sighed. "Both things together mean the headset can’t be turned or pulled off, and I doubt the straps can be easily cut. They looked sturdy to me."

The Orc looked down in disbelief. "Well, uh, there has to be some—"

The crowds of people drowned out the Orc’s voice, everyone talking to their neighbors or out loud to themselves. Lucas and Tony had moved further into the plaza, watching everyone getting riled up as they, too, grew worried. Two hours had passed since they had started the game. The sun was setting, mirroring the sun’s action in real life if what the man had said was true. Voices rang out from the mass of people once more.

"How long are we going to be trapped here?"

"Shouldn’t they have fixed it by now?"

"Is there some way to get out?"

"What if we die? It’s realistic, maybe there is permadeath or something?!"

"Permadeath?"

"Do you think dying would work?"

"What if it hurts?"

"I’ll do it!" A man cried out amongst the crowd, his voice grabbed everyone's attention. "I can’t be any later than I already am. No way am I going to lose my weekends with my kid!" It was the man from earlier. The one Lucas and Tony encountered when they first learned of the log out problem.

"Someone attack me!" He continued, looking at those surrounding him.

"The town is a safe zone. You can’t hurt other players!" A voice called out.

The man looked around desperately. Anyone that had been near him backed away a respectful distance from the panicking father. His eyes locked to the top of a clock tower on the edge of the plaza.

"I’ll do it myself then." He pushed through the crowds of people, breaking out into a run once he broke free and rushed into the bottom of the tower.

People talked amongst themselves once the man had disappeared from sight. Some were unsure what had happened, others worried about what they suspected would happen next. After a few minutes, a voice called out, everyone in the plaza looked to the top of the tower. The man stood near the very top where a big bell was hanging. The enormous face of the clock on the tower was beneath where the man stood and told the time; it was nearly a quarter after seven.

"If I have to jump from up here to log out, I’ll do it!" He yelled, looking down at all the people gathered below. Anyone directly beneath him stumbled back once they realized what was about to happen. The man took a deep breath, then let himself fall forward over the railing, his body turning over as he fell until he smacked into the cobblestone road below. His limbs were sprawled out as he laid on his back, letting out a pained groan as he stared up at the orange sky.

There was no blood splatter on the road, no blood coming from the man’s body at all. The people nearby rushed over, a small crowd forming around him.

"Why am I still-" His voice trailed off as a shadow appeared above him. The shadow shimmered, growing less transparent. It only took a few seconds for the apparition to reveal a skeleton in a ratty black hooded robe wielding a large scythe in one hand. The newly appeared being hovered a few feet above the man, lowering the blade of its scythe at the man’s head.

It pulled the scythe back and prepared to swing it down, then a bright light shone from the sky above. The light engulfed both man and the strange entity and, after a few seconds, the light ceased. Nothing remained in the place it had occupied. The people nearby looked on in confusion at the place a man had committed suicide. Voices filled the plaza once more.

"Was that the grim reaper?"

"Did he die?

"What was that light?"

"Maybe he logged out?"

No one was sure what to make of it. Everyone was talking to one another for several minutes until they heard a familiar voice call out once more.

"It didn’t work, goddamn it!" All the eyes in the plaza looked to see the man that had jumped from the clock tower.

The Orc, still standing on the edge of the fountain, called and waved the man over. "Hey, are you alright? What happened?"

"No, I’m not alright. I’m still trapped here!" He walked over to the fountain, people separating and creating a path. "That thing appeared above me, then everything got bright and I couldn’t see." He hopped on to the fountain and looked up at the Orc. "When I opened my eyes, I was in the church a few streets over. I did all that and gave myself a heart attack for nothing!"

The Orc looked at the man with a dumbfounded expression. "That’s all? You respawned?"

"I came back to life if that’s what you mean, and I—"

"That’s not all." The feline woman from before interrupted. She pointed to a spot above the man’s head while holding her opened journal in her other hand. "Look at his name."

The man looked up above himself in confusion. "My name?"

Everyone pulled their journals out and flipped to the party page, the Orc doing the same. Looking at the man now showed his username floating above his head, but not only that, there was a skull icon beneath the name.

"What is that?" The Orc turned his gaze away from the skull icon.

"A status effect." She shrugged. "No idea what kind. His journal should say something about it."

"Uh, right." The Orc instructed the man on how to retrieve his player journal and how to set it up. It was fairly quiet in the plaza, everyone waiting to see what the man’s journal had to say. The Orc tried to turn the pages for him, only to learn he couldn’t. It seemed only the owner could use this piece of equipment.

"Turn to the third page."

The man did as he was told, turning to the page titled Stats. There was a list of stats for his character, such as strength, constitution, dexterity, and intelligence. Below that was a section named Status Effects, and it only had one active effect within it.

"Death’s Mark." The man read out, silently reading the rest. "I don’t understand."

"Let me see." The Orc leaned over to read the page. "You have escaped Death but are now marked, making it impossible to escape again while marked, and will remain marked for one day. All stats are lowered by thirty percent while affected." He stood up straight. "Sounds like if you die again while marked you won’t respawn."

Hushed voices began breaking out amongst the crowd.

"So you’re saying all I have to do is jump again?" The man asked the Orc, who shrugged in response. "Fine, I’ll do it again. It didn’t hurt that bad, anyway!" The man dropped his book down onto the fountain edge and stormed off to the clock tower.

The talking ceased as all eyes were on the man once more, as he stood at the top of the tower. "If you all want to sit around trapped in some game waiting for the game makers to get you out, then go ahead! I’ve got a son that is waiting for me, and I need to get out of here." He called down to the crowds. "I’ll send for help when I’m out, for the ones too chicken to jump from a virtual tower."

Without another word, the man climbed up onto the railing and jumped, belly flopping onto the hard surface of the road.

"Ugh, nothing to it." The air above him shimmered as Death emerged, hovering over the prone man. There was less hesitation this time around. The scythe raised up and promptly sliced into the center of the man’s back.

"Ngh, damn!" He cried. Everyone stared, watching as the man’s body became pixelated and distorted over a few seconds. As he became unrecognizable, his body exploded into a mess of pixels and polygons that fizzled away in the air as they flew out.

People gasped and stumbled back away from the spot the man had once occupied. Death slowly raised his scythe up, no one able to see the entity’s face beneath the hood as he quickly vanished the same way he had appeared. The Orc looked at the journal the man had left behind. It, too, was fizzling away until nothing was left of it. Everyone looked on, the scene before them completely gone now; then the talking began.

"What just happened?"

"That didn’t look like a log out to me!"

"Did he die? Like, for real?"

"No way he died for real! He got out, right?"

"What if we can’t get out?!"

"Are we trapped?"

"Everyone, calm down!" the Orc roared. "I don’t know what that was. Maybe he logged out because he wasn’t able to respawn, but that didn’t look right. It’s better if we wait for the developers to fix the problem."

"Come on." Tony grabbed Lucas’s arm and walked away, pulling the tall Draconian along after him.

"What just happened?" Lucas glanced back at the crowd as he was led out of the plaza.

"I don’t know, but that—that wasn’t right." Tony slowed down as they got further away from all the voices. "I couldn’t see what happened very well, but I could still tell it didn’t seem normal. The way he just—"

"Got all messed up and exploded?" Lucas finished his friend’s sentence. "Yeah, it didn’t seem normal. Maybe it was a bug or something?"

"I have a bad feeling about it." Tony came to a stop. The streetlamps flickered to life one by one, providing light with the flames inside as the sun continued to set.

"What if he actually died? The Nest is new technology that has never been used on a large scale. Maybe the headset made him comatose, or fried his brain?"

"I don’t know." Lucas looked at his worried friend. He didn’t know what to say for several seconds, as he, too, was worried. "But it’s like that Orc dude said. We can wait for the problem to be fixed. In the meantime we can play the game."

"Yeah, we just can’t die while being marked." Tony looked up the street for a moment, then pulled his map out.

"Which way do we need to go, Mr. Navigator?" Lucas asked with a soft smile.