“Not OK, not OK, not OK, not OK.” The words came out of Reeve’s mouth with the same rapid cadence as her still-pounding heart. She spun in place, finding only old-growth trees and scattered underbrush. “This is not OK!” Her scream rolled away from the empty spawn point, its echo returning from increasingly distant parts of the woods. There was no response, save for the gradual resumption of birdsong and the unceasing babble of the nearby stream.

She checked her UI. The most recent Party Log entry read:

Reavyr (II) has respawned. Death hangover will last for ten minutes.

The timestamp was from six minutes ago.

She grunted and looked toward the trail leading down the stream—the trail that they very obviously had not taken when they’d spawned-in half an hour ago and then climbed up and out of the ravine.

“Seriously?” She said to the forest. “This is what we’re doing now?”

She started toward the downstream trail. She’d be able to track him easily with her Ranger’s skills. But…she paused and let her naginata slide through her loose hand, the butt of the pole making a deep hoonk when it struck the ground. If he died again while she was away from the spawn point, he might spawn back in again before she got back, she wouldn’t be there again, and… She let out an exasperated breath, spun her blade through the air to slice in half a lobed oak leaf as it swung side-to-side in its descent to the ground, and began pacing the perimeter of the small area free of underbrush that was the spawn point. Motion was her natural state, and it was when she did her best thinking, so much so that her teachers often had to ask her to return to her assigned spot in class when she got carried away in responding to a question and started scooting around. Passing her naginata from hand to hand, she shrugged her shoulders to reposition her bow and considered her options. I could wait, she thought, but should I go after Mom instead? Because if I stay here, how long will I have to wait for Dad to come back…or die again?

A soft chime sounded.

“Not long,” she said and pulled up her UI.

Reavyr (II) has died. Respawn in 30 seconds.

Reeve closed her eyes and thumped her forehead against the staff of her naginata until all of her hair had escaped its ponytail. She bent to pick up her leather scrunchy, a craftable item she’d invented herself, and tucked it into a pouch on her belt. She ran a hand through her hair and tried taking a few deep breaths while repeating one of her mantras. “I forgive my parents for their mistakes.” It was one of many she’d developed during 5th Grade English Language Arts, the classroom of which had a poster with one-hundred-and-one affirmations and positive thoughts for children, pretty much every one of which Reeve had been able to modify to help her cope with her parents.

When it was almost time, she opened her eyes and looked at an area of packed earth. A soft light began to illuminate the spot, and soon the halfling started to appear, pale and nearly transparent at first. He was perfectly still as he materialized, but, once fully present, he shrieked, flailed his arms, and toppled onto his face.

Reavyr (II) has respawned. Death hangover will last for ten minutes.

Reeve looked down her hooked half-orc nose at the halfling avatar her father had chosen.

“You OK, Dad?”

“Eh…eh…there was…eh…a little thing with huge wings.” He rolled onto his back and held his arms several feet apart. “You know I hate pretty much all flying bugs.”

“You somehow don’t even like butterflies.”

Walter shivered at the thought. “Well, it startled me something good. ‘That’s one big ugly moth!’ I think I said. Then I saw it had a face. It did not seem happy being called an ugly moth. It shot me with, I don’t know, this itsy little bow.”

Reeve gaped at her father. “You were killed by a pixie?”

Walter Williams, who did not appear the least bit embarrassed by having been killed, back-to-back, by two lowly fodder monsters, stared toward the sky. “Well, Honey, I was halfway across the stream when it shot me—“

“Why were you crossing the stream?”

“It was wide but pretty shallow there. I thought it must be the place where we’d crossed it the first time.”

“We didn’t cross it the first time!”

Walter pursed his lips. “I don’t have shoes,” he wiggled his halfling toes in the air, “and the rocks were smooth and slippery—I just can’t get over how convincing everything feels, and smells, and looks—“

“Dad!”

“—well, that little arrow hurt, and when it hit me I slipped, so...”

“You drowned?”

“It felt bouncier than that.”

Reeve stared at him.

“And I think there may have been a fish.” Walter rubbed his forehead.

Reeve closed her eyes again and cast about for a helpful mantra, settling on a few quiet repetitions of “My parents’ challenges help me grow.”

She checked the Combat Log in her UI. The first four entries read:

A Level 1 Goblin Scout stabs Reavyr (II) with a crude wooden shiv for 4 points of damage.

A Level 1 Goblin Scout stabs Reavyr (II) with a crude wooden shiv for 5 points of damage.

You slash a Level 1 Goblin Scout with a naginata for 14 points of damage.

You kill a Level 1 Goblin Scout.

Then there was:

Reavyr (II) is bleeding out.

followed by

Reavyr (II) has died. Respawn in 30 seconds.

Now that her father was back within her range of perception, a long list of new entries had appeared.

A Level 1 Pixie shoots Reavyr (II) with a shortbow for 2 points of damage.

Reavyr (II) lands on stream cobbles for 1 point of fall damage.

The timestamps indicated that the next event was almost half a minute later.

Reavyr (II) is swept into a cataract boulder for 1 point of crushing damage.

Reavyr (II) is swept into a cataract boulder for 1 point of crushing damage.

Reeve didn’t open her eyes to speak. “There are rapids downstream?”

“From what I can remember.”

Reavyr (II) is swept into a cataract boulder for 1 point of crushing damage.

Reavyr (II) headbutts a Level 1 Salmon for 1 point of damage.

Reeve was embarrassed to find herself relieved that her father had at least managed to get a hit in on something before he died. She opened her eyes. Her father was sitting up. “It was a salmon.”

He gave her a thumbs up and nodded.

She closed her eyes again.

A Level 1 Salmon headbutts Reavyr (II) for 1 point of damage.

She took a deep breath. Fair play, salmon, she thought.

Reavyr (II) is swept into a cataract boulder for 1 point of crushing damage.

Reavyr (II) is swept into a cataract boulder for 1 point of crushing damage. Reavyr (II) is unconscious.

The timestamps indicated that ten seconds passed before the final entry.

Reavyr (II) lands on a waterfall plunge basin boulder for 983 points of fall damage. Reavyr (II) has died. Respawn in 30 seconds.

Reeve sighed and opened her eyes. She leaned forward, her free hand resting on her muscled thigh. “That must have been pretty rough, Dad. Sorry.”

“The arrow did hurt much more than I expected it to. The rest was kind of a blur. I don’t feel so hot now, come to think of it.”

“You have a death debuff. You’ll feel better in about ten minutes.”

He scratched at his miniature nose. “Pixies are surprisingly dangerous, huh?”

“A Level 1 Pixie? No.”

“But that thing back in the clearing, that was pretty scary, right?”

“The Goblin? The Level 1 Goblin that shanked you?” Reeve’s half-orc voice rose to be almost as high as the halfling’s voice. “Nobody gets killed by a single Level 1 Goblin, Dad!”

“Somebody has to be the first, right?” He said with a chuckle. “What Level am I?”

“Level 1.”

He nodded, looking satisfied. “And you?”

“Level 14.”

“Gosh, that’s great Reeve.” He looked at her for a moment. “Is that a lot? You’ve only been playing this new game for a few weeks.”

“Yeah, but game time is different than real time. With the direct neural interface, things in here happen much faster than in the real world. In the VRMMO version...“ Reeve let out a slow, dispirited breath. “Please don’t, Dad. That’s the same expression you gave me when I tried to explain to you how to fly my drone.”

“Reeve, I’ve told you I’m sorry about the drone.”

“I know, I know. It’s fine. Really. Anyone could accidentally fly a drone literally straight into a woodchipper two houses down. I’m sure it happens all the time.”

Reeve and Walter looked at each other in silence for a few seconds.

“Anyway,” Reeve said, “VRMMO. The Virtual Reality Massively Multiplayer Online version of this RPG.”

Walter coughed politely.

“Role-Playing Game. This game. The VRMMO version is where I usually play. In that version, game time moves about a hundred times faster than real time. It could be even faster for most players, but the servers have to run at the speed of the slowest neural interface hardware the game supports, the lowest common denominator.”

“One hundred times faster? Amazing! And good use of ‘lowest common denominator.’ Vocabulary point there, Sweetie.”

“Uh-huh, thanks. A hundred times faster is for the MMO version that has millions of actual players. For the story mode I put us into, with just us three on the LAN, time can move much faster. Right now—“ She glanced at the corner of her UI. “Holy cow!”

“What?” Walter sat straighter and looked around with concern at the trees that surrounded them. “Is a LAN coming?”

“No! A LAN’s a Local Area Network. I know you’re not into tech gadgets, but you do have computers at your work, right?”

“Well, we do, but IT mostly—“

“OK, sorry, right, never mind, don’t need to know. The point is that we’re only running on the system in my room right now, nothing outside the house, and game time is over seven hundred times faster than real time.” She shook her head. “Actually pretty impressive. A month in game time would be, what, only like an hour of real time? I didn’t know it could run that fast—I’ve never bothered with the story mode.”

Walter took in his surroundings, which seemed so real. “How long have we been in here? I mean, after we came in from that strange dentist’s office waiting room place where we had to make all those decisions?”

Confused, Reeve looked at her father for several seconds before saying, “Uh, the lobby? Where you built your character?”

“Yes, that.”

She checked the UI and snorted. “Less than ten seconds. That’s how I’ve been able to level up so much after only a few weeks of playing when I can.”

Walter was looking at his daughter. She could tell he was trying to follow what she was saying about game time. She could tell he wasn’t having much luck.

“Dad, listen, why don’t we get out of here? I think you’ve gotten an idea of what it’s like, right? Can we go now?”

Walter took in the spawn site. Occasional rays of sun made it through the forest canopy and illuminated motes of dust that floated by in the breeze, a breeze noticeably more gentle than it had been in the exposed clearing. He shivered at the memory of the goblin’s attack. He picked up his hands, which had been resting on the packed dirt, and rubbed dust between his fingers. “It’s fantastic, Evie. It really is.” Walter drew out the first syllable of ‘fan-tastic’ to be several times longer than the other two syllables combined, in a way he found endlessly pleasing but that Reeve found excruciatingly embarrassing when they were in public. “Faaaaaaaaantastic,” he said again. He glanced at the sky, which remained free of clouds, and considered the fact that he was without his umbrella. In real life, Walter always carried a small collapsible umbrella in his pocket, even when there was no rain in the forecast for the week. If rain was anywhere in the forecast for the week, he would also wear a blue see-through rain slicker that made him look like a tourist about to board a boat for a misty ride to the base of Niagara Falls. He concluded that, virtual or not, he was uncomfortable with his current level of rain preparedness. He looked back to his daughter’s avatar where she—it?—stood in a broad, confident stance. He smiled and had to blink quickly a few times before he felt ready to speak. He cleared his throat. “I’m glad I had a chance to see it, but we can go, if you’re ready.”

“I’m definitely ready.”

“Okey-dokey, then.” He rose and dusted the back of his breeches. “Where’s your mother?”

Reeve facepalmed. “I don’t know, Dad. We’ll catch up with her in the lobby. Just hold on a sec. I’ll log out and then log you two out.”

He looked uncertain but nodded.

Reeve mentally selected the logout feature from the UI.

Nothing happened.