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The mind can be a powerful thing. One had to undergo some preliminary testing before they could play the game in true safety. Because you experienced it all physically, you could trick yourself into thinking the stab-wound you just received was real. This is why everyone was equipped with a panic button. It was easy to reach, and it saved one from regretting the signing of the waver.

Val had yet to press her own.

She knew that once you left the room your body was always intact. She had left feeling sore from the occasional battle, yes, but that was to be expected. She never bruised, never bled. No one ever did. It was all a mental experience. If someone was convinced they were dead, it was their own fault. She considered the game a veritable Darwinism enforcer- survival of the cognizant fittest. Not many had died anyway. Not many at all.

She laid low another would-be assailant, taking his longknife and a few experience points in the process. 

She slid her sword into its sheath, strapped her shield to her back and stretched for a moment, taking in the threshold of the huge… she didn’t want to call it a castle, because MidWorld wasn’t Medieval world. There were no castles, no true knights. No kings, queens, vassals or serfs.

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Quite a few jesters, though. She rolled her eyes at her own dumb joke, readied a spell if she needed it, and started to climb the steps of the pyramid-like structure.

Unlike a pyramid, it fattened in an odd pentagonal level where it should have tapered. This is where the stone steps ended. Huge double-doors awaited for the spell she’d spent a good half-year earning. She wondered at the select few that must have made it this far. All the newcomers were still toiling with each other below, failing at petty quests and slaying their digital selves on soft, green digital fields. She breathed deep the fake scent of sulphurous smoke, grinned, and stepped inside.

~

She’d seen the images of this Boss Shardik. Apparently an attempt at some demon-knight character. It had all been done in decades passed. Still… his amorphous tendencies intrigued her… and the fact that his armor was made- made of magma, his sword unthinkably huge and flaming. It was rumored that draconic serrated spikes emerged where he pleased to impale the unsuspecting victim. Assuming you could go on unsuspecting around something that looked like that.