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Thwip!An arrow sails past me.

Fuck. They’re going to kill me before I have the chance to talk to them at this rate.

These fucking arrows are dangerous. There’s something about the way human hunters act that indicates they have no fucking brains whatsoever.

I land behind a very large rock and start shouting. If they kill me for trying to help them, that’s going to suck a lot, but what can you do?

“Stop it! I’m human!”

“You’ve got wings!” someone yells back.

“It’s not my fault!”

They start arguing with each other now. “A human with wings? A harpy! She’s probably rare. We need an elite!”

“I’m not an elite, I’m a business graduate,” I shout out.

“What? Where from?”

“UCLA.”

“UCLA?”

“Yeah.”

“Not Berkeley?”

“No. Does it matter? If I come out, are you going to kill me?”

“Come out anyway. We have more than enough people to flank and surround you. Better to let us have a clear shot than risk getting winged. Get it?”

“Stop being a psycho, Tony,” someone says. “Come out. We won’t hurt you.”

I come out to face a group of people of all ages, genders, hair color, and attire. They haven’t been able to do any dungeons like they would in the game, because there are none here, which is good because they’d be even more leveled than they already are.

“I’m Melissa,” I say. “I got brought through a portal a while ago.”

“You must be one of the testers,” someone says. The crowd speaks with dozens of voices all at the same time.

It’s hard to differentiate everybody. The leader of the group is a middle-aged man who is balding and looking absolutely at home in Gulch Plat armor.

“You should group up with us, we’re about to run Ireforge. None of them seem to see us coming, which is weird and useful.”

“They don’t see you coming because they’ve never met humans before, and most of the realms are settled and peaceful. Nobodyexpects anybody to show up with a quiver full of arrows and a heart full of malice.”

Everybody looks faintly insulted by that, which makes me realize I am on the verge of losing the crowd. That could be very dangerous if I don’t keep everybody on my side.

“What do you guys think is happening?” I ask the question curiously. I still don’t know how Nox got them here really. The guys at the party didn’t really know what was happening, or at least, we didn’t ask them about it. We fixated on the how and not the why.

“We’re here in the World Championships. The best players in the world all got sent here to this simulation, like VR, but better. You know. Nobody got here without being selected in the tournament.”

“Maybe she’s got the Holographic sickness?”

“Maybe she’s part of the simulation.”

“So you all came through the same door?”

“Yeah, we went to the Equinox HQ and got put into the simulation,” a cheerful-looking young guy says. He’s fresh-faced, with a neck tattoo, and I am starting to realize I actually don’t want any of these people to end up hurt.