When the stones beneath your heels start to give way and cascade one by one into a black abyss of nothingness with no apparent bottom, your limbic system kicks into high gear and hints hard that maybe you ought to move your feet away from certain doom. I don’t make a point of arguing with my lizard brain in life or death situations.

I launched myself into motion by pure reflex and took off sprinting down the corridor at full speed, hoping desperately that I could run faster than the path would crumble. Torches whipped past my head on the left and right as I whizzed down the ancient stone passageway, and my eyes straining against the gloom ahead. The passageway appeared to have no end.

As I fell into a rhythm of movement familiar to me from my years of track practice, old habits kicked in—my muscles flexed and my arms pumped, bare feet slapping against the dusty stone, and I forced my breathing to come as evenly as it could despite my sprint. I was impressed at how fast I was going. In high school, at the height of my varsity career, I had averaged just under a 5-minute mile, with my best time ever being a 4:34-mile at section finals. I was pretty proud of that! It was hard to judge without a stopwatch, but this body I was inhabiting was moving at least that fast, and maybe a little faster. Considering that I was lucky to run a 7-minute mile these days, at the ripe old age of 28 with a desk job, this was damn impressive. It felt good to be suddenly, inexplicably back to my high school level of fitness.

But I knew better than anyone that I couldn’t keep a full sprint up forever no matter how in shape this avatar was. Already my breathing was growing more ragged than I’d like, and a quick glance behind me confirmed that the collapsing walkway sure wasn’t slowing. Just as I started to panic, the gloomy darkness ahead of me receded and finally coalesced into something other than an infinite path forward and relief flooded through me. But the panic quickly spiked back as I approached.

It was just a wall. The path ended with about fifteen feet of dark abyss and then a stone wall, just like the gaps on either side of me. It looked like I was going to figure out what a fall into darkness meant sooner than I had expected, and I was more than a little frustrated at my stupid HUD instruction. If “run or die” really meant “run and die” why hadn’t I just tumbled down in the first place?

The bright blue text flickered and suddenly I had a new instruction: “Leap and climb.”

What? I thought. But again, I had little time to do anything but obey. I reached the end of my path and flung myself forward over the empty air just as the final stones behind me fell away into nothingness. I sailed through the air in a long, high-arcing leap that would have made any of my long-jumping friends proud, and noticed a few thin, gray vines hanging in the air around me just in time to seize them. My hands closed against dry fiber, catching and holding tight, and for a disorienting moment I hung and spun, swaying back and forth amid the barely-visible vines over a yawning eternity of blackness. Above me, I now saw that the passage continued vertically, the creaking vines snaking their way past still more torches.

I’d never had to do a rope climb before, not a real one, but the principles are obvious. I knew I’d tire quickly if I just hauled myself up arm over arm, although I suspected that my new, svelte biceps might be strong enough to do that, but I didn’t know how long I’d have to climb, so I used a combination of clinging with my knees and hauling myself up bit by bit with a two-handed pull that slid me up the vine a few feet at a time. Fortunately, I’d gone less than thirty feet up the vines when a new passage opened. I swung my body back and forth, gaining momentum like a pendulum, and finally released my vine and leapt when I thought I was close enough to the edge to grab it. I made the jump—barely—and stood panting in a large room with a small, two foot square pedestal in the middle.

A broad-bladed short sword had been driven into the middle of the raised stone blade-first to about half the length of the sword, and again the bright blue text in front of my eye flickered. “Instruction: Draw the blade.”

I approached cautiously, keeping an eye out for traps. As weird as this was, and as much as I was still worried about Brianna, I was actually starting to relax and get into this. Whatever was happening to me, it was undeniably cool, and I could stop and work things out once I was presented with a different option than moving forward. For now I just wanted to roll with things and try to beat whatever this strange tutorial wanted to throw at me.

If my dad had been responsible for the love of all things nerdy in my heart, my mom had her own nerdiness to her that manifested in other ways, like an obsession with all things Disney that rubbed off more on Brianna than on me. But even if I could never really get into watching Beauty and the Beast or The Little Mermaid with her, she compromised with me on the movies that were more aimed at boys, and I ended up seeing Robin Hood, Aladdin, and The Sword in the Stone hundreds of times over the years. When I was eight years old, my parents had surprised me with a birthday trip to Disney Land in California so that we could escape the cold January weather with a family vacation somewhere fun, and I’d been excited beyond words to discover that there was an actual sword in an actual stone in the middle of the theme park. Or in a golden anvil, anyway. It had an impressive, shining gold hilt and a polished steel blade, and it even bore the famous inscription that I knew so well from the movie: “Who so pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil is rightwise ruler born of England.”

Like thousands of children before me, I tugged and tugged on that sword until my arms gave out. What small boy doesn’t want a free, magical sword that grants him kingship powers? Imagine my disappointment not only because I couldn’t free the sword from the golden anvil, but because I came back hours later with my parents to see the iconic show with Merlin and discovered that the kid they do let draw the sword only gets it 70% of the way. I was not at all impressed with my new, 70% Disney Land ruler. What good is a magical sword if you can’t even wave it around menacingly?

That was the memory that came to me as my fingers wrapped around the hilt of the arming sword in the pedestal before me, and I drew it fully free from the stone with a shrill, grating scrape in a single yank. I’m not going to lie: It was an absolutely satisfying culmination of all my childhood Arthur-related fantasies.

I’d held swords before, but those had mostly been crude, heavy implements made more for show at medieval fairs than for actual use, and this seemed more like a real implement designed for killing. It was light and well-balanced, maybe two and a half pounds and just under three feet long, with a cruciform hilt wrapped in rough brown leather. The blade was straight, double-edged, and quite sharp, which I verified by running it lightly across my arm and noticing that it sheared right through the hairs. As I studied it, a small pinpoint of blue light appeared on the HUD over my left eye, centered on the sword, and a thin line ran off of it to display text which appeared to hover beside the blade.

Crude Iron Short Sword

1H Slashing

5-10 Dmg

- No modifiers.

Now that was interesting. My mind spun like crazy processing all of the new information I’d just been given. Just from the fact that I had a sword and it had stats, I had confirmation that I was in some kind of game, although more advanced than anything I’d ever encountered before. Definitely fantasy, judging by the sword, the dungeon, and the designs that had been on the Ataraxia machine. It had to have some basis in physics, just because I was free to move around, and weapons appeared to have statistics like the ones I was familiar with from any number of fantasy RPGs I’d played. It was a pretty safe assumption that I had statistics too, even if I didn’t know how to see them, and that I’d need to engage in combat at some point.

“Some point” turned out to be very soon indeed, as a rumbling, grinding noise emanated from the wall before me. It began to lift upward, stirring the dust beneath it. The text on my HUD updated once more to “Instruction: Fight!”, and then three small green-skinned humanoids were charging me. They had spindly limbs and big heads, with wide mouths full of pointy teeth, and they leered at me as they spread out in a semi-circle, loosely clutching splintered wooden clubs. I put my back to the wall and held my sword out in front of me, dropping into a natural fighting crouch. A pinprick of blue light appeared on whichever goblin I focused on in my HUD displaying printed text in a floating, translucent teal box beside him. Each of them looked the same:

Goblin

LVL: 1

???

So things were starting to come together. I grinned and rotated the blade in my hand, feeling my gamer instincts kick in. I had to be able to take a few goblins, right? This was a tutorial. Some people might have been frightened or too freaked out to do anything but cower in the face of real, actual violence—or what seemed likely to feel like it anyway—but I had a few things going for me: first, I’d been in some actual fights in my life. My dad had taught me some self defense basics along with a philosophy to never start fights but to end them once started, and it had served me well with schoolyard bullies on more than one occasion. Second, I’d had stick fights with Mark using PVC swords we’d built one summer, so I knew enough not to chop my own arm off.

I charged the nearest Goblin swinging wildly, and his hasty leap backwards wasn’t good enough to save his life. I lopped off his club arm with a single slice and caught him across the face with my next, and I grimaced in disgust as he dropped to the ground spurting black blood.

But the other two goblins hadn’t stood idly by while I’d acted. They moved together, and I spun just in time to catch one of their clubs on the edge of my blade while the other club came crashing into my knee.

That hurt! My knee collapsed under the club blow with a sickening snap, just as it would in real life if someone slammed a solid chunk of wood into your knee, and a nauseous feeling suddenly rocked through me as my previous confidence wavered and I shifted my whole body’s weight to my good knee. I slammed my left fist into the face of the goblin struggling to pull his club away from my sword and was pleased as he staggered back, stunned. I yanked his club out of his hand and finished him with a quick cut that opened him from neck to navel. He too went down in a shower of black ichor.

The last goblin hung back warily, dancing just out of my reach, while I winced at the pain of my broken knee and held my stolen club in my offhand in lieu of a proper shield. I hadn’t noticed it until now, but my HUD had also updated with two new pieces of information: a blue dot on my club lead to a small window which listed the stats of my new offhand weapon, and a read-out at the far upper left of my vision reported my status.

Splintered Wooden Club

1H Blunt

2-8 Dmg

- No modifiers

Michael Peters

HP: 92/100

- Crippled: Left Leg

Well, that was just great. Five minutes into the game, and I’d already managed to get my leg crippled. It wasn’t the auspicious start that I might have hoped for. Before I could figure out what to do about that, though, I needed to finish this goblin off to make sure I didn’t wind up with any other crippled limbs. I lowered both my weapons and gasped for air, pretending I was winded, and sure enough the dummy took my bait. He darted in with a savage overhead swing that I knocked away with the club in my offhand while skewering him in the gut with a thrust from my arming sword. He collapsed onto the blade, gurgling and twitching, and after the light went out of his eyes, I used the tip of the club to slide his body off my sword and dumped him on the ground.

Now that all three goblins had been dispatched, a few more messages scrolled across the bottom of my left-eye HUD:

Killed: Goblins (3). XP +75, Gold +60.

The bodies faded away a moment later, along with the club I’d held in my offhand. Apparently I couldn’t keep their weapons unless my foes officially “dropped” them. The XP award and levels on the goblins confirmed more of my theories about standard RPG rules applying to my new environment, at least partially, and it was nice that I didn’t seem to have to actually deal with picking up and carrying currency. However, the fact that one of the goblins had shattered my knee—and so easily!—was extremely concerning. My lack of clothing or armor seemed a lot more troubling than it had a moment before. With the fight over, I turned my attention back to my injured knee, wondering what I was supposed to do about it.

I was surprised at how little pain I felt from it, actually, and now that I had a moment to think about it, it hadn’t hurt nearly as much as it should have when the goblin first smashed it. During my freshman year of track, I’d tripped and taken a bad tumble that left me with a nasty twisted ankle, and the pain had been pretty debilitating. Adrenaline helped, but it faded fast. Getting my knee broken should have left me gasping in pain and completely unable to fight, instead of just being a minor inconvenience while I killed two more goblins and executed a clear-headed strategic feint.

While the pain of my injured leg was present, it wasn’t as sharp or immediate as it would normally be. When I’d gone in to the hospital with an inflamed appendix, they’d put me on a strong dose of morphine that made the pain seem distant and unimportant without removing it completely, and that was kind of what this felt like now—unpleasant, possibly even life-threatening if the bleeding wasn’t staunched, but not immediately debilitating. I quickly realized that in a game revolving around fighting and combat using real physics, it would have to work that way to avoid players being rendered useless at the first blow. It was good to know that, but I’d still need to be more careful in a game where I could really get hurt. I’d have to work harder to avoid taking stupid hits in the future. What if it had been my skull instead of my knee?

I tested the broken leg gingerly and winced again when I put pressure on it, but after a few tries I managed to very slowly shuffle forward via a sort of hop-drag movement that kept my weight on my good leg. At least I could move around without crawling. But where would I move to? Beyond the false wall where the goblins had been waiting for me stretched a new, darkened corridor, but I didn’t think hop-dragging my way into darkness with a crippled leg was a great plan.

There had to be some way to fix my leg. In a world with goblins and swords and experience points, that shouldn’t be too difficult, right? Shouldn’t there be a potion or something I’d need to quaff after my first tutorial fight?

My eyes fell on the pedestal where I’d claimed my sword, and I saw that it was empty no longer. Now three, tiny globes of light sat atop it in a triangle pattern: two purple and one green. My HUD did its handy identification trick as soon as I focused on them.

Skill Orb: Basic Weapon Skill (Blue)

Skill Orb: Martial Weapon Skill (Blue)

Skill Orb: Mend (Green)

Skill orbs, huh? I wasn’t sure what the colors meant—maybe passive and active?—but I shuffled over and picked up the green one. As I held it, the text in the center of my HUD updated once more: “Instruction: Consume skill orbs and recover.”

In the time I’d been poking at my wound and gawking at the orbs, I’d noticed my health slowly ticking back up every few seconds, and I was now back at 100% health points (although no less crippled). It was reassuring that my wounds could heal themselves even if my limb damage couldn’t. I made a mental note to do some testing with health regeneration speed later and tried to figure out how I was supposed to “consume” the skill orb. After a few seconds of experiments that would have looked ridiculous to anyone standing nearby—bonking myself on the head with it, trying unsuccessfully to crush it between my hands, shoving it into my chest—I decided to take the instruction literally and popped the little orb into my mouth. It dissolved with a cool, minty taste, and text once again flowed across the bottom of my HUD like a marquee:

Learned new skill: Mend (5MP | Heal up to 5HP and limb damage outside of combat.)

Well, that was convenient. How to use it, though? I tried focusing on my free hand, thinking “Mend” and was pleased when a bright yellow light sputtered into place around my fingers like a golden nimbus. I held it over my leg and willed it to cast. The golden light immediately flowed off my hand and surrounded my splintered, bleeding leg, knitting flesh and bone back together in a display that was both amazing and painless. Within moments my knee was as good as new, and my HUD had blinked to an updated status reading.

Michael Peters

HP: 100/100

MP: 15/20

“Cooool,” I whispered. My crippled status had faded as soon as the Mend spell hit my leg. I hopped up and down, confirming that it really was restored, and then noticed my mana points regenerating too, although it seemed to be much slower than my health regeneration had been. After my mana ticked up from 16 to 17, I immediately started counting the seconds. At six-one-thousand, it advanced to 18. So some kind of regeneration was happening every six seconds, although I wasn’t sure if that was also true in combat. Either way, it was more information to file away for later, and I knew that it would take about two minutes of rest to restore my whole mana pool from zero.

I now picked up the other two orbs and ingested them in quick succession. Each had a fresh, minty taste like the first one had, but this time the results were a little more dramatic. My HUD informed me that I had two new passive skills, proficiency with basic and martial weapons, but it wasn’t just an entry on a character sheet! My brain suddenly flooded with knowledge that hadn’t been present a moment before about the proper stances, physical movements, and fighting styles for everything from knives to two-handed war mauls. It was like getting a decade of training with medieval weapons in the space of a second.

“Whoa,” I breathed. “Trippy.”

Even weirder was the knowledge that my newfound training was wrong. Along with her Disney indoctrination, my mom had left me with a thorough appreciation for history, and I’d hung out on /r/AskHistorians enough to know that sword fights as they were depicted in movies and videogames—with an artful trading of carefully choreographed blows—was utter nonsense. Yet that was what my brain now told me I should do against opponents, and strangely, I knew it would be effective here. The dissonance grated on me until I shrugged and accepted the bizarre pseudo-realism of my game world. If we could have XP and goblins, we could have neat, stylized combat techniques of block, parry, and riposte at reasonable speeds. Especially now that I knew how to execute them for basically any weapon!

Eat your heart out, Neo. I thought. I see your instant kung-fu training and raise you martial mastery of medieval weapons.

Whatever was going on, this was hands down the most fascinating experience I’d ever had in my 28 years of life. I still had no explanation for what this place was except that it seemed to be a real-life amalgam of some of my favorite types of videogames with some very real dangers included, but fucking hell this was cool. Real fighting? Real consequences? Loot, XP, and magic at a touch? It was everything I’d ever wanted in a game, and everything I’d daydreamed about as a teenager who wanted to make virtual reality his actual reality one day. I was almost giddy with excitement.

But then I paused—those real dangers worried me as much as they excited me. Not for myself, but for my sister. Had she faced three goblins with only a sword to protect her, too? Had she run from the collapsing floor and climbed the vines? A chill ran through me as it occurred to me that any of these things might have killed her, and I still had no idea what happened when you died.

All I could do was press on and search for some sign of Brianna. Whether this strange game was a vision, an acid trip, or a secret government VR experiment didn’t matter much to me at that moment. I was still going to track my sister down and get her home safely, and in the meantime, I was going to do my damnedest to play this game well and try to have fun with it.

I clutched my Crude Iron Short Sword tightly in my hand and padded off into the darkness.