I started awake in a field, but not a particularly green one. I was curled up under a blanket in a tipped over refrigerator, sans door, and the space around me was littered with Junk.

No, littered wasn’t a strong enough word.

There were literal heaps of junk scattered around me, some reaching multiple meters tall, with a practical carpet of smaller stuff covering the rest of the space.

“This is not the start I was expecting…” I grinned. “Wow do I love the sound of this voice.” 

I stood up and stretched, letting the blanket fall to the ground. My small body creaked with satisfaction. I felt way better than I normally would IRL after waking up. It was really no contest at all between the two. If Dive Space always felt like this then I could definitely get used to it.

The area reminded me a lot of a junkyard, or at least the fictional equivalent to one. The junk heaps looked impassible, but there were mostly cleared paths that wound through the area. I could even see patches of grass and other undergrowth in those areas.

There was a forest on the nearest edge of the yard, which was hopefully not just as junk-filled as the rest of this place. The Sun...err. Suns?

Right. Suns.

The Suns were high in the sky to the right of that forest and, to the left, the skyline of what I could only assume was a city took up a good 20% of the sky. It looked a little off from what I expected, with lots of weird looking towers that were all way too tall, but it was probably the place to go.

I looked down into the fridge where I woke up. The wall came up to my hips! I noticed something on the ground by my feet.

Well, somethings.  I reached down to pick up what was, I swear, a wind up gun. It looked a little rusty, with a crank sticking out one side, just behind a long coil that stuck out of the casing and ended in a bizzaro-verse barrel. I gave it an experimental crank or three and saw a light begin to dimly glow. One of three. So either the other lights were broken or that’s how many shots my windup gun got from a full charge.

Also on the ground was the blanket, though that description may have been a little generous. It was more of a rag than a blanket, albeit a large one. I folded it up and put it back into the Fridge. It seemed like the thing to do. Last of all, there was a small bag hiding beneath the rest. It jingled when I picked it up. I pulled open the draw string and looked inside.

It unsurprisingly contained coins. It was obviously a money pouch. A little more surprising was that it also contained nuts. The metal kind. Large and dull black, but thankfully rust-free.

My overalls had plenty of pockets, so I slipped the bag into one of them and wound up my pistol until all its lights were slowing amber. They seemed to have a range to them, where one slowly went from dim to something still not-quite-bright before the next one started to light up. I doubted it would be enough light to see by if it were dark...if that was even a thing in this game?

Wow. Barely 15 minutes in and I was already losing track of reality. The immersion was frankly breathtaking.

I scrambled out of the fridge, pulling myself over with surprising ease, if not finesse. Then I took one more look around the horizon. Cities meant people. Even in a game, that was still probably true. So that’s the direction I chose.

I was, of course, completely blind-sided when the slime nation attacked.

Ooze Bros?

Gel Pals?

Whatever. I was quickly swarmed by slimes. Not cute slimes with big eyes and a smile, either. These ones were more like an ooze, featureless green and only about solid enough to hold themselves together and clumsily pull themselves around. They crawled out of the junk around the path and quickly took up a lot of space. I did the only sensible thing to do when confronted by a slime in a game.

Pop.

My shot didn’t ring out so much as it fizzled. I had been pointing at one of the slimes in front of me, maybe 5 meters away? But the little bolt of electricity went wide. It bent in the air and slammed into a pile of cans.

“Err...what?”

I squeezed the trigger again. Then again. Two more bolts of static shot out with similar results to the first. I wasn’t even pointing at that smashed TV!

But the gun didn’t care. I tried to fire another shot before remembering that the pistol only had three, then I set to grinding its crank as fast as I could. The slimes had cut off my escape route while I’d been dicking around. The ones in front of me were starting to get closer, too.

I just about managed to get another shot and a half into the pistol before I whipped it towards the nearest slime and squeezed. I even hit a slime this time!

Just not the one I was aiming for. Seriously!?

The electricity at least seemed to be effective against the monster. The slime who took the bolt shrunk down to half its size and was moving notably more slowly than before. It was just too bad that it wasn’t one of the slimes about to eat me!

Which is exactly what happened next. One of the slimes eventually got close enough to start climbing over me. It’s touch was acidic, I think. I felt a deeply uncomfortable feeling, like something immediately adjacent to pain, and my skin tingled where it touched. Either the slimes had a numbing agent or the game didn’t want to make me experience the pain of being eaten alive by slimes.

Honestly, it could be either one.

Another slime grabbed my free arm. It wasn’t too hard to shake off, but the numb feeling didn’t go away when it did. I couldn’t wind up my pistol anymore. I fell with a start. My legs decided they didn’t want to support me anymore. And then the slimes were literally on top of me. I tried to fire off one more shot, but the bolt fizzled ineffectually. It lacked the charge to do much damage, let alone enough to deal with this swarm.

And that’s how I first died in RoL:E.