"Hello," the voice from above called again. It sound gruff, slightly nasal.

We were in no shape for another fight, but we might not be given the choice, so we readied ourselves. Mack unsheathed her sword. Aaron drew their knife. I raised my staff. And Josh yelled, "Hello there!"

"Are you players?" the voice asked.

"Sure am, bro!"

I would have slapped my forehead at his sheer stupidity, but Mack beat me to it. 

There was a creak of a door opening. Then, "Oh, thank God! The goblins are dead." A female voice called to us, "If we come down you won't attack will you?" A new voice (male) said, "Do you think they'd tell of if they were?" "Well, what do you suggest?" "Shhh! Shhh! Unless you want to stay up here until our session expires, we have to take a chance," the original voice said.

We watched as three figures made there way down the staircase that wound around the exterior wall. The one in the lead appeared to be a dwarf with chain-mail, an ax, and a long red beard. The next, was an Elenian like me. He was tall and muscular, wearing leather pants and no shirt, exposing a buff torso lined with rune tattoos. He held a tall staff that had an irregularly shaped ball on top. His antlers came out more to the sides than straight up like mine. And they were longer with more tines as well. The last, was a small woman that made me think of Aaron. Although as they came down to the ground floor, it became apparent she was a different species. She was about half-a-foot taller and seemed even thinner (if that was possible). She was pale instead of tanned, and her hair was severely short, spiky, and bright silvery-blue. She wore only two wide blue-gray ribbons. One across her chest, the other cleverly tied to cover her butt and groin.

The dwarf said, "You're a sight for sore eyes. We've been stuck up there since last night."

It turned out to be another player party. They watched us warily, and they looked a bit ragged and traumatized. But they came around the fire and rubbed their hands in front of it for warmth. 

Aaron asked them what happened.

The tall elk-man spoke for the group. His voice was rich and confident and carried a dignity to it. "We'd been in Feronia for about two weeks. Five of us had started the game together, and we'd leveled pretty well. We were all between level 7 and and 9. Lots of good equipment too. We were almost ready to leave the Borderlands for a second tier region, but then, everything glitched up. It had been pouring rain, and the drops just stopped and hung in the air. We hadn't seen anything like it. The game had been pretty reliable up until then. We thought it was just temporary. And it was, but not in a good way. Things got worse. The sky cleared and the sun came out, but we were suddenly in virtual bodies exactly like our real ones and naked. After a few minutes, Katie announced herself, and these plain smocks appeared on us. We thought the system had crashed and was slowly building things back up. But while we were waiting to get our equipment back ..."

"And waiting for our skills," the dwarf added. "The damn game had reset us to level zero and stripped us of our abilities."

Elk-man nodded. "Yes. We were very vulnerable, and just then we were set on by a group of Smilodons."

The dwarf said, "Giant, filthy feral cats. Curse them to hell." Then to Mack, he said, "Sorry. No offence."

She replied scornfully, "It's not like I'm really a cat you know." The dwarf looked down abashed.

"We ran, but they got Tom and Ryan."

The small woman said, "They tore them to pieces."

"We waited for them to respawn," the elk-man said. "But if they ever did, they didn't rejoin are party." He was quiet for a minute. "Eventually, we became characters again, but these were new ones. We'd never heard of the races or the classes before. At least, not in Feronia. I'd been a human druid. It changed me to an Elenian Shaman at level zero. I'm Rick, by the way. Even though, for some stupid reason, the system shows my name as 'unknown'"

The dwarf spoke next, "I'm Jonathan. I had been playing as a dwarf warrior. Now I'm a gnome."

Aaron said, "Oh! Well, they seem to be very similar species. And at least you didn't have any gendering issues. We had a couple of mix-ups with our characters." They trailed off getting self-conscious.

The gnome hid his face in his hands.

The small woman said, "We had some problems to. You see, Jonathan always used an ax. But it turns out male gnomes use hammers. The women use axes. She's an Ax-Maiden class now."

"You're a girl?" Josh said. "But you have a beard."

"What's with Simple Simon?" the small one asked.

Aaron said, "He ended up with a very low Intellect roll."

Mack added, "To be fair to Katie, he didn't give her much to work with. And how about you? Are you some kind of fairy?"

"Yeah, some kind," she said. "A Pixie to be exact. I went from being an Elf Illusionist to a species specific class called Trickster-Mage. My name is Matthew."

 "Sorry," Aaron said. "I know how having your gender changed can be ... er ... disorienting."

"Actually, I chose to play as a woman. I'd heard how realistic everything in Feronia was and wanted to see how it felt. In fact, until I can get a game name, I'd appreciate it if you called me Ellie. What about all of you folks? Did you go through the same thing? Did your characters change much? Did you lose anyone?"

Before anyone else could respond, Mack took a step forward and said, "Yeah, pretty much everything happened the same, except we'd only just arrive. I guess we lucked out because we had our new characters all ready when we entered our first battle. Just barely, I mean by seconds, but at least we were able defend ourselves. I'm Mack a Felinoid Duelist. That's Aaron, the Wood Sprite Forester—that's like a ranger not a Subaru. Then, you've met Josh, Human Village-Idiot ... oh and his class is Hermit. Then, the quiet one trying to disappear is Tanner. She's a Elenian Hedge-Witch."

I waved, still a bit to shy to say anything, but also reeling by Mack's easy lies. If I'd been talking–if I'd been comfortable enough to be the one talking—it would have never crossed my mind to not say anything except the truth. But I could see the logic in concealment. It probably wasn't a good idea to advertise that our being loaded into the game may have crashed it. These people seemed pretty torn up about what happened to them and their friends. There was no need to give anyone reason to seek out vengeance, even if it really wasn't our fault.

Jonathan asked, "So, Mack, you got gender-bent too? Was it welcome or unwelcome?"

"Actually, Mack is short for Mackenzie and I'm a woman in IRL too. Pretty much exactly as you see me except the ears and tail." As she said this last lie (she didn't look anything like her character), she glanced over at Rick. When she realized he wasn't looking at her, she addressed him. "So, Rick, how did you end up trapped by the goblins."

He turned to her. Wait! He turned from looking at me. I hadn't noticed his eyes were on me until they weren't.

I crossed my arms over my chest defensively. He wasn't checking me out, was he? No, he must have just been curious about seeing another Elenian. 

Oh my god! Did he have an erection?!? Ew!

Okay, no. It wasn't hard. Just really big and on display in his tight leather pants. And I probably spent way too much time examining it. I bent my head and concentrated on my shoes. Oh, if only that invisibility ring worked properly, I sure wouldn't have minded vanishing at that moment.

Rick said, "We fought our way out of the woods and came across this tower. When we got here, this main floor was deserted, and we camped out, healing up and trying to figure out what we were going to do. We aren't the most balanced party as you can guess. Then late last night, the goblins showed up. We killed a couple, but there were too many of them, and we were wounded, so we retreated to the upper chamber. We were waiting until we were back at full strength or for them to leave, but then we heard people talking English. And well, you know the rest ..."

Aaron pointed up. "Was there anything up there? Monsters. More levels?"

"The floor above this one was empty, but there's another one above that filled with spiders."

"Huge spiders," Ellie added in.

Rick continued, "There's also a metal hatch ..." He waved to a dark part of the room opposite the doorway. "Some stairs lead down to a tunnel. I was actually thinking, if we joined forces, we might stand a chance of clearing the tower and exploring the caves."

"Counter proposal," Mack said. "How about we all get some rest, and then in the morning we clear-out the dungeon, and you can start walking to town."

The other party didn't look to happy about this. Aaron told everyone to just wait a second, then dragged us to another part of the circular room for a meeting. Both him and me thought Mack was being short sighted. We could really use a few allies until we were stronger. But Mack was insistent that they'd just get in the way and make it so we got less treasure and experience. So, we put it to a vote. Mack tried to convince Josh to go along with her to create a tie, but he said, "Josh is tired of always getting hurt. More people is better."

So, we came to arrangement. We would form a party until the first town we came to. Once we were in the safety of the town, we could reassess if we wanted to stay together or go our separate ways. Also at that point, we'd divide all the cash and the loot we were able to sell into equal shares. Any usable loot would go to those who could equip it and who needed it most. I saw this last point leading to more than a few arguments, but no one had a better idea of how to get around the problem. 

When everyone had shook on the agreement, we shared our food with the others and began to settle down for the night. I decided to check out the upstairs chamber the others had been stuck in just to see what was there. Rick came along with me. Apparently there were sections of the floor that were rotting away, and he felt that someone should point them out to me to save me from any accidents.

Just like the ground level, it was all one big room, but where the lower level had been bare, this was cluttered with remnants of furniture. Chairs and tables were shattered into pieces and turning to dust. Scraps of fabric clumped together with moisture and grew fungus. It didn't look like any place you'd want to be stuck for long. Six narrow slit windows were positioned at intervals around the room, and a ladder was cut into the stone wall leading up to a trapdoor.

Rick came up behind me and put a hand on my shoulder, while pointing out the trapdoor. "You can see why we didn't dare take on the spiders. The entrance is a choke point. The first person up there would be lucky to survive long enough for reinforcements to get through."

I felt his body's warmth even with the few inches between us, and his breath was hot on my ear. I stepped away from him.

He said, "Is it weird I feel comfortable around you? I mean, I know we're not really elk-people, but for some reason I sense a kinship."

"It's possible," I said, walking over to one of the windows and looking out. Not looking at him. "The game can mess with your mind a bit. We noticed it when it made Josh a lot dumber. It's possible it creates an affinity between members of the same species too."

He came up and looked over my shoulder, leaning forward with his hand against the wall in front of me for support. "It's a beautiful night. You know before all this bad stuff started, Feronia was an incredible place. I guess it still is."

We stood there for a moment looking at the star drenched forest. me very aware of how much smaller I was than him and how his bare, rune-etch skin surrounded me.

After a while, he said, "You might be right about the mental effects. We've noticed some little things too. The game could be altering us in ways we don't even know. Or maybe I'm just genuinely attracted to you."

I slipped under his arm and put some distance between us. More scared than I had been when bandits attacked us. "Ahhhh!" I said with alarm. "I'm not ... this isn't ... I'm a man!"

Rick's face tightened into a look of shock. He mouthed a wide silent, "Oh," and raised his hands up. "I didn't realize."

"Yeah. I ... Um ... Yeah," I said with all my typical eloquence, before I dashed down the stairs, my face burning red.