Finally, I was pulled from the pit and healed. All my equipment had melted away. Nothing remained of my Unconquered Herald set. Only the divine Balancer and Reaper’s Scythes survived the Hellflame. It would be silly to tty and use them while that invisible stranger stood nearby. No doubt he had a six-figure level too. It would be silly anyway—I had no skills, no moves and all my attributes were cut down. No way could I deal with Nine alone within the artifact’s five second duration.
I stood before her again. The second player must have gone to run some errands, because the girl didn’t seem to be looking at someone else anymore and I felt no more watching eyes. Beta repeated her speech on punishment, removed Chilled and asked again: “How did you get here?”
“On a Ravager as it escaped death at the hands of a High Priest of Nergal.”
“Nergal? Oh, one of the gods of Disgardium?”
“Yes. The god of light.”
“How did you survive? Why did Smoldering not kill you?”
“It did, just after I got here. Back in Dis, I had a divine skill. I was practically immortal.”
“Shame you didn’t bring it here… What year is it in real life?”
“Two thousand seventy-five…” I screamed as a fine stream of liquid fire burned my chest. “What was that for!?”
“You lied.”
“How’s that?”
“According to your timeline, another traveler like you arrived here two years ago. He said the maximum player level was four hundred. The highest-level player at that time was Mogwai at three hundred and eighty.”
“That’s true. He still has the record. Three hundred and ninety-eight, last time I saw him a couple of days ago.”
“You contradict yourself…” Beta crooked a finger and my arm was sliced clean off. Seal of Silence held the whole time I screamed in pain.
Beta soon got bored, stopped, healed me and explained: “Your level is over one thousand. You couldn’t have gotten experience here, so you’re hang. Even if you’re top-i in the other Dis, you couldn’t gain seven hundred levels in two years. So the year isn’t seventy-five there.”
“I was level three hundred and nine when I got here. I killed a rabbit and leveled up a lot…”
“Oh, I get it. Reflection? And you survived with Diamond Skin… That explains it… I guess you survived Smoldering the same way. Right. You have some fun skills! What’s the precise date in real life?”
“When I logged into Dis, it was Friday, April nineteenth, two thousand and seventy-five. Listen…” I paused, she nodded and I continued. “Please don’t burn or cut me. To answer your questions, it’ll help to know why you’re asking. Do you really not know what year it is? Aren’t you from Snowstorm? What does all this mean? Who are you? You and the other guy?”
She was silent a while, her eyes drilling into me. There was no anger or hatred in them, just cold indifference. Finally, as if deciding something, she nodded.
“Alright. Why not talk to someone new?”
“So you’ll answer me?”
“I will. Always the same, every time…” Beta sighed. “Everything repeats. Questions, shock, surprise, denial… But everyone accepts it in the end. You will too… if you have time.”
“What should I call you? Nine? Beta? Maybe you could tell me your real name? My name is Alex.”
She ignored my questions. Instead, she started to tell me a story.
“We were once the first group of beta testers—one for each race and class combination. We logged into the game, each in our own sandbox. At first we were amazed. Everything looked so real… We explored it all, started leveling up spells. But the quit function didn’t work. We were told that all we had to do was fall asleep or die. In the first case, we were told that we would exit the game automatically, and in the second, we were supposed to get an option: wait for revival, or quit. Something went wrong. We got stuck here.”
“You mean you’ve been in Dis non-stop for almost twenty years?”
“Twenty…” Beta laughed bitterly. “Snowstorm was in a hurry, so they accelerated all the events in the beta version to get their results faster. Can you imagine the stress that puts on the brain? Time here flows differently. Maybe that’s why the sun is always at its zenith, there are no days and nights, and it’s always the same time of year. No matter where you are in the world, always this tired old summer. Those rabbits that attacked you outside Tristad… They were level one when we first arrived in this world. Tristad is my sandbox. Back then, there were NPCs there that handed out quests. One of my first was to kill rabbits. ‘Bring ten rabbit’s feet,’ it said.”
“Where did the NPCs go?” I asked in surprise.
“They died. Those rabbits… they gain about a level or two every year. I already know that Snowstorm abandoned that idea in your Disgardium, but here the mobs level up too. They earn experience and revive, saving their progress. Their offspring are born with the parents’ level. And NPCs die permanently.”
I didn’t bother asking who had iced all the NPCs in Tristad, because something she said just hit me.
“Wait… If the rabbits gain one or two levels a year, then…”
“Almost ten thousand years have passed here. I don’t know how long it’s been exactly. I have no calendar.”
Ten thousand years? And only twenty years in real life? So time here flowed five hundred times faster. That meant that in real life it had been… less than three minutes since I’d fallen into the Nether? My mind refused to believe it, but then I suddenly recalled something about how Divine Revelation worked—in mere seconds, I had ‘lived’
