I screeched as an extremely loud noise appeared right by my head. Why couldn't Doug get over his pathetic attempt at a joke? "You're still jumpy as shit, Turner. What's wrong? Did your Mom miss you yesterday?" as a matter of fact, no. She rarely did, when the urge took her. My reflexes were bad enough that it wasn't hard, but she wasn't incompetent. Even with more alcohol in her system than water she had good aim when it came to hitting me. Most women wouldn't have her arm or eye, even sober. Lucky me.

Damn puberty for skipping me. Most boys were bigger than their moms by a huge margin by now. I was still under one hundred pounds. Even then, most of my weight was bone. Maybe I had a medical condition that made me extra heavy and weak so I could notice so much more than I could react to. Then there were monsters like Doug with the opposite problem. He weighed over two hundred pounds. At thirteen. And he apparently didn't know that his hand weighed more than my head, to say nothing of when it was accelerated by an arm thicker than my waist. What was wrong with him? More importantly, how could I replicate that wrongness? Fingers on the back of my neck? Shit.

"Talking to you, Spacey." And stars flooded my vision. Ow! My head should have become more resistant to damage by now. He'd been slamming my head into my own locker door since we'd gotten lockers. In elementary school, he'd just shoved me into the wall. Thin metal doors on hinges hurt less, but he pushed harder. And it was all focused on my head. He chuckled like a troll as he walked away; all gravel and bass. The world had changed a million times, we were reading about a time when insults were legally relevant in history class, but middle school remained the same. The adult world might belong to the smart, but the adolescent world belonged to the strong. Damn their muscles to Hell. Damn all of the pubescent morons and whatever universal law that stated strength and intelligence were inversely related.

"You good? It rang more than normal today." Jason always made sure to arrive right after Doug. I didn't blame him. Much. Doug and I had a long history that nobody wanted a part of. "I swear, one of these days we'll get him back. He's peaking early, that's what my Dad says."

That was never going to happen. My brain didn't function the right way to build robots, and that was where all the money was. Too much math. I'd tried to take things apart and put them back together, but I usually got caught with the pieces all over the place so I couldn't even try to put them back together. The professor route wasn't better. Sometimes paper felt as dead as the moon. On paper, I was a retard. So retarded that the teachers didn't expect me to pass. Wasn't my fault they insisted on teaching things that didn't matter in the least interesting way possible. "Give it up, Jason. We'll never win in this world. We're too weak to win as kids and too dumb to win as adults." Unfortunately, that was the truth. I couldn't test at all. I'd only passed four tests in the last three years. Your entrance into the adult world was based on paper, not brains. Captains of the archery and fencing clubs didn't go all that far. Their games got bigger, but they were still just archers and fencers. Maybe three of each were rich enough to call themselves rich. The rest were poorer than robot repairmen. Which made no sense. I was the best shot in the district, but I got bullied because I was small. Jason was the best fencer in the school, but the wrestlers still beat him up every day after classes ended. Why weren't we allowed to bring our weapons everywhere with us? I would have put an arrow through Doug a dozen times at least…which might be the reason we weren't allowed to bring them out of the range. Rules seemed to be built specifically to get in the way of righteous vengeance.

I pulled my backpack over my shoulder as I scurried to my next class. It was never a good idea to spend longer in a hallway than absolutely necessary. I would avoid my locker completely if my tiny frame could support the weight of all my books at once. What a nice dream. As it was…I was forced to see it twice a day. So my head was introduced to metal twice a day. For being such a dumb brute, Doug sure could keep to a schedule. And he was patient. He would wait by my locker for me to appear. He'd wait through three periods. I'd tested him multiple times.

The door was oddly heavy when I pushed on it. It didn't budge. I pushed harder, and suddenly the hinges were greased. I flew through the door to land on my face. A half-manly giggle sounded from the doorway. Greta. Who would name their child Greta? It was like asking for them to become a bully. Luckily, Doug had finished early today so there were only four people in the classroom to laugh at me. I snarled to myself as I scurried to my desk as fast as possible. Greta's monolithic frame shook and jiggled as she dropped into her seat next to me. "You trip every day. What's wrong with you?"

"Gosh, Great-A, guess I'm just clumsy." I muttered, wishing I had the courage to actually use any of my excellent permutations of her name as I dreamed of ways to kill her. There weren't many. I didn't drive a car or own any power tools. The only real option was stealing a baseball bat from the school and hitting her with that. Though, from the size of my arms, that wasn't a very promising option. She would probably laugh and sit on me until I turned to mush. Unlike Doug, she wasn't exceptionally strong. Just heavy. The bat would just bounce off of her. If I could get my bow…but the teachers were strangely vigilant with the deadly weapons in school. Even the simple tip arrows we shot at targets had plenty of penetrative power to end Greta. 

"Take your seats!" I tried to listen to the teacher. I really did. All I ended up doing was imagining my strategy for War World Online. I'd already leveled up my Paladin as far as he could go. And that was the last of the melee fighters. And I'd started with the magic users. So…rogue archetypes. Ranged physical and melee glass cannons. This was going to be awesome! I'd saved the best for last on purpose, though I hadn't thought I'd get to start any of the rogue classes until launch. Leveling alts was easier than I'd thought it would be. WWO was set up so that gold was shared among all of the characters on an account, but not the items. It didn't matter, because all you had to do was buy a shop access potion from someone experienced and use the badass shops to buy all of the equipment. 

I loved starting out. I could buy all of the best equipment and level up at lightning speed. But it always slowed down. Near the end it was the same pace as the first character, but blitzing through half of the grind was a special kind of high. I'd set a goal and I'd do my best to keep it; every class maxed out before the Beta ended. In actuality, that goal was impossible and I knew that going in. I could have gotten all of them two thirds after the first one got maxed out, that wouldn't have been a problem, but those last few levels took forever in comparison to the beginning and middle. I'd done good, though. So far as I knew, I had the highest account level in the Beta. There wasn't any information out there to indicate I was, but I'd spent all the time I could and done two thirds of an impossible task. Pretty awesome, if I said so myself.

Unfortunately, it was the only game I had enough money to own. It was a beta I'd gotten into by a ridiculous fluke, as all lotteries must be. I'd spent all of my allowance money on sleep stimulants since winning the console and access to the beta in one fell swoop. It was awesome. I jacked in and slept while leveling up, so I was always rested. Can't have nightmares when you're playing a game instead of sleeping. What was even better was the fact that the unconscious part of my brain was in the game too, even if only a little bit, so I actually picked up some things from playing.

I'd figured it out when I started accidentally using my Barbarian's skills with a wooden spoon when I was wasting time one night during a patch. I'd never spent a day in a dojo, but my footwork felt specific. It made me even more irritated with how slow my actual body was, but it was actually kind of impressive. In a very nerdy way. It wasn't all that useful to use two-handed axe skills with a spoon, but the fact that I could learn actual fighting moves from a game was pretty amazing. Maybe my archery skills would transfer to my character. Being a level one sharpshooter would have all sorts of value in-game.

The bell rang, knocking me out of my stupor. Shit. PE. Couldn't waste any time, then. The only bonus of the class was that Doug wasn't in it. If he was, I'd have drunk my Mom's booze and died of alcohol poisoning a long time ago. I rushed as fast as I could, but there was already someone in the locker room when I burst in. He didn't even look around as I flashed into my stupid PE uniform. I was out on the hard-wood before I could formulate a real thought. "Turner. You're early, as usual. Up to your corner." That was one benefit of this class. Some coaches were hard on the weaklings. Coach Harvard ignored them. He put them into teams together, and gave them a loss against the pubescent teams without forcing the painful game to be played. "Baseball today." Finally, a game I didn't have to struggle through. I'd still pretend to suck, if for no better reason than I didn't want to end up on the same team as anyone who knew Doug in a friendly manner. I grabbed a glove and rushed to the corner of the gym. I hopped into the bleachers and rushed to the top corner, getting as far as I could get from the door. I went back to thinking about WWO as I waited for the rest of the class to file in.

It was an odd game. Most games had a very specific quest line. There were always side-quests and other random things you could do, but those weren't the main focus of the game. WWO, on the other hand, made side-quests the main point. WWO was designed as if it was a world. There weren't monsters with infinite respawn abilities or little paths with a glowing pointer showing you which way to go. The monsters were npc camps set up out of cities, just like the non-hostile non-player-characters. They even had huge battles when one city attacked another one. The developers said that they were working on setting up wars. All of it could be swayed by the players. If they wanted to, they could attack their own army and watch as the enemy sacked the city, or participate in the sacking. There was even a chance that the neighboring cities wouldn't attack the stolen city, and that city would become property of the "monster" hordes. Most of the quests were gang-related in the cities. Most of the good hunting quests were from villagers or merchants that had been attacked by random roving bands of bandits that stayed dead when you killed them. The marauding bands also attacked each other, too. It was extensively realistic

The best part, I thought, was that you didn't pick up a shiny sword out of the carcass of a dragon. You could collect scales and bones, those were worth a lot of gold, but killing a dragon without a bounty was usually barely worth the repairs you'd need for your gear afterwards. Bounties meant bigger rewards, they also meant bigger groups sharing damage. The bounties on dragons were always awesome. I'd gotten some of my best gear from those quests. That was the way it worked for all the natural type monsters, which were few and far between. All of the really efficient bounties were for rogue npcs, but you'd occasionally get one for the natural beasts of the world. Depending on where you were, the animals could be pretty gnarly. I'd never killed those enough to see if they had infinite respawn. Maybe they did. The dragons never seemed to run out, so I had to assume they fell in that category. Or maybe those two particular caves made all five dragons go mad and attack the surrounding villages. Such poor peaceful creatures, turned to violence by choosing the wrong mountain to sit on.

"Baseball! Everybody get your gloves and bats. You all know your teams." There was some grumbling. One team always won. Coach thought it was good to promote "realism". After all, pretending you could go pro when you couldn't even beat the naturally gifted in PE was foolhardy. PE was for the basic movement necessary to keep yourself healthy and real-world preparation, not something as pointless as fun. He told us so every single time we had a class. He was known to hit people that claimed having set teams was unfair. Repealing child-abuse laws had always seemed strange to me, but history class told us we'd had them at one point. There was probably a reason, and it was probably stupid. "Teamwork is better than any single player, you squealing babies! You want a promotion, show me you're worthy!" if that was the case, why did the team with all of the best players always win and nobody ever got promoted? Oh, right. Because it wasn't a single player. It was all of the players. Pitting a team of losers against a team of winners was unfair, regardless of teamwork. My team didn't say anything and none of the middle teams cared that we weren't on their team, but that was to be expected. You don't fight or whine to give yourself a detriment.

I hopped down off of my seat and walked across the turf. It had been a while since Coach had had to switch the gym proper from hardwood to turf. The last one had been football. That was a disaster. It had been doomed to fail from the start, not that any sport was all that different with the way he ran the class. I picked up the bat as my team assembled. All of us had yet to hit puberty. At least we were similar. "Hey, Hell, have you started anything else or are you going to stay a Warlord for the entire Beta?"

"Hey, I'm learning all of the ropes, man, so when the game comes out I can bust up the ranks like nothing else. You'll know that I was right when the real game starts. You'll be missing your stash, and I'll be playing on easy mode. You know all of our stats and items reset, right? I'm getting as used to my skills as possible." Of course the items and levels would reset. It was a beta. I'd had a rare weapon dematerialize out of my hand during a fight once because the stats on it got patched and apparently nobody told the sword until just then. I thought it was a bug, but they said it was because of the patch. It was a bit irritating to lose all the stuff I'd been working for all this time, but I would have played anything that let me in for free. Technically it wasn't free, but it was free for me. Being familiar with the world when it came time to actually pay for it would also be a big advantage. Especially in a world as complicated as WWO. With that background, I'd be on an even playing field with all of the other players, despite my lack of general gaming experience. Not so familiar with one class as Hell, but I didn't plan to only have a main in the launch version either. I'd be more rounded. Maybe even up there with the guys writing walkthroughs. Nah, I'd had to use a couple walkthroughs even in the beta, so I was still a ways behind them. "What about you, Void? You finished maxing out every character yet?"

"No. Turns out there's way too much ground to cover. I finished all of the mage and melee types, though." I smirked inside as his jaw dropped. To be fair, he probably didn't understand how easy it was to level alts. He'd been a Warlord since the beginning, after all. Chancy and Derrick glanced at each other. "War World Online. We're both Beta testers." Derrick rolled his eyes. We may have mentioned it before. Once or twice.

Chancy just came back after a sick leave, though, so he was appropriately psyched. "Lucky! I've been saving up forever for that! How's the Beta? Any glitches?" glitches? As far as I could tell, the game was real life. I couldn't smell or feel pain, but apart from that, I might as well have been in the real world. The graphics were beautiful, I could only tell stuff wasn't real if I was actively watching for anything abnormal. There was the occasional tree that I ran into and got stuck in, but I reported it and the tree was teleportation-proof the next day. Hardly enough to call a glitch. From what I'd been able to figure out, the company was remarkable in how good they were with the beta. "How's the interface? I heard that it doesn't use a visual menu. Like, the main menu is all in your head!"

Why would a virtual game need a visual menu? Did they expect to see a bunch of levers to control how their legs moved? You could pull up different stuff visually, like your backpack and your journal, but who needed a visual medium for settings or logging out? It was intuitive. Even the backpack and journal didn't need visual confirmation after a point. There was the option for using a visual menu, but I'd never needed it for the general settings. At this point, even looking at the stats of weapons was something that I felt more than saw. "No main menu. It's easy to learn, though. There are always pop-up menus that you can make, or you can change your journal into an actual book on your belt. It's pretty awesome. Once you get the hang of it, you can forget you're even playing a game and think it's all real." For a game based in a magical world where goblins and ogres roamed freely.

Unfortunately, our corner couldn't be completely peaceful. "Nerd Squad! Who's up to bat?" I sighed as I approached the plate. I took an awkward stance and put the bat on my shoulder. David wasn't known for his mercy. His team wasn't the best but it didn't take the best to stomp us into the ground. He wound up and threw. It was pretty slow, in all honesty. I could have hit it, but then I'd get promoted. "Strike!" he wound up again. I missed the second one, by just a tiny bit. I accidentally hit the ball, barely glancing the ball with my bat. It bounced behind me before the umpire caught it. Close, I almost hit it enough that I'd have to run. "Strike!" technically it was a foul ball. Oh well. I wasn't taking any chances with the next one. "Strike! You're out!" darn. I missed. I walked back to my fellow losers, dragging the bat like I was depressed. Appearances are important.

"…are the best! I can even take control of some of the monsters if I almost kill them. They'll bow down and follow me like slaves!" a definite bonus of being a Warlord. Conjurers could do the same thing, but they weren't usually close enough to notice the foe kneeling down in defeat. Druids and Saints were similar, but with natural and divine monsters. They also had the problem of killing the foe before noticing that it was trying to surrender. The Saint was almost a pure support character, so there were usually a few tanks or bruisers helping out, and they'd notice, but not all of them knew what a monster kneeling meant. After all, there were only seven classes that could convert enemies. Thugs, Thieves, and Rogues didn't make their bandits kneel, though. Their conversion was more of an alliance than servitude. Thieves and Rogues could be different, but my Thug had just convinced the bandits to work for him. They'd turned on me a couple hours later, but only after I'd used them to kill a dragon. Almost all of them had died, and they'd barely scratched his hide. My Conjurer had sent hundreds of his slaves to slaughter and none of them had even tried to flee. They were slaves. Their wills were broken. They could do nothing but obey.

"But what if you want to be a good guy? What good classes are there for righteous people?" Chancy would be one of the good guys. I thought they were kind of boring. The dark classes were made for more damage dealing and slaughter providing. The good guys were all about support and tanking. That was reflected in the names and effects of their abilities. Smite hit as hard as Eviscerate, but it didn't feel or look the same. Both types had stacking passives that made group play better and the light ones looked nicer, but I preferred debuffing enemies to buffing allies anyway. Even then, I was a mostly solo player anyway, so the auras weren't a big part of my style.

I decided to give an opinion that actually knew what it was like to wield two thirds of the good guys. "It depends on what you want the good guy for. If you're a lone player, I'd suggest the Evoker, Crusader, or Knight. The Crusader is a good balance between attack and defense. The Knight is basically invincible as long as you keep your gear up. The Evoker is the toughest battle mage so it's easy for your first go."

"Cool. What haven't you done yet? The Beta's over tonight, so what more do you have to do? Danny says you max out every class." So they were talking about me. Danny, aka Hellspawn69, was one of the few that actually knew how awesome I was in the game. He had reason to talk about me.

"I still have all of the rogue classes left. There's twelve of them." Chancy's jaw dropped. He was probably doing the math in his head. If there were twelve rogue classes, that meant that there were twelve melee and mage classes. A total of thirty six classes. Meaning I'd maxed out twenty four of them. The max level for the Beta was sixty, so I'd advanced one hundred forty eight levels in a month. The real game maxed out at level two hundred fifty, so I'd gotten over half way to the real limit. In a month. The reviews said that the fastest anyone would get to level two fifty was a year. I believed them. Without my first twenty levels coming in fifteen minutes, it would take a long time. It had taken me one of those weeks to get to level sixty the first time. "I don't have time to do all of them, so I'll probably just do the Assassin. I've heard good reviews about him. Though…the Shadow looks fun too." That much was true. The Assassin was extremely popular because he could kill anything ten levels below himself with one hit, as long as the victim was unaware of the Assassin. Get a maxed out Assassin, and almost any foe could be killed with one hit. I didn't see the hype. All of the best monsters were too powerful for that to work on them, and if you used a Berserker, you hit so hard it might be a one hit kill anyway. And not just for the weak and unaware. The Berserker was the heaviest hitter among the melee. He died too much, though. He could plow through armies, but he never got to the other side alive. Like a suicide bomber.

"The guy's a machine. He's the richest player in the Beta. All the display shows is a row of zeroes." That wasn't entirely true. I could see the number, but nobody else could. I also doubted that I was the richest player. I spent the majority of my time as a lower level character. Hell would have been way more wealthy if he didn't give so much away. Even then, I was pretty rich. Any value over one million was shown as a row of zeroes to non-owner players. My wealth was five hundred seventy three point two trillion gold coins. I could only carry one million with a level one player, any more and the weight would be maxed out. 

Unlike most games, WWO had a banking system and coins that actually had weight. With a vault that actually held all of the gold. Some of the higher level players just liked to swim through their gold vaults. I'd tried it a few times, and it was quite entertaining. Like swimming, but in something way thicker than water. It was impossible before level thirty, given the fact that gold was not a liquid. It was fun enough to be part of the reason I had an ocean of the stuff. It had kept me using maxed out characters for a while after I maxed them out, which might have played a part in my not completing my goal. I thought it was worth it, though. I liked how gold actually had weight, though. It was a good idea. It also made killing other players for their cash less effective, which was always a good idea. There were always assholes, even in games. The more realistic the world was, the higher the incentive to murder other players for their loot. The items on the character couldn't be stolen, but everything in the inventory dropped at death. Realistic and painful, but not enough that it would make people rage-quit. It did produce a hit-list in the chat system for player killers. Or supposed player killers. A few false reports had been laughed out of the chat, but most were burned at the stake. A good system for dealing with assholes, if ever I'd seen one.

The class passed in a blur of talking about WWO. It was something we could talk about all day and still have plenty to say. I finished off the day and returned to my locker. Sure enough, Doug was there. I resigned myself to the pain of another head-bashing. I tried not to look at him as I put in my combination. He let me finish. I shoved my backpack into the locker and closed it, still not looking at him. Was this actually happening? Was I going to get away without a headache? Was it possible? I didn't dare look at him as I rushed for the exit. Mercy was a rare choice for him, I wasn't about to waste it.

Nobody stopped me. Nobody tripped me. Nobody slammed me into a wall. I finished an entire day of school. Had I really only been hit once? That was a first. Maybe it was the universe trying to say sorry for all of the times I'd been sent to the hospital.

I didn't look back or stop my high-velocity walk all the way home. Home was a dank and smelly apartment complex. I hated it. The whole thing smelled like shit. We lived on the top floor, because the elevator was broken and nobody else was enough of a loser to walk up twelve flights of stairs except us. Apparently it was cheap enough to be worth it. But, it was a large apartment. It had been the penthouse, back when the building had been a hotel in some lost age. I was convinced the whole building was repairs on top of repairs, though the last one was a good while back.

I opened the door and realized that it was the universe trying to even things out. But it wasn't the way I wanted. Mom was both home and awake. "So, you're finally home. What a lazy shit."

"School got out an hour ago. We live a mile and a half away. I'd love to see you match my time." I muttered all of that under my breath as I smiled at her and kept my eyes firmly on her teeth. They were yellow and disgusting. They weren't as bad as her eyes, though. I knew from experience that they'd be so bloodshot they'd look like they were bleeding. They were always bloodshot. "Work get out early?" not likely. I'd be willing to bet all of my money in WWO that she'd gotten fired again. Probably for trying to seduce her boss. Some girls could get away with it. They were attractive, though. My Mom was not.

"I'm taking a lunch break." Right. She apparently didn't like the look on my face because she immediately wound up. She didn't like it when I dodged, so I didn't. Her fist connected with my face and the force knocked me into the door. It was a good thing I'd developed a habit of closing the door behind me. She'd kicked me out the door and down the flight of stairs that led to the apartment too many times for me not to try to close the door first. "You're still a runt. Why don't you grow?"

Why couldn't she be asleep? It was the time when she was the most pleasant. And if she was whining about how big I was, maybe she should figure out who my father was so I could tell if I'd grow any more. I wouldn't be surprised if he was the size of a bean. She didn't have a standard. I doubted she knew what a standard was, let alone how to hold her knees shut long enough to implement one.

"Get your rations and get out of my face." Rations. A word she only knew because she'd spent time in the army. Unfortunately, it had also introduced her to both alcohol and the cheapest food on the market. Rations. I walked to the cupboard and pulled out the bottle. I'd saved my allowance for three months to buy real food a couple of times, but I didn't have the control to do it regularly. Even that was before I realized the glory of sleeping pills. I pulled off the cap and started swallowing as fast as I could. It provided every nutrient needed by the human body for one day. And it tasted like barf that had been fermenting for a few centuries in a vat of shit. I coughed as I slid past her into my room. Or cubicle, as that's what it was. It had been a closet when the place had been a penthouse. The rest belonged to the drunk who paid the bills. Barely.