Ask about her

“I take care of any little mishaps our girls might have.”

“But this is an IVR,” you reply, “How can I get hurt?”

She chuckles. “Well, for one thing, getting hurt is one of the ways you learn here - this school teaches with the rod, you know. But besides, this place - not just here, but the rest of this world - follows the same rules as that other place you come from. Gravity works here, and so do sharp objects. If you cut yourself with a knife, you'll bleed.”

“Can I bleed to death?”

“No. You just get kicked off the network. Before you get any suicidal ideas, remember, if you get kicked off the network, we'll just log you back in again. And then beat your bottom black and blue.”

You think about this for a minute. “So just how detailed is this Domain?”

She frowns at you. “We don't use words like Domain or IVR here, young lady. I'll answer these questions only once, and then you'd better behave as if this world is real to you, understand? To answer your question, the modeling reaches down to an atomic level. You bleed here because your body is filled with blood, pumped by a heart, oxygenated by lungs. You can smell things here because odor here works the same way as in real life - drifting particles that your nose has olfactory neurons for. Even your brain is composed of a billion virtual neurons. Basically you'd need very sensitive instruments to determine that this world behaves differently at all from the real world - and therefore, for those who live in it and don't care to build particle accelerators in their back yards, it's real enough for all intents and purposes.

“And you will heal only as fast as you would in reality, so a paddling will keep you from sitting comfortably for a few days.”