Probably

I lay there with my eyes closed for a while, just breathing. I could hear the girls moving around, but I didn't pay much attention to what they were doing.

Exit.

I waited.

That was a good sign. Maybe they'd gotten the hotfix out.

So far, the devs had been ridiculously proactive. Two full-blown updates in the same day? And now a hotfix?

Excitement started to well up in me.

A pause. Then:

“What?” I stared at the message. Why the fuck was it denied?

“Riven?” Valentia's voice came from somewhere nearby, tentative and worried.

Then another line appeared.

“Shit.” I tried again.

This time, the response came almost immediately.

I growled. “FUCK!”

I felt both girls flinch, even though I couldn't see them.

I opened my eyes and took three deep breaths, forcing myself to calm down. Then I sat up. “Sorry.”

“Are you alright?” Valentia asked.

“Yeah. Sure. Great.” I rubbed my face. “It's not like I'm going to die in the next few days or anything.”

“Look,” she started, “we're sorry. We didn't think that-”

I looked at her. “I don't care about the vampires. Right now, they're the least of my problems.”

She and Ami exchanged a glance.

“What’s wrong?” Valentia asked.

I sighed. “If I don't get out of here, I'm going to die here in the next few days.”

Her expression changed immediately. “Are you sick? Do you need a healer?”

“No. I don't need a damned healer. If I can't log out, I'm eventually going to die from lack of water.”

She looked confused. “There's a stream just over there. Do you want me to get you some water?”

“It's not going to work. I need real water. In my real body.” I shook my head. “Otherwise I'm going to real die.”

“I don't understand...”

“Of course you don't!” I snapped. “You're an NPC run by an AI who thinks this whole world is real. You don't know that it's just a game simulation. You're not real. This world isn't real.”

I gestured helplessly around us. “And I'm stuck in this fantasy land until someone can unplug my real body from the game. But I'm the fucking idiot who told everyone I was sick and wouldn't be around for the next week. So no one's going to come check on me.”

My voice cracked. “Which means I'm going to die here.”

“Alright...” Valentia said, trying to calm me down. “How can we help? How do we unplug your real body?”

“You can't.” I put my head in my hands. “We're in here and it's out there. While I'm in here, I can't move my real body. And I can't log out anymore.”

“What happens when you try to... log out?”

“I get an error message that says an active neural link can't be terminated.”

“And it worked before?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Is that... when you disappeared?”

I nodded again.

Valentia was quiet for a moment. “Are there any weird statuses on your character sheet?”

I frowned. “What?”

“On your character sheet,” she repeated. “Are there any statuses you don't recognize?”

I furrowed my brow. “What do you know about character sheets?”

Confusion spread across her face. “I know the same as everyone else. They show your Attributes, Skills, Talents, spells known, equipment...” She paused. “Stuff like that. Is there a problem with yours?”

“You can see your own character sheet?”

She nodded, looking even more confused.

“Can you show it to me?”

“We'll need to add you to the party, but yeah.” She looked at Ami. “Is that alright?”

The dwarven woman looked conflicted, but nodded.

A window appeared in front of me.

I hit Accept.

The window disappeared and was immediately replaced by another.

I immediately saw a little representation of Valentia and Ami in the bottom left of my vision along with little graphs that I assumed showed Mana and Health.

I opened Valentia's character sheet. She was level two. Her attributes were much more balanced than mine, and she had three talents.

Ami was only level one. Her attributes were more heavily weighted toward the physical side. Like Valentia, she also had three talents, probably because her Resilience was five.

“Emperor's ashes!” Valentia looked at me, eyes wide. “You have twelve talents?”

“Uh... yeah. I guess.”

Her expression shifted from surprise to outright shock. “And you have four unspent Talent Points? And eight Attribute Points?”

“Wait, what?” I pulled up my character sheet.

She was right.

I was level six now, which accounted for six of the Attribute Points. I had no idea where the other two came from. And I should only have two Talent Points.

I checked my notifications.

“Holy shit.” I stared at the notifications. There was an absurd amount of stuff piled up in there from the last few hours.

Then another thought occurred to me. “There’s a Sex skill?”

Valentia blinked.

“I didn't see that one during character creation.”

“What? There’s no...” She stopped. I assumed she was looking at my character sheet again. “Since when is there a Sex skill?”

She and Ami both flushed bright red.

“Don't look at me,” I said. “I didn't code the engine.”