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1. People who just won´t shut up

  Current stats: 5764/50000

  Well then, seems like a good start I think? We will see if I can keep that up, hehe~

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  With a ping another complaint arrived in the GM′s message box. As always at this time of the night he was all alone in the GM headquarters main lounge. The sudden ringtone never even fazed him, despite the fact that he was half asleep. He lazily opened his eyes with a yawn and blinked a few times. As his blurry vision cleared up he took in his surroundings. A bleak room with a small wooden table surrounded by five matching chairs and the small green couch he was resting on entered his view. There were neither windows nor doors in this boring white-walled room. The GM lounge was after all one of the places the games players would never get to see. There was no need for fancy decoration and thus the room was kept practical.

  This room was part of one of the less popular virtual reality games on the market. These games which allowed the players to experience an entire world filled with sights, sounds, tastes, smells and even touch as if they were real had become standard about twenty years prior. Now there were countless games of various genres on the market. This particular game was like any run of the mill fantasy massive multiplayer online roll playing game out there. There were monsters to slay, castles to build and dungeons to explore. The only thing that made the game stand out at all was the fact that it had a somewhat superior artificial intelligence managing the NPCs actions, which would allow slow but gradual advancement in the game world. There were new technologies developed at all times and the game world which had launched in a medieval setting had reached the point of an industrial revolution not too long ago.

  With a groan the GM halfheartedly swiped his hand over the scroll shaped icon that indicated he had mail. In front of him the message spread out and he read quietly fighting the urge to go back to sleep.

  "Hello GM =)

  Should I order pizza or Chinese takeout?

  ~Monkayman"

  "Hello Monkayman,

  Thank you for your ticket.

  Chinese. Pizza is overrated.

  ~GM"

  

  "Alright I′ll take pizza then ;P.

  ~Monkayman"

  With a sigh the GM closed the chat box. Due to firm policy he wasn′t allowed to be impolite to the players. Even if they bothered him with useless things. This one for example already knew from the start that he would take pizza and just spammed for the heck of it. The GM was used to this treatment. If there was one thing he had learned within the past 5 years in this line of work it was that playing along made the attention needy spammers stop the fastest.

  Before the GM had the chance to turn around and continue sleeping another ping heralded the next ticket. The GM routinely browsed the new message and slowly got up, shaking his limbs to get the sleepiness out of them.

  "Hello GM,

  my guild just killed the boss "Venzalos the Dark" but there were no drops. Can you help us?

  ~Irth"

  This was the actual reason the company still bothered with game masters. A real bug. Finally something to fix. The GM smiled and teleported towards the player Irth while joining the guilds chat room just to be sure they didn′t try to cheat him. He browsed their latest chats and deemed the request real. With a thought he left the invisible mode and illuminated the dungeon with his GM robes. Those robes were always surrounded by ones and zeros in a neon colour of the GM′s choosing. They made him easily recognizable for the players who called him. Currently there were only 5 GMs employed by the game company. Their game wasn′t the most popular so it couldn′t be helped. Among the five this GM was the only one who never took of the robes hood. He was also the only GM to choose the colour neon green for his robe. Long term players were already familiar with him. This time however a relatively new guild called him so they didn′t know him yet.

  "There he is."

  "It′s a GM cool, it′s my first time seeing one!"

  "That gear looks awesome. Can I get that too?

  "Nah I think it′s some kind of GM uniform, the last one I saw wore that too, just in red."

  "More importantly, do you think he will give us the loot?"

  "I really want that staff~"

  "No the shield! It has to be the shield."

  While the guild chat buzzed with activity the GM calmly looked through the raid group's battle log and confirmed the fact that there was no loot distributed. As the experience wasn′t awarded either the GM already knew how to solve this particular bug and began to hack away at a summoned keyboard. After looking at the monsters code his suspicions were confirmed and he easily fixed the problem.

  GM:"Alright, I confirmed the fact that this boss was bugged and fixed it. This is the loot that was supposed to be dropped, oh and the experience too."

  Irth:"Wow that was fast, thank you GM!"

  With a smile the raid leader took the loot. The entire party was momentarily engulfed in blue light as the experience was distributed equally to all participants.

  GM:"If that was all I will take my leave now. Good luck with the dungeon."

  Irth:"Yes, thanks again. bye bye!"

  "Yay my bow dropped!!!<3"

  "NOOOOO. It took ages to kill that one! Where is my stafffff?"

  "Haha get over it."

  "Easy for you to say! You weren′t mana drained and used as a fricking melee mage!"

  At that point the GM left the guild chat and teleported back to the lounge. There was no need to linger after all. The GM wasn′t a gamer himself so while the terms were familiar and he had seen people play enough to understand how raids worked in general, he simply didn′t care about the technicalities of DPS measurement and optimized damage, heal and aggro output.

  The GM walked towards the couch and was just about to return to his job of waiting for tickets when something changed. It was a slight change. A shift in the way the virtual game felt, no maybe it was a lag. With a frown the GM sat at the table instead and summoned his keyboard to search for the reason. Within a short amount of time he was able to determine that it was a server wide lag. Fixing that sadly wasn′t within his capacity so he tried calling his superior to report the lag and have the IT team handle it. However, there was no connection.

  

  After all the capsule he used to access the game needed the internet to connect to the server itself in order to play. If there was no internet... how was he still here? Maybe his capsule didn′t process it yet...he was about to be disconnected. For sure. But capsules are state of the art technological equipment. How could it still not have processed that? Was it broken? Damn those things are expensive. Surely any second he would be disconnected. Surely. But what if...

  Before dangerous thoughts could fully enter his head he started to log out. The familiar timer counted down from 10. Once the timer hit zero he would contact headquarters.

  9

  

  8

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  6

  5

  4

  3

  2

  1

  ...

  

  The GM opened his eyes to the same scene as before. There was an ugly green couch, a table and a bunch of chairs in a doorless room.

  

  He rubbed his eyes and called his menu up. Nothing strange...

  

  Not one to give up fast the GM tried again. However, when he pushed the icon of an open door he received a message instead.

  "You are not logged in therefore you cannot log out. Please log in to log out."

  

  The GM tried again. The same message appeared. He closed it impatiently and tried again. Same message. He didn′t close the window and just kept hitting the open door icon. And of course the only change was that his surroundings were gradually filling up with the same joke of a message. After five minutes of hammering at the icon in increasing panic he spent another 10 clearing out the message windows and calming himself down as much as possible.

  

  Thoughts about certain anti-VR activists and their unreal fears of being stuck in a game echoed in the GM′s head.

  In his panic the GM hadn′t even noticed the flood of tickets that arrived one after the other in his ticket box. With dread he looked at the counter. "262...263...264..." With shaking hand he pushed the scroll icon.

  "Help me I can′t log out!!!!! :((((((" ~ Flagraiser

  "This is so creepy. I think I can′t log out...." ~ Gorger

  "What is going on? Is this an april′s fool? But it′s august! Please let me log out!!!"~KittenoftheDark

  "What do you think about cheese?"~ TrueRebel

  "Did you notice that lag just now or was it just my capsule?"~Freddiefred

  "Why can′t I log out? Something is strange with my menu, I just keep getting some joke message...Did I break it? Please! I have insurance so let me log out for now!!!! I can pay you back!!!!"~Cyberninja

  "I will totally sue you for not letting me log out. I will be rich!"~AnotherChaos

  Somewhat overwhelmed the GM scrolled through the tickets and saw his fears come true.

   The GM took his time drawing circles on the table while thinking about ways to get the log out function back but...

  

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