[color=39b54a]"Yeah!"[/color]  Tess agreed.  [color=fff200]"Sure,"[/color] Sartorius added, as they followed Rixxy.

[hr]

Weeks passed, then months.  As the crisis continued, people became more compliant with the GM's demands for information sharing.  What started out as either anger or apathy quickly became a desperate concern.  People realized that they had been logged in for days, indicating that something was keeping their real bodies alive.  Others were not so lucky, as they slowly became weaker and weaker from hunger and dehydration, until their avatars suddenly vanished.  It was easily assumed that their bodies had died, that whatever paramedics had been deployed to provide life support to the trapped players had not reached them in time.  It also implied that they couldn't simply be 'unplugged', or people in the real world would have been unplugging everyone and in a matter of days everyone would have been freed.  It was assumed that unplugging a player probably resulted in death.  Nobody ever logged in either.  Another new thing that happened as well was that damage sustained in the game became the sensation of real pain proportional to the amount of total health.  And especially disconcerting was the fact that when an avatar died, it was extremely painful, and they didn't respawn.  This last thing then, became the great unknown, what happened to the player when the avatar died?  Did they get freed from the system, or did that cause them to die as well?  Since there were never any new log ins, there was no way of knowing what was on the 'other side', what was going on in the 'real world'.  A few groups of players had resorted to cultish, mass suicides in the hopes that they would be freed, but the GM's highly discouraged this.  Eventually, what remained was a community of players that had decided to remain indefinitely until the situation was resolved on the other end, forming a microcosm community consisting of a central government ran by GM's, as well as some fringe elements.