"I miss Realms." Matterhat said over voice chat and from the way his voice had begun slurring, I could tell tonight he started drinking early.

  "Yeah. It sucks." I agreed, but kept my mouth shut so I didn't poke him to start him ranting again.

  Sucks was an understatement.

  It kinda sucked that the week before the xpac drop, I was forced to go home to Vegreville to watch my half-sisters while my mom and stepdad went on a second honeymoon to Mexico. When I tried to log in for the raid, I found out just how shitty my parents' internet was and had to bow out for the night. So they'd got someone else to off-tank. It was likely Chocoboss.

  Then it sucked that because I hadn't looted the new instance key, my spot in the Night Crew had been usurped by Valhz and his cronies.

  But the biggest suckit of all was that I missed the Great Ifaneli Abduction. 10 of our guildies just disappeared completely. I saw the footage of Peregrine's stream, saw her just poof! disappear, and the camera continue filming the empty room up until the point the RCMP came into her room and disconnected the camera.

  Almost all the Night Crew, my late night raiding 10-man of misfits, were gone. KitchenSimon, Peregrine, Tudojoia, FairDinkies, Humplains, and Courtesy all disappeared during the second phase of the Lich Boss in the raid. They weren't the only ones who disappeared -- thousands of raiders around the world hit the same infamous phase of the fight were also gone -- but they were the ones that mattered the most to me.

  The realms servers shut down. It was like the company that made it didn't exist. Apparently their head office in Italy was just a front and nobody knew where the developers even were.

  It was some crazy shit. I even had to visits to my dorm from CSIS asking me questions about it which was really insane. I felt like I was adjacent to some conspiracy shit. Like I had just narrowly missed being in a car accident. Or I missed a flight that ended up crashing into the Bermuda Triangle.

  And that was the part that sucked the most because I knew that deep down I wished I hadn't missed a thing. That wherever those guys went -- and I didn't think they were dead -- I'd be there with them.

  It would be better than this boring bullshit. With Realms of Ifaneli permanently down, I'd tried to gather up the remaining members of the guild that were still in the voice chat server. I tried getting all of us to move to another game. It worked for about a month only people stopped logging in and then soon ghosted the server and moved onto other games. It just wasn't the same. Before The Abduction, most of our guild was max level and geared out. We were progressing against the best guilds in the world and some of us were just a bunch of filthy casuals.

  Six months later there were only three of us still active: me, Matterhat, and the old guy named Paul that hung out in voice chat who had his mic open all the time. He was with us but he played games on his Playstation instead.

  "We should have been there man." Matterhat said and he forgot to depress his push-to-talk so I could hear him take a drink.

  "Yeah." I agreed and thought about my conversation with CoalMinaCanary just a few days after the incident.

  "Drew. That could have been us." She said with distress in her voice.

  It was just the two of us chatting at the usual time we would be raiding with the Night Crew. I don't know why we showed up. Matterhat hadn't. We were the 3 players who didn't raid that day. I just felt like I needed to be there. I hoped that maybe they would log on, but they didn't.

  "We shouldn't feel guilty." I said, but I felt guilty so it was hypocritical of me to say it.

  She sighed at that. "Do you know that someone put together a list of all the players that disappeared and it was everyone who raided that day who didn't wipe on the first boss. Something like 150+ raid teams of 10 players and people around them disappeared too. Thousands of people."

  I'd seen the post online with the names. Our guildmates were on it. Their family members were too. It'd ended up on some news network so now all the world knew about the disappearances. "My mom saw. She called me in a panic. Begged me not to play the game."

  I had responded to her that I wouldn't play it, but I wondered if it was actually available to play, would I have? I'd never know because the servers were down.

  "I need to do something with my life," she said and we'd talked further, but I think that was the moment she had given up on playing with us and she never logged back in. She added me as a friend, then quit the server. I didn't see her log on again.

  I checked my friends list and CoalMinaCanary wasn't online. A little voice in my head said that she probably had herself marked as Offline and she just didn't want to talk to me, but I tried to ignore it.

  "Hey, Matterhat?"

  "Yeah?"

  "I'm gonna log and work on my essay."

  "Cool man. See ya later."

  I disconnected from voice chat and was about to log out, when I saw that CoalMinaCanary popped online. Right away she messaged me.

  CoalMinaCanary: @Drewsclues I have something amazing to share with you.

  I hesitated before answering. I really should be working on my essay so it wasn't a total excuse to leave the depressing voice chat, but I'd had a bit of a thing for Mina ages ago and I'd actually missed her. I typed back to her.

  Drewsclues: What's up?

  CoalMinaCanary: I've been invited to a private server of The Game.

  Drewsclues: Which game?

  CoalMinaCanary: Realms.

  I scoffed. I knew for a fact that nobody had the files to reverse engineer a Realms server. All versions of the game had updated somehow to become absolutely useless right after the Great Ifaneli Abduction. I'd joined all the subreddits, substacks, Youtube conspiracy channels, and even old-school blogs to find out more information about it. Consensus was that whoever had built the game had done so to abduct people. Some thought it was aliens or Italian Mafia since the headquarters had been in Italy. Then they'd made their own game self destruct. Even the people who had install discs found them to be wiped clean.

  Drewsclues: Sure I'll bite. Have you actually played it?

  CoalMinaCanary: I'm max level again. We've been raiding. It's invite only and I thought I'd use my one invite to get you back with us. We could use you. Tanks are few and far between. Lots of druids, but nobody wants to be a tank.

  Drewsclues: Send me the link.

  Her link led to a website that looked kinda like the original Realms official forums. It was called RealmsEmu and had a single thing to click on which said Registry Code.

  Drewsclues: What's the registry code thing for?

  CoalMinaCanary: You need a GUID invite. Here. Paste B8C91F7A-417B-44B8-8EDF-3467E003F047 in there.

  I did and hit enter. The next page was just a download link, but before I clicked on it I typed to her:

  Drewsclues: Is this malware and am I going to end up the bitch of some hacker?

  CoalMinaCanary: No. It's legit. Let me know when you've logged in. There's just one server and my character's got the same nickname as ever.

  Instead of logging out and doing my essay, I ended up spending nearly 30 hours playing Realms on the RealmsEmu server. Mina helped power level me with some of her guildies. I joined their voice chat server.

  First rule of RealmsEmu was that we didn't stream RealmsEmu. It was an invite-only game where you got one single invite per account and the system was able to tell if you tried to register a second account for yourself. People warned that you'd get permabanned if you tried which was neat because nobody could run multiple characters at the same time with many accounts to power level themselves.

  Despite the one-invite limit, the server was insanely populated. It was like how Realms had been the first year of the game. You could really get a name for yourself and apparently the guild CoalMinaCanary had got us into absolutely had a name for itself as leaders of the server.

  Debating it for awhile, I wondered if I should send my sole invite to Matterhat. I finally just did it. He thanked me for the invite and he joined, but he did his own thing and ended up joining the other faction. I saw him from time to time in-game, we playfully murdered one another in faction PvP, but I think we'd gone our own way.

  As for RealmsEmu, it felt like I'd come home. Everything was familiar and while it was frustrating to start over, it was also so satisfying. Every item I looted felt like the biggest high and I was just addicted to progressing. I don't remember how I finished my essay because the remaining months of the semester, I spent almost every waking hour playing. It felt like I'd partitioned my brain. One part was just obsessed with Realms and the other did things as if by rote.

  Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  By the time it was Final Exams, I'd hit max level and we'd cleared every dungeon and just got keyed to Dungeon Shade. The dungeon. The one that we'd missed. The one that was tied to the Great Ifaneli Abduction. In RealmsEmu, it hadn't dropped. People asked about it, but there were no hints from the mysterious devs about when it'd finally drop.

  So until the expansion came, we just leveled, but I felt this urge to finally enter the raid dungeon. I needed to see what I missed. I needed to know whether it was the thing that caused my friends to disappear.

  During summer break, I went back home and got a shitty job so I could save money and also pay for better internet for my house. We raided. We geared up. We waited. Waited for the expansion to drop.

  It was just before the end of August. I remember the weather being so hot and miserable. I ran a fan pulling hot air from outside back inside just to feel a bit of a breeze on my face. The expansion dropped on a Tuesday and because of the size of the download, we all knew that it was going to be it.

  There were 10 of us who entered the dungeon. I off-tanked. CoalMinaCanary tanked. We had the guild's best healers and DPS. We knew all the strategies from the people who'd been in the beta of the original game and I watched Peregrine's stream of the dungeon over and over.

  Just like in Peregrine's stream, we fought and we wiped a few times on the early bosses. 2 of the rare bosses weren't in the dungeon and I just thought maybe that they wouldn't be there, but 1 was actually there and I got an upgrade from the loot.

  Then it was time to fight the Lich. We used the same strategy that the Night Crew had. Our ranger started the battle by shooting some item. Then Mina and I shared threat. We got to the spot where the second phase would begin. My anxiety spiked but also I felt this insane clarity like this was it. This was the moment that we were going to find out where the others had gone.

  "Oh shit!" Someone shouted in voice comms.

  "What's wrong?" Mina called out.

  "We're pulling mobs from somewhere in the dungeon. Something just entered the room."

  "What?" I asked. Incredulous because how could that be? We were following the best strategy. I pivoted and switched spells so that I could grab the monster or monsters that were entering the room from the supposedly locked door.

  This was not something that happened in the fight. It had to be a glitch. It was the first time I noticed any deviation from the original game.

  I grabbed the mob using my threat spell of entangling thorns and realised quickly my error when the mob -- a giant three-headed ogre -- smashed down on me with a club. Half my health dropped.

  "It's one of the rares that hadn't spawned." I said with as much calmness in my voice as I could. "I'm going to need everyone to switch DPS onto it. Tank and spank."

  Just when I thought we had a handle on it, Mina said, "We're going into phase 2. We're going to need to stack up."

  "It's got a wide swing." I said about the ogre. "If I go over and stack on all of you, it'll hit everyone."

  "Phase 2 incoming."

  Fuck. I said to myself and just threw myself a quick heal as I said, "Everyone stack up. I'm going to drag it as far away as I can so we don't kill you with the debuff during phase 2."

  I knew the range of our healer's healing spells. I stayed just within it, but dragged the elite mob as far away from the group as possible and manoeuvred it until it was hopefully a good distance that the debuff we'd get from not stacking up on the Lich would not hurt the raid.

  The first debuff took most of my health. I drank the most expensive healing potion I had in my hotlist. The debuff on the elite boss then bounced off my own and I lost the same amount of health again. With just two of us sharing the debuff, it was taking way more health off me.

  I died before I could heal myself through it. The elite boss ran across the room and killed the healer who got a single heal off on me just before I died. Then they died. And soon like dominoes we all fell. Just before our mage died, they activated the special attack that worked like a self-sacrifice and killed the elite boss.

  A few people cheered, but someone hushed them. It was the other healer who was still alive.

  We watched as Mina and the healer slowly fought away at the Lich's health until it hit the point. The exact point that the sigils all around the room began to glow.

  My druid's corpse was on one of the glowing runes. It lit him in strange colours and the whole area began to thrum in-game with hypnotic music.

  "Finally." Mina said with reverence as if this moment was the moment she had been waiting for.

  I too felt it. I hoped that when we were abducted, it'd still work despite the fact my character wasn't alive during this part of the fight. This felt right. Like I was truly, truly coming home in a way that I didn't realise I had been seeking.

  "Here we go." I said.

  The room glowed intensely.

  I couldn't breathe.

  "Phase 2." Someone in the raid called it out when the glowing lights just dropped and the room swirled with magic.

  Then the Lich boss turned into his 2nd phase which was when he turned into a ghost and he'd pop up and the raid would have to run from him.

  I could tell because she had stopped tanking, that Mina was stunned the fight had continued. She just stood there so when the Lich's ghost touched her, she dropped dead. It was only moments before the healer too was dead. We'd wiped on the boss.

  "Everyone release." Someone said and most of the guild pressed the button which would port them back to the start of the dungeon, alive in their body but with death damage on their gear that would have to be fixed.

  Vaguely, I heard the rest of the raid talk about taking a bit of a break before the next attempt.

  Someone joked. "Guess we aren't going to be abducted afterall."

  There was laughter.

  Neither Mina, nor I had released our dead bodies. From your corpse you could look around the room. You could see what it looked like. When Peregrine and the other Night Crew had disappeared, it was at the peak of phase 2 just before it turned into phase 3.

  Our raid had done that. We had gone through phase 2. We had been in phase 3. We'd wiped, but we had done it.

  CoalMinaCanary: Maybe the second attempt.

  Drewsclues: Maybe.

  We didn't disappear the second attempt. We didn't disappear the twentieth time we did the raid. We didn't disappear when I went back to school for my final year. Whatever conspiracy theory people had about the disappearances being connected to the raid was bullshit.

  Over Christmas I stayed on campus in the dorms. We were PvPing for fuck's and giggles while drinking on New Years. At that point, everyone was geared out and had done all the raids. We had it like clockwork. We'd even begun running people through the raid for gold. I found that kinda funny because on my original server, I'd been part of the misfit and fuck-up crew of a basic guild. On this one, I was sort of famous since my druid had the most health out of any character.

  On voice comms Mina said, "Okay guys. I have an idea. Let's try to 5 man the Lich."

  I laughed. "With who? We're two tanks and no healer is on."

  "I'll come!" Our guildmate Straggler, the sacrificial mage said.

  "Awesome," she said, then I saw WorldChat and her name in it:

  [Worldchat]CoalMinaCanary: 2 tanks, 1 DPS looking for group for DungeonShade.

  [Worldchat]Botulizmz: Woah. Seriously?

  [Worldchat]CoalMinaCanary: Must be keyed. Okay got 1 more dps. Looking for a couple of healers and then good to go.

  [Worldchat]GarryGus: Don't you need 10 people?

  [Worldchat]Straggler: Not us. We can 5 man it.

  I laughed at them. I was tipsy, but Straggler was totally drunk. Mina sent me a raid invite and I thought, why the fuck not? and I just joined.

  That Botulizmz guy was in the raid group. Mina had linked him our voice chat info. A couple of other people who didn't type anything in Worldchat joined.

  "We got a healer! Woop Woop!" Mina cheered.

  One of the best healers on the server who wasn't in our guild, joined the raid. Mina linked the voice chat again in the raid and people started popping on.

  In the end we had a full raid. All randoms. Some were actually geared out raiders.

  "Raid rules," she said and hiccoughed. "This is a New Year's fun raid. If you don't want to have fun, then leave now." Surprisingly enough, nobody left. "Need before greed for bind on pickup. Roll only on what you can use. Bind on equips are going to me as raid leader and at the end of the raid we'll roll on them with whoever is left. Link me your professions and I'll dole out recipes and patterns to whoever can use it. And you have to learn it right away or we'll boot you. Capisce?"

  Straggler spoke up. "Also get booze. We will take a shot after every downed boss."

  The raid started out really fun. We had all three random elites. We slaughtered the other bosses sloppily because people were getting more drunk and since 6 of the people in the raid were heavily geared out, the fights were kinda easy. We ignored strategies that a more cautious raid would do and just healed our way through debuffs, diseases, auras, and poisons that in earlier runs we would actually clear away.

  I tanked like a lazy ass. Sometimes I'd let mobs get away from me just to be able to use my root pull ability that was typically best for pvp. Whenever someone died, they had to take a shot. Whenever we downed a boss, we all had to take a shot. We were going to also take a shot when we wiped, but we didn't wipe on any bosses.

  So the Lich came up again. Our new strategy was to have someone with a damage over time spell cast it on the item that started the fight, but that was only for caution. We'd discovered that it was best for me to tank the boss completely and only use Mina's deflects during specific moments. We'd gotten so good at it that it felt like a dance.

  I knew exactly how I wanted to approach this fight. "Okay everyone. We're going to roll for facepull."

  I started off the rolling of dice. And soon everyone in the raid rolled their d100s. At 87%, the low score geared of the raid Botulizmz who had drunkenly told us he'd never been able to find a group who would let him raid with them had to the do the face pull. I explained it. "Okay. So you're going to run over there and grab that item. Then you're going to run around in circles around the lich about this far out." I ran over to the spot that was the perfect distance around the Lich. "If you survive this fight, I will personally run you through this raid a dozen times and let you loot whatever you want."

  "Fuck yeah!" The guy said and then he ran into the room.

  Phase 1 begins.

  The fight was on.

  It was hilarious. Dude actually survived the facepull. Our healer, who was amazing, she kept him up without even seeming to dent her mana. I expected him to just die from the Lich's attack.

  We fought our way through Phase 1. It was sloppy as hell, but I laughed so much that I didn't care.

  "Okay kids. Get ready for Phase 2. Stack up on the Christmas tree! Let's rave!" I cast my tree spell which was just a low level bullshit cantrip that I'd gotten as part of the in-game holiday themed event. It glowed with festive lights as we all stacked up, bouncing and dancing underneath its bows.

  The room around glowed with unearthly light. All the runes and sigils pulsed with power.

  "And if the lich catches you in phase 2 you gotta drink!" I shouted.

  I've been at a concert where the speakers were so loud that my head vibrated. Though there was no sound other than the in-game music, I felt an oppressive vibration that pushed on my ears. It pushed on my head. Gravity shifted and like a fishing boat lurching in waves, I slid.

  I slid through time. I slid through space.

  My dorm room was gone.

  Colours blasted me from everywhere. There were greens and reds, but also blues and purples. Others in the raid cried out in voice chat and above all their voices I could hear Mina scream out, "Finally!"

  The vibrations grew faster and faster until with a pop everything stopped into silence.

  "Welcome to the Inverted Funnel of Madness to our first tower climbers!"

  You Can't Spell Funnel Without Fun. I wondered what had happened to the other 3 raiders from the Night Crew who didn't get Funneled with Kaylee and company.