The beginner's area is quite crowded. As yet, I am totally unprepared to talk to anyone, preferring instead to listen to conversations going on in the area. There's an awful lot of people shouting "I don't understand", and "I keep dying". There's other people, who seem to hang around in the area simply to heal people. I assume they are real people, and I can imagine the type; people who, in real life (I'll use the abbreviation "irl" when I am ready to forget that I have a body) would pounce on strangers in the office with acts of ferocious kindness. The recipient would be disorientated and grateful, and bond with them in a way that would be difficult to sever when they realised that the person is pouncing on strangers because they have systematically alienated everyone else with their strange and needy personality. On the strength of this unjustifiably cynical prejudice, I do not say thank you for the healing.

There's also another element that makes me uneasy about these people. I'm a child in this game; at level two, I'm desperately inexperienced. I'm told that this world (it is called Rubi-Ka) is huge, and I've only walked around this area, which is - honestly - called a playground. Now, I know it's called a playground in a butch "combat is playtime around here" sort of way, but still... the idea of experienced people hanging around playgrounds trying to make friends just reminds me too much of the local good-natured retard. Hands like shovels, heart of gold, gets angry if you talk about his shoes, you know the type. It also reminds me of the local sex offender, of course.

Of course, my neat paedophile theory is somewhat undermined by the fact that I am clearly a big fat man in a metal tunic. Surely a turn-off to your average paedo.

Progress update : The weasel creature that killed me was called a Leet, and I have found that my purple handbag shield is about as damaging as slinging woolly noodles around. I have, however, found a free starting spell, "Lesser Anger Manifestation". This creates something that hangs around my head and attacks things in such a way as to cause damage. A little butterfly brushes its wing against my heart.