User Unfriendly by Vivian Vande Velde Arvin's friend Sheldon is a hacker, and he's hacked a Rasmussen program. The program takes Sheldon, Arvin, their friends, and Arvin's mother(a major embarrassment to Arvin) into a world where nothing is as it seems. Arvin becomes Harek Longbow of the Silver Mountain Clans, an elf. His friends also become characters in the program, on the quest. The quest appears to be saving the princess, who has been kidnapped. For the quest, program characters are supposed to accompany and guide them, but these characters start looping early on in the game. After fighting a water-creature, Arvin's mother develops an awful headache that does not appear to be part of the program.
They split into two groups. Harek's group is captured by slavers, whom they escape. His group picks the wrong approach with an old man, breaking down his door, so that they have to pay heavily for magic items taken from a frozen troll. Then they run into a group of people butchered by wolves, and meet a man who says that the slaughtered people were his brothers, and that he was attacked. Wolstan joins the group. Then they go through caves filled with rats and orcs, and then Robin gets sucked into by sand hands, and nobody knows if he's alive. By now, you should see the pattern: anything that can go wrong, does.
Fiction books begin with the premise that the reader knows that none of the events in the story really happened. Fantasy books one reads with the knowledge that the events of the story couldn't happen. This is a science fiction world, in which we have a fantasy world, making the events of this book as far removed from the reader as possible. That said, this story still manages to draw the reader in is remarkable.
Happy reading.
