Just before I walked through the shed door, I had a sudden urge to make a sharp 180 and go off on my own. Whenever I played an MMO on my computer, I chose to play solo. Online games are designed to be a social activity. You can speak to people as you play, plan out and coordinate your attacks, chat about this and that. You share the highs and lows, the laughter and the tears.Not me. I liked to explore alone and try to deal with monsters on my own. It took longer, but it was just a lot less stressful that way. Of course, I would occasionally join a group to do a dungeon or a raid, but more often than not you’d run into a bunch of arseholes.People who took the game too seriously, swore and screamed at anyone who made a mistake or didn’t already know the mob attack patterns, and generally used the game as their personal venting platform. And then there was the whining when it came to rolling for loot...Playing solo meant you could do what you want, make as many mistakes as it took,

We finally worked our way around the wheatfield and reached the other side. A fallow green field on a gentle slope led to the top of a low hill, beyond which there was a huge open area of grass, completely flat and disappearing into the distance in all directions.The country was called Flatland, and I guessed this was why.And everywhere you looked there were rabbits. Hundreds of them.They didn’t look exactly like the rabbits back home. They were about the same size — brown, black and a few white ones — with long, floppy ears, but they had elongated faces, and instead of a pom-pom tuft, a pinkish stub for a tail. They didn’t hop, either. More scurried about.“Aw!” said Flossie. She walked up to the nearest one and picked it up.She picked it up! I was stunned. If it was going to be this easy we’d have five daggers each by sundown.Of course, it was not going to be that easy.The rabbit turned its fluffy face to look at Flossie and then snarled at her, revealing not a cute Bugs

It was evening, and the light had started to fade by the time we returned to the shed. Captain Grayson was sitting on the edge of his desk with a stack of grey blankets next to him.“Welcome back,” he said. “I see you’ve been...” His voiced trailed off as he saw the rabbit and he pulled a strange face I couldn’t quite place. “Here, you’ll need these. It gets a little chilly at night.”He handed each of us a blanket. They weren’t very big — more shawl than cloak — made of a scratchy, wiry material. We happily took them from him.“Do you have anything we can use to carry water?” I asked him.He raised an eyebrow at me and then jumped off the desk. He walked over to a wall that had a large cloth hanging over it, which turned out to be curtains. He parted them enough to reach in and pulled out another box. This one had a bunch of water skins in it.I felt a bit irked that he hadn’t told us about them before, but it seemed like it was kind of a test to only give us certain things when

I must have dropped off at some point. When I woke up, the others were pottering around the fire. It was early, cold and bright. Our group was the only one in the courtyard.“Where’d the rest of them go?” I asked, worried we had missed another memo.“No idea,” said Maurice. “They were already gone when I woke up.”At least it meant we wouldn’t have to deal with any awkwardness. We got our stuff together, did our business in the bathroom — which, as expected, was a hole in the ground — and set off for the hunting grounds.We were much more confident in what we had to do, and more relaxed about it. Even Dudley joined in the conversations about who would bag the most rabbits, although he still had a habit of looking straight up when he spoke.We seemed to reach our destination a lot quicker this time, but I think familiarity with our surroundings just made it feel like that. The rabbits were waiting for us and as unimpressed with our deadly intentions as they were the day before. And

As the others sat around the fire, smiling at each other, talking freely, you could see the bonds forming between them. Loyalty, concern, affection. All beautiful symbols of friendship, and all next to useless.You might think a party who are willing to die for each other would provide a powerful advantage in a fight. But the aim isn’t to die, it’s to stay alive.What I needed from them was obedience, focus and an unwavering desire to win. Fat chance of getting those qualities out of this lot.“Get all our equipment out, I’ll be back in a minute.” If it sounds like I was talking down to them, acting like I was in charge, that’s not how it was. They did as I asked not because I was the leader, but because they had started to trust me. They hadn’t just bonded with each other, they had bonded with me as well. We were in this together. Or at least that’s how they saw it.I saw it in more practical terms. I had to tell them what to do because otherwise they might start thinking for them