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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: It was written in the rules--Save the world! Over the past two years, Melanie, Tyrone, David, and Scott had given so much of themselves to their gaming world that Melanie hoped it would develop a magic of its own. It did! But David was tired of the magic and the rules and the game. The only way to end it was to create the evil force of Scartaris and destroy Gamearth. Now it was up to Melanie to communicate this danger to her characters. Yet Gamearth would never be destroyed without a fight, and its inhabitants journeyed across the desperately hostile land fighting enemy after enemy until they reached Scartaris--their deadliest, most evil challenge. And the war was no longer a game--it had become a death-dealing struggle for survival!

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com
Fictionwise Release Date: November 2004

13 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [1.4 MB], eReader (PDB) [283 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [289 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [258 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [228 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [287 KB], hiebook (KML) [635 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [317 KB], iSilo (PDB) [239 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [296 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [324 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [390 KB]
Words: 87330
Reading time: 249-349 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

Melanie blew warm breath against the map of Gamearth, trying to make the paint dry faster. She didn't want the other players to see what she had changed. David would probably call it cheating--but their game would keep playing itself, no matter what they did.

Melanie wanted to win.

A shoebox of acrylic paints lay on the card table in the study. Some of the colors had dried up, with lids cemented by hardened paint. But the bottle of deep forest green had some sluggish drops left at the bottom.

The map's hexagons of terrain were bright and vivid colors, like some lost Arabian mosaic. They represented mountains, forests, seas, deserts. Melanie pulled a strand of long brown hair behind her left ear and blew again on the wet paint. She looked at where the mysterious "Rulewoman" supposedly lived on the map, in one of the forest-terrain hexes deep in the south. The complexity, the patterns of the map were dizzying.

Gamearth--they had created it as a fantasy world setting for a role-playing game, she and Tyrone, Scott, and David. The four of them played there, embarking on imaginary adventures into imaginary lands every Sunday night for the past two years.

Melanie had painted the map herself, acrylics on a smooth sheet of wood, using rulers and protractors to lay down the precise grid of hex-lines between sections of terrain. No store-bought map kit would do for their world--it had to be something personal, something she created herself. Gamearth needed to be different from all the other worlds available in simple boxed adventures.

Melanie and the others put a great deal of themselves into Gamearth. Perhaps too much.

But times changed, and the Game went on and on. One entire race of characters, the Sorcerers, departed from the world in a magical Transition that turned all of them into six powerful Spirits: three white Earthspirits and three black Deathspirits.

David wanted to end the Game there. He said it wasn't fun anymore. But Melanie and the others outvoted David, and so they kept playing. David could not leave them. The Game had too much of a hold on all of them. Instead, he made an attempt to destroy the world, but he had been thwarted.