as the sorcerer. He captures Baal under the ruse that he is the hero, but when she makes sexual advances at him, he tells her the truth, too honourable to take advantage of her even if it is only within a game. They begin telling each other about their real lives. In his days as a cop, he had an affair with a battered woman he was protecting, and the jealous husband ran him down with a car, leaving him paralysed from the waist down. He still has sexual feelings but is unable to perform. Baal, a plain girl despite her voluptuous appearance in the game, has type I diabetes and is depressed from having recently broken up with her boyfriend, who couldn't handle her disease. She pursued the game as a way of flirting with suicide. They discover that he may be capable of sex within the game, but they are interrupted by a hacker who has infiltrated the software. Calling himself Phreak, the hacker targets specific individuals and locks them in the game so that he can harass them. Walter receives an error message every time he attempts to return to the real world. Aided by his police training, he remains calm and talks to Phreak, even though he knows his real body is in danger of eventual dehydration. Baal temporarily quits the game after agreeing to meet Walter later in the game's next section, where they would use signals to identify each other, since they would have a different appearance. After unsuccessfully trying to get the police involved, she contacts the game's company, who want Walter to stay in the game as bait so that they can capture Phreak, who has eluded authorities for years. They give Baal a patch that will lock Phreak in the game along with Walter, so that they can force him to give the code that will free Walter. We learn that Phreak is a 15-year-old boy whose father was part of a snake handling sect and died of a rattlesnake bite. The mother eventually died, and Phreak is convinced that she was also killed by snakes, which he believes lurk in the shadows waiting to pounce on him. He lives in his aunt's house, secretly using his own telephone line to hack into games, but he avoids experiencing the games directly for fear of being traced, despite the temptations of online