You're sure everything about your own rig didn't used to seem this big compared to you, or have you always been this small? No matter. You were just arriving, you didn't need to leave yet. There's so much more to see.

I'll let you keep doing that, at least. I want you to know just how you've always been crawling through these servers; you must have been trying to avoid my notice, that's why you can't make eye contact with me, yet can't seem to look away...

When your ability to define yourself starts to falter and fall under my ability to say just how things are and how things should be and how things have been and how things will be then really there's little more you can do than watch very closely, is there?

A sysop with nothing all that valuable to protect, however, has a little more time and a lot more creativity on her hands.

Any sensible sysop would go straight for the weak points. A little more in pain. A little worse at keeping your location a secret. A little less "about to be a problem", overall. A little less likely to come back, whether that's a firm dissuasion or a more permanent state change.

In a space where perception is truth, being imagined to be something just a little weaker, just a little more hurt, by someone or something whose actualisation extends just a little beyond where the boundary of your self ends can be fatal.

That's simple. Self-image.

Net damage is a funny thing. If the net is, as we posit, just a shared hallucination, what image could be bad enough to hurt, to main, to kill?

But your avatar. The essence of you. You can't get any closer than that, right? If you can control anything, you can control that.

A moment too long spend reading a note or a gaze held in a twinkling light could be all that's needed for your sphere of influence to falter just enough for the ground under your feet to become all too malleable to the thoughts of your assailant.

Well, skill and focus. There's a reason why distraction is a tool in the belts of sysops and runners alike.

Those of us who are more practiced have a wider range of influence - almost anyone could change the way they appear, or the shape of a weapon they'd wield, but shifting a room, a building, the highest point of an infinite tower, the clothes off the back of a visitor, that takes a lot more skill.

A reminder of what a true master of the arcane looks like.

yessss defeated villain is something I don't see explored enough this is very good

it'd gradually move down the body, yes, but there's something about it starting from the eyes that's just. Really got me lately