What do you do when your game is too tough? Bring in a ringer.

On his first night as a beta tester for Sicora Online, twenty-one-year-old Galen Cole meets the clone: Prairie 'Ringer' Powell. He isn't sure what to make of Prairie; she's engineered for violence, a maestro with a bow, and a real wild card. But they need each other. Galen and Prairie are two of the first batch of testers for the game that has a tendency to stomp its players.

Fresh from debugging, Sicora Online is an ever-shifting world whose AI has been programmed to alter its level based on the personalities inside it. But Sicora needs to feed before she can blossom into an MMORPG: she must learn human behavior, motivations, and reactions to setback.

Enter the level crawl.

Ten days. Ten unpredictable worlds. If Galen survives, he’ll be granted his heart's desire: a lifetime of free access to Sicora Online.

But first he has to survive.

The Ringer is a prequel novella to the Sicora Online series.