Tenchi Teikoku
As far as user caps went, Tenchi Teikoku had one of the lowest in the area. The rumors went that its sysop, who went by the name of Kenoh, ran the board out of his basement with his own equipment and bundled T1 lines. That meant bandwidth into Tenchi was low, and once a user was there, the features and details of the temple construct sometimes failed to load completely, leaving holes or low-resolution placeholders in the walls of a shimmering red pagoda. On good days, twinkling snow would gather on the stacked rooftops. On bad days, the surrounding landscape would become an endless sea of bright blue, like a VCR blanking the screen after the tape ended.
Seth, who went by the handle SanityLost, visited the board a couple times a week, but only in the small hours on a weekday when his parents said he should have been resting up for school. At that time, when the server load was low and there was one, maybe two other avatars roaming the temple, the construct took on an almost photo-realistic quality, approaching the kind of virtual fidelity found in the Net. It was only then that the anime boxes on the shelves began to move, shifting out of their cover art to display a preview whenever his gaze fell on them. Muffled soundtracks played on each level, changing from innocuous laughter on the first floor to plaintive moaning at the very top. SanityLost only ventured that high if there were no one else in the temple. Even in virtual space, behind a formless, opaque avatar and scrambled handle, he preferred not to be seen by other users.
