Melia opened her eyes. The view had not changed in the last twenty-four hours. That was probably a good thing, seeing as she hadn’t really left the room she was in for a long time. The problem was that it wasn’t the same one she last saw when closing her eyes two days ago.

  Probably, she thought somberly, doing so for the last time.

  To say that Melia was ill would be an understatement. Despite the miracles of modern medicine, it was not perfect, and her body seemed determined to fight it at every turn. Her condition was, while not entirely unheard of for the doctors, relatively rare. Especially for those who had and managed to live past their earliest years. She’d heard the average was 5 or 6 years old, and she pitied those children. Melia herself was 24, nearly 25, and the last 15 years had been living hell. It was a horrific, gruesome, and gory disease where the body ate itself, decomposed, and eventually disintegrated, and, without stepping into graphic details that induced lasting trauma and night terrors, was a fatal condition with a zero percent survival rate.

  It was called Lancaster’s Disease, named after the son of an incredibly rich business mogul, who held the previous record of longevity. The man spent billions fighting for his son’s life, eclipsing the income of some small countries and nearly bankrupting himself. He managed to prolong the inevitable for 17 years before the son eventually passed. And Melia had lived 7 years past that.

  But this was now, and that was close to a hundred and fifty years ago, around the beginning of the 2000s, and technology had increased by leaps and bounds. No, sadly, people did not have flying cars like everybody thought back in the early tech days of television and science fiction. Though to be fair, that was more because of laws, rules, and regulations regarding safety and air traffic control instead of technological limitations. If that original Lancaster could see what the doctors did for patients of his disease today, what they’d done for Melia, he’d be green with envy. Or possibly, he might even be alive. Melia’s family was not rich, decidedly middle class, and their meager healthcare was only able to afford them so much. And it had given them so much. More than anybody probably had any right to ask for. They were grateful. All of them, Melia included.

  Because of her condition, she had long ago moved to a permanent residence in a medical center. Her family visited regularly, but there wasn’t much to do and there wasn't much to see. Melia wasn’t so much “bedridden” as she was part of the bed itself. Most of her organic body was gone, her mind being sustained by many synthetic means, but those could only go so far. While science could replicate an artificial heart, they could do nothing about a brain. And that, too, was failing. To put it in a point: the common name for Melia’s condition was Lancaster’s Disease. There was an actual scientific name that nobody remembered, couldn’t pronounce, and had to be looked up whenever a person was born with it every 75 years or so. But even to those who did know it, it was usually called something far more on the nose and crass: Devouring.

  Once it became clear that Melia would no longer have a normal childhood (or any prospects for a decent length of life, though that went mercifully unsaid), her parents went through great lengths to ensure her comfort and provide enough entertainment to take her mind off her inevitable demise. Melia wasn’t exactly the most athletic kid, but like most kids she had lots of energy to burn and wanted to run around and play. For a while she was able to do so until her condition took her mobility from her completely, but luckily by that time, she’d found something to invest herself in: virtual reality gaming.

  Melia went through many different titles in different genres, including racing, adventure, strategy, and even a few sports games. She tried one or two first person shooters, which made her parents grimace but they carefully vetted the titles before allowing their daughter to indulge, and several simulation titles. “Shop” and “market” sims were entertaining for a few days but never lasted long, despite the clear wry amusement they gave her parents when she played them. Eventually, she settled on what could be considered a generic fantasy mmo, set in a late medieval, possibly renaissance era, vaguely British-European setting with elves, dwarves, and other fantasy races. It was simply called Fantasy World, and its name did itself no favors. Most people called it Ebonvale, which was the name of the world it took place in, and to a kid’s slightly cringy edginess, sounded much cooler.

  E-vale, as said before, was standard. Character customization was extensive, but not prohibitively vast (too much choice) or small (too little), and players could choose one of many fantasy races…including plain old humans. With magic. Because yes, of course there were spells, as well as other staples in massively multiplayer role playing games like skills, abilities, talents, and levels.

  Through the immersive means of virtual reality, players steered their characters through quests, went on adventures, competed in duels, and otherwise enjoyed a myriad of diverse activities. But it wasn’t what people thought of when they first heard the words “deep dive VR”. Especially not those people who weren’t familiar with video games.

  It was not a “second life”, not even for Melia. She was given the chance to do things she never would be able to do again, like walking and sitting, talking and laughing, but it was still a video game, limited to its engines and its hardware. While it did interface with people in semi-sleep to create a dreamlike state, the game itself and how it controlled was closer to the pioneering titles that championed keyboard brands and mouses with built in macros. Players inside the game didn’t even need to always walk around in the first person: it might have taken a little getting used to, but the advantage players got from being able to see all around their character from a cameraman-like view was preferred by many. Many things that sounded cool in fiction just didn’t work for a real video game, especially not if it wanted to retain a large and varied playerbase, but in the end, more people enjoyed it than those who didn’t, even if sometimes people complained about the company “nerfing fun”.

  Most of that applied to Melia like it would any other player. When she first signed up for the game it was in its final stages of beta testing, finally open to the public. Those characters needed to be deleted once the game went live in six months, so Melia didn’t put a ton of thought into it. Her first ever avatar for her first ever character was a generic female human that was depressingly similar to her real life body, which she did not want to use because while the option to scan her likeness into the game was present for everybody, her particular circumstances didn’t exactly lend themselves to a functional or awe inspiring avatar, even in the beginning. At least, not in any good ways. Ebonvale had some level of prosthetics, but even if she didn’t have to walk around with a peg leg, she’d rather be whole.

  She chose a [Priest] as her first class because, unsurprisingly, she liked the idea of being able to cure injuries. She knew it was a silly wish to be able to bring those healing skills into the real world to share with her real body, but she was 12 years old at the time and such fantasies were hard to resist. She was, however, quickly assured that the path of a video game healer was not for her. Demanding and ungrateful pickup groups and whiney loot leeches lazing about in the main cities dissuaded her from maining any sort of healer class. While fun, it was much more stress than it was worth when all she wanted to do was have fun when she got done with schoolwork.

  Melia couldn’t attend any normal school, but her education wasn’t abandoned. It probably wasn’t nearly as strict as it could have been even in public school, but she didn’t fight against the tutors and completed her homework dutifully, probably helped greatly by the amount of exercises and workbooks that were available digitally and converted into various types of games. Math and typing were a lot more fun when you were shooting zombies with correct punctuation and blasting aliens with sums.

  The beta for Ebonvale passed quickly and for Melia’s first real character on a live server, she decided to change things up. She was 13 now and even if she had been in full, complete health, she would have been a smaller, slender girl, average in most things if not veering slightly toward petite. While she was running around, she was neither tall nor too short, but neither were exactly true anymore, since she had lost her left leg and her right foot was going quickly. On a whim, while being visited by her best friend and soon to be co-player (if the girl kept her grades up), she decided to play as a gnome. In game they were the shortest of the playable races, standing at between 2 and a half to 3 feet tall, with huge, expressive eyes on a head that was slightly cartoonishly large. Melia’s friend joked that soon enough she would be that height in real life, and fortunately they both laughed it off, as morbid as it was.

  And truthfully, Melia could not have been happier with her choice.

  She found she resonated with the gnome. In game lore, gnomes were bright, bubbly, energetic, and inquisitive. A complete departure from her waking-world surroundings and something Melia was at heart. They were also industrious and prone to more than just a little mischief and misadventure. There was a reason gnomes got a racial bonus to the [Engineering] profession, though it wasn’t enough to be considered a required pick for anyone thinking about choosing that class.

  Melia’s first real class was a [Mage]. She liked the idea of support classes and casters, and she wasn’t sure she wanted the pressure of handling a tank class to start. She and her best friend, Brandy (who rolled an elf), spent countless hours grinding, questing, exploring, and generally doing what they couldn’t do in the real world, here. Those early days, as with most people when beginnings are still filled with wonder and excitement, were special. They weren’t all easy, as the game had trials and troubles while learning proper balancing, but they were cherished.

  Time passed. Brandy got busier with real life, maintaining her active lifestyle and pursuing things like cheerleading as she moved into high school, so her time spent in game was inevitably decreasing. Thankfully, she never fully stopped playing the game with Melia, who was forever grateful to the girl for sticking by her side as a best friend throughout the years despite logic stating it would be very reasonable for her to move on. The game continued to be popular, enough to drag expansions into development.

  With Brandy’s reduced playtime, Melia didn’t want to play without her best friend but she also didn’t want to stop playing entirely. So, after 3 years playing a mage, she created her first alt character. She chose to go crafting.

  It was a mistake.

  Not that she didn’t enjoy it, becoming a crafter in a video game was an interesting, rewarding experience. It was just, at the beginning of Ebonvale’s life, crafting professions and classes were horribly complicated, convoluted, and, some might say, corrupted. They were, undeniably, a time sink. They were designed to be “realistic” and “intuitive”, meaning the developers mistook players wanting a feeling of accomplishment for “an unreasonable grind for materials and experience”. Melia didn’t know how people were expected to raise a crafter solo, since she struggled to do so and she had nearly all the time in the world.

  Crafting was designed to be interconnected. One class needed stuff from another class. The idea was this: so why would anybody want to play a crafter? Making stuff. The devs assumed that people wouldn’t play a crafter (and thus deny themselves from participating in endgame raids) unless they could produce high quality, endgame equitable gear and equipment. That created a problem that if crafting gear was better than the stuff people could get from difficult raids and dungeons, why bother with the dungeons? So crafting had to be hard.

  So the example.

  A [Dragoon] player wants a new spear (to crush their enemies or something). They go to a [Carpenter], who makes spears. The [Carpenter] says “sure, I can make that,” and starts looking up the ingredients. It needs, as one might expect, wood, metal, maybe some leather for a grip, and a few fantasy bits and bobs that nobody in the history of warfare ever actually put on a spear.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  To get the wood, they needed a [Logger].

  To get the metal, they needed a [Blacksmith].

  For the [Blacksmith] to refine the metal, they needed a [Miner] to dig ore out of the earth.

  For the leather grip….

  And so on, and on, and on.

  Years later, the entire crafting system was reworked (multiple times to achieve decent game balance), but in the beginning, it was a very unpopular slog only chosen by those people deemed masochistic.

  But Melia had the time, so not only did she roll a crafter, she rolled all the crafters. Soon she had a whole army of gnomes, each with their own quirks and specialties, because most of the time it was easier for her to just go get the stuff herself than try and bug another player for it.

  And that was also not really considering the auction house, which was a whole other world to itself inside the game.

  Even with the dreaded “social life killer” that was crafting, Melia eventually found herself with time to spare. She didn’t want to leave Brandy behind when new expansions and updates came out, so she started rolling other characters to play with. Her first and favorite (so much so that it usurped the title of “main” away from her [Mage]) was a [Warrior]. She had originally shied away from the class because it was known to be tricky or finicky to play, and it was. But after the nonsense that was crafting, Melia was no longer afraid to learn. And she did. But what really drew her in was the simple fact that her tiny little gnome with bright pink hair tied up in two ponytails could wield massive, giant swords, each at least the size of her body. It was adorable and hilarious, and Melia never wanted to go to anything else ever again.

  But she did, because as her new main, her [Warrior] needed to be ready and present when Brandy logged in for their next adventure, so Melia rolled them all. Well, technically not all. She never touched a few classes, because they weirded her out and at that point in life Melia was starting to take something of personal identity in the gnomes she played, and if they didn’t mesh with her in real life, they wouldn’t be a fit in game. Things like [Warlocks] and [Necromancers] were right out.

  This led Melia all across Ebonvale’s map to conquer starter zones for all the races in search of new, exciting, and most importantly, different quests to level with. She’d replayed the same “go get me 4 wolf steaks” quest from the human starter zone so many times she considered writing to a GM and explaining why they should patch in the extinction of a particular forest wolf in a particular zone, purely for lore reasons.

  This, in turn, led Melia to begin undertaking what she called “lore seeking”. She made it a personal quest of hers to complete every quest in the game. And, to her credit (which the developers subtly nodded to when they got around to implementing game achievements), she eventually did. She got an in-game title for completing X amount of quests (numbered such that other players could get it, technically not every quest like she had done), and started cataloging which questlines were her favorite and which should be avoided.

  She also found many that the developers clearly had certain plans for that never got to see the light of day. For instance, there were a very small handful of what the community dubbed “epic” questlines. Not because quests themselves had rarities, nor did the quests themselves technically offer much in the way of rewards.

  They were, instead, huge, overarching chains designed to fully immerse players into their characters as heroes in the world of Ebonvale. They started small, innocently, like talking to a certain NPC owner of a “filler” shop (that didn’t sell any useful goods, just planted to flesh out the world), which led to the next guy, a fisherman, and to the next, and the next, until suddenly the player was traipsing to every corner of the game map, uncovering a plot to overthrow the human government by kidnapping the king and installing spies and impersonators.

  Not all of those quests were finished, it turned out, and some seemed to change writers partway through. While Melia found the unfinished and poorly altered quests disappointing, by this time in the game’s life she didn’t mind too much. She had other things to sate her lore itch, as she discovered role playing. Role playing was nothing new, established games dedicated to “immersive storytelling” had existed for centuries, but Melia had always been a bit hesitant to engage whenever the topic came up before. Now, with a full character limit of max level characters, she didn’t have an excuse to put it off.

  Her only regret was not giving it a chance earlier.

  Oh, at first, she was terrible at it. She was definitely not born a natural, at least how she envisioned it, with her “acting” being cringey at best, repulsive at worst. But the small community dedicated to enjoying RP was patient and kind. Mostly. There were always examples of creeps that tried taking things too far one way or another, and those types were quickly ostracized and never seen or heard from again. Sometimes even in real life.

  What made it click for Melia was one day when she was working on her [Blacksmith] and a known RPer came up for a friendly chat. Melia wasn’t “in character” so to speak, but she had been so ingrained into the game by that point she easily slipped into the role without thinking about it. They were talking simple, silly stuff like “how does a gnome even hold a hammer that big?” and Melia rolled with her patented cheeky, yet honest, playful, and encouraging tones. They “talked shop” for hours as she grinded several hundred iron bars, explaining the crafting process, where to use certain skills to get quality increases or production buffs, sometimes getting her extra outputs or higher quality results. Before she knew it, a whole skit was playing out with a decent sized gathering, recreating what could be considered a digital ren-faire. Several players wore cosmetic outfits resembling tavern workers went around serving beverages and a random [Bard] showed up and started playing music. He tried squeezing troll songs in like “sandstorm”, but when he tried rick-rolling the audience, they heckled him into submission.

  Melia would never think to rank her various times in the game as eras of importance, but the RP era was higher up than most. It probably came at the perfect time in her life, as she was breaking out of her social shell in game just as she was locked into one outside of it. Eventually, the day came where her condition progressed to the point where she was in too great of danger to risk any sort of contamination. So, her medical bed was converted into a housing, a small, torpedo-like tube with a glass dome so she could still see the world around her, especially when her family came to visit. Though in the moment when she breathed her last fresh air, part of her wished she couldn’t see the tears streaking down her parents faces, nor the upset, confused look on her 5 year old baby brother, not old enough to understand what was going on, only that he was sad and he was losing something precious.

  Visits, predictably, slowed after that. Her family still came, and Brandy still visited every weekend, even if for just a few minutes, because the best friends could do so much more together in-game. There was only so much she could do when the extent of her interactions with the world was looking out from the other side of the glass.

  In the game, she did not let her personality diminish. It was most likely thanks to her small yet incredibly devoted support group that she wasn’t destroyed by depression. Her character in the game became hers: she was just as much Melia inside as out. So she should be excused then, if she looked crazy, when she might tell a story to an NPC that, by definition of being a game character and not real, could not comprehend or respond.

  And just because she was max level didn’t mean there weren’t things she could still grind. Having succeeded in her journey of completing every quest, Melia turned her attention to reputation gains and “useless” items, like cosmetics and toys. Things that offered no value to competitive gameplay like player versus player or endgame raids, but were fun or cool or things to brag about having to one’s friends. Like [Alchemy] potions of “giant growth” which scaled up character size, or the famous “gnomish world enlarger”, which did so…by shrinking the player.

  Melia’s friends and the communities she was in could not spend nearly as much time on game as she did, since she, for all intents and purposes, functionally lived in the game. She’d taken to practicing her storytelling and generally worked her nerves of social interaction by talking up NPCs in secluded areas. Some of her favorites were quest NPCs in instances where she couldn’t be overheard and thus embarrassed for talking to the computer, or her in-game retainers that performed several quality of life enhancements the game implemented over time and were stationed at her house. They were mostly there to supplement gathering materials for her crafting alts and managing player housing, but they were the perfect captive audience. Sometimes she liked to pretend they were simply the best domestic servants, content to silently indulge their youthful charge and her whimsical flights of fancy.

  She had two favorite pastimes as of late.

  Having played the game for nearly 15 years, logging in over 75,000 hours of game time, Melia had more than an average amount of experience and knowledge in the game. After the second expansion, the developers had started adding new races to play the game as, as well as one or two new classes, some of which started off as higher level straight out of character creation. She had all of those unlocked, of course, though she never chose to create a different race, only the classes. She loved her gnomes, after all. It wasn’t until the very last expansion, which allowed players to play as “Dragonkin”, essentially humans with horns, scales, and a tail, that she changed her mind. It wasn’t the human form that interested her. If a player reached max level on 25 different classes, they could create a new character, set at level 1 but containing the ability to level all the already-maxed-alt classes again…as a dragon. One with a dragon form and a humanoid form, which could be based off any of the original races. The dragon form itself was entirely cosmetic: it was huge, immobile, and overwhelmingly awesome, but because it was so big, cool, and lore-wise strong, it had to be made irrelevant. Having access to one race could not allow a single player any advantage over another.

  But it was freaking cool to be an honest to goodness dragon, sitting in the middle of town square blocking all the mailboxes, even if she couldn’t interact with anything! And, currently, she was the only character with that race, since she had maxed out 37 classes, but it was only a matter of time before other “no-lifers” joined her in greatness.

  So her favorite pastimes, after re-maxing out her classes, was sitting in the instance of a rather obscure quest giving NPC that gave repeatable quests for a reputation that was largely irrelevant, only unlocking the ability to replay old cutscenes from past dungeons and story arcs. The NPC herself was a young princess, fourth or fifth in line for the throne, probably somewhere around 10 to 12 years old, who was always accompanied by a maid and offered tea to a player in exchange for stories. Melia took that personally, and after exhausting all of the options the game supplied for dialogue, she took to idling inside that room instanced to her and regaling the young princess with her own stories of the many parties she’d been in, clearing dungeons and struggling through raids, of guilds and their dramas, and sometimes what she would do to create new expansions. She learned to tell grand tales with flair and exuberance, enabled by such a captive audience.

  When she was not busy bothering the princess, Melia was taking part in a growing theater of RP. As the only current dragon, she had taken to sitting in an abandoned mansion that was originally meant as inaccessible background landscape (but of course players managed to find their way into) and dialoging grandiosely.

  One of the more famous RPers was something of a screenwriter, acting as a very popular Dungeon Master in the real world and doing some decent amateur writing. Together, the community formed parties and would “raid” Melia in her dilapidated mansion, where both she and they would read from prepared scripts before taking place in a mock duel, whose outcome was already pre-determined. As a dragon, Melia “won” nearly all of those performances, but for the few she was fated to fail, the community had wrangled together interesting prizes for the players that won, and Melia had even contributed to crafting a few of those.

  It was during a lull in those sessions, where a group of “heroes” were partaking in a story arc to defeat the “evil, greedy dragon”, that Melia’s part in those adventures came to an end.

  The doctors came to her during one of her mandatory “awake” zones, time carefully regulated to ensure her health, when the long-expected and prepared-for time came. Her body could be supported no longer. She used eye movement to convey her understanding and agreement, since that was pretty much all that was left of her physical form. She already knew what they were going to say: she and her family had long accepted it would come. It was time for her to shut down. The end, the doctors said, would be very brief…but very painful. If she was awake. She looked to the side, saw her mom and dad, her little brother, and her best friend for the last time. She was going back into the game one last time, very briefly, as life support cut out. In theory, it would be painless.

  And it was.

  Melia, as she sat in the abandoned mansion in her dragon form, for the first time, albeit very briefly, felt tired in the game. What would a little nap hurt? She closed her eyes to the welcome darkness.