Melia sighed, heavily, which was incredibly obvious because her body was so incredibly large, and, heavy. She was doing her best to ignore the fact that she had been awake for nearly 24 hours, despite the fact that she shouldn’t be awake at all. It was easier to ignore that for the moment than it was her body. Or, perhaps more accurately, her body was very hard to ignore. It bears repeating: she was a dragon.

  Dragon! With a capital D! By measurement, her body, not including her head or her tail, was 100 feet long. Head and tail included brought her closer to 200, probably somewhere around 205 if everything was straightened and stretched out. She had black, obsidian-like scales that glistened in the moonlight filtering through the courtyard’s open sky, massive leathery wings that ran from her shoulders down the length of her body, and four, powerful legs that each held a hand or foot full of incredible, razor sharp claws. She was a quadruped, and her long, slender neck thick with muscle flexed and bent to allow the monstrosity she called her head to observe every inch of her body. She had two great horns that jutted up above her several-foot-tall eyes, and a long snout full of spikes promising impending doom in a mouth that, on occasion, belched steam.

  And Melia knew this about her body, because that was exactly how she created it. Though, in the game, her exact size had never been specified, only listed as “large”, which she attested to when trying to discover what buildings she could fit inside. The answer was not many.

  Still, she wondered how she knew exactly how big she was now, sort of how she knew the delightful, sweet scent she was smelling in the wind was actually mana.

  Earth didn’t have mana, and even if it did, she never heard of it being smelly.

  But she wasn’t thinking about that, because that would remind her that she was dead, and shouldn’t be thinking at all. She wasn’t in denial, she knew exactly what happened and it happened exactly as the doctors said it would. She could not fault them. She was simply…confused. But she wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, as the saying she never truly understood went, and if she wasn’t dead, she’d take it. She’d take it very gladly, because in the last day of doing nothing at all except laying perfectly still on the ground, she felt more alive than she had in the last decade.

  Which scared her.

  Not because she was afraid to be alive, but she was terrified it would suddenly disappear, like some cosmic entity would realize its mistake and take it back.

  But it didn’t, and the minutes ticked by, so Melia slowly started breathing easily, eventually letting out a victory roar in celebration.

  It had been long enough now that any excuse she could create, no matter how flimsy, fell apart, and she had to accept reality: she was alive. She sighed again, this time in something closer to contentment, and continued to simply lay on the cold hard stone, feeling neither the hardness nor the coldness, and…sat there. Doing nothing. Because she didn’t need to! She was alive! And she was going to take it. She wasn’t going to second guess it any longer or spend any more time stressing over it.

  Would she miss her old life? No. Mostly. She could already feel the bitter ache the gaping hole her friends and family left forming. It would be that way a while, Melia didn’t see it fading any time soon. But she would do her best to grieve them and remember, but move on. She would never forget.

  She snorted…and a tiny gout of flame illuminated a nearby wall.

  She eyed the new scorch marks carefully, but thought about her memory. She was a dragon, meaning she probably couldn’t forget. Tiny details of events half remembered from outings when she was barely more than crawling began presenting themselves for her perusal, like some enthusiastic aunt she hadn’t seen for years who visited just to show embarrassing baby photos.

  Her eyes began to sting, curiously not because of tears because while she thought she could cry, all she could feel near her face was steam, not water, so she put aside the memory of her mom crying while waving, her dad putting on a brave smile. He would surely break down as soon as he left the room, but he was strong for his baby girl.

  So Melia turned her attention to the small room she was wearing like a turtle shell. She recognized it instantly as the “grand ballroom” of the abandoned mansion located in the western side of the Coldridge Mountains, in the human kingdoms. Of course, it was a location inside Fantasy World, on Ebonvale, in which Melia was slowly coming to terms with being alive.

  But this wasn’t exactly the same Ebonvale she was used to.

  For one, as she already realized, she wasn’t used to being quite so…huge. Just hours ago, by her recollection, she had been practicing her role in this hall for an upcoming session the RPers were putting on, and she had fit into that room. Not comfortably, but she could stand up on all fours, flare her wings, and swing her tail. Which was the extent of the emotes her dragon form allowed her. Now, however, she feared that if she tried raising a wing, without even bothering to stand, that part of the roof would come crashing down right on top of her head.

  Not that she would get hurt, or probably even feel it, which was a secondary problem.

  But before considering a new problem, there was another issue with the room. Besides being too small, it also looked far too…worn.

  She expected, having suddenly woken up in a world suspiciously like one she was familiar with, that there would be differences transitioning from virtual to reality. The developers were keen on details when creating their world, but not that keen. This building was never meant to be seen by human eyes (rather, players), and as such it was little more than a huge, empty square. The barest amount of care was spared for parts not visible from air where directed flight paths would take players through, while said parts were intricately designed to mimic a once grand manor fallen into ruin.

  But no developer ever had time to devote to recreating each and every individual brick in a house that probably held over a hundred rooms.

  So while Melia knew this room…she also didn’t. It was changed in a way that felt all too real, probably because it was now, and she could almost taste the centuries of disuse and neglect.

  Really. Her new senses were very strange.

  She could only guess, but if she had to say, if this world was based on the one she was familiar with, there were definite, not so subtle differences.

  The very most obvious and glaring change: her level.

  Because, yes, the first thing she did once she stopped panicking was check her status. It came up, which gave her a mild surprise, even though no “game system” menus did. No “help”, “bug report”, “summon GM”, nothing like that. Certainly no “logout,” and Melia wouldn’t have tried it even if it did.

  But “character” did come up, though Melia understood it wasn’t so much her saying the words as it was her focusing intently on her status sheet. And what floated in front of her, so only she could see, was her very familiar status screen.

  So why was it so…inflated?

  Melia was maxed character level. That was never in question. Neither was the fact that she had multiple characters at that level. She had to in order to unlock the dragon race. Over the years, Fantasy World had moved the goalposts for what “max level” meant. When the game originally released, the highest level players could achieve was level 60. No experience was gained after that, and their stats reflected it. Expansions, as expected, raised the max level, usually by 10, and the stats bloated up along with it. Eventually, the numbers got out of control and needed to be wrangled, so several times the devs had to implement “stat squishes” so the levels didn’t soar into the hundreds and an individual stat wouldn’t measure in billions.

  The max level eventually stabilized between 80-100 (currently it was due for another squish and was sitting at 100), with individual stats varying in the mid thousands, up to 10 thousand at times, depending on the class specialization. Tanks, for instance, had an ungodly amount of health, especially those more geared for being “meat shields” instead of armor class, and had Constitution in the high 18,000s, giving a player somewhere in the 6-12 million heath range. A dedicated spellcaster would have split focus between one of three stats, and usually have about the same total split between them. Depending on if the class prioritized having a deeper mana pool (Intellect), higher chances to critically hit or apply secondary effects (Wisdom), or simply have higher regeneration (Spirit), one would obviously be larger than the other. Personally, Melia’s preferred brand of [Mage], back when she played it, wanted Intellect and nothing but.

  It should be noted, despite having a ludicrous amount of all three, not just one, Melia didn’t feel any smarter, and a large part of her was relieved that those particular stats didn’t mean smarts.

  But she stalled enough, so she pulled up her stats screen once again. And it sure said a lot.

  Name:

  Meliastraza Obsidianheart

  Title:

  the Magnificent

  Race:

  Archdragon

  Class: Destroyer of Worlds

  Level: 3700

  HP: 257B

  Mana: 3.9M

  Rage: 0/500

  Energy: 1000/1000

  Constitution: 1,000,030,744

  Strength: 793,242,877

  Dexterity: 403,966,152

  Agility: 398,125,009

  Intelligence: 8,752,461

  Wisdom: 2,650,039

  Spirit: 2,602,998

  Melia flinched, just like she had the first time she saw it.

  First was her name. That was the simplest, easiest to rationalize and understand, least complicated. Her name was Melia, and she got into the game early enough to reserve that username without having to resort to xXx’s or a host of numbers trailing off it. When she created the dragon, she had to put in a last name, and in doing so she also spiced up her first name to make it sound more draconic. She had originally considered purposefully misspelling “Obsidian” to with a Y like “Obsydian” or “Obsidyan”, but she kept failing autocorrect and now that she was a little older and, more importantly, living in that body for real, she was extremely glad she didn’t. She would have become Meliastraza the Anti-Social, the world’s first shut-in dragon.

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  The fact that she was called “the Magnificent” made her cringe too. It made her sound pompous and arrogant, which was exactly what they were going for when making their skits, but did not fit her personality at all. Melia would never consider herself a social butterfly, she was more meek than outgoing. Whenever they weren’t doing a session, so long as she didn’t forget, she would change her title back to “of the Shattered Sun.” It wasn’t a particularly hard to get title, but it was old, most people didn’t go out of their way to get it anymore (if new players even knew it existed), and, crucially, it was long. Sometimes she enjoyed standing around in main cities, looking for people taking selfies, and conveniently placing herself in the background. If they didn’t have nameplates filtered off, her name alone would take up half the screen. Smiling fondly in reminiscence, Melia thought briefly about activating it again, but instead opted for the safer, “no title” option. Just “Melia”, she would be.

  What wasn’t so easy to digest, but completely impossible to avoid, was her race. She was a dragon, alright. Big, heavy, magnificent dragon. She didn’t know exactly what an “Archdragon” was, but it wasn’t hard to guess it meant something along the lines of “big and nasty”, if her size alone meant anything. Back in the game, when creating this character, she had several options to choose from for the dragon form. Since they were completely cosmetic, the archetype did not matter. Her humanoid form had a bigger gameplay impact than her dragon form (and as always, she chose to be a gnome), but even so there was only one choice for Melia.

  There were Chinese dragons, Japanese dragons, western style dragons of various shapes and sizes…and indeed, Melia chose a western one mostly for its size. It was something called a “behemoth dragon”, no relation to the mythic level world boss monsters, named only for its size and ferocious looks. It was so heroically fantasy that it practically screamed, “I will eat all of your dwarves and your Hobbit if you so much as look at my shiny pile of gold”.

  Not all of her current body oozed murder and mayhem. Yes, her scales were pitch black, or more accurately a purple so deep, unless the sun shined directly on them she appeared black, and her ridges looked sharp and immovable as a broken mountainside, but she was not entirely an edgelord. She loved bright things, pastels and cheerful hues, and all of her gnomes rocked bubblegum pink hair. For Melia’s dragon form, this included a very visible strip outlining her belly, the supposed “soft spot” on a dragon, which itself was blinding white.

  What Melia couldn’t understand was her level. There was no reason she should be that high. The max level in the game was 100, but even if she ignored the “stat-squish” eras and added her level up continuously, it would only reach 150, 170 max. As popular as the game was, they only released an expansion roughly every 22 months, or two years to players who didn’t wait on them religiously. As of Melia’s last login, they had successfully released 5 expansions and were due for a new one next year, and when it came, it would up the level cap by another increment…if they didn’t do another squish. Something Melia would never know.

  No, there was no reason for her to be level 3,700. It was such a strange, oddly specific number. It was as if…and then it hit her. Technically, her character had been level 3700. Or rather, she had accrued 3700 levels on her dragon. Each of her 37 classes and professions were maxed out…at level 100. She sighed and wanted to cup her face in her hands, but realized she couldn’t, due to the constraints of her body.

  Besides, who wants to see a whiney dragon?

  While it didn’t exactly explain all of her stats, it was the best guess she had given the circumstances. That and her race. Dragons, in most myths and fantasy tales, generally were quite strong, near invulnerable and invincible creatures of might and magic. Melia could only guess that her race acted as a multiplier on her base stats, combined with her outrageous level, to create the utter monster that she now was. If she wasn’t too busy being morbidly fascinated by her whole situation, even she might have been afraid.

  If her stats in the game were anything to go by, then by comparison, with the stats she had now, she was more than just “strong”. She was more than overpowered. Calling her a natural disaster or a calamity would be closer, but that still felt like calling an ocean a puddle. Her stats weren’t just greater by an order of magnitude. In some cases they had risen exponentially, and then doubled on top of that. The strength on her [Warrior] alone used to be slightly over 18 thousand. Now it was almost 800 million. She imagined crushing mountains under her claws, grinding them to dust like breaking apart a particularly crumbly cookie. She shuddered.

  Eventually Melia realized she couldn’t stay frozen in place forever, even if something in the back of her mind told her that, as a dragon, she could last a really long time. She waved away her status screen and did her best not to think about all the ways things could go wrong for somebody with her bulk of stats, especially when it came to interacting with fragile, tiny mortals.

  Something she still very much identified with and considered herself as.

  And yet, she shuffled minutely to the side, and where once upon a time such an insignificant movement would have been imperceptible even to people looking for it, her massive size in an already cramped room said otherwise. Her right wing, still folded up comfortably on her back, had tried to stretch a little…and brushed up against one of the support pillars holding up the crumbling roof.

  One of Melia’s eyes swiveled up to stare warily at the poor building as several bricks tumbled down her back.

  No, she could not remain a monstrous, hidden mountain forever. Melia wasn’t the most outgoing person in the world, but she craved company. She didn’t want to be alone. And one of the most important parts of remaining not alone was to avoid terrifying or crushing potential new acquaintances.

  She had yet to access it so far, but she knew this body came with a humanoid form. All dragons did, for a whole host of reasons, and according to game lore even lesser dragons sometimes took the form of the mortal races. Sometimes it was to better infiltrate a society they wished to take something from, others it was for the simple fact that moving around was much more convenient.

  And besides all that, Melia was actually excited. She knew what to expect, having created the character herself, but a tiny fraction of her mind was worried she would transform into something wholly different or unknown. But she brought up the picture of her gnome in her mind and her body started doing the rest.

  There was no great, ominous transformation sequence where her body started twisting, groaning, and reshaping itself. No unnecessary destruction of her environment to assuage her cooped up limbs for being cramped so long. No horrific amalgamation of body horror as her size imploded on itself and she shrunk down to a fraction of her size.

  Her form simply glowed white, turning her into a mostly recognizable silhouette, as if somebody cut out a dragon shaped section of the world and the background was pure white, and the light instantly compressed itself. In less than a blink, the white mass reformed into a tiny little figure. Small, spindly, and unassuming.

  Gnomes were one of the smallest sapient races, by far the smallest sapient race that made up “Alliance of Man”. Said Alliance was, as one could guess, not actually only made of humans, but contained other free, harmonious folk that could work together for the benefit of all, such as the elves, dwarves, and beastkin, which collectively referred to themselves as ‘humanity’. They were set apart from the monsters, who were born of mana, and held no love for things other than themselves.

  In this world, if it followed the game, “humans” were the base size, the average, and everything was adjusted from them. Not politically or historically or anything to do with lore, but strictly size. That is to say, a human that was between 5 and 6 feet tall was average. An elf would be considered “tall”, even if a short adult example of their species was, at lowest, 7 feet. Beastkin followed humans nearly exactly: they only differed (in looks) by having obvious tails and ears that mostly raised from the tops of their heads. Dwarves were stout and sturdy, ranging from 4 and a half to 5 feet tall, and usually as wide and well built as the strongest of humans, while halflings were like human children. And then there were gnomes.

  They were an inquisitive race, curious and explorative, with an unfortunate penchant to let said curiosity get the better of them, despite the consequences. Their personalities were huge, in stark contrast to their physical size, and they were known for their minds, producing great [Tinkerers] and [Engineers], with the occasional [Enchanter] or [Archmage]. But gnomes were almost never known for their strength.

  …said “almost” was almost entirely attributed to Melia’s [Warrior], who had some manner of fame within the game, though she probably didn’t know it.

  But above all, gnomes were tiny. Standing between 2 and a half to 3 feet tall, their head alone made up a good portion of their body. At a glance, they did not often get mistaken for children: they were too short, their bodies too mature for what they were, and far too emotive and expressive, even compared to a child. Their eyes were large, even on their large heads, and they generally had round ears like humans, though proportionally much larger. They were not, however, misshapen or disfigured. Their heads, large though they might be in comparison to the rest of their bodies, were still proportional, and their limbs, though short and sometimes a little chubby, were not restricted.

  Melia, for instance, stood all of two feet, six inches off the ground, and six of those inches were her head.

  When the light cleared, she blinked the stars from her eyes…and felt her mouth falling open in wonder. Where before she felt claustrophobic, her body pressing into all sides of the building, now she felt she was lying on the floor of some great, forgotten auditorium. The roof, thankfully not crumbling down onto her, loomed miles above her head, though she could see exactly where her wing had previously scraped it.

  She stretched, a yawn widening her mouth comically large, and sighed. A glint of light from several yards away caught her attention.

  Her now tiny steps took far longer than she remembered actual steps taking back when she was walking, but that was partly to be expected since playing the game was not like living day to day. She approached an object sitting on the ground, and after a few curious seconds, she was hit by dawning understanding.

  In front of her was a triangular, oblong object that at first she had taken for a very strange table. Laying as it was on the ground, it came up to her thighs, and as she circled it she noted the length was several times her height. As soon as she understood the shape of it, she thought it might be a discarded kite shield. She herself had a collection of shields for her [Warrior], though she never used them since she preferred to dual wield. A shield this size would have to belong to one of the “big” races, anything over 7 feet, such as elves or the northern barbarians, which were pretty much huge humans. Melia’s take on size was currently a bit hazy, but it looked at least 8 feet long and 4 feet wide.

  But it was the strangest looking shield, without design or any sort of hand or arm straps, and that’s when Melia noticed. It wasn’t a shield at all. She had, several hours ago, had an idle itch on her arm, and she scratched it without thinking. She heard something fall to the ground, but thought nothing of it.

  A scale.

  This was a scale.

  More specifically, this obsidian piece of armor was one of Melia’s arm scales. Not the largest, not the toughest, and yet something akin to a flake of skin dwarfed her current size.

  Her awe redoubled as she rounded it again, unable to find words to properly describe how she felt. Just moments ago, she was that huge? No wonder her stats were grossly inflated!

  Without thinking, probably because part of her subconscious recognized the scale as something that came from her body, Melia bent down to pick it up.

  It should not have budged. It had to weigh over a hundred pounds, and Melia was probably a third of that.

  And at first, it didn’t.

  Melia was shocked, but more because of the second burst of strength that hit her, like her body seemed to remember it needed to put in effort. Without thinking, she was weak and tiny, but as soon as she needed to, she could call on her monstrous strength. That was good to know, it boded well for future interactions when she didn’t want to crush people in a hug.

  She dragged the scale over to the wall, which was mercifully close, and propped it up…side down, technically. On her body, the flat part of the scale was usually on top while the point…pointed down.

  Her scales, at least the obsidian ones not covering her belly, were that deep, deep purple bordering on pitch black, polished to a sheen and unblemished by any scratches or spots. Looking at her reflection in the glinting scale, it was perhaps a shade darker than it would have been in a standard mirror, but she could see her new body perfectly.

  As she had intended during character creation, she was not of average, mundane appearances. But what else could be expected of a gnome? Melia had already lost her real legs by the time she created her first gnome, and it was at that point she decided she didn’t want to have an average body. She could have chosen an elf for their incredibly tall, slender, and lanky forms, but that early in the game’s life, the northern barbarians weren’t a playable race yet, so she couldn’t be a hulking Amazon. Still, she set most of her sliders to their limits.

  She chose the shortest option, but also the curviest. She may have been bed bound, cursed to an early death, but she was still a young woman. She could admit jealousy to the fuller chests she would never have. She could admit to maddening envy at hips of any size, as hers deteriorated and rotted away at the bone. But there were limits to any game slider, so she ended up looking closer to a plus sized model rather than a blown up cartoon exaggeration.

  Her legs were “long”, at least according to her tiny frame, standing slightly more than a foot at her waist, while the rest of her torso to her neck was another 10 inches, bringing that part of her body to 2 feet.

  Her head, in reality probably the size of a small child’s, was a gnome’s more identifiable characteristic, lending them to look like chibi characters rather than small humans like halflings. They had huge eyes, taking up a good portion of their face, and usually either comically large noses (with incredible facial hair in the case of males), or extremely petite ones, which Melia had gone with. Her lips were full and almost always pulled into a playful smirk or smile, and her rounded ears, like satellite dishes, were visible even through the strands of hair that escaped her ponytails.

  Melia’s hair was a compromise. Originally, and for every iteration of character creation she had done except her dragon, she wore bubblegum pink hair. But, to accommodate her dragon form, her gnomish form had to match. That was why she had a brilliant white belly and a bright pink boundary where it ran into her obsidian scales. In her gnomish form, her skin took that pale, milky color that wasn’t sickly and could probably attract attention from a certain sparkly, nocturnal crowd, while her hair was that purple of endless night. However, she had two natural streaks of bubblegum highlights on her bangs that represented her roots, and she would not forfeit them. She generally kept her long, waist length hair pulled into twin ponytails that managed to flutter all over the place, and would most likely get in her way now that they were real.

  Her eyes, subtly draconic, were large, round, and expressive, with elongated irises that hinted at her true heritage but didn’t outright scream “large flying reptile”, and had the color and sparkle of freshly polished amethyst.

  Currently she had on deep purple mascara and black lipstick, emphasizing her pearly white teeth as she smiled. Teeth that were, in some places, perhaps a bit too sharp.

  Her eyes drank in her form greedily, barely able to contain her excitement.

  “Holy cow, I’m amazing!”