Melia stepped into the road, curious to see where it would take her. Traveling through the forest was nice, but a forest in reality had so much more undergrowth than it did in a video game. She was glad to escape the tangling bushes that were half as tall as she was, especially with how much skin she was showing in her not so protective outfit.

  Perhaps she should have considered stepping onto the actual road a little more carefully, as she was nearly run over by a passing wagon.

  Twice.

  The first time it happened Melia could easily admit to being at fault. She was still under the effects of [Stealth] and nobody that wasn’t an equal level with applicable detection abilities could see her. She had to dive out of the way from a horse’s clomping hooves, not keen to test whether her body could withstand getting trampled and then run over by a wagon wheel.

  The second was most definitely not, even if technically it still was. There was a bend in the road, not enough to be a hazard to any drivers, but enough so that one couldn’t immediately see what was around the corner. Melia, no longer stealthed, had walked around the bend, and she turned just in time to once more dive out of the way of giant hooves. The horse, let alone the driver, had not even seen her, she was so small and short. Feeling just a little miffed, a mixture of plain annoyance and outrage, partially because this body was a direct result of her actions and partly due to the driver’s obliviousness, Melia got up and shook her fist in the air.

  “Hey, watch it!”

  Her voice came out high and squeaky and she was sure that no matter how mad it sounded people would only laugh. The driver barely heard her, peeking around the edge of the driver’s box looking around, confused. When his eyes fell on her, they widened comically, like he hadn’t even seen her, and he was far enough away that she could barely hear his muttered and mostly incoherent apology.

  Melia kept herself to the soft grass beneath the roadside fence after that.

  The sun rose steadily higher and it was around 8 o’clock by Melia’s guess when the path in the road suddenly forked. Both directions were still covered by the gentle canopy of trees, letting ample sunlight onto the hardened dirt path, but one continued traveling west while the other took a sharp turn, heading due north. There was a large wooden sign post planted in the T intersection with scrawling, looping letters, and Melia was greatly surprised to find she could read it.

  North: Abbyton

  East: Hammerfall

  Melia paused to rest underneath the lowest rail along the fence, placing herself in the nook against a pole. Not that she was tired, which surprised even her after walking throughout the entire night, but simply because she could. She watched a handful of carts and wagons travel up and down the road, including a large coach-like thing resembling a bus with many passengers. Most, including the bus, continued traveling west toward Hammerfall, while only a handful, mostly simple carts full of supplies, headed north to Abbyton.

  Hammerfall was a name Melia recognized, being the second town of the Human lands, generally still considered low level but not a starting zone. Most mobs, in the game at least, were still in the mid teens to early twenties. It was also where most human players discovered their first dungeon. Melia wondered how dungeons worked in this world, and what the state of Hammerfall was. Since there was a sign pointing there and people traveling toward it in bulk, she assumed it existed, and must be reasonably safe.

  Hammerfall was added to her ever growing list of places she wanted to visit, which Melia admitted included pretty much the entire world beyond the game’s map too. But she knew her roots, and those grew deep in the abbey. She wondered if the previously unnamed church building was actually called Abbyton, or if a town sprung up around it. Maybe both. She picked herself up, dusted off her shorts and thigh boots, and continued.

  An hour later, still in the early stages of the morning, she came across a strikingly familiar sight that stopped her in her tracks, making her legs wobble and her lip tremble. It probably meant nothing to the players in the game or people of this world but before her stood an arch, a massive wall 30 feet high connecting the closest points of the small mountain range the abbey was trapped by. Overwhelming nostalgia threatened to pool tears in her eyes, but she smiled brightly and wiped them dry.

  She passed a bored looking guard standing at the foot of the gated arch, who didn’t exactly do a double take when he spotted her, but he was not so subtle with his staring.

  “Good morning!” Melia chirped, still pleased at how her voice was high, bright, and bubbly, nothing at all like the synthetic thing she was forced to use for years when her lungs began to erode.

  “A good morning to you, Little One,” the guard eventually mumbled out cheerfully in response, and that was it. Melia’s first interaction with a real person, and it was blissfully normal. No great confrontation, no revelation from the gods regarding some hidden purpose, no blaring alarms calling for her to be put down like the monster she was. Just a simple bored guard waving through a small, strangely dressed traveler.

  And he had used the term “Little One”, which Melia thought she would find annoying or patronizing, but she did not. Races in the world came in all shapes and sizes, from big to small, where dwarves and halflings were considered “small” and gnomes “tiny”. Nobody dared to call a dwarf “little”, but Little One was the polite form of address to somebody whose full height was significantly less than the human standard, usually by half or more. Melia was certain she would inevitably run across someone who looked down on her figuratively and metaphorically, using the term derogatorily, but the guard was simply happy to see somebody on the road.

  She passed under the arch and immediately found the source of all that hammering and scraping. Though the wall itself looked to be in good repair, about 2 dozen men were doing work on it, several of the wagons that had passed Melia on the road revealed themselves as shipments of heavy bricks and mortar.

  Melia, curious as any gnome, wandered over.

  “Wahtcha doin’?”

  Several men were caught off guard, looking up and around before looking down. One audibly gawked at her clothes and Melia could feel his eyes raking over her, she kept up her smile but felt it grow brittle. Yes, she needed a change of clothes soon. Another simply nodded down at her, cracked his neck as if craning it down so far was tiring, and went back to work, grunting with exertion as he lifted a 20 pound block of stone. The last man wiped his brow and squatted into a crouch, an acceptable way for the taller races to converse with the shorter ones instead of bending over.

  “Makin’ repairs,” he said gruffly but not unkindly, as if the work itself should be obvious. And it was, but Melia asked anyway. “Makin’ sure she’s steady in case we get a stampede.”

  “Stampede?” Melia bubbled, intensely curious. She could guess a stampede was when monsters crossed over zone lines in huge numbers, but that wasn’t a mechanic in the game. She wondered if it was exclusive to reality. One of the men snorted but kept working, while the one kneeling in front of her gave her a curious look.

  “Just in case any big beasties decide to try their luck down here instead of the other side of the mountain. Don’t want to be caught unprepared.”

  In the game, the Human Capital and the Dwarven Stronghold were low level, protected zones in the west and central parts of the map, respectively. That was meant to show their strength in game, as if to say no monster could penetrate those bastions of Humanity. However, while on the southern side of the mountains that divided the two cities were the human starting lands, and the far north were the starting lands of the dwarves, there was a zone straight in the middle, a sort of massive protected valley, home to an endgame zone of max level monsters. Melia, like most players, found the contrast amusing and engaging, especially when flying overhead on the game controlled taxi mounts where they could look down and see huge, powerful monsters waiting for them to grow in strength.

  Here, where the world and the people were real, it didn’t seem so amusing.

  “Why would they do that?” Melia found herself asking. “Come to this side of the mountain, that is.”

  In the game, monsters didn’t leave their zones. Even if a level 50 lava spider patrolled a route next to a level 10 lush forest, it wouldn’t stray into the treeline and start burning everything down. The man, who she considered the foreman, looked at her funny and barked out a short laugh.

  “Lassie, are you daft?” a few of the other men chuckled in agreement. “Did you not hear tha’ great roar two days ago? Bloody dragon come home to roost, most like. Monsters might be monsters, but they’re not brainless. Even the ones that are have some sort of survival instinct. What do you think they feel is safer? Risking coming down those mountains, or sitting in the shadow of a dragon?”

  Melia felt her heart sink. Of course she heard the roar, she had made it herself. One of the first things she did, in fact, after waking up. She was so pleased and happy to be alive, not to mention the joy of discovering her new body was the one she lovingly created and shaped over so many years, she couldn’t contain herself.

  She never even thought of what repercussions there might be if a dragon of her power level roared.

  “And,” Melia added hesitantly, trying to gauge how strong a normal dragon was in this world, “You think this wall will stop a dragon?”

  “Of course not,” he snorted. “Nothin’ save a party of Heroes can stop a dragon from going where it pleases.”

  Melia nodded at that, it was sound advice. It didn’t give her any new information to place her own standing among dragons, but it did confirm her suspicions that she was firmly a tier above most mortals, at the very least. The conversation done, the men turned back to work, but Melia hesitated to leave. She was here now and found she had a strong attachment to the abbey. She didn’t want monsters ravaging it, especially with the revelation that any stampede coming their way was caused by her. The least she could do was help fortify their position to make up for her carelessness. She glanced up at the men, already back at work.

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  “Need any help?”

  Two men gave her a quick glance and a dismissive scoff, saying nothing else, but the man who’d bent down to talk with her raised an eyebrow.

  “Aye, if you’re offering. What can yeh do?”

  Melia credited the man for not dismissing her outright. He was probably a higher level than the rest, which she already gathered having listened to him giving out instructions. He likely knew that looks weren’t everything when it came to people and didn’t want to judge her prematurely. At least not to her face.

  But Melia had to think. What could she do? If this was her old life, her old body…nothing. She was less than useless, being an actively negative agent in any situation because somebody had to watch over her. In this world? She had options.

  The end goal was building a wall. If that was all she knew needed to happen and was given no other instructions, she could actually build one from scratch, all by herself. She had multiple artisan and production classes, each of them maxed, including [Carpentry], [Masonry], and [Mining]. Not only could she dig the stone she needed, she could shape it, set it, and reinforce it into a bastion that would survive a siege designed to break castles. Not that the game allowed players to build anything they wanted wherever they wanted, and the number of blueprints were small and allowed only in player housing areas, but this was real life. She had no such restrictions here. She glanced at the bricks and blocks of stone in the cart and frowned. None of them were poor quality, but none of them were good.

  Crafting materials were more often measured by their quality rather than their level. Yes, something made with rarer ingredients was usually “better”, but if a lower quality item was created with skill and precision, it would always outshine a poorly crafted “superior” item, barring of course the gap between the two wasn’t an ocean in size. For example, a perfectly crafted iron sword would always be better than a mediocre steel sword or a poorly forged mythril one, but never better than even the worst piece forged from orichalcum or adamantium. Finished products were assigned a star rating by the system, viewable by crafters or scholars with the appropriate level of inspection. Melia, as a veteran of many crafting professions, [Inspected] all the bricks.

  They were all 2 to 3 stars, which was common for normal materials bought from npcs. A 4 star item was a 1 in a hundred craft worth saving for just the right time, while a 5 star was the prized craft of the month. Melia, as with other dedicated crafters, spent hours perfecting her methods, creating the right synergy of skills, grinding millions of crafts over hundreds of hours, so that she could consistently and reliably have 5 star outputs.

  So, while she was disappointed by what she saw, she wasn’t too surprised. She also didn’t want to cut into the work and start stepping on toes, so she did what she knew always needed to be done but nobody ever wanted to do. Manual labor. She approached the stack of blocks, the 20 pound version more than half her size, and lifted one up. At first she felt a moment of strain before her monstrous strength kicked in and she hefted it up and down to get a feel for it, taking it from the cart to the wall.

  The first two bricks she moved went unnoticed, until the men at the wall looked down and realized they didn’t need to walk all the way to the cart to get more supplies. Then one of them saw how the bricks were getting there and his jaw fell to the floor. His partner to the right, annoyed at the slowed productivity, went to yell at him, but his eyes also fell on Melia, now carrying two stones, effectively making her look like a tiny wall that sprouted feet. A tiny wall with a weird sense of fashion for shoes. By the time she had made a dozen deliveries, creating a decent backlog for the workers, work on the wall had all but stopped. Melia, concerned, glanced up at the foreman nervously.

  “Seems she’s got some sort of physical class,” he chuckled to himself, likely unaware that gnomes had better hearing than humans. He turned to his group of men gawking like idiots. “Alright, men! The Little One has graced us with her generosity, and it looks like she’s got more muscles than you lot have brains. Get back to work so her gift doesn’t go to waste! I expect double time, since you don’t have to waddle your sorry butts back to the wagon!”

  Melia had come down the mountain with the intent to visit the abbey, but she didn’t mind her small detour to help the men reinforce the wall in the slightest. If she truly was a dragon in this new life, she was all but immortal, with the benefits and drawbacks that came with it. She didn’t want to think about staying young while the world grew old around her, but she wouldn’t shy away from making new friends and building new relationships. She had seen her family and Brandy watching over her at the end. Theirs were tears of sadness and great grief, but also of joy. Her time on earth may have been short, but none of them would have traded it for anything.

  Several hours passed and the men suddenly found themselves freshly out of materials to work with right about lunchtime, so each of them crouched respectfully to thank Melia deeply, touched by her help. She waved them off as they piled into the wagon and headed wherever they were going, before turning herself toward the towering building in the distance with the great steeple and bell.

  All around Melia she heard the pleasant sounds of rustic life. What little she knew of suburbs and communities came before she was very cognisant of such things, and by the time she was, her entire world was trapped inside a tube. But, even expecting nothing didn’t prepare her for both how loud and how quiet it was.

  There were no cars, no motors, no electricity. Yes, the game had magic and magical tools, magitech and amazing artificers who created wonders, but it was not the same as a thriving, bloated, urban jungle. If she strained, she could practically hear the silence around her, the rustling of the leaves, the swaying of tree branches, the chirp of a distant bird. All the while, near at hand but somewhere out of view, children laughed and played. It was a distinct sound.

  “Quite a lovely slice of life we’ve made for ourselves, isn’t it?”

  Melia may have jumped, but she was more grateful that she didn’t suddenly let out a great gout of flame in panic.

  “Oh, forgive me, Little One,” a mirthful voice giggled. “I didn’t mean to surprise you.”

  Melia turned to face what could only be a nun. A sister? A lady of the cloth? Perhaps they had many names. She was tall, as all races were now to Melia, who had to strain her neck to see above the woman’s knees. The woman crouched down, much like the foreman had, and Melia saw she had a warm, if timeworn smile. If looks could be believed, she was likely in her late thirties.

  “Hello!” Melia bubbled, putting the awkwardness behind her. “I’m Melia! And you?”

  “Grace,” the woman continued her gentle smile, offering a hand. Melia could only guess that ‘grace’ was the woman’s name and not a new type of greeting, so she put her small hand atop the woman’s and shook it. “Well met.”

  “Indeed! And I must agree. This place always gives me that sort of…homely feeling, I guess?” Melia tilted her head thoughtfully. “It just feels…right.”

  “Oh?” Grace asked. “Have you traveled to Abbyton before? I haven’t heard of any gnomish gardens passing through recently…certainly not in my time.”

  Melia’s smile faltered slightly. A “gnomish garden” was simply what one called a community of gnomes, like they would a “grumble of dwarves”. That wasn’t what bothered her, it was the mention of time. Melia didn’t expect to recognize any of the NPCs from the games here, but she was familiar enough with the ones around the abbey that she’d recognize their names. Grace was not one of them. Not to mention, it felt like summer out. The morning was cool and crisp, but the afternoon was getting hot enough to sweat just from moving about.

  When Melia had last logged in, it was during the Winter Veil holiday event, which ran the month of December, ending January 2nd. Time had clearly passed.

  “I…don’t know?” Melia answered honestly. “Or rather, I know I have, but I don’t know you. Have you lived here long?”

  “All 29 years of my life,” Grace smiled. Poor woman, Melia thought, she must work with a lot of kids.

  But that answered Melia’s questions…or started to at least. She gave another look around the square they found themselves standing in. In front of them, the splendid church with its towering steeple, to their left, a stables and several semi-permanent carts with vendors. To their right…a very familiar vineyard.

  Melia felt her lips twist into a lopsided smile. She tamped down on those strange, gnawing feelings of nostalgia and bygone days, eventually tearing her eyes away from the vineyard. Grace was waiting with her patient smile, and Melia’s quickly returned to normal, though it held a hint of irony.

  “I thought about making a joke,” she said, waving a hand behind her toward the fields of grapes. “But that no longer seems appropriate. Is it still called Miley’s Vineyard?”

  Grace seemed surprised at first, perhaps forgetting that size and stature did not mean age, before taking on a bright smile and nodding.

  “Indeed it is! Though few refer to it as such. Most simply call it the vineyard these days, as it hasn’t really belonged to any one person since…” her smile turned thoughtful as her voice faded.

  “I figured as much,” Melia sighed. “She is gone then, is she? So much seems the same, and yet, so different.”

  Melia only meant to mutter that last part to herself, but the sister heard her.

  “She lived a full life, or so I’m told,” Grace said diplomatically. “In truth, I never knew her. That was a hundred years ago.”

  That revelation stunned Melia. She was prepared to accept that this world was an entirely different one from the one she knew, or even maybe that it was the same one but time had passed. Even expecting it, hearing somebody from this world tell her to her face that a hundred years had passed since the world she knew…made her feel things.

  “A hundred years….”

  She said that quietly to herself, but the sister must’ve heard her. Not only that, but she must have picked up on some of the deeper meaning of the sigh, as her voice turned somber, offering gentle condolence.

  “Did you know her? Were you friends?” she asked softly. Melia snorted. Technically she didn’t know anyone, but she felt she had a measure for the woman. She’d read her quest text boxes enough times to assume a personality.

  “I wouldn’t say we were enemies or anything, but I don’t think you could call what we were ‘friends’.”

  She let out a rough snort which turned into a high pitched giggle, suddenly breaking the somber air. Melia shook her head as a wide, mischievous smile took over her face.

  “The amount of grapes I must have picked for that lady…!” she cried out dramatically, falling into her race’s tendencies for emotiveness. What was left unsaid was each of those bundles was for a new starter character when this world was only a video game, but she had to have run through the starter zone two dozen times. That meant at least a hundred and forty bundles of grapes, minimum!

  The sister smiled and offered a small chuckle of her own. The bell from the steeple rang, and the sounds of children drawing closer rose around them. Grace stood up and brushed off her robes.

  “Will you be staying long?” Grace asked. “Midsummer isn’t here for another day or two yet, and I’m sure you don’t take up much space.”

  Melia let out a loud laugh, appreciating the joke for what it was. She could spare some chuckles at her own expense. Besides, she was interested to see what festival Midsummer would bring. The game always presented unique goodies during seasonal events.

  “Perhaps I will,” she decided on a whim. Her plans were forming on the fly. “A lot can change over the years, if you’re not careful. The last time I was here was a hundred years ago…but when you’re something like me, it hardly seems like it’s been a day.”

  “And what are you?”

  For a second, Melia thought about telling the truth. Saying she was a dragon. Eventually it would come to light, she didn’t plan on hiding away forever. But that same mischievous smile crept back as she smirked.

  “Powerful.”