The next day didn’t begin with a morning jog; this was good for my laziness. Instead, I had a leisurely breakfast while browsing ECHO’s community forums. I had been tempted to wolf down a quick breakfast and hop back into the pod to play, but I did have things to do today, and I       didn’t want to get so caught up in playing that I’d forget to log out in time.

So instead of wandering around Echeirn and doing delivery quests or finding a place to practice archery—which I really should work on at least—I was on my second bowl of breakfast cereal, third glass of chocolate milk, and fifth gargantuan forum thread.

I had already read a heated discussion about whether or not allies should block line of sight which devolved into a litany of complaints talking about the worthlessness of magic and Archery.      There was another thread where some players were attempting to create a listing of all known spells. Some good information there, but too many people were whining about perceived imbalances or the fact that there were no especially powerful spells available right away. People wanted massive fireballs or miniature tornadoes rather than the much more modest spells at the start of a magic path.

I had also skimmed through a collection of screenshots, ignoring most of the discussion when it became clear that it was generally complaints about the terminology: there were no screens involved, so how could they be screenshots? Instead, I focused on the pictures themselves which were mostly of terrain: waterfalls, fields of wildflowers, mountains, beaches—that sort of stuff.

I had also read through the patch notes, most of which was minor balancing and tweaking that didn’t affect me, but there were at least two lines that were relevant:

* As a result of a bug in encounter scaling, some players received better-than-expected rewards from tougher-than-intended encounters in the tutorial. All players will receive compensation of three silver coins via system mail upon their next arrival in the game world.

and

* Beastkin Archetype Racial ability “Hidden Nature” has been modified to have a scaling cooldown based on how frequently it was used in the past six hours. The initial cooldown is one minute (60 seconds), doubling for each use within the past six hours.

The ability would be less convenient, now—at least for those who wanted to use it frequently—but the ability’s duration now made sense. Given the number of times I had shifted to the primal form in that fight with Sar’Glagalth, I probably would have bumped up against the the cooldown scaling being in the way at some point. Hopefully, however, future fights like that would be few and far between. And, by then, I should have enough abilities that such desperate measures wouldn’t be needed. Moreover, I’d have teammates rather than trying to solo a raid-style boss.

The fifth forum thread that I was perusing was … related to that. Nazhai or Victoria or someone had released that much abbreviated and condensed video of my final tutorial encounter and the commentary ranged back and forth across at least fifty pages. Mostly, I was skimming the comments. Some were praise for my skills, some were accusations that cheating was somehow still involved, some were speculation on how dumb someone had to be to try and do a fight that was obviously intended to be run from…. A couple others were variation on incredulity, wondering why someone would choose to play as a cow.

A lot of the discussion was on how to replicate or improve upon my performance. Stoneshaper Draconic would take less damage from the earth-based attacks of Sar’Glagalth. Shielding spells, such as those found in Restoration Magic or similar schools, could also help reduce the damage taken. It was nearly universally agreed upon that high agility and ranged attacks were necessary, preferably with something to boost range.

There was one long rant from someone who had tried to follow as much of the suggestions as possible, building his character specifically for that encounter. Unfortunately for him, it wasn’t the giant stone centaur-thing he had encountered, but rather a water-based creature that morphed and shifted between a myriad of forms.

There was even, amazingly enough, two pieces of fanart posted to the thread. One was of Sar’Glagalth standing in a field littered with tombstones and fallen figures. And the other was of … Madelyn Alexis, portrayed in a bridal gown and standing atop the severed head of the stone centaur. The caption was “This waifu needs no protecting” in letters resembling cracked and shattered green crystals.

I was only thirty pages into the thread, but I finished breakfast and closed down the browser with a sense of unease. Where there was one fanart, others would follow—especially given my future role as a mascot. I was no stranger to the rules of the internet, but there were some things I just didn’t want to contemplate. Even cutesy and innocent fanart would likely make me uncomfortable, but for the first to have labeled my character as a “waifu” was … disconcerting and set a bad precedent. Thankfully, it hadn’t been her primal form, but still … I resolved to stay well away from image boards for the foreseeable future.

A bit more than half an hour later, I was walking into the small, local library, and one of the best cures for a distracting spiral of thoughts presented herself.

“Uncle Taylor, Uncle Taylor! Guess what? Mommy let me choose three books today, and you get to choose one of them to read today! We’re going to the beach after Mommy is done working, so I’m wearing my swimsuit under my shirt. Do you want to see it!?”

With two red braids streaming behind her, little Noabelle Wirkkala came bounding past the four sparse aisles of non-fiction that separated the children’s and young adults’ side of the library from the adult fiction side nearest the door. She dodged past spinners of pulp westerns and Harlequin romance novels, treating them almost like a slalom course, and would have jumped up to hug me except for the three books she had clutched to her chest.

Noabelle wasn’t my niece and I wasn’t her uncle, but after the second day I had read to the kids and helped with the library’s literacy program, the girl had declared “‘Mister’ is for strangers, so you’re ‘Uncle’ instead.” It was possible we were related, though. In a small community, almost everyone is related to almost everyone else, and even newcomers that stay tend to end up in the web after a generation or two. If I remember correctly, the Wirkkalas and the Taylors were related through grandmothers being in-laws of some sort.

I stepped to the side so I wouldn’t block anyone else coming into the library, and squatted down to be eye-to-eye level with her. “Hello, Noabelle. What books did you choose? And don’t forget to use your library voice, we’re not outside.”

“No one’s here yet except Mommy and me … and you … so it  doesn’t matter!”

“But it does matter, Princess Sunny Bunny. You don’t want to turn into the Bad Habit Rabbit, do you?”

Noabelle closed her mouth tightly, covered it with one hand, and shook her head back and forth, almost whipping her braids through the air as she did so. “Sorry,” she whispered. “Also, I’m not a princess today.”

“You’re not? Did you get promoted to queen?”

She giggled and kept whispering “Don’t be silly. I’m not a princess because I’m a mermaid. When I show you my swimsuit, you’ll see. Here! This book is for the little kids.” She handed me Dr. Seuss’s One Fish, Two Fish. “This book is for the big kids.” Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. “And this one is for me!” She proudly presented…

“Third-Grade Mermaid? Did you get older when I wasn’t looking, Noabelle? Shouldn’t it be First-Grade Mermaid?”

“No, silly! That book doesn’t exist.” She wasn’t whispering anymore, but her voice was still appropriately quiet for a library.

“I see. Well, maybe you can write it someday?”

“Maybe! Or maybe you can and I’ll draw the pictures for it. Also, see?” She lifted up her light pink and overlong tee shirt to reveal part of the swimsuit she had mentioned. Coincidentally, it was pale seafoam green with dark pink, almost coral, accents. Emblazoned across the chest in sparkly white letters outlined with that dark pink was the phrase “Part-time Mermaid.” The last curve of the small “m”s extended further than normal and was stylized to look like a mermaid’s tail. Both dots of the lower-case “i”s were done with sea shells.

“A part-time mermaid, huh? That reminds me of a story.” Obviously, I wasn’t going to tell her about my situation, being literally a part-time mermaid myself, but Noabelle and I had developed a tradition of telling somewhat collaborative stories while we were waiting for others to show up for the reading program. “Let’s go sit down and see if I can remember the story.”

“Okay! Come on, Uncle Taylor!” Noabelle took my free hand, the one not holding the books she had presented to me, and led me toward the little, low table in the children’s section of the library.

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

As we were passing by, Carrie Wirkkala—Noabelle’s mother and the library’s only paid employee besides Mrs. Beard, the aged librarian—came out from the aisles. I didn’t know her well; she was five years older than I, so our paths had never really crossed at school. She had, after all, graduated before I had started high school. Carrie was a single mother, which was why Noabelle was at the library now and spent so much time at the library in general. School was out for the summer, Noabelle wasn’t yet old enough to be left alone at home all day, and daycare cost more than Carrie could spare on the low salary a small-town assistant librarian could make.

Even if I had wanted to try and solve the problem by offering to pay for Noabelle’s daycare, Carrie wouldn’t have accepted. She, like many small town residents—in fact, like my own family had been—had more than a faint disdain for charity: “we’ll manage, somehow” might as well be the unofficial motto of small town families everywhere.

And, of course, throwing money at problems doesn’t really make anything go away except the money. If I tried to solve too many problems like that, and there were no small number of them even in this little town, then very quickly there wouldn’t be much of anything left for me and my twin.

Carrie smiled at me, then squatted down to talk to her daughter. “Now, Noabelle, make sure you share Mr. Taylor when the other kids arrive. He isn’t here just to play with you, okay?”

“Mommy! ‘Mister’ is for strangers! You have to call him ‘Uncle,’ too.”

It was a common conversation by now. So far, Carrie hadn’t given in to her daughter’s persuasion, but sooner or later she might. Just last week, Carrie had suggested that “Uncle” was for someone older and since she was older than I was she couldn’t use it; Noabelle had promptly come back with the idea of “Little Uncle.”

Between “Little Uncle” and “Little Sister,” I was picking up all sorts of new family relations lately.

After a little bit of back-and-forth between mother and daughter, and an apologetic look or two sent my direction, Noabelle and I were seated at the table. I sat cross-legged on a cushion on the floor, and the young girl knelt across the table from me, with crayons and paper spread out in front of her.

“Once upon a time,” I began, “there was a lonely mermaid princess named Starlight. Princess Starlight was the only daughter of the mermaid king. In fact, she was the only child her age in the whole giant mermaid castle under the sea, so she had no one to play with.”

“I’d play with her,” Noabelle interjected.

“Of course you would, but Princess Starlight lives many, many miles under the sea. Humans can’t get there. Not even the world’s best swimmer can hold her breath long enough. How long can you hold your breath, Noabelle?”

“Ummmm…?” She took a deep breath and covered her mouth with both hands, a blue crayon held between her fingers like a cigarette. I counted aloud, slowly, and by the time I got to seven, she had exhaled with a loud “Whooooosh!”

“One for each year. That’s pretty good, Noabelle, but it isn’t enough.”

“How long is enough?” She fixed me with a determined stare.

“Hmmm? Maybe a million.”

“A million years old! That’s older than the dinosaurs! No one lives that long!”

I nodded. “And that’s why no humans could come to visit Princess Starlight—even if they learned where her house was. Princess Starlight knew what humans were of course. She read all about them in the story books in the great big library inside her father’s giant mermaid castle. But Princess Starlight didn’t know if humans were real.”

Along came another interjection. “I’m real! If she met me or you, Uncle Taylor, she’d know then.”

“Yes, she would. Do you think she’ll meet a human, Noabelle?”

The girl responded with a vigorous nod.

“How?” I asked, prompting her. “If humans can’t go to where she lives…?”

“Then she’ll go to where humans live! We have beaches, she could come here and meet us!”

“Or someone like us, maybe.” I nodded. “So one day, Princess Starlight was very, very naughty. She swam away from home so she could find out if humans really were real. Maybe she could find a little girl her age to play with.”

“The story doesn’t end there, does it?” Noabelle looked very worried. “I don’t want Princess Starlight to be in danger or in trouble. Mommy says it’s dangerous for me to be by myself. I can’t even cross the road alone yet. Princess Starlight should have gone with an adult.”

“Your Mommy is a very smart woman, Noabelle. It’s good you listen to her. There are lots of dangers in the world and there are lots of dangers under the waves, too. But even though Princess Starlight was very, very naughty, she was also very, very lucky. She didn’t see any hungry sharks or giant octopuses and she stayed very, very far away from the great big kelp forest where she might have gotten lost.” I took a couple of the crayons and drew a very simple shark in blue, octopus in orange, and lots of squiggly green lines to be the kelp forest all on one side of a piece of paper. Then I drew a stick figure of a mermaid with a blonde ponytail swimming on the other side of the paper.

“Princess Starlight swam up and up and up and when she got to the top of the water, she was tossed around by some very big waves. If she had been a human and not a mermaid, she might have drowned because of the waves. When the waves stopped throwing her around, she saw that she was on a beach with pink sand and lots of white and blue seashells.”

“Just like my picture?”

I nodded. “Just like your picture, Noabelle. In fact, it was right, um .... here,” I pointed to a spot on her crayon drawing, “that Princess Starlight landed right next to a real human girl. Both the mermaid girl and the human girl were very, very surprised, but they became very, very good friends right away. The human girl’s name was Anabelle….”

“That’s like my name! Is this Anabelle?” She showed another crayon drawing of a blonde mermaid with green scales next to a girl drawn with the darkest brown in the box.

“It looks like her,” I admitted. “But Anabelle was wearing a bright pink swimsuit and had longer hair.”

After Noabelle modified her picture by drawing a pink outline around the girl’s body and drawing really long black curls to make her hair longer, I continued. “Anabelle taught Princess Starlight how to build sand castles and how to listen to the sound of the ocean in seashells. Princess Starlight didn’t know any mermaid games to teach because she never had anyone to play with, but she told Anabelle several stories, with the two girls acting out the parts as best as they could.”

“Finally, the sun started to set and both Princess Starlight and her new friend Anabelle had to go home for dinner. They promised to meet again on the beach in six days. Princess Starlight wanted it to be the next day, but that would be Monday and Anabelle had to go to school.

“So the next day, after school was over for the week… Hmm, what day would that be?”

Noabelle answered, “After Friday is Saturday.”

I nodded. “Very good. Thank you. So on Saturday, Anabelle went to the beach after breakfast, and saw that Princess Starlight was there, waiting for her. Before Anabelle could suggest that they build a bigger and better sand castle using seashells for decorations, her new friend said, ‘I want you to come visit my place.’”

“Uh-oh,” Noabelle said, looking worried again. “Anabelle isn’t a million years old.”

I smiled, “No. She’s only seven and a half. But Anabelle was a smart girl. She looked at the big waves and told her friend she wanted to, but she knew she’d drown if she went too far into the water. Princess Starlight said, ‘Don’t worry about that! I, um, borrowed a magic necklace. You’ll be fine. See!?’

“And Princess Starlight put a necklace made of white coral and pink pearls around her friend’s neck and … POOF! … Anabelle’s legs became a tail and the human girl became a mermaid like Princess Starlight.”

“Wow! Is it magic?”

I nodded. “They looked just like sisters, except one was dark and the other light. So Princess Starlight and Mermaid Anabelle went swimming down and down and down to visit the mermaid king’s castle under the sea. Now both were very, very naughty….”

“Both girls went without permission, right?”

Again, I nodded. “And if this was a sad story, something bad would happen so that little girls who are listening know not to do that. But you’re a smart girl, right Noabelle, and you don’t need a sad story, right?”

“I’m very smart!” Noabelle smiled at me, and then looked over at her mother who had been working nearby. “If it was me, I’d ask Princess Starlight for a necklace for Mommy, too, or I wouldn’t go with her.”

Both Carrie and I smiled at Noabelle, somewhat sharing our smiles with each other. After Noabelle showed her mother all the pictures she had drawn for the story so far and was complimented for them, I continued the story.

“So, it isn’t a sad story. Anabelle and Princess Starlight were very, very naughty but they were still very, very lucky. They didn’t see any hungry sharks or giant octopuses and they stayed very, very far away from the great big kelp forest where they might have gotten lost. When they got to the giant mermaid castle under the sea, Princess Starlight showed her friend all the special places: her bedroom, the giant library, the little kitchen cupboard that always had snacks, and even a secret hiding place where the two girls could watch the mermaid king have boring meetings with other adults like soldiers and teachers and farmers.

“They swam around in the castle so long it was starting to get late. Princess Starlight begged her friend to stay with her, but Anabelle was getting worried about being away for so long. ‘I don’t want my Mommy to worry about me,’ she said. So the two girls swam up and up and up and got back to the beach, where the big waves tossed them around until they landed on the sand. If Anabelle had been a regular girl then and not magically a mermaid, she probably would have drowned from the waves.”

Noabelle was starting to look a little worried again, so I hastily reminded her. “But it isn’t a sad story, so both girls were safe. When they got to the beach, Anabelle took off the necklace made of white coral and pink pearls and … POOF! … her legs were back to normal again. She gave the necklace back to Princess Starlight and they hugged. Princess Starlight said, ‘Please remember, don’t try to swim to me without the necklace, humans can’t hold their breath long enough.’

“Anabelle promised, and the mermaid girl and the human girl hugged again, saying they would meet once more in one week. And that is how Anabelle became a part-time mermaid.”

I wrapped the story up because other kids were starting to arrive and it was getting close to time for the reading program. So I would keep the idea of mermaid penpals and messages in bottles for another day. While Noabelle put away the crayons and carried her drawings to the library’s office where her bag and her mother’s purse were, I checked the notification that had buzzed on my phone in the middle of the story. It turned out to be an email from the ECHO devs.

Dear Miss Starlight (player of Madelyn Alexis),

Can you be available this afternoon or tomorrow afternoon around 3 PM (PDT) for working on a project that we alluded to in our meeting the other day? It will be one of the early steps in your not-a-job career as a mascot for Elemental Chrysanthemum Homeland Online. By “available,” I mean in the game world or home instance and not busy adventuring with the group you have connected with.

GM Victoria Delacroix

P.S. The two pods will be shipped to your designated recipients after they confirm their details and availability. Slightly modified “Congratulations! You won…” emails will be sent this evening.