The dim, flickering light of candles filled the spartan room. Heather sat on the edge of the bed, oblivious to the darkness around her. She was lost in thought as she stared at the holographic screen of the panel.
The great pizza adventure was over, and they returned to find a group of jerks in the graveyard. Heather tried to speak with them, but when they made her angry, she sent them into a trap instead. Breanne was both shocked and impressed by Heather's skill. She went on to remark that Heather was meant to be a necromancer, a comment that haunted her for a few hours.
Breanne was two floors below in a little guest room Heather was able to buy. Thankfully Heather was awarded some points for the death of the adventurers. Breanne said it was because she revived and buffed the skeletons, so she aided in their defeat, and earned a reward. Heather used those points to add a small room that came with a second tiny bed, a small cabinet, and a chest. She insisted Breanne take one of the simple chairs that were collected from Moon's town hall to give her a proper place to sit. Heather had one in her room that she glanced at, realizing she was sitting on the bed anyway.
“It's more comfortable,” she said to herself as she poked through a menu. The screen was mostly orange lines on a gray background. She had long ago discovered how to change the colors and had tried blue for a bit. This felt too bright, and she cycled through the options until arriving back at the default orange.
Breanne’s words came back and revived the old arguments that occupied her mind in those first few days. Why was she here? What made her chosen? What was she supposed to do with herself?
Breanne seemed to think Heather had some destiny that involved the long lost necromancer kings. Frank didn’t agree at all and suggested that Heather’s class was more of an accident than choice, but Breanne was convinced.
Breanne then lectured them all on the understanding that Heather was called to do something, and the visitors would be trying to steer her onto that path. Again Frank didn’t agree, and Quinny could only shrug. Heather agreed more with Frank than Breanne. If the visitors wanted her to do something, why not just tell her? Did they really have so little grasp of how we communicate that they couldn’t send her a message? An email perhaps, or maybe just a text?
She put a hand over her mouth as she yawned. The very notion of getting a message was why she was hunting through the panel now. None of them were sure what could or couldn't be done on a chosen's panel. Maybe there was an email client or something, and she could send a message out?
Heather had long ago realized she missed her mother. Breanne acted like a woman who had raised a family and had a strong motherly quality. As they walked back, Heather had a chance to ask her about her past. She was shocked to learn that Breanne was eighty-one years old. Breanne chose to come in to escape a host of medical problems and her advanced age. She had a deep understanding of the history of the world and her birthplace. She was originally from Ireland, and her mother used to tell her stories about fairies and fairy mounds. Heather was fascinated by the detail Breanne put into the stories. It was almost as if the woman had been there to live the stories sand legends herself. There seemed to be a hundred varieties of faeries in Irish folklore, but one of them was unique. It would wail in the night, and anyone who heard it could expect the imminent death of a family member.
“The modern word for it is a banshee,” she said.
“Is that why you picked this?” Heather asked.
Breanne nodded. “I wanted to honor my mother with my choice. She was the one who told me the old stories and instilled a sense of wonder in me. She made Ireland seem like a magical place full of mystery just waiting to be discovered.”
“It never occurred to me that people would come here to escape old age,” Frank said.
I wonder if many will,” Breanne said. “I told my friends about my plan and encouraged them to follow me. They laughed at the idea and dismissed it as something foolish young people did.” She was silent a moment as she lifted a hand before her face and studied the smooth young skin. “But I saw it as a chance to be young again, and to have a life I enjoyed. I am literally living one of my mother's stories.”
“It makes sense to me,” Quinny added as they walked along. “A second chance at a new life. I knew a lot of paralyzed people were coming in, so why not the old?”
Heather agreed, but knowing Breanne's age made her think of her mother. This led to more thoughts about all the things that she was going to miss. She wouldn't be there for birthdays, or holidays, or anything family. What did her family think had happened to her? Did they even know she was here? Maybe they thought she had been abducted and killed? At least Frank and the others told their loved ones. Their family wasn't frantically calling an empty house, or filing a missing person report.
The more she thought about it, the more she wondered if she could be happy here. Who could be happy living such a strange, unnatural life? It was a life based around video game concepts that were so alien to her she found them hard to grasp. She mused at how accurate the word alien was. The whole world was built by aliens who she could only hope understood how human games worked.
All of this made her feel as if everything was out of control. She was a person who went to great lengths to organize and manage her life. She worked very hard to get through school and was just beginning her career. How could she live in a world where virtually nothing was controllable? Worse, she was a class that was despised by the vast majority of players for reasons none of them truly understood. Even Breanne, who witnessed some of it, knew very little of the truth.
It was now a day to day reality that any player could potentially be hostile, and her secret could get out even more. Thankfully she had a good cover story. After her encounter with the three adventurers, she sat down with the others and fleshed it out. She was a regular player who was a friend of Frank from the real world. She came in on her own volition and chose the flower singer as her primary class, and the recluse as her secondary. This way, if put to the test, she could demonstrate her powers as a flower singer. Nobody needed to know she was a chosen and had a third darker class. The friendship with Frank would explain why she choose the recluse class and lived in the graveyard. The plan worked well on the rude adventurers, and with luck would work on everybody else.
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After sending the fools to their deaths and making Breanne a room, Heather hid in her own room. She spent the night, poking through her panel in her hopeful search. There were menus and submenus with options that only appeared when you made certain choices. She was desperate to find some way to send a message out to the world. However, hours of careful searching had proven to be pointless. All she managed to do was discover a way to alter the sound of her voice and translate Spanish.
“How do I send a message to my mother?” she asked out loud.
BEEP! [Error – mother not found] the panel replied.
Heather raised a brow and leaned over the screen. It didn't say it couldn't send the message. It only said it couldn't find the recipient.
“How do I send a message to my mother on earth?”
BEEP! [Error – mother not found.]
Heather sighed. “Do you even understand what a mother is?”
BEEP! [Mother definition: the female parent of a child.]
“Great, now who is my mother?”
BEEP! [Linda Owens]
Heather sat up straight and felt a sudden rush of emotions. The panel knew who her mother was, but it couldn’t find her? Maybe she needed to ask the question in a different way.
“How do I send a message to Linda Owens?” Heather asked.
The panel was strangely silent, and for a moment, the screen flickered.
“I asked you, how do I send a message to Linda Owens?”
Heather waited for a moment more and nearly jumped when the panel closed of its own accord.
“What the?” she stammered and rubbed at her tattoo. The light of the panel came back and looked no different than before. She tapped through the main sections, and nothing had changed, so she sat back and asked her question again. This time the panel flashed something briefly before closing again.
“Why won’t this stupid thing answer my questions?” she asked to nobody in particular. She brought it up again and defiantly glared at the screen.
“Why won't you tell me what I want to know?” she asked.
BEEP! [Access to external world denied]
“What do you mean access denied?” she shouted. “If you don't know anything about our language, how come you can format an error message exactly the way we would?” She waited in silence, but the panel never answered.
She rubbed her tattoo and dismissed it in frustration. Laying back on the bed, she wondered what it all meant. If access was denied, then there must be a form of access, she just didn't have permission to use it. As she struggled to understand it, she glanced over to see her scythe resting on the wall. It was taller than her with a blade half again as long as her body. The handle was a black polished wood that bowed in the center. At the very top where the metal blade met the shaft was a crown of metal flowers. She used a special perk to enchant the top so she could spray perfume at will, something she regularly doused her skeletons in now.
Everybody laughed at the modification, saying the perfume was a waste. “Why were they laughing?” she wondered aloud. It worked against the troll, didn't it? Frank explained that anything that didn't add to combat was pointless. She argued it did add to combat, but he felt she had been lucky, and that other people will expect her to have picked a better choice. She didn't care at all. Why did she have to do everything the way other people expected?
“Why does anybody else have a say in what I want?” she asked. “I didn't ask to be here; I shouldn't have to play it their way!”
The only reply was the silence of the tower, a silence that reminded her of the grave.
With an angry sigh, she looked around the room. It was her room, but it wasn't her room. It didn't have her computer, or her pictures, or the silly horse statue her mother bought her. It didn't have the corkboard with all her plans and photos pinned up, showing her dreams. One was a house in the country with a big porch. Another dream was a photo of a bedroom set with a canopy bed and cherry wood dresser. The last dream was a drawing she made of a man with long hair smiling at her. She thought of that silly drawing that was supposed to represent a husband in her future. She drew it after attending a class at the wellness center. The speaker spoke in great detail about how her thoughts could shape her future. One of the things he mentioned was visualizing the man she wanted to marry. Heather took it a step further and drew him so that she could stare at his image. Two years later and she was still staring at that image.
“What good are my dreams now?” she asked herself. “What right did the visitors have to take them away from me?”
Again the silence was her only reply. She supposed there was no real use in being upset about it. She was here, and she needed to make the best of it. She tried to count her blessings as she looked around the dim room. She had a place to stay even if it was a creepy old tower. She had friends who were at the very least fun. She was free of her student loan debt, provided they hadn't found a way to tax her in here. She couldn't die, or, she supposed, stay dead. Breanne had made here aware of what might be the greatest perk of all. She would never grow old or lose her beauty. She was effectively immortal, a goddess in many ways.
“That's something to be happy about, I suppose,” she sighed.
She got up and walked into the next room where the strange book sat on a table. She ran her hand over the cover and wondered how to open it. She wasn't very fond of the idea of reading the contents at first, but she was beginning to change her mind. Who knew what secrets might be inside the book? There could be a way to get a message out or get out of the world altogether. Maybe that's why the players didn't respawn because they got out.
She tugged at the metal band that held the book closed. When it didn't budge, she pounded a hand on it in frustration.
“What good is a book you can’t read?” she groaned.
The room remained quiet as she tugged at the book, turning it over. This side had the round depression in the middle of the band. She traced a finger around the shape and wondered why it was there.
She thought about what they discovered in that tower. A book hidden by magic so only the dead could see it. A necklace on a body with writing that also could only be read by the dead. The whole building and its contents were out of place. It looked as if it was a hundred years old and long forgotten, yet New Eden wasn't even a dozen years old. The contents, though broken and rotting, looked carefully placed. Clearly, it was a player home, and true to that idea, they found the body of the owner inside. This too was out of place like the rest of the tower. By all rights, the player died a hundred years ago but was still there as if he never respawned.
A creeping doubt filled her mind. What if Frank and the others were wrong. Maybe the world generated places and things as if they were thousands of years old? Why not fill the world with ancient ruins as if a past civilization had risen and fallen. Isn’t that what the real world was like? How much did they really know about what the visitors were doing? Nearly all of them had come in because of some motivation to live a different life. They didn't care about the purpose of the world, only what it offered.
Heather was focused on the purpose with laser precision. She was pulled in here to fulfill that purpose after all, and she was bound and determined to know why. If Breanne was right, then that purpose involved her being a necromancer.
“Then I intend to be the most powerful necromancer that ever lived,” she said aloud.
The silence of the tower was oppressive, and she let the book fall to the table with a heavy thud that echoed off the bare stone walls.
“What I need is a blow torch to cut that open,” she laughed as she stared at the book.
She looked back to the dresser in her room and saw the strange amulet sitting on top.
“You're just as much a mystery as the book,” she said as she walked over. She lifted it by the chain and quickly chanted her spell of undead sight. She went over the words on the back again and again. Nothing new came to mind, and she discarded it next to her mirror, but something caught her eye in the reflection. There on the very narrow lip of the necklace was a single word. She snatched it up and held it so she could see the tiny letters carved into the side. Her brows creased in confusion as she read the tiny obscure inscription.
“Nimh?”