Joint pursed in one side of his mouth, John scanned the layer of garbage on the coffee table. Somewhere among the Twix wrappers, Milwaukee’s Best cans, McDonald’s fry boxes and barbeque chip bags was a lighter. Allegedly. He reached forward with a grunt and shoved at some of the trash, sending a can of Ranch Pringles thudding to the floor with a scattering of crumbs. No lighter appeared. With a flash of inspiration, he thrust a hand between the cushions and felt the cool of plastic.

“Gotcha,” he said awkwardly, from the jointless side of his mouth.

He sparked the yellow Bic, holding its flame close as he inhaled long and deep. The cherry blazed like a tiny, fleeting star. By the time he finished his first pull and shoved the lighter into a pocket, a red after image floated in his vision. It followed wherever he turned. When he looked at the wall-mounted television, its screen showing a flamboyantly dressed character of fantasy flying a Pegasus horse over green pastures, the after image stained a portion of the blue sky crimson.

When he looked at the myriad frames of flower paintings, chosen by his grandmother before she passed, when this studio apartment was hers, the stain followed. When he looked at the couch, the coffee table, the kitchen table and the bed - all her furniture, all basically trashed now, it stayed in his eyes. When he looked at the dishes piled in the sink, bothered by a legion of fruit flies, and the piles of dirty clothes that littered his floor like rumpled corpses, the after image was still there.

Finally, it faded. For some weird, irrational reason, John almost missed it.

He puffed through the rest of the weed, letting the high try its hardest to lift him away from the horribleness inside. Not that it ever did. How could it? John had nothing. He was nothing. He was a squatter, a bum, trespassing in his dead grandmother’s home and panhandling a pitiful existence from his perpetually disappointed parents.

Granted, it would be worse if he lived in their actual house, which stood just across the driveway, rather than this apartment. They had set the apartment up for John’s grandmother above the second garage - where John’s father stored his Classic Corvettes - after John’s grandfather had died a decade ago. John’s grandmother lived here until she passed John’s senior year of High School. When John completely fucked up his life two years ago, the apartment was just as she had left it, ready to receive his sad state of affairs.

Yes, living in the big house with his parents would have been worse. Still, things were pathetic enough as they were.

Sighing, John picked up the controller, and as it so often did, the voice at the back of his mind began to assault him.

You are a massive, massive failure, you know that?

He cued the inventory menu and scrolled through his hundreds of accessories. Before the coliseum duel, which the quest description had explicitly stated would involve a fire-wielding Arlaxxian, Jonn had enchanted a stronger fire-resistant amulet to give him an edge. Kaelin dumped you because you’re a loser, and then you proved her right by spiraling and flunking out. For some reason, when John had enchanted that particular amulet, he had broken entirely from his usual naming convention.

He had already possessed four “Fire Protection Amulets.” He had crafted them at various points over the last two years, intermittently making a new one when his enchanting skill had improved enough, and each time he had simply added a sequential number to the previous name. Accordingly, he should have named this newest, strongest amulet “Fire Protection Amulet 5.” Your friends hate you, and your family is disgusted by the sight of you. Instead, he had named it “Ultra Strong Fire Protection Amulet,” which meant when he had needed it, he couldn’t find it.

As his duel with Gorlorn the Inexorable had begun, John had looked more closely at his “Ice Protection Amulet 3” and “Nature Protection Amulet 4” to see if he had misnamed his newest amulet badly. He hadn’t, of course. Finally, he had scrolled near the bottom and found it - for all the good it did.

Turned out he didn’t need it, anyway. That supposedly difficult fight had been a complete joke. Still, it had been annoying. There is no point to you, John Robbie. It had been so annoying he had simply discarded the amulet at the colosseum and promised himself he would craft a new one, named properly. Sure, he could have sold it to a vendor, but his character was so rich already it hardly mattered.

It was strange, though. Why had he named it “Ultra Strong Fire Protection Amulet?” It wasn’t like him. Something must have been distracting him. John had a vague recollection of something happening that morning, or possibly that afternoon - whenever it was he had gotten out of bed - but the memory wouldn’t come. He dug the phone from his overly tight gym shorts to check the time. When he looked at the screen, ice pierced him.

Mom: Hi buddy! Just a friendly reminder Clark and Vaness are coming over for Christmas Eve-

It was a text from his mother. So that was it. The first line said something about John’s brother and sister coming over for Christmas Eve dinner. Just as he had earlier that day, John stuffed the phone back in his pocket without reading the rest, not even bothering to close the “Texts” app.

Was today really Christmas Eve? His earlier thought process resurfaced, having been buried along with the memory of seeing the text. Considering how often John actually checked his texts, that message could have been from a week ago. Christmas had probably come and gone since then, which, of course, would suit him just fine.

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If he wanted to be sure, all he had to do was look at his phone again and check the date. For some reason, he couldn’t do it.

A familiar ache bloomed within John’s gut. It wasn’t indigestion, or anything like that, but the kind of ache he sometimes felt when he thought about his family. Despite his efforts to stop them, imagined scenes always accompanied it, like a movie following its score. They showed him merry family gatherings, sans John, where his family members laughed, drank wine and regaled one another with stories from their perfect lives.

Clark is blazing up the ladder of his Wall Street firm! He’s a real wunderkind! Vanessa is top ten percent of her medical school class! No surprise there! John’s mother delivered triplets this morning - blindfolded! John’s father won a 20 million dollar class-action lawsuit riding a unicycle and juggling chainsaws!

Sometimes, in those daydreams, John’s brother asked where he was. When John’s mother replied by saying, “I’m sorry, Clark, but John isn’t capable of functioning like a normal person,” everyone looked away awkwardly. Other times they broke out laughing. His father gleefully recounted the lowlights of John’s life, starting with his failures in childhood sports and ending with his failure to last even three semesters in college. Then, after a smirking “I knew that boy wouldn’t amount to anything,” he toasted the continued success of the two children he actually wanted.

John navigated to the Nordic Runes “Journal” menu. He needed something different. He needed something to take him far away, hopefully to a place he’d never been. Scrolling through his unfinished quests, which numbered in the several dozens, he spotted one called “Ruins in the Frozen Forest.” When he selected the quest, a description appeared.

A tavern owner in the village of Olsmir has told you of ancient ruins hidden somewhere in Uldwyld Forest.

It wasn’t much to go on. He had probably picked up the quest ages ago while stopping through a random tavern to sleep and buy supplies, and like almost every quest in his “unfinished” list, his character was way too powerful to bother with it now. Still, something about a “frozen forest” was appealing. Snow and evergreen trees - it sounded kind of Christmasy.

Not that John cared about holidays. He certainly had no interest in being with his family for the typical hallmark bullshit. Maybe, though, just this once, a little bit of Christmas-adjacent adventuring would be nice.

He opened his map and located the tavern where he had acquired the quest. Uncharacteristically, he selected the “fast travel” option. John normally avoided fast travel because it broke the immersion, and he found it strangely soothing to travel the skies on his flying horse, Falcor. Now, though, for reasons he couldn’t quite explain, he didn’t want to wait. The ten minutes it would take to reach the Valheim’s northernmost region seemed like an eternity.

An oval of crimson light appeared in the sky beside John’s character. Like their particles were being sucked into a vacuum cleaner, Polaris and his horse disintegrated into it and disappeared. After a moment of black screen, they reconstituted from another crimson oval beside a quaint, snow-topped house. A creaking wooden sign hung from its facade, swarmed by snowflakes. It read, in neat but roughly carved lettering, “The Thawed Paw.”

John didn’t need to bother with the inn. His storage capacity was godly, and he had everything he needed for a winter climate, and then some. Still, force of habit lead him inside all the same. It was a scene he knew well. Any Inn throughout Nordic Runes, it’s always the same - a rustic looking innkeeper behind a counter, tables of townsfolk NPCs who stare at the wall as they mechanically bring foodstuff items towards their faces, a bard singing “Ode to the Starborn” for the ten billionth time, and last but not least, a drunk NPC with a mug dancing unsteadily beside the fire. Nothing new here.

Polaris approached the counter, and John engaged the “Buy/Sell” interface with the innkeeper, a surly-looking bald fellow named “Teodras Bearpaw.” Unfortunately, anything John needed to get rid of sold for at least fifty times more than the Innkeeper’s total amount of gold. Not wanting to waste the trip, John bought a perfunctory “Olsmir Ale” and had Polaris drink it. Ale gave a minor stamina boost, though that was a useless drop in the bucket for a level twenty, 5-Star character like Polaris. Still, Polaris deserved a cold brew every now and then.

The innkeeper began to boast by saying “You won’t find a finer ale in all the…” but John wasn’t about to wait around for that. He headed back out into the snow. With a couple of button presses, Falcor disappeared, back to wherever the horse went when John didn't need him, and John navigated northward, towards what his compass marker indicated was “Uldwyld Forest Ruins.”

With his character’s significantly enhanced movement speed, John managed to reach the tree-line in under a minute. For better immersion, he switched from third-person to first-person perspective, showing him the forest as if he was actually there. God, what he wouldn’t give to actually be there. The yearning was so strong it was physically painful. He pushed it down. No use wishing for the impossible.

Night had fallen, thanks to the time skip of fast travel, but darkness hadn’t been a problem for John’s character for eighteen levels now. He cast “Arcane Lamp,” and the crystal of his staff brightened significantly, illuminating the trees around him with pale blue. A hare scampered from beneath a shrub and bounded into the darkness.

A distant, subdued part of John recognized himself in the cowering animal. He saw a feral version of John Robbie, scrambling through the snow on all fours as he fled from the big badass. He forced that away too. Right now, he wasn’t John. He was Polaris. Right now, he was the big badass.

The forest wasn’t much to see, unfortunately. The graphics were nice enough - very nice, actually, thanks to the mods John had installed - but if you’d seen one Nordic Runes forest, you’d pretty much seen them all. The only thing different about Uldwyld was the sheer quantity of snow. Even more than the other northern forests, there was a lot of it. It fell heavily among the evergreens and piled high on the ground in a thick, powdery carpet.

Now that he was here, John did find it refreshingly Christmasy, after all. Go figure.

As his character trekked through the winter landscape, leaving a trail of realistic-looking footprints in his wake, nothing appeared to challenge him. Completely predictable, of course. Polaris was so much more powerful than the mobs of the forest, they simply ran away when he came near. Even the strongest enemy here, which was certainly the inevitable boss monster of the Uldwyld Ruins - probably a lich-lord or something like that - would fall to Polaris in a single spell. Boring? Maybe. On the other hand, who didn’t like to be King of the jungle?

Ahead of John’s character, a white wolf lowered its muzzle to the ground, its eyes coins of reflected blue, then bounded away in the opposite direction. It was a smart move. Polaris’s automatic defenses alone would have killed it.

Something - something in the real world - set off John’s inner alarm. He paused the game and listened.

Footsteps thudded up the stairs outside.