My virtual avatar in the game appeared in front of me. It was a slender beautiful woman, looking to be about 19 years old with my mother’s red hair named November.

I’m not a pervert. Nor do I think I am transgendered. I don’t play a female character to catfish men or something ridiculous like that either. To be honest, my character was female mostly due to an accident. It turns out, in Xternity, you’re only ever allowed to make your character once per account, and each account costs about $100. It was unfortunate but, since I was only 15 back when I got the game, I was too young to technically sign up… So I had my mom do it for me. Of course I hadn’t expected her to make the avatar too. Thus, I ended up playing as a woman. Though, to be fair, due to technical limitations I never really even noticed the difference unless I looked in a mirror. My mom designed the character rather flat chested, so even when I looked down I hardly noticed much of a difference between the virtual body and my own. It helped that I wore tunics and long pants in game, too. While I did have a few pieces of ‘special female equipment’, I hardly ever used them except when I needed their specific bonuses… And that was very rare.

It was also a bonus that, in the game, I was able to have my mom’s beautiful red hair too. I vowed that, once I graduated highschool and was on my own, I was going to dye my own in real life.

Still, it made for a bit of a funny story. James, perhaps my only friend in the real world, promised not to say anything about it if I decided to join his guild in Xternity… And that’s how I ended up as the guild’s only Enchanter, Armorer, Smith, and Alchemist.

I didn’t originally pick those classes, mind you. I was… Coerced, by James and his friends. Back then I didn’t know anything about fantasy games and the like, so I could only do what I was told and trust in my ‘friends’. That trust was a bit misplaced, but, to be honest, I really didn’t mind it. Xternity was a very advanced game and most crafting type professions had very deep and intricate methods to them. I found it vastly interesting and absorbed the knowledge like a sponge. There was no hand holding either. Players weren’t given potion recipes or rune enchantments. Those were things that people had to discover on their own.

I was, particularly, skilled in this regard. Most potion recipes could be interred from actual knowledge of plants and botany. By learning about Xternity’s plant life and of each plant’s effects when consumed, I became the foremost potioneering expert in the entire game. The enchantment runes were eerily similar to electric circuits themselves.

I was, I guess you could say, the greatest crafter in the entire game of Xternity… Though my skills as a smith were lacking in comparison to my other craft. Even that skill, though, was rather high spec. I studied up on actual sword smithing techniques and they were all almost recreatable in the game.

Crafting skills were incredibly valuable and, thus, the guild highly valued me as well. Thus, when I logged on and found they had built me my own house/workshop, I was ecstatic. Our guild was, all things considered, one of the largest on the American servers. We had almost 1000 members, and I was in the top brass. James himself was the third in command. It was very very rare for members to be given their own locations in the guild headquarters.

My new house was a two story tall beautiful wooden building with white siding. The roof was a low pitch and it had stone shingling with powerful anti-magic properties.

I ran inside and was overjoyed at finding my two NPCs, virtual teammates if you will, already waiting for me.

I had two NPCs, a short black-haired woman wearing a default mage outfit named Tenia and a gruff looking lion-beastman with a massive sword on his back named Benson.

As a crafter, I wasn’t very powerful in combat. While my level was at the maximum, I hadn’t acquired many combat skills. Thus I was reliant on having NPC companions to protect me in the case of raids or to help gather ingredients. The guild, seeing my value as their only professional crafter, provided them for free.

While I may bitch from time to time about being used by the guild, they did take good care of me. I had fun doing the crafting and research for them anyways. Apparently attitudes like mine were very rare. Most people who played the game wanted to be combat classes in order to fight monsters and live the ‘fantasy dream’.

I was content though, and that’s all that mattered.

I enjoyed celebrating my new home with several of the other high-ranking members of our guild. James, the guild leader Parthenon, and the game’s strongest mage Carlyle. We toasted and each drank an ‘Alcohol Potion’ together. Of course we couldn’t actually get drunk, due to technical limitations, but our avatars were appropriately debuffed and our vision was blurred on the edges.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

After a few hours of discussion and party, the others set off to take care of some missions. I stayed to explore my new in game home and to start working on the guild’s shield runes.

The inside of the house was rather nice. The front door opened into a sitting room complete with a dining table. The back room had a small kitchen and a connected bathroom. Bathrooms, while unecessary in the game world, provided benefits to the NPCs that lived in buildings. Thus they were essential. The other side of the downstairs had a small crafting workshop built into it. A rune inscribing table and all the necessary tools, including some of Legendary Class, were lined up along the walls.

Upstairs there were three bedrooms, one for me and my two NPCs, a bathroom with a shower, and a potioneering workshop. The potioneering workshop was filled with flasks, beakers, and other combining tools. It also had a small garden in the corner filled with terribly rare plants and ingredients. They were being grown by a magic Sun Stone, an enchanted crystal that released the same light as the sun. It was a pseudo greenhouse.

Outside the building there was a forge and metal refinery. There were also anvils and other necessary tools to smith and design weapons and armor.

All in all, it was the perfect workshop for me. It was even enchanted fully with specialty shield and reinforce runes.

After fully exploring my new abode, I set about making the shield runes the guild needed. They were difficult, involving intricate circuits on small wooden disks, but they were unbelievably powerful. They could repel even Legendary Class magic attacks once.

It took me several hours to complete the runes. A few of the guild members came to check on me from time to time, to pick up the completed ones, but soon enough they stopped coming.

“Hey, Rob,” called out a voice I recognized just as I finished up the final shield rune.

“I thought I asked you not to call me that in game, James,” I replied as I dusted apron off.

“There’s no worry of anyone overhearing us right now. It’s already 2 in the morning. You should head to bed. Everyone else has already gotten off. You know the guild has a strict curfew for its members.”

“Bah,” I grumbled, “I never understood that rule. It’s Saturday morning, James. Why force our members to go to bed on the weekend!? I understand for weekdays...”

“I mean, I don’t completely care about that rule either, but you know Parthenon will enforce it if he wakes up and sees the logs. Come on, there’s no reason to bristle him right after he gave you your new workshop is there?”

I couldn’t help but let a sigh leak. “Fine. Let me just finish shaping your staff and then I’ll head to bed.”

“Okay. I’ll be logging in early tomorrow, so I’ll know if you stayed up late. Don’t make me come over there and rile Emma up.”

“I know, I know. Goodnight, James,” I said with a smile.

“Night, Rob.”

Then, like smoke, James vanished. I opened up my status screen and watched him vanish from the ‘Friends’ list. I didn’t want to admit it, but he was right. If I stayed up I’d be annoyed endlessly by Parthenon all day tomorrow…

With a grumble I took out the Landstrung wood that would become James’s new staff. It was a beautiful and incredibly rare material in Xternity. It had incredible mana circulation, meaning runic circuits and spells could be siphoned through it with ease. I smiled as I slowly carved it down into a typical staff shape. I planned for a more Gandalf-like style, being fairly straight but with a gnarled and twisted top piece. James typically liked his staves to be longer, anyways. He wasn’t like Carlyle who preferred wands.

I worked for well over an hour on the staff before I realized how tired I was getting. When you start to fall asleep hooked up to a VR helmet, it tends to give you a terrible headache. It was about 4 in the morning now. Some of our earlier risers would be getting online in two or so hours. I was certainly going to be in trouble…

A sudden screeching sound echoed in my head. A throbbing pulse reverbed through my body and I retched. Leaning forward, I tried to force manual disconnect from the Mark 6, but for some reason it wasn’t responding.

Everything started to get fuzzy. Xternia had fairly cartoonish graphics, but something strange was happening. The cartoony looks were fuzzing between absurdly sharp and absurdly fanciful.

I hit my knees and screamed as pain racked my form, and then everything went black as I passed out.