Prologue Interlude

Some people know a certain sort of grief, where you feel denied by the world itself.

There was once a young girl who went by "Saber" online. She dropped out of middle school because of bullying. She didn't understand why everyone hated her so. Well, she partially did. It was because of her art.

During the last year of middle school, she had an art book, just a regular college-ruled notebook that she doodled in. She'd often design her own fantasy characters. A half-fox ninja that wielded a spear. A dragon with a living shadow, connected at their tails. A winged swordmistress with a gleaming blade – that one was "her." And sometimes she'd draw her classmates, too. As kings, mages, knights, tavern brawlers; the whole assortment. She even gave them supernatural abilities based on their personalities. Fire-manipulation for her quick-tempered desk neighbor, intangibility for her quiet classmate that never talked much, and so on. She drew vignettes of them going on adventures, fighting battles, beaten down but never fully defeated.

Soon, a couple of her classmates found out. Just one or two.

Their feelings seemed mixed. They'd ask her awkwardly who she had drawn in the notebook, and whether it was themselves.

Then, one day, the one she drew as a tavern brawler got ahold of the book. He was rowdy. She had thought of him as the class clown.

"This crap's hecka creepy," he said out loud as he paraded her sketchbook around the classroom, showing everyone her private drawings of them. "Hold up, is that you?" he asked a girl two rows away, showing her a sketch. "That's you! No way…what the f*** is this?"

It seemed like from that moment onwards, everyone began to despise her drawings. She couldn't understand why. She never drew anyone as the bad guy, or even in any overtly unflattering manner. But they still called her a creep, a weirdo, and acted like she had betrayed their trust in some strange way. And they treated her like a villain, one who deserved punishment.

Someone stole her backpack. Someone locked her locker with padlocks and hid the keys. And someone drew her. They made drawings of her, caricatured and misshapen but still her, doing grotesque things she'd never do. They'd circulate it around the school, and people would look at her as she passed. Then they'd smile or laugh. And even in class, she'd hear syllables of her name in their whispered conversations. The school failed to identify the original artist of those drawings, so they took no further action.

Was it revenge? If so, how was that fair? She never meant any of them harm.

A month passed before it became unbearable. She stopped going to school and finished the rest of the school year at home, with the principal’s approval.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

For all four years of high school, she refused to attend in person. So her family homeschooled her. At first some of her closest friends from middle school would still come over to visit. But by the start of the second year of high school, that stopped. What were they up to now? Had they come to also remember her as the creep who drew everyone behind their backs?

The end of senior year felt like salvation. College brought with it the promise of a fresh start. She moved on to on-campus dorms, and thankfully she managed to secure a single-person room to herself. And once she moved there, she met tens, hundreds of potential new friends on campus. New school. New beginnings.

In hindsight, her notebook and her drawing of her classmates made her cringe. She hated her past self. How tactless, how unaware she had once been. But the past was in the past.

Saber went to class, talked to people, and tried to fit in. Nothing came easy, of course, to her who had spent the past four years within the confinements of her home. Sometimes she'd say the wrong things, or not say something when she should've. And the conversation topics and responses she relied upon in middle school no longer felt sufficient; socializing in college meant learning and mastering a whole new culture, one more mature and nuanced. And the way they whispered to each other around her…it felt just like middle school, as though she could hear her name uttered under their breaths. But why? She hadn't done anything wrong here, in college, had she? What if she indeed had, and she alone had been too blind to see all the ways she messed up?

People still didn't make sense. She hated herself for not being able to make sense of them.

At least, she couldn’t make sense of them in real life. During her time of homeschooling, she had met people online, mostly through the games she played. Even as she began college, she still had those friends, and always went back to them when things in real life got too difficult. At least with them, she felt normal. They were alike her in some deep, innate way. They were kin who understood.

Perhaps she belonged online. Other people, ordinary people, could have the physical world, and do what they wanted with it. But it wasn't hers. There was little happiness for her to find there.

And so, Saber stopped leaving her dorm room, almost completely. She’d obviously still leave to at least pick up food, often two meals at a time. Most of her professors recorded their lectures, and Saber watched them from the comfort of her own bed.

Two years passed like this. In a way, it provided a comforting sense of familiarity. She was once again alone in her room, as she had once been while homeschooled. She had hated it back then. But now, it felt normal. And for those fleeting two years, she was happy.

In the third year of college, she suffered acute renal failure.

The whole ordeal came about like a freak accident. She had merely eaten the lunch she had picked up the night prior, as she habitually did. But this time, every single factor so aligned that she fell sick with food poisoning, which then worsened into blood poisoning. By the time the ambulance brought her into a hospital's emergency room, both her kidneys had already stopped. The doctors saved her life, but she suffered irreversible damage in the process. Her weakened kidneys no longer sufficed for keeping her alive. Twice a week, she needed to pump her blood through a dialysis machine to filter out waste material. The condition was permanent. They estimated she had eight years to live without receiving transplants.

The college discharged her home, for they could not supply the intensive care she now needed. And since then she had stayed home, back in her old room, where her classmates had once driven her into. This time, it felt like fate itself, her own cursed fate, had cornered her there.

If only the world would have mercy.

If only she had a second chance.