“Thank you very much for bringing these up,” I told the bellhop after he stacked the last box inside the empty room of my unit. ‘Bellhop’? Was that the right term for him? This may not be a hotel, but Grand Scaup’s did have attendants and housekeeping included in their amenities as a luxury apartment. What was the difference between a hotel and a serviced apartment like this? Bah, I’d just consider him a bellhop. “Uh, Phil, isn’t it?” I asked, doing my favorite name trick again.

“Yes, sir.” He stood up and looked around. “Is there anything else you need help with, sir?” The classic signal that it was time to give a tip.

I whipped out a wallet stuffed to bursting point with one-hundred-warbler bills, took a few without looking at it, and gave them to him. “Here you go, Phil. And thank you again.” Bear the word of my magnanimity and spread it among your co-workers.

Cash wasn’t used much nowadays, and neither were wallets; people mostly paid using their WeeCees. However, I had a thick stack always prepared in case I needed to do something like this. I could’ve swiped my WeeCee over his, but it was undeniable that tipping with cash had more oomph to it while also appearing more personal. Swiping WeeCees to tip felt business-like to me.

“My pleasure to be of service,” he said with a slight bow before leaving.

Jimmy had delivered five boxes, each one about twice larger than the VR helm box. Two of these were from the time my family moved out of our original house. The other three were filled as years passed. Mum brought them all along—my sisters also had their own boxes—as we transferred from place to place, piling them on the back of our cranky second-hand pick-up truck. We should take care of them because they held precious memories, that was what she always said.

And when the renovation of our house would be completed, all of these boxes were going up in the attic, never to be moved again. A fitting end to their journey.

A satisfied grin crossed my face. A decade and a half later, many things were coming to a full circle. These boxes, our old house, me returning to this city, I was even playing an MMORPG again.

The story of these boxes would be such an inspiring opening for the speech I was going to give at Gadwall High, my old school, for their career day next week. I never found that kind of event helpful, but with my attendance, perhaps I could lead those ambling kids on the right path. Herald Stone, The Pied Piper—hang on, that guy led children to their deaths.

Let’s go with, Herald Stone, Career Consultant Extraordinaire.

Perhaps I’d find something interesting in these boxes to add to my speech. I needed a connection with the kids to grab their attention. I could hardly recall what was in these boxes which mildly piqued my interest.

The oldest box, with crumply sides and seams held together by peeling duct tape, was filled to the brim with old toys Pops bought for me. More digging and I also found various souvenirs from the Penduline Provincial Fair, a yearly event for our whole family—it was more for Pops than for us; his dream wish was to be licensed as a food vendor at the fair.

Nonetheless, I also enjoyed the experience. I was a kid; it didn’t take much to entertain me. Our family was complete, the rides were awesome, and the food was great.

And although Pops wasn’t able to fulfill his dream, my sisters and I did it in his stead. Goal #91. Selling our products at the Provincial Fair for a couple of years helped plenty in making our restaurant famous. The inspiration for our signature product, Dolly, a hotdog with peanut butter and jelly in a croissant, actually came from Provincial Fair food items which were always over-the-top with literal heart-stopping calories.

Below the toys and knickknacks were books, my favorite fantasy books. I couldn’t believe I’d almost forgotten about these. Stories about magic, supernatural characters, and mythical creatures were always my favorite, which was why I played fantasy RPGs. I always spared the time to read even after I got into gaming—or addicted, as Mum insisted.

And what was this at the bottom?

“Why is this here?” I whispered in amazement as I pulled out a notebook. It was full of creases like it got wet and then dried off in the sun. I thought I had thrown this away. Mum must’ve kept it but didn’t mention it to me.

I didn’t write diaries, there were no written records of my embarrassing moments or thoughts as a kid. What I did have was a personal notebook where I put all the theorycrafting for my tank build in Nornyr Online. Now that I think about it…this was magnitudes more embarrassing than anything I could’ve written in a diary.

Several pages of the notebook were stuck together, writings smudged because of the ink running, courtesy of a leaky roof of our hole-in-the-wall restaurant at Myna. There was a storm that night. I came home from a part-time job at the convenience store to take my shift at the restaurant and found this notebook, among other things, drenched. It was already ruined and I had no use for what was written on it, so I dunked it into the bin.

I had no idea Mum had saved and stored it.

A glimpse of all the calculations and notes was a time warp bringing me back to my childhood when my biggest worry was making the strong tank character in Nornyr Online. Goal #1—the first time I had decided I’d devote myself to accomplishing a target and complete it, and not just those generic ‘goals’ nonsense I’d write on the career assessment form in school or answer my uncles and aunts when they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up; I had no intention of completing those ‘goals’.

If anyone heard of my Goal#1, they’d dismiss it as dumb, childish…trivial. And they’d be right—objectively speaking. But it was important to me, Herald Stone. That was all that mattered.

And it wasn’t like it was an easy task because it was a game.

A very tall order, in fact.

I didn’t have the resources of the so-called whale players: money, both in-game currency and cold hard cash, plenty of time to grind, the support of strong guilds, and so on. It was a monumental challenge to poke my head into the competitive level with next to nothing…like real life.

“There are plenty of life lessons in games,” I mused with a raised brow as I carefully peeled apart two stuck pages.

It was all coming back to me. The sleepless night I spent staring at the ceiling of my room, brainstorming what the heck I’d do with the little I have—a very useful ‘skill’, if it could be called as such, that I eventually applied in growing our family business.

My ingenious plan to be competitive in Nornyr Online was to go with a non-meta build. Choosing a sub-optimal strategy or an ineffective way to play didn’t sound like a bright idea, and it wasn’t—meta is meta for a reason. But there were plenty of advantages to it.

The best gears for meta builds were hard to farm because every player and their grandma’s second cousin was looking for them. As a result, the prices of these gears both on the in-game auction and the black market would be sky high—simple demand and supply interaction.

In comparison, items needed for so-called gimmicky strategies were considered trash and valued as such. The rarest pieces of legendary equipment dropped by the most powerful end-game bosses could have backyard-sale prices if they weren’t used in a meta build. Some people would even just sell those to the NPCs to quickly free up inventory space. Pages of my notebook were filled with theories and various combinations of those dirt-cheap legendary items, cobbling together a build that actually worked.

Another benefit was my opponents wouldn’t be familiar with the way I played since it was unlikely they had encountered it before. Furthermore, the meta builds warped the whole game into countering themselves, ergo there would be fewer counters against me.

“Would you look at that?” I said. “My kid self was already a genius.”

Genius might be too strong of a description, but I couldn’t help but be proud of myself, and rightly so. This counter-intuitive strategy-making was applicable in business as well, innovating and advancing in unexplored directions, offering novel products. It was also useful in stock investing, going against the market decisions of the masses and profiting off of being ahead in a trend.

And Mum said this was all a waste of time, I thought with a chuckle as I peered at my writings, trying to decipher them. It reminded me of a fantasy story where a swordmaster made his stubborn student thoroughly clean parts of the castle keep every day with a time limit, and it turned out stamina and speed were more important for sword fighting than building huge muscles.

I continued flipping through the pages until it was all blank. No more calculations, illustrations, or scribbles about Nornyr Online. And I finally reached the last page—or where the last page should be. A piece hanging on for dear life on the notebook’s seams was what remained of the page that was torn off.

I touched the small piece, recalling what was written on it. This should be the page where I wrote my first seven…or six, I wasn’t sure…Goals. The first List. Did I tear this page off before I binned this notebook? I must’ve when I copied the List to another notebook. At present, the much-expanded List was in my WeeCee files.

As for the missing page? I probably also threw it away afterward.

A big hotdog squeaky toy was the first thing I saw when I opened the next box. Manson’s name was written on its side with a permanent marker. I squeezed it, and it let out a weak fart-like noise. I wasn’t sure if it should sound like this or it did because it was old. Either way, Manson would’ve found something funny with it. Seriously, that guy…he gave me a hotdog toy as a parting gift so, ‘I wouldn’t forget him’.

This box was filled with gifts from my friends and classmates before my family moved away. I rummaged through it with a smile on my face and a watery eye—it could just be the dust floating in the air.

I couldn’t recall who gave what in this box—they didn’t have names like Manson’s gift—but I could guess. The baseball cap, for sure had to be Paul’s. He always wore this outdoors and indoors, getting detention multiple times for wearing it in class until he finally decided to follow the school’s rules. There were several CDs, probably mix CDs, or what the hell these were called back then. One of them had to be from Jefferson; I recalled he burned a playlist of the songs we always listened to while playing at Vanguard Gaming.

“This has got to be Boady’s gift.” I fished out a huge physics book. Sure enough, written across the edge of the pages was his name.

Boady had asked me what I wanted for a gift, but I refused anything from him since he had already helped me by buying my Nornyr character for more than what it was worth. In the end, he gave me one of his college books as a gift—or more like a joke, so that I wouldn’t feel guilty accepting it. He explained that he had no use for it since he had no plans of going back to college, but it might help me as a reminder not to follow in his footsteps.

If what Eclairs said was true about Boady, then maybe I should follow in his footsteps now.

“Huh?” A piece of paper fell out of Boady’s physics book. “What is—the List?”

I raised a brow. The missing page from my notebook? It wasn’t horribly wrinkled like the other pages, and it didn’t have any ink blotches. I must’ve torn this off long before the notebook got wet.

My brows furrowed. I reread it several times to make sure I had it right. My forehead wrinkled in thought. I closed my eyes for several seconds, opened them, and read the first List again. It was still the same.

“Goal #1…” I whispered. “It-it never mentioned being a tank in Nornyr Online?”