Years went by. My father was long dead and my mother still living eternally in SwordGate, her corporation booming. She sent letters to me, maybe three times a year, a little more, a little less some years but it was all the same to me: she betrayed our family. I wanted nothing to do with her.

SwordGate was by far the most advanced VRMMORPG out there, and one of the few to incorporate full feeling into the game, both translating brain waves into emotions and physical feeling as well, through the use of extremely complicated technology that I really did not care to find out how it worked. The game’s developers, Sigma Studios, had a lot of pride in their creation. It was like a completely new universe was born because of them, and they knew it as well as the players.

I, however, only valued the game as a tool to communicate with my mother a few days a year. That was all I used it for, typically. However, in high school I was really big into playing a MMORPG on my desktop computer called EverWorld. I wanted nothing to do with Virtual Reality but my passion was still RPGs, even multiplayer ones. However, nobody could resist the pull of VRMMORPGs, and after having gotten over my mother’s real-life death, I sunk myself into Everworld, for quite a long time. For six years, in fact.

I had so much free time that I climbed guild ladders over and over again, becoming officers of multiple guilds, as well as upgrading my PC over time with my mother’s money, which was a drop in the great sea of money she had at this point. But I always came back to Everworld. However I did eventually, in when I turned 22, decided to create a separate character in SwordGate to play under my mother’s nose. I had dropped down to visiting my mother only one time a year or so, because of obligations in Everworld, whether it be leveling new people who joined the guild to gathering or crafting items for people,

MMORPGs still had a very large fanbase since the VRCapsules were still fairly expensive. You could buy a VRHeadset for about the price of a normal game console, which at this point in 20XX was ridiculously cheap (typically 200-300 dollars) which was maybe a week’s worth of grinding money in most VRMMOs provided you didn’t have other responsibilities or something. A typical VRCapsule ran for, at the cheapest model, about 1,000 dollars, coming with all sorts of technical support and needing to contact support for that model a lot, to the top tier models at 5,000 dollars and up, which was entirely possible to get money for in various games. But again, SwordGate was the top contender for this. With it being the most popular game equaled more real life money to exchange for the gold in game.

So with that being said, I did begin playing SwordGate, retiring from EverWorld and using my mother’s old VRCapsule to begin playing.

I entered the capsule, lifting the lid slightly and activating the capsule, having it raise the lid for me after lifting it a little bit with its pneumatic servos. I laid down in it, and the capsule, detecting a person inside, immediately slowly rose to a 45 degree angle and closed the lid on the way up. The capsule whirred to life, heavier than earlier, activating the multiple CPUs and parts inside it and displaying a screen to my eyes. The capsule used eye gestures to open programs after opening the “desktop” of the capsule. You selected items by looking at them, and blinking to open them up. The capsule could detect a normal blink versus an interface blink, same with reading items in the capsule versus trying to select something with your eyes. The capsule also, without you knowing it at all, was able to access your brain through your optical nerves, which assisted in the capsule knowing what to do with the interface.

I realized neither I nor my father even had ever touched this capsule, never looked into my mother’s interfaces or tried to use this capsule or anything, we just left the capsule there. The thought of this saddened me a bit. I decided to take a poke around her desktop. Sigma Studios did not automatically wipe any capsule data due to a large legal lawsuit that had happened to them a while back revolving around the particular issues, so this was fortunate for me. There were several folders, of which were seemingly related to her in-game company, and then one titled: ‘Diary’. Now, peeking into other people’s diaries is pretty atrocious, especially if the person was still uh… “living”, we’ll call it, as I mentally put air-quotes around living, but I had to read these files.

The folder ballooned up, making the folder interface full-screen, and there were just .txt files upon .txt files. I opened a file named ‘1-11-2020’. This was 5 years ago, with it being 2025 now, of course. The file overtook the file explorer and just opened up a plain notepad file with text in it.

Dear Journal,

What a whirlwind today has been. A lot of stuff has been going on with the company, so much so that we actually had to fire a couple executives for embezzling money. Imagine that. My board of directors was in unanimous agreement to fire these executives so we did. Fortunately these people weren’t even near the backbone of the company, so it didn’t hurt us a bit.

Oh yeah, I thought to myself. I bet nothing is going to ever take down your company even if you’re the last one standing...

I’ve been missing Zack and Richard a lot, I wish they would just join me here so I could be with them forever. I don’t know why they want to stay in that world full of disease and anger and… and… and PAIN! Here, everything's as well as can be in a virtual society and it’s just like real life! I can feel my silk sheets in my bedchamber, the grained wood of an unfinished bow, the hot steel of a sword being forged. I will just never understand them. I wish Richard would just join me here, and Zach so we could just all be one happy family.

I thought to myself silently, stone-faced, why didn’t she just come out of the damn capsule instead more to see us? She didn’t need to be at her company every waking moment of every day!

I might pop out of the capsule today and surprise them for an hour or two.

That was the end of the log. I’m supposing she was pulled away to do other things at that point. This log was early on in the list as well, supposably when she wasn’t as ingrained in the VRMMORPG world as she ended up being.

At this point I decided, fuck it. I’m going to play this game and figure out what to do from there. So I closed the journal log and just stared at the journal file window. There were hundreds of journals. I scrolled through them but decided I’d look through them at a later date. I selected the Swordgate VRMMO icon and thought to launch it, and I went blind.

After what seemed like an eternity in the pod, scenery flashed by me, like I was being propelled at an extremely fast speed past the entire game world. A female voice boomed from out of nowhere.

“Welcome to Argen, the landmass that Swordgate Online is played on! Here you will quest and adventure with friends, as well as do anything else your mind can dream of!”

Images flashed by of giant dragons, huge, sprawling cities and monsters of various shapes and monstrosities I’d never even dreamed of thinking about. It was almost too much to bear for my meager senses. Smells, sight, various textures running across my fingers. I wondered how anyone truly did this the first time they logged in. I didn't remember this being a part of the new character experience with my first character so it was extremely disorienting.

After a while of various scenes, my vision was flying in on a small abbey in the middle of a forest, secluded from all civilization. A lone human was standing outside of the abbey, dressed in a burlap set of clothing with thin sandals that had leather straps twisting their way halfway up the calf, so the sandal would stay on. The camera, or, me, at that point, flew down to view the human figure. A deep male voice boomed out from seemingly everywhere once again, like one of those comedic god voices you would see in cartoons on TV or something:

“Choose what you will look like, your race, one profession and one perk. You will be able to get all professions eventually, but you will only be able to master to their fullest extent, two professions. Choose wisely.”

I scrolled through the race list, they had every kind of fantasy race imaginable. Kobolds, Orcs, even Trolls and Ogres, though the Trolls I’m sure were not as large as their fantasy brethren, but they were mighty big, a towering seven and a half feet tall or more, depending on the species of troll. Mountain trolls were the tallest at eight feet. I scrolled through the race menu some more, There were Nephalem, the descendants of Angels, as well as Halflings. Werebears, Werewolves...Were-prettymuchwhateveranimals. This list was pretty amazing, and amazing that the developers actually were able to make this many races with custom fitting armor, not to mention the models for every race.

I took my time scrolling through the list, but was leaning toward Giant, Orc, or Nephalem. Or, to be honest, just straight Human, as lowly as it sounded, they came with some good bonuses that sounded pretty good with what I wanted trade-wise, but not profession or combat-wise, so I wasn’t really sure.

Race: Human

Str: 5

Con: 8

Agi: 5

Int: 5

Per: 5

Cha: 5

Lck: 5

Profession Bonus: Trading +5

Stat Bonus: None

Humans were pretty flat but a good base to start with all around. I thought about it, with that trading bonus I could probably make a pretty penny in no time. But that wasn’t my goal. I was planning on actually recovering gemstones farming ore veins for money, as well as ore to sell or use for armor, depending on the class I chose later. I reviewed the Giant race:

Race: Giant

Str: 9

Con: 8

Agi: 5

Int: 3

Per: 5

Cha: 6

Lck: 5

Profession Bonus: Mining +7

Stat Bonus: Str +1 (Applied to existing stats)

Giant seemed to be what I wanted, but I wasn’t quite sure still yet, unfortunately. The Strength bonus was good and the Mining bonus was the highest of what I was looking for, but, I wasn’t sure. I decided to keep scrolling, willing the list up and down looking at the races.

However, I saw a race flickering at the bottom of the list I hadn’t seen there the first time. It made me nervous about what I was looking at, since such a solid game shouldn’t be having bugs in its character creation screen that millions of people probably see every day.

Race: Naz’catec

Str: 7

Con: 7

Agi: 5

Int: 7

Per: 7

Cha: 7

Lck: 9

Profession Bonus: Trading +5, Mining +7, Smithing +3, Archaeology +10

Stat Bonus: Str +2, Lck +4, Int +2, Agi+2, Per +2, Cha +2, Con +2

I looked at the model for the race. It just looked like a… really tan Dwarf, with one arm, the right arm, pretty much being a robotic arm, but developed in the manner of a human arm in bone structure. But it was only bone structure plus cabling for the muscles. It was dressed in actually some really nice clothes, almost looking like a noble.. A purple, flowing no-sleeved shirt with gold trim on it and matching shorts, reaching down to the cyborg- half-dwarf’s knees.

I mentally clicked the model and it just made a loud ping noise, which was the noise for “error”. Like it couldn’t find the information for the race to tell me its background. However, I was extremely interested in Archaeology, I’d never heard of another game having something so interesting. I love history and everything about it, so this extremely intrigued me.

One part of me wanted to collect things and maybe hole them up in a house and keep them forever… another part, my inner greediness just wanted to sell great finds and keep all the money.

At this point I was so into the game I had completely forgotten about real life. I could easily see how someone could get so lost in this game, in any VRMMO game.

Obviously I had to make my race choice the Naz’catec. I’d be an idiot not to. I considered taking this race being a bannable offense, but I decided to chance it. I thought to myself, ‘I’m pretty sure the devs have eyes watching the game 24/7, so it’d be weird not to choose this… obviously glitchy but extremely overpowered class...right?’

It was almost comedic to have this chance to be so overpowered in a game. I quickly typed in my character name to be Setari, which was my handle for everything online, and away I went. Immediately I spawned in the forest abbey. I had no profession, no weapons and no armor besides the fancy shirt and shorts I was wearing. Admittedly, my height seemed a bit taller for a dwarf, since they usually were about 4 feet, but I was maybe halfway to five feet, a little more or less. I thought it was very interesting. I looked at my hands and feet, which actually had actual very nice leather boots on them! Something I hadn’t noticed on the character creation screen. I heard the crunching of gravel behind me, and turned around.

“I welcome you to our humble abbey…” the man opened his eyes and looked at me. “I...er… what are you?” The NPC asked. Boy, I didn’t expect this kind of response. Then again, it’s to be expected from a class that apparently wasn’t supposed to be in the game.

“I dunno, apparently a Naz’catec Dwarf? Or just a Naz’catec, I suppose.” I shrugged at him.

“One moment.” The NPC’s eyes glazed over to a creepy white as he just stood there and did nothing. I decided, fuck it, I’m gonna look around. So I started to move around him, when I was frozen in place.

I’m sure I’m going to learn a lesson about choosing buggy races right now.