A bright, all encompassing light obliterated anything else in her field of vision, inverse to the darkness that had greeted her upon entering virtuality. She raised her hand to shield her eyes from it, but the light stopped just short of being painful. A moment or two later, colors began to resolve themselves. The perfect blue of the sky, interspersed with fluffy, stark white clouds, greeted her. Looking down, she saw that she was standing in a field of grass. Every color, every object, was oversaturated and well defined. The world just looked...better. The difference was impressive, reminding her of the photographs she had taken with her phone after discovering the High Dynamic Range setting.

A smile spread across her face, and the expression that had been her default a few weeks ago felt foreign to her. It took a few moments to place the reason for it, out of practice as she was, but she quickly recognized the emotion as nostalgic happiness. The colors, the lack of pollution, reminded her of the world she knew from her youth. She normally shrugged off feelings of nostalgia, recognizing it as looking back through rose colored glasses to a time when your biggest concerns were playing with friends and enjoying magical holidays, before the magic transformed into a responsibility to organize and pay for them.

Still, the feeling was an oasis in her present reality of loss and hurt, so she let it warm her. She closed her eyes, raised her face to a perfect sun that her heart told her was warm, overpowering her mind that tried to remind her that it was merely a finely packed grid of yellow-white LEDs.

The virtual eden reduced to a dark pink glow through her eyelids, her other faculties returned to the foreground. The voices, muted by distraction, returned in a flood.

“Yo, D, where you been, man?”

“It’s been three weeks, we had to take on the Path of the Wendigo quest without you.”

“You had us worried, you weren’t returning any of our messages.”

Holly kept her eyes closed, a distancing mechanism because she had no idea how to break the news of David’s passing to his friends. She had never met them, personally, but recalled the names from David’s stories, at least enough to be able to place each of them by voice.

Meg was from London, England, and the cultured, smooth accent was the one expressing worry. Had all three of them only been concerned with what David brought to the table as a gamer, or in how his absence had let them down somehow, it would have been easy for her to log out and simply leave their questions unanswered. The genuine concern in Meg’s voice hooked her, preventing her from imagining these people as caricatures unworthy of the truth.

“Hello, Meg.”

Holly spoke the words before opening her eyes. Hollow as they sounded, it must not have been immediately obvious to them all that she was not David, because they all resumed talking over each other before Meg asserted dominance over the other two.

“Shut the fuck up, you two!”

Holly was taken aback, but a completely out of place smirk snuck through her emotional firewall despite the growing dread in her. Opening her eyes, the appearance of the three characters in front of her surprised her even more than Meg’s outburst had. She’d seen screenshots of them several times, from David’s stories relayed in passing, but it was an entirely different thing to be standing before them in virtual reality.

Meg was almost entirely covered in bright red feathers, with wings neatly folded against her back. Her face managed to meld the hooked beak and round expressive eyes of a Peregrine Falcon with the angular crown of feathers more akin to that of a blue jay. Her body cut a curvaceous silhouette, which Holly guessed was probably similar to the way she looked in real life, though the physics of high speed flight likely dictated that the majority of the volume be body down and feather. It all came together in a way that Holly thought to be exceedingly beautiful.

The other two creatures standing before her appeared to be of the same race, but on opposite ends of the gene pool. One was large and green, the other was a blaze orange and slight. One carried around a battle axe the size of a Stratacaster, the other one carried a bow and a short sword. The small one fidgeted with a nervous energy that matched most cliches Holly had come across, and the large one moved with a conservative grace that was all about patience and calm.

Out of curiosity Holly rolled up her own sleeve, uncovering a cobalt blue wrist and forearm. David’s avatar had smooth skin, while the other two unnamed creatures bore skin that was leathery, reptilian in nature.

The large one spoke to her in English that carried a hint of an Indian accent.

“David, are you listening? Did you forget about the raid, my friend?”

Holly looked up at him, and after a moment of focus, a legend appeared above the creature’s head displaying the name Garavald. David had told her about this friend as well. He was a graduate student named Ritesh, and he lived just outside of Mumbai. He’d been one of David’s online friends for years. Though Holly had never spoken to him personally, hearing his name so many times over the years gave him a touch of familiarity in her eyes.

“Hello, Ritesh.”

Her words were calm, even though her mind was still racing to figure out what she was going to do. A big part of her felt his friends deserved the truth, but what form that would take, how she would convey that to them, perplexed her. To stall for time, she decided to divulge the one piece of information that involved no shaping. She decided to introduce herself.

“Sorry. I am David’s mother, Holly.”

The three looked at each other, not knowing how to proceed. Finally, Meg broke the silence.

“Ah. It's nice to finally meet you, David talks about you all the time. I'm Meg.”

She gestured at the green humanoid reptile.

“That's Ritesh.”

And finally, she turned to the small orange creature.

“And this here is Laird.”

Holly nodded to each of them in turn, the smile on her face genuine. It felt really good to finally meet them, to put faces to the names she had heard in countless story fragments, even if the faces didn't quite match up to her expectations.

Meg followed up her brief introduction.

“Is David in some sort of trouble? He hasn't logged in to Silenia for three weeks.”

Holly stepped back into a position where she could see all three of them at the same time, dipping her head to stare at the grass as she decided how to break the news. She would just tell them. They deserved to know, and she didn't have the strength to carry the secret any longer.

“That's actually part of why I came here to meet with you.”

She had to bite her lip to stifle a sob, but managed to compose herself before one of David’s friends asked her a question.

“David...is gone.”

Holly knew that they would have questions, so she forced herself to give the details they would no doubt ask for.

“There was a shooting at his school. David was shot several times while trying to push others to safety.”

It came out quickly, devoid of emotion in her haste to cut them off. The friends all stared at her, shock slowly taking over their alien expressions.

Meg’s hand went to her mouth. She sat back, almost falling into a sitting position atop a felled tree behind her. Laird’s mouth mouth went slack for a moment, then closed slowly as his eyes went white, and Ritesh’s chin fell to his chest, his eyes flicking in different directions as though the ground held answers to all of his questions scattered about.

She wanted to take the pain from them all as soon as the words left her mouth, to break the news more softly, but the damage was already done. Seeing their reactions, any doubt as to how real their friendships had been with David vanished instantly.

“I’m so sorry.”

Nothing she could say would help them through their grief, she knew that. Nothing had helped her, despite her mother’s ham-fisted attempts to help her come back to the world. That had lasted about a week, ending when Holly lost her temper, screaming at her mother to, “leave and not come back”.

Holly was not her mother, though. Her mother's complete lack of tact had pushed her in the opposite direction. Empathetic, sometimes to a fault, Holly would give David’s friends all the time they needed, and answer any questions they might have. If she was being honest, it felt good for her to have someone else to commiserate with, someone to spread her loss with that also cared about David.

A few obvious questions later, Meg and Ritesh logged out as well, the eyes on their avatars turning white, a small amount of color draining from their bodies. The effect didn’t remove all personality from their characters, but it was enough of a change to show they were no longer logged in.

Holly stared at them, realizing that David’s avatar must take on a similar change when no one was logged in to control it. Holly turned the thought over in her mind a few times as the avatars of David’s friends began to move around, picking up items, cleaning up camp, before turning to look at her.

“Are you going to help, David?”

Meg’s avatar asked her.

“I’m not David, Meg. I’m Holly.”

The avatar stared at her, tilting its head in a surprisingly lifelike expression of confusion.

“Stop screwing around, David. We have to get ready to leave for the Oracle tomorrow.”

“The Oracle?”

Avatar-Meg repeated its head tilt.

“Stop screwing around, David.”

Realizing that she had bumped up against the conversational limit on Avatar-Meg regarding this topic, Holly busied herself with finding the logout function. Looking up towards the very limit of her vision, she focused on the menu button in the upper left. A translucent list slid down, spelling out several options, the final entry stating simply, SIGN OUT.

Holly focused on the entry, and the screen in the VR headset flickered out. Hanging it back on its hook and replacing the controllers back in their charging docks, she was a little startled at the transition back to reality. Slight disorientation aside, she found that the thing she missed most was the overly saturated colors, followed by the sounds of open country when a distant siren interrupted the silence.

It was a nice vacation, but Holly knew that she needed to start dealing with reality, not hiding from it.