Melia’s high pitched, bubbly voice echoed through the once great ballroom. The echoes reverberated through the high vaulted ceiling, what remained of it anyway, causing her to giggle even harder. Soon enough, the desolate, somber relic of bygone greatness was host to a veritable choir of childlike wonder and glee. She doubled over, clutching her sides, hysterically shaking.

  She was, legitimately, rolling on the floor laughing.

  An outside observer might have questioned her sanity, but that would be incredibly naive. A stern parent might possibly be worried about her getting her clothes dirty, which Melia welcomed.

  She relished the fact that she had the freedom to roll around in the dirt, something she had not been able to do for…over a decade. She was nearly 25 years old, and she swore she would meet her next birthday standing.

  But, it would be a shame to actually ruin her outfit, which was the same one she had on when she logged for the final time. It was a striking, bold choice of clothing, but it wasn’t particularly powerful.

  If Melia had been doing anything other than practicing her lines for the next “show”, she would have been wearing her normal endgame gear. Gear of the highest quality and rarity, earned from countless hours in grinding endgame raids, spending special currencies, and the occasional crafted item to create a bizarre hodgepodge of best in slot items. No real thought went into the looks of max level gear, because they were hand picked by players and didn’t always feature the game designers’ sets. So while her actual armor would make her look like a walking chest plate with swords coming out of her pauldrons while wearing a pair of shorts, and render her massively overpowered, it did not look good. She always transmogrified them to look like other items, but what items she could do so to were limited. Hence why she had to change into her stage clothes, which were item level 1, with literally zero stats.

  Her outfit was called [Reverie of the Midnight Queen], which was exactly as revealing as it sounded. The outfit revealed a generous amount of skin, consisting of a corset that was cinched a little too tight to make everything up top “pop”, with intricate lacework running up the front and back, ending in a pair of boy shorts that, now that Melia was actually wearing them, revealed entirely too much of her milky thighs. The outfit was completed with a very sturdy set of thigh high black platform boots that, at Melia’s 2 and a half feet, added nothing. Congratulations, she was now two inches taller.

  The entire set was made from leather. It was a limited time, cosmetic set, obtainable only during the yearly Halloween seasonal events, and was the leather armor class variant of the “dark, broody, witchy” holiday outfit. Other armor classes had their own, such as the full plate set trying to give off the vibe of a living set of armor, which kind of failed because all it did was force a player to have their helmet be visible at all times and was otherwise a very standard looking set of full plate mail, or the somehow even more risqué cloth set, called “Elvira’s Enchanted Evening Gown,” which was based off the looks of a historic celebrity.

  Melia was pretty sure she didn’t want to walk around looking like a high school goth, but she didn’t have any other options at the moment. Her inventory, as it usually was, was chock full of random junk she swore she would sort out “tomorrow”, but never did. It held countless things she thought were really cool and held some sort of personal meaning for her, but her normal ensemble of overpowered gear was nowhere to be seen, most likely sitting right in her bank where she left it.

  If that even existed still, she thought with a pang of melancholy.

  Thankfully she still had several weapons, which were part of how she switched her classes as a dragon, by equipping different sets, but she didn't know how she felt wearing boy shorts, too many belts, and two massive greatswords with serrated edges that were each 4 feet long.

  They were her Executioners, one of the rare items that actually looked cool to Melia since after the third expansion the developers started introducing “new, edgy weapons” that looked like metal wrapped in duct tape. They were a relic from a bygone era, crafted items that were no longer available since the very first rework of the crafting mechanics, and Melia loved them. In truth, the swords themselves were not the actual Executioners she herself crafted almost a decade ago, merely being best in slot two handed swords she was able to transmogrify the appearance of, since she still held her original copies.

  Melia sighed and put aside the thoughts of how she was going to walk around with two swords somehow strapped to her back that were literally twice her size without clipping through the floor like they had in game, but this conversation wasn’t over. She absolutely was not giving up on waddling around with those swords out on display, she just needed to find out how to do it in style.

  Instead, she accessed her inventory, materializing twin daggers out of thin air. They were evil looking krisses that gleamed with poison, though thankfully they did not drip. Melia glanced back at her status screen and felt her heart plummet. Her class had not, as she hoped, changed to [Rogue] or [Assassin] as it should have when she put them on. It had not changed at all.

  And that was probably going to be a problem.

  Melia would have been more than happy to be a [Rogue] again, since she was somewhat familiar with the play style, having been one of the last classes she leveled to 100. She would have been over the moon to become a real [Warrior], as she had mained for all those years. She would also have accepted being a [Mage], her first love, having no-life’d her way to a “server first” leveling achievement back when the game company still did things like that. They quickly took that away, after too many players whined about other people essentially being more special than they were.

  But no.

  Melia was stuck as something infinitely more terrifying.

  Something that was obviously never even remotely considered by the developers and wrought worry deep into Melia’s bones.

  [Destroyer of Worlds].

  It did not take any imagination to guess what that class did, and Melia wasn’t keen to find out. If she was going to be stuck with something as ridiculous as that, she’d rather be “[Planter of Flowers]”, or something equally as harmless and cute, which could bring smiles and joy to people’s faces.

  Melia paused.

  Her class, regrettably, did not change.

  Melia stared at her reflection in the scale, conflicted. As cool as she thought she looked, as amazing as her new body was, and felt, she didn’t know how she felt presenting herself to the world as the high school queen goth. If somebody asked her to step on them, no matter how desperate or worshipful, she was going to run away shrieking. She wouldn’t even kick them, because they’d like it. She could always stab them…but Melia was no murderer. Even if this world had resurrection spells like the game, she was not willing to test to find out.

  While, yes, in the game she had a level 100 [Priest], that was one of more tedious classes she leveled, somewhere right in the middle of the great grind to get them all maxed, and she was bored of it, mostly phoning it in. If anybody asked her how to play a [Priest], she would shrug, and say something like “spam heal, don’t die,” which was laughable. In this new body, this new world, Melia could smell the magic in the air, she could see mana workings shimmering, like the enchantment on her daggers, but that did not give her deep insight into a class she didn’t care about. As it was, pretending to be a [Rogue], she had strange, vague impressions on how to use her abilities, which both confused and excited her, having never held a real weapon before, barely remembering holding a steak knife. And yet, as an idle thought, Melia twisted her wrist, and the daggers spun and twisted in her hands with a show of unmatched Agility in a dazzling display of Dexterity. Her grin grew feral, as she thought of the [Rogue’s] most famous skill.

  [Stealth].

  And Melia quickly faded into shadow, for all intents and purposes invisible, her reflection no longer present in the mirror. Melia quickly stored her discarded scale in her inventory, her hoarder’s greed screaming about crafting materials.

  Melia knew where she was, but she didn’t know where she was, at least in relation to this new world. If it was the same world as Ebonvale, she could navigate literally everywhere, but she already knew it wasn’t a 1 to 1 transfer by virtue of the mansion alone. So the first thing she needed to do was find her bearings.

  Well, the second. The first thing had already been done. Find out what she wanted to do with this new life, her new chance of freedom. She could be anything, do anything, and there were strong enough odds that Melia was willing to bet nothing short of a god could stop her.

  If she wanted to live up to her class, she could easily become the next “demon lord” or whatever expansion-level final boss she desired. Every expansion had to have a new “big bad”, and they all brought death and destruction to the realm, sometimes trying to take it over, sometimes killing just for the sake of being evil.

  But Melia was not evil, and she didn’t want to be evil either. While she had no intention of truly hiding herself away like the harbinger of the next calamity, she was more than happy just to be plain old Melia Marcus. Or now Meliastraza Obsidianheart, as she was called. Melia cringed. If that was what her 22 year old self had chosen, now she’d have to live with the consequences…even if she secretly loved it.

  So step one was stepping out the door, because Melia refused to be locked away any longer. She spent the majority of her life imprisoned in a hospital bed, over a decade trapped inside a glass cage, and she craved human comfort, companionship. Human touch. Grief swelled within her knowing the first hug she was going to give wouldn’t be to her family or Brandy, but grief was something she was resigned to work through.

  Outside of the dilapidated mansion, which Melia realized she didn’t even know the name of, since it was designed to be inaccessible, Melia looked far and wide.

  Much farther and wider than she thought possible. After a second of straining her eyes to glare into the horizon, something in them shifted, the world sharpened, and suddenly she could take so much more in. She blinked…but didn't really blink, because it was her second set of eyelids, her real, draconic eyelids that kept her eyes healthy, blinking. She’d heard that reptiles used them to clean their eyes and help see in certain environments, but could never pronounce what the membranes were called.

  But that didn’t matter, not when she could suddenly see crystal clear for what seemed to be miles, where on the horizon suddenly appeared Horizon, the capital city of the human lands. Horizon sat, still just as small and distant in the mouth of a sheltered bay, but she swore she could just make out the tiny forms of waving flags fluttering above what had to be massive castle spires. Horizon was a bastion of safety for the humans, and that was going to be her next destination.

  …not to raze or make off with any princesses.

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  Which sounded like an absolutely legendary troll to pull when this was a game, but now that the world was real would be just plain wrong, especially the longer she thought about how trivial it would be for her to do.

  Actually, Melia had good reasons to visit the capital city. For one, it was close, despite the apparent distance. In the game, the abandoned mansion in the mountains was only a 3 minute flight away, the halfway point in the flight between the human capital and the Dwarven Stronghold, or a 10 minute walk on foot. Melia was keen to experiment with actual flight now that she was a real living dragon, but she wasn’t so sure she wanted to do it in the middle of the day within sight of a place that generally housed some of the strongest, most bored adventurers (players) milling about with nothing to do, nestled next to the low leveled starting zones. It was one of those zones that Melia fixed her eyes on, still far away but not a distant black speck to her normal sight, probably about a good half day’s carriage ride from the castle, or so she guessed by the few ant-like specks she could see traveling back and forth between the two.

  Yes, Melia knew this zone, having leveled more than a third of her 37 classes in this kingdom, and she held a special place in her heart for it. There was an abbey, little more than a large church in the game, and a smile crept its way up Melia’s face just thinking about it.

  In the game, the abbey was part of a very tiny “mini zone” that was walled in by some low mountains to contain any freshly spawned level 1 players. There was just enough space around the abbey to house a “woods” ( no more than a dozen cleanly spaced trees), a small mine (which shared the same generic shape all mines had at launch), a tiny little river brook and a vineyard that would have only been about 30 feet long and wide if it were actually real.

  Essentially, just enough space for a new player to figure out how to walk without running into things, especially if this was their first foray into a virtual reality game that allowed them to control their character from the third person.

  Melia’s thoughts wandered to the vineyard, where the human starting zone featured its second quest. The first was very simple, kill 12 wolves, which sounded ferocious and unreasonable until the player reminded themselves they were in a video game and the wolves were also level 1 and wouldn’t attack them unless provoked. The wolf quest was little more than wandering up to a wolf and auto-attacking it to death, since a level 1 noob only had a single, basic class ability that usually had some sort of cooldown.

  The second quest was just as simple as the first, go collect 12 bushels of grapes, but there were two key differences. It wasn’t a combat quest, not exactly, since the only way to get attacked was if they accidentally targeted a nearby mob instead of the grapes, instead designed to teach players about how to interact with…interactables…in the world. As a virtual reality game, somewhere in between staring at a computer screen and feeling like they were really there in the world, interactions weren’t as simple as “point and click”. Players could choose to let the game system do all the heavy lifting, and honestly 90 percent of the players eventually chose this route after the novelty of acting like they were really harvesting grapes wore off.

  Melia had run this quest on each of her 37 characters, even the ones that didn’t spend any time leveling in this zone. It simply became a tradition, wandering into the abbey as a much higher level character, accepting a worthlessly low level quest from a starter npc, and moving on with her life.

  With her mind fully saturated by thoughts of picking a plump bounty of grapes, Melia started making her way down the mountain. As an area that was never designed to be accessible to players, climbing down on foot was going to be a challenge, especially with Melia’s new size. She got accustomed to walking surprisingly quickly, seeing as she hadn’t actually walked since she was 9 years old, but the motion came back instantly, something deeply ingrained in her, and she was marching forward as quickly as her tiny legs would carry her.

  She marveled at the sheer size of everything around her. As a tiny gnome, things that should have seemed inconsequential were now more than minor inconveniences. She had to pause at the grand set of stairs leading down from the mansion’s entrance as each step loomed below, each half her height. What a normal person would take by thoughtlessly lifting their leg slightly and walking forward, she was forced to physically climb down. For the first time, she wondered if giving herself the smallest character possible was a mistake.

  Her unease quickly vanished as she got into a routine. For the first few steps she actually sat down, gingerly shuffled herself to the edge of the step and let her legs dangle off the edge, hovering above the next step by several inches. She then stretched as hard as she could as she tentatively lowered herself, wiggling her toes inside her boots, trying to feel the exact moment they made contact with the next step. Even then she was too short, and had to drop herself off the ledge, taking it by faith that she was only fractions of an inch away, and not about to free fall into oblivion. She landed, steadied her shaking legs, patted herself off of dust, and approached the next step.

  It. Was. Tedious.

  She only traveled 4 steps in such a manner before she gave up and decided to jump. More of a hop, really, as she paused on the next step, internally weighing the pros and cons of risking her neck if she slipped and fell, forgetting momentarily that she was 3699 levels higher than a step, if steps could even have levels in the first place, and practically invulnerable. She took a breath, grimaced, and leapt. From her perspective the small distance was not so trivial, looking to her like jumping off the roof of a one story house, or at the very least, dropping from about 5 feet in the air. She hopped…and landed, perfectly safe and sound, in an incredibly anticlimactic fashion. She let out a weak chuckle, realizing how silly she was being, since she was actually a dragon and not a gnome, and hopped down the rest of the stairs.

  Travel moved much faster after that, once Melia understood that she was no longer a delicate flower that could trample itself just by getting hit by a gentle breeze. The world still seemed huge to her, as it always would at this new size, everything appearing at least 3 times larger than it once did, but the fear of giant things quickly faded.

  Like when she got to the edge of the mansion’s clearing and the grounds turned into huge, imposing boulders that led into steep cliffs, creating the impregnable mountainside the mansion was known for. Players had spent years awkwardly walking their horses and other mounts into every inch of the impassable mountainside searching for poorly placed polygons, eventually finding the circuitous, twisting path that let them climb up. It was not straight, and frankly Melia didn’t even know how to find it going down, since she never used it going that way. Whenever players wanted to leave the mansion, they would simply warp out. But that was not an option for Melia, having been one of the first things she experimented with, since her fast travel network was cleared.

  She learned that the system still existed, in some capacity, since she could feel her body trying to link with the registered crystals around the kingdom, but it was like they had been reset. She would need to physically touch them to re-register, if that was something she wanted to do. For now, she was still filled with joy of having legs, being able to feel the warmth of the afternoon sun on her skin, even if it prickled and might start to burn her pale flesh, and the simple fact that she could feel moisture and dampness on her body, even if her high stats would allow her to probably take a dip in lava or swim through a frozen lake, simply because it wasn’t the carefully monitored air inside her sterile tube.

  Melia clambered up the top of a boulder that would have reached the chest of an average human and felt like she was queen of the world. She looked down, utterly lost to finding a path but utterly unphased. There was a tiny voice in the back of her brain that told her she could jump the entire way down, however many hundreds or thousands of feet up she was, and she would be perfectly fine without a scratch and all she’d have to do was climb out of whatever crater she created when she hit.

  But she wasn’t quite that adventurous yet, just in case it was lethal. She wasn’t suicidal, and the game did have fall damage. She settled instead on locating a boulder only three feet away, once again looking like jumping from the roof of a house, and leapt. Her aim was true and she stuck the landing, coming to a dead stop in a crouch, not staggering in the slightest. She felt her grin grow.

  The next leap was twice the size, like leaping off a two story building, but in reality was still only about 6 feet away. Her tiny body handled that with the skill and grace of an olympic gymnast, and she began laughing with childlike glee. Soon she was leaping from greater and greater heights, comfortably taking jumps that ranged from 20 to 30 feet, like she was able to soar across great open fields or leaping down skyscrapers. Small ones, at least. That seemed to be the limit of her comfort, one particular boulder groaning ominously as she landed, though she knew she could survive much, much further. But with the wind in her hair, her eyes crinkled into crescents due to the exhilarating joy, she found she suddenly had all the time in the world, and a little “boulder hopping” was exactly what she needed.

  And to think, not even an hour ago, she was worried about some stairs.

  Even as fast as she was going, it still took Melia an hour to reach the base of the mountain. When she looked back, all she saw was a sheer cliff of imposing rock, and despite having just descended, she wondered how anybody could ever climb it. From her position at the very edge of the base, she couldn’t even see the mansion, and wondered why anybody would ever try.

  Melia dusted herself off, her outfit having remained surprisingly clean despite being a level 1 set, but that could also be in part due to the limited nature of holiday cosmetics. She could feel that they were more durable than regular clothes, but even they would give up and tear if somebody stuck a sword in her.

  Or if a wolf decided to sink its teeth into her.

  A brief shift of motion in the nearby treeline made Melia whip her head up, staring at a sycamore tree that, to her, stretched up into the heavens like a redwood. Indeed, she saw a wolf, which she instinctively cast [Identify] on without even considering if she still could. All players had a base level of [Inspect] so they could gauge their chances against mobs and other players, and it didn’t tell them much. It was not nearly as insightful as a dedicated skill like [Identify] or [Analyze] from a crafter or somebody in a specific profession, but it was generic, able to give a basic description to the caster if their levels were in a similar range, and everybody had it. If the object was too high, it would simply say “unknown”, give three “???”s, or else suitably fail to give any information at all.

  Such was not the case with Melia and the wolf. The wolf, having glanced at Melia, seemed to realize she was staring at it and it immediately scampered away, disappearing into the woods. Melia frowned, suddenly not feeling so sure of herself. Was it simply afraid of her because she was a person and it was alone? Or did it somehow know her true strength and flee for its life? Part of her hoped for the former, because she didn’t want to be a pariah among Humanity, shunned and feared.

  Another part of Melia’s brain started to whirl. The wolf had been level 50, which was outrageous to her. This was supposed to be a starter zone, so there was clearly some disconnect between her expectations and reality.

  Melia simply didn’t have enough information. Maybe the world was much higher level than she thought? Maybe this zone itself had grown more powerful in reality? Or else had never been a starter zone at all? Melia paused. Perhaps time had passed, and due to unknown factors, like a lack of adventurers maybe, the monsters in the area had slowly risen in level?

  There was also the fact that Melia herself was level 3700 where she expected to only be level 100, so clearly what she knew about levels in general was off.

  This and other thoughts about what differences existed in her new world from the one she was familiar with in the game swirled in her mind as she plodded slowly forward. She had found that her normal walking speed would lose to a toddler in a crawl, so she had broken into a brisk jog, slowly increasing the pace until she met the limits of comfortable movement. It came much later than she expected. As a [Rogue], her main resource for abilities was “energy”, and her status told her she had a maximum pool of 1000. [Rogue] abilities pulled from her energy, depleting it quickly but generating it back almost as fast. In that way, a [Rogue] playstyle was fast, action packed, and revolved around managing cooldowns more than it was spent waiting to generate resources, like mana or rage.

  At some point in her increasing jog, she had unconsciously activated [Sprint], which used to increase player movement by 100 percent for a short time before going on cooldown, but she found in reality it simply toggled on and off while costing a minor energy drain. After watching her energy bar, she found the drain was negligible and her regeneration outpaced it, so she could sustain the [Sprint] indefinitely. She reapplied [Stealth], having let it fade when she was jumping down the mountain, and made her way through the forest in the middle of the night.

  Night that she was surprised to find falling around her, since a part of her new body she knew about intellectually but never actually considered showed its worth. Gnomes, in lore, lived deep underground, sometimes deeper than the dwarves. They all had darkvision, and Melia, if she even thought about it, would have guessed the world around her would have turned grayscale like some sort of budget action movie night vision. It did not. The world around her darkened noticeably, but stopped getting darker when the world looked like it was in the eve of twilight, after the sun had gone down but there was plenty of light left to see. It was during one of her many moments to pause and literally smell the roses, or rather simply taking deep, filling lungfulls of air and letting reality wash around her, that she heard the sounds of nightlife. Curious, she looked around and spotted an owl.

  Suddenly remembering gnomes and their darkvision, she mentally commanded it to go away, and it did. Her eyes shifted again, sort of like they did when she peered into the great distance, but now she was engulfed by darkness, plunged into inky blackness. She doubted anything else could see her (if she wasn’t already stealthed) even if they were inches in front of her. Melia shrugged, interested at this revelation, and continued moving, uncounted miles disappearing beneath her feet.

  She did not stop until several hours after the first rays of light began cresting over the mountain behind her. The forest before her cleared into a well maintained path, and in the distance, sounds of hammers and picks slamming into stone rang out, early men already hard at work, the world lurching into motion for another glorious day.