“Hammerfall? For the Fire Festival?”

  Melia was down in the garden, playing with dirt when her two new friends found her. They approached with a purpose, and it seemed they wanted to invite her to join them for the opening of the Midsummer festivities.

  Alastair and Jessica had been more than a little shocked to see the gnome nose deep in the cloister’s vegetable patch, standing in a hole nearly as tall as she was, surrounded by a bunch of bemused brothers holding shovels and hoes.

  The adventuring pair had thought to check other areas first for the so-called powerful gnome, perhaps with the local guards at their barracks training, or literally anywhere else but a small field of dirt.

  Melia, after yesterday’s wonderful spree of hunting wolves, had decided she wanted to make sure the abbey’s food stores were adequate if she was going to be eating there long term. That meant installing some improvements. Now that she was feeling well fed, she also felt like sharing her skills.

  Last night, long after everyone had gone to bed, she had concealed herself in [Stealth], snuck out to a large clearing, and transformed back into a dragon. Her true body, grateful to be free, stretched and covered the entire tiny chapel below her and a good portion of the surrounding homes, her wings stretching 200 feet across. Satisfied that she was still concealed, she carefully made her way to a nearby open field full of Wololols to feast.

  In her dragon form, she could pick up an entire Wololol with two claws on one hand and pop it into her mouth like a chicken nugget. She tried not to think of how she was eating a living creature whole, skin bones and wool all at once, without cooking it, but she was starving and it was a monster that would respawn in an hour anyway. When she brought the first one to her salivating maw, she closed her eyes so she wouldn’t back out. Her hunger was ravenous and she would rather die than lose her mind and do something unspeakable like eat her friends. She flicked it inside, feeling a strange sensation of literal wooly mouth, accompanied by a faint trill of “wololololo”…until she snapped her jaws with a crunch.

  …if she didn’t think too hard about it, it was kind of like a bland, funky piece of beef jerky that was a few days past expiration.

  Melia ended up eating 72 sheep before she was satisfied and crept back to her room.

  So when she woke up in the morning, Melia had a newfound purpose: make it so she would no longer need to go galavanting around under the cover of darkness for a midnight snack. Eventually her secret would be out that she was a dragon in disguise, there was no way she could hide her very real appetite and hunger forever, but she hoped to be on these people’s good side before she scared them half to death.

  Also, vegetables would never replace meat, not for a dragon. But there were some things she could help with to tip the scales a tiny bit in her favor.

  And that started with something she never considered needing even when she woke up in this world.

  Several of her crafting professions allowed her to build farming plots for player housing, netting players the ability to supplement their gathering needs, and some of those higher tier skills allowed for increased crop yields and rapid harvests.

  Melia was counting on those properties carrying over to this world so she could have more food, and she was hoping the abbey would be able to provide for her at least in the short term. She never considered what it would take to keep a dragon alive, especially one of her size, and she was learning it was a daunting task. Perhaps in exchange for her magically amazifying their garden, the brothers and sisters of the abbey would be willing to cook for her. Melia, of course, was a max level [Chef], but she couldn’t cook without tools, and she didn’t think it would be easy in her real body either.

  “That’s right,” Jessica said, very distracted. It was hard enough to talk to a gnome in the first place when they only came up to her kneecaps, but when one was digging a hole? Madness.

  “We’d like to introduce you to the rest of our team,” Alastair supplied, more helpfully. “They’re reserving us some rooms at an inn before they all get booked.” Eventually his curiosity got the better of him. “What are you doing?”

  “Digging a hole,” laughed one of the brothers with a shovel. Jessica gave him an unamused stare.

  Melia finished scooping a trowel full of dirt and dumping it to the side. “I was hoping to enrich these growing plots in order to expedite growth and output.”

  Jessica shared a glance with Alastair.

  “It’s…just dirt. You grow things in it. Unless you’re a high level [Farmer] too?”

  “Nope!” Melia replied cheerfully. “[Gardener].”

  Alastair choked on a laugh and turned away coughing while Jessica looked highly unamused.

  “But you’re not a [Bard].”

  “Nope.”

  “Not even a level.”

  “Nuh uh.”

  “So let me get this straight. You’re not a [Bard], you give out performance buffs, you have enough levels in [Rogue] to make an assassin wet themselves and now you’re also a [Gardener]?”

  Melia glanced up at her with an expression that said “what’s wrong with that?” She turned back to her hole and added, “Yep. Among other things.”

  “Other things,” Jessica repeated through squinted eyes, tasting the phrase like a particularly pungent cheese. “What the hell were you planning to be when you grew up?”

  Melia shared a look with Alastair, who had just recovered, and asked, “A dragon?”

  Alastair had to walk away to not die.

  Melia started to explain some of the skills she had, or rather, some of the items she could make with those skills. First was an [Enlarged Planter Box], which could fit a far greater amount of crops than should be able to grow in that space, due to some magical shenanigans that she innately understood but couldn’t explain. She had enough high level lumber in her inventory that she didn’t need to go out and gather any materials, and she could build the XXL versions. She would start with two plots, which if she did her math right would be the equivalent of a full acre of land in a 30 foot by 30 foot square. One of the brothers asked her how that worked and she started to explain, but he got a headache and asked her to stop. She smiled wryly and told them to not think too hard about it.

  Next was a foundation of [Planter Stone], which Melia didn’t really know what it did other than the game always made her put it in and the tooltip said it helped with irrigation and drainage.

  On top of that, which Melia was attempting to prepare for now, was going to be a layer of [Fert-L-Gro].

  “Fertilizer,” Jessica stated. “Magical fertilizer.”

  “Yeah!” Melia replied enthusiastically, “So the soil will be really healthy with lots of nutrients to grow lots of veggies!”

  “Green dragon?” Alastair whispered to Jessica, who elbowed him in the gut hard enough to make him double over.

  “Shut up,” she hissed.

  “But I’m missing some materials,” Melia grinned, having watched the entire exchange and ignored it.

  “What materials?” Jessica asked, resigned. Maybe they could help her out and trap her into joining them?

  “Well, I tried finding some this morning, but I think the area around the abbey is too low. I sifted through all the monster poop-“

  “You’re on your own,” Jessica immediately blurted. Hell no.

  “It’s not that bad,” Melia said, grinning massively. She didn’t mean to ask them for help gathering poop anyway. “And it doesn’t need to be super high level. I think I will go with you to Hammerfall. Do they have any livestock?”

  Melia, Jessica, and Alastair hitched a ride to Hammerfall on the back of a stagecoach. One of the buses that frequented the road Melia walked up on two days ago had dropped off some passengers to Abbyton, and while the Serenity Forest and Gold Coast zones were low level and thus didn’t really require armed escorts, a stagecoach worth its salt would never pass up exchanging an already empty seat for a little extra protection.

  Melia sat on the roof of the boxy bus and watched the world go by with a face full of wonder. She’d seen these trees a million times when walking down this digital path, but in the real world the forest really felt it deserved its name. The biggest threat to anybody was a roaming boar or stray wolf, but their levels were in the low 70s, peaking at a hundred at the highest. People could walk this path without fear, which several people did, surprised to see a gnome sitting on top of a stagecoach and returning Melia’s cheerful waves happily. The trip to Hammerfall was supposed to take several hours, but nobody expected trouble.

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  After an hour of bumping along on the roof, the forest quickly faded away like an invisible boundary had repressed the trees’ forward march. In the game this would have been the boundary between the zones, and Melia assumed it worked similarly in this world. The shady, cool avenue beneath the towering sycamores, full of greens and tans of healthy bark, transitioned into the heat of a summer sun baking a golden plain. Gold Coast was aptly named for both its color and its mines: a low mountainous ridge followed the coast, a rich source of the precious metal, while the rolling hills inland were home to acres and acres of growing crops. Mostly wheat and corn, Hammerfall and the surrounding villages were part of the western breadbasket, one of the biggest suppliers of grains for the whole kingdom.

  Melia stared up in the sky at a single passing cloud and a vulture slowly circling some cows. Without realizing she was doing it, she cast [Inspect]: level 172 Razorwing. Yes, still very low level comparatively even though it was clearly a step up from the forest. A twang sounded from above her and half a second later, the inspection screen she was looking at greyed out, the vulture dead and falling to the ground.

  “Don’t want any monsters disrupting your search for glorious poop,” Jessica’s upside down face smirked as Melia leaned backwards and peered far up at the girl standing behind her. “I can’t believe you agreed to come to Hammerfall with us just to gather manure.”

  “It’s important,” Melia shrugged, patting the roof next to her. Jessica sat down, stowing her bow in her inventory. “And that isn’t the only reason, obviously. I want to see how the Fire Festival has changed since I last saw it and I want to meet your team. Nice shot by the way.”

  “…thanks,” Jessica grudgingly said after staring at Melia for a while. She hated being looked down on by higher level people and normally if anybody complimented her on killing a monster close to a hundred levels below her with specialized skills, they were mocking her. The gnome’s face, as always, was bright as the sun above them and smiling without a care in the world. She probably meant it genuinely.

  A sad, dark part of Jessica wondered if the gnome even had a sense for what was good or bad for somebody so far beneath her own level. Some high level adventurers forgot what it felt like to be so weak after getting into the high 4 to 5 hundreds and it only got worse from there. And she didn’t even know what Melia’s true level was.

  Jessica sat down and stared contemplatively at the gnome, who either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Honestly Jessica couldn’t tell which was more likely. Or scarier. Something as powerful as an assassin that could kill hundreds of wolves in an hour should not be oblivious. That was a disaster waiting to happen.

  Melia was content to let the amber hills roll by, not at all perturbed by the glacial pace at which they passed. She always heard stories of people taking road trips with their families, and she remembered one from her early childhood right before her brother was born, riding up the coast of California. That memory was even hazy now, with her draconic memory only letting her perfectly recall exactly how hazy it was when she passed. She had seen rolling hills like this in the central corridor along the 5 freeway and remembered thinking how big and empty it was.

  That feeling hadn’t lessened, despite the fact that as people grew older and bigger, the world usually became a smaller place. Melia was actually smaller now than she was during that road trip, though she was infinitely more pleased with the view now than she was then.

  “It just kind of goes on forever, doesn’t it?” Jessica sighed from beside her. She sounded impatient, ready to be done with the trip already, a sharp contrast to Melia’s feelings.

  “Yeah,” Melia agreed happily, “It really does.”

  Jessica gave the gnome some side eye.

  “I get the feeling we’ve got a breakdown in communication here. I don’t mean that’s a good thing.”

  “And I do,” Melia shrugged, waving a hand toward the endless plains. “Isn’t it amazing?”

  “What,” Jessica smirked, “Sitting atop a stagecoach that a cow might be able to outrun?”

  “Yes,” Melia replied simply. Jessica’s smile faltered.

  “Really?”

  “Definitely. You miss these little things when they’re gone, we spend our youth so focused on getting from point A to point B that we forget about the journey along the way.”

  Jessica rolled her eyes.

  “Is that the wisdom of a race that lives several centuries without considering level longevity?”

  “No. It’s the regret of a person who spent the majority of their life locked in a cage while the world passed them by.”

  Jessica’s smirk disappeared entirely, replaced by something somber and thoughtful as she stared at the small gnome. If Melia was telling the truth, the gnome had been something of a powerful up and coming adventurer in her youth that somehow got injured enough to fatally wound her, where she somehow fell into a coma of sorts and slept through a hundred years while her body repaired itself.

  Jessica didn’t know what to say to that, if she should try and comfort her or how to ease the pain. If it was her, Jessica would be overwhelmed by despair, losing everything and everyone she’d ever known, but Melia hid it well, so she said nothing. Instead, she tried to take her mind off potentially long lived races missing out on centuries of life by satisfying her curiosity about the past.

  “What was it like, traveling around a hundred years ago?”

  Melia stirred, as if she was lost in thought and only just remembered she had a companion on the roof. She thought briefly about how travel would have worked a hundred years ago…in Los Angeles, California. In the early 2000s, before cars were all electric, the massive Metro retrofits and extremely congested freeways that were never designed for the daily traffic of 20 million people. She laughed, her shoulders shaking as Jessica gave her a peculiar look, and reached for her memories of the game. How did she and her friends get around, mostly?

  “We walked,” Melia shrugged. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Jessica’s mouth slowly fall open in disbelief.

  “Or rode mounts, if we could afford one.”

  Suddenly Melia had a pang of longing and sorrow for all her mounts. She had collected dozens, maybe hundreds, and a good portion, over 75 percent, were live animals like horses or more exotic beasts, as opposed to mechanical or magically enchanted things like striders or flying carpets. Animals that were now very much real in this world. Melia hoped they lived long, peaceful lives that were well cared for, instead of starving to death all alone. She wouldn’t miss most of them, since most of her mounts were simply obtained to fill out her collection, but one held a very special place in her heart, and if her Nightsaber tiger met a grisly end, she would be heartbroken.

  “You’re telling me you walked,” Jessica’s flat voice told Melia just how little she believed her. “You. You walked. Somebody who could probably murder enough mobs in a day to buy a dozen horses. You walked on your own two feet.”

  Jessica didn’t know exactly how strong the gnome was, but every time she pulled out some bizarre, random skills to a class she had no business leveling as a high level adventurer, the estimate crept up. It wasn’t at “yes, dragon” status yet, and she was totally going to tell Al about the “not-a-dragon who walks places”, but if the gnome couldn’t afford a cheap horse, she’d eat all her arrows.

  “If the situation called for it,” Melia shrugged. She was thinking mostly of the levels before players could buy mounts, imposed to make the world feel bigger since it took time to move around, and a sense of accomplishment for when they eventually saved the gold required to buy one. Mounts, especially in the early days before any expansions or quality of life upgrades, were expensive, and that wasn’t even considering the training and license. There were also places where players weren’t allowed to mount, like indoors or in most instances, but players chalked that up to trying to be lifelike, since most people wouldn’t try taking their horse inside an inn.

  “But no, I had a mount,” Melia found herself actually growing a little teary, though she couldn’t place why. Before a few days ago, that mount was nothing more than digital data, a bunch of pixels in a VR plane, and it had no personality or emotions. But she still felt attached, because she attributed a personality to it, from what she could tell of it during all of its animations and idle stance. Melia even gave it a gender and a name, calling her Midna, short for Midnight, after her rich, deep blue fur the color of the night sky or deep sea, with slightly lighter, greyish stripes like jagged thunderbolts. Her eyes were a startling, brilliant yellow like radiant stars, and they sometimes glowed in the dark.

  Jessica stared at the gnome who was clearly lost in memories, and thought that was the end of the conversation. As much as she hated to admit it, the gnome was right. The ride was peaceful, the only monsters out were still low enough for her to one shot if she blew all her cooldowns, and spaced far apart enough that she wouldn’t need to worry about them recharging before the next monster came along. And then the gnome went and said something utterly ridiculous.

  “Her name was Midna, my Nightsaber. I hope she had a peaceful life.”

  Jessica turned fully, pulling her legs up from where they were dangling off the side so she could stare down at the gnome and offer the entirety of her judgmental stare. Jessica didn’t know what was worse. The gnome walking, or the gnome riding a temperamental, finicky beast that could swallow her whole. And that didn’t even get started on the fact that the silly little gnome was hoping the terrifying monster, known for ferocity in battle, carrying on when their riders fell, dying gruesomely beside them, lived to reach a ripe old age and be pampered like some common house cat.

  “Now you’re telling me you, a gnome, owned a Nightsaber?”

  “Yes? Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because those are 7 foot tall war cats bred by the elves?”

  “Right? They’re adorable, aren’t they?”

  Jessica’s mouth fell open but no words came out. Her rage crashed violently with her disbelief and simmered to a cold, apathetic death.

  “No shot.”

  It was, however, extremely dragon-like.

  “Well,” Melia put a finger to her chin, “It was pretty difficult to build my reputation high enough to make them sell to me.”

  The rep grind, especially in the beginning before there were extra ways to earn faction reputation, was atrocious. It was only awarded by quests, in very small quantities, and a player needed to have the highest tier reputation, exalted, before they’d sell. Most factions started at neutral, and a few at unfriendly, but all the “starter races”, races players could pick to play as, all started at friendly. That meant she had to climb from friendly, to renown, honored, revered, heroic, and finally exalted, each of those a magnitude harder to pass. Melia was scraping the bottom of the barrel for quests when she first made the grind.

  “But…,” Jessica stammered as if the thought itself was ludicrous. “But you’re a gnome.”

  “Yes?” Melia asked perplexed. Why should that…oh. “Ahh, right. As I said, it was a long, hard grind.”

  In Ebonvale, there were no factions directly opposed to other factions, no “mortal enemies” between player races. That did not mean there were no grievances and beefs in game lore. Certain races had their grudges, quirks, and personalities. Dwarves were a good example of this, being brutally honest, almost rude, staunchly stubborn, but if they could be befriended, impossibly loyal.

  And then there were the elves and gnomes. Elves valued nature, the moon, and other Druidic types of themes. Gnomes were all about curiosity and invention, often without thinking about the consequences. In Ebonvale lore, the gnomes nearly eradicated their whole species due to a scientific mishap resulting in the destruction of their underground kingdom, and a widespread plague. A plague that spread from under their mountains into the elven lands above. The Everbloom, the elven capital lands, was partially transformed into the Evergloom before it could be contained.

  In game, it was a great way to establish “personality” in several game zones, introduce quests, stories, histories, and lore.

  In real life?

  Millions of people probably died, or at very best, were transformed into grotesque, horrifying abominations bereft of sanity and stripped of their humanity.

  Yes, elves probably had a very good reason to hate gnomes.

  And now that Melia was one of them, she would probably receive her fair share of hate, if she ever met an elf. It would be weird, because Melia loved elves, her best friend had played one.

  Also…now that Melia was insanely overpowered, perhaps she could do something to right her species’ wrong. A thought for later, perhaps.