Melia woke up to a gentle prodding on her tail. The fact that she had a tail worried her, until the memories of last night slowly came back to her. Her face heated up as she realized she might have gone a bit overboard.

  “Melia, as amusing as this is, I think I might need to get by you.”

  Melia opened her eyes fully and looked straight into Alastair’s. She was no longer under the effects of [Avatar], so it wasn’t like she was still huge (which would have been a real trip in any other setting), but she was sleeping on top of a massive pile of junk.

  Literally, junk.

  Anything in her inventory that had substantial size was used to pile up in front of the girls’ tent, where she had literally thrown everyone last night after dragging their bodies safely back to camp. They had been poisoned and were no longer drugged; they passed out as their bodies tried to repair. She didn’t even think how it would look to anybody else, tossing Al in with the girls. She peered around his head, wondering how they’d actually fit. This was a two man tent.

  With one full grown man and three women.

  No, best not to think about that. Especially since she just caught a glimpse of limbs tangled around each other. She hoped the girls didn’t mind being close.

  Melia hoovered all her stuff back into her inventory, taking note of one of the blocks of stone she’d been using as a pillow and two logs that made up part of the base. Surely she had better options in there.

  With his way no longer barricaded, Alastair sought refuge in his own tent, but it wasn’t long before Jessica stirred, found she did not care for her current circumstances, and went to join him.

  Loudly.

  That then woke up the other girls, and well, it was probably time everybody woke up anyway.

  It wasn’t early, so it wasn’t like they were disturbing anyone with the noise.

  In fact, almost all of the adventurers that had been commandeered for the raid yesterday had already left, either securing a ride in a carriage or on their own two feet. The party’s tent was alone in an empty field bordering the woods.

  It was almost as if yesterday never happened.

  “Where did it go?!” Y’cennia shrieked.

  Melia closed her eyes.

  Yesterday most certainly did happen. Events had come to pass that, answering for her previous lapse in judgement when roaring into the sky, she had needed to slay a dragon.

  In doing so, she inadvertently made many other mistakes, made people happy and sad, given out a pretty nifty buff, and exploded a “fearsome foe” more than two thousand levels beneath her. As a reward, she gave her new party one of her scales, thinking it might make up for some of their recent headaches.

  She really should have thought that through better.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Melia called into the tent weakly, already aware of how ineffective her words would be.

  “Don’t worry about it?!” the catgirl shrieked. Melia peeked inside to find the poor [Alchemist] bristling with her tail ramrod straight. Melia shrunk into herself. She knew the scale was valuable, but she never had the best understanding of money anyway. She was still in the “allowance” stage of her personal finances and earnings when her personal ability to bring home the bacon was removed, and in game she was rich beyond comparison. So to Melia, everything was either incredibly valuable or laughably cheap. Sometimes both, but never in between.

  So she understood the catgirl’s anxiety explosion, but her mouth moved without her thinking. Again.

  “Do you have any idea what that was?!”

  “Yes,” Melia said simply. Better than most, went unsaid. “It was just a scale.”

  “Just a scale, she says,” Y’cennia threw up her hands. “From an incredibly powerful dragon!”

  “I’ll get you another one.”

  “You’ll…what?”

  Y’cennia froze in her pacing of the tent.

  “I said I’ll get you another one.”

  “How?”

  Melia threw her hands in the air.

  “Are we really doing this? After everything I’ve said and done, do you still not believe me?”

  Melia pointed right to her own face.

  “I. Me. I am a dragon.”

  “B-but…,” Y’cennia stammered.

  “Prove it,” Jessica said firmly.

  Melia turned to see the [Hunter] standing behind her, fully dressed.

  “Prove you’re a big, mighty dragon. Transform. Or whatever. Right now all we see is a tiny gnome with some cute horns and a tail. You want us to believe you’re a big scary dragon? Turn into one.”

  “No.”

  Ellesea and Y’cennia looked a little shocked at Melia’s instant denial, but Jessica gave her a knowing look.

  “No?” she scoffed, placing her hands on her hips. “You won’t transform. Or is it ‘can’t’?”

  “Won’t,” Melia sighed. “I don’t want to break you.”

  Everyone, even Jessica, paused to consider the gnome.

  “What do you mean?” asked Alastair from behind. His hair was wet as if he dunked his head in a bucket of cold water, but otherwise he was wearing a clean, if slightly rumpled, shirt and pants. None of it was his normal adventuring gear.

  “What?” he glanced at the others still inside their tent as he sat down on a rock outside. “I figure if we’re having this conversation right now, I need to be part of it.”

  Melia turned to acknowledge him while the girls shuffled around in the tent, eventually crowding down onto Ellesea’s bedroll. It seemed like none of them were wearing their armor or gear today. Not that Melia minded or cared, since everybody needed a day off and after yesterday they probably deserved one, but it was strange seeing them without it. In an interesting twist, Ellesea was wearing a well tailored pair of pants and a blouse while Y’cennia wore what looked like a yellow sundress.

  Normally the [Mage] was inseparable from her iconic robes and staff, while the [Alchemist] wore a long sleeve shirt with leather reinforced pants, better to protect against the hazards of her craft.

  “So you claim that you’re a dragon,” Alastair said calmly as an opener. Melia resisted the urge to roll her eyes.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “But you’re a gnome,” Y’cennia complained. “So small.”

  “You realize that dragons have a human form, yes?” Melia asked, then she paused. “Actually, what do you know about dragons?”

  “First, yes, we do know that most dragons, at least ones that aren’t monsters, can take a human form. But, like, that’s a human form and not a gnomish form.”

  “Actually, there was a dwarf.”

  Y’cennia and Ellesea turned to stare at Jessica, who shrugged.

  “What? I looked it up after we met Melia. Apparently there was a black dragon. Responsible for turning the Ashlands into what it is today. This was hundreds of years ago when those were still lush plains and forests of the dwarven lands.”

  Ellesea and Y’cennia looked like they wanted to argue more, but Alastair kept them on track.

  “You won’t tell us your level, your class, or show us your true form. You said you don’t want to break us. What does that actually mean?”

  Melia took a deep breath.

  “Let me ask a few questions to help explain that. You know I was active a hundred years ago, yeah? Or at least, you’re familiar with the fact that a hundred years ago, the world was under great strain, turmoil, and stress. You’ve started calling it the Age of Upheaval. And we can all agree that there were some really gnarly bad guys back then, right?”

  Ellesea mouthed the word “gnarly” as Y’cennia elbowed Jessica in the ribs.

  “Yes,” Alastair answered.

  “What do you think of some of those monsters? People and creatures both, not every enemy of humanity was spawned by mana.”

  “They were terrifying, honestly,” Jessica said, “But anybody would tell you that. It’s what’s taught in schools and passed down as legend.”

  “And do you believe they were real?”

  “I don’t have to believe,” Jessica scoffed. “I can look at maps and see where they changed whole landscapes. Their power was very real.”

  “Could you imagine fighting against them?”

  “At my current level? No.”

  “And I’m guessing that, even if they didn’t find you as a threat at all and had no interest in you, you wouldn’t want to hang around them.”

  Jessica gave Melia a flat stare that told her all she needed to know about that.

  “So you admit that, against a creature powerful enough to change the landscape, even if it isn’t directly your enemy, you might be afraid of it. Does that sound fair?”

  “Yes,” Alastair added before Jessica could say something snarky.

  “So what do you think you would do when you came face to face with something more powerful than them? I helped kill a lot of those, you know.”

  It was true. Melia had, at one point during each expansion, joined various progression raids working toward first kills. She was never part of a specific guild, but she had enough connections to reliably join 3 to 4 whenever they needed somebody, if a regular got sick and couldn’t make it, or else they knew she was more reliable and consistent than one of their own. She wasn’t part of every single server first boss kill, but she had many, and she had cleared every encounter within the first 6 months of release every time.

  And that didn’t include any of the bosses she went back and soloed after the level cap was raised, she got better gear, and they otherwise fell into obscurity.

  Jessica and Y’cennia looked at her, confused, but Alastair and Ellesea’s jaws dropped.

  “So, now I’m telling you, I’m higher level than they were. I’m stronger, have more stats, and have a class that can do more than affect continents. I can see some of you having trouble processing that already, and it’s only so much. I’m not hiding it from you to lie to you or cheat you or anything like that. I just don’t want my new friends to get hurt…just because I’m me.”

  Alastair gulped and nodded, while the tent fell silent.

  “You beat some of those calamities?” Jessica eventually asked, her voice shaky.

  There were more than two dozen “end game” raid bosses over all the years that Melia played, and she didn’t have proof for every single one of them.

  But that didn’t mean she had no proof at all.

  She switched her title out to her old favorite, “-of the Shattered Sun”. She encouraged them to inspect her, knowing they could at least see her titles, and watched their stunned faces carefully.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “We got this for foiling the plans of The Executor,” she simplified. In the game, it was a reward for reaching exalted with the faction of rebels inside the raid who could be turned to help the players out, offering repairs and goods for sale. Strictly speaking they didn’t get it for killing the boss, but to even access the final boss in the first place, at least one person in the raid needed the title, because it meant they had the reputation required to get the last NPC to open the final door.

  For the next proof, Melia reached into her inventory and removed a ceremonial offhand item. It was level 80 when it dropped, but was pushed all the way to 800 in this world. It wasn’t a weapon, not exactly, but if a spellcaster or magic user didn’t use a two handed staff, they often carried around something in their other hand while their main hand held a wand, dagger, or sword.

  [Gorgol’s Third Finger]

  Level: 800

  Intelligence: 666

  Wisdom: 666

  Spirit: 666

  Equip: On spell cast, hex yourself for 6.66% of the damage dealt. Upon taking damage, the hex breaks, amplifying the amount by 66.6%, reflecting it back to the attacker, and healing for the same amount.

  Read between the lines.

  Melia handed the…thing…around the tent so each person could look at it. Feel it. Be absolutely sure it was real.

  Because, as Y’cennia suddenly found out with dawning horror, tossing it away toward Jessica while clamping a hand over her mouth, it was a finger.

  Specifically, Gorgol’s middle finger. The once normal demon drunk too greedily from the well of power and mutated into a gigantic, hulking fel-fiend. The finger, only comprised of the middle and top knuckle, was larger than Alastair’s leg, when the enchantment to shrink it into its holder wasn’t in effect. The flavor text, born from the developer’s signature sense of humor, was essentially saying Gorgol was flipping the player off. On top of the item doing damage to an already squishy caster class, making the wearer take damage to use it made this a tricky item indeed.

  “He didn’t need it after he was dead,” Melia offered with a shrug. As far as lore went, the middle finger of the demon dropped after players killed him. It made sense if somebody took it as a trophy.

  Ellesea took one look at it and scooted as far away on the bedroll as she could. She wouldn’t touch it and wouldn’t look at it. She could see the hateful, malevolent power that radiated from it, even now, so long after his death.

  “Kind of proving my point,” Melia smiled sadly at the squirming [Mage]. “You can feel it, right? Sort of like a palpable darkness creeping towards your soul?”

  “How can you bear to hold that?” Ellesea whispered as Alastair took it. “That…is evil.”

  “Perhaps it could be purified?” Alastair mused, though he himself was several shades paler than normal.

  “Imagine, then, what you would do against some of the Old Gods or Shadow Realmers?” Melia sighed. One of the earlier raids dealt with a Cthulhu-like eldritch creature in a creepy, horrifying Lovecraftian setting. But the end boss wasn’t the actual monster, only one of its many, many eyes. The eye was the size of a small house. It inflicted a debuff called [Insanity] just by looking at it when its gaze was on a player, and not even Melia wanted to know how that translated into real life.

  Melia could have easily given them a dozen more examples of her exploits, which she kept cluttered in her inventory. Nicknacks and trinkets to her now, no longer relevant as actual items since she long upgraded from them, but useful for jogging her nostalgia.

  Seeing how the girls were looking sullen and queasy, she held off.

  “If you were around back then, doing all these things, why haven’t we heard of you?” Alastair asked, keeping things on track. Around them, all the girls nodded fervently.

  “How would I know?” Melia shrugged. “I’m not responsible for history. Chances are, people knew about me, but they didn’t actually know me.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, for one, I never joined any of the big guilds.”

  “What?” Jessica blurted. “Didn’t you say you were part of Daybreakers?”

  “No,” Melia shook her head. “I said I was friends with Daybreakers. I knew them, we hung out a lot. Almost every day. But I wasn’t part of their guild.”

  “What guild were you part of?”

  “NMI,” Melia gave a lopsided smile.

  “I’ve heard of that!” Ellesea snapped her fingers. “There’s a guild house in the southern coastal district that bears that sign. It’s a legacy property, and it always causes an uproar whenever people want to try and tear it down to build there, because they can’t.”

  “Really?” Melia nearly laughed. There had been problems in the player housing market, too. She never thought she’d be the proud owner of a derelict beach house. Or a house in general, but here she was, and it sounded like somehow the old player zone may have been transformed into a noble’s district.

  “Never mind that,” Melia could revisit that later. “Another reason is pretty simple: you actually do know me. You just don’t know what I actually looked like. I told you my name when we first met. You laughed at it, yes, but I once went by Melia Marcus.”

  Ellesea’s mouth couldn’t fall open any wider, it already looked close to dislocated.

  “She was human,” Jessica crossed her arms, though she sounded much less confident than the first time she denied the possibility.

  “And besides, tons of people were named after old heroes-

  “Yes yes,” Melia sighed tiredly. “I’m aware. But I think you’re misunderstanding something. Changing your appearance is easy, especially if you’re only trying to convince people by sight and no other senses.”

  Even though Melia’s [Mage] really was human back during the game, she didn’t know how to explain to her friends about creating new characters without getting into the whole ball of wax that was “I’ve been reborn as my video game character in the video game world”. She didn’t plan to either, simply because she didn’t think it was possible. But to the point, even though Melia’s [Mage] was human, she spent more time than not transformed to look much differently. Changing size, changing races, polymorphing into various creatures…all these things were possible without ever touching the different ways to actually redesign a character.

  Melia made a show of pulling several items out of her inventory as she heard Ellesea mutter darkly under her breath.

  “Easy, she says. Oh, if only transmogrification was so simple!”

  “You have [Polymorph],” Melia pointed out, making Ellesea flinch. She didn’t think she’d been heard.

  “Yes, but that’s just a sheep, and the moment the target takes any damage, the effect breaks.”

  “True,” Melia agreed. “But if you put that sheep next to a real sheep, do you think most people could tell the difference?”

  “Well…no.”

  “As I said, fooling sight only.”

  The game never even tried to bring up things like scent or manasight, which may have had lore implications, but again Melia didn’t care. She had three things to show them, trinkets and toys by game logic, but astounding in real life.

  Melia picked up what looked like a prism made of crystal, nearly the size of her head.

  [Prism of Illusion]

  Level: 200

  Quality: 5 stars

  Rarity: Superior

  Use: take on the form and appearance of the person closest to you.

  Duration: 30 minutes

  Charges: 50

  Made by: Melia

  “I made that with [Enchanting],” Melia explained while tossing it up to Y’cennia sitting in the middle of the three girls. “Go ahead, use it.”

  Y’cennia did, with some trepidation, and the moment she did, closing her eyes and focusing on the fleeting power inside like a rainbow filtering through a window, she gasped. A puff of smoke exploded from the prism, shrouding her entirely, but as soon as it appeared, the smoke cleared. And instead of Y’cennia sitting between Ellesea and Jessica, two Elleseas stared at each other in great confusion.

  The middle Ellesea, in Y’cennia’s voice, stared at the real thing, her eyes going up and down, and blurted out, “Holy crap, you’re really short!”

  The real thing was instantly filled with indignant rage and began attempting to pummel the catgirl with the ineffective strength of a pure intelligence class: [Mage]. Jessica nearly fell over laughing.

  “That lasts for 30 minutes, but if you hate it so much you can cancel it at any time,” Melia grinned. “And for the record, Ellesea, you’re plenty tall to me.”

  That mollified the poor girl slightly, but she was now pouting because Y’cennia refused to change back.

  “Okay,” Jessica started uneasily, no longer the least bit sure about her argument, “But that’s only a half an hour-“

  “I don’t know if you were able to inspect the prism,” Melia interrupted, “But it was full. Each one of those has 50 charges when full, and I have thousands of them in my inventory.”

  The fact that one crystal could make somebody else look like her for 25 full hours made Ellesea lunge toward her double, trying to pry it from her hands.

  “It’s not perfect, it’ll get dispelled with too much damage or exertion, and it does nothing for your voice, as we’ve heard. It also only works on whoever is closest, which let me tell you, can be very shocking if you’re clearly expecting one thing and getting another. Regardless, not considering sleeping and other times when you’re preoccupied, I could take on somebody’s form and keep it for over an entire year straight.”

  Jessica shrunk back as Ellesea finally emerged triumphant with the prism in her hands, but Melia quickly snatched it from her and returned it. She pointed to the next item.

  [Orb of Deception]

  Level: 450

  Quality: Epic

  Take on a different form.

  This item was clearly from a dungeon, because it had a very basic description, without any of the markings of a craftsman or creator. It was purple, putting it at epic quality, meaning it was a very, very rare drop.

  Sadly, none of the team were high enough to use it, even though Melia let them all try. Most of the team were slowly starting to waver when it came to the question of Melia’s real race, but her generosity confused them, as dragons were typically very stingy and greedy.

  “This dropped from The Fel Court,” Melia explained, one of the base game’s original high level dungeons. It was an ancient, elven compound that had fallen to demonic rituals gone wrong. This was also before demons were introduced as a playable race, which sort of split “summonable fel creatures” from “humans with strong stats and small horns”. Things like satyrs and infernals roamed over the ruins of an elvish city.

  The [Orb] was a .01 percent drop from any mob in the instance, and Melia got hers from a Felhound.

  Melia took it back after everyone had a chance to look at it, activating it.

  She groaned as her spine creaked and cracked, joints popping in pain as her body reformed itself. In seconds, she went from the 2 and a half foot tall gnome to a 7 foot tall Minotaur, crouching so that she didn’t decimate the tent.. Melia shook her head, briefly glancing at her friends as they stared up at her in shock, but quickly dispelled it.

  The transformation was not nearly as pleasant as she hoped it would be, having never experienced any sort of sensation when using it in the game. Now, she found she probably wouldn’t use the thing much. Much too uncomfortable. And painful.

  “That,” Melia sighed as she took her natural size, “Is much more thorough than any spell or illusion.”

  In truth, her entire physiology had changed. She was, in that moment, entirely and completely a Minotaur.

  “The form one takes when they use the [Orb] is always the same, each and every time. But it only lasts for 30 minutes, and it has a 6 hour cooldown. I couldn’t sustain that like the prism, but you get the point.”

  The others nodded along, now even more curious to see what the last item would bring. Y’cennia, still looking like Ellesea’s twin, was bouncing up and down. It was a potion, and those were always interesting.

  “Strictly speaking, this is a poison, not a potion,” Melia began. “It’s called [Degenerate’s Desire], but a lot of people call it a ‘Brain Melter’.”

  Y’cennia leaned forward, clearly interested, while the others subtly shifted away from the small vial. It was larger than a standard potion, which in reality was only enough for a good mouthful. This was the same size as a small can of soda…not the normal cans, but the ones that always left Melia feeling like she needed two or three to be satisfied. Back when she was allowed soda, at least.

  It was a syrupy brown, too, and it fizzed a little bit with carbonation, making the comparison even more appropriate for the gnome, but she didn’t know how well that would translate over to this world. Oddly enough, due to the developers’ love of referencing pop culture and including crossover advertisements, soda actually did exist in this world. Melia was keen to try it, wondering how it would rate.

  In fact, Melia was very interested to see what lore made it into in reality, because there was a “Carbo-Cola” (complete with a less popular version “New Carbo-Cola), and they had a heated rivalry with the oh-so-cleverly named Pop-C. Sometimes, the developers were not known for their originality.

  But that was neither here nor there, though it should be said that [Degenerate’s Desire] was not a beverage available to purchase immediately in the game. It was locked behind an obscure fetch quest that chained on and on across multiple zones, born from a dwarf’s incurable thirst. He wanted something that wasn’t traditional dwarven ale, and was trying to break into the top 3 of the cola market.

  Needless to say, even though there were only two big cola companies, he did not make top 3.

  The drink nearly killed the dwarf, and it didn’t make him famous in the way he wanted, but it did cure his thirst.

  Among other things.

  [Degenerate’s Desire] had three different effects the player could receive upon drinking it.

  Two gave situationally useful effects and the third didn’t impact actual gameplay at all, the item was always designed to be a fun little gimmick with cosmetic effects.

  The most useful, with the least visible change, simply gave the player feather falling for 30 seconds. No visible change happened to the player other than the fact they fell slow enough to not take fall damage. Useful in not getting killed for jumping off a cliff.

  The second useful effect gave underwater breathing for 10 minutes. There weren’t a ton of underwater areas in the base game to begin with, so the only way a player would die to drowning is if they afk-ed. The startling part of this buff, and why the few people who bothered unlocking the drink drank it, was that it turned the player’s character into a skeleton. This came with a special heavy metal headbang emote which was useful when loitering in the main cities and dancing in tavern cellars and on top of mailboxes.

  The final effect was Melia’s favorite, and she would often chug through stacks of the potion until she got it. It shrunk the player’s size by 75 percent…and that was it. But as one of the very few ways to change player size, it was essential for those who cared about such things.

  It didn’t give any sort of benefit in dungeons, though there was a chance somebody who was good at pvp could use it to startling effect, but that wasn’t Melia’s interest.

  She picked up the potion, hesitated very briefly, and knocked it back.

  It tasted…much better than it had any right to taste, indeed, it had a sort of store brand, third party root beer feel to it. The moment she drank the last drop, she felt a little burp escape her, and with it she was enshrouded with a dense, opaque cloud.

  The girls yelped and Alastair muttered a reflexive “By the light,” as, instead of the black haired gnome with pink highlights staring up at them with a mischievous grin, there stood a gnome sized skeleton.

  It was suitably terrifying in its own right, not the least bit because there wasn’t a hint of explanation why the skeleton wasn’t crumbling into a giant heap of bones.

  There were no obvious enchantments keeping the joints together, no indication of intelligence or some other form of control or dominion. No flames burning in the eye sockets or some sort of ethereal, undead soul or heart.

  Melia cackled, and instead of her normally bubbly voice, all that came out from her chattering jawbones was a grating rattle.

  She only kept the transformation active for a few seconds, preferring to not scar her new friends and teammates.

  “See?” she asked as she reappeared with another cloud of smoke. “There are ways to make yourself look different.”

  The others stared at her with various emotions etched onto their faces, from incredulity to exasperation to the last vestiges of lingering doubt.

  “So what does this all prove?” Ellesea asked.

  “For the time being, that our gnome isn’t lying about being able to take different forms.” Alastair said.

  “I don’t know if I’m ready to call you one of the ancient heroes yet though,” grumbled Jessica. “And what kind of dragon is named Melia?”

  “Well,” Melia laughed sheepishly, “if you really must know, that’s my human name given to me by my human parents. My full draconic name is Meliastraza.”

  Her party blinked at her. Jessica summed it up best.

  “Damn,” she chuckled. “That’s a lot more impressive.”