Melia the Magnificent

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, shaking hysterically.

She was, literally, rolling on the floor laughing.

An outside observer might have questioned her sanity, but this would be incredibly naive. A stern parent, on the other hand, 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 on her own two feet.

But, it would be a shame to 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 crafting the occasional 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 protruding from her pauldrons in a pair of shorts and render her massively overpowered, it did not look good. She always transmogrified them to look like other items but the items she could transfigure 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 as revealing as it sounded. The outfit exposed a generous amount of skin, consisting of a corset that was cinched a little too tight to make everything up top “pop.” It had intricate lacework running up the front and back, ending in a pair of boy shorts that revealed entirely too much of her milky thighs now that Melia was actually wearing them. The outfit finished with a very sturdy set of thigh-high, black platform boots that added nothing to Melia’s 2 and 1/2 foot stature. Congratulations, she was now two inches taller!

The entire set was made from leather. It was a limited-time, cosmetic set, obtainable exclusively during the yearly Halloween seasonal events; it 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 make their helmet visible at all times. Otherwise, it was a very standard set of full plate mail. Or, somehow, the more risqué cloth set called “Elvira’s Enchanted Evening Gown,” which was based on 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 that she swore she would sort out “tomorrow” but never did. It held countless things that she thought were really cool, which held some sort of personal meaning to her, but her normal ensemble of overpowered gear was nowhere to be seen…it was 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 the way she switched her classes as a dragon, namely, by equipping different sets. But she didn't know how she felt about wearing boy shorts, too many belts, and two massive greatswords with serrated edges that were each 4 feet long.

These greatswords 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. Melia loved them. In truth, the swords themselves were not the actual Executioners she herself crafted nearly a decade ago; they were merely best in slot two-handed swords that she was able to transmogrify the appearance of, due to the fact that she still held her original copies.

Melia sighed and put aside the problematic thought of walking 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 changed to [Rogue] or [Assassin] as she hoped…as it should have when she put them on. In fact, 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 because she was somewhat familiar with the play style, given that it had 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, however, after too many players whined about other people being more special than they were.

But no.

Melia was stuck as something infinitely more terrifying.

Something that was never considered by the developers in their wildest imaginations. And the mere thought of it wrought worry deep within 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, then she’d rather be “[Planter of Flowers]” or something equally as harmless and cute…something that 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, she didn’t know how she felt presenting herself to the world as the high school Goth queen. Even if some hapless people 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 it and find out.

While, yes, in the game she had a level 100 [Priest], this was one of more tedious classes that she had leveled. This accomplishment occurred somewhere in the middle of her great grind to get all of the classes 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, in this new world, Melia could smell the magic in the air. She could see mana workings shimmering like the enchantment on her daggers, but this didn’t give her deep insight into a class she didn’t care about. Pretending to be a [Rogue], she had strange, vague impressions about the way to use her abilities, which both confused and excited her since she had never held a real weapon before and could barely remember holding a steak knife. And yet, as an idle thought, Melia decided to twist her wrist. The daggers spun and twisted in her hands with a show of unmatched Agility and a dazzling display of Dexterity. Her grin grew feral as she thought of the [Rogue’s] most famous skill.

[Stealth].

Melia quickly faded into shadow, and, for all intents and purposes, she was invisible. Her reflection was no longer present in the mirror. Melia quickly stored her discarded scale in her inventory, leaving her hoarder’s greed to scream 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. However, she already knew that the difference between worlds wasn’t a 1 to 1 transfer by virtue of her experience of the mansion alone. So the first thing she needed to do was find her bearings.

Well, this would be the second since the first thing had already been done; now she needed to find out what she wanted to do with this new life, her new chance at freedom. Melia could be anything, do anything, and there were strong enough odds that she 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 every one of them brought death and destruction to the realm, sometimes trying to take it over and 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 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 this was the title her 22-year-old self had chosen then 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, trapped inside a glass cage for over a decade, and now she craved human comfort. Companionship. Human touch. Grief swelled within her as she realized that 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.

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

She gazed much farther and wider than she thought possible. After a second of straining her eyes to glare into the horizon, something in her eyes 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 and blinking. She’d heard that reptiles used their eyelids to clean their eyes and help them see in certain environments, but she could never pronounce the name of the membranes.

But that didn’t matter, not when she could see crystal clear for what seemed to be miles, and where, on the horizon, there suddenly appeared Horizon, the capital city of the human lands. Horizon sat just as small and distant in the mouth of a sheltered bay, but, through her sharp eyes, she swore she could spot 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 Horizon was going to be her next destination.

Not to raze or make off with any princesses.

Razing cities and abducting princesses sounded like an absolutely legendary troll to pull when this was a game, but now that the world was real, it would be just plain wrong, especially as she thought about how trivial it would be.

Actually, Melia had good reason 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; it was 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 flight now that she was a real, living dragon. However, she wasn’t so sure she wanted to fly in the middle of the day within sight of a place that housed some of the strongest, most bored adventurers (players) milling about with nothing to do. It was nestled next to the low-leveled starting zones. And it was one of those zones that Melia fixed her eyes on…it was still far away but not a distant black speck to her normal sight. The trek was about a half-day’s carriage ride from the castle as she guessed by the few, ant-like specks that she could see traveling back and forth between the two capital cities.

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

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

Essentially, there was just enough space for new players 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. To begin, the first quest was simple: kill 12 wolves which sounded ferocious and unreasonable until players reminded themselves that they were in a video game, the wolves were also level 1, and they wouldn’t attack players unless provoked. The wolf quest was little more than wandering up to a wolf and auto-attacking it to death because 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: collect 12 bushels of grapes. But there were two key differences. It wasn’t a combat quest–not exactly–since the only way for players to get attacked was to accidently target a nearby mob instead of the grapes, which was designed to teach players how to interact with…interactables…in the world.

As a virtual reality game (somewhere 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 of the heavy lifting, and, honestly, 90-percent of the players eventually chose this convenient route after the novelty of harvesting grapes wore off.

Melia had run this quest on each of her 37 characters, even the characters that she 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 saturated by thoughts of picking a plump bounty of grapes, Melia started descending the mountain. As an area that was never designed to be accessible to players, climbing down on foot was going to be a challenge, considering Melia’s new size. She got accustomed to walking quickly, seeing as she hadn’t actually walked since she was 9 years old. The motion came back instantly. Something deeply ingrained in her returned with force, and she was marching forward as quickly as her tiny legs would carry her.

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

Her unease quickly vanished as she settled into a routine. For the first few steps she sat down, gingerly shuffled herself to the edge of a step, let her legs dangle off the edge, and hovered above the next step by several inches. She then stretched as hard as she could, cautiously lowering herself, wiggling her toes inside her boots, and 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 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 should she slip and fall. But she momentarily forgot 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. The small distance was not so trivial from her perspective, looking as if she was jumping off the roof of a house, or, at the very least, dropping from 5 feet in the air. She hopped and landed. Perfectly safe and sound. And in an incredibly anticlimactic fashion. She let out a weak chuckle, realizing how silly she was being since she was, in fact, a dragon and not a gnome. With this new-found confidence, she hopped down the rest of the stairs.

Travel moved much faster after that once Melia understood that she wasn’t a delicate flower that would blow itself away just by getting hit by a gentle breeze. The world still seemed huge to her as it always would at this new size; everything appeared 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 that 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 granted them access to climb up. It wasn’t straight, and, frankly, Melia didn’t precisely know how to find the path going down since she never used it going that way. Whenever players wanted to leave the mansion, they would simply warp out, but this was not an option for Melia because this was one of the first options she experimented with. It seemed her fast travel network had been 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 this was something she wanted to do. At present, she was still filled with joy over having legs, being able to feel the warmth of the afternoon sun on her skin–even if it prickled and started to burn her pale flesh–and reveling in the simple fact that she could feel moisture and dampness on her body…even if her high stats would allow her to likely 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 to the top of a boulder that would have reached the chest of an average human. She felt as if she was queen of the world. She looked down, utterly lost to finding a path but also utterly unphased. There was a tiny voice in the back of her brain that told her she could jump the entire way down, regardless of the hundreds or thousands of feet up she was, and that she’d be perfectly fine without a scratch; all that she’d have to do was climb out of whatever crater she created when she hit.

But she wasn’t quite that adventurous yet in the event that it was lethal. She wasn’t suicidal and the game did have fall damage. She settled instead on locating a boulder about 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. She came to a dead stop in a crouch and didn’t stagger in the slightest. She felt her grin grow.

The next leap was twice the length, like leaping off a two story building, but, in reality, it was only about 6 feet away. Her tiny body handled the jump with the skill and grace of an olympic gymnast. She began laughing with childlike glee. Soon she was bounding from greater and greater heights, comfortably ranging from 20 to 30 feet, as if she was soaring across great, open fields or cascading down skyscrapers…small ones at least. That seemed to be the limit of her comfort as she viewed one particular boulder groaning ominously as she landed, although she knew that she could survive a much, much further jump. Nevertheless, with the wind in her hair and her eyes crinkling into crescents with exhilarating joy, she found that she had all the time in the world, and a little “boulder hopping” was exactly what she needed.

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

As fast as she was going, it still took Melia an hour to reach the base of the mountain. When she looked back, she stared at a sheer cliff of imposing rock, and, despite having just descended, she wondered how anybody could manage to climb it. In fact, from her position at the very edge of the base, she couldn’t even see the mansion and wondered why anybody would ever try climbing up in the first place..

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

Or that they would be ripped to shreds if a wolf decided to sink its teeth into her.

A slight shift of motion in the nearby treeline made Melia whip her head up, staring at a sycamore tree that, from her vantage point, stretched into the heavens like a redwood. Indeed, she saw a wolf, which she instinctively cast [Identify] on without considering whether she still could or not. All players had a base level of [Inspect] so they could gauge their chances against mobs and other players, but 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. Moreover, it was generic with the ability to give a basic description to the caster if their levels were in a similar range…and everybody had it. If the object’s level 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 that she was staring at it. It immediately scampered away and disappeared into the woods. Melia frowned and suddenly felt unsure of herself; was the wolf 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? A 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 because it seemed way too high. This was supposed to be a starter zone, so there was clearly a disconnect between her expectation and reality.

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

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

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

At some point in her advancing 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, that it simply toggled on and off while costing a minor energy drain. After watching her energy bar, she found that 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.

She was surprised to find night falling around her since this aspect of her new body she understood intellectually but had never considered it experientially. Now the awareness showed its worth. Gnomes, in lore, lived deep underground, sometimes deeper than the dwarves. All gnomes had darkvision, and Melia–if she happened to think about it–would have guessed that the world around her would have turned greyscale like some sort of night vision in a budget action movie. It did not. Her surroundings darkened noticeably, but the world stopped getting darker when it touched the eve of twilight: after the sun had gone down but still plenty of light left to see. It was during one of her many reflective moments when she literally paused to smell the roses, or, rather, she simply inhaled deep lungfulls of air and let reality wash over her, that she heard the sounds of nightlife. She looked around curiously and spotted an owl.

Suddenly remembering gnomes and their darkvision, she mentally commanded it to go away. And it did. Her eyes shifted again in a way like they did when she peered into a great distance, but now she was engulfed by darkness and plunged into inky blackness. She doubted anyone or 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 with uncounted miles disappearing beneath her feet.

She did not stop for several hours, until 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, she could hear the sound of hammers and picks slamming into stone as men, early to rise, were already hard at work. The world lurched into motion for another glorious day.