Tessa didn’t black out. There was no gap in her consciousness. All the of the impossibility of what was happening to her crashed over her awareness as her world fractured and dissolved around her.

The moment of transition from one world to the next differed for each person, based mostly on their capacity to absorb and process it. Many did pass out, only to awaken with the lingering suspicion that they were in a dream, or a coma, or dead and stuck in some strange afterlife. Tessa didn’t have that luxury though. She watched her body dissolve into light but her stream of thoughts continued, apparently in spite of the lack of a body to house them in.

“I’m dying!” she said, as the sparks that made her up streaked across a sky filled with other streaking lights.

“Or I’m dead?” It sounded ridiculous to say, and instinctively she knew it wasn’t true. She wasn’t “going into the light”, she was the light, however that had happened.

She thought of moving her hand and the glowing outline of her arm moved just as she’d imagined. It was effortless, as was twisting around and curling up into a ball. All she couldn’t do was change direction.

In the vast starry sky there was a star, a drop of glittering crystal brilliance which called to her.

Or maybe she was calling to it?

There were currents moving within her Tessa couldn’t name, impulses she was only barely aware of but which sprang from a well of intuition that stretched well beyond her earthly knowledge. In the pit of her stomach, intangible though it might be, she knew the destination before her was the one place in all the multiverse where she absolutely had to be.

“If this is a psychotic break, it’s a really pretty one,” she said, admiring for a moment the tapestry of living light which flowed around her. No human before her had ever seen a sight to rival the cosmos wide panoply which sprawled out in every direction. No human could, their eyes weren’t built to capture infinity, and Tessa was glad to the point of tears that for one brief moment she was something other than human. Something which could see creation’s reaches and be one with its glories.

Then a planet hit her.

Traveling as fast as she had been, the crystal star that had been calling her went from a distant speck of light to filling the entirety of her vision in the blink of her immaterial eye. Landfall happened so shortly afterwards that Tessa was surprised that she didn’t leave a crater from the impact. That was the thing with ghosts though. Being bodiless meant colliding with a world at light speed wasn’t exactly going to scuff her up.

“What….the…” She wasn’t dead. She was a ghost, but she knew she wasn’t dead. Being a ghost was normal. And fixable.

Her mind reeled as the world swirled around her. This wasn’t making sense at all.

Except that she knew exactly what she had to do.

The was a [Heart Fire] brazier inside the chapel on the edge of the town square. She needed to take a spark from it. That would let her fix the whole “being a ghost issue”.

She heard a series of low howls in the distance. They sounded just like the sound file had.

Sound file? Tessa struggled to bring her thoughts together and make sense of what she was seeing.

Everything was disorienting, but it was all too familiar too.

“I’m inside the game?” she said, shaking her head as she stared at a perfect replica of [Sky’s Edge], the town Pillowcase had been fighting in. It was covered by the misty haze of the [Dead Lands], with all the color and most of the sound washed away but it was still easy to recognize the piles of boxes she’d spent several minutes carefully weaving around. She felt weightless, and insubstantial, but the world around her was solid. That was something to start with.

Part of Tessa wanted to go into immediate denial mode. “No, it’s not possible”, “I can’t be in the Fallen Kingdoms, Broken Horizons isn’t real”, “This is ridiculous, I must be dreaming”. It would have been easy to write everything off as a hallucination, but with each moment that passed her spinning thoughts were calming down and the solid blandness of the environment was seeping into confirm that, however strange it might be, the ground she stood on was real.

“I can’t even begin to believe this.” The woman who spoke was Tessa’s age. She was translucent, just like Tessa was, with the hint of a loose T-shirt and baggy sweatpants covering her ghostly frame. Tessa smiled. With all of the strangeness of seeing [Sky’s Edge], there was something fundamentally comforting about seeing someone who looked like a normal person rather than a hyper-exaggerated game model.

“I’m guessing you’ve got no idea what just happened either?” Tessa asked. Around them, beyond the ruins of the buildings of Sky’s Edge’s town square, the howls rose again.

“Yeah, not exactly,” the woman said. “I’ve got no idea how it happened, but it’s pretty obvious what it looks like has happened. We’re in Broken Horizons. Like, for real.” After a moment of sizing Tessa up, she added, “You’re Pillowcase, aren’t you?”

Wheels clicked into place in Tessa’s mind.

“Yeah. And you’re Lost Alice?”

“Yeah.” The howls were drawing closer. “We should get into the chapel.”

The [Hounds of Fate] were a game play element in Broken Horizon’s designed to keep the players from abusing the ghost form state. Tessa decided she had very little interest in discovering what function they might serve in a world where the Fallen Kingdoms were real.

“Wait for us!” a young girl called out. An even younger boy was trailing behind her.

Tessa blinked wondering where a pair of children could have come from. Broken Horizons, like most MMOs, didn’t have child characters around for events where people were being killed. Despite the immense amounts of casual violence in the setting, violence against innocents typically only occurred in backstories, never as an event the players could witness first hand.

“I’m Rip Shot,” the girl said. “This is Matt.”

The boy waved shyly.

Tessa reevaluated her guess as to their ages, trying to take into account how kids looked younger than she remembered when she was their age. At first Rip Shot looked like an early middle schooler but, with the lens of an old lady of six and twenty years in place, Tessa guessed Rip was more likely a freshman in High School and Matt Painting was probably the same age, just slow to hit his growth spurt.

“Get inside,” Lost Alice said, gesturing to the closed door of the chapel.

In theory the [Hounds of Fate] wouldn’t be an issue if the ghosts didn’t stray too far away from their bodies or the direct path between the bodies and the [Heart Fire] but no one seemed thrilled to test that in the face of the ever approaching howls.

Rip Shot moved through the door first, stepping through without opening it after her hand passed through the door handle. Matt went second, nodding gratefully to Tessa and Alice.

“After you,” Tessa said, stepping to the side and scanning the town square to see if there were any signs of approaching danger.

Apart from the grey fog which covered everything in a thin sheet and gave the [Dead Lands] their uniquely haunted look though nothing move. The “all lifeless and grey” aesthetic had seemed creepy to Tessa when she first saw it, but over time she found the soft lighting and gentle silence strangely peaceful. However bad things were going, and whatever disaster was befalling the party she was with, a trip to the [Dead Lands] meant at least a few moments of peace to collect her thoughts and calm down before heading back to the fray.

Inside the chapel, Alice, Rip, and Matt were waiting for her. Tessa could see flickers of other people as well but the images were never more than flashes.

“So there’s at least a few people hiding out in here,” Alice said, pointing to one of the flickering images nearest to the [Heart Fire].

Tessa knew those might be the players who’d fled to huddle in the chapel before the Wraithwings showed up.

“How do we get back to being alive?” Rip Shot asked, as she warmed her hand near the [Heart Fire].

“Probably the same as in the game,” Alice said. “Just got to take a spark of flame back to our bodies or we should be able to reincarnate here.”

“How do you do that though?” Rip Shot asked. “We’re new here. We just started playing today.”

A sinking feeling plunged through the bottom of Tessa’s intangible stomach. They were newbies?

Getting drawn into the Fallen Kingdoms had been a dream of Tessa’s for years, and while she was old enough to know that the reality wasn’t going to be as fun as playing the game had been, part of the dream had always been predicated on the idea that the mastery and skill she’d spent years developing would come along with her.

She had no idea if any of the skills she’d once had were really going to transfer over, but the sense of familiarity with the world she was seeing around her, ghostly and strange though it might be, felt like it was going a long way towards keeping her sane for the moment.

New players though? They wouldn’t have any of that. If Tessa’s guess about their ages was right, then this was probably their first massively multi-player online world. There was going to be so much they didn’t understand, and so much they would have to learn the hard way.

What would burning to death because you didn’t know to move out of the path of a fireball feel like in this world? Or crumbling to dust because you didn’t remember to bring a [Counter-Curse Charm] when you fought a [Mummy]?

The Fallen Kingdoms were home to wonders beyond count, but there were so many horrors waiting to devour the unwary too.

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” Lost Alice said, her thoughts apparently running on a parallel track to Tessa’s.

“What…?” Rip Shot asked as she quickly pulled her hand away from the [Heart Fire].

“It might be safer to stay like this,” Tessa said. “There’s nothing in the [Dead Lands] that can hurt us. If you go back for your body, the Wraithwings will still be out there waiting for you.”

Tessa paused when she finished speaking. Something about “[Dead Lands]” had sounded strange but she couldn’t quite place what it was.

“What about the howling?” Matt Painting asked. “What are those things?”

“That’s the [Hounds of Fate],” Alice said. “They hang out and keep ghosts from wandering around too far. As long as you stay inside the chapel, they shouldn’t bother you.”

“I read about them,” Rip Shot said. “But how do we know they’ll still act like that? I mean this isn’t really the game is it? Everything looks too real.”

Tessa had to give her that point. Even with the best monitor and video card on the planet, there wasn’t a game that had ever been made that could match the clarity of the world around her. The mist that shrouded everything was thinner inside the chapel and the detail work on the pews and altar was easy to make out through it.

Tessa brushed her hand over the top of the small desk where coin offerings were collected to confirm that it wasn’t a simple model with a wood texture painted on it. Looking closely, it had the richness of minor blemishes and details which no game could or would bother to deliver.

“I think we have to assume that everything is real,” Alice said. “It doesn’t make sense, and we don’t know how or why we got her, but if we try to pretend this isn’t happening, we’re going to get eaten by something unpleasant. I’m just hoping that since whatever this is went to all the trouble to look like BH that it’s going to follow BH’s normal rules.”

“If it’s following the normal rules, shouldn’t we be able to log out?” Matt asked.

“We’d have to be able to bring up the menu for that and I don’t see any game interface to…work…with?” Tessa’s voice trailed off. She was wrong. The moment she thought of the interface for the game it had appeared before her, hovering in the air with its usual icons and menu options.

And at the bottom, looking the same as it ever did, the [Logout] option was waiting.

Tessa wished, more than anything, that she could just talk to Lost Alice. They were playing together in their struggle to survive the buggy Wraithwing event, but the constant maneuvering Tessa had to do with Pillowcase meant any kind of collaboration was basically impossible.

Which sucked. They had tactical options, plenty in fact, but they could only take advantage of them if they coordinated their actions and without voice chat, Tessa had no idea how to convey the plans she was coming up with to someone she’d never worked with before.

> Lost Alice said: “Think we can just outlast the event?”

Tessa couldn’t type in chat, but Alice’s player had the advantage that Alice was standing still and focusing on a single ability, which left her player free to type chat messages as much as she wanted.

Tessa wanted to answer and say “no, with a buggy event there was no telling when, or if, it would ever end.”  Eventually the servers would be rebooted of course, so it couldn’t literally be endless, but one of the two of them would make a mistake long before that happened.

“Hell, I’m tired enough to fall asleep and I’m not the one who’s been running for ten minutes,” Tessa said, wishing the microphone on her headset could magically carry her words into the game.

It wasn’t an unreasonable request. Several games had built in voice chat and allowed player to auto-join team channels. Tessa grumbled at the twin fact that she and Lost Alice weren’t actually teamed up, and that Broken Horizons was an old enough that they’d never included voice chat in the game client even if she and Alice had been teamed together.

“What we need is to kill one of these damn things,” Tessa said, looking for a spot in the route she’d worked out where she could afford to square off against just one of the Wraithwings.

Even if it was only for a few seconds of attacks, just enough to do more damage than the Wraithwings could heal, if that was even possible, that would be all she’d need. A move like that which she could repeat over and over again would let her whittle down one of the Wraithwings, and with enough wittling, she and Lost Alice would be able to claim at least a partial victory from the whole mess. Not to mention that a dead Wraithwing meant a chance for loot and experience!

Tessa also guessed that, unless the rewards were as buggy as the event itself, killing a Wraithwing would result in an incredible amount of character progress. Where killing a typical level 1 monster might reward the character with one tenth of the experience needed to advance to level 2, the reward for killing a Wraithwing should be enough to shoot Pillowcase up at least into the double digit levels.

Usually the game avoided giving out rewards which were that large, but it also usually avoided putting low level characters into such ridiculously unfair encounters. Also, even with that much of a boost, Pillowcase would still have a long way to go to reach the maximum level of 99. Skipping past the lowest levels would mean getting access to new areas sooner and allow Tessa to play with a better selection of the [Soul Knights] skills and spells.

Unfortunately for her, the pack of Wraithwings she was leading around were clustered too tightly for her to do more than take a single swing at them as she rounded the one set of barrels in the town square where the Wraithwings had particular trouble following her.

Pillowcase’s swings weren’t focused on any specific Wraithwing and rarely hit any of them at all, but the swings were enough to provoke the crowd to continue following her rather than deciding to race over and drag Lost Alice off to wherever their lair was.

>Lost Alice said: “Looks like the chapel’s safe. Can you make it there?”

Tessa glanced across the town square as Pillowcase ran another lap. The chapel was unharmed by the Wraithwing’s assault. The other buildings in town were in varying stages of wreckage from the Wraithwings attack – their acid breath had dissolved a number of walls  – but the chapel looked exactly as it had at the start of the battle.

In game, the lore said that [Heart Fire] chapels were protected by the mandate of the Ancient Gods who forged the Fallen Kingdoms from the blood and bones of the Primordial Titans who existed before time began.

In practical terms, the developers couldn’t allow the respawn points to be destroyed or when a character died they’d have nowhere to go and a player who was stuck with a character as bodiless ghost forever was a player who was going to unsubscribe from your game forever.

>Pillowcase said: “n”

It wasn’t much of a response to Alice’s question, but it got the general idea across. Tessa just hoped Alice could figure out the reasoning behind it on her own.

Tessa had been forced to “kite” monsters often enough with Glimmerglass when a weak Tank couldn’t hold their attention. Kiting, as the name implied, worked best when the character was able to keep the monsters away from themselves. Since the monsters moved roughly as fast as the characters did, that meant the only option was to stay constantly in motion, as Pillowcase was while she ran around and around the village square with the ever growing pack of monsters fluttering behind her like a kite.

When it was done correctly, the strategy worked great since the monsters never got close enough to unleash the attacks their coding was telling them to make, but it fell apart the moment the character who was kiting tried to stop.

Tessa knew that Pillowcase could make it to the chapel door with no problem. She kept passing it on each circuit she made around the town. The moment she stopped to open the door though, the eighteen or twenty Wraithwings behind her would catch up and all of them would unleash their attacks at once.

If the game were a bit more realistic, Lost Alice could have opened the door for her, but that level of realism would beg the question of why the Wraithwings couldn’t simply follow them through the door. Or open it themselves, since they did have hands of a sort.

Tessa was frustrated by the problem, but also thrilled at the challenge it presented, both emotions fueled by how much she was allowing herself to be absorbed into the game. History told her that failure and defeat was by far the most likely end result of PIllowcase’s somewhat silly endless jog around the town square, but that didn’t matter. That there was even the chance of success, in whatever fashion that success might take, stirred her blood just like it had when she was a kid.

She smiled. Even in the event of a total failure, she’d still have the enjoyment of grousing about a monumentally stupid encounter.

Except that she didn’t have a guild anymore, so who was she going to share her stories with? There were people at her work who’d played MMOs, but she didn’t know of anyone who played them still, and even if she did, she wasn’t sure she wanted to connect with any of them like that.

She shook off the thought as unimportant. She had what she wanted right in front of her.

> Lost Alice said: “I think we’re the last two left here. Everyone else made it inside or got hauled off.”

An arrow and a pink bolt shot past Pillowcase and slammed into two of the Wraithwings.

> Lost Alice: “I stand corrected.”

Tessa scanned her screen as she continued maneuvering Pillowcase around the town square. She couldn’t see any other player characters in the town. The trajectory on the arrow and [Mind Bolt] though meant that they had to have been launched from somewhere nearby.

> Matt Painting said: “We’re still here! We can help!”

“What the hell?” Tessa asked her monitor. To respond to the local chat, “Matt Painting” had to be close by, but there was no one beside Lost Alice and Pillowcase on the screen at all.

It was possible to turn invisible in Broken Horizons of course, but not as a level 1 character fresh out of the tutorial.

Tessa pulled the camera back and kept her eyes peeled. A moment later another [Mind Bolt] shot across the screen and burned into a Wraithwing. Tessa tracked it back to…the empty porch in front of the town’s food shop?

> Lost Alice said: “Where are you?”

> Rip Shot said: “We fell off the map. There’s a hole at the edge of the porch. We can still shoot out though.”

Tessa cackled. She couldn’t help herself.

Game glitches could take many forms. One of the simplest being that the pieces of virtual landscape weren’t always perfectly aligned with one another. All it took was for there to be a small gap between two sections – like, for example, the edge of the town square and the edge of the store’s porch – and the game would treat it like a hole in the world.

Typically dropping into a geometry glitch would result in the character falling into an undefined void until they exceeded some maximum position the game could support, at which point they’d either be marked as dead or teleported back to a safe location, depending on how kind the developers were feeling when they wrote the error handling code.

Occasionally though, the areas outside the game’s mapped terrain would have other things in it. It could be anything from a few pixels the developers forgot to delete, to objects that were being stored in a spot where the players couldn’t see them for whatever reason.

Tessa found it hysterical that the buggy encounter with the Wraithwings might be winnable thanks to the equally buggy work on the area’s 3-D modeling team.  It wouldn’t be the first time competing bugs had come together to produce a feature, and given how early the bugs were showing up Tessa knew it wouldn’t be the last. She just hoped that when the next bug hit, it wouldn’t have any serious ramifications.

> Pillowcase said: “yay!”
> Pillowcase said: “fight!”

Communicating in one word sentences was difficult but surviving while typing more would have been impossible so Tessa made do as best she could, while in the back of her mind she ran an old series of calculation.

Could they pull off a full victory by exploiting the geometry bug? In regular play Tessa wouldn’t even have tried. Exploiting bugs in the game was an excellent method of getting yourself banned from play forever. In this case though the impact wasn’t likely to ruffle many feathers. The whole encounter with the Wraithwings was broken and the rewards for beating them, assuming there were any, would probably be rolled back when the, for more serious, logout bug was fixed. All they were really playing for was bragging rights, and neither Tessa’s inner 14 year old nor her outer 26 year old selves were willing to give those up.

Looking over the clutter in the town square, she picked out a new route, one which pulled the swarm of Wraithwings into a tighter circle and gave Matt and Rip Shot unrestricted access to fire on the monsters.

The tighter circle meant maintaining Pillowcase’s distance from the Wraithwings grew even more difficult though. With each pass around the circle, Tessa had to sending Pillowcase into a diving forward roll to gain a little ground and evade the more frequent attacks which the Wraithwings had opportunities to pull off as they came ever closer to finally catching her.

> Lost Alice said: “Careful, you need to keep attacking them too.”

Tessa flicked a glance over to the swarm and it growing diffuse as its members lost interest in her.

The first to go switched its course ninety degrees in an instant, making a beeline for Alice the second she popped up to the top of its threat list. Tessa had Pillowcase roll again and race after the Wraithwing. As she did though more of the monsters split away, heading towards the porch Matt and Rip Shot were hiding under.

“Gotta hope the geometry glitch only let’s players get through it,” Tessa said as she clicked to have Pillowcase slash at the Wraithwing that was homing in on Alice.

Her blow went wide – she hadn’t quite caught up to the Wraithwing – but it passed close enough that compulsion her attacks possessed was able to reach out and snare the monster’s attention. It turned and spewed an acid breath attack on her, but thanks to the attacks slow animation time, Pillowcase was already on the other side of the Wraithwing and sprinting away before the acid could land on her.

“Safe!” Tessa yelled in triumph.

> Pillowcase has been defeated by Wraithwing.

By the time Tessa saw the animation of the two other Wraithwings who’d managed to flank her, Pillowcase’s health had already been reduced to zero and she was tumbling towards the ground.

She watched as the swarm dispersed, heading towards Alice and the two under the porch, and sighed. They hadn’t even taken out one of the Wraithwings. And it was her fault.

She felt sick.

And cold.

And her hand was glowing.

Tessa blinked. That wasn’t right.

It is time…

Staring at her fingers, she watched tiny motes of chromatic light rising from each of them as her hand turned slowly transparent. Her breath had stopped. The cold grew even more intense.

Mogwin landed on her shoulder.

Not Pillowcase’s shoulder in the game.

Tessa’s real shoulder. In real life. Her shoulder that was connected to an arm which had become nothing more than a luminous outline of the limb it once was, and even that was fading as Tessa watched.

Come Hero…

The dialog in her headphones felt like she’d cranked the volume knob to 11. She could hear the words so clearly, but she had no idea what they meant.

The Gate Is Open…

Tessa felt her heart slam blood through her veins like a freight train. She was dissolving and the light was going…somewhere. It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t sane. But it was what was happening.

Follow Your Soul…

Tessa heard bells, clear, bright bells ringing. There were hundreds of them. Or thousands. But only one called to her. She closed her eyes, trying to push away the impossible sights before her, but in the darkness she saw stars shooting up all around her.

Find Your True Self…

Tessa opened her eyes to find the world around her fading into shadows. Something was coming for her. Something that knew her. Something that wanted, that needed, to destroy her.

Something she had to stand against.

…And RISE!

The world didn’t go away.

But Tessa did.

Stabbing chest pains are never a pleasant part of the day. That the ones which gripped Tessa corresponded with Pillowcase being clawed by one of the Wraithwings was eerie but Tessa knew there was a sadly mundane explanation for it.

The burrito wrapper at the bottom of her kitchen garbage basket had warned her that it contained a number of ingredients which wouldn’t sit well on her stomach. She’d known better than to buy the dreadful thing in the first place but she’d been tired and she’d craved the tangy sauce that came with it, so she’d over ruled the voice of experience which tried to warn her away from buying the gut wrecking dinner, and then warned her even more strenuously before she ate it. As usual though, she hadn’t listened to that wiser voice.

The worst part of her suffering wasn’t the odd gas pains, as it turned out though. The worst part, the part she desperately hoped she would remember next time, was that in the end the burrito hadn’t even been that good.

Getting an antacid, or other remedy for the pain didn’t cross her mind. How her body was feeling at that moment was secondary to the disaster that was unfolding in the game.

Grabbing the Wraithwings’ attention had worked out great, at least insofar as she had absolutely convinced them that they wanted to focus on killing Pillowcase rather than pay any mind to the healer whom they’d been chasing.

The problem was, the Wraithwings seemed more capable of accomplishing their murderous task in the blink of an eye.

“I’m down to one hit point?” Tessa stared at the screen as she threw Pillowcase into a dodge roll to evade attacks for a moment and create some space from the Wraithwings.

A single Wraithwing had hit her once and all of her health had been stripped away. That left her with an unpleasant chill. She knew what had happened. The “One Shot Code” had come into play.

The One Shot Code was an immersion breaking change which the players had more or less forced the developers to implement after one too many foes were given such ludicrously damaging attacks that there was no chance for even the toughest, most well geared of players to survive them. In response to an unusually unified wave of backlash, the devs had put in a special bit of code which said that most monsters weren’t allowed to defeat players in a single hit. The idea was to allow some form of counter-play where the players would at least have a tiny window to react to the monster before they were defeated.

In practice, that generally meant that players spent the time between the first and second hit vainly grasping for anything they could do to save themselves only for the illusion that they might have a chance to be crushed a second later when the monster attacked again.

What was weird was, the One Shot Code shouldn’t have applied to the Wraithwing Assault. That wasn’t because it wasn’t in force. Event related monsters, like the Wraithwings, were subject to One Shot limitation the same as the normal monsters were. Typically though it didn’t come up because Event Monsters were configured to be “level-less” – meaning characters of any level could fight, and survive, them.

The developers’ intention was that both high and low level characters should be able to participate in the grand events which happened in the world and that everyone should get something out of it. That could only happen if the monsters hit the characters differently based on their levels. So low level characters would take small hits that represented a meaningful portion of the health, and high level characters would take much larger hits but which would represent about the same portion of their health as what the low level character lost.

The goal of a game event after all was to bring the players together, not slaughter them by the droves.

“This is definitely a buggy event.” Tessa’s iron grip on the mouse reflected her irritation. Dying wasn’t a big deal. She’d done it countless times on Glimmerglass and, with Pillowcase set as a tank, she knew she would get knocked down even more often. What bothered her was the sheer ineptitude of the design work.

The World Shift expansion was supposed to be a chance for Broken Horizons to bring in new blood to the game, either in the form of returning players like her, or new ones who hadn’t been tempted to play it yet. Throwing new players into a meat grinder right as they finished the barest bit of the tutorial meant there was an excellent chance that a lot of potential new players would leave the game in frustration before they got to see any of the fantastic things it offered.

That wasn’t going to be her. Tessa knew how rewarding the game could be if you broke through the difficult patches, but it galled her that she might be alone in that and all the good work the developers had done would go to waste if the general public thought the game was a flop as had almost happened with the expansion which drew Tessa to Broken Horizons in the first place.

> Lost Alice casts [Minor Blood Channel]

>[Minor Blood Channel] heals Pillowcase for 10 health!

Tessa watched Pillowcase’s health bar fill back up to full. The healer she’d “saved” was returning the favor!

A Wraithwing pressed forward and tagged Pillowcase again. Once more all of Pillowcase’s health except for the last point drained away.

“These things can’t be intended for this zone,” Tessa said as she looped Pillowcase around a box, taking advantage of the Wraithwing’s poor pathing function to create enough space between them to escape the Wraithwing’s follow up hit.

> [Minor Blood Channel] heals Pillow case for 10 health!

The furthest Wraithwing turned away from Pillowcase at that. The game’s monsters had very simple rules they followed when it came to who they would attack. People who healed a target a Wraithwing was attacking moved up in priority based on how much healing they were doing. By healing all of Pillowcase’s damage twice, Lost Alice was riding the borderline of convincing the Wraithwings that she was the more important target on the field.

Pillowcase stabbed at the Wraithwing who looked towards Lost Alice. The attack didn’t even connect but, as a [Soul Knight], all of Pillowcase’s attack had a small enmity factor to them which compelled the monsters to remain focused on her.

Tessa knew there were serious limits to how long and how many of the Wraithwings she could keep focused on her, even if she could survive their attacks, but that was a problem for the Tessa of five to ten second in the future to deal with.

Lost Alice said: “Kite”

In the thick of battle, typing long messages was never a good idea. Even a half second delay in reaction time could be enough to guarantee a defeat. It was why any serious group used voice chat to coordinate what they were doing. Voice chatting with random strangers wasn’t really something anyone wanted to do though, so the in-game chat function was the only method of coordinating their actions Pillowcase and Lost Alice had.

Tessa could picture Alice’s player wondering if Pillowcase would understand the simple command. The only thing harder and more frustrating than dealing with a difficult encounter in the game was dealing with a player who didn’t know what they were doing and wasn’t willing to listen.

> Pillowcase said: “on it!”

Tessa put Pillowcase into a run before she typed that message, and plotted a course around the village square.

She couldn’t run in a straight line, because the Wraithwings had been set to move just a bit faster than the adventurers. Running in a circle didn’t make staying ahead of them any easier, except that by putting obstacles between the Wraithwings and herself, Pillowcase ensured the Wraithwings simple movement routines would send them on a much longer path than the one she was running, thereby negating their speed advantage.

> [Minor Blood Channel] heals Pillowcase for 0 health!

Tessa grinned at the combat log. Since Pillowcase was still at full health [Minor Blood Channel] had nothing to repair. It was still ticked away though, and would probably continue to do so far as long as Lost Alice maintained it. Under the circumstances that was amazingly powerful, but Tessa knew it was also a fluke.

[Minor Blood Channel] was the starter ability for [Grave Mender] class, one of the new healer classes introduced in the expansion. Unlike the more common healing spells which improved as the caster leveled up, [Minor Blood Channel] was set to always tick away at a set value. Ten health per tick was incredible on a 1st level character but by 10th level it would be only a minor aid.

In a sense Pillowcase had lucked out being as weak as she was. The Wraithwings were probably hitting for ten or a hundred times her maximum health, but the one shot code prevented the majority of the damage from mattering since the hits were capped at one point less than Pillowcase’s maximum health value. With [Minor Blood Channel] being strong enough to restore her back to full, Pillowcase was able to stay that precious one health point above the level the one shot code was capping the damage at.

It was an exploit for sure, and one which the developers would certainly be patching out of the game with one of the early bug fix releases, but it wasn’t a perfect defense even so.

Tessa saw one of the Wraithwings peel away from the pack that was following Pillowcase and begin to make a beeline towards Lost Alice. From how Alice was standing, Tessa knew that [Minor Blood Channel] had a limitation where the caster had to remain motionless to continue casting it.  

Motionless and alive, which seemed to be mutually exclusive things with the Wraithwing inbound on Alice’s position.

The pack behind Pillowcase was starting to lose cohesion too, as the enmity generated by her initial attacks was gradually forgotten.

Tessa altered Pillowcase’s course, cutting too close to Wraithwings she’d been kiting and taking another nearly fatal hit. The burrito in her stomach seemed intent on replicating the chest bursting scene from Alien but Tessa fought it down.

The battle in the village square wasn’t one they were going to win, and in the end it wasn’t going to matter. There were no real consequences to losing a fight as a fledgling adventurer. There couldn’t be. If anything too disastrous happened to a level 1 character, the player would simply delete them and make up another one. Despite that though, Tessa wanted to show off what she could do.

It was a point of pride she couldn’t defend in any way that felt rational, but being a good player mattered to her. It always had. She knew plenty of people who played “for fun” and refused to take the game seriously. To the extent that they were having fun, there wasn’t anything she could say against that.

All she could say was that she needed to play things differently than that. She needed to play like she cared what happened. Because she did. Her father had never approved of that, and had pointed out repeatedly that defeating a virtual foe didn’t help her at all in the real world, and it was hard to say he was wrong, except that he was.  

Even apart from the joy that accomplishing something difficult brought to her, being good at something unreal mattered to Tessa because her victories made it easier to help other people have fun. All she ever saw were pixels on a screen, but the people behind them had real feelings, and if she could make their days brighter by being awesome when they needed her to be that was a win for everyone in her book.

> [Minor Blood Channel] heals Pillow case for 10 health!

Pillowcase slashed at the Wraithwing that was charging at Lost Alice, placing herself solidly back on top of it’s “Hate List”. It was a risky play though and Tessa had to throw Pillowcase into another dodge roll to avoid a trio of attacks from the Wraithwings which had caught up to her.

That was the other reason the “Level 1 character plus [Minor Blood Channel]” exploit wasn’t anything like Invulnerability. As soon as a second monster joined the fight it was extremely likely that its attacks would land before the [Minor Blood Channel] had a chance to tick Pillowcase’s health back up to full, and with only one health point Pillowcase couldn’t survive an attack from even the weakest of foes.

If two foes were deadly, then Tessa knew she was doomed. She watched as roughly a dozen Wraithwings clustered into an overlapping ball of rending death on the screen. She sighed. There was probably no chance that she could take even one of them out. The factors in play for the fight just didn’t allow it.

Lost Alice couldn’t do anything except maintain the [Minor Blood Channel] or Pillowcase would die in seconds since the lead Wraithwing were keeping close enough to get single attacks off every time Pillowcase turned a corner in the village square.

Pillowcase couldn’t afford to seek a more cluttered environment because, the moment she broke line of sight with Lost Alice, the [Minor Blood Channel] would fail.

Best of all though, the Wraithwings health bars were hidden, so Tessa had no idea if the few attacks she’d been able to make had inflicted any meaningful damage on them.

If her suspicions were correct, the overpowered Wraithwings could probably heal faster than Pillowcase, with her relatively low “Tank scale” damage, could hurt them.

> Lost Alice said: “Nice kiting!”

> Lost Alice said: “Thanks for the save there too.”

All the misery Tessa’s fatigue and the burrito had inflicted on her vanished from her mind at the sight of the compliment. Recognition had a harder kick than any drug, but she knew she shouldn’t reply. Not until the fight was over, and a millisecond loss of focus wouldn’t undo all the hard work she’d done.

> Pillowcase said: “thnks!”

Tessa smiled and narrowly avoided taking the fatal two hits that would end her mad run around the village square.

Even in battles you’re destined to lose, you could still find some unexpected victories it seemed.

Tessa felt a jolt run through her as the world flashed white. Or maybe it was just the screen. She sat back and rubbed her eyes. Reading the new tutorial instructions had taken longer than she’d expected and according to the in-game clock, which had to be lying, it was a quarter to midnight already. That was nowhere near as late as she had stayed up playing Broken Horizons as a kid but also much later than she was used to hitting the sack as an adult.

On the screen, the white flash cleared to reveal Pillowcase glowing with a rapidly fading silver radiance. She was a [Soul Knight] at last, and new, yet oh so familiar, interface elements appeared to show the abilities she’d received for completing the first part of the tutorial.

Outside, a storm had blown in with the occasional flashes of distant lightning strobing through her closed curtains. As ambiance went, she couldn’t complain. The tempest matched the change in the atmosphere in Sky’s Edge where Pillowcase was standing.

“Looks like you’re not alone,” Mister Pendant said, gesturing to the fountain in Sky’s Edge’s central square.

The flash of light had covered not only the addition of the new user interface elements to the screen but also the transition from the solo instance of Sky’s Edge, where Pillowcase had started out, to the open world version when players could interact with each other.

Around the fountain, a thick sea of other players were congregated. Most were standing motionless, their players either away from the keyboard or chatting with each other via Discord or in-game /tells.

Tessa moved Pillowcase to join them, guessing that the next quest giver was probably somewhere at the center of the pack somewhere. She stopped when Mogwin landed on Pillowcase’s shoulder though, curious if the game was going to hand out another quest automatically to her.

“You’re going to want to get ready. Nasty things are coming,” Mogwin warned. The voice actor for Mogwin wasn’t familiar to Tessa, which was nice. She loved the voices from the old version of the game, especially Niminey’s, but a few of them got used for far more parts than they really should have.

It was one thing to hear a shopkeeper advertising their wares in a rich, smooth baritone. It was another to hear that same voice coming from three different farmers, the mayor, and the local horse thief. Eventually the world started to feel a bit unintentionally creepy when half the population all spoke in the exact same voice.

No dialog options came up in reply to Mogwin’s warning, and he didn’t gain any marker to indicate that he had a quest ready, so Tessa marched Pillowcase forward, passing through the crowd like they were ghosts. The lack of collision detection between player avatars was something that had generated a lot of debate early on, since it wasn’t particularly immersive to be able to move through other people like they weren’t there, but the gain in convenience and the elimination of an avenue for players to grief one another put the debate to rest. Eventually.

“Wrathwings!” a town cryer shouted. He was deep in the crush of adventurers but didn’t seem to be paying attention to the horde of people around him. Because he wasn’t. He had a couple of lines of dialog, a trigger for when he said them, and that was all the processing power he needed.

His message was enough to be interesting though even if his personality was basically non-existent. Tessa had been wondering if she’d get to see a Wrathwing attack. They were a new element that was being added with the World Shift expansion and she’d read a lot about them. That they were appearing so early in the game was an unexpected treat too. She’d thought they were limited only to the higher level zones, since they presented some new and unique challenges.

Originally, Broken Horizons had only static enemies. They would patrol around predetermined areas or just stand in place waiting for an adventuring to get close. Eventually the developers expanded on that to include “event style” enemies who would spawn in at intervals or in response to other quests being completed.  Those made the world seem somewhat more alive and responsive.

The Wrathwing Attacks were the next step in that process. Not only did they occur by their own pattern and with variable levels of intensity, they represented a real threat to areas they attacked. From what the beta-testers had reported, Wrathwings and the other “Dynamic Assaults” could do lasting damage to the towns and other player-friendly areas in the High Beyond.

If the Wrathwing’s killed the town Blacksmith for example, the blacksmith’s shop would be out of commission until the players repaired the shop and someone did the quest to recruit a new blacksmith for the town.

What was more exciting though was that the Wrathwing Dynamic Assaults could carry away more than just the non-player character [Villagers]. Any adventurers who didn’t put up enough of a fight to escape the Wrathwing talons would be dragged into the air and carried off to a new, and far more dangerous zone.

Tessa looked around, checking the skies to see if the event was starting but aside from some clouds that were rolling in, there wasn’t any sign of approaching giant birds. Looking around on the ground, about half the other players seemed to be “in the know” on what the town cryer’s “Wrathwings” warning might mean.

Some of them were scurrying inside the sturdier buildings, probably intending to wait out the event rather than struggle through what could be a tough fight with barely any skills or spells.

Others were taking the exact opposite approach, trying to form impromptu teams to meet the Wrathwings head on.

> BattlerX shouted: “Forming Event team. Looking for 6 members. Send tell for invite.”

Tessa considered replying, but hesitated. With six slots open on the potentially eight person team, BattlerX didn’t have much of a party assembled yet. Tactically speaking it would be better to join a full, or nearly full team since the more people they had, the more kills they’d get in the coming battle and the more overall rewards they’d earn.

Tessa’s hesitation wasn’t founded on tactical considerations though. Even the thought of teaming up filled her with dread. There was so much potential for drama and stress and headaches on a random group, and none of that was what she was looking for when she came back.

Plus, she was just a baby Tank. She didn’t have a hundredth of the toughness she’d eventually be able to offer a team. It felt far better to risk trying to solo the event and then spend some time working out how her new class played rather than to try to team up too soon. The last thing she wanted was to  get soured on the whole experience because a teammate decided to be an idiot, especially since the people playing at this point were either pretty hardcore, or as tired as she was, or both.

“Wrathwings! They’re coming!” the town cryer called out again.

> Kami Anne Do shouted: “Where are the Wrathwings? Is the event bugged?”

Tessa was willing to give decent odds that was the case, given the larger shutdown problem the game was having. It had clearly been rushed out to meet a deadline. Even so though, she knew there’d be plenty of other things to work. Simply exploring the new areas could lead to rich and rewarding surprises, and there were likely at least a few quests that weren’t horribly broken. If nothing else presented itself, she could even just mindlessly kill off enemies, providing she could find anything to fight.

“The Wrathwings are almost here,” Mogwin said. “If you look up you can see them.”

Tessa blinked. It almost seemed like Mogwin was responding to Kami Anne’s shout but it was more likely to just be fortuitous timing. Scanning the global chat channels for text cues was certainly possible but the processing required was far beyond any value that could have been derived from it.

Tessa panned the camera up again, searching the otherworldly sky for any sign of giant bird monsters but all she saw was the storm cloud which had almost reached the town.

The storm cloud which was breaking up into smaller, faster moving pieces.

Tessa blinked again.

That wasn’t a storm cloud.

It was a nearly solid wall of things out of a nightmare.

On a technical level, Tessa had to admit that the effort put into the Wrathwing design was impressive. Their models moved in the distinctly unnatural manner which suggested bones were breaking with every flap their wings took. Also they had human heads which were rotating in all directions, and their talons were a disturbing mix of human hands with long, curving metal blades jutting from the palm.

They didn’t scream or cry out as they approached, just moved in an eerie silence as all of the other game noises were muted out as well.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Tessa said to her empty apartment. “How the hell are a bunch of level 1s supposed to fight that?”

She had Pillowcase draw her [Rusty Knight’s Blade] anyways since it was better to go down fighting that to try to flee the town given the speed the Wrathwings were traveling at.

In the worst case, she hoped she’d be able to kill at least one or two of the Wrathwings and get some kind of armor or weapon reward from it. Given the literal trash level quality of her current equipment any new piece would easily be an upgrade.

> Buzz Fightyear shouted: “Damn, I didn’t know the game could spawn that many enemies! See ya all around the Heart Fire!”

Tessa cast a glance over towards the village’s tiny chapel, the one building that would never be destroyed no matter what force assaulted the town. She hadn’t been inside it, but she knew there would be a silver fire burning in a divinely inscribed brazier at its center. When the adventurers who were waiting to defend Sky’s Edge died – and that was going to be “all of them” and “very soon”, they’d respawn around that [Heart Fire] as [Wandering Souls].

From there they’d have the choice of trying to get back to their bodies and resurrect themselves in a mildly weakened state or reincarnating at the Heart Fire in a more significantly weakened state with some extra equipment damage thrown in on top.

Tessa guessed that most of the new players would opt for staying in the chapel until their weakness wore off but there were sure to be some who’d try to throw themselves back into the fray over and over since damage to worthless starter equipment wasn’t exactly a deterrent.

> BattlerX shouted: “Forming Event team. Looking for 4 members. Send tell for invite.”

Tessa admired Battler’s tenacity if nothing else, but knew he wasn’t going to get an answer in time. Before anyone could have typed a response, the first of the Wrathwings began to flood into the village square.

Pillowcase’s mobility (and Tessa’s old reflexes) saved her from the first telegraphed attack a Wrathwing made at her. Rather than standing in the red cone that appeared, Pillowcase side stepped out of it the instant it appeared, clearing the edge of cone only a half second before the Wrathwing belched out a spray of acidic blood that left the area sizzling and ruined.

Another tried to attack her with its palm blades, but missed as Pillowcase backed out of its range. With years of experience as a healer, she was used to keeping away from enemies who were rampaging at her until someone from her team could come deal with them.

Tessa wove Pillowcase around several piles of boxes and fence sections to confuse the Wrathwing’s pursuit tracking system before hiding in the shadow of a building’s porch pole for a moment to take stock of what was happening..

With a moment to breath, several things occurred to her as she scanned the battlefield. First, she had no team, so no one was going to take care of the Wrathwings who were still searching for her.

Second, even if she did have a team, it probably wouldn’t have helped because the low level adventurers were being completely overwhelmed by their attackers. As she watched, several adventurers were lifted above the fray, caught in the claws of the Wrathwings who were fleeing back to their nests already.

The third, and most important thing was that, Pillowcase wasn’t a healer.

She was a tank. The first line of defense. She wasn’t the one who ran from monsters. She was the one who ran to them, so that no one else would be in danger.

Looking over the battlefield again, she saw that the hastily formed teams had been shattered by the onslaught. No one knew how to work together, or at least no one was bothering to try, with characters running around and being picked off one by one no matter where they tried to hide.

The general helplessness wasn’t complete though. One group seemed to have the right idea and had huddled together behind a Metal Mechanoid player, “Buzz Fightyear” from the nameplate over his head, who’d chosen the Guardian class. That team had given up trying to outfight the Wrathwing horde and were making a fighting withdrawal. Tessa wasn’t sure if it was proving to be effective because they had enough firepower to back it up or because there were so many other targets for the Wrathwings to attack instead. In either case, she considered joining them, until she saw someone moving in exactly the same manner she’d just been.

Behind the pale skinned woman, a trio of Wrathwings had formed up and with the village square emptying out there were fewer and fewer places and people the woman could use to distract her pursuers.

Feeling a surge of [Healer] solidarity, Tessa sent the Pillowcase charging out from the shadow she’d been hiding in. The [Soul Knight] rushed across the small square and crashed into the Wrathwings. When her presence alone wasn’t enough to draw their attention away from their quarry, Pillowcase started laying into them with the basic attacks the tutorial had shown her.

That got the Wrathwings attention nice and quick.

The problem was, Tessa had no idea what to do with it.

Getting beaten to a pulp wasn’t supposed to hurt, at least not in Tessa’s experience.

“The beta-testers weren’t kidding when they said the tutorial needed some work I guess,” Tessa said, rubbing her temples.

On the screen in front of her, Pillowcase was waiting tucked into a small niche in a broken wall while her health ticked back up to full. At her feet, the body of the tutorial’s first regular monsters, a trio of [Radioactive Goo Rats] lay waiting for her to finish harvesting their body parts.

The typical strategy in MMO tutorials was to dial the game’s normal difficulty down so that even brand new players would be able to win the first few fights with ease. The idea was to give neophytes a chance to grasp the mechanics of moving around and fighting before any real level of mastery was required of them. Broken Horizons had taken a different approach however.  

Instead of cheating openly in the characters’ favor by presenting them with fragile, soft hitting enemies, they gave the players real, dungeon-scale foes and then placed a series of special buffs on their characters so that as they fell closer to being defeated qualities like the rate they regenerated health, and how protective their starting armor was grew to proportions that even extremely well equipped max level players would have a hard time replicating.

The net result was that the early combats felt difficult while also giving players the sense that they were snatching victory from the jaws of defeat as they rapidly learned the basics of attacking, positioning, and when to use their limited powers. It was an effective illusion unless, like Tessa, the player was already familiar with the basics of combat and had an well honed sense of how durable characters typically were.

After six years of playing Glimmerglass and watching how well everyone she played with withstood damage so that she could tell when they were in need of healing, Tessa could almost see the exact numbers behind the scaling buffs as Pillowcase was driven back by the onslaught of a trio of rats the size of small bears. That the rats were glowing green and made of what appeared to be radioactive sludge didn’t seem out of place. Fledgling characters in many games were given quests to slay rats, and the little extra added to the ones in the World Shift tutorial was only there to fit the “strange and otherworldly” aesthetic the expansion hoped to evoke.

Appearance aside though, the rats were really no different than the thousands of other vermin Tessa had exterminated over the years so the outcome of the fight was never really in doubt. She defeated them one after the other but they got their licks in too. As the battle music faded, Pillowcase was left with just a sliver of health, apparently no more than a heartbeat away from death’s door. That was all well and good for creating a tense and exciting fight, but the aftermath promised to be rather boring. Since Pillowcase was too new to have any healing potions available, Tessa assumed her only recourse was to have Pillowcase hide away until her natural healing could bring her back to full health.

In what might have been intended as a teaching moment to showcase one of the Clothwork’s inherent traits though, Tessa turned out to be wrong about the enforced downtime. As she watched, Pillowcase’s health regenerated faster than any other character she’d ever played. It was one of the reasons the beta-testers had reported that Clothwork’s made good tanks for a group, but seeing the effect in action still exceeded Tessa’s expectations in a pleasant way.

Leaning back on her chair, Tessa wished her actual body could borrow some of Pillowcase’s vitality. Sometime during the fight with the rats, Tessa had started feeling sore. Not in any one area but all over and without obvious reason.

“I am going to make myself sick if I keep going like this,” she said, trying out the idea to see if hearing it aloud would motivate her to take a different course of action.

If any responsible part of her was still hoping that she might get to bed sooner in response to her declining health it would have been sorely disappointed by the first thought which followed the declaration.

“If I’m sick, I guess I’ll just have to call into work tomorrow for a day off!”

Time off was a limited and highly supervised resource. Vacation requests were routinely refused due to “staffing needs during a busy period”. And, of course, they were always in “a busy period”. The only days someone like Tessa could take off without prior approval were her allotted sick days and she had so little of them that she never spent them unless she absolutely had to. If she was legitimately sick though? And if that just so happened to buy her more time to play? Well, one day away wouldn’t really hurt that much. She’d have twice the work to do when she got back but she’d get it done twice as fast if she wasn’t exhausted and dead inside from stress.

With the thought of not needing to wake up before the break of dawn seeming like a plausible reality, Tessa felt a surge of relief wash through her. Her hands found the keyboard and the mouse and she put the residual aches she was feeling out of her mind.

It was play time. She could do this all night if she wanted to.

[System Message: ALERT!]

[Please do not logout or otherwise exit the game!]

[If you must leave, please set your character for “No Auto Logout” in “Settings > General” and leave the the game and your computer running or irretrievable corruption may occur.]

“What the hell?” Tessa blinked and read the message again.

As a rule, new expansions always have bugs. It wasn’t surprising – all code has bugs. No one could think of every scenario that might come up or cover every possible configuration someone might have their computer setup with. In the case of a major expansion to a game it was even less likely that all of the issues would be caught since there was no chance that a quality assurance staff of, at most, a few dozen people were going to replicate all of the odd behaviors a few million players might attempt.

That didn’t stop Tessa from being puzzled about the system message though. The thing with bugs, in her experience, was that they either fell into the category of “annoying but not game breaking”, in which case the players could be allowed to continue playing while a fix for the problem was created or the bugs were “game breaking” ones which had to patched immediately.

In the worst case, a game breaking bug might corrupt the data which defined the characters. Levels, items, and even personal information could be erased or compromised such that the only fix was “rollback” the data to an early backup. Rollbacks meant erasing all of the playtime the players had put in, including striping them of any valuable items and experience their character had gained, so development studios were exceptionally loath to let things get that far out of hand.

The problem with the system message was that, for serious bugs, one of the first tools to contain them was to bring the game servers down and force people to stop playing. That would at least prevent any damage the bug did from spreading too far. The system message was weird because Tessa had never heard of bug that required players to stay logged in.

As she brought Pillowcase into a battle with another nest of [Radioactive Goo Rats], she couldn’t help but try to piece together what might be happening in Egress Entertainment’s development wing.

If logging out was causing problems, then the issue either involved the log out code itself, or the final save routines which ran to disconnect the user from the server. If it was a server related issue though it would be reasonably simple for the EE devs to force a clean shutdown directly. There might be some data loss but better to suffer that sooner than later.

Which meant it wasn’t a server issue. The EE devs made mistakes but their were professionals and had always shown a reasonable level of competency.

“How could they screw up the client shutdown?” Tessa wondered aloud as Pillowcase looted a single [Glowing Rat Tail] from her defeated foes. Why between three rats there was only one tail was something she’d long ago learned not to question.

It was more fun to think about the programming issue EE was facing too.

As far as Tessa knew, there wasn’t a lot that happened during the shutdown sequence. The game client was closed, the memory it used was returned to the available pool, and the temporary files the game made were cleaned up. Of those none of them could have permanent or worrisome affects.

“Unless the game’s cleaning up more than just it’s temporary files?”

That shouldn’t have been possible, applications weren’t supposed to have access to other applications files, but buggy code could do all sorts of things it wasn’t supposed to and Tessa remembered she had run Broken Horizons in administrator mode to get it to work. That would have given it far greater ability to wreck things than it should otherwise have.

She tried to picture what the worst case scenario there would look like. A program running amuck could access all kinds of things, with the most legally dangerous being any personal information which was also on the computer, especially if it transmitted that information anywhere else.

Stealing personal information seemed unlikely though. If the bug was intentionally malicious code it could have stolen everything on the computer without alerting anyone. Stolen credit card numbers were a lot more useful if people didn’t know you had them so subtlety was usually the plan there.

A more likely problem would be if the shutdown caused a full drive wipe. For some people that would irreversibly disastrous. The image of hundreds of thousand users with computers that had been turned into worthless bricks drifted through Tessa’s mind. A lovely class-action suit would be sure to follow an event like that, probably on a scale sufficient to bankrupt EE if the case went poorly for them.

The odds of the problem actually being that bad were microscopic though. The most likely scenario was that someone had discovered a really unlikely sequence of events that could lead to something like a full drive wipe and the developers were being overly careful in an effort to make sure if something did happen to one or two people it wouldn’t be the game studio’s fault.

The warning was still there though, and still something she had to respect, or at least something she had a few self serving reasons for why she would choose to respect it.

“Oh no, what a shame, guess I have no choice but to keep playing then,” she said, delighted to have the decision to continue on and take the next day off reinforced a bit further.

The actual problem with the code didn’t concern her much. If she was correct and it was a scenario which could lead to an erased hard drive she wasn’t in any real danger. Aside from Broken Horizons and a copy of her company’s current project (which she wasn’t technically supposed to have on a personal machine), there wasn’t anything on Tessa’s computer that she cared about. She just hoped that whatever patch they rolled out wouldn’t eat into her day that much. It always sucked to have time off that she couldn’t do anything with.

For the time being though, the game was still up and she was definitely awake enough to continue.

Pillowcase returned with the [3 Glowing Rat Tail] to the quest giver who’d asked for them and waited for an animation to play out wherein “Mister Pendant”, a Skeletal Mage in a top hat and coat tails, added them into a bubbling cauldron to produce a [Vial of Soul Ink].

He was the end of the initial chain of quests she’d been given at the start of the game.

After the opening cinematic had played, showing Pillowcase’s reanimation, the game had given Tessa control of her character and set her to a few simple tasks. Move around, talk to some people, and fight a training dummy were typical basics any tutorial would run new players though since it was impossible to play at all unless you knew how to do them. In case of the World Shift tutorial these tasks came with introduction of a friendly character named Mogwin.

Mogwin was a crow, or rather Mogwin had been a crow. His translucent body and the gently pulsing aura of purple light which highlighted his edges marked him as having moved beyond his mortal form.

“Looks like you’re here now?” Mogwin had said when Pillowcase woke up. “Or almost here I guess,” as Pillowcase took her first faltering steps. “Well, you’re moving around and that’s what counts. Looking a bit run down though and that ain’t gonna help either of us. We should see about getting you back in fighting shape, cause we both know there’s going to be a lot of fighting to do, and probably a lot sooner than you’d expect.”

The intro area had seemed like an odd place for a battle to break out. Pillowcase rose where she’d fallen, on the lowest plains of the High Beyond. All around her were the remains of other warriors who’d fallen in service of the Consortium of Pain, her former masters.

Her former masters who’d betrayed and abandoned her.

The Consortium had held back the support their battleships could have contributed to the fight with the Fallen Kingdoms’ signature heroes because the raid Pillowcase had been a part of was merely an expeditionary thrust. She hadn’t been created to win, or even to survive. All that was expected of her was to force the defenders of the Fallen Kingdoms to reveal the sort of abilities they possessed.

The Consortium had reclaimed what minions they could and had allowed the rest to lay where they fell, having no use for creations which couldn’t materially advance their aims.

Pillowcase and Mogwin had been alone on the empty and silent field, which had given Tessa time to refamiliarize herself with Broken Horizon’s control scheme. She’d been worried that after six year away from the game she would feel clumsy trying to manipulate her character with a new mouse and a new keyboard. If anything though it was like the six year gap had never occurred. From the moment she took control of Pillowcase, all of her old reflexes came right back.  When it came time to square off against the stationary husk of a fallen Metal Mechanoid, Tessa had felt like she could dance Pillowcase around the goliath with more grace than she’d ever managed with Glimmerglass.

Some of that was probably due to the various improvements in animation handling and overall control which the developers had added to the game over the years, but Tessa was tempted to take part of the credit too. There was no reason to believe her reflexes were better than they had been, but it was nice to imagine anyways.

Once Tessa had proven that she had control of Pillowcase’s basic motor functions, and that she understood other characters in the world could be communicated with, Mogwin had sent her to scavenge a basic weapon and some starter armor from the fallen warriors around her.

With a [Rusty Sword] and [Cracked Shield] in hand, Pillowcase had ventured towards a nearby village which she could just make out in perpetual gloom of the High Beyond’s lowest level. The wondrous sky of alien stars and swirling light from the main cinematic was visible overhead but the rest of the environment was shrouded in an inky blackness which seemed to flow like water over shapes in the distance.

Before Pillowcase had reached the village she’d run into her first scripted battles. The minion of the Consortium had existed for no other reason than to showcase the [Stealth Kill] option available if you could sneak up on certain enemy types. As a Soul Knight, Pillowcase’s sneaking capability would be abysmal once she was properly geared up in heavy armor, but the more lightly armored classes could make good use of it when the situation allowed.

From the minion, Pillowcase had retrieved a pouch of Astral Coins, the new currency in the High Beyond, invented so that existing players with billions of gold pieces couldn’t rush in on the first day and buy every interesting thing that was for sale at once.

For Pillowcase the coins served as her ticket into the shop of Mister Pendant, the primary quest giver for starting Soul Knights. His white top hat and tails gave him an air that was slightly off kilter with dark and shadowy pallet the rest of the starter area was painted in, but it had the upside of making him very easy to find for people who might otherwise be lost as to where to go or who to talk to.

And he was definitely someone new players wanted to talk to thanks to his offerings of a variety of starter items like low level potions and the all-important [Basic Adventuring Bag].

The game walked Pillowcase through acquiring the bag as the first item she purchased in order to introduce Tessa to the idea that she had a magical inventory with oddly limited space constraints. A thousand arrows would count as one item, but a pair of rings would count as two. Tessa understood the programmatic limitations which made a bag like that seem reasonable but she’d always been bugged that the game lore never offered an in game suggestion as to how and why adventuring packs worked like they did. In the end, it was a ubiquitous enough system across different games that everyone pretty much just accepted it and moved on.

Once she’d spent the last of the coins she’d received on the bag, and a healing potion, Mister Pendant revealed his true purpose.

“It looks like you used to be something other than you are now,” he said. “Soul Knight. Yeah, you could be one of those. But you’ve got no [Soul Mark], no way to call on the powers you’re supposed to have. Well, we’re just going to have to fix that right up then, aren’t we?”

From there, Pillowcase had been sent on a number of fetch quests – errands to procure the various components Mister Pendant needed for the [vial of Soul Ink]. The quests had introduced Tessa to Sky’s Edge village, the starting city for all of the characters created as part of the High Beyond.

Or at least her own personal version of it. Until she completed the basic elements of the tutorial, the game kept Pillowcase in her own private instance of the town so that Tessa wouldn’t be distracted by other players while she was learning how to play. The enforced isolation usually made Tessa skip the tutorial when she made a new character but with her current mood a little “alone time” to start things off hadn’t seemed so bad, even if she didn’t really need to learn anything that the game was trying to teach her.

She’d visited the Blacksmith shop where she was told how her weapons and armor could be repaired, upgraded or deconstructed when they broke, grew too weak, or were replaced by a better item. She’d stopped by the Night’s Over tavern where she received a free meal for being new and was introduced to the idea that food increased your attributes, including ones like “chance to critically hit” which wouldn’t seem to be something you could influence by the meal you chose.

In short order she’d visited half a dozen places and developed a sense of the layout of the small village in the process of collecting the ingredients Mister Pendant needed to craft the [Vial of Soul Ink].

“This’ll start you off,” he said as he drew a complex design where Pillowcase’s heart would have been had she been human. “This ink will never come off and it’s never gonna fade, but your [Soul Mark] is going to stay small and weak unless you feed it. Gotta have soul to be a [Soul Knight]. That’s all on you though. It’s nothing I or anyone else can do for you. Just remember this, because it’s important, you’re not an empty doll. Your bosses? Maybe they used you up and tossed you away, but that’s not who your are. You are who you chose to be. So choose well.”

For a moment, Tessa felt a weird swirl of vertigo pass through her. Mister Pendant’s dialog was clearly referencing Pillowcase’s origin video but “empty doll used up by her bosses” hit disturbingly close to home for Tessa too, and, with how the shot of Mister Pendant was framed, it looked like the glowing blue orbs in his skeletal eye sockets were staring right out of the screen at her.

The world was melting into darkness and blood. Every moment saw another vestige of the light swept away, all color and vibrancy lost to a rolling Stygian emptiness. It was more or less what Tessa had expected.

[BROKEN HORIZONS]

[World Shift]

The titles slammed into view, their gold rimmed letters burning away the darkness to reveal the new expansion’s splash screen for a moment before the intro cinematic began to play.

Tessa had to give the development team credit. They were working with an older engine but the animations were still on par with the best the industry had to offer. It had to have cost them some long days, but the results were evident in Broken Horizon’s still be around after fifteen years when so many of their competitors had gone under.

As Niminey, one of the game’s signature heroines, appeared on the screen, Tessa was glad to see that they’d kept the principal art team on the job for her new look. Gone were the soft brown leathers and velvety green cloak from the original box art for Broken Horizons and in their place she wore an ornate mithril chain shirt and the sigil inscribed sky blue “Cloak of the Celestials” which had been one of the ultimate rewards from the previous expansion. The new look took Tessa by surprise but it wasn’t the first time Niminey’s iconic look had been updated. As the game’s storyline had progressed so too had the stories of its principal characters, with their armor and weapons changing to reflect their expanded history (and to sell more merchandise).

In Niminey’s case there had been more changes than most. The Niminey of World Shift was no longer the neophyte who had been menaced by a trio of goblins in the original box art and drawn in millions of subscribers. In the intervening fifteen years, she had traveled to all corners of the Fallen Kingdoms and been at least a side character in every major event  that occurred (that was when she wasn’t cast as one of the pivotal actors, as she appeared to have been for the first time in a while with the World Shift expansion).

Tessa watched as Niminey passed through a portal of ice and shadows to arrive in a landscape unlike any that had appeared in the game before. Gravity seemed to be a vague suggestion at best and the sky was an immeasurably dense mass of red stars against a swirling blue and vibrant purple backdrop.

The High Beyond was a new area that had been added with the expansion and, at least from the cutscene, it looked gorgeous. Freed from the need to evoke a sense of connection to any realistic historical setting, the animators had chosen a palette that evoked fantastic cosmic scenery and vista that could never be seen in Earth. Tessa knew the in-game areas wouldn’t look quite as appealing – the animation possibilities for pre-rendered cutscenes always exceeded those which a desktop computer could managed to replicate on the fly. Despite that however, she felt her pulse quickening at the thought of getting to play in an area that was so vibrant and colorful. It was beautiful, especially in light of what she’d learned to expect from the Fallen Kingdoms of six year ago.

Well, beautiful and creepy, if she was being fair.

For all that the High Beyond evoked the grandeur of a place beyond space and time, it was also intended to carry a sense of dread as well. The shadow shrouded landscape which lay beyond the neon dappled valley Niminey moved through wasn’t empty, and from the viewpoint of the camera that followed her, shapes could be scene moving just outside of her field of vision.

The attack, because in an intro scene there inevitably was going to be an attack, came when Niminey bent to investigate a single gently glowing pink flower.

The camera went into slow motion, showing the bright sparkles of light which dropped from the flower freeze in the air as time stood still.

From the shadows, moving in a blur, despite time being slowed to a crawl, two bodiless wraiths shot forward. Their forms trailed behind them like purple smoke caught in a gale and, from their nebulous hands, claws of bloodied steel emerged.

The camera cut back to Niminey as she gazed in wonder at the flower, seemingly unaware of the peril she was in.

If Tessa hadn’t played through the earlier expansions, and kept up to date on the later ones, she might have been concerned that the studio was going to kill off one of their major characters to make a splash for their 15th anniversary. From a purely economic viewpoint though Tessa knew that Egress Entertainment was unlikely to give up such a marketable figure, and within the lore of the game world it wouldn’t make sense either.

Niminey rarely saved the day on her own, that was the player’s job after all, but as the maximum level the players could reach had risen, so too had Niminey’s prowess. If she could be taken down by two simple opponents, it would signal to the players that their hard earned strength was going to be completely overshadowed in the new areas, and that was not an impression that was likely to draw in new players or convince lapsed ones to return.

In a far more economic and narratively plausible stroke therefore, the two wraiths got no closer to Niminey’s back than the length of her sword before a flash of blue light cut them in two. The camera turned from their dissolving forms to show Niminey with her blade “Clarity” drawn and scanning the terrain for other enemies.

True to form, the camera pulled back to show the shadows come alive as though a nightmare factory had belched forth an army of abominations.

The scene cut away from impending battle after showing Niminey bringing Clarity to a ready position, a small smirk appearing on her lips.

Tessa knew she being sucked in as much by the rising orchestral music as anything else, but the scene brought her back to her childhood nonetheless. That moment. That little smile. That was what she wanted.

She remembered moments like that. Encounters when things could have gone terribly awry but she’d been the one to hold things to together. It had been wonderful to feel like she was defying not only the expectations of the other players but even fate itself when she refused to let her party members fall and had instead seen them through to a hard fought victory.

Defying fate had felt so right then, but somehow she’d never had the chance to do the same in her real life. Fights there carried too high a cost, and winning together was a foreign concept for too many people.

The cinematic wasn’t done when it departed from Niminey. Her involvement spoke to the existing characters discovering new foes and challenges to face in the new areas. For the fresh characters who were natives to the High Beyond, a signature character of their own was introduced.

Tessa had seen concept art and the final designs for Silken Black, the assassin who served as the player stand-in for the promotional images that preceded World Shift’s launch. For as much as the fourteen year old Tessa had wanted to be the Elven Niminey, the twenty six year old Tessa had to admit the idea of having a job which allowed her to stab people was terribly appealing. Being a vampire would be a plus too, but primarily because it would mean she could stay up all night and sleep all day.

Silken was revealed in close-up at first, the camera focusing on her glowing red eyes and fangs before she pulled up the mask which covered her mouth and nose. When the camera moved, it swung around showing the tableau she was a part of.

In the distance, Niminey’s battle against the shadow horde raged on, but Silken made no move to either aid or attack Niminey. Instead, she began to climb a tall spire of rock covered in strange, alien reliefs.

Near the top, a pair of giant iron statues moved to block Silken’s entrance through a door which led into a twisted structure that soared up through the clouds.

Rather than showing the fight, the animation jumped forward in time, showing a slightly scuffed Silken standing before an altar with a basin in the center of it. In the background, the steaming remains of the two iron statues were just barely visible.

Using a chalice that waited on the altar, Silken scooped up some of the boiling black liquid from the basin and drank it down in a single gulp. The camera pulled away as her body began to stretch and change, showing first her shadow twisting far outside its natural proportions and then an exterior shot of the temple with her screams reaching even the camera’s distant position.

The cinematic concluded with Niminey returning back through the portal, glowing pink flower in hand, and looking only somewhat battle damaged. Waiting on the other side of the portal, a small crowd congratulated her on her safe return while a Dwarven herbalist took the flower and quickly brewed a potion to give to a child in a bed just behind the crowd.

The child was facing away from the camera, but as they turned to take hold of the potion their face was revealed to be half human skin and half tough green scales. They drank the potion down and then smiled in wonder as their scaled half morphed back to being fully human.

Neminey’s mission was a success, but outside the room a shot of the city showed many other people suffering from similar or worse conditions, as generic adventurers set off on similar quests to aid them.

The camera trailed over several of them, showing off a few of the new expansions different armor sets before it focused on a figure in the background as they moved through the crowd. The woman looked like a non-descript, black haired extra until the camera pushed in on her and her eyes flashed red for just a moment.

Tessa wondered if people would get that the “normal peasant woman with the red eyes” was Silken’s new form, or if they would see the significance in the signature character for the new faction’s actions.

Tessa knew she was cheating a little in that regard, given that she’d read developer interviews and kept up with the beta-test commentary but she still thought the opening cinematic did a good job explaining that the new characters could be part of a whole new faction, unallied with any of the ones previously in the game, and that while they weren’t in league with the High Beyond’s bad guys, their goals and motivations didn’t line up with the existing character factions either.

The bit Tessa found important though was that it not only looked like she’d be able to have Pillowcase travel to the original areas (as Silken had done) but that she could obtain a disguise to move around there unhindered by the bad reputation the World Shift native characters should possess with all of the rest of the factors. Disguises meant new looks, and Tessa was willing to bet the cash shop would have more than a few options for what those disguise potions might allow you to look like.

Granted the transformation looked like it was meant to be agonizing but the nice thing about being on the other side of the keyboard from her character was that Pillowcase could suffer all sorts of abuse and the only damage Tessa would take was the fatigue from staying up far too late.

Glancing over at the clock, she saw she was only about a half hour past her normal bedtime. A wave of lightheadedness which swept over her as the game finally connected and began loading her into a play zone, which seemed a little odd. It was true that she hadn’t been getting decent sleep lately, but a half hour shouldn’t have been enough to take that much out of her.

As the personalized cutscene began to play, she considered whether turning in really would be the best idea. The initial rush of rebellion had faded, and she could already feel how miserable she’d be in the morning. The responsible voice in her mind promised she would feel better if she got what sleep she could, and noted that the game would still be there the next night, or even on the weekend.

Weekend’s could fill up with work too though, and given the deadlines that were looming at her work it seemed as likely that she’d lose as big a chunk of the coming weekend as she had the previous one. Add to that all the basic chores that got put off because of how busy her weekdays were and it felt like she was doomed to have no time that could be dedicated to anything she’d want to call a life.

On the screen, the next cinematic finished loading and captured her attention. Where the first had introduced the new expansion, this one was tailored just for the new characters. The cutscene showed Pillowcase being stitched together with magical thread. She was a Clothwork, so her construction was the obvious starting point for her story.

As a construct though, she’d been built for a purpose, and that purpose was war. From the assembly line where Pillowcase was built she was marched away and fitted with a suit of impractically bulky black armor before being given a sword that looked like it’s crafter was morally opposed to straight lines and simple curves.

Watching the intro video required less energy than figuring out how to stop it, and so that won out, with Tessa promising herself she’d stop before it got too late. Worst case, she decided, she could try to sneak a fifteen minute nap in the restroom during her lunch break. It wasn’t a practical idea, but it didn’t need to be practical to sound like a valid excuse to stay up under the circumstances.

On the screen, Tessa watched Pillowcase being marshalled with an army of other Soul Knights. They were dispatched from a vast flying castle which was shaped like a starfish and covered in glowing violet nodules. The invaders from the High Beyond had come to the Fallen Kingdoms and Pillowcase was one of their shock troopers.

The Soul Knight army landed on the Plain of the Rolling Winds, a familiar spot to any Broken Horizons player because it was one of the low level areas they all passed through from the original release. The Soul Knight assault left it unrecognizable though. Their assault burned buildings that had stood for fifteen years of real time and killed characters who’d been repeating the same dialog for just as long. Throughout the fighting the camera switched between scenes of the overall chaos and close ups of Pillowcase’s hollow eyed helmet as she pushed through the generic defenders of the Fallen Kingdoms.

Tessa wondered if the expansion was going to permanently rework all of the base game’s starter zones, perhaps changing them into areas controlled by the forces of the High Beyond, until the scene shifted to show the signature characters of the Fallen Kingdoms arrive with fresh armies to reinforce the low level defenders of the Rolling Winds.

With the recognizable heroes and characters meant to represent the high level existing players joining the fray, the battle quickly turned against the Soul Knight army. Tessa watched as the High Beyond’s forces suffered loss after loss until they were in full retreat. When the camera focused on Pillowcase again she was staggering back through one of the hundreds of portals that had opened to the High Beyond, her armor shattered and her ridiculous sword abandoned on the battlefield.

Pillowcase was the last to make it through the portal she used before it sputtered closed, but her strength failed a few steps later as she sank to the ground, the spark of magic in the mystical threads that animated her fading away.

A wind blew over the battlefield, its passing a stand in for the passage of weeks or maybe months. As it blew, dust covered Pillowcase’s inert form and in its wake the world (and the background music) went silent.

The camera shifted to the sky which had grown dark and empty. Sitting in her lightless apartment, Tessa didn’t notice that everything had gone silent around her as well.

[Come hero.]

The text appeared as a voiceless subtitle while a drop pattern of thin lines began to glow on the screen in sky above. In Tessa’s headphone’s, faint notes of a new song began to play.

[This age is not yours.]

The lines connected to form a circle with a triangle in its center and an ever-increasingly complex set of geometric shapes around its circumference. The song grew louder, picking up horns to go with its drums.

[This world is not yours.]

The shape in the sky began to pulse with a slow but accelerating heartbeat of light. Each beat shifted the color of the light through the various hues of the rainbow. Stringed instruments joined the song as it gained momentum.

[But it needs you.]

The pulsing light sped up until it was a solid glare of white. Voices joined the song in a chorus that spoke with no need for language, their tones simply another marvelous instrument blending into the whole.

[Will you answer it’s plea?]

[Will you forge a new tomorrow?]

[Will you RISE.]

“Yes,” Tessa whispered, swept up the moment and not caring because there was no one to hear the fourteen year old in her come out for a moment.

A single drop of light fell from portal and landed with gentle hesitation on the fallen form of Pillowcase, as the music paused for a single heartbeat.

Where the Clothworks eyes should have been, two fresh sparks surged to life, bringing the song rushing back in with them.

[Click “Play” to begin.]

Tessa saw the familiar dialog appear on the screen and drew in a long breath. All it had taken before was that one click and her life had changed forever.

In her mind, she’d followed the glowing cursor across the border to another world. One where she’d been someone so much closer to the person she’d wanted to be than her fourteen year old self ever could have been.

For a while the journey had been intoxicating. She’d formed friendships within the game that were deeper and dearer to her than any she’d found elsewhere. Sure, none of their trials and achievements offered any real rewards, but the joy of playing together, of being a team, and being a part of each lives despite the vast distances that separated them was more than real enough.

Or at least Tessa had thought so.

Twenty six was a long way from fourteen though, and as she looked at the old, familiar login screen beckoning her once again, Tessa felt the weight of the six years she’d been away from Broken Horizons, the game that defined her teenage years, weighing down on her.

“This is a mistake,” she said, speaking to the empty walls around her.

There should have been posters there, but those were back in the old apartment. With Crystal. It still hurt to think of her name, but it was getting better each day. Tessa told herself that and most of the time she could even pretend she believed it.

Most of the time, but not quite at that moment.

She needed a distraction. She knew herself well enough to know that. Something to break the spiralling chain of thoughts that were leading her nowhere useful or good.

The good news was, she had one. Right in front of her. Only it held its own share of broken promises.

Sighing at her own foolishness, Tessa got up, leaving the login screen behind her.

There was laundry to do. She knew she should probably do that rather than let the computer suck her in. Dishes too. The sink wasn’t too full, but she hadn’t cleaned the bowl she’d used for breakfast. She could take care of those and claim to be a responsible adult and no one would think she couldn’t hold herself together.

Except no one would think that no matter what she did. There wasn’t anyone around to judge her anymore.

“This is ridiculous,” she said, as she poured herself a glass of water. She would have preferred tea, but tea required effort and after a thirteen hour work day, hacking away at code that no one really cared about and would probably be deleted when the next feature change came in, she didn’t have that sort of energy left at all.

No energy for personal maintenance chores, at least not on a weekday, and not for stuff that could be put off.  Playing games was a whole different sort of thing though. Or at least it used to be.

She sighed again as she sat back down at the computer, and then scowled at herself. She knew she was hesitating, and she knew why, but she also knew that she’d already spent a decent chunk of her limited spending money picking up the 15th Anniversary expansion pack for Broken Horizons. The game wasn’t going to be anything like what it was when she’d left it six years ago. Everything and everyone would be different and new, and that was as much the problem as it was the promise of the new expansion.

Gazing at the screen, she warred over the idea of slipping back into the shoes of Glimmerglass, her beloved Elven healer. She thought back to earlier expansions and the wild joy of  exploring the new sights and progressing to new heights of power. Going it alone would be rough, but it was possible some of the people she’d known might still be playing, or might be coming back for the new “World Shift” expansion like she was.

That was almost enough to convince her to shut the program down entirely.

They’d been her friends, and her confidants, and the ones who’d supported her. Right up until they weren’t.

Turning away would be the easiest thing in the world. Did she really even want to do this? She had to be at work in less than ten hours. An hour of play wouldn’t be satisfying and a responsible adult wouldn’t let herself have more than that or, and she could hear the words in her manager’s voice, “it would hurt her productivity”.

She clicked the “Play” button and felt both the thrill of rebellion and an echo of old loss ring through her heart as the first familiar notes of the intro to Broken Horizon’s anthem boomed through the headphone speakers.

[Select Character] or [Create New Character] the game prompted her.

Without thinking her hand swung the mouse over to the Select Character option, as she’d done thousands of times before. Glimmerglass awaited just a click away, but for all the wonderful memories attached to her, there were so many painful ones too.

The kind of drama that wrecks friendships and destroys guilds doesn’t usually come from nowhere. It grows from one problem layered on top of another. It lives in hurtful words and unkind choices and it dies in apathy and regrets.

Tessa needed more than that. She thought about where she was in life, and how well she’d be able to handle running into her old guildmates. Even if there was only silence between them, it would be like a knife twisting in her old memories of when she believed that what they had together mattered to them as much as it had to her.

It didn’t take much reflection to see that she couldn’t go back into the morass of memory and broken relationships Glimmerglass represented. She loved Glimmerglass but she couldn’t be her anymore.

[Create New Character]

It was the simplest of choices. The past was the problem so the solution was straight forward- leave it behind. The new expansion for the game meant a new start for the world with a fresh storyline, and new character options to pick from, so why not make it a clean start entirely?

Even if she’d been playing consistently, Tessa knew she probably would have created an alternate character for the “World Shift” expansion, the same as she had for the “Dark Tide” and “Scourge of Dragons” expansions that had launched while she played. New characters were great for exploring the new storylines that got introduced since the character quests and the expansion storyline tended to be woven together. Also, it wasn’t as though a new characters required deleting her existing ones. Glimmerglass would still be the next time she logged in and, if she was in more of a mood to risk running into people next time, then she could always switch back.

[Select Race]

The first choice Tessa had to make was which of the five new races she wanted to try out. The theme of the “World Shift” expansion was “creatures from beyond time and space”, but somehow that had translated into “halloween town people” for the new player choices, with the options skewing towards being cute and marketable enough that Tessa wasn’t surprised “Chainsaw Teddybear” had made the list.

Apart from their appearance though, the different races did have a fair bit of mechanical complexity to them, which meant the choice between them was one that required careful consideration. Happily, Tessa was already well armed in that regards.

Though her interest in playing Broken Horizons had been crushed by the loss of her guild, Tessa’s interest in the game itself had remained strong enough that she stayed in the loop on the general developments that occurred around it. She had a sense of what each race brought to the game thanks to reading the forums and following wiki posts from the beta testers after “World Shift” hit the public test servers, so weeding out a few of them was easy enough.

With a potential choice already in mind, she clicked on the Artifax race choice first, curious to see the options available for what was supposed to be the best casting race among the new selections. The Crystal Artifax subrace choice came with a number of special features Tessa would have murdered a million monsters to get on Glimmerglass back in the day. They had limitations as well, but it wasn’t the limits which made Tessa pause.

In general the art director for Broken Horizons did a good job with setting a distinctive style for the game while managing to evoke a good deal of reality in how the characters looked and moved. The digital art wasn’t photo-realistic in any sense, but it was easy to imagine it belonging to a real and consistent environment.

Sadly that art director had apparently been on vacation for the six months or so when the Crystal Artifax were being developed because they had wound up looking just as terrible as the beta-testers had complained they did.

Instead of polished work which would have been in line with the rest of Broken Horizon’s offerings, all Tessa found as options for the Crystal Constructs were off-putting, overly-sexualized proportions, jagged, overlapping bits of geometry in the models, and sample animations that utterly failed to convey any sort of weight or fluidity to the character’s movements.

With a groan, she clicked back to consider the other options. She knew there were a few other choices which would make decent healers, but before she left the Artifax race she noticed one of the other subraces.

The Clothworks were similar to the Crystal Constructs in that both followed the general Artifax motif of being people who were constructed from non-living matter. Where the Crystal Constructs were built from gemstones though, the Clothwork were living rag dolls.

They made terrible healers in general as their recovery powers were largely self focused, but the beta-testers had reported that they made surprisingly good, if unusual, tanks.

Tessa clicked to follow the Clothwork build path, mulling over the idea of focusing on a different role than healing for a change.

“It’s supposed to be a fresh start right?” she asked herself as she began playing around with the different appearance options available for a Clothwork girl.

Where the Crystal Construct art development had been relegated to the interns (or designed by the marketing department more likely), the Clothworks showed the characteristic style and craftsmanship of the Broken Horizon’s more talented art team members.

Tessa found a variety of pre-set appearances which ranged from near-human to full blown nightmare. She opted for something towards the human end of the scale but with decidedly inhuman elements, and tweaked each to bring out the qualities she was looking for.

When she was fourteen she’d wanted to be beautiful and amazing. Between the break-up with Crystal and the grind of her unrewarding job though, Tessa found the urge to go just a bit feral hard to resist.

Picking a class for her fledgling character was easier than picking her race had been. Clothworks had access to three of the professions that could make viable Tanks.

Guardians were the plain vanilla, plate armor wearing, sword and shield wielding, walls of muscle and steel that people first thought of when the question of who was going to stand in front of the boss monster and get punched in the face repeatedly came up. They had a few interesting tricks, but were also intentionally one of the simplest classes to play since they tended to attract a lot of new players. That said, they were also arguably the best of the Tanking classes as well, since their durability was simply unmatched by anyone else.

Tessa would have considered going with one except their principal advantage – the armor related skills they gained – didn’t mesh well with the Clothwork’s inherent abilities.

A better choice would have been the Shadow Caster, which focused on surviving the damage their enemies did by simply not being there when the blow landed. Shadow Caster’s had enjoyed an excellent (or overblown depending on who you asked) reputation when Tessa had been playing, but a series of “adjustments” from the developers had stripped away a lot of their more potent (or abusive) powers and left them in a questionable state for the launch of the “World Shift” expansion.

Also, one of Tessa’s worst experiences healing had been with an incredibly arrogant Shadow Caster and she still wanted nothing to do with him or his stupid class.

That left the Soul Knight class. Where Guardian’s resisted damage, and Shadow Caster’s avoided it, Soul Knight’s took the approach that if they were missing health then they would simply steal it right back.

In Glimmerglass’s heyday, accepting a Soul Knight into the party had been considered a serious gamble. Good ones could do amazing things, supposedly, but finding a good one was roughly as difficult as finding a unicorn. In the real world.

Tessa had enjoyed playing with even the bad ones though since a bad Soul Knight required her to be right at the top of her game when it came to healing their shattered carcasses up. Nothing let her show off her prowess like keeping someone alive who was ping ponging against death’s door during every encounter in dungeon.

With her race, her appearance, and her class decided, Tessa’s new character was almost complete, staring back at her from the monitor and missing only one thing.

A name.

“Ok, something cloth related that’s also protective,” she said. Coming up with names for new characters was something she dreaded. Not because she was bad at it though.

Silk Knightgown

She typed the name in, delighted at the pun.

[Name already in use.]

Silk Knightgoon, she tried, the idea of being a bit “goon-ish” seeming appealing too.

[Name already in use.]

She sighed, unsurprised. Broken Horizons was an old game, which meant there’d been 15 years for people to come up with all the clever puns and cool, badass names for characters already.

Twenty minutes passed as she tried variations on her original idea as well as various branching ideas for other “Knight” related possibilities, all to no avail.

“Cloth and protective”, she said, rubbing her temples. Her hour of free time had already passed and the clock said it was time to get to bed. She knew she should close everything down and come back tomorrow. She make the choices she’d spent an hour agonizing over in just a few minutes and be able to get in the rest of the hour as regular play time.

She glanced over at the bed in the opposite corner of the small two room apartment.

All that lay on the other side of that bed was another work day where no one knew what they were doing or why they were being asked to do it.

Pillowcase, she tried as a wry smile played across her lips. It was cloth, and sort of protective. And it was silly. She felt ok with silly. Silly was what she wanted. Silly like she remembered. Staying up late like a fourteen year old silly.

[Name accepted! Begin Tutorial?]

Her doubts and responsibilities lost their hold on her. All it took was that one final click.

Click Play to Begin.

The one click she could never take back.