During a gloomy, rain-soaked afternoon, the storm had passed, leaving behind puddles that shimmered like forgotten mirrors and the scent of wet earth rising. Rosaria walked her usual route home, slipping through the narrow alley behind the bakery with quiet steps.
That’s when an echo, soft and strange, called a name she hadn’t used in years. Not Rosaria. A name that was buried beneath time, one she’d long since folded away like a letter never sent. She slowly turned, her breath catching in the thickly humid air, but the alley held only silence.
She might have dismissed it—chalked it up to wind or weariness—until the name came again, clearer this time, like a thread tugging at her memory. She had told no one where she lived. No one. And yet, someone or something was calling her back.
Her life wasn’t unhappy. It was content in the way a book rests on a shelf. But the one place she had felt joy—true, unfiltered joy—had closed to her. Now, it seemed, that door was creaking open again.
When she returned home, she unearthed the old headset from beneath a stack of notebooks and dusted it off gingerly. Mythikar. The world where mythology breathed and imagination had weight. Where she had once been more than simply Rosaria.
She couldn’t remember when she last logged in. Time had blurred. But the thrill of adventure had never left her. Even if it wasn’t real, it had been true.
Since then, she didn’t have a reason to return—until she was greeted by her old gamer tag: a Draconic human warrior, forged from myth and memory, known for the terror she evoked in those who crossed her path.
She intended to find out who called for her. It was time to return—and to remind the world why her name had once echoed like thunder.
Rosaria powered up the VR visor, gloves, and shoes. “To the world of imagination,” she murmured, speaking the phrase that unlocked the gate. “Take flight.”
Cascades of color flowed across the display, fluorescent and flickering. The images always began pixelated, like forming dreams, then sharpened until they felt more real than reality. The gloves were thin, translucent—designed for the system to know the size and shape of one’s hands. The shoes, textured like misted glass, served the same purpose.
Welcome back, Sylvanna flashed and disappeared on the screen. Upon her return, the Mythikar she knew wasn’t the one she was in now.
Mythikar was a game where people could create avatars based on mythical creatures, monsters, or something entirely different.
To enter the game and create a character, players had to undergo a process. First came the calibration: the tech measured physical features and generated an avatar based on data approximation. Then came the persona questions, which helped determine whether the avatar leaned more toward its mythological depiction—beastly, elemental, otherworldly—or toward a more human form. The system also assigned skills that matched the player’s responses.
Once that was done, the final step was personalization. Players could choose the avatar’s colors—skin, fur, scales, eye shape, pupil style, and other details.
Since the creator’s disappearance, riddles would randomly appear throughout the game—but few players paid attention to them.
Mythikar was a world the average person could easily mistake for real life. In here, reality felt like it was just a nightmare. In any MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) game, you could grow closer to a stranger on your friend list than to someone in your neighborhood.
There was a kind of freedom in cyberspace. You could show your heart and soul without fear of judgment.
That was what she loved most about games: the way they defied normalized standards. In here, she wasn’t a weak, awkward girl trapped in her own head. She didn’t stumble over words or shrink from conversation. Talking through a screen—typing instead of speaking—came naturally.
This game was different. Mythikar offered more than escape; it offered recognition. Fame and fortune could spill into the real world through the digital tourney, if you were willing to fight for it in the Gladiator Arena.
Rosaria never cared for fame. It felt hollow—like reputations built on scaffolds of pretense, destined to collapse.
Eventually, Rosaria understood: if she wanted to be heard, she had to be feared. That meant PKing—player killing. It frustrated gamers, sure. Losing progress, losing loot. But it wasn’t immoral. Not in a world where the body wasn’t real.
Still, she wondered. What if it was real, in an indirect way? What if games were a place to vent urges that, left unchecked, could cause harm elsewhere? If no one allowed curiosity to trickle into reality, then maybe—just maybe—nobody got hurt.
Rosaria had leveled up, fought, and won, earning the fear and respect that she craved. Her second-gen visor model read brainwaves and allowed full dive in a state of relative paralysis. It was glitchy, but it worked well for her.
Rosaria didn’t believe the world she left would change. But judging from its new look and atmosphere, there was a new player in town and they wanted her.
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