DragonHeart

Game Over. Try Again?

I curse as I run up my stairs two at a time, almost tripping over my feet as I rush towards my bedroom -my VR gear, laying on my desk where I left it yesterday.

I only have ten minutes left, at best, before midnight.

'Damn traffic!'

With my heart hammering against my ribcage, fingers unsteady, I hurriedly strap on my helmet and lay on my bed. YGGDRASIL's starting screen materializes before my eyes, and so do my different accounts' avatars. There's my cousin werewolf Sorcerer, my younger brother's human Paladin, my friend's fairy Rogue, and then in the middle, mine.

Knowing that after tonight I won't be able to play her, or YGGDRASIL ever again, I can't help but take my time to examine it.

Ryoko, class Fighter, race Dragoniod. She's Tall -yes, Tall with a capital 'T'- standing at a proud height of 6'2", something my measly 5'1" height in reality can only dream of. She has thick, hardened -though I wouldn't compare it to tree trunks- muscles, with wine and mahogany coloured scales covering every inch of skin, compacted on the arms, legs, chest, belly and tail, and thinning on the upper back where the looming hooked horned wings sprout, and the face. White, slightly twisted horns arch away from the skull and point backwards, black ruffled hair cut into a pixie style around them. (Long hair simply does not look good). Her expression is frozen in a half-smirk, a glimpse of a fang poking out and with her sharp golden eyes cat-like and narrowed. Or snake-like, whichever.

She's currently dressed in a mesh of old and new gear; a leather guard with iron breastplate and pauldens overtop it, leather pants which consists of a few straps I see as more for fashion than anything else, but no shoes, leaving the scaly, monstrously-shaped and clawed feet bare. Lastly is the large, sturdy sword at the hip in a black sheath with golden carvings.

To be perfectly honest, I spent a long time fighting myself either or not I should choose her, or go with my original plan of creating a Rogue Elf beauty. Ideally I would be a Rogue Dragoniod, but the game didn't allow for that with this race. So in the end the wings won out.

In the seven years that I've played, I've done so obsessively, to the point that I was able to max Ryoko out only a few months ago. And although I had always fancied myself as a character who would fight behind the scenes -defeat the opponent before they even realized it was a battle- I've grown to enjoy being a frontline, heavy-hitter type fighter that this race demands.

A big part of why I was so determined to max her out was to conquer this particular guild, in which a very annoying past classmate of mine often boasted of being apart of, but in the end I wasn't able to do that.

(It leaves a sour taste on my tongue.)

After another moment, I mange to pull myself from my longing and wishful-thinking long enough to click my avatar and login. As soon as the game is finished loading I materialize where my avatar last was; my personal bedroom within the Great Nazarick. All forty-one of the guildmembers has one, although admittedly I haven't personalized it or put as much effort into stylizing it past the basic -though grand and expensive looking- setting it already comes in. To be fair, the bedrooms are more for decoration, seeing as no one actually sleeps in this game.

I was always far more busy helping to recreate Nazarick and going on adventures to level-up than to spend any more time than necessary on the room I only use to login and out of.

Knowing the time, the meeting that Momonga had emailed the entire guild a month ago has already started, but before that I wanted to see one particular floor of Nazarick before saying goodbye.

The seventh floor.

It only takes a second for me to teleport at the entrance, and I take my time to walk through the entity of it. The sweltering heat and ashy taste the floor would normally generate doesn't actually affect me or anyone else in-game, although the River of Fire and the leaking lava from the rocky walls and ground are plenty impressive even without it. NPCs of varying strength are scattered about, including the seven Demon Lord Sins I personally added near the entrance. Altogether the floor is dimly lit -bats flapping and shrieking unseen from above- but the glaring glow the lava muddles give off the needed light to see as I stroll through.