Chương 53: A Bargain

The last few weeks had been a total nightmare. Not one of those silly nightmares where you find yourself addressing an important meeting or standing in front of an assembly while giving a speech, only to find you don't have any pants on. Not even one of those over-the-top, frightening-in-the-moment but laugh-at-it-later types of dreams where you're getting chased by a giant monster. Usually, those monsters turned out to be utterly ridiculous once a waking mind has the chance to analyze them fully.

This nightmare was the subtle, insidious kind that slowly wears away at your sanity. Trapped inside a dream, knowing full well the world around you isn't real, but you're unable to wake up, slowly growing mad as insanity takes hold and the last vestiges of your mind crumble piece by piece. The only saving grace was that this dream lacked any elements of the previous two. Mostly. It all started about 3 weeks ago.

Brandy woke up in an unfamiliar place. It wasn't her bedroom and it wasn't the VR pod she was testing for her work. It wasn't any sort of room she was familiar with at all. If anything, it resembled one of those ancient historical cathedrals from European history, but everything Brandy knew about those all came from movies. She hadn't really set foot into a church since… Melia died. Her service was three years ago. The room was huge and well-lit despite the vaulted ceilings and tall pillars.

A gigantic statue of a beautiful woman in a flowing dress stood behind her with her arms outstretched, as if welcoming Brandy into her home. But Brandy didn't exactly feel welcome, due to the fact that she was lying on a freezing slab of marble. And she was naked. Brandy tried clearing the fog from her head, but she felt dizzy, disoriented, and weak. Like she hadn't eaten or slept for days, and her body barely had enough energy left to gripe at her.

Work had been demanding over the last several months, trying to close the deal on a lucrative new partner, but her days of sleepless nights cramming for exams and living off Cup O' Noodle were long behind her. Her head felt heavy, and the moment she tried lifting it off the stone, she was assaulted by a migraine.

"Be still," cautioned a warm but unfamiliar voice. Brandy tilted her head to the side and her eyes bulged wide. Not only was she naked, lying on a stone slab like some sort of sacrificial altar, but she wasn't alone. A woman in a classic black-and-white nun's habit came walking serenely toward her, bearing a fine cloth. Before Brandy even had a chance to complain or get embarrassed, the woman pulled the sheet gently over her, covering her up.

"Take your time and rest," the woman continued, her peculiar voice sounding strangely loud even though she seemed to be almost whispering.

"You've just revived. You're probably under the effects of [Resurrection Sickness]."

"Revived?" Brandy asked numbly. Her words came out muddy and slurred, like her tongue had forgotten how to work, and her throat felt constricted or maybe swollen. It wasn't painful, but talking was almost impossible.

"Ressssssurrection…sicknesss?" She understood the words, but their meaning eluded her. What was going on? Did somebody kidnap her and force her into some sort of weird play?

"Take a look at your status screen," the strange woman encouraged patiently.

"That should help."

"Status?" Brandy asked. That made no sense. Status screens belonged in the land of video games and fantasy books, not real life. Brandy worked for a video game company. Usually, she was the one trying to explain to others how "systems" worked and why they were cool in rpgs. If she ever found herself giving the sales pitch to people who moved in different circles and didn't have a clue about gaming culture, she was always the one who felt like cringing as they looked at her like she'd grown an extra head.

The irony of how she felt at the moment was not lost on her. But something alarming happened as soon as she had said that magic word: a status screen did appear. Brandy's mind was slowly clearing from the fog, but she almost wished it hadn't.

Name: Eluna Brandywine Title: Light's Hope Race: High Elf Class: Saint Level: 1 HP: 124 Mana: 245 Constitution: 1 Strength: 1 Dexterity: 1 Agility: 1 Intelligence: 2 Wisdom: 2 Spirit: 2 This was… far, far too detailed to be a dream. Far too real to be a hallucination, and far too fantastical to be anything her sleep-deprived brain cooked up if she somehow finally managed to get the VR pod to do what it was advertised to do.

And even if she somehow did manage to get the stupid thing working, full immersion gaming wasn't anywhere near this level of fidelity.

That's why her company agreed to take on this trial: the world wanted more, and nobody could deliver anything close to the pioneers of "living imagination" like Inception or Sword Art. Over a hundred years had passed since those works took ancient media by storm, but the promised technology simply never appeared. And yet, in front of her, a light blue box floated tactfully in the air, visible to her no matter where she looked but never fully obstructing her vision.

"What do you mean, Resurrection Sickness?" Brandy asked again. Her mind was working overtime, taking in every little detail it could. If this were somehow a dream, she needed to burn as much of it into her memory as she could. She was an old hand at rpgs, and something about this screen was hauntingly familiar to her. It was almost like she'd seen it before, though that should have obviously been impossible, since no game she ever played was anywhere close to being this realistic.

So then why did she know exactly where to look to find her buffs and debuffs? And now that she thought about it, "Resurrection Sickness" was a very specific debuff from a game she was intimately familiar with. Her eyes floated back to the top of the box and found her name. And… her race. Brandy's eyes went wide as the world started fading to white.

"Miss?" came the woman's voice, and now that Brandy was hearing it again, she wondered how she actually understood it. The woman wasn't speaking English.

"Miss?" The woman's voice sounded more hurried, almost panicked, but Brandy couldn't answer her. Brandy didn't know exactly where she was, but she had a guess. And that guess shouldn't be possible. Because even if this dream was the aftermath of her fevered mind finally getting the "full immersion" pod to work, this specific world shouldn't exist. Fantasy Online shut down its servers almost two years ago. Ebonvale was gone. Brandy stared up at the ceiling, eyes unfocused, letting everything wash over her.

She heard the patter of soft-soled shoes hurrying toward an exit on the other side of the room, the status box slowly faded away, and the silken cloth that was placed on top of her caressed her naked skin in a way that should only be possible after soaking for hours in a very relaxing bath. In other words, it was real. As real as the body she now found herself in. Brandy never would have had any reason to suspect she was in anything but her boring, old, original body if she hadn't looked at her status sheet.

The last thing she remembered was being an average girl who was definitely not approaching 30 and had most certainly worked off the freshman 15 years ago. She had wavy blond hair and fair skin… when it wasn't getting sunburned if she tried to get a tan. But Brandy had a sinking feeling things might be different right now. She raised a hand, but instead of her small, manicured hands with polished nails and slightly pudgy fingers, she was met by something much larger. Strangely, it didn't seem masculine… only big.

Her fingers were incredibly long and slender, but if she held her current hand up to what it should have been, this one would easily be twice the size. And the hand was connected to a long, rail-thin arm that seemed to stretch for days, telling Brandy her new body was likely much taller than she realized. And something was off about her skin tone, too… the pigment had too much red.

If she weren't staring so intently at her own arm, she might imagine it belonged to a pale girl who spent too much time out in the sun, but she wasn't burned; she was literally pink. She reached a hand up to her head and brought down a lock of hair. Teal. Not blond, which was her natural color, and not even black when she had that gothic phase back in high school. Honest to goodness teal. She had green hair. Brandy groaned as her hand traveled higher. She knew what she was about to find and she dreaded it.

Elves, which she apparently now was in this bizarre dream, were famous for their pointy ears. If her suspicions were correct and she was lucid-dreaming about the days of old in Ebonvale, those particular brands of elves had it much, much worse. Most elves had slight curls or pointy edges at the tips of otherwise human-looking ears. At most, certain franchises stretched them out an inch or two, leveled them out with the top of a character's head. Not so for Ebonvale.

Elves, and "high elves" in particular, which was what Brandy chose as her starting race, really leaned into the "knife ear" shtick. Her hand found her ear, sensitive and ticklish, and slowly traveled up. And up. And up. The further her hand slowly crawled, and the more the ear seemed to stretch forever, Brandy felt a tiny part of her soul wither in despair. Every single inch of ear was there, flared drastically behind her, even with her head lying on the stone, like an industrial-strength weather antenna.

High elf ears were famous for being nearly half as long as the player's arm, which meant she was now rocking two spears on the side of her head, upwards of two feet long. Brandy's arm flopped limply onto the stone slab. She was exhausted and so over it. Maybe she could fall asleep and wake up back in her office, and she'd realize she'd drunk too much cheap wine and passed out on the tiled floor. But until then, only one thing stuck out in her mind. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere.

Support the author by seeking out the original.

"Dang it, past me! What were you thinking?!"

Sadly, as Brandy already predicted, she was not dreaming. The nun eventually came back, this time with several people in tow, fancy people dressed in beautifully tailored robes that would make any renfaire junkie green with envy. They bowed to her respectfully, reverently, which made her feel very weird inside because she had never done anything to impress these people. She was just a mid-level quality control assistant and beta tester.

Not some sort of "saint", which seemed to be more than a simple title they were trying to push onto her. Brandy couldn't deny that this system, whatever it was, had chosen a class for her, and that class just happened to be a [Saint], but the way they idolized her with adoration in their eyes sent shivers up her spine. Shivers that didn't have anything to do with the cold; the goosebumps on her arms were doing that well enough on their own.

The first nun, who found her when she woke up, helped her sit up and get dressed, which confirmed Brandy's earlier suspicion: she was really tall. At first, the nun looked close to Brandy's normal height, somewhere in the five and a half foot range, but as Brandy stood up, she dwarfed the poor woman. Brandy had to be somewhere close to 7 feet tall. At least having giant hands made more sense. The next few days were a whirlwind.

Brandy tried explaining to these people that she wasn't who they thought she was, that even if the system thought she was a [Saint], that wasn't who she was. They all kept calling her Eluna, too, which Brandy almost never answered to because she wasn't used to people using her old in-game name. All Brandy wanted to do was wake up from this dream and go home, but arguing with the church-people seemed to have a negative effect.

One of the fancy people seemed to agree with her that she wasn't a [Saint], but instead of helping her log out (or whatever might send her back), the man tried accusing her of being some sort of imposter. Brandy thought he was joking at first, since she didn't know who she was supposed to be posing as in the first place, but he was not. At first, he claimed she was some sort of summoned demon that needed to be banished, and chucked a ball of light at her.

Brandy stared at it, confused but amused, wondering how (and why) some random guy in long black robes conjured up a glowing yellow orb the size of a softball. But as soon as it hit her, she crumpled into a heap, screaming in agony as her body seized up. Brandy's body felt like it was on fire, like every tiny hair across her skin was a minuscule spear trying to stab her to death. She spasmed and convulsed, but the whole experience only lasted a second, maybe two.

As soon as it was over and her breath returned, the pain faded and no trace of the attack remained, as if it was only in her head. But Brandy's head was drenched in sweat, and when she glanced at her status, her health points were nearly depleted, nine-tenths missing and dipped dangerously into the red. Brandy closed her eyes and almost wished the man had finished her off. Maybe then she could go home.

But she couldn't, and something in the back of her mind told her this wasn't a game; if she died, she wouldn't mysteriously get a second try. On the plus side, though, she thought as she lay on the floor breathing heavily, she gained a level. Now she was level 2. The other people in the room were not pleased that the black-robed dude chucked a gold ball at her, and one dude in red robes did a flying tackle and laid the fool out, while a white-robed dude rushed over and knelt beside her.

He laid a hand gently on Brandy's forehead and whispered, "[Healing Light]," and the final vestiges of pain vanished completely. Brandy glanced at her screen and saw her health return to full. The red-robed guy restrained the black robe, and soon, some really beefy-looking guys wearing white tabards with a judge's gavel on them came in and hauled him away. As he left, kicking and screaming, he kept screeching about heresy and blasphemy.

Once the commotion died down and some of the more gentle clergy helped her back to a real bed, she was finally able to ask what was on her mind. She didn't get any answers that she liked. Somehow, Brandy found herself back in the world of Ebonvale, though quite some time had passed since it was a game. And here, it might not have ever been a game, or at the very least, these people had no idea what she meant when she asked about "npcs" or "gms" or anything to do with the company or developers.

They certainly had no idea what she was talking about when she asked how to log out. They looked at her peculiarly, as if they couldn't understand every word that she said, despite her somehow understanding them and speaking the same language, and at best, they thought she was asking them for a real wooden log, like the trunk of a massive tree. Obviously, that wasn't what she wanted.

After that, they seemed to think she might be suffering from brain damage, and as much as it annoyed her adult sensibilities, Brandy played along and let them treat her like a simpleton. She was given clothes, food, and shelter free of charge, without any expectation of recompense, and was made comfortable. But her sanity was thinning, her will to live was slowly dying, and part of her didn't understand why. Really, this should have been a dream come true.

Waking up in the world of her favorite game as a kid, possibly even as the reincarnation of her character, sounded amazing. On paper. But this world was too real, she felt too alive, like she belonged here, like she could live an entire life here.

And not in any new and exciting sort of way, but the tired, mundane, monotonous sort of way that middle aged folk got when they wake up one morning and realize they've been working the same dead-end job for the last 35 years and the only hope for retirement is when they get too old to function properly, they keel over, and die. It wasn't the escape it should have been. Maybe that was because it was outside of her control. Maybe it was because it wasn't something she was longing for or actively seeking out.

Deep inside, Brandy always longed to recreate the olden days with her guild, raiding dungeons with her friends, staying up late into the night instead of studying or doing homework. But at the end of the day, she could unplug, disconnect, and go back to the real world. This, somehow, had become her real world, and she didn't know if she had it in her to make another life for herself. Not when everything else she had going for her was suddenly… cut off. Brandy became lethargic, almost catatonic.

She took to sleeping longer and longer, moving around less and only becoming active when people closely monitored her. She could tell her keepers were getting anxious and worried, but to her, they were just that: keepers. Guards and jailors. They never forced Brandy to do anything she truly didn't want to do, and after that one black-robed man, nobody ever attacked her again, but Brandy felt like an empty husk. And that's when things got worse.

One morning, she woke up, thinking that a nun had brought her breakfast again. They were kind to her, really, and Brandy really was grateful, even if she couldn't muster up the energy to show it. But it wasn't a nun, and it wasn't breakfast. It was a system screen.

[The Light of a Dying Flame] System Quest Level: 0 Rarity: Divine Listen to the pleas of a shackled goddess. Hear her cries, release her from her bonds, and bring her radiant light back into a darkened world.

Reward: [Celestara's Celestial Scepter] Level: 0 Class: Saint Rarity: Legendary [Accept] Brandy knew a quest prompt when she saw one. She'd done hundreds of them in her time, any self-respecting gamer had. Maybe not as many as some, but not everybody could be a loremaster. Not everybody was Melia. Thinking of her old best friend didn't do Brandy's mood any favors. If anybody deserved a second chance to live in a beautiful fantasy world, it was her. She'd be more than happy to take on a ridiculous quest.

Brandy might have been more swayed if the reward had been some sort of pet, but reading the bare-bones description told her this wasn't going to be some simple escort mission or fetch quest. It was probably going to be long, arduous, and frankly, incredibly tedious. There was only one problem. There wasn't an option to decline.

Brandy tried avoiding the system screen as long as she could. Her expected breakfast finally came, and she ate it in silence, not bothering to try to make small talk. But unlike any other time when she summoned the system on her own, this screen never went away. It took up a decent chunk of her vision and she swore it was slowly growing larger, taking up more space, as if it was pestering her to pay attention. Eventually, she got so annoyed and wanted it gone so badly that she hit the button. Accept.

The screen vanished instantly… but nothing changed. Until she went to sleep. Brandy was getting used to her new, too-tall, too-lanky body that needed to duck just to see under doorways, but the biggest surprise was how fast she adapted to having gigantic ears. They truly were like blades, cutting into the air behind her, and if she pretended hard enough, she imagined they were aerodynamic, streamlining her face so she could run faster.

Her biggest fear was that she wouldn't be able to sleep, since she liked to lie on her back and they obviously couldn't stick straight out. It turned out they were very bendy. Or, as it also turned out, she could sleep on her side just fine in this new body. It was just that as soon as she fell asleep, she found herself in another dream. Brandy wasn't convinced that her new body in this strange world wasn't a dream, but that possibility was vanishing rapidly.

Especially as time went on and little things made themselves apparent, like when she stubbed her toe on a dresser, bonked her head on a hanging lamp, or gave herself a papercut when she picked up a book after wondering if she could read the language. She found she could, but not well, and she also learned her blood was closer to black than it was to red. The dream featured Brandy standing in an open pavilion similar to the ruins of the Pantheon in Greece, but the structure itself was set atop a sea of clouds.

It was bright out, even though there wasn't any sort of light or sun, and the only thing in the pavilion, besides Brandy, was a large, desecrated stone throne encircled by marble pillars. Brandy didn't approach the throne and instead wandered toward the clouds. She wondered what would happen if she tried stepping off the pavilion, if a cloud could actually hold her weight. Strangely, the clouds were very solid, like walking on normal dirt, even if she did sink slightly into them as she took a step.

That first night, she walked the opposite way from the pavilion and didn't look back. Brandy didn't know how long she walked, and when she woke up, she hardly remembered the dream at all. But the dream wouldn't let her go. Each night thereafter, she was forced back into the pavilion. After avoiding it a second night, the dream followed her to her naptime in the middle of the day. Finally understanding that something wanted her attention, Brandy decided to give it to them.

Maybe then they'd finally let her sleep in peace, or maybe they'd let her wake up in the right place, back home, finally. Or not wake up at all. It was a dark thought, but it grew increasingly attractive to Brandy as the days went on. Nearly two weeks had passed in this world, and Brandy's body was atrophying. She began to lose the will to eat, to sustain herself. It was the third night of the strange dream, and Brandy was simply tired of it all. She just wanted to be done.

She approached the throne, and on it sat a pale blue crystal, long and skinny, with a pyramidal cap on both ends. She reached out a hand to touch it… and when she did, she felt a sharp prick in the back of her mind like somebody was trying to pull her eyeball back into her socket. The pain was short and fleeting, but it was enough to wake her up. And when she did, she found herself sitting up in her bed, in the middle of the night, holding the crystal.

Something was clearly going on, but Brandy didn't know if she cared. Somebody, someone or something, obviously brought her here, to this world very similar to the one she grew up playing as a video game, but what they didn't realize, what they didn't know, was that the magic was gone. Not literal magic, since Brandy was coming to terms with seeing the people around her cast spells on a daily basis, but that little spark that made the world special.

It was dead and gone, in more ways than one, ever since the servers shut down and the guild all went their own separate ways. It didn't have the personality to draw her in, and dangling a rare quest in front of her, no matter how "divine" it might be, only drove her further away. Until one day (Brandy had lost track of how long it had been), whoever pulled the strings seemed to lose their patience and tried a different tactic.

The crystal sat by Brandy's bedside, unused, but when she fell asleep, she had another dream. A different dream. This one was starkly different from any of the others, and seeing it made Brandy's blood run cold. Brandy's point of view, like the vision of a floating ghost, hung suspended in her company's office. It was late afternoon, everybody was about to get off for the day, but nobody had gone home yet. In fact, nobody was moving at all.

People had smiles on their faces and everybody looked excited about something. Brandy knew exactly what they were excited about, because she had been excited too. In this dream, she screamed out, a voice without sound, into an office of frozen people who couldn't hear.

"Don't go!" she yelled.

"Don't do it!" Brandy yelled until her voice turned hoarse, but her words fell on deaf ears. Especially by the one person she most desired to warn. Herself. There, at the far end of the room, was a pitch-black pod, the "full immersion" virtual reality unit her company had received from a recently acquired partner… and she was the one who signed up to test it. It all came rushing back to her. The last thing she remembered doing before waking up in this body…

was sinking back into some symbiotic liquid and getting plugged in. The pod was closed, her body was inside of there, and the world around her seemed to be… frozen.

"Quite a similar situation we find ourselves in, is it not?" a voice rang out.

"Who's there?" Brandy yelled, but the people in the room remained frozen in time. Next to her, or at least where she imagined her invisible body to be, a misty vapor started to form. It started as a small cloud, growing larger and larger, until it finally coalesced into the body of a tall, mature woman. A strikingly familiar woman, whom Brandy instantly recognized.

"You're the statue lady in the place I woke up," Brandy accused. The woman took no offense, simply smiling and nodding.

"I am Celestara, and 'that place' is my temple," she explained. Brandy thought back hard. She knew that name; it was important in the game and it was very familiar. Especially to healers.

"You're a goddess, right?" Brandy asked.

"Did you bring me here? Send me back! Put me back!"

"I did not bring you to Ebonvale," Celestara sighed, "And even though I know who did, I cannot say. My lips are sealed," she said with a wry smile, "Along with the rest of my body. And my power."

"Tough tits," Brandy spat. If she had arms, she would have crossed them.

"You're talking to me now. Tell somebody else to send me back."

"I am talking to you because of your previous affinity and class," Celestara said.

"If you had not been such a powerful [Priestess], my words would not be able to reach you. Reaching anybody else is out of the question. But…let us not be so hasty. As you can see, time flows differently here. You've been in my realm for nearly three weeks by our counting, yet no time has passed in your original world."

"No dice," Brandy instantly denied.

"If a deal is too good to be true, then it probably is. Let me guess. You want me to help you with your 'quest'... which I'm guessing will unseal you or whatever, and then you'll send me back? Fat chance."

"You and I, we've gotten off on the wrong foot," Celestara sighed.

"As I said, I did not bring you here, nor would I have…without asking your permission first. Other deities are not so…courteous. I will be honest with you. I need your help. But it won't go unrewarded. There are other things you might value, I think, that I could provide."

"Yeah?" Brandy asked skeptically, "Like what?" The view of the office shifted slowly, sluggishly, as if it took a considerable amount of Celestara's power just to turn it. It moved down into a very specific cubicle, Brandy's work station, and zoomed in on a framed photograph of two children running in a field, taken nearly twenty years ago.

"You aren't the only one to find their way here, you know." Brandy stared hard at the old photo. Alarm bells were ringing, her gut was screaming at her, but her heart would not listen. She knew this was most likely going to be a trap, but she was going to walk into it with open arms.

"Tell me everything."