A Long Time Ago

Once upon a long forgone time, when Amoria Online was new, Lucas, Charlotte and I had been inseparable. Netherian, Desdenia and Stormborn. Three players who ran into each other while killing snakes, and talked away through the night as we did all the quests in the Carugua jungle.

I don't remember who suggested it, but we agreed to log in again at the same time the next day, and so it went from then on. We made a good trio. Desdenia and I were damage dealers, while Netherian healed us. The only thing we were missing was a tank, but Desdenia's pets made up for one. Back then, she had specialized in Beast Handling, and her tamed elephants were enough to tank any dungeon bosses.

I have always been careful not to tell anyone on the internet my real name. But they exchanged theirs freely, and Desdenia even named one of her elephants after Lucas.

This was all before some people realized that there it was possible to earn money by selling things from the game in the real world. I suppose a lot of people had been aware of that possibility, but it wasn't common knowledge. Back then, it was the last thing on my mind.

I had always played MMORPGS, but I had never bonded with anyone in other games. None of my friends in the real world played anything, so the two of them became their replacements in this fantasy world. When we made it to level 80, Desdenia started getting into player battles, and Lucas and I continued to explore the world. The quests only took you to certain places. The rest was a wide, welcoming unknown.

It was about that time that Starford had become the hub of the PvP players. They built a giant coliseum where players got to beat the shit out of each other and win prizes. The Pit, as it's called, attracted a lot of players, and it grew even larger every day with the influx of rich people who bought clan houses and built stores around the castle. Desdenia started to hang out with other people, but we still talked while Netherian and I quested.

Then came the Neural X.

O-light Entertainment was the first company who successfully managed to create a immersive, VR experience in which people couldn't tell the difference between reality and fiction.

Amoria Online was the first game they tried it on, and it was a hit.

Despite concerns about the implications of using the Neural X (how it affected your memory, how much access it had, or how it would hurt your muscles by having you stay still for so long), it conquered the world.

It was natural that it would affect the way players behaved in Amoria Online. Suddenly, your in-game character wasn't just a figure in a screen. It was you. You were fighting the raid bosses. You suffered the damage. You died, you won, you lost. And people started taking it seriously.

Desdenia was among the first ones to monetize her playing time. Even before the advent of the Neural X, she had been streaming her PvP fights to her ever-growing collection of followers.

One day, the PvP clans of Starford decided to attack Chimstad. It was still a small town surrounded by farms, with mismatched thatched houses sprawling all around its borders.

Several news sites had already been writing about the Amorian Lifestyle, as they called it. They spoke about the cities, and who people were making a living out of playing. The attackers knew who they were targeting.

They set fire to the farms, killed the players, and waited near the graveyards to kill them again. They would have sieged the city's castle, but the game didn't allow the clan leader to hold more than one castle at the time. So they destroyed everything else.

Among the victims was a woman from China, Liu Yang, who had been featured in one of those articles. She didn't specify where she lived, but she told the story of how playing Amoria had lifted her and her family from poverty.

After working in the game for twelve hours a day, she had been able to start a new life somewhere, and provide for his three siblings and wife. She had escaped poverty thanks to Amoria, and even if she didn't give her name, she hinted that Chimstad was where she had earned her small fortune.

She spoke about the crops her land had yielded, and how the game was fair as opposed to the real world. How she had the same opportunities as everyone else, because the game couldn't judge her based on her ethnicity, sexual orientation or race. Her wife and siblings played too, and together, they owned a lot of land and played in a clan made up only of their family members.

The Starfordians were smart enough to find the smallest clan from Chimstad, which also happened to own most of the land around the city. So they targeted her, and destroyed everything she had worked for in the matter of a few hours.

Liu Yang committed suicide the next day. She hanged herself from a ceiling fan, and one of her siblings found her on the floor after the fan had broken away from the ceiling with her body attached to it by a noose.

There was outrage. There was a call to boycott the game. But everything was done in accordance with the rules. It wasn't explicitly prohibited to kill players in the game, nor was it disallowed to raid cities, farms, or homes. Everyone who played Amoria Online knew that it was a possibility. But none of them had staked so much of their lives into the game as Liu Yang had.

The attackers were never identified individually. Everyone just knew they were from Starford, and so the animosity between Starford and Chimstad began.

Desdenia, of course, shed crocodile tears for Liu Yang. I knew she had been there because she was still on my friend's list. But I didn't sympathize with either side. Back then, I hadn't even been to any of those cities in months. I kept to myself most of the time, and as long as the events in Amoria didn't bother me directly, I ignored them.

O-Light donated an undisclosed sum to Liu Yang's family as a gift for having been such loyal followers of the game, and her wife even became the company's face for a while. But then everything died down, as it always does, and the incident was forgotten. The animosity stayed.

I stopped talking to Desdenia because she was too busy managing her clan, and despite her insistence that she had nothing to do with the attack, I knew she was lying. She invited me and Netherian to play with her and her new friends from time to time, but I always refused. Netherian joined her once, and then quickly regretted it. He said all the people in her clan were unbearably obnoxious.

Her group eventually sieged Starford Castle and then made up new clans as allies to take others. Soon, they owned half the castles that could be sieged by players. Chimstad alone stood in opposition, as it still does to this day.

Netherian and I continued to play. I leveled up my crafting skill while he became a potion master. We married our characters so we could always teleport to each other from wherever we were. Another perk of marrying your characters is that you get an extra shared bank slot, and if you own property in any of the cities, you can set the tax to be paid by the money in that bank slot.

Then one day he disappeared.