Thursday, August 28th, 2042, Coal Harbour, Vancouver, Canada.

Adelina finally left. The room felt lighter, but the weight of her words remained, pressing down on Leoric's shoulders. He let out a heavy breath, sinking back into his office chair with a dramatic slump, his unprofessional posture betraying just how exhausted he was. Sophie's favorite client had inadvertently created the most challenging meeting of their career—a conversation thick with unspoken tension and ideals at odds.

He chuckled at the thought. Normally, this would have been the fun, relaxing meeting, strategically scheduled to land right after the horrible meeting with Coventech Industries. How the tables had turned!

Lina's words still hung in the air and kept bringing his mind back to the meeting. He needed a distraction. But maybe what he actually needed was some kind of solution to this new problem.

Still slouching in his chair, Leoric pulled up a search window, noticing how he was still wearing his glasses.

Heh. No reason to take them off.

After all, he was going to be alone for the rest of the day. He focused back on the input box, patiently awaiting his instructions. "Search for news about the glitch—any news or signs when it's going to be fixed?"

A spinning circle appeared under his prompt. He closed his eyes, waiting for the text-to-speech narration of the answer.

"Negative. There are many discussions online about the glitch and how people are realising the inconvenience of their experiments with unusual avatars. The only statement from HexakAI Inc. is how the glitch is a 'Known Issue'. Some players have threatened to sue them if they did not get this solved quickly."

Leoric let out a long sigh. They bought the code to an old game, tossed an allegedly AI-generated fresh coat of paint over it, and converted the game to work in FullDive VR. Some AI specifically trained to port games had possibly handled even the programming. When thinking of it this way, it made Leoric feel like the developers may simply be in way over their heads. They likely never expected all those new users—the ones brought to them by Kaelyn's sudden viral screenshot. And somehow their code had messed with the FullDive network and the virtual life of millions.

He could easily picture the less-than-one-hundred employees of a globe-spanning company trying to deal with time zone differences in order to figure out their next move, and how every minute wasted just spiralled issues further out of their control. Their lives, jobs, and the entire company's fate possibly slipping away from their hands.

But it was not only their lives that were slipping away. It also affected innocent people, just like Leoric. How many other players would deal with issues in the VR world over the next couple of days? That vast majority of humanity worked entirely in VR space. So many virtual lives would end up disrupted with this glitch.

With so many people affected… Of course! There's bound to be people who'll take matters into their own hands. It's the internet, after all.

Leoric smiled at the sudden realisation and opened his eyes. "Search for hints of hackers trying to replicate the glitch without the game, or undoing its effect?"

The spinning circle came back. "There are multiple rumours of groups of various renown trying to either solve or replicate the problem. So far, none have stepped forward with a fix. In some spaces, there is an undercurrent of anxiety at the idea of hackers weaponising the glitch. Counter-measures are already being researched by many of the world's tech giants."

Weaponize the glitch?

Leoric shuddered. If hackers forcibly altered people's avatars without consent—without the game's calibration system—then they could make it impossible for some people to live in VR. And with how hostile the real world had become to many, what would happen to them? What would happen to him?

This… this could become a disaster.

Leoric let out a nervous laughter. He chastised himself for it—laughing felt like the wrong reaction right now; things were escalating, bigger and faster than anyone had probably expected. He straightened up. Leoric took the glasses off his nose and returned them in their storage box. They belonged to Sophie and did not suit him. They were a tether to his past, and letting them go felt like snapping an invisible thread. A quiet, subtle liberation. And yet, was letting go a relief or a loss?

He pondered for a moment what it meant. Was he still Sophie? Was he walking away from his old life and embracing Leoric again? He kept thinking about the image he now projected. The confidence Sophie had sought when she created him.

But there was something else, something more, and he did not know how to call it, or what it was.

Leoric's body had never truly felt wrong. Even during the meeting with Adelina, once he had donned the glasses, he had felt himself fall back into the familiar rhythm of their previous conversations. And despite being taller, in a muscular and more angular body, he still had access to the full range of Sophie's emotional intelligence.

He glanced sideways and took a quick look at his reflection in the glass window. His Throne & Co suit, his Montalier watch. He knew as soon as he would log back in the game, he would immediately revert to his character's adventuring gear, a mix of store-bought and quest rewards, which had served him well in that world. It was not as smart and professional as this, but the rugged look suited him as well. Clothes meant for the outdoors, instead of office buildings.

Still, he had to check. If the developers would not fix the glitch soon, perhaps there was another, faster and far easier solution: delete his character and start over.

Maybe I should just have made a Xena bunny princess, after all?

He chuckled as he lingered on the idea.

Nah. Still not the image I want to project.

Leoric stood up and walked to the door of the office. He entered the sterile white and grey world of Sophie's entry Hub and walked to the icon of A Realm Reforged Again. He checked the different options.

"Open application."

That's it? Maybe there's a Main Menu after you load the game. Some kind of character select?

He pressed the button and immediately found himself back in the alley where he had logged off the previous evening. He frowned in displeasure.

Straight to the game? How do you pick which character you want to play?

He noticed a message blinking in the periphery of his vision, and he opened it.

"Kaelyn Moonshadow has formed the registered party «Golden Dawn». You are one of its founding members."

A window popped up with information on her teammates.

Kaelyn Moonshadow, Encantadora, Priest 9, Offline for ten hours.

Vaelith Dawnscale, Ícono, Mage 11, Online, Silvergale Strand. Partied.

Elyssia Windwhisper, Guardián, Martial Artist 12, Offline for eleven hours.

Leoric Stargazer, Galán, Ranger 14, Online, Luminara.

He raised an eyebrow at the unusual titles each of them had next to their name. They had Kaelyn's fingerprints all over them.

Or paw prints in this case?

He chuckled as he recalled the felinae's unique speech pattern. She had kept throwing Spanish seemingly at random in her sentences yesterday.

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He focused on the title he had been assigned.

"Galán, huh," he smirked, raising an eyebrow. Chivalrous, noble, gallant. But did he deserve this title, when he was the one who played it safe? A ranger who preferred to hide, avoid danger.

He studied his reflection. Tall, athletic, striking. Maybe Kaelyn had not meant bravery in the knightly sense. Maybe 'galán' was not about fighting—but about standing tall in the face of adversity. Sophie had always shied away and disappeared. But maybe Leoric would change that.

He closed the party window, but his mind drifted to his party members.

He had noticed how Vaelith was online already. According to what she had told them yesterday, she was only supposed to log in much later. Or at least that had been what she had told them when they had discussed their schedules to line-up group activities. Not only was she online, but currently was in a group, in the newbie zone around Luminara.

Trying to catch up levels? Commendable.

He wondered about the teammates she ended up with. Given how none of the rest of her registered party had been online until he just showed up, he imagined she probably joined some pickup group who recruited her. He did not really know her, but from what little he had seen yesterday, he did not peg Vaelith for the type to go out and fight things by herself, if left to her own devices. Someone must have offered to help her out, and she was certainly small and cute enough to attract those kinds of protective instincts.

Leoric returned his thoughts to his current problem. If he deleted this character, he might have to do just like Vaelith—work double-time to catch up with the rest of the team. The idea of throwing away an entire day of progression and adventure gnawed at him, but if there was no simple way to edit his character's appearance, he might just have to bite the bullet.

He searched the game's options for a way to return to the character creation screen. Logging out of the game was as simple as willing yourself out of the game; intuitive and simple. The way to return to the main menu should be equally simple, he reasoned. However, he could not locate it. He tried voice commands, mental nudges. Nothing.

Okay then? Maybe the game only allows a single character?

Leoric went through the reasons people often created alts—alternate characters—in video games.

By far the most common one? Playing different classes. However, with the class-change system they had in this game, you did not need to start from scratch. You could just change class whenever you needed to, or if you felt like it.

The second reason was usually to stay within your friend's level range, so you could play with them. Once again, the game offered an alternative. With the level-synchronisation feature, a player could simply lower their level to match their friends', and play with them whenever you felt like it.

There were other reasons, but they were nowhere as commonly seen. Some people just liked the options of playing with a visually distinct avatar. Others wanted to experience the low-level story or progression again. A few might be curious to see how different the experience was when you started in another city. A few people used alts to troll, swindle or otherwise disrupt the experience of the game, but they were by far the smallest group.

Blocking the creation of alts only to prevent this kind of behaviour seemed highly unlikely. Leoric determined the game developers must have known how important it was to their fans and weighed all their options. It seemed like a feature way too big to leave off the table.

He concluded this had to be an intentional design decision. Maybe the developers had some perfectly reasonable justifications he could not think of. Technical limitations? The developers of the original version of the game had earned quite the reputation with their struggles with server limits with data. They had restricted the designs of so many of their systems using that excuse.

So if they expect us to stick to a single character, there must be a way to start over? Erase a character and start fresh?

It had come to that. He let out a long exhale and voiced his frustration aloud. "Okay, where's the Delete Character option, then?"

He searched through the options once again. And after a few minutes of looking everywhere for it, he scratched at the top of his head in puzzlement, his long burrovian ears twitching. He could not find it.

Maybe this is like some of those hardcore games where your character has to die permanently before you can make a new one?

The various ideas of hardcore mode—permanent death—were nothing new in games, but they were rarely forced on the player base, except in very specific genres. This was a role-playing video-game. Getting killed—or knocked out—hundreds of times was expected for the most challenging encounters.

A dead player would just reappear—respawn—after getting knocked out. Maybe, if the game designers felt mean or old-school, the player would get hit by some experience loss or debt. Leoric tried in vain to recall the exact death penalty in the previous version of the game, all those years ago. Since he could not recall what it was, he assumed it must have been quite mild.

Pay to repair your gear, perhaps?

Leoric returned to his interface. Surely he had missed an option somewhere, so he kept checking. He went through every single menu he knew of and checked every sub-menu. Twice and then once again, for good measure. He started panicking the more time he spent just combing over every square centimetre of the User Interface. He was baffled; there had to be a way to start over.

But after another ten tedious minutes of fruitless searching, he gave up. He did not have to do this alone; others probably had looked for that option, too! Someone else was bound to have found where the developers had stashed it. Someone would know! He could the answer to his question if only he returned to his search engine. "Be right back, then."

His consciousness returned to his Hub. "Search the net for ways to create alts, or to delete and create new characters in A Realm Reforged Again, please."

Once again, a spinning circle. It kept spinning. And spinning some more. Leoric tapped one foot on the white, plain surface. Every tap sounded like an eight-bit sound from the classic game console.

"The prompt resulted in over 18,000 different hits where people have been asking the same questions. So far, none revealed proven solutions. A few threads have linked to instructions and screenshots of ways to do so. They were all debunked by people posting counterproof and accusing the original posters of doctoring screenshots. Over eighty percent of links were simple Rick Roll attempts. Some users went as far as deleting and reinstalling the game. One even registered a new account. No fail-safe way to create a new character seemed to exist."

Leoric let the information sink in. How could the game know it was still you, when you using a brand new account? Well, he supposed there were many ways; just like in the era of network adapters in PCs, the neural jacks at the base on everyone's neck all had unique serial numbers to identify the user. The game must use this to track who is playing.

He wondered what that meant for him? Were there truly no do-overs and was he stuck as Leoric?

He let out a happy sigh.

Wait. Was that relief? It sure feels like it.

Leoric paused. Was he afraid of fading away? Of returning to Sophie or becoming someone else?

Had becoming Leoric also meant losing Sophie? They had always been the same person, had the same taste. They shared their love of the outdoors, and an intense desire to thread a path that belonged to no one but themselves. Their freedom ruled above all else, and he treasured the ability to pivot at a moment's notice to see where the wind blew.

He left the colourless Hub and returned to his office, where he let himself collapse onto the couch, sitting right by the door.

Everything about Leoric felt right. Sophie had survived for all twenty-nine years of her life. She had tried her best to follow her heart, and she fought the entire world every second of the way. It had been exhausting, an uphill battle every day. Her career had been a never ending challenge. Her life with Daniel had felt like she was simply following the expected path laid before her. Sure, she had been attracted to him, and more than simply physically. But had she truly ever loved him? She had envied him. She had wanted to be him.

Yesterday, she created Leoric. A little over twenty-four hours had passed since he was born. And he already felt like he was the answer to all her issues. Adelina had disapproved of him, but was it because she saw in Sophie someone she thought was like her? Sophie had been a peer, an ally in her fight against the world.

Sophie, however, had never wanted to change the world. She had simply wanted to fit in. And was it not much easier to fix herself than the other way around? Was it wrong to take the easy way out? Did it mean he was weak, or a coward?

Was he simply choosing the path of least resistance?

Should he feel guilty about this?

Hey, it's not like reinventing myself is easy.

Leoric had a sudden idea. What if the fact you cannot delete your character was a message, a sign?

Maybe, then, Leoric was just meant to stay. When Sophie created him, together with Zephyra, she felt empowered and filled with joy. Every choice felt like it came from deep within her own soul. There was no hesitation, because every selection felt like it was the obvious choice. The only choice.

If Sophie had to go through character creation a second time, would she just end up recreating Leoric? He thought long about the question. But no matter how he approached the idea, he always came to the same conclusion; he probably would. Nevertheless, he hesitated.

Vaelith's online, right? Maybe I can just go talk to her about this?

He did not know her very well; only what Elyssia had told him about her. And Vaelith? She knew even less about him. Would she help a stranger?

Am I a stranger to her? Or would she see me as a friend already?

He wondered if they could compare notes? How she had created Vaelith? How it had felt since yesterday to be her? After all, he was sure there would be some commonality between their journeys.

Hopefully, she won't mind some company, and maybe she'll even have answers.

Leoric realised he really could use someone to talk to, even if she had no answers for him. Even if she only laughed at him for asking his questions. Leoric felt any kind of response might help him figure out his path.

But his instincts told him that was not how Vaelith would react. She was not that type of person. He could tell because of how protective Elyssia acted towards her. The dracan mage was the one who insisted Elyssia and Leoric gave Kaelyn a chance. She saw the good even in someone like her. She is either too kind, or sharper than she appeared. Despite her young appearance, the player behind her gave off an impression of someone far wiser than himself.

Leoric knew one thing. He did not think he could figure out all the answers alone, and until Elyssia logged on, Vaelith was his best shot. He stood, inhaled deeply, and logged back in.

Time to pay her a visit.

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