oneironym

With her giant hammer balanced across her shoulders (it just barely fit through the doorway), Maggie made her way down to the quest board near the front of the Tavern. If she was going to have to kill slimes anyway, she figured it best to see if there were any other quests she might be able to knock out at the same time. Maybe someone else wanted slimes dead, too, and she could double-dip…. “‘Pick up five vegetables from around the amphitheater’,” she read, quirking a brow. “‘Deliver a pizza and two-liter of soda to the blacksmith’. ‘Find three missing pigeons and return them to the roost’.” None of them sounded particularly… heroic. “I literally logged in because I didn’t want to clean my kitchen,” Maggie lamented, reluctantly tearing the paper strip with the contact number for the vegetable-collecting quest. She was not exactly itching to run off and fight a dragon that very minute, but she had hoped for something that felt less like she was doing someone else’s chores. Princess

“I- I lost the lottery….” It felt like someone else speaking the words, but the fear needling into Maggie’s heart was all too real. She stared, open-mouthed, at herself, trying to process what all of this meant. Or perhaps trying to process an alternative to what she knew it meant. When the patch rolled out, she was going to die. Or worse-- Maggie would cease to be, wiped from the game as though she had never existed. A hand dragged over her portrait in her Gallery, smudging the lines into oblivion, so that no one would remember her, or what she looked like, or her name…. This was her deepest, darkest fear. This was why she wrote her name over and over on the walls of her cave, drew her face, wrote her thoughts, sketched moments of her life covering the stone interior of her dream. If she died, she died, but Maggie wanted someone to remember her, always and forever. She left a mark upon the world, if even in her nightmare, so that someone someday somehow would see it, and remember

At the stroke of midnight, April 1st, Maggie felt herself Change. Her hair stayed in her eyes where she liked it, but it had gone strangely white. The curtain of fluff that hid her eyes from the world had gone sparkly, too, like fresh snow under bright sun. Maybe with a touch of aurora, and some extra glitter for good measure. She tossed her head to feel that it was much longer now, too. She had a real mane now, down her back and probably dragging on the ground. An experimental bob of her tail indicated that it was, in fact, no longer the bob she was used to, either. With luck, the ground would also be fresh snow, or all that hair was going to get dirty. “Elegant,” she thought, “But I can’t go out like this.” Perhaps all the shimmer and sparkles would serve to hide whatever dirt she managed to pick up-- Wait, no, she was not planning to stay like this! Maggie could barely walk without stepping on her own fluff! She felt cold, too. Not unpleasantly cold, or even like she, herself