Eighteen Gruelling years

Try as he might, Reader could not get the character sheet to open again. And although his memories of being promised a heroic part in the struggles of his world never faded, he could never reconcile them with the utterly unassailable normalcy of his life. In time, he came to think of the whole thing as a dream and a metaphor, an exhortation to do his best for the world however he could. His memories of being a well-liked but unremarkable high school teacher were harder to explain, but there were few lessons to be learned from them - the occasional specific memory that came in handy in class, and some better ideas for social interactions. A sense of perspective, perhaps a recognition that heroism didn't have to be loud and flashy. But for all his good intentions opportunities for heroism, even the quiet kind, were hard to find.

With no way to reconcile the memories of his previous life with anything happening in his current one, Reader became fascinated with metaphorical meanings that it might have had. The fact the world he lived in was supposedly known as 'Gamer's World' became a focus, and the difficulties he encountered in life he found weighed less heavy when he was in a game. In a world partly of his own imagination, where he could make and save his progress, he felt as close as he could to that feeling of having potential, of being someone important. And he knew there must be something important to it, because the strange dispraxia that plagued him in real life was absent, or at least distant, when he was immersed in a game. In the real world his abilities were strangely inconsistent, and he would joke with the rare educated friend he happened to make that he was as good as the next at _episteme, _but had been somehow robbed of the capacity for gnosis.

For all his patience, he was a strange youth in a world that seemed to value banality, and life was not easy. _Perhaps the lesson is that given the chance to be a god, one should always take it _he'd muse, typically before escaping into a world partially of his own making. The focus of his life made his likely career path - game design - one less thing to worry about, but he had little interest in it for its own sake. It might be good practise if I do eventually get my own planet he would console himself in quiet moments, but lacking anyone to share such thoughts with, they never grew. As the years wore on like a too-long grinding session, reader felt more and more like he remembered being in the last months of his previous life, taking part in the world but fading from it.

Then on the day of his eighteenth birthday, everything changed.