Maya paced her room, lost in thought. She had three options, really.

Easiest would be to tell Darrow to get lost. Very kindly and gently. I’m not the person you remember, things have changed, sorry you wasted your time coming to see me, I don’t remember you, blah blah. It would be awkward for her and painful for him, but they’d get over it.

Maya wasn’t good with people. She wasn’t good with anything, really. She still had a long way to go getting herself in any sort of reasonable shape to be a useful human, let alone trying to deal with someone else at the same time.

Second, and what she was leaning towards, would be to let Darrow stay around without actively encouraging or discouraging his participation. He could be an acquaintance, a friend perhaps, like anyone else she studied with or quested with. If they were able to reach some deeper understanding at a later date, fine. If they drifted apart, fine. It would be slower, requiring more participation on her part, but it wouldn’t be drastic upheaval for anyone.

Third, she could give up her own plans and go back to world 11934 or whatever with him. Start over somewhere else. Begin their life together anew.

The thought of it made her feathers prickle. She didn’t like the idea of throwing herself into someone else’s power. And maybe it would turn out just great, but maybe it wouldn’t. She was … perhaps not entirely happy here, but at least she was content. She was making progress! She was working to fix herself one tiny step at a time. Sure, it would probably be a lifelong process, but tiny steps still got somewhere in the end.

Maya didn’t want to give up on herself, but she wouldn’t feel right just ditching Darrow either. Her memory was so bad that she really may well have had an entire adult life she couldn’t remember. She still recalled nothing at all about her parents, so the fact that he didn’t show up in the few glimpses she retained didn’t mean much.

Even if it eventually turned out he was a scammer or simply mistaken, she couldn’t discount the very real possibility that he was as lost and confused as Maya herself.

So, for now, she’d stick with option number two. He’d been given a room in Diamond Hall, a different lodging building than her own Sapphire Hall. What was the right word for them? They felt more like hotels than dormitories, but lodging unit sounded so utilitarian and made her think of sparsely-furnished trailers packed side by side.

So she could go to her classes, carry on with her questing, and stop worrying about him.

Any time now. Any minute. Just stop thinking about him. It’s not important.

She didn’t have to go running to him just because he claimed to have known her. She didn’t have to keep lingering over how he’d come all this way just to find her again, if it was again. She didn’t have to quietly think how unworthy she was of that kind of dedication, that kind of timeless devotion, that would drop everything the moment he found her.

Hopefully it would turn out to be a mistake. His real wife would show up, the real Maya that he knew and loved, and then he would never have to realize he’d almost run off with an inferior alternative.

But she couldn’t help but wonder. What if she had been someone worth loving? Someone who’d cared enough for someone else that she’d apparently gone to great lengths to save him?

What if she could be like that again sometime?

She tried to care about people, she really did, but after a while they started to expect so much more than she could be. It was easier and safer to keep things casual. Then they’d never have cause to be disappointed by what they found.

So much easier to care for people collectively. She could care for humanity, mourn and rejoice with the great tragedies or triumphs, so long as she could escape the way they’d look at her when they inevitably discovered how useless and broken she was.

She inhaled deeply, then crossed to the mirror. This wasn’t going to end well, so she stared directly into her beautiful, fierce harpy face with a stern glower.

"Stop it," she commanded. "You have more important things to worry about."

Her reflection glared back at her, demanding.

"I’m watching you. You know you can do better."

Her reflection nodded back in unison.

"Go look at your to-do lists. Goodness knows you have enough of them. Pick a thing. Work on it. Make progress. Stop thinking so much."

Anger edged her voice, hints of the self-loathing that she’d only managed to run from for so long. Part of her wanted to go back to not caring. It would be so much easier if she could stop caring. But she’d made a quiet promise to herself, and she knew she only had so many of those. Once she started breaking them it would never stop.

She would see this through. She’d stay on World 9352. She’d go all the way to max level, whatever that ended up being. And she wouldn’t hide from the world more than necessary.

"Save game …" Maya trailed off. She’d completely forgotten her savename conventions. Was it number, then title? "Eighteen …" she couldn’t think of a good tag, her mind blank.

Game saved: Eighteen

She shrugged. Close enough. She took out a paper and began copying out her to-do lists, then switched to her most recent save on her other save branch and did the same.

It ended up as a jumbled mess of short and long-term goals, most of which were either irrelevant now or poorly thought through in the first place.

She spent some time culling anything useless, rearranging what remained, and felt pretty good about herself when she finally arrived at the final product:

-Continue studying magic

-Get to know the other mages better

—Trixy’s back, check in with her

—How are Yinon and Rion coming with the Diviner quest?

-Level up more!

-Upgrade equipment

-Take over Standalone’s house

-Research the pantheon

—Standalon’s deity (Kane?)

—Ask the Trickster about the Fate’s Follower specialization

-Become powerful and troll other tricksters

She had to smile when she found that one. She’d forgotten that part of her plans entirely, but she definitely wouldn’t consider herself a proper trickster until she’d found a way to get back at Domitius’s pet tricksters. Maybe not Hara, she seemed decent until she got her memories scrambled - and that was terrifying in and of itself, that such a thing was possible - but Pizza and whoever the other one was, they had it coming.

She frowned at one entry, considering for a long time what to do with it.

-Go back and loot the dead lizard guy under the city that I killed earlier. Or would he still be alive in this version? How do saving and loading even exist in a multiplayer game?!

She hadn’t been back to the dungeon beneath the city, but it seemed like an opportunity, being the one person who knew about it. She’d never heard anyone talking about it. Maybe it was a hidden dungeon? She’d only stumbled on it by misfortune, and had never been able to relocate it afterwards. But it did exist. She adjusted the description to be less dramatic and added it to her list.

-Investigate catacombs under Kalyx

Then considered a few minutes and added one more.

-Ask group heads for access to their spell lists

She deliberately didn’t list Darrow. She wasn’t going to worry about him any longer. And she certainly wasn’t going to deliberately remind herself of his existence in the off chance she managed to forget.

Too bad today was so low luck. She could do with a good day to springboard her grand return to action as Maya Starborn. But, alas; fate was not smiling upon her.

She was surprised to find that her Trickster’s Orb had reset. It now included the full 5 dots, each good for a private consultation with her erratic class-patron deity.

The temptation to call immediately grew stronger, but she refrained. She wasn’t sure the full extent to which low luck hindered her critical thinking and she needed to be at full capacity to confront the Trickster.

Same thing with magic research. Trying to tinker with spells on a low-luck day would be asking for trouble.

So that left the mundane things. Leveling, exploring, talking to people, or …

She glanced up, frowning. Had she had something on her list … no, she lost it. Whatever it was, it probably wasn’t important.

Hopefully wasn’t important.

She hated her mind sometimes. She was in a virtual world, immortal, with limitless potential, and still her stupid mess of a brain was making her life miserable.

Maya took a breath and flicked her palm, refocusing onto the moment. She had a list. Time to start following it.

Pick a thing.

Where to begin? Fill in her map? Try to level? Talk to people?

She didn’t really want to talk to people. She was all people’d out for the day, between Darrow and Shardlord. But questing alone wasn’t as much fun as having someone to talk to. It would just have to be someone she trusted and wasn’t uncomfortable around.

Really, Sevard was the only one she wanted to work with, but he had his other obligations and would be offline for hours yet. And she should probably let him take a break.

Wait, hadn’t he promised to send someone to meet her?

Maya smacked herself in the forehead. "Lily. Or Lisa? Something like that. Ugh. Ugh! Why did I forget?"

She hurried downstairs, hoping she hadn’t missed whoever it was. No one could come into her room without permissions, and she didn’t advertise her location. It was probable she could have been searching for hours without finding Maya.

Darrow wasn’t standing around in the courtyard, which was a plus. She appreciated his dedication, but it could get weird quickly if he was too clingy. Fortunately, he’d respected her desire to not be followed around.

She checked with the guard at the gate first, who confirmed that, yes, someone had come around asking after her, but he’d told her off and she’d given up.

Maya groaned. "I was supposed to meet her. Do you remember how long ago it was, or which way she went?"

"It was several hours ago, and she went around that way." He pointed north-west, following the outer wall of the academy toward the main city wall.

Maya thanked him and hurried along the road, though she doubted her contact would have bothered waiting around for so long. Why did Maya have to be so scatterbrained? It was enough to tempt her into searching out some of those quick-edit solutions Sevard warned her against. Surely any potential side effects couldn’t be worse than continuing to slowly tediously struggle against her nature forever.

She reached the outer gate of the city and the guard there confirmed that, yes, a vampire woman matching the academy guard’s description of the stranger had exited the city some hours previously, heading toward the leypillar.

Maya sighed and stared at the obsidian obelisk rising into the sky. The quick-travel system allowed transit from any leypillar to any other - once you’d unlocked the zone - and thus her contact could have gone anywhere. There was no point in trying to search for her further.

Why had she let Darrow distract her? Why had she gotten so wrapped up in it all?

This was stupid.

She was done with people. She couldn’t do this today.

A half hour’s jogging brought her to the forest, where she set about demolishing the goblin and drile populations, ignoring the protests of the noobs. Her Path of Life save meant she had considerably higher health for her level than most mage-specced players, and she leveraged that to her advantage. The fact that she had incredibly overpowered gear also helped.

She switched between spells in rotation, practicing to see what felt most natural and how she could increase her DPS while casting continuously. Her more high-power spells burned through her energy fast, but she could also swap in throwing knives or stabbing with her twin daggers.

Unlike Mayon, Maya Starborn had no problems annihilating the low-level creatures here. Of course, she also didn’t gain any levels from the exercise, but it did help her release all the tension of the day. She may be slow, distractible, and forgetful, but when it came to slaying goblins she didn’t have any problems.

She returned to town several hours later as darkness began to seep across the sky, checked the quest board in case any of her goblin spears or drile tails were requested for active quests - they weren’t - and headed to the shopping district.

The payment for trash drops would be better if there were a quest, but ever since the influx of newcomers, the quests were being finished faster than they could be posted. The list could replace one quest every ten minutes, and the whole thing refilled at midnight, which was plenty for someone like Rominian to stay busy non-stop, but not enough for a whole zone full of newbies trying to actually level through the zone.

She sold everything that couldn’t be used in crafting, getting a meager pile of copper in return, but she’d come a long way toward acclimating to the lower prices in the starting zone. While a few hours of dedicated grinding with Sevard could net between twenty or two hundred gold in the higher zones, the same time and effort in the starter zone would bring less than a silver.

Still, even though spending a few hours slaughtering her way through the zone had been cathartic, she still came back to the same problems.

Meh. She’d deal with it in the morning. For now, she deposited her coins and crafting materials in her apartment storage box, then headed back to the academy for the night. While sleeping wasn’t required and granted no in-game bonuses, sometimes she just felt tired and resting helped.

Perhaps things would go better the next day.

It wasn’t until she lay in the half-asleep haze, about to drift off, that she realized she’d never even looked at her trickster quest for the day.