"Good morning, miss! Are you feeling better today?"
"Huh?"
The girl was still half asleep when the child entered her room. So it's no wonder she's having a hard time processing the question.
Oh, also, the headache is probably not helping as well.
((I feel like a truck has just passed over me.))
Of course she wasn't hit by any truck. There are no trucks in this world, after all.
The girl tentatively focuses her sight on the kid at the side of the bed.
((It's weird. I don't remember child nurses in the hospital…))
The child is a very normal little girl, with her colorful clothes and half-elf ears. Her reddish-brown eyes are shining with mirth, and she wears a maid hat over her nice straight blond hair.
((W-wait, what? Half-elf ears?))
The girl suddenly sits up on her bed, startled.
"Good morning. I'm okay… I think. Where are we?"
The child sounds an exclamation of happiness seeing that the guest seems to be recovered.
"We are at the Wisp's Hearth Inn, in the village called Aberswan."
"Aberswan…"
"Oh, and my name is Marya. I'm pleased to meet you."
"Right. The pleasure is mine, Marya. I'm Cecilia."
"Good! The breakfast is ready, so you should come eat before it cools. Okay?"
"Okay…"
Marya merrily crosses the room to open the window, then heads to the door.
"I hope to see you downstairs eating soon, okay?"
"Okay, Marya."
She breaks into another smile and then leaves the room, like a breeze of excitement, leaving Cecilia alone with her thoughts.
((What the hell? Am I inside the game? But this feels too real to be the game.))
She looks at her hands, and they don't look like her hands at all, but they are, without a doubt, her hands. She can move them and feel the smoothness of the blanket and the pillow. And also the feeling of the hands themselves when they touch each other.
And yet, there's something absolutely alien in those hands. First, they are ebony black, while Cecilia has always been a white person. Second, they look too healthy.
Actually, the simple fact that she can move her hands and feel stuff is otherworldly for Cecilia. There is no needle with the cannula and clamps, nor is there an infusion stand at her side. The room also doesn't look like a hospital room at all.
It actually looks like a very common inn room that you would find in the VRMMORPG Hyperborea, where Cecilia has spent so many of her waking hours in the last couple of years.
"Maybe I can stand up?"
Saying that to nobody in particular, she carefully puts her feet to the side and then tries to stand slowly.
"It's actually a lot easier than I expected… what the hell is going on?"
The world of Hyperborea had a lot of freedom in what people could do because of the Virtual Reality device's connection with the nervous system of the player.
But, at the same time, it had some very hard limitations. Some are technical, some are ethical, and some are about game design.
On the technical level, there was a limit to how much the system was able to render and how many different assets the developers were able to create. That's the reason the players would say 'don't look too close,' but that was valid for every VR game out there.
On the game design limitations, there was balancing and progression to take into account. That means that a person with real-life training in combat shouldn't have an automatic headstart in the game.
The skills and techniques were the way people actually moved inside combat. That made movement a bit weird to get used to at first, because your body insisted on trying to move like in the real world.
And the sense of smell was also very limited. Not because of it being dulled, but because the game could only synthesize a limited number of smells at a time.
The textures in the game world were also limited. Though you were able to feel that you were touching stuff and even the relative softness or hardness of textures, the tactile sense was very dulled.
Finally, on the ethics side, there was a very hard limit on what any player could actually sense of the game world.
For example, there was no pain. When you got hurt, there would be a sense of touch that vibrated a bit, and you would see the world a bit reddish for a moment.
And these were the limits. Cecilia went to check as soon as she stood on her feet.
First, the movement is too fluid, and the textures are too detailed and realistic.
Second, the textures feel very real. Cecilia brushes her hand on the table that is at the side of the bed. It's a simple wood table, without ornaments. But the texture feels very natural to the touch. Not uniform, but with the kinks and fibers of the wood.
"Impressive…"
Then, she passed on to the pain check, pinching her own arm with all her strength. The headache she was feeling before had already subsided, but a headache could occur when playing the game, as its origins would be outside of the control of the game.
The game wouldn't block actual pain that the body could be experiencing, as a safety measure. Pain is an important message the body sends us, after all.
"Ouch!! Oof, this actually hurt."
((So, this is not a simulation, huh? If it is, the processing power is on a scale unimaginable for humans. At least in the stage where we're at.))
She looks around the room again. Her bed is in the center of a wall, very much like a proper hotel room like the ones Cecilia has seen in movies and anime. There is a table, which she had been touching a few moments ago, with a chair.
Completing the furniture of the room, a large wooden wardrobe, with a body-sized mirror on one of its doors, stands on one of the side walls.
The window is right over the table, letting the light of the morning enter.
((The question now is, how am I not at the hospital, how am I able to move around, and why is my body black? Huh? Those are three questions, actually, not one.))
She walks slowly to the mirror, with her heart racing inside her chest, as if she's afraid of what she will see.
And what she sees reflected there is the one thing she didn't expect to see.
In the mirror, a dark elf woman looks at Cecilia, mimicking all her movements. A dark elf she is very familiar with. It's Morielen, her character in the game of Hyperborea.
"Am I dreaming? All the checks gave me positive responses on this being reality… But the girl said that this was in the town of Aberswan."
Aberswan was a town on the outskirts of Drakestadt, the nation in Hyperborea that Cecilia helped to build.
Her appearance is exactly as she remembers from the game. Extremely beautiful, with a regal poise and very elegant and fluid movements.
A perfect exemplar of elven royalty, with her silver-white hair and her lavender eyes, her elegant brow, and the almost perfect lines of her jaw.
Her character in the game was more of a healer, so strength and constitution were her dump stats. Which meant that she wasn't muscular or robust. Instead, her body had a slender build very fitting of the view people have of elves in general.
Bewildered, Cecilia goes through the motions again, feeling her body and her clothes, pinching herself, scratching herself with her nails.
And she felt everything, exactly like any person in the real world would feel.
"There's still one final ethics test. If this is the game, there's no way they would have breached this taboo."
She slides her hand under her dress, going straight to the genital area.
After all, no character in the game had genitalia. That was a complete taboo, for obvious reasons. Male or female, everyone was like a doll down there.
If even with all that, there were the occasional weirdos who would undress NPCs and do weird things. Imagine what would happen if genitals were to exist.
The devs soon after release added a feature that would notify a dedicated team every time someone did something like that, and the person would be banned from ever playing the game again. It worked because the game demanded real-life ID on account creation.
There were also rumored 'baits' in the game. Characters in vulnerable situations that existed just to lure people into trying something.
It's said that a whole ring of pedophiles was busted because of a player that fell for one of those baits.
So that's the final test Cecilia is going through, as she moves her shaking hand up her thighs.
And there it is. Something that, if this was really still the game, shouldn't be there no matter how well the technical details were solved.
"I have a… pussy? WHAAAAAT?"