"You know, daddy... I'm actually out of gold…"
"No worries, Anais! I just scored a fat loot drop!"
- {DaddySins is Requesting a Trade} -
"Also, my armor's basically stitched with sadness at this point-"
"Bam! New set."
"And my outfit is, like, so last patch-"
"Boom. Fashion upgrade."
"Awwww, Daddy! What would I ever do without you~?"
Behind the VR Headset, a young man snorted through a mouthful of chocolate bar, his fingers dancing across the joystick with lazy precision. His hair was a storm of black tufts that hadn't seen a comb in weeks. His eyes were hollow from three all-nighters and a diet consisting entirely of sugar, spite, and sarcasm.
"Tch," he clicked his tongue. "These guys are too easy."
And no, before you ask, he wasn't the 'daddy.'
He was the one calling that other poor player 'daddy.'
With a heart-shaped emote. And a lisp.
There was an art to it, really. Say you're a girl. Toss in a few "~uwu"s. Play helpless. Boom, gold fountains. Digital sugar daddies tripping over themselves to equip you like a raid boss.
Noah wasn't confused about his sexuality or having some Freudian crisis. He just understood the battlefield and male libido was his most reliable loot box.
Meet Anais: cute, naive, a total damsel dressed up as a priestess.
Also known as: Noah in a female avatar and voice changer, emotionally bankrupt, and min-maxing catfish builds in a not-even-fully-launched VRMMORPG beta called Vestige: Requiem of Evrinol.
In Vestige: Requiem of Evrinol, the threat wasn't dragons or demons.
It was other players, desperate, fractured, and willing to kill for survival.
It defied the usual fantasy tropes: no chosen ones, no grand resurgence. Just a world that had moved past its golden age and fallen into a cold, post-adventurer dusk.
What if the world built for heroes no longer had a place for them?What if it only had room left for survivors?
That question was what set Evrinol apart and why it stayed with people long after they logged out.
But for Noah, he just saw a sandbox ripe for manipulation.
"Look at that gold stack…" he whispered, leaning back and cracking his spine like a proud conman. "A million. Christ."
He lived his whole life wrapped in layers of fiction, but this was art.
In the forums, he was already infamous, feared, and sometimes worshipped.
They called him: "Miss Mister Fortune"
Some of his most successful catfishing tactics included:
– Entering raids and acting completely clueless, missing all skillshots, and still getting carried because three different players swore they could "teach her slowly, one-on-one."
– Misspelling every fourth word on purpose. Apparently, nothing activated male generosity more than a girl who didn't know how to spell "sword." "Is dis a swrod or a wand? T///T"
And perhaps the most impressive:
– Fake-confessing to a player in broken text emojis, only to immediately get gifted a house, matching couple rings, and a full-tier weapon set.He logged off, blocked the guy, and sold everything. No regrets. That one funded his next two scams.
His habit of lying hadn't started because of gold.
No, it went way back, back to when he was a lonely, awkward kid who told little fibs just to get someone to sit beside him during lunch.
The kind of lies that made him feel wanted, if only for a moment. And then, as quick as they came, people left.
One by one.
The lies got bigger.
The loneliness stayed the same.
It was hard not to lie when lying was the only thing that ever got him anything.
The truth? In real life, Noah was just a loser.
A forgettable guy with greasy hair, has no girlfriend, and a social battery that ran out before conversations even began. No cool backstory. No sad orphan arc.
So, really, the scams were more of a routine than a thrill at this point.
"Well," he sighed, stretching his fingers, "back to the breakup script."
As hours passed, he returned to the usual grind:Break some poor guy's romantic delusion. Collect emotional loot. Disappear.
"I'm sorry..." he spoke, engaging the voice changer with a smooth, soft modulation. "Thank you for everything, but I think... I think we should stop seeing each other."
"W-What? Why?!" the guy on the other end panicked. "Did you find someone else?!"
"No! I just… I just can't do this anymore. There's too much going on IRL... I'm sorry."
And with that, Noah hovered over the player's name, DaddySins, and clicked Unfriend.
"NO! ANAIIIIS! PLEASE! YOU CAN'T DO THIS TO ME!"
He snorted. "God. They always say that."
He clicked the logout button once.
Nothing.
Clicked it again, harder this time.
Still nothing.
"The hell…?"
His brows furrowed as he kept tapping, faster now, irritation crawling into his throat. The button stayed grayed out. Frozen. Like the game had just... stopped listening to him.
The air around him started to feel weird and heavy.
Like someone turned up the humidity or he'd walked into a room that wasn't quite real.
The colors around the edge of his screen started bleeding together, warping like heat waves.
Even the background music, the usual soft fantasy harp thing, started crackling, cutting in and out like an old radio.
Then, there was pain.
Sudden and sharp, like someone shoved a hot rod right into his spine.
"ARGH!"
He doubled over, gasping.
It wasn't some VR feedback or game mechanic.
This hurt.
It really hurt.
His arms jerked against his will, legs stiffened.
His stomach twisted in knots, and his mouth went dry, his tongue felt thick like it didn't belong to him.
Something was wrong.
His vision stretched unnaturally wide, almost like his eyes were being pulled open from the inside.
Everything around him blurred, smeared together like wet paint.
And worse, he could feel it, the breeze brushing against his skin, the pressure of the ground under his feet.
None of that was supposed to happen. This was a game. He was wearing a headset. He wasn't supposed to feel anything.
"What is this...?"
His hands weren't responding right. His body felt like it was floating and anchored at the same time. Cold sweat clung to his back.
In the corner of his HUD, something flickered to life:
-{SYSTEM ERROR}
-{Connection Severed}
-{Recalibrating User Data…}
-{Stats: Reset — Level 0}
-{Status: Undefined Entity}