1 A Girl's Past

Her name was Alice Hart, she was born healthy and quite average like most babies. She grew up as the only daughter of a very responsible couple that actually took care of her, at least it was until they started to have problems of trust. Her mother thought Alice's father was cheating on her with a colleague, which was terribly far from the truth.

One night, her mother went a little overboard and pushed Alice away when she was trying to get them to stop fighting. Alice fell down the stairs and when she reached the bottom she didn't stand up anymore.

When the couple reacted and took the 5-year-old to the hospital, they received a harsh notice for their already crumbling relationship. It appeared that Alice had broken a few vertebrae and would unfortunately not be able to stand up anymore.

Her mother was filed guilty of child abuse after the situation was cleared up, and her father immediately broke up with her to focus completely on his daughter, feeling the guilt on his heart push harder than any lover could fix ever.

13 years have passed since that incident. Alice developed a weak immune system after not being able to leave the hospital for long periods of time, low exposure to social environments, and some genetic diseases starting to take a toll on her from part of her mother.

Alice always had a kind soul, and seeing her father struggle every day just to keep her in that hospital gave her a huge squeeze to her heart. She started to talk to him that maybe they could just go home and...See what happens after that. She tried to persuade him that maybe it wasn't worth it to keep working so much if she was just going to be a nuisance.

Her father didn't listen to her words and by work of bad fortune and the fact that her father didn't have the best of jobs, the next time she heard him speak was on the testament read that some lawyer gave her so she could know that yes...Her father died of a heart attack due to the incredible amount of stress, pressure, and overwork that he tackled in order to keep his daughter alive.

Alice was destroyed by this and the notice that she would need to leave the hospital two weeks after that due to the non existent funds that kept her on that bed to start with.

She decided to use her father's phone to look up some places she could try and live until she becomes unable to sustain herself. And that was the moment when it happened.

She noticed a strange website on the results of her search. Apparently, it seemed like one of those game advertisements she saw occasionally on TV or videos, so she decided to look at it for absolutely no reason. Right now her mind wasn't working enough to push her to continue looking for information, so she shrugged off the pain and stress for a single moment to look at a random advertisement.

"Abandon all responsibilities and join us in New World Online! The completely new world for you to discover and is absolutely free!"

Yeah, it seemed good so far. She had some money so maybe she would give it a try since she didn't have much to do now that her family was gone and she had some sort of income to use barely to survive. It appears that the life savings of her father would be redirected to a bank account of her own.

This and the inheritance would probably be enough to buy her a simple room at a specialized building and a wheelchair to move around on. Alice decided to continue reading about this game...Maybe distracting her mind would help her overcome the hard situation she was in right now.

So, checking the price of the game and the system used to play it, she found out that she had just barely the amount of money to get all four things since with the purchase of the game itself, she would receive a massive discount on the system.

Alice prepared her things and first of all, bought a wheelchair from the hospital since they wouldn't give her a free one. Then, she would make sure to secure a room on the second floor of a building that had an elevator for her to use, and just then, checking her money once again, she would order the game in order for her to make sure she would have enough to do everything she wanted.

Two weeks went by and now she was sitting on her single bed. The room around her was on the second floor of a decent but cheap apartment complex that somehow had enough income to place an elevator on their building. Her surroundings were filled with...Pretty much nothing.

There was a simple mini-fridge, a basic kitchen she would most probably never use, a small table in the center of the room, and her bed. The bathroom was in a separate room and it was cheap as well.

In her hands was the system which she could use to play the game she ordered, it was called "FIS-001" (An acronym for "Full Immersion System v001")

It was like a motorbike helmet, but much lighter in weight. It had some cables that went directly towards an electric output in order for it to operate, apparently, it also had an emergency battery that would turn on if an electric shutdown was to happen in order to keep the user from disconnecting outright.

This system was made so that the brain wouldn't be hurt by a sudden disconnection towards the real world, which could create some headaches and confusion for the user. Alice took the game out of its box and introduced it into a different compartment of the helmet, before putting it on and laying on the bed.

A holographic interface appeared before her eyes and with a single thought, she felt almost as if she was pulled forward, her mind left her body, and was introduced to a big text window.

"Welcome, to New World Online."

And so, her story would start once again. Would this opportunity bring peace to her mind? Or chaos to her heart? Who knows.