(Side Story Short) Electric Dragon Rider

She'd never quite understood why no one else thought that electricity was magic. People pretended to understand it, and most of the world ran on tamed lightning these days, but they ignored the fact that if you shook your bedsheets in the dark, you could summon a miniature lightning storm, and laughed off the occasional sparks that leapt from one person to the next with a little jolt. "Just static," they'd say.

When she heard about the new game where everything was done by magic, because electricity in that world was too alive to be tamed, she laughed. And then of course, she tried it. The four elemental races offered disappointed her. Earth, air, fire, and water. So boring. She voiced her complaint to the character creation AI who claimed to be the world's Emperor. Like any real Emperor would really waste time greeting each person who came through the entrance.

The 'Emperor' did grant her request though, in exchange for Karma gained from giving Starcraft Technologies access to your old game accounts. The game didn't even try to disguise its data mining nature. But whatever, her character was electric. Literally, it was a being of pure electricity. It was also obviously bugged.

She floated helplessly in the sky, unable to even control her own direction, until she was summoned by the next NPC. And then she had control of her own direction for about five seconds before she dissipated and floated off into the sky again. A dragon flew up to her a few minutes later and offered to be her mentor, which at least matched the same over the top character introduction as the Emperor who let you choose your race.

The dragon summoned her several times while it taught her to use the limited summoning time to zap whatever she was summoned near. She could choose not to accept the summons, but that seemed to be the extent of her abilities.

She filed a rather bitter bug report before quitting the game. She was rather startled when she received an apologetic email right away, offering to refund her Karma and let her reincarnate, but also promising that her chosen race would be modified to be playable soon if she wished to wait.

She decided she'd give it one more try tomorrow, since they'd responded so quickly. If it wasn't really cool though, she didn't see much point in collecting the refund.

--

It was really cool. She zapped all over the beginner's vale. She didn't have a lot of energy, but it recharged through movement. She wasn't sure if that had changed or not, because she hadn't been able to move around enough to use it up before. But now she could move freely, very quickly in her materialized form, or slowly in her dissipated form.

But she had a new skill called ride, and it let her attach to anything. She could ride her dragon mentor, or the water of the stream that ran down the vale, or even a leaf falling out of the tree overhead, and her energy would recharge like she'd plugged herself into an outlet.

And once she could move around and materialize voluntarily, she could do all the normal sorts of game activities. She lit fires for various villagers in exchange for new skills, and she used her new skills to accomplish more tasks in order to acquire her starter gear.

For whatever reason, only metal accessories and objects would materialize and dematerialize with her. She wondered if it was because her energy flowed through them, but it wasn't too bothersome, since the first item was a storage ring.

She'd already decided that "Living Jade Empire" was pretty fun before she left the beginner's vale. But she didn't fall in love with it until she experienced her first thunderstorm beyond the vale.

The storm was full of dragons like the one who had mentored her, but they came in all sizes, and they carried the storm with them in the wind. As long as she stayed within the boundaries of the storm, she never ran out of energy. And when the storm faded away, she could ride a dragon for as long as she wanted in her dissipated form, even after the dragon shifted to its own dissipated form. Although like her, they tended to travel very slowly in that form, more like leisurely sky whales than a dragons flight.

And then she realized that there were other dragons, larger dragons, higher in the sky than the storms that she could catch ever traveled. Higher than she could travel before running out of energy. Suddenly she had a goal. Someday she was going to ride one of those, and someday she was going to travel all the way to the top of the sky.