Eyes of Ember

A somewhat tall and lanky man was walking through the city center, a large box in one hand, and an elongated white cane in the other. Between the two hands was a large grin, as he strolled towards his apartment.

Kane had recently turned 17, and had even more recently spent 4 years of his savings on the box currently propped between his arm and torso.

Or more accurately, what's in the box.

He approached his front door while fumbling for the keys, but before he could find the right one, the door was quickly opened from the other side.

Standing just within the doorframe of the apartment was a burly bearded man, his father. "Did you get what you wanted!" He said excitedly, an even bigger grin on his face than on mine.

"Hell yeah! Think you could help me set this up later?" Kane said while looking in his father's general direction. Receiving a hearty nod.

The closest he could truly get to 'looking' at someone would be pointing his blindfolded face in the direction of their sound.

If he were just your normal blind person, he could easily get away with shades, or even less.

But he's not. Kane wasn't just born blind, but without eyes at all! Making wearing things such as masks and blindfolds a daily occurrence, as to not gross out those around him.

He'd tried glass eyes in the past, but could never get used to the feeling, instead opting to simply cover them completely.

They entered Kane's room and quickly set the box down. Kane's large, muscular father cracked his knuckles, only to then anticlimactically pull the user manual out of the box and begin reading quietly.

Unfortunately, even in the year 2047, user manuals didn't all come with braille. Then again, this isn't something a blind person would typically buy.

After a few minutes of wiring, a few more minutes of reading, then more minutes of re-wiring the wiring he messed up before re-reading, the somewhat large VR headset was propped up over the head of Kane's bed.

This is the kind of headset that slides over your face from above and surrounds the whole head. Allowing full immersion, and the uninterrupted transmission of whatever neural tech plugged you directly into the game.

This kind of technology was top-secret military stuff just a few years ago, suddenly being released to the public upon the transition of our government's grand council.

As you can imagine, rich game companies scrambled for this tech, with a few banding together to create the most expansive game possible. Ember Online.

Kane bought the hard copy, wanting to feel the joy of having another case added to the long row on his bookshelf.

"I could've bought this for you, you know. You didn't need to spend your own money, bud." His father piped up, "Just the chance that my son might get to see is worth a lot to me."

Kane smiled at his father's loving words, "I know, but I'm also buying this game for the game itself, it wouldn't be fair to make you spend so much on that."

After a few more minutes of back and forth on who should've spent money on what, and a few hours at their favorite restaurant, Restaurant, the game had finally finished installing.

Arriving back home, Kane rushed over to his room, putting on the headset almost immediately.

Thankfully, the game had text to speech and voice commands enabled in the menu by default, and a "braille" option. The fact that a braille setting could even work in a VR game is only possible due to its "full-dive" nature.

There being a setting for braille made his heart sink, if the game gave sight to the blind through its revolutionary mechanics, it would never need such a thing. But this was still his best hope.

He probably should've waited a while to make sure it actually let blind people see, before spending all his money on it. But he already pre-ordered.

And his secondary goal of becoming a top player would be much more plausible if he's one of the very first on.

The text to speech feature read out all of the options on the menu, and Kane selected 'Create Character.'

He'd already made an account on their website beforehand, so all he had to do now was pretend to read the terms of service, and give his character a name and appearance.

His father always told him what he looked like in-depth whenever he asked, so he had a pretty good idea of how to build his character.

Text to speech listed out the different races, typical of a fantasy game, and their bonuses/drawbacks. The classes listed were also pretty generic, but out of all of them, one caught his "eye."

Knight, Tank, Brawler, Assasin, Ranger, Mage, Healer, Tamer, Craftsman, and... Aporter?

He'd heard the game would have made-up classes, but he didn't expect those classes to be named made-up words as well. Or maybe his vocabulary just wasn't as big as he thought.

"Race, Elf. Class... Aporter." He heard a 'bleep' of confirmation.

He went with 'Elf' because of their heightened hearing and higher mana pools, with Aporter being a mana-reliant class. If the game didn't give him sight, he'd be relying on this.

Kane next began customizing his character based on the features his father often described.

"Silver hair. White skin. Balance all facial features, elongate the chin by a quarter-inch. Clean, black, slightly slanted eyebrows." Now for the eyes... "Color them lightning blue."

He wasn't sure if "lightning blue" was an actual name for a color, but he heard a beep of confirmation anyways.

Kane was having a lot of fun, mixing his supposedly real features with complete non-sense.

His sense of style and color combinations were fueled only by the descriptions given in many of the novels his father had read to him over the years, and those he'd read in braille himself.

Finally, setting his height and weight at 6',135 lb, he pondered the name of his character.

"Kane? Nah... The Eclipsed One? Sounds stupid at only level 1... Oh! Kane!"

It was perfect.

Deciding not to overthink his name, he went with the one his absolutely unbiased father said fit very well.

Finally completing his character he logged into the game, filled with apprehension.

Kane always enjoyed picking weird classes and trying to be overpowered with them, the feeling of beating a strong combat-oriented enemy 1 on 1 with a support class or strange skills was addictive.

Unfortunately, due to his disability, there were very few games he could hope to pull this off in.

He'd always wanted to be a top-ranking player.

Whether or not this game gave him sight... with sound, touch, smell, and so on being just like in real life, he might finally have a chance at achieving this.

Being blind had great benefits for his other senses, and Kane in particular had always worked hard to improve them further than the norm.

He figures he can hear at least twice the distance of your average blind person, thanks to lots of meditation-ey stuff and seeking out advice from various (mostly blind) sources.

The game finally finished loading.

A vast, wide, glorious world stretching out in front of him. Beautiful fantastic landscapes and clear skies reaching out endlessly!

A wonderfully constructed archaic village in a dense forest surrounded by mountains, with floating islands up ahead and spiraling tree houses just above him. The center of the Elven village.

It was an absolutely stunning world... one that he still couldn't see.