Even a month after the event, the deaths of Emma Chambers and her poor brother Nicholas weighed heavily on the minds of many. Most didn't know the celebrity personally, but her death was still a tragedy–A freak accident without any explanation.
The truck had seemingly appeared from nowhere and subsequently vanished into thin air. The only reason anyone knew it was a truck accident was the couple of eyewitnesses. They had seen three people get hit and apparently die instantly. Some also reported the truck toppling over after it attempted to swerve, but there was no wreckage.
Two detectives had worked the case of her death. One on the behest of her father, Alex. The other on the behest of the extended family. Neither returned any evidence of who caused it. Alex's detective had found skid marks near the bodies leading into a nearby building, but there was still no trace of the vehicle.
There was a new scandal in the news, that of the funeral.
Addison had begun to make the news circuit, discussing the tragic death of her daughter. She also insisted that they would hold a funeral for Emma in London, the place of her birth. Alex Chambers had been more secluded, but when he was asked about the situation, he agreed with his wife that they would hold Emma's funeral in London.
No mention of their other child appeared on the news. The reclusive Nicholas Chambers hadn't been in the public eye since he was a boy, and even with his death, was only mentioned as an afterthought to his sister.
The only large public mentions of Nicholas came from the USA. The siblings' aunt and uncle, Beth and Aaron Collins, were brought up repeatedly. They refused to send the corpse of Emma to Europe for the funeral, instead holding their own ceremony for the siblings.
It was a smaller affair, held outside the public eye. Only the close friends of the Chambers siblings and the family of their bodyguard, whose name was only mentioned twice in the police report, and once in the local news. Koki had also died in the crash.
Even as the Chambers family in the UK kept trying to sue the Collinses for Emma's body, they kept being rebuked by the actions of the very person they hoped to turn into a much larger media story. Emma had left the family to move to America with her brother and bodyguard. She'd mostly fallen out of the public eye, still releasing music and performing herself once in a while, but much less frequently than when she lived with her parents.
She had also stated in her will that her body was to be buried beside those she loved in America, not in the UK. As such, she, her brother, and her bodyguard were buried together on the Collins family plot. Even if they didn't carry the Collins name, they were still Beth's family and earned their place on the plot.
The scandal was causing more and more people to investigate the private lives of both the living and the dead Chambers. Some speculated on the relationship between Emma and her bodyguard. Others on the home situation of the Chambers family. The lack of mentions about their son, Nicholas, was given some attention. It wasn't as much as Emma's estrangement with her family, but a couple of articles were released.
Even so, most of the world was still mourning Emma's sudden death.
Beneath the news articles about the death of Emma Chambers were several other news stories. A mysterious attacker had apparently attacked a schoolroom filled with students. The government had called it a terrorist attack, but had been incapable of pointing to a culprit.
Despite a classroom having been blown up, the international community had been rather quiet. Even with the media attention given to Emma Chambers' death, the terrorist attack remained rather low-level news across the world. Most people never even heard of it, and those who did barely made an uproar. The families of the children didn't even speak up.
A much larger story appeared only about a day after the attack, that of what seemed to be a massive arachnid moving across the northern United States and into southern Canada. While no recordings of the spider existed, some photos had been taken by drones. Most of these photos were only found in online forums, but a couple had reached the larger news stations.
Biologists confirmed that the organism matched no species they'd ever discovered, as if that wasn't obvious. It also left no trail for them to follow; no footprints or other marks of its presence were left on the landscape in its wake. The organism seemed to just vanish.
There were a couple of incidents of sea serpents being spotted as well, but those stories were never real. Some believed them, but most just ignored the so-called "proof" of giant scaly monsters in the seas of Earth.
Elsewhere, as summer's warmth settled onto the western hemisphere, a new game appeared on most platforms. The game, called A Change In Aostea, cost $30, though it went on sale when it released, halving said price.
The game got around 300 sales across all platforms. Considering it was only really available on PC, and its utter lack of advertising, the sales were still considered good to those who would look back at the game.
One of those 300 sales was by a boy named Mark. He'd been running his shitty old laptop into the ground trying to run most games. Even attempting to run a basic JRPG made his computer's fans turn on, and the heat begin to rise in his room.
He knew he had a problem, buying games he couldn't play on his current device instead of saving for a new one. But he liked to see what games his computer could run, and the many it couldn't. He wanted to seem up-to-date with his knowledge of which games he owned, even though his friends knew he couldn't play them.
But A Change In Aostea was different. Opening the game, his fans didn't even begin to spin. His room remained cool as he waited for something to happen.
The title screen appeared suddenly, automatically full-screen. It was kind of generic. Pixel art name without much style set on a black background. Three buttons, one to create a new character, one to play as an already existing one, and a third for settings. It wasn't a complicated interface at all, and Mark selected the option to make a new character.
The first sign that this game was something truly special was in the character customization. There was a proper model for the character in high-resolution. While it just looked like a humanoid without any real defining features, the number of polygons alone should have fried his laptop.
As he went through customizing, he found tens of thousands of options. Most were greyed out, telling him to progress further in the game to unlock them. Species like dragons, kobolds, and many kinds of faerie were locked. As for the ones he could choose, they were standard fantasy fare. Humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, and gnomes were all classified as humans. Then there were rabbit, bear, wolf, leopard, and deer people, all simply called the beast-species they were closest to, and then adding the -kin suffix. So rabbit-kin, bear-kin, wolf-kin, etc.
There were other beast species he could choose from, of course, but most of them were greyed out as well, once again telling him to progress in the game to unlock other species.
Finally, he had access to a species called Alvod, which seemed to be close to a stereotypical oni. Muscular humanoids with small horns emerging from their foreheads. He got a choice of three colors of Alvod: red, blue, and yellow. The different color only changed the color of the character's horns and slightly altered the build of the avatar.
After that, he could customize everything. Skintone, hair color, clothes, or lack thereof, eyes, teeth, and bone structure. He even got options on genitals and small things like fingernail length. It was a startling amount of customizability for any game, especially one apparently so small that he could play it.
After that was the status window. It was a bit long, with nine stats and some weird terms. But after adjusting the points a bit to make the character a little more physically strong through the STR, SPE, and END stats rather than INT, WIS, or WIL, he was satisfied.
His avatar appeared in a city. The game was first-person, which wasn't too odd, but not to Mark's tastes. Well, he couldn't really notice that as he looked around.
The city was grand. White marble made up nearly every building. Gorgeous and vibrant colors almost overwhelmed the senses. It was gorgeous.
Mark had chosen a human as his species, seeing the fewest flaws. Humans were apparently very diverse in this game, which seemed standard across fantasy fiction. They were adaptable, but didn't have many other traits. He was 'tin-rank' and 'Z-Grade,' whatever that meant, and his archetype was Creature (I).
It took him a little bit of exploration to realize something absolutely absurd. The graphics were beyond modern standards. Hyper-realistic without any kind of lag. They didn't even have loading screens between his status window and the world.
He controlled his character to do a couple of things around town before heading out into the wilderness. He wanted to experience the new world.
A month had passed since Mark had first picked up the game. He had gained the Warrior class and leveled it to 30. Apparently, a class maxed out at level 100.
He also had tons of skills from the various things he'd been doing. Mushroom harvesting, monster fighting, and even hitting a dummy had its own skill. The responsiveness from the game was unmatched and almost enough to make him believe he was in a real world.
He'd joined a small forum about the game. No one knew who the developer was, and the publisher was only listed as VR Productions. Since it wasn't a VR game, no one was quite sure why the publisher called themselves that.
But he'd heard about some events going on in the Central Continent. So far, he'd only been on the Southern Continent, the one the humans called their own. Most never went to the CC because the game would wipe your character if you died. It was one of the few major flaws with the game's design. But it also allowed for greater exploration, as the achievements received during the previous playthrough did carry over and allowed for further options in the character creation screen.
But mostly, the world felt real, and the sky was the limit in terms of creativity. Some players had become vendors, others became builders, and yet others fought. Magic was a bit complex compared to most games, but it was figured out with relative ease once more people became aware of the apparent extraordinary game optimization.
After the initial release, the game was listed on every site it was published on to require 80MB of space total. It was breathtaking just how much time the developers must have put into designing A Change In Aostea. As the fandom slowly grew, so did the many ways the players played the game. Even as things apparently kept happening in the world, Mark was more than happy to just keep looking around the SC.