Brent Roth - The Dragon's Wrath: A Virtual Dream (4 page)

Chapter 4: Why I Game

(Saturday, January 2nd Game Day / January 1st Real Day)

Thinking back on how I got to where I am now was sometimes a little depressing, but for the most part I tried to find encouragement from it. I was blessed with a lot of good physical and mental gifts but it seems I was also cursed with fragility.

I was around the average height of 5'11"-6'0", weighed in anywhere between 195-205lbs while being fairly in-shape, and was considered quite strong and fairly intelligent by most. But those characteristics, if you could call them that, weren't static for me.

They weren't standard.

They always fluctuated.

In high school I was off to a good start, out-lifting most of the serious body builders and power lifters at the local gyms, but that didn't last too long as I was soon injured through sports.

Concussions, a torn ligament in my elbow, and a back injury basically derailed my young high school life.

After drifting in and out of school, missing nearly half of my freshman and sophomore year due to health issues, I dropped out the beginning of my junior year.

That never really got me down though, I was young and optimistic.

So, I entered junior college after just turning seventeen and plugged away, only to find that the lingering issues from my concussions hadn't really gone away. I had been living with daily headaches throughout the entire day that were quite painful for about two-years.

That started my first year in high school. By the third year they had gone down to once-a-week headaches but my ability to learn was still impacted.

It was a sad state of affairs really.

I had placed in the 99th percentile in my favorite categories without even trying. I also placed in the 92nd percentile up through 95th percentile for the subjects I disliked and never studied. For all intents and purposes, I was a bit too smart for my years.

Concussions took care of that for me though.

They leveled the playing field.

Maybe it was punishment for squandering my talents… I often find myself wondering why things happened the way they did.

Going forward, I struggled at the junior college level for a semester until I was forced to take a year off to recuperate. I figured that some time off to let my mind heal was in my best interest in the long-term.

So I moved on, doing nothing but playing the most popular MMORPGs of the day to waste time. Through that I discovered I was actually quite good at gaming. I had never played RPGs online before and didn't really know what to expect, but soon found myself addicted to the Player versus Player aspect of the games.

I was addicted to the competition.

Eventually, I made it all the way to the top of the leaderboards with my ranking placing me in the top 3 for those of the Warrior class and top 5 in the Paladin class on my server of 40,000. I wasn't half bad at PvE either, as I ended up being a Main Tank for multiple high-end raiding guilds on my Warrior and was considered at least in the top 10 for Paladin healers in Player versus Environment.

My reputation preceded me and there weren't any decent PvP or PvE players that didn't know my name. I was famous through action and not words… it was something I had long craved.

Something I had been lacking in my real life.

Not long after, I had realized that through video games my mind seemed to have recovered to a respectable level.

All of the small amounts of memorizing game data, learning every class and every classes' skills and cool downs and the strategies behind them amounted to a lot of information. Because it was interesting and I enjoyed it, it was a lot easier learning compared to reading a textbook.

The days where I could read a 300-page textbook front to back and recall everything were long behind me anyways.

I don't expect to ever be at that level again.

So, with my mind no longer feeling sub-standard I went back to school. I got good enough grades to get me into a highly ranked university and things were looking up.

Then I found myself with another health issue: severe food poisoning, on New Year's Day no less. I didn't understand what was happening at first, thinking my stomach ache was just from bad food and all I would need to do was flush my system. But, then I looked down and saw that instead of stool there was just blood.

For a week, there was just blood.

As a male, going to the toilet and finding a large pool of blood is not normal.

After two-week's time, I had lost nearly forty pounds. At that age I was only 165lbs but my height was the same. I turned into a 125lbs, 6'0" guy in just barely under seventeen days. I was bed ridden for about two months; too weak to move or do anything but eventually I started to get healthy enough to return to work.

Returning to my physical nature of work, I ended up severely straining all of my upper body muscles as I was simply too weak to do anything but thought I could push through the pain.

Fast forward nearly two-years of physical therapy later and I was a healthy 195lbs with fairly little body fat thanks to my rapid weight loss turning me into skin and bones.

The world was mine for the taking.

I transferred over to a highly ranked university and continued my education, only to somehow tear my meniscus in my right knee while moving some furniture down a flight of stairs.

Whatever, small setback I figured… I still had plenty of time to heal while in school.

Not to be outdone though, with my bad knee that wouldn't track properly and didn't allow me to walk normally, I ended up stumbling one day while in a hurry and hit my head on the sharp edge of a metal object, directly on my temple.

My jaw was bruised side to side from the impact.

It turned out to be my third serious concussion and one that proved less painful but more difficult overall. There was no pain or headache after two months, but there were mental blocks that persisted. 

I failed every class going forward for the next two years as I tried in vain, with help from counselors, doctors, professors, and the financial aid staff at the school to simply graduate. I only needed three classes to graduate, but they had proved impossible even though I had repeated them three times. I had been in the school system now for nearly nine years since I first attended community college.

They wanted to help me, but I couldn't even help myself.

I was a super senior without the partying, without the laughs and glamor of a fraternity. I gave up on schooling. I had had enough of my mediocrity and failures.

I moved back home to live with my family to try and restart my life once again, for a third time. I had been dealing with health issues for twelve years now, but I wasn't ready to quit.

Adversity makes one stronger, or so they say.

Then it happened again.

I was working on some electrical wiring for a house not more than six months after leaving University and was bumped from behind, knocking me off balance. Instinctively I threw my elbow out to brace my fall… unfortunately my elbow braced my fall with a metal pole with a hot wire in my other hand.

I got lit up.

My neck, shoulders, and back were all burned along with my fingers and elbow. My back, stomach, and ribs were all bruised as consolation. I thought, at the time, it wasn't that bad. It was whatever; the pain wasn't anything to give consideration to.

Burns and bruises heal in time; I was familiar with healing over time.

A week passed and I thought I was somewhat back to normal and got back to doing some work around the house when I suddenly started feeling fatigued. I didn't think much of it so I just took the rest of the day off.  The next morning I woke up in incredible pain throughout my entire body. I had no idea what was going on, I didn't understand it.

My body had basically shut down on me.

Every injury I ever had, and there were a lot… enough to cover my entire body head to toe, felt like they had ruptured or ripped open. My entire body was aching, throbbing, burning, and stinging with pain. The Achilles tear, the quadriceps tear, the biceps tear, my calf tear, my elbow ligament, my shoulder ligament, my knees, and my wrist that I broke twenty years ago… all of them hurt.

The pain itself wasn't really the worst of it though as I had experienced worse pain before. The worst part of it was that it happened again… and so soon. I had just barely recovered from the meniscus tear and the quadriceps tear was still relatively fresh. I had spent the last few years on a lot of pain medications and anti-inflammatories and my stomach wasn't really holding up to it. Not to mention the pain killers rarely did anything even at maximum dosage. And then here, again, I was struck with another issue.

I cursed myself, I cursed everything.

I was tired of being in pain.

I was tired of being disabled for periods of my life.

I would have been happy if I didn't wake up the next day.

Sure it wasn't permanent, but the constant crushing of my hopes and dreams every time I seemed to get close to achieving something had taken its toll. I had been striving for greatness for twelve years and every other year was a year spent in recovery. I was a complete and utter failure who lived off the kindness of others, while lying in bed in pain.

But, I did wake up.

After the pain started to subside a few weeks later, I found I couldn't even walk or stand up for more than two or three minutes. I used crutches to get around the house and sat in the shower. That persisted for nearly seven weeks until I ended up throwing away my hesitation with drugs, and purchased illegal research peptides that had shown great healing effects in trials.

I started injecting.

They weren't steroids or growth hormones but they were awfully similar. A peptide that aided in wound healing and regenerating torn muscles, something that had been in the US research system for nearly seventy years but was never legalized despite there being no evidence of negative side effects.

The companies simply didn't make any profit off of them in an injectable state, so they had yet to legalize it. The research companies that purchased the rights to the drugs wanted to sell them in an oral tablet or as a topical cream, something that simply didn't work effectively but would make an excessive amount of money if it did. For $175 USD I had all of the necessary equipment and the powdered vials to last me three months. There was no profit to be made there.

Reconstituting the powder in the vial it came with was easy. All I had to do was take an insulin syringe, draw 50 units of bacteriostatic water and inject it into the vial. Once the powder dissolved, draw the liquid and inject it into a subcutaneous layer of fat somewhere in the body.

I had plenty of fatty spots to choose from now.

Spot injection worked the best though. My swollen shoulder that hurt so bad that I couldn't move it and wouldn't reduce in swelling despite the 875mg prescription pill I was taking for anti-inflammation twice a day, disappeared in three hours after direct injection.

The pain never came back either.

I ended up doing injections every other day for nearly a month to get myself back to a condition where I could actually walk and stand up for more than thirty minutes.

All from a research peptide that was "illegal" for human use.

It did what the prescribed drugs failed to do.

It did what the doctors failed to do.

It did what the therapists failed to do.

And, it also healed my mind.

The peptide was being used in research for traumatic brain injury and had shown very positive signs in rats. The studies for human-use were still on-going but there was little to no evidence of any negatives. It was a risk, but the evidence supported it. Lack of profit kept it illegal.

I'm testament that it worked, at the very least.

And then one day while lying in bed and browsing the internet on my laptop, I came across an advertisement for a new Virtual Reality game that was in development.

Everything I had ever wanted from a video game was being presented right in front of me. All those months that I was stuck lying in a bed with nothing to do but daydream of a better life, of a fantasy life filled with adventure and accomplishment, was now possible. Free from the constant reminders of my failure, of all the expectations that everyone held for me that weren't even remotely met. The expectations that I had for myself that I couldn't meet. It was now possible in a complete virtual state.

I could escape.

The technology for virtual reality had already been out for years but there had been large strides made recently, and now this company called
AIcorps
was touting out a new line of hyper-realistic virtual reality.

To say I was hooked to the idea would be an understatement.

I quickly browsed through the advertisement and found the one catch, the price. But it didn't matter to me; I had long since lost my attachment to my old hobbies. It was an easy decision. I applied, was accepted, and just had to pony up the extreme amount of cash.