Adam Jacobs has a secret: he’s going to marry a character from a video game. This is not what some would call an “otaku” thing, nor is she a “waifu” – she will be his wife, carry his name, and bear his children.
This sounds like a fantasy, but all of it is true. I know this because I am the one Adam Jacobs will marry. I am Princess Stellaria, Keeper of Lore, the Sixth Princess of the Kingdom of Arcaniana on the Continent of Blessed Adventure.
I was born into one of the cadet branches of the royal family. My early years were happy ones, spent playing with my cousins and some friends, all carefully chosen by my parents, on the grounds of the family manor. Being in one of the cadet branches, I was outside of the line of succession. As, like all of the royal family, I had an innate magical ability, I was thrust into magecraft, and began my education into the mystical arts at the age of 10. My future would be spent in a library deep in study as a sage or living rough in the field as an adventurer. There were no other options.
If you are not born into a world like mine, it can be difficult to understand what it is to have a role set out for you from the time of your birth, and to fulfill this role without question. But for the last twenty generations, that had been the way my family, and my world, worked. I entered into the Academy of Magecraft and Wizardry without bitterness or complaint. There I made some of the dearest friends of my life, who I will remember until the day I die.
My grades in arcane lore placed me at the top of my class, and I found myself on the road to becoming a sage. While I took pride in my success, it felt empty. I envied those who had ventured down the road of combat and support magic, and found myself spending most of my spare time with them, learning whatever they could teach me. When I graduated at the top of my class at the age of 16 and was given the honorific “Keeper of Lore” and a placement at the Great Archive, I felt empty inside.
For the first time in my life, I felt as though I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing. I knew, deep in my heart, that I should be in the field, blasting monsters into pieces, and helping to save my world.
When the Hero of Prophecy’s party arrived at the archive to seek wisdom for their upcoming journey, I took my chance. I told the hero about my hopes and dreams, about how I had spent my time learning battle magic, and begged them to take me with them and prove my worth.
To my surprise and delight, they said “yes.” I don’t know how badly I scandalized the Great Archive or my family by quitting less than half a year after starting, but I had no regrets. For the next three years, I was battling the forces of the Great Darkness at the side of the Hero of Prophecy. And then came that terrible day.
We were exploring a dungeon filled with wild magic. Much of what we encountered was familiar, but much of it wasn’t. Strange devices adorned the walls, panels that looked like they had once had blinking lights but now long still and silent. The problem with wild magic is that it is, by nature, random. You never know how it will warp reality, and it will never do the exact same thing twice.
This is getting difficult. It’s not easy to write about the moment where you were ripped from your world and thrown into a new one. What I remember was that as I took a step, the floor was no longer solid. I fell out of the world, and suddenly found myself in a new one.
The streets were made of a hard dark grey substance and filled with people in strange clothes, more than I had ever seen in one place before. The air was cold and smelled foul. Loud machines roared down the streets, travelling with such speed it seemed impossible to cross from one side to the other with any safety.
For the first time in my life, I was truly terrified. As a graduate of the Academy of Magecraft and Wizardry and a member of the Hero of Prophecy’s party I was familiar with teleportation, but this wasn’t it. Not remotely close. I was in a new place, and nothing in it made any sense.
I spent the first day huddled in an alley, keeping to the shadows, watching people pass and catching snippets of their conversations. I could speak the language, or so I thought, but so many of the words were new and strange. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that the Hero of Prophecy and my comrades in the party would be looking for me, but that didn’t last long – I knew enough to know that the wild magic that had brought me here would not repeat and that there was no place in my world that was anything like this. I was alone. There was no rescue coming.
That night, I cried myself to sleep huddled into a corner. There was no heat – there was nothing within reach that I could use for a fire.
I spent the next day trying to figure out what I could do. I had to get out of my alleyway, but the street was still filled with those fast moving machines. There was also the problems of my clothes – they were lightweight, bright and colourful, revealing my midriff, and looked like nothing anybody else was wearing. I could not leave my alley without attracting attention, and I had no way of knowing if anybody would be friend or foe. And even if I did leave my alley, what could I do? There was no way that the coinage I carried would be accepted as money here, nor would I be able to exchange it. I was worse than a pauper – at least a pauper knew how things worked, and where they could go for charity or a meal.
I did not leave my alley that day.
That night I did not cry myself to sleep. I felt too hungry, too weak, and too numb. I just sat in my alley until my eyes closed on their own and I drifted off.
The morning of the third day, I knew it was probably my last. I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since I had arrived. I was so weak I could barely move. All I knew was that there was no hope, nobody coming to find and save me. I was going to die alone and unmarked in an alien world.
And then I saw somebody stop at the end of the alley and look at me. Our eyes met for a moment, and then I looked away. I heard his footsteps approach.
“Are you okay, miss?” he said.
I took a deep breath to collect myself, but it broke into a sob. A tear rolled down my cheek.
“Please help me,” I said. “I don’t know where I am, and I don’t know what to do.”
He nodded. “Okay. Can you tell me who you are?”
“I’m Princess Stellaria, wizard of the Hero of Prophecy’s party.”
He blinked. “Wait, like the video game I was just playing? I mean, you look like her.”
I broke down into tears. “I don’t know what a video game is. I don’t understand anything here. Can you please help me? I haven’t eaten in days.”
“I will, I will,” he said. “But you’re saying something pretty unbelievable. Can you prove it? Cast a magic spell, or something?”
I took a deep breath. He loomed over me, tall and clean-shaven with dark brown hair. The hunger had drained all of my resources, including my magical power. There was perhaps one spell I could cast, but I didn’t know if I had enough left for it to go off. I held out my hand and closed my eyes, unable to bear to see whether it had worked or not and spoke the incantation.
There was a moment of silence, and then he said, “Okay, I believe you.” I felt his hand take my own and he pulled me up. “My name’s Adam,” he said, taking off his coat and draping it over my shoulders. “Let’s get you to the car and get some food into you.”
I didn’t know what a “car” was, but for the first time in days, I felt safe.
It’s hard to describe what it is like to discover that you are a fictional character. Adam showed me the game I was from, Chronicles of Arcaniana, on my second day of staying at the apartment he was renting for his first year of university. He was a gentleman – he let me have the bed while he took the couch. But, that was little comfort as he loaded up a saved game and I watched an avatar of myself splashed across the screen in dialogue.
I lost track of all the thoughts that went through my head. I remember thinking that if my world wasn’t real, than what was I? Was my absence even going to be noticed, or would another copy of me just take my place as the adventure continued? And what of my parents, or brother, or sister? Would they ever know how much I missed them, now that I could never return?
For a week, Adam tended to me with the patience of a saint. I know he couldn’t understand what I was going through, but he understood enough to let me work my way through it. He even helped me clean up after I had used a spell in front of him to get a cup I wanted to look at off one of the high shelves, not realizing it was on a base with a couple of candlesticks. At the end of the week, I had made my decision: I would build a life in this new world, and I asked Adam for help. I think I already knew what his answer would be before he said it.
“Of course,” he said.
What I did not realize was that the first step would be a trip to a cemetery. When we got there, he led me to section for children.
“It’s a trick from an old spy novel,” Jacob explained as we wound our way through the headstones, looking at dates. “If you’re going to live in this world, you’re going to need identification, a bank account, a social insurance number, and for all of that, you need a birth certificate. So, we need to find a child who died who would be your age now. Then, we’ll use the obituaries to find the name of her parents, send in a request for a replacement birth certificate, and hope they don’t look at it too closely.”
He stopped at a small headstone. It looked worn and neglected. “How do you like the name Anne Marie Sorenson?”
“Will you still call me Stella?” I asked.
He smiled. “Whenever you want me to.”
“Then Anne Marie Sorenson sounds great.”
One application to the Ontario government and three weeks later, I officially became Anne Marie Sorenson of Kingston, Ontario. Everybody called me Stellaria or Stella – we passed it off as a nickname. But, as I held the birth certificate in my hands, I realized that taking the name of a dead child didn’t feel right.
“We have to do something,” I told Adam. “Something to help the family, to pay them back somehow.”
“I understand how you feel,” Adam said. “But first we’d have to find them, and then we’d risk them finding out why we’re interested in their daughter in the first place. And that could go very badly.”
I frowned. “Does caring for the last resting place of the dead matter to the people of this world?”
Adam smiled and nodded. “Very much so.”
“Then I know what to do.”
That weekend, we returned to the cemetery with flowers, and placed them on Anne Marie’s grave. I touched her headstone and said, “Thank you for letting me use your name – I promise I will do honour to it and never disgrace it.”
Every weekend until the day we left for Japan we returned to visit Anne Marie with flowers. We also paid for a replacement headstone.
My new identity established, we began the next step of my new life – an education. After all, there was no school that would recognize a degree from the Academy of Magecraft and Wizardry. We spent weeks preparing to take the Ontario High School Equivalency Certificate test, which for some reason Adam kept calling a “GED.” With this, I could enter his university as a mature student.
As we prepared for the test, I kept thinking back to what I was. There were so many questions that I wanted to ask the people who had created me and my world. When I brought this up with Adam, his eyes became sad.
“They’re in Japan,” he said. “It’s a long way away, and we can’t afford to get there. And even if we did, there’s almost no way they’d agree to meet with you. And then you’d have to prove who you are.” He took a deep breath. “But, we’ll get there somehow. We’ll get you a meeting. I just don’t know how.”
My breath caught in my throat when he mentioned proving who I was. My powers were already fading as the weeks passed. By the end of my first year in this new world, they were gone. It felt as though somebody had removed one of my limbs. Even if I told somebody who I really was, I could never prove it again.
But by the end of my first year, two other things had happened: I passed the GED test and entered Queen’s University as a student in the physics department, and Adam and I had fallen in love.
I don’t know when it happened. All I know is that one day, we both knew that we would spend the rest of our lives together. I met his parents, and they approved of our match. Adam was an art history student, and the same skills and intellect that put me at the top of my class in the Academy of Magecraft and Wizardry allowed me to catch up so that we both graduated and entered graduate school together, Adam taking art history while I studied quantum physics.
The day of our graduation was also the happiest day of my life – that was the day Adam proposed to me.
All the while, we had been saving money for a trip to Japan, although we still lacked a plan for getting a meeting with the people who created me. It was the year before graduation that Adam discovered a Japanese convention held every October in Tokyo, which my creators always attended. We now had a date. We just needed to learn Japanese, buy our tickets, and hop onto a plane. We would go at the beginning of our thesis years, six months before our planned wedding.
We had no idea of what awaited us, what we would gain, and what we would lose.
You probably think that this story is nothing more than a fantasy. But I’m writing this all down because it isn’t. This is not only my story, and Adam’s story, but the story of all the creations who followed me. All of them – Atria Silversword, Captain Infinite, Jenny Calhoun, Jack Death, Daiki Yamato, Saline, The Destroyer – walked here in this world. Some were our friends. Some were our enemies. Some died. All of them lived, laughed, loved, and mourned.
All of us were here, among you. This is our story.
NEXT: “Atria Silversword”
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