Chamomile's Interlude

It was common knowledge that Chamomile was the most popular player in WanderQuest. Not only was she the strongest player in the game with a level of 294, she was also known to be friendly and willing to help any player that needed it.

What no one knew was that Chamomile was not a gamer by any definition of the word. When she was a kid, she’d done what everyone else did—read the occasional book, watch too much TV, kick rocks—but she never bothered with video games. They were expensive and her parents told her all sorts of horror stories to keep her away from them; she was convinced her brains would rot out and her eyes would liquify if she so much as touched a game controller.

It wasn’t until university when Chamomile first started thinking about gaming. This was BC—Before Console—when she was still Izumi Fujioka. The semester had been long and boring and Izumi was left with too much free time on her hands. Everyone on campus was obsessed with WanderQuest, so of course whenever she asked her friends what she should do they told her to make an account.

At first, she had been hesitant. Izumi didn’t know the first thing about MMOs and even if she knew her parents had just been trying to scare her when she was younger, she still held deep reservations against video games. Finally on one particularly boring night six months ago, she caved and created an account.

That night Izumi Fujioka faded away and Chamomile was born.

Chamomile’s friends were kind enough to show her the ropes of the game. Everyone praised it for being so versatile and having thousands of different game play options, so she figured something would eventually entertain her. First she tried fishing, which she absolutely hated. The controls were janky and it involved a lot of sitting around and doing nothing. She tried farming after that but it was just as boring with all the repetitive motions; she could feel her fingers cramping up from hitting the same two keys over and over for hours at a time. Then one of her friends invited her on a quest.

The quest had been simple enough but required a lot of monster slaying. The monsters were all low level, which made it great for a beginner. Her friend had handed her a spare battle axe and told her to go to town. Chamomile had no clue what she was doing, but the second she swung her axe she fell in love.

After the encounter, Chamomile had gone up ten levels and earned the respect of everyone around her. It wasn’t that common to see someone take out an army of monsters at such a low level, but to never have fought one before the encounter? That was impressive.

After that, Chamomile started playing WanderQuest every day. She was only interested in fighting and would spend hours crawling through forests in the hopes of aggravating any monsters that lived there. As soon as she had enough gold, Chamomile bought her own battle axe; it was two-sided and almost the size of her.

Her reputation continued to grow, but not just because she was nice and a good fighter. Players thought she was kind of weird. For one thing, Chamomile never replaced her axe. While most people would continuously change what weapon they used as they got better ones, Chamomile refused to part with hers. Instead, she would take any weapons she found and either sell them for money or have them taken apart to upgrade her axe. Just using a battle axe in general was strange in the eyes of most players. Swords were by far the most common weapon in the game, but players were known to use the occasional bow or spear. Almost no one used a battle axe, and if they did they soon switched to a more popular weapon. Chamomile also flat out refused to use any magical skills in battle, instead opting to rely solely on her fighting skills.

Weeks passed and the worst thing possible happened: Chamomile’s workload increased. Suddenly, she had essays and tests taking up every bit of her life, and she had to swear off all gaming until after she’d completed them all. After several grueling weeks of non-stop work, she finally handed in her last paper and logged back on to WanderQuest.

The welcome reception had shocked her to her core. Thousands of players were contacting her, asking why she’d disappeared for weeks. Everyone was obsessed; her friends, who were the only ones that had known why she’d taken a hiatus, kept sending her links to forum posts of conspiracy theories covering her absence.

That had been the event to launch Chamomile into fame and cement her as the most popular player in the game. Between refusing to use magic, relying only on an unusual weapon, and disappearing for weeks, Chamomile shouldn’t have been the highest player in the game, but no other player even came close to her level. She was an enigma and the people loved her.

Chamomile quickly fell into a pattern. She could not be proactive if her life depended on it, so she always left assignments until the last possible moment. This meant Chamomile would play WanderQuest for every waking moment she could, then would disappear for a week or two to complete all her assignments, and then join the game again like nothing had happened. Each time she pulled the stunt, people became more and more intrigued. Theories popped up almost constantly about Chamomile’s strange schedule, although none of them suspected she simply had poor time management skills.

Eventually her identity was revealed. Chamomile wasn’t too upset about it—at this point it seemed like she was Chamomile more than she was Izumi—and it made her a bit of a celebrity on campus; whenever she stopped playing WanderQuest for a few days, classmates knew she was in the same boat as them. Sometimes people tried to find Chamomile at her university so they could talk to her, but her classmates seemed to have made a silent pact to protect her from any particularly creepy fans. In turn, she always made sure to play a few hours with them when they wanted to.

There was one thing every player of WanderQuest could agree on: Chamomile was the most talented player they had ever seen; there was no one—past or future—who could beat her.