The first time you saw John after his funeral was as an anonymous ghoul in a melee fight you really shouldn’t have jumped into without your party. But it was just a brief moment, maybe less than that. It was a natural mistake.
You stopped doing your own thing, though, and stuck with your party even during the one-sided slaughters you used to skip on. Your friends thought it was because you felt lonely and said nothing. They were wrong. And yet you were alone when you saw John the second time, invisible to everybody else behind an ancient wall graffitied with fresh blood. Some of it was from the ghoul who had attempted to ambush you with predictable pseudo-intelligence – you had thrust your spear back over your shoulder to kill it with disdainful calm.
You still felt calm while you turned around and saw the ghoul had John’s face. Frozen between thought and thought during seconds. Enough time to remove any doubt that it was his face. Almost enough time for another group of monsters to truly ambush you.
Your friends rescued you from your infrequent peril but didn’t comment on it. You thought about the overhyped ersatz creativity of AI characters and did not comment on it either.
The third time you weren’t alone but nobody said anything about it either.
After the sixth time and an awkward chat with another member of your party about why you opposed so much a new quest through the Realms of the Undying Moon — it happened to be the person who had known John and you the best offline — you realized that the ghoul did not look like John to anybody else. Your friend’s pity was blatant in each pause in the chat, and when you said you’d take some time off the group and rejoin after the new quest she thought she understood why and asked clumsily about the therapy you knew she knew you weren’t doing.
She thought you were going, briefly and narrowly and understandably, insane with grief. You knew her wrong. Not about the insanity but about the reason.
She didn’t know about your guilt. Of that you were sure – she had been closer to John than to you, and she’d have called the police if she had known.
You went on your own, avoiding your party and everybody else. The game kept generating dramatic landscapes for you to walk on, puzzles to solve, monsters to kill. Every one of them was different from the other ones and from what any other player had ever met: more monsters in the game than human beings have ever been alive was part of the game’s pitch. Yet there had been only one John, or so you had felt at the time. The only person you had truly loved and the only person you had ever killed.
You met and killed five ghouls with his face in less than a week of wandering. Two in the same last night. Clearly spears and spells weren’t enough. You got a gun. Real-life.
You saw John for the twelfth time within the first hour of play, put the gun in your mouth and fired.
The next time you saw John was as an anonymous ghoul in a melee fight. You were both fighting on the same side.