What Money Can Buy In A Fantasy Game

The past burdens us all. Wilfred Saras, a man that inherited a walloping fortune when his parents died in a car crash, can no longer bear the boring day-to-day life his status affords him. On a whim he buys a game, Vitae Verum, a virtual reality experience in a fantasy world of the olden days. Wilfred\'s bleak childhood gave him no time to be a gamer, and he struggles to find a justification to hop inside a world he knows to be full of wish-fulfillment for the weak of mind; but who is to say that he is above them. Everyone has their issues -- even the obscenely wealthy.

What does Wilfred want from the game? What is he missing? The answers come quite clear to him: friends, and ultimately love. But being tad too cynical for his own good, the task seems harder than he thought; throw into the mix a healthy dose of arrogance and the solution is further from his reach than he could have imagined. And when he finally finds someone, a person that culls the mind of its rationality, a person so vibrant and cheerful that the traits seem pathological, he truly understands that everyone is broken.

So why not fix them? Can a broken mess put back together something beautiful, or perhaps, should they first save themselves?

The picture is a minutely modified image from an artist at deviantart: kuvshinov-ilya