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After being asked by Elayne to come eat lunch with her and her family, Mark hurriedly moved back home to prepare. He took a warm bath and washed himself well enough, after that, he changed clothes into some casual attire that made him look good, then he shaved and put on some perfume as well… He was pretty much ready by now.
He took out a fine wine from the storage room inside of his apartment, where he stored food and wine, and he took the most high-quality bottle he could find, one that cost hundreds of Canadian dollars. He would have never drunk it in such a casual situation as of now, and he actually wanted to save it for New years or Christmas, but he really wanted to use it now to enjoy this special day with Elayne as much as possible.
Mark lived alone inside of his apartment, which was rather close to the market where he worked as the manager or "boss" as they called him, although he didn't really own anything there. But he did decide who he would hire or even get someone fired as well, so every coworker was always forcefully nice to him due to his position, and because of that he could never make true friends. Everyone was always just interested in his position.
But when he contracted Elayne almost five years ago, things changed for his life. At first he had pitied the woman because her husband had recently passed away due to terminal cancer, and although she was left with some money, that would certainly not be enough to maintain her and also pay the bills. The bill included her daughter's high school, which was quite an expensive and prestigious one, and then there was the need to save money for her college… Due to that he ended up hiring her and looked to see how she would work.
He had found her attractive from the get-go, but there were also many pretty women in his work, and most of them were just nice with him because he was the boss. Some had even attempted to seduce him in very direct ways, which only made Mark feel like people were only interested in him due to his position… Of course, those women were later on fired for misconduct.
However, Elayne was truly different, she was gentle and nice, and although Mark thought she was like that out of interest like every woman he had met in the work, he later realized she was simply put… innately nice. He had seen her acting nice with everyone, not only for the first months to make up appearances, but she kept being nice with everyone for years, and years… five years have already passed, and she was still the same, with a gentle nature, a nice personality, a motherly and lovely smile and… honestly, she was way too nice for her own good, and Mark even began to worry that someone would take advantage of her personality.
Without realizing it, all this time he had been slowly falling for her more and more, until this year, where he had finally kind of realized his feelings for her, and had been thinking on ways to approach her more. The two were in a friendly relationship for a long while, so he didn't know if Elayne had any feelings for him. But the thing about her husband was something big, it wasn't realistic to think that she would develop feelings for him when she was married for over ten years with her husband before he passed away, and even had a daughter with him.
Because of this, he always kept himself prudent with her, and didn't want to abuse his position to force her into doing something unwilling either… He was also a good and gentle man, as good as a Canadian man can get. His parents had taught him well about life, and he wasn't someone that abused his position to get what he wanted but used hard work to reach the position where he was now.
He also was perhaps just as nice as Elayne, or perhaps a bit less, but he and Elayne really had matching personalities in various things, and the other coworkers all knew that he was in love with her. Whereas Elayne seemed always oblivious about these things because she believed herself to be an unattractive old woman most of the time, probably thinking that because of having a daughter, she had already stopped being attractive… Well, she still believed herself to look nice and not like a grandma or something, but she never thought too deeply about others watching her intensively.
Mark just wanted to get a nice relationship, he had been living alone for way too long, and the creeping of old age was slowly approaching, he didn't wanted to reach 40 while still being single and a virgin, and although he might had such opportunities in the past, all of them would be fleeting moments with women that were not really interested on him romantically, and he really wanted his first time to be special.
However, he really didn't thought much about sex but more about love. He just wanted someone to be at his side, to hug him when he needed, to kiss him and comfort him when there was nobody else, and to simply accompany him through the long journey of life itself, which was always filled with arduous challenges.
Mark sighed. He just wanted the time to hurry up so he could go meet her… There were still two hours left before the meeting, but he was already very nervous. The young man didn't know what he would say when they met or what they would talk about after all, so he was looking forward to seeing what he would do…
"Sigh… I am really nervous, maybe I should relax a little bit and play something."
The man sat down over his bed and put on his VR helmet, quickly logging in. The first thing he did was put on an alarm clock for the hour he should go out back to his work where Elayne said she would meet him.
And then, he clicked on the big logo saying; "Brand New Fantasy Online" and logged in with his freshly made account around a week ago. He had recently bought the game online when it was finally on stock again. Since its launch that the game and the VR Helmet had been selling like hot cakes and people were having a very hard time buying it because it was always out of stock, this incident reminded Mark of the times the PS5 came out, and how it was never on stock or when it was, it only lasted a few minutes at most.
There were also a lot of scalpers, people buying the console and the games en masse and reselling them at insane prices that desperate people end up buying anyways. But Mark wasn't someone that would buy from a scalper, he had his principles, so he waited patiently all this time until he could finally get his hands into the products.
When he opened his eyes again, he found himself in the middle of a small forest. His entire body was covered in wood, branches, and leaves, and his head was covered in the large skull of a goat, with broken horns and glowing red eyes beneath the eye sockets of the skull, his body was around two meters big, and his arms and legs were as thick as logs, while he had large hands with sharp wooden claws. In the middle of his chest, there was a large glowing, red-colored jewel, overflowing the rest of his body with Mana.
"Ah, back again… Hm, this body is as uncomfortable as always… Ah, well, I've gotten used to it…" He sighed. "I really liked the Ents in Lord of the Rings, but I really shouldn't have chosen this race on a whim… Now I have to delete all my progress if I want to create a new character or just stay as an Ent… I read in a forum that it can eventually evolve to shape its body into something like a human… I really hope so." He thought internally, moving his enormous and cracking body covered in wood.
Mark had made himself into an Ent, a Race of tree people. They were similar to Dryads in that they were considered the spirits of the forest, but just like Dryads being a female-only Race, Ents were a male-only Race that only males could pick.
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