LISTON

FIEND

Ever since she recalls having use of reason, Marisa has wanted to be a surgeon. It might be the early soaps she saw as a child while her parents were out, it might have been the medical journals her father used to collect and that she used to read with rapt interest, it might even be the urges she had to simply, carefully, take things apart so that she might put them back together, usually better than they were at first. Whatever the reason, she eventually came to be the person you wanted in your group in science class when it came time to dissect frogs and other small animals—and rarely ever else. It can be hard to be friends with a child who thinks taxidermy is a neat hobby and that you are an idiot for not getting it. But she never stopped.
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Still, things didn't stay that way forever—mostly because burning ambition is hard to get in the way of. The young Marisa Liston arrived in Stanford, CA hailing back from her home of Tampa, FL at the young age of 19, holding a scholarship and several grants after blitzing through her time at USF with a Bachelor of Science in Biology and her pre-med track completed. Such a thing would normally be unheard of, but Marisa's need to advance had meant she would never take no for an answer from some institution. So she pushed and pushed until someone would give, and then took advantage to advance.
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Her early time at Stanford University Medical School saw her complete her basic science and clinical medicine courses at an aggressive pace, turning the first two years of what should be a four-year track into a single year affair, the young woman hungry and eager to absorb information. She would graduate not long after and began her residency at Weill Cornell at 22, with almost no connections other than those she blew past and through.
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When she finally turned 30, Dr. Marisa Liston was on the cusp of becoming one of America's most sought-after cardiothoracic surgeons. She was known in her field for her thoroughly-honed skills with a scalpel, accurate and near-flawless decision-making in high-pressure environments, and almost encyclopedic knowledge in her field. It really seemed like the only thing that would be able to get in her way... was herself. The shakes could be taken care of with medicine, and no one really cares if you're filling your own prescription if you keep performing.
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Being a cardiothoracic surgeon was as stressful as it was lucrative. Dr. Liston's ambitions soared ever-higher, fueled both by her need to seek greater challenges, and by an urge to prove to the people who constantly tried to claim themselves her betters exactly where they stood in relation to her on the totem pole. Her meteoric rise was watched by her peers, most in complete awe. It stands to reason that they would watch her crash back to earth with the same level of fixation.
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A LONG FALL

She was in the middle of a high-risk coronary artery bypass surgery when she finally hit her limit. Burning the candle at both ends had finally caught up to her, and what had once seemed a small shake she could calm with self-medicating, a cigarette and a short break had developed into full-blown tremors, and with an inaccurate cut and inadvertent stab to the heart of a patient, what was once a meteoric rise was found to be a narrowly-avoided wrongful death medical malpractice suit, and the subsequent loss of her medical license for "substance abuse".
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Incredibly, the license board was sympathetic to her cause—likely because she immediately threw herself at their mercy, citing a need to perform at her level so as to be considered a reliable surgeon and to serve as an example for her peers. Of course, her pleas were part of her plan—the board didn't want to see their rising star crash to Earth given how she might bring down the reputation of so many others around her if she did. Submitting herself to their suggested treatments to help with what they considered to be the so-called substance abuse was also part of the plan, but she knew no medicine could help the sudden onset of dystonia that confounded both the expertise of neurologists... and her own.
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Eventually deciding she needed to get away from it all, she searched for as different a position as she could elsewhere, leveraging her credentials into becoming a biology professor at Stony Brook. While there, she languished about, stories of her prior career keeping an invisible barrier up and around her, making her difficult to approach. It's not surprising, then, that video games were the escape she chose. She eventually settled on some kind of online, massively multiplayer affair—they kept talking about it being this award-winning story, and that you could play to a certain level for free with no restrictions. And it's not like she had spent any of all of that massive salary she had accumulated over the years.
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TO THE EDGE

Years of spending time doing complex things and not really enjoying much of anything else nor maintaining healthy interpersonal connections meant that she would likely find the game either completely pointless, or riveting. To her amazement, it was the latter. She quickly became engrossed in every aspect of it, having to learn to overcome decades of underdeveloped social skills so she wouldn't get banned for her otherwise abrasive nature. With how much she loved a challenge, it's no surprise that she also naturally gravitated to the more complex classes, and particularly to the healers.
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Finally able to forge bonds during her time in said fantasy world—something the game also regularly touched upon in its story—she found herself developing that neglected part of herself. Her familiarity with the political wheeling and dealing of medical boards of directors, ethics boards, medical compliance boards—all people who often tried to get her to bend heel in one way or another—was nothing compared to having to learn to be in active, constant cooperation. No, that required trust. And just like when she could only do that by trusting the nurses and anesthesiologists around her, so then did she throw herself into the fantasy world like she'd thrown herself at surgery before: no half-measures.
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So, she learned. How to play nice, how to catch flies with honey rather than vinegar, how to hold onto hope. The story and its message were quite positive, even during its bleakest moments. Her connections in her life as a teacher improved. Having a thing she could talk about with students made her appear more relatable, if still weird. Slowly, the cutthroat doctor had become the quirky science professor. Her way of working things through was always bizarre: take everything apart to see how it worked, and put the pieces back together.
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It helped that her imagination and creativity made her obsessed with one of the classes she found. It was able to maneuver small, flying contraptions that could shoot beams with unerring precision, flitting about through the air to both heal and protect her allies, and bring harm to her enemies. She imagined constantly what it would be like to use those now that her hands were no good. It was this class she was most heavily associated with playing among her found online family. Her tremors never went away, but they weren't so much of an issue for keyboard hotkeys and larger mouse movements, and watching those little things flit and fly to do her work felt strangely liberating every time.
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Still, even with her new passion, she still wanted to take something apart. To fix it, and to make it whole again. Having those little models of the nouliths arranged on her desk did her no good. What if they could be real? Of course she'd decide to start trying to research whether it could be done. And that was the last thing she did before the world changed.
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How ironic then that she would find herself loading in a little later to a world that had changed to be not so dissimilar in its nature to the subject of the obsession over the last few years of her life. But it was still reality, and reality and fantasy are much different... aren't they? Still, what an exciting proposition: if reality was willing to bend in this way, she just had to take it apart and look inside to see why it worked now the way it did.
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Right?
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