Challenge #01835-E011: The Caring Gap
Their world was games, and Facebook and selfies. Then they wound up in an emergency ward and discovered electric lives are no substitute for the real thing. -- Knitnan
[AN: You clearly have no understanding of modern connectivity. AKA: "You dang kids get off of your social media and get a real life!" ::shakes cane::]
Alice was technically a Cam Girl and technically a Gamer. In reality, that meant grinding assorted games for a pitiful income per game per hour, and taking selfies at least four times a day. In the eyes of a certain generation, she was lazy and vain.
The fact was, she was doing everything she could to raise enough to (a) keep alive, and (b) pay off the debt she owed for a degree she'd got for a job that had been shipped off to a different country. She ran a Patreon. She had an Etsy shop. She had a Ko-fi account. She spent every hour of every day scraping for pennies and doing whatever she could to get someone to pass her a couple of dollars.
She barely made it to the poverty line, lived on food stamps, and kept looking for what everyone else called "a real job". She had more friends online than she had friends in the neighbourhood. Especially considering that the entire population were practically vagrants and, much like Alice, scraping to make rent and eat at the same time.
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