“We met in Goldshire,” says Lisette.

“It’s not a nice place any more, but back then Goldshire was a pleasant little village, where you could meet new, interesting characters. I was looking for someone to role play with, and among others sitting around a campfire was the one I would later learn to know as Ibelin.

“I – or Rumour, rather – acted somewhat impulsively. I jumped out of the bushes and snatched Ibelin’s hat. We stood for a moment, staring back and forth, then I ran away with his hat, with no thought of direction.”

She smiles a little.

Mats also wrote about this first meeting with Lisette, in a blog post he called Love.

“In this other world a girl wouldn’t see a wheelchair or anything different. They would get my soul, heart and mind, conveniently placed in a handsome, strong body. Luckily, pretty much every character in this virtual world looks great.”

Lisette says: “Mats was a good friend, sometimes a very close friend.

“We wrote [to] each other about everything, but he didn’t write about his condition. I thought his life was like mine. For example, we were both agreed that we hated school.”

But there were things on which they could not agree.

“He wrote that he hated snow. I wrote that I loved it. I didn’t understand then that he hated it because of his wheelchair. I didn’t know about it.”

Teenage Lisette’s love of gaming concerned her parents. They were worried about her school studies and her apparent lack of a social life. Their solution was to restrict her access to online play.

“Being separated from my game friends was hard for me,” Lisette recalls.

But Mats did not fail their friendship. Even if he could not find her in the game, he kept in touch with her through other channels.

“He even wrote a serious letter to my parents, in which he tried to help them understand how important playing was for me,” she says. “I have saved that letter.”