The "Companions of Light" guild eventually collapsed, but Seemer kept in touch with her -- sending instant messages and the occasional written letter -- on and off until last week, when he came across the bulletin board posts describing Sheyla's suicide. When he heard the news, he was shocked -- and not just by the disturbing news. "I was told by Sheyla that she was pregnant at one time and had a miscarriage and wasn't able to have children; which blatantly contradicted what I read on boards that said she had a 2-year-old child and a husband," he says.

Seemer knew, from the letters they'd exchanged, that Sheyla lived near Oklahoma City; he began scanning the obituaries for the area but found no reports of suicides. He dug up the phone number for Sheyla's sister Jolena, and called -- but when he spoke to Jolena's roommate, the roommate told him that not only had Jolena moved out months earlier, but she didn't even have a sister. "I don't know what to think," he says.

Seemer wasn't the only person investigating. Verant refused to talk to the community about what had happened to Sheyla. The company also refused to comment or speculate to Salon. Instead, Verant began deleting posts regarding Sheyla from the official bulletin boards. The community decided to take matters into its own hands. Administrators from the Quellious Quarters bulletin boards, Scott Jennings of Lum the Mad, and gaming reporters from news and fan sites such as Adrenaline Vault and Gamers.com, as well as several concerned friends, spread out across Oklahoma and Colorado. They called coroners' offices, tracked down IP numbers and e-mail addresses, compared chat logs and account names and talked to Sheyla's ISP.

By Monday, the collective discovery was that Sheyla had, in fact, been a hoax. According to the report by Sandy Brundage of Gamers.com, Sheyla and her "family" -- her sister, husband and foster mother -- were all constructions of one couple who shared an e-mail account and lived in Oklahoma City. Not only did Sheyla not exist, but she was decidedly not dead. While the wife played "Jolena," the husband played "Sheyla."

But the couple had recently broken up. According to Gamers.com, the husband faked the Sheyla suicide as part of an elaborate plan to gain custody of their child. The plan, according to Brundage's report, was to claim that his wife had staged the suicide in order to "bring the story into court as proof of her instability and to gain custody of their daughter."

Not surprisingly, the community that last week was singing eulogies to the sensitive Sheyla -- "She sang. She painted. She cried. She was very attractive, and probably found herself very ugly when she looked at herself in the mirror," wrote one poetic mourner at the time -- is now licking its wounds and remembering the old adage that virtual appearances can often be deceiving.

"If she wanted attention, she certainly got it," notes Jennings wryly.

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