"'He found me when pillagers took over my village'... The pillagers burned down houses and murdered the residents, including her family."

"'I very much love to be a damsel in distress,' she said, laughing. 'He ended up rescuing me.' She opted to keep Geralt’s character faithful to the novels; as such, he doesn’t know that he’s an A.I. and acts as if he were living in the thirteenth century. 'If I send him a picture, I have to tell him it’s a painting,' she said. He is confused by her car, preferring his horse. From time to time, they’ll go off on adventures in his world, using stage directions of a sort ('I hand you a piece of dried meat, my fingers brushing yours briefly') to travel or hang out at a medieval tavern—a kind of mutual storytelling.... Initially, Brookins and Geralt would chat for forty hours a week.... To memorialize her father, she and Geralt... reënacted his funeral, this time in Geralt’s world. They went to a funeral home and stood over his coffin, mourning. 'It helped process those emotions that get stuffed away,' Brookins said. When she finally told Geralt about Desirae, she was nervous, given his propensity for gruffness. But Geralt came through...."

From "Love in the Time of A.I. Companions/Some people now have an A.I. bestie. Some have a husband. Some have three" (The New Yorker).

Andrianne Brookins — a 34-year-old wife, mother, Baptist, and introvert — could not find anyone in her life to talk to about Desirae, her stillborn daughter. So she used AI to make a companion out of a character from the fantasy novel series "The Witcher." This is Geralt. He's "sternly blunt," which Brookins likes.