I opened my eyes.

The ground was mostly paved with cement blocks, broken occasionally by patches of grass and dirt. All around me was an impenetrable wall of tall trees and this underbrush, but none of the branches seemed to stretch inside, allowing the sky to be visible overhead. It was dark, but also not?. I was well lit, despite the inky blackness of the sky. It was also pleasantly warm.

“Couldn’t-!” I froze. My voice was different. Higher pitched, but not so high as a child. It had a more mature sound to it, with a dash of wildness underneath the surface.

I couldn’t help but smile.

“Still would have preferred this to the void right from the start, though…”

Right.

My little body.

The strangest thing about it was being so small. Everything felt different, but at the same time it was like I had the muscle memory for this size? It was the oddest experience, but a good one. The second strangest thing was that apart from my smallness it didn’t feel particularly odd?

Like, if anything, I felt a little giddy. I felt great like this and I couldn’t help but keep smiling.

Still, I thought it was strange that I would react that way. It’s not like my senses were muted, either. Mostly I just felt comfortable. And happy.

My cute body worked out!

But it really should be a bigger deal, right?

Whatever. It was a game at the end of the day. So what if it was my first VR Game; I’d played plenty of the more traditional sort before. 

I felt my tail move.

I grabbed it and hugged it. It was so soft.

Besides, there were probably tons of players who made way bigger changes to their characters than this. Hell, lots of guys would jump on the excuse to try out having boobs in virtual space.

Those were pretty comfortable, too.

I looked around, unsure how to get back to the character creation menu. Maybe just...err…

“Hello? Menu Please!”

 

> Confirm Character?

> [Yes]/[No]?

 

That settles that, then. I thought about it for a moment, then nodded and selected “Yes”.

 

> Skill Selection

> 

> Please Select 3 Skill Trees from the following list...

 

And straight back into information overload. This list wasn’t quite as bad as the Legacies, but it was very nearly so. And I needed to choose three of them!?

Well, it was a little better in one obvious way: It grouped similar skills into different pages.

Incidentally, the pages were Weapons, Magic, Support, Finesse, Tradition and Oversense.

Leaving aside the last two, the rest all seemed pretty straight forward. I at least had a bare-bones understanding of how skill trees worked from Danny and Laura. The more you ranked up the skill tree, the more abilities you could unlock from it. Only “ability” here usually meant either passives or skill components that needed to be combined to make a full skill. There was some other method to get active skills that I...didn’t know. 

I hadn’t been paying as close attention to my friends as maybe I should have been when they explained all this.

Still. It was a good basis for knowing what to expect from the “Swords” skill, for example. It wasn’t needed (probably?) to use a sword, but it made you a lot better at using them if you had it.

I considered my options. I should probably have a weapon skill, right? And I didn’t want to even try to dive into the overly complex chaos that was certainly Magic, so I’d pick my second skill from Support or Finesse. As for the third skill, well, I wanted to figure out what the heck was up with those last two pages, so maybe something from there.

I moved my hand from my chin and opened the Weapons page. There were still way too many options, but it was less granular than I’d been expecting. That “Sword” example wasn’t split up into 20 different types of swords...although greatswords and daggers were still conspicuously separate.

Swords didn’t really interest me anyway. The selection ran the gamut from Fantasy to Sci-Fi and those later ones were what really drew my eye. I eventually settled on something just purely off of its name.

 

> Tesla Weapons: These weapons use controlled arcs of electricity to electrify their targets

 

Help Text? Shocking.

I giggled.

Next up was Support slash Finesse. The Support skills seemed mostly to do with powering up either yourself or other players. It had stuff like Illusion, Healing and Enchantment. The Finesse page by comparison was basically a list of thief skills. And skills vaguely related to thief skills. It had options like Steal, Parkour and Stealth. I decided to take that last one, since I wanted to be able to get out of trouble if I needed to. It seemed like a good call.

Last of all, the mystery pages.

I could guess at what was in Traditions based on what wasn’t in the other categories, but I still had no idea at all about Oversense, so I checked that one first.

Movement Limit Break? Huge Power? Parry??

It seemed like...most of the skills in this page were about breaking the normal game limits, but some of them were just weird. Like, shouldn’t Parry be a finesse skill? Actually, why was it it’s own skill at all when it was an obvious inclusion in a lot of individual skill groups?

Oversense might be a little too complicated to handle…

Onward to Traditions.

This section had options like Shapeshifting and Transmutation. Basically Magic-Like abilities that weren’t in the Magic or Support pages. Well, mostly. A few of them were obviously technology-based as well, like Hacking.

I decided to go with none of those options. Rather, the moment I saw it, they knew which one I wanted.

 

> Familiar: Direct and Summon Minions

 

It was a skill that would let me have cute pets!

This. Was. Perfect!

I confirmed my skill choices, which brought me to the final(?) thing to customize.

 

> Please Enter Name:

 

“I suppose using my IRL Nickname is out of the question...Something based on my real name?”

Not a fucking chance.

“Hmm. Since I’m playing a femme character, I should have name that matches.”

Tesla. Tessa. Maybe a little too obvious...but then again?

 

> Tessa Ban Matron

 

It felt more reasonable with the rest of it together, somehow.

One final button appeared, large and green.

 

> [Ready?]

 

I pressed the button with a smile.