When I could see again, I was hovering in front of a blue screen displaying Worlds, Genres, Timeline, Character, Family, Equipment, and so on. It even had an option of playing the hero, villain, NPC or something called  "zero to hero" where you started out weak and powered up.

This was all explained to me in the beginning. Basically, All I had to do was think about which area I wanted, and it should open. Each area had multiple options that had a point value assigned to them based on how hard it made the game and these points would then be used to upgrade your character (or down grade if you kept selecting easy options). An example of this would be picking to play an ugly character in a romance genre where you had to nab the male or female lead. Sure, you would be able to have more skills, like being a top-level hacker, but grabbing their attention would be harder. They stressed the realism of the game, so I had to choose wisely.

With this thought in mind, I thought "world" and began��

The title WORLDS blinked and a list of hundreds appeared. I narrowed my choices down to eight.

Heavenly Realm cost 1000 points – Enjoy your time without a care. Every pleasure will be just at your fingertips

Superhero World cost 200 points – Ever dream of being the hero? Now is your chance. With thousands of powers to choose from you can save the city or destroy it; it is your call

Standard World cost zero – Happy with your day to day life? Then this is the choice for you. Be a business tycoon or attend a college you always wanted to go to.

Space Credit 200 points – Ever want to travel the stars or visit worlds? Pilot Mechs or ships while expanding the new frontier

Cultivation World Credit 300 points – where might makes right and your fists do the talking

Fantasy World Credit 400 points – Explore dungeons, live in castles or just hang out at the pub. A world where magic and swords will save the day

Alien World Credit 800 points – creep and claw your way to greatness. Fight back those invasive humans and use them as food for your fellow brothers and sisters.

Devil Realm Credit 1000 points – from imp to demon lord now is the time to bring hell on earth. Slay the heroes and get your pillage on

It was a hard choice. The heavenly realm seemed like a dream vacation more than a game location and after sitting for more than a year I wanted at least some excitement.  I finally settled on "Fantasy Realm" for a few reasons. First, the credit offered showed that it was an average difficulty and for my first attempt I did not want to die five minutes into it because it was too hard. Second, MAGIC, I mean come on its magic and who does not want to cast spells, make potions or enchant objects.

With a thought I selected the fantasy world and returned to the main screen. World – Fantasy was now greyed out. I quickly selected genre and looked through the list. A few options were already greyed out like "medical – hospital" since they did not fit into the world setting but even so there were still hundreds to shift through. I only thought a half dozen looked truly interesting. I reread them:

Sports +0 – Think you have what it takes to be an all-star? From jousting to magic duels let your skill do the talking.

Otome +100  – Are you the type that always wanted boys or girls to be interested in you? Now's your chance! Seduce your way to a "happy ending"

Political +300 – Think you can out strategize an evil king or duke while climbing the social circles. Will you unite the lands or end up without your head?

War-zone (defense) +400 – War has come and the king needs you! Gather your troops and fight back the hordes and defend your lands

War-zone (conquest) +400 – evil (or good) is a blight upon the land. Train your troops, gather your mages and set off to take what should be yours!

Dungeon Crawler +600  – Your life is one of adventure! Join the guild and set off with a party to conquer dungeons and clutch the treasures… unless of course it is a mimic and eats you!

Dungeon Core +700 – Like to build a civilization? Plot and plan your vast underground lair. Lure in unsuspecting adventurers, citizens, farmers daughters, billy-goats, whatever and kill them to help increase your dungeon.

I settled on Dungeon Crawler since it seemed to offer what I was looking for namely companionship and adventure and with that choice I went back and selected. For timeline, I selected medieval for +300 points and while I thought it was interesting that they did offer modern (+0) and futuristic (-300) the  fantasy worlds were where all the cool stories were based. Family options ranged from evil to good and numbers into the hundreds of siblings. I clicked poor, good and small for +20 points.  Since I was going out to adventure, I doubted that a family will come into play but better safe than sorry. Age on the other hand was a hard choice. It gave points the younger you were. Infant for example would give you +800 points and then decrease in value until you hit late teens and then it zeroed out until around fifty and then it became cheaper and cheaper. Being a fetus was out for m since I did not want to be in somebody's care again and unable to control my body. The option for "one month left to live" offered a thousand points but who would invest their time to play such a character. This company offered me a game pod after testing the game so I was going to maximize my experience and looked at the long term since they wanted me to test for a while. I finally selected an thirteen year old for +150 since I would be big enough to adventure if I needed to and small enough to stay in town to learn new skills and how things worked if I chose.

With my points sitting at 1190, I thought "character" and began to design my character. A meeple shaped person slowly appeared in front of me with the stats floating to the left and a "Male -50 points / Female +200 points" floating above its head. Thinking about gender a description came up explaining why the points were the way they were. Long story short being a female in the middle ages sucked a lot apparently and the game took this into account. They had to deal with family trying to marry them off, they were expected to bear children and stay at home and apparently the game had creepy NPCs that may or may not take advantage of female adventures. That was on top of the normal girl issues although I had no idea why a game would add such realism. The fact that in a dungeon a companion may take advantage of you is just messed up. 200 points seemed too small to me to deal with the hassle, but I will leave it for last encase I really need those points.

Going back I looked at my status

Name: ?

Race: ?

Level 0

Profession – None

Experience - 0

Stats:

Strength              1

Stamina                1

Intelligence        1

Wisdom              1

Charisma            1

Dexterity            1

Perception          1

Luck                      N/A

Skills: None

Talents: None

Bloodline: none

First thing I had to do was pick a race. The reason was that each race gave a plus or minus to points. For example being a standard elf would cost me 100 points but if I choose being a Royal elf it would cost 900 points but the benefits would increase as well. If I wanted to earn points I could be a monster type like kobolds, slimes, golems etc but every one of them had downsides that went with the race you picked. Things like less stat points, weakness to magic or elements and of course the other races are hunting you for your magic core. Humans were the neutral race and did not cost anything but also did not give anything special. I did not give it much thought and quickly selected human.

Next was stat point allocation. The company had explained how leveling these would work. It was pretty straight forward and all you had to do was pay points equal to the stat you are going to. That is to say to increase a stat from one to two you paid two points. While this seems cheap just to get to five which is what a lazy man's average stats would be cost me ninety-eight points. They highly recommend getting to 5 because if you did not have at least five in a stat you would start to have issues with your character. A one in dexterity would have you tripping into things, falling into moats and so on. Plus, I wanted to be an adventurer, so I needed higher stats than a farmer if I was going to accomplish anything. So, I increased all my stats to 10 each for 378 points figuring ten was a good place to start and I will come back once I pick my profession to increase the recommended stats. Reducing my points down to 792

Now the hard part "professions". They had the standards of course; cleric, warrior, mage, bowman etc but once you went into that section, they had dozens of sub-categories for every profession. Warriors had berserker, dual wielder, sword and shield up to elemental weapon master but again higher points equaled better options. There were also stat requirements. I noticed that when I looked at the elemental shield's profession. A neat tank class but it needed 15 in strength, 14 in Stamina and 12 in wisdom on top of the 300 points to buy the class. I thought about it but after being crippled I knew I wanted to be some kind of healer so it would never happen again. I admit I did not know if being paralyzed was in the game but if they put in girl's menstruation I could only shudder in fear on other things that they put into the game for "realism", so I definitely would be a healer.

Thinking "healer" I pulled up the sub menu for them. God of Healing stood at the top of the list but how could you even get the points to buy it? The damn programmers must have put that there to mess with the players. Shaking my head, I moved on. Clerics had the ability to cast a few healing and a few elemental type spells which varied on the God or Goddess you selected (there were a bunch). Priests were upgraded clerics with the same elemental attacks, more healing options and minor blessings which were buffs you could put on your party members. They had medicine men and shamans that used nature magic to heal if you did not want to be part of the churches. After scrolling through them all I saw one called Angel of Mercy for 400 points, it had no attack spells but it had healing, buffs and quite a few defensive spells you can pick up as you level. You can also manifest wings for flight! How cool is that? To select this class profession, it also required a wisdom of 17 which was another ninety-eight points. Other than no attack spells it also had another downside. You could not lie and it would not let you kill unless it was a demon or monster. I thought about it and gritting my teeth I selected that option which dropped my points down to 372, Then I picked up a mace: beginner skill for 20 points for my weapon skill. I may be an Angel of Mercy but I am still going to smack a bitch if they attack me. Poorly perhaps but I still will bring down the hammer of justice…. Or in this case a mace. Tailoring, jeweler, herbalism, first aid, alchemy and enchanting were all talents I was looking at. To get beginner was fairly cheap for most talents and skills averaging 20 points but to get the next level of craftsman was 50 then journeyman at 100 and Talented for 150. There were others like GOD level skills but at 10,000 points I quickly gave up on them. Sure, I could learn new skills and talents in the game but I was unsure how that worked but figured that like most games you probably had to find a person that can teach you and there was no guarantee that I would find anybody at the high levels. I settled on

Enchanting – Talented

Herbalism – Journeyman

First aid – Beginner

Alchemy – beginner

Now you may be wondering how my measly 392 bought 530 points worth of skills. Well I will tell you. In the end, I figured how hard could it be to play a girl character and with that I selected female and if it proved to be too hard I would remake my character. I would lose time leveling but it might be an interesting experience. I Played around for an hour or two designing my dream girl which slowly emerged for the meeple although I had to raise charisma to get the look I wanted with the left-over points. I also lowered my strength and stamina to nine while raising dexterity and perception to eleven to maximize the leftover two points, with that I added a name and read through my character sheet one last time.

Name: Alice

Race: half-Angel

Level 0

Profession – Angel of Mercy

Experience - 0

Stats:

Strength              9

Stamina                9

Intelligence        10

Wisdom              17

Charisma            14

Dexterity            11

Perception          11

Luck                      none earned

Skills:

Mace: Beginner

Enchanting – Talented

Herbalism – Journeyman

First aid – Beginner

Alchemy – beginner

Talents:

Holy Casting

Bloodline:

Angels gain following skills

Demonic Counter - Heal spells do damage to demons equal to healing value

Flight – Medium level flight

Holy Aura – A 3-foot aura that reduces pain and adds boost to all healing spells

Speak No Lie – People with angel blood are unable to tell lies

Pacifistic Blow – any attack against others will always fall short of killing them (monsters and demons excluded)

Vision of Diagnosis – Ability to detect ailments at a glance

It looked ok to me. The only thing I was worried about was how real the NPCs were going to be since I was a support character I would need people to support after all. I guess I will find out. I sighed and clicked accept.

LOADING….

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***

"report"

"Sir, worlds Direblight and Frostmore are progressing smoothly and devoted followers have begun to appear and we are seeing movement on most worlds. Only a few show no signs yet of any progress."

"Excellent, keep proceeding to get more game testers that are on the brink of despair. They turn so easily once they are given power" The man behind the desk smirked. "game testers," he murmured.