Chapter 1: Logging In

I brush a stray lock of hair away from my eyes, tucking it back behind my ear. Nervously, I fiddle with my ponytail. My eyes flicker towards the window in my room, another strand coming loose and demanding my attention. Out the window I have a clear view of the street and most especially, the mailbox.

The motion that caught my attention was just another car passing by our quaint suburban road. I glance at the time on my computer monitor, noting that the mail should be arriving anytime now. Somewhat absently, I turn around and take another look at the large headgear lying on my bed. It’s good as new, only having been used once for calibration so far. I wanted to make sure that it’s in proper working order for when I use it tonight. I note that the headgear is not only still there, but all set up and ready to go.

The sound of a vehicle coming from the window next to me causes me to turn my head back. I nearly fell out of my chair in my attempt to stand up so quickly. It’s the mail truck, it’s here!

With a rush, I creep my way out of my room, my stops soft and slightly clumsy as I try to make my way as innocuously as I can towards the front door. Unfortunately, the living room next to the front door is occupied. Nonetheless, I stride confidently towards the front door, my feet making no sounds against the floor as I walk. I hit my elbow against the wall with a thump, causing the living room’s sole occupant to look up at me. Curse my lack of balance for selling me out.

“Jacob?” my mother asks, looking me up and down as I make my way to the door.

I hide my wince at the name expertly, expecting the sting of hearing it by now. “Hey, Mom, I’m just going to get the mail.” She looks puzzled for a moment, but then a lightbulb seems to go off in her head.

“Oh, your game? Is that today?” she asks. I nod gently and she smiles at me with a shake of her head. “You boys and your games. You and your father both, I swear.” She chuckles lightheartedly as I nurse the stabbing pain in my heart at her words.

“Yeah, uh, something like that,” I mutter, inching my way to the door. Just a couple inches from safety from this conversation. “I’m gonna go grab it now, alright?”

“Have fun, sweetie. I’ll put a plate in the fridge for you whenever I finish dinner. I know you’ll probably be a little too preoccupied to come eat, but I do want you to at least eat whenever you finish,” she says, turning back to the small table she had been focused on beforehand. It’s filled with a line of tiny beads; she’s buried deep in her jewelry making before I’m even able to respond.

“Thanks, Mom,” I say, slipping the rest of the way out of the house and making my way briskly over to the mailbox. I grab the stack of mail, fingers gripping a smaller package tightly. I ignore the name on the label, focusing on the fact that it’s mine. My heart begins to beat a little faster as I actually have the package in hand, entering the house quietly. I detour to the kitchen to drop the rest of the mail off before all but running back to my room. I get to my room and lock the door, turning off my lights and tearing the package open.

Inside the package is a small game box. Well, objectively it’s normal sized for the system I’m playing on, but it’s still smaller than most other game boxes. I open the box gingerly, extracting the memory stick inside. I pick up the piece of headgear and plug the memory stick into the proper port, the stick sliding into the small hole and sliding almost all the way in, barely sticking out the side.

I shiver with anticipation, wanting to put the headset on immediately, but I restrain myself for a moment longer. I make my way to my desktop computer and pull up my chat client, Eris. I navigate through a couple of chats, knowing that there are no urgent updates. With that finished, I change my status to ‘Playing Terresite’ and set my profile to ‘Do not Disturb’. I shoot a quick update to some of my online friends, letting them know that I just got my copy and that I’m going to be hopping in. I don’t wait for their response, instead snoozing my computer. Finally finished, I turn with excited anticipation to the headset.

The headset is a gift I got out of the blue from my father over the summer. It’s the newest model with the most advanced deep dive virtual reality technology yet. I was shell shocked when he brought it home. Not only that, but he brought two home. Apparently he got a good deal from a family friend, a Mister Wolf, or maybe it was Fox?

He wanted us to play games together, which I had been interested in at first. My discomfort became more apparent as I didn’t have any games to play on my own, slowly I stopped using it over the last month. Until I heard about this game. I saved up enough that I could buy it on the spot, not telling my parents what game I had bought. I couldn’t have Dad following me here, I need this as my own space.

I get into bed, pulling my hair tie out with a wince. The hair tie hasn’t been broken in yet and it’s a little tight, but it holds my hair up. Now I let my hair out and pull the headset over my head, securing all the straps and manually adjusting the electrode pads as I remember them going. After a secondary inspection, I run a test scan. When the green light pops up, I know that I managed to get the electrodes in the right spots.

I lean back against my pillow, pressing the power button and hearing the headset whir to life. With the device finally on and my body lying down, I calm my breathing and say the trigger phrase. “Dive sequence, launch.” I can feel myself losing consciousness slowly, the device putting my body in rest mode and simulating my mind into the virtual home environment.

“Welcome to your virtual home environment, User: Purple Prose,” a cheery feminine voice calls as I come to consciousness in my home environment. I look around carefully and sigh, letting myself fall back into the large beanbag I woke up in.

My virtual home environment is very cozy and as I sit in the beanbag, I realise that I actually kind of miss it. The only thing that would make the space feel cozier could be a virtual cat or two. Or twelve.

...Maybe twenty.

That aside, I call out to my virtual assistant. “Adira? Is Terresite installed yet?”

“I’m sorry, the download should take twenty more minutes real time. Would you like to enable time dilation?” she asks.

“No, that’ll be fine, it’s only twenty minutes. I’ll just wait here, resting. Can you inform me when it’s ready?”

“Of course, User Prose!”

I nod and sink back into the bean bag, melting into the soft fluffy texture. I try to ignore the awful feeling of my body as best I can, slowing my breathing and just trying to center myself. Even without the time dilation, I manage to make the time fly with the pseudo meditation.

“User Prose?”

“Mmmmf,” I mumble sleepily, not entirely there.

“Terresite is fully downloaded. Would you like to Connect?” I sit up suddenly as my brain catches up to what she’s saying. The calm disappears in a heartbeat as I shiver with hesitant anticipation.

“Yes, please,” I say, my voice barely a whisper. I know it doesn’t matter, that she’ll hear me anyways.

“Connecting to Terresite. Enjoy yourself, User Prose.” Her voice fades away as I feel my consciousness shift away from the virtual home environment.

My surroundings are replaced by a rustic looking stone building, filled with only light furnishings. There’s a few tables and a bookshelf, but they’re all off to the side of the room. Instead, in the middle of the room is a large, full-body mirror. As my surroundings are slowly replaced, my bean bag disappears and I drop to the stone floor with small yelp.

“Greetings, adventurer!” the voice booms. “Welcome to Terre Nov, the wondrous world within Terresite! Please be aware that time dilation is set at one hour real time to four hours game time; please be careful that your session does not exceed ten hours real time or your session will be terminated. Additionally, if there are any physical issues with your physical body, your session will be terminated.” Picking my head up and looking around, I don’t see anyone that could be making that voice. “Before you can begin your adventure, you’ll need to create your adventurer! Please approach the mirror to begin character creation.”

Tentatively, I pick myself up, dusting myself off. I notice that I’m no longer using the body template from my home environment, the self-scan model. Instead, I’m inhabiting a featureless and androgynous body model. I let out a sigh of relief. It’s not great, but it’s miles better than that old body.

I wander over to the mirror and a series of menus appear in the air next to me, floating in midair beside my view of the mirror. There’s an upload button towards the bottom that I consider ignoring entirely, until I pause as a thought occurs to me.

Slowly, my hand falls to the upload button and I upload the self-scan. Instantly, the androgynous body model is replaced by a view of my fleshy prison. I cringe away violently, turning my head to the various categories along the side and get to changing things.

I focus on my face first, opening submenu upon submenu. It takes some time, but eventually I stop having to cringe away from my player model. It feels a little silly that I even bothered uploading the scan in the first place if I was going to change the face so much, but in a weird way I can still kinda see myself in this new face? Better yet, I can see myself in this new face. The real me. I reach up and feel my cheek, frowning at the feel of my skin. I scan my eyes over the advanced character menu, not finding the option in the menu I’m looking for.

I tab out, looking through the parent menus before digging through the general and miscellany tabs to find the option I’m looking for. Eventually, I find it. I slide the dials way down to one side and feel my skin once more. Gone is the rough feel of my hands and cheeks, and instead replacing it is the soft skin I was looking for. I nearly sob at the feeling, rubbing my hands against my face and relishing the soft feeling I was looking for.

I spend at least an hour making the micro adjustments necessary to the scan for it to be acceptable. Eventually, after several submenus and adjustments, I can see myself for the first time. I still look like me, but… better. I look more like me than I ever have, in fact. The changes seem surprisingly minimal, but looking at my reflection, I know they’re all that I needed.

My face is much softer and rounder, any sharp edges having been softened out. My hair is already long in real life and I keep it the same length for the most part, but I add an inch and tone the color down from dark brown to a light brunette. My hair is naturally almost straight with very little waviness, so I add just a bit more waviness. I keep my green eyes the color they are because they’re already a pretty intense green, but I increase the length of my lashes. I already had some very faint freckles, but I make them just a little bit more noticeable. After all the changes, I almost cry at the fact that I look right for once.

As for the rest of my body, I keep most of my bone structure about the same, not wanting for there to be too much disconnect from my real body. Not that I could really feel more disconnected from that body than I do already in my day to day. I adjust a few of the sliders, giving myself a more generous shape. More hips, and a chest, but I keep the chest on the small side. I only go to what I could estimate as A cups. I enjoy how lithe it keeps my form, not really being a fan of bigger boobs in general. After all of the tinier adjustments everywhere, including eradicating all of my body hair and hastily choosing the proper ‘plumbing’ without much investigation, I look perfect.

As I look through the general body grouping tab, I notice there are options for nonhuman races in the game. I scroll through a few to get a look, but I can’t bear to change away from human. I’m getting a chance to be the real me, and as neat as trying some alien features might be, I settle on the normal human version of me. It feels right.

I hit the finalization button for my character creation and I’m prompted to enter a name. I smile as I type in the name, my real name. The name I’ve been waiting for people to call me for forever. As for a fantasy surname, I actually hit the randomize button a couple of times and I find one that I like. I’m actually caught a little off guard by the second prompt that pops up, a custom pronoun prompt. I fill it out with ‘she/her’ with a smile. They’re pretty bland pronouns in comparison to some I’ve seen, but they’re mine. With a giggle, I hit enter and an entirely new set of menus opens up.

The new menu is related to class setup, including skill point and ability point distribution. I look through the menus with glee, considering all my options. There are only six basic classes to choose from, but I’ve heard that the class options branch into different advanced class paths. The six classes I can choose from currently are Mage, Swordfighter, Archer, Rogue, Curist, or Brawler. I consider the options carefully, but I can’t deny the call of the Swordfighter class. I’ve always been a sucker for blades.

I assign my skill points carefully, but I don’t have that many to assign. I only get twenty points in total from my first level, and out of the six traits, I put eight points into Agility alone. I attempt to evenly distribute the last twelve points, putting a little extra into Strength and Imagination. As for ability points, that’s a little harder. I have three to distribute, and my class only starts with two abilities to begin with. I decide to upgrade the one ability that seems most interesting twice, the Dash ability. With the last skill point, I’m actually able to unlock one more basic ability, and there are a couple for my class that look useful. I eventually choose a simple one that should make my combat a bit better, called ‘Cross Slash’.

With everything for my character decided, I’m given one last overview of my class info to go over. I skim it briefly and it all looks good. Hitting ‘Accept’, I stagger a little as a leather bag appears on my back, a plain and dull sword appearing on my hip. I shift the sword a bit, not bothering to pull it out of the sheath just yet. This and the bag must be my starting gear.

The booming voice from before returns as the room around me starts to fade away, “Greetings, adventurer Astraea Willowtide. Your story starts somewhere in the country of Bestril. I wish you luck on your journey throughout the lands.” The voice stops talking just as the last of the room blinks out. A warm smile crosses my face as I hear that name, my name. Astraea Willowtide.

SylkWeaver

New story! I decided to stop waiting to post this. I'm still kind of struggling after the move, so, posting might be slow, but I'm trying my best to get some stuff out. Every couple of days I should have a new chapter of this out for a while at least. Somewhere in there I'll have the next chapter to Accidental Witch finished too. This is my definitive promise to y'all that I'm not dead, just slow dslfdjfksflks