mialbowy

Arc 4: Help, I woke up as a girl in a video game world, but I don’t know how to pass!

“Alex” wakes up inside the MMO he plays with his best friend “Crystal”, but there’s a small problem: his character is female. His feelings for Crystal and his own gender complicated, he gives being Alexa a try, struggling to adjust to the hyper-gendered world of towering hunks and femme fatales. (Childhood friends)

“Well, that was fun. I’ll see you tomorrow, Alex.”

I smiled. “G’night, Crystal.”

Just before she left—“What the fuck? You’re an old guy playing such a cute girl? Fucking pedo.”

Blood running cold, I scanned my computer screen for the person talking. After copying his user ID, I pressed down my voice chat key. “Who’s your mom? I want to tell her what her brat’s saying when he should be studying. Actually, you’ve got a bunch of cosmetics, don’t you? Who’s your dad, does he know you’re wasting his money on a game? And what’s your ID? Kids aren’t allowed to play, so I’m going to report you.”

He tried to interrupt me a few times, but my last “threat” saw him quit on the spot. It wasn’t the first time, that spiel something I knew by heart, and that was why I copied his ID first. Not that these kids really ever got banned—why would the company ban people spending money?

“Thanks,” Crystal said. And she sounded so down, my heart ached, especially since there wasn’t time to cheer her up.

“Why’re you thanking me? It’s my duty to educate the youth,” I said.

She laughed, but it was painfully hollow. “If only everyone had such good teachers growing up.”

Then she left, her character disappearing in pink sparkles. When I first saw that logout animation in the cosmetic shop, I wondered who’d waste money on something they never even got to see, but I understood now.

“Goodnight, Crystal,” I whispered to myself, logging out too.

She was my childhood friend. Even when we were young and she didn’t know she was a girl yet, I still had to protect her. She was such a crybaby and everyone told her boys didn’t cry, so she cried more like she knew, and I would have to comfort her and shout at whoever started it.

These days, she joked that her job was cosplaying as a middle-aged man. But she had her own flat where she could be herself and she said playing as a cute girl helped. There wasn’t really more she could do, not unless she moved abroad, practising her English in case she ever did save up enough to do it.

I smiled, remembering when she told me she wanted to be called Crystal—in English. Such an idiot, my first impulse was to tell her it was kind of a trashy name. Luckily, I stopped myself before I said anything because, whenever I called her Crystal, she really shined bright. Perfect name for her.

It was her name only I knew, at least in real life. She talked anonymously online, but no one like her ever wanted to meet up and for good reason—the people who did always turned out to be bigots trying to dox people like her. Someone taught her that early, so she thankfully stayed safe.

I finished up my bedtime routine and settled into bed, those same thoughts running through my head like always. And I thought to myself, It would be nice if we could just live in the game.

Asleep, my dream felt strange, sort of too real and also wrong, but I was only lying in my bed. A dream where I was trying to sleep. Then there was a voice, soft and muffled, not really talking to me, just near me. But I honestly answered her questions I couldn’t hear, somehow knowing what to say.

Until finally, I feel asleep within my dream. A dreamless sleep.

I woke up to the sound of people talking, not noticing what was strange at first. No, I just lay in bed, staring at the roof while trying to remember the questions.

Slowly, this kind of paralysing dread sunk in. My roof wasn’t bare wooden planks, my bed not this hard, pillow not this soft—and the people outside, I caught English words. That wasn’t entirely unusual, but I only heard English words, not my native language.

When I couldn’t hold off any longer, I sat up and looked at myself. It wasn’t me, but I recognised who and, stomach clenching, I scrambled out of bed and looked for the full-size mirror, knowing exactly where it would be, and pulled down my pyjama bottoms.

At the same time, the bedroom door burst open and Crystal rushed inside, saying, “I’m a woman! I’ve got boobs and a pussy!”

Ignoring her, I stared in the mirror, not moving to cover myself up. It didn’t really feel like that was me. Only after I hesitantly reached down and touched it did my mind sort of believe, suddenly overwhelmed with shame, turning away and pulling up my clothes.

“S-sorry,” I said.

She took a couple of steps towards me and, glancing over, I saw her frowning. “You too? But… you’re Alex?”

I hesitated over what to say. “When I made Alex, I… was going to be a girl too, make it easier for you. But I ended up changing my mind, so I made her look boyish.” I knew it didn’t sound convincing, but I hoped it was enough for her.

For a second, it felt like she knew, the way she looked at me, but then she hugged me. “You’re the best.”

I felt a spike of guilt, but pushed through and hugged her back. It was funny, kind of getting second-hand euphoria, because I was hugging the Crystal she always wanted to be and that made me so happy.

If this was all a dream, I wanted to treasure it.

Once the hug started to drag on, she stepped back, smiling, but she looked a bit worried too. “What do you want to do? I mean, just because you’ve got a woman’s body, you can still dress as a guy. There’s probably a spell or potion we can get you. Well, there wasn’t one in the game, but things might be different here.”

I listened to her, the guilt coming back from how honestly she wanted to help me. “No, um… I’ll give it a try. Being a woman, I mean.”

Her expression softened. “It’s not like you can’t change your mind later, right?”

“Yeah, exactly,” I said, nodding.

She took the lead from there, looking at the clothes in my closet. Unfortunately, I only had “men’s” clothes, bulky and in boring colours. Our bodies were too different to share clothes too, her short and curvy, me tall (for a woman) and sort of broad. After I’d made the character, I couldn’t change her gender, but I could change her name and appearance, so this boyish body was the result.

That said, she did an amazing job. “We’ll brush your hair into more of a bob.” “Some contouring to soften your face.” “Cute accessories help give a girly impression.”

But there was only so much she could do. When I looked in the mirror, I still saw a man. A funny thought that almost made me laugh, it was like a girlfriend giving her boyfriend a makeover for fun.

“You like it?” she asked, cheery.

I almost told her what I was thinking, but it was… complicated, and she might not have found it funny. “Yeah,” I said.

She found her own funny thought, saying, “All my cosplaying finally came in handy.”

“I’m in your care.”

Standing taller, she raised her chin and said, “Leave it to me!”

I chuckled and, unable to resist, patted her head, which made her scowl and turned to the mirror to fix her hair.

While we went through our morning routines, we discovered that this really was just like the game world as we’d left it last night. We had a shared apartment in the middle of the city, all of our furniture and items there, even our money. I panicked when I realised there weren’t keys to press, but she quickly calmed me down and showed me how to use the “interface”.

Arm out, palm up, she said, “Status!”

Next to her, I stared at the sort of pop-up window with all her details. Sure enough, it listed everything as I remembered, my gaze lingering on the gender field for a moment. When I looked at my status screen, I stared at the gender field for more than a moment.

Hers read: “Female.”

Mine read: “Female?”

“Wow, it really is incredible to pick up on that,” she said, pointing where I was staring.

I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Yeah,” I mumbled.

Getting into our inventory was similar, just reaching into a pocket instead of holding out her hand—which proved a problem for her. “Fuck, this skirt doesn’t have any pockets,” she said, then tried with mine, relieved that it didn’t have to be her pocket. “At least one of us always has to have pockets, okay?”

“Okay.”

Breakfast was interesting, sort of like a mini-game where our cooking skill gave us instincts on how long to fry something and we had to react in time. Well, that was how it felt to us long-time gamers. The taste was interesting too, the flavours familiar even though the ingredients weren’t.

Then she dragged me out to go shopping. She called it sight-seeing, but we’d seen everywhere in the city, having played for over a year already. There were more details to everything and we could now go into every building if we wanted to. Except that most buildings were housing, and it was too early to drink, and we didn’t need a locksmith or to wash our clothes.

So it ended up being a shopping trip.

“Ooh, this shop looks nice—what do you think?”

I joined her by the window, looking in. There were some dresses on display, some being altered, and they looked pretty enough. I didn’t really know enough to say more than that. “If you think it looks good,” I said.

We stepped inside, but that was as far as we got, one of the assistants coming over. “Women only—men wait outside,” she said, looking at me.

And I froze, squashed between guilt and fear, afraid “male” was branded onto me, apparently so obvious she could tell at a glance.

Crystal didn’t even hesitate. “She is a woman, but, if that’s how you’re going to greet us, we’ll spend our money elsewhere.”

I let her lead me out, pulling me by the hand. After we got clear of the shop, she stopped and turned around, letting go of my hand, and her angry expression melted looking at me.

“What?” she asked.

Finally, I laughed, which made her pout. Remembering earlier, I resisted the urge to pat her head again. “I’m happy the little girl who cried all the time grew up into someone so confident.”

That wiped away her pout, a smile blooming, but she didn’t look quite at me. “Well, it’s because someone was always there to help me.”

I grinned and asked, “Really—who?”

Her pout came back and, for a second, I thought she’d kick me, but she just lifted her foot, drawing a small circle with the tip of her shoe. “Actually, that reminds me. Do you still want to be called Alex? It is, um, what’s the word… a girl-and-boy name?”

“Unisex,” I said, not surprised she didn’t know it in English.

Then I realised her question, thinking it over. Alex was just a name I chose for my character, not special like Crystal was for her, but it was something we were both used to. Still, if I was going to try….

“Her name was Alexa, before I changed it,” I softly said.

“Ah, like the—”

“Yes,” I said quickly, stopping her. “It was the first English girl name I thought of, and I knew I could change it later.”

She giggled and it was so cute, finally setting in that this was her now. It wasn’t a masculine voice pushed to a higher-pitch, or changed by a voice changer, but the natural voice of her natural body.

And if it made her laugh like that, I liked it. “I think… Alexa is good,” I said.

She settled into a smile, then held my hands. “Good to meet you, Alexa,” she said.

Her smile was a little infectious.