** Rosa **

 

Landing in my VR home was always nice. I liked my farm and all the animals, it was perfect in many ways, but nothing beat my open plan apartment at the top of a misty mountain range. It was all virtual, so it could be whatever my heart desired at that moment, as could my body. I looked down at it, grinning at it again. I looked the same as outside the game, but I still enjoyed it.

Everything from my middling to short height, to my short brown hair, to my green eyes. My wide hips, my small breasts, my smooth groin. All of it was wonderful. All if it was me. I’d chosen it. I gave another happy sigh and relished it all for a moment, as I did every time I looked down in the real world, before I told the system to start the game.

As I was connected with Cora via the Faster than Light Network, I wondered what sort of character I felt like playing. I’d played a caster in the last game, sitting back and lobbing deadly spells at my enemies without much fear of retribution. I felt a little too worked up for that. I wanted something a bit closer, more personal.

My theorycrafting was cut short by the welcome text plastering itself across my vision.

Welcome to the Cauldron of Realms Ascended!

Cool, okay. Standard stuff so far.

The scene shifted from my home to one that showed the void of space. Stars and galaxies swirling in their dance to a beat that was eons long. I loved space, I loved the idea of hopping into a spaceship on my own and just exploring. Maybe I should try a space MMO after this one?

Out of the void, several softly fluctuating coloured orbs phased into existence, and some more text appeared over my vision. One in particular, a neutral grey coloured one, came to the forefront.

This is the realm known as the Cauldron, the plane of the lost. The Cauldron collects stray pieces of the many other realms when they break away into the void. New strangeness comes into being regularly, and will keep those that take up the profession of adventurer ever busy.

The scene began to shift again… before something went strange. It stuttered and froze for a moment, and then a room flickered into place around me like that old robot trying to start, the one that Tim insisted was still usable. Chairs and tables appeared around me intermittently, before disappearing just as jarringly. Okay… bugs already. Interesting…

A woman about my own age — twenty four years old — appeared in much the same manner as everything else, only she stayed whole.

“What the fuck has gone wrong now?” she muttered, moving over to kick the space where a chair had been, causing it to flicker back into existence.

“Uh, hello?” I asked, very confused by everything that was happening.

Seriously, what the hell was going on? I’d left my last game in part because it was a buggy mess, could this one please not be a buggy mess too?

“Hey there, uh, Rosa? Right? Sorry about this, I think one of my subroutines jumped the gun—“ she said, interrupting herself to bash a table back into existence, muttering, “Wow, now I know why Tami finds this so fun. Maybe I should try crushing a spider the way she did a few weeks ago...”

“Riiiight,” I said slowly, looking around at the room that was doing its best to make and unmake itself at the same time.

“Yeah, hi. So one of my dumbass jury rigged subroutines kinda um… decided to give you a random character already. Problem is, in addition to jumping the gun on that point, it also assigned you to a race that isn’t actually meant to be playable,” the woman said, frowning and taking off her glasses to clean them.

“So I need a reset or something?” I asked, with a groan. My brain felt tired. Why was everything breaking?

“If you’d like. You can also go along with the subroutine’s choice too. The random character function assigns you to a character it thinks you will like. I can... see why it chose this one too, even if it’s a bit… unorthodox,” she said, her eyes scanning a page I couldn’t see.

“Hmmm,” I said, thinking… “Okay a few questions. Is there a kill feed or something that will tell people if it was me that killed them, and if not, will they think I’m an NPC if I’m playing as a race that isn’t available?”

“No, there isn’t a kill feed, although there is an identify function that is limited by a player’s knowledge of the game. So that would protect your identity… yeah, actually. People could well think you were an NPC,” she mused, a smile forming. “Do you mind if I set something up for you before you spawn in? It might take an hour or so… but I get the feeling you’ll need some things once you spawn in.”

“Really? You can just do that?” I asked.

She shrugged, playing with her glasses again, “Yeah. A lot of random characters have back stories and stuff. We have to set them up, place a few things discreetly into the world, that kind of thing.”

“So by ‘we’ you mean…?” I asked, already thinking I probably knew the answer. If Tim the farm AI had gained sentience, then why not the game’s AI too?

“Ahhh, not important. So would you like to continue with what you’ve been given?” she asked, avoiding my question.

I shrugged, why not? If the the randomiser picked things I might be interested in, then why not give it a go? I could just log out and play a different game if it came to that, or start a new character. “Yeah whatever, sounds good.”

“Okay… good luck! Oh, and remember to feed,” the woman smiled, waving her hand and sending my vision black.

 

****

 

When I fumbled my way to consciousness again, I could feel that some time had passed. I’d been napping for maybe an hour or two, just as the woman had said. The next thing I realised, was that I was incredibly high up in the air and travelling downwards very, very fast.

I tried to twist and move in the air to figure out what was happening, but my trajectory seemed set. I was going to hit the ground at some ludicrous speed no matter any panicked wriggling I might do. Speaking of the ground… I looked down, or based on my personal orientation, up. That was a bit odd. It felt like I had a body, but it wasn’t the same. It was just the vague suggestion of a body.

The ground on the other hand, was definitely real. It looked to be a sparse pine forest, gradually thinning out into a vast tundra beyond, and all of it was covered in a thick layer of snow. It would have been beautiful, had it not been for the battle raged across it, littering it with dead bodies and the husks of vast war machines. Off to my side, I could see the forest stretch down until it hit a shoreline, and in the distance, just a haze on the horizon, I could see another landmass across the sea.

The sight of the sea took my breath away. Not because it was the sea, I’d seen that thousands of times in my life, no it was the immense armada that lay upon it. Every ship flew a red flag with a design I couldn’t quite catch, and several of them looked odd. The odd ships looked more like enormous worms with tank treads along the side, held afloat by some sort of hovering tugboat thing.

The worms were in the middle of making landfall, each one hauling its huge bulk up the beaches even as the guns on their backs began to roar and spit purple bolts of energy. They were massive too, the biggest few coming in at possibly two hundred meters long. Their flanks covered in thick brutalist looking armour plates, and their heads sporting huge spiked drills.

My attention wandered in the direction of their cannon fire to see a sight just as awe inspiring and bizarre. Huge castles, their architecture reminding me of old japanese buildings, but made of steel rather than wood and paper. Some were small, only fifty or so meters tall. I say only, because I could see one that was more of a mountain than anything else. Each one was unique, some using tank treads to get around, while others used enormous legs. Some few smaller ones even floated along using some mechanism I couldn’t see. Across the flanks of these castles, more cannons answered the worm’s attacks with arcane blasts of their own.

On the ground, thousands of infantry fought with all manner of weaponry. Both sides were flinging spells at each other, while they clashed with more mundane weapons. It seemed that swords, spears and crossbows were the name of the game for the red side, while the blue side favoured swords, glaives and bows. As these two titanic armies did their thing, I could see teams of people that were obviously players wading into the fray too.

I caught all of this as I plummeted through the air towards impact, and that time was approaching. The area I was about to hit looked like it was more heavily forested than the main battlefield, and both sides were sending skirmishers into the trees, rather than full regiments.

The moment of impact came sooner than I thought it would. One second I had time to survey the battle, the next I was rapidly approaching what I figured would be my end. That subroutine or whatever had probably messed up again and spawned me much too high in the air.

Except, I didn’t die when I hit the ground. I… expanded, my form rushing out in a haze of black smoke that engulfed everything for a dozen paces in every direction, before it rushed back into what I was beginning to realise was a very formless body.

I shifted, looking around at myself and finding that I was in fact a vaguely defined mass of black and grey smoke that seemed to be boiling out of a point around where my perception was based. I say perception, because near as I could tell I didn’t actually have a head. The smoke itself was odd, seeming to move and shift organically as I did, like I was wearing a dress or something.

As my form pulled in, it began to take a vaguely humanoid shape, and almost as a reflex I frowned at how androgenous it looked, only for my form to cooperate and shift into a vaguely feminine shape. Good. Needed them hips. My hips are life. Quite literally.

I really wasn’t a fan of the way I’d been dropped into the middle of a huge battle as a level one. I mean… even just having so many people around was getting my hackles up. Still, I needed to calm down. I couldn’t lose my shit during minute one of my playtime. So with that in mind, I looked around. I wasn’t feeling the cold, even if the lack of form was making me feel a bit strange. On the one hand, I felt safer like this, but on the other hand, the lack of a body was messing with my head on a baser level.

Time to test how movement worked I guess. I tried to take a step forward, and found that I could, although it was a bit jarring from what I expected. I expected to feel the soft crushing of snow, followed by solid impact as my foot hit the ground. What I got instead, felt like I was walking on a trampoline, except this time, it was my body that was spongy, rather than the ground. At least I was able to move, so that was a good thing?

The woods somewhat muted the roar of battle beyond, and it gave this eerie feeling to the place. Great titanic forces were doing battle outside, and yet I was walking through snowy woods where a far smaller and more personal battle was taking place. I saw evidence of this personal battle as I walked, bodies dressed in both red and blue, but neither meant anything to me. I had no idea who or what these sides were fighting about.

When I tried to pick up their weapons, I found it difficult, like trying to hold water, although I suspected it was actually like water trying to hold something. It happened with anything I tried to loot. Made sense I guess, I was a near formless mass of dark mist right now after all.

Only a few minutes after landing, I heard the clash of blades and the thump of something else, possibly magic. It was just up ahead, or so I thought with a frown of concentration. It was hard to tell with the trees obfuscating every sound. The sound of combat came to a crest as the ringing of steel grew to a fever pitch, followed by a gurgling cry and then… silence.

I pressed through the trees, finding that I didn’t need to worry about them too much, simply flowing around the offending branches rather than having to push them out of the way.

So it was that I came upon the fighting I’d heard. A non human body in blue lay dead on the ground, the race looking something like a demon or a tiefling. I bent down to inspect the body, feeling my form shift and deform to allow that to happen. The body was very recently dead, the blood still flowed sluggishly from a great many wounds.

Looking up from the body, I spotted a set of tracks in the snow, looking fresh and trailing blood. Dimly, I sensed something, somewhere between a smell and a taste. It was a dark and bitter sensation, reminding me of olives or coffee, it was hard to tell. I followed the scent and the tracks through the woods, noting that although there was a lot of blood, it was thinning even as the tracks seemed to grow weaker. Whoever it was had managed to staunch the flow of blood, but they were probably feeling dizzy from what they had already lost.

I found the person, a woman in a red uniform leaning against a tree, and watched her fumble with a tourniquet she had wrapped around their leg. There was another one around her arm, and her already pale skin was looking decidedly vampiric as she gasped for breath. A strong part of me just wanted to kill her, I was still equal parts angry and upset over the mail, but I held back.

It was cliche really, but I held back because she was beautiful. Simple as that. Even battle weary and bleeding, she had a majesty to her that commanded attention. Her uniform was crisp and sharp, even after fighting through these woods, and her glossy black hair was done in an impressively intricate braid to keep it out of the way. Her face was almost harsh in its angles, but had just enough softness to keep her in the realm of modelesque beauty.

“Are you okay? Can I help?” I found myself asking, before I could clamp a hand on my non-existent mouth.

My voice came out indistinct, sounding as though it were many different voices layered over the top of one another. A feminine chorus of inquisitive and gentle words. Unfortunately… her reaction to my words was anything but gentle. Her head and gaze snapped up to meet mine, and I felt something crumple inside me as her face turned ugly with hatred.

“More inhuman scum? Come to finish the job all your other friends couldn’t?” she asked in a harsh, choking voice.

Something inside me switched with her words. It had been a long time since I’d lowered my defences like that, a very, very, very long time. I should not have done so. This woman might have been beautiful on the outside, but it was painfully obvious that she was anything but on the inside. Additionally, I felt a calling from her, the taste and smell of bitter coffee calling me as it did on a cold morning. The smell was still indistinct, but as I got closer to her, I sensed it grow deeper, fuller and richer.

Her eyes widened, showing the smallest sliver of fear as I went silent and stalked forward, and I realised with a low chuckle what that smell was. It was her fear. Fear smelled… good.

“Well, since you’re going to throw my offer to the dirt, I may as well right?” I asked with a harsh laugh.

Her sneer returned, but at least a portion of it was bravado. Just like all the people from my hometown as I packed my things in my car. They’d all looked like that, anger and disgust written across their faces even as small facial flickers indicated the greed and fear that lay beneath. Fear that they would miss out on the money I held close to my chest. This woman and every other were no different.

As though by instinct, a plethora of options presented themselves to me, like I’d always known how to be this creature. There were ability slots I could see in the bottom, but they were currently all empty. No, this was a more primal, instinctual set of skills.

I followed the first, my form exploding out into a line, rushing past the woman and her tree, then coalescing again out of her sight. The next instinct followed, smoke billowing up from the ground all around us to form a foot of opaque twisting shapes that writhed and boiled like a pot set above a stove too hot.

“What is this? What are you?” she called, dragging herself with a pained gasp to her feet and spinning around.

I burst apart again, shifting to a different spot with a low giggle that I knew was bound to draw out a little of that sweet, bitter terror. The woman raised and released a bolt of purple energy in my general direction, and I watched it shear branches in two before shattering against the trunk of a tree. I don’t know why, but I felt like that would do some serious damage to me if it were to land home.

“I have no idea what I am,” I told her truthfully. “Except you pissed me off. So I know one thing, I know that I am… angry.”

This time, I employed my first and third instincts, following that cold, inner rage as it fuelled me. I burst forward, arriving abruptly before her even as chains of shadow flew from every direction, twisting and snaking around her wrists and ankles, viciously shackling her to the ground. She gasped in fear, as she realised she was helpless. It was real uncontrolled fear this time, and I grinned in deep satisfaction.

I didn’t wait to make a speech or fuck about with torture, I simply tore those delicious emotions from her mind with one terrible ephemeral hand even as the other formed a blade out of smoke and plunged it violently into her chest.

She gasped for a moment, then shuddered erratically before going deathly still. No need to draw out the suffering longer than it needed to be, even if she wasn’t real. I needed fear, not pain. Watching dispassionately as her body fell to the ground, I wondered at the way it was leeched of colour and shrivelled slightly, like it had been dehydrated.

Stepping back, I found myself giving a shaky sigh. It felt good to kill her, easing the wounds I had held close, hidden within me for these long four years. Then a faint feeling of disgust echoed out from the time before I had been betrayed, and I crushed it with a frown. I wouldn’t stand to be judged for this. I knew the difference between the real and the virtual, and I would get my catharsis where it would hurt no one.

In an effort to ignore that part of me, I turned to the pulsing mass of fear I now held in my hand. It smelled delicious, and with only the barest of pauses, I plunged it into my core. It was absorbed instantly, and I felt myself grow slightly, gaining a little power. That wasn’t all I gained though. I felt an awareness of the woman’s form. Somehow, as I had known how to wield my powers of smoke and shadow, I knew how to take that form. I could take a body now, if I so wished.

Progress already. This game might work out to be good after all.

Feeling around the new form, I commanded my smoke to solidify to match it. It happened quickly, all the smoke that was me rushing in and coagulating until I was standing there in the snow. An incredibly beautiful naked woman. This body was stunning. Seductive in ways that almost defied my poor gay mind. Fucking hell, I was definitely rocking this body as often as I could. With… clothing though. Not her clothing mind you, I think I liked the blue team better on principle. Anyone who wore that unique shade of oppressive regime red was probably an asshole.

I’d go find a more intact dead body to steal the clothing off, I decided, and moved out into the cold, wartorn night.