Michael
“Are you ready, Luna?” Michael asked.
“Yes, Dad! Let’s go! I want to play!” Luna exclaimed, bursting with excitement.
Chuckling at her enthusiasm, he told her, “Alright, let’s get your helmet on, then.”
Making sure it was turned on, he asked her, “Can you see?” It was a VR helmet with cameras built in so the wearer could see the world around them, even with their vision fully obstructed by the helmet.
“Yeah!” she replied as she looked around the room. It should look exactly the same, but the fact that she wasn’t looking at it directly made it novel.
Ahh, my daughter is so cute.
Luna quickly grew bored of looking at the familiar room, and said, “Dad, hurry up! Let’s play already!”
“Okay, okay,” he replied. “Lay down on the bed while I get my helmet on. The game doesn’t work if you aren’t laying down.”
The girl immediately ran to the bed and laid down, then became instantly frustrated by how boring waiting for her dad was.
Michael grabbed his matching helmet and put it on. The helmet’s cameras were good, but not perfect. The room looked the same, but there was a slight fuzziness to the image quality from the cameras. Few games implemented them anyway, so that wasn’t a big deal. The quality was already quite high for something that would hardly be used.
He laid down on the other side of the bed, then grabbed a controller to select the game they were going to play.
It was one that Michael had spent quite a bit of time in up until last year, and then dropped it because of a significant change to his life at the time. He had still logged in occasionally, but simply didn’t have the time or desire for it most days.
This VR game, like many others of the past five years, had an actual “dive” functionality to them. It didn’t perfectly emulate the senses, but it was possible to walk around the world in the game just as you would with your real body.
In reality, your body was simply comfortably laying somewhere. There were a plethora of sensors and safety mechanisms that made sure to detect any potential harm that may come to the body, either in real life or from stress in a game.
Michael went through the menu and selected Torneltha. It was a fantasy game with a lot of stereotypical elements to it, but that was one of the reasons it was popular; it was a familiar setting but with new technology. Its odd development cycle had also drawn attention to it, as it almost seemed as if, out of nowhere, hundreds of people had all had the exact same idea and the drive to make it real.
The other reasons it was popular were the absolutely absurd amount of detail and realism in the game. Thankfully, the game had parental settings, meaning Michael would be able to casually walk around a fantasy city with his six-year-old daughter, and any of the bloodier or more adult aspects would automatically be hidden away. He had already walked around the game world to test it out, and was satisfied that it was something fun and harmless he could do with Luna.
A bright blue color filled their vision as they logged in, with small specks of multicolored light fading in and out of existence all around them. Though everything was such a vivid shade of blue, it wasn’t painful to look at. Michael felt a small hand grab his own.
“Dad, where are we? Is this the game?” Luna questioned.
Her confusion was completely understandable, as they were in a mostly blue space, with only a couch. This was the VR version of a computer desktop.
He explained, “We’re not quite there yet. First, we have to create your character. Then we can play.”
Michael sent an invite to Amber, and only a minute later, she popped into existence right next to them on the couch. Her character was an elf with tan skin and vibrant, copper hair with red streaks throughout. She sometimes referred to herself as a “volcanic elf” because she used [Earth] magic with a [Heat] modifier.
Torneltha’s magic system made it so you could only use one element, but you were allowed to apply a modifier to it, allowing you to cast spells with that modifier much more easily than any spells without it. Being able to heat up earth until it melted and turned into lava was why Amber called herself that.
“Hiya!” Amber exclaimed.
“Wh-Who are you?!” Luna asked in surprise.
“I’m your dad’s friend, Amber. I’ve met you a few times, but I look different in the game.”
Amber was a friend Michael had made at work. They'd both had an interest in games and eventually started to play with each other. Despite the roughness of the past year, they still found time to play on occasion, though it hadn’t been very often.
“Ohh!” Luna looked at her with sparkling eyes. “You look so cool now!”
“You mean… I don’t look cool in real life?” Amber fake-pouted.
“No no no, you’re really cool in real life! Even cooler than Dad!”
“Wha-!?” Michael said. “So I’m not cool?”
“No! Your nose is big and I always want to poke it.”
Well, she does poke my nose a lot…
Amber snorted in amusement. “Yeah! Sometimes I think a plane is about to land, but then it turns out it was just his nose.”
Michael retorted, “Okay, you two. Don’t make me turn this plane around.”
She chortled and changed the subject. “So did you show her some of the options? There’s kind of a lot to go through.”
“I did that yesterday. She hasn’t made a decision yet, though, so we’ll be going through things right now.”
“Okay,” she nodded. “Let’s get started, then.”
He opened his UI as an example for Luna to learn how to open hers, then showed her how to begin character creation. A copy of Luna appeared in front of them.
“Whoa! It’s me!” she yelled.
“Yep,” Michael said. He reached into her menu and pressed various buttons to show how she could change things. Luna’s duplicate flashed through a few different species and hairstyles as he and Amber explained what was going on.
Luna was excited to get started and began pressing every single thing she could, just to see what would happen.
The two adults patiently explained some things about how the system worked and what changes she was making, but mostly just let her have fun. Eventually, she started to get bored and wanted to begin playing already.
“Do you know which species you want to play as?” Michael asked.
“Umm…” Luna looked between her dad and Amber. Unlike Amber, he was currently here as his real self, not his avatar. “Elf!”
“Good choice!” Amber praised her. “Much better than the weird snake guy your dad plays as.”
“’Weird snake guy’?” Luna repeated, looking at him with her head tilted.
He chuckled. “Yes, I play a ‘weird snake guy’, just like the weird elf girl told you.”
“Rude!” Amber said.
“I want to see!” Luna exclaimed.
Michael flipped through his menu and made his avatar appear next to Luna’s. As Amber had said, it was a snake man; specifically, a snakekin. That meant his avatar had snakelike scales and slitted pupils.
I think it’s interesting. You’d think more people would play as them, but I guess they don’t have as much appeal.
“That’s so weird!” his daughter said.
Amber laughed at her reaction, and Michael just ignored both of them.
He hadn’t changed his avatar’s appearance from his real one at all, but the game still gave a correction to the appearances of all the players. He was going to be very careful about how Luna played these kinds of games, because he didn’t want her getting self-esteem issues regarding her appearance in real life.
“So what do you think?” Michael asked. “Do you want to be an awesome snake?”
“No!” She violently shook her head. “Elf!”
He smiled and rubbed her head. “Okay. Elf it is.”
Luna had only decided on the species she would play as, however, and still had a lot of options to go through. Having made that first decision, her interest in the character creation process was renewed, and she was having fun going through everything again. She was having difficulty pinning down what she wanted, however, and was growing frustrated.
“You said you wanted to make snow to play in, right?” Michael asked her, remembering what she had said last night. Luna loved playing in the snow, and the day she went snow tubing with her mom was one of her favorite memories.
Michael tried not to think about how they wouldn’t be making any new memories with Mia anymore. He was still grieving her.
“Yeah! I love snow!” Luna replied.
With a direction in mind, they went to work making her character look like someone who used ice. This game’s magic system was also partially tied to appearance. Hair, eye, lip, and fingernail colors were all dictated by the element and modifier chosen.
Amber had bright, coppery orange as her main color, which meant she used [Earth] element magic. And the yellow streaks running through her hair meant she had the [Heat] modifier. When it came to the eyes, the element color would be the base, with the modifier providing little streaks in the irises. The lip color was almost exclusively the element color, and the fingernail color could kind of vary.
Michael’s snakekin character used [Wind] element magic with the [Cutting] modifier. That meant his main color was green, and the accents were silver. The colors on an avatar could be to be darker or lighter, or a different hue, but someone with wind magic would only ever be able to have green hair.
Luna was having a lot of fun changing up her look, and she eventually settled on a few things. There was no ice magic in the game, which meant, to create snow, she would have to be a [Water] mage with the [Cold] modifier.
The [Water] element meant her avatar could only have blue hair, and Luna had pushed it all the way to the lightest possible shade of blue the game would allow. It was quite pale, but was still visibly blue.
The [Cold] modifier was white in color, leaving her avatar with light blue and white colors, which did indeed look quite icy. There was still enough blue in the eyes and lips for them to be visible.
“Very cool-looking,” Amber commented.
“Literally,” Michael added.
“Yes, that was the pun I just made.”
“I enhanced it by pointing it out.”
“…Uh-huh.”
Luna interrupted, “What will it look like when I’m older? Will I still look cool?”
“Let’s see,” her dad replied.
A person’s avatar, if below the age of adulthood, could only match their real body’s age in appearance. However, during the character creation process, the game did have a way to temporarily age up the avatar to see how it would look in the future. However, it did not have an option to view them side-by-side.
For that reason, Michael opened up his own character editor and changed everything until it exactly matched Luna’s profile, but as an adult. The result was a pretty woman with a fierce expression and light skin, with pale blue and white colors. He wasn’t going to save any of these changes, as this was just to show his daughter what her avatar would look like all grown up.
Might be interesting to play like that for a bit… No way I’m going to do it, though. I chose not to do that when I first started, too.
“Ohhh! I love it so much!” Luna shouted. Despite how much she loved it, she continued playing around with the settings.
She has some specific look in mind, it seems.
At first, he copied all her changes onto his own avatar, but quickly stopped, as that grew tedious. He was content to just sit back and let her have fun while he and his friend made comments. Once she was finally finished, a cute girl was standing next to a woman with similar, yet distinctly different looks.
The adult’s expression looks kind of fierce in comparison. And Luna’s character looks super cute. Not that she isn’t already super cute, her avatar is just a different kind of cute.
Amber said, “I like the current design of your avatar more than the other one, Mike.”
He rolled his eyes. “You would.”
“So what do you think?” Amber asked the young girl. “I think it looks very cool and cute.”
Michael added, “Yes, she is very cool and cute! Pretty, too. And so is her character.”
“Aww, thank you!” Amber replied.
“No no, I was talking about this cute one right here,” he retorted, ruffling his daughter’s hair again. The girl was basking in the compliments and attention she was receiving.
Then the world went black.
Its odd development cycle had also drawn attention to it, as it almost seemed as if, out of nowhere, hundreds of people had all had the exact same idea and the drive to make it real.
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