I, Senra, looked at the app icon of the game I bought -- ``Deathless Empire'' -- A VWMMO sandbox RPG. A few years back, technology had advanced to the point where devices had the ability to create worlds. In these ``virtual'' worlds, users feel like their surroundings are real (which, in a way, they are). In fact, All senses are reproduced without difficulty. This system had been created as an alternative to freezing users' muscles, as doing so would often result in death, or other similar circumstances. Simply put, there were two machines, one was able to analyse the body, recognize the nervous system, copy it's chemical flow, deconstruct the body and send the information to the second machine, which was in charge of maintaining, sometimes in a loose definition of the word, a virtual world. The reverse process could also be generated. These machines are altogether branded as VirtWurld.
I, who was currently standing (or rather floating) in a body created by these machines, in the ``Home World'', pressed the icon. Rapidly, my surroundings warped and a window popped up:
| ``Welcome, would you like to use your default user name?'' | |
| YES | NO |
[YES], I entered, of course. I wanted to get to the game, not waste my time picking a name!
| ``Would you like to build a new body, use the default body (your current body; this will result in your race being human), or generate a random body (this will skip the rest of the steps of character creation and send you straight into the game)?'' | ||
| NEW BODY | DEFAULT | RANDOM |
I did not want to waste my time on a new character either, and [DEFAULT] was the best option, as I would not have to get used to a new body. Alas, at the last moment, my finger went too far to the left and clicked [RANDOM].
I stared at the window in disbelief as a loading bar trudged begrudgingly across it, along with some senseless too-fast-to-read text posted underneath. This game was notorius for it's randomiser. Not only was the job randomly selected, but no one who had used it, as of yet, had gotten away with a symmetrical body. More often than not, the avatar would have a dystrophy and would be unable to walk. Some even missed some fingers. This was a result of the character creator being so infinitely precise that every single muscle, bone, and tissue in the body could be fine-tuned. The randomians, as they were called, would also have a hard time finding themselves a party and would face severe discrimination. As such, most randomians quit within a month, despite the game not being free, since the game had no reset button, courtesy of it's eccentric creators (their reason was that ``There should only be one soul per body.'')
Obviously, the game had been released a long time ago, but somehow it's support still ran well and over 50k players were active, around a quarter being permanent (permanent players never left the game).
``Loading complete. Welcome to `Deathless Empire' ''
My surroundings flashed white and the usual feeling of disorientation assaulted me.
