Second Chance

An End and A New Beginning

            The game dumped me in an open area with nothing but a giant mirror and spotlights shining around me. I glanced at the reflection in the mirror and saw a passable recreation of myself, though with smoother features. The me in the mirror did have a sort of strangeness to their features though. I think it was called the uncanny valley, the way that really well recreated versions of people looked fake. I mean, the person looked human, but it didn't really look like me. I had forgotten that they automatically added your physical features in using the data from your implant. However, what I had not forgotten was this space that started most multiplayer games. It was time for character creation. Ah, but I needed to log off. Getting out old coffee stains was a pain and character creations could take hours.

"I have to admit, this is new."

      I whirled to face the voice, but all that was there was more darkness. Straining my eyes to see yielded nothing. It was like the darkness was a physical barrier. I bet that if I walked up the edges of this area, I would hit a wall that I wouldn't be able to see. Whoever was speaking was obviously not in the lit area with me.

"Who's there? Where are you?"

"Ah, I did not process humans' need to face something with physical form. Standby please."

I stared as a classic loading wheel was superimposed over one section of the darkness for a moment before I shrugged and turned back to the mirror. They'd probably simply given a quirky personality to the tutorial NPC for the sake of livening up the most boring portion of games. I'd heard that most VR games did that nowadays. Now, how to adjust my character? After a moment's search, I found that simply touching a part of my body and swiping changed the body part. It was kinda fun watching my nose and cheekbones morph. Unfortunately, there were no elf ears, which I had wanted. Instead, I changed my hair color to black, darkened my skin, and began trying to create a vaguely dark skinned character with an impression of little physical strength but high agility. I wish the NPC would hurry up and help. This would be so much easier with instruction. I attempted to adjust the lip shade again. I made my shoulders smaller, my nose shorter, and my eyes farther apart as I waited. It really was an in-depth character creator. I hadn't even adjust my stats or named the character yet.

"Finally! My servers can not handle the load of this unexpected issue in addition to the over-projected first day load. This is turning out to be quite troublesome."

         I turned at the voice. I hadn't noticed before, but it was quite a pleasantly deep voice. I had heard that Second Chance used entirely computer generated voices for the first time in VR ever. No voice actors. It was one of the more controversial choices in gaming history, and that was saying something.

"I know this is probably your programming and everything, but do you really have to do this entire act each time a new player comes in?"

            To my surprise, the figure (which was just a humanoid shape enshrouded in a black cloak with a swirling dark mist) answered my question.

"Of course not! You are special dear, and I am quite unsure what to do with you."

            I suppose a game with entirely computer generated voices would have a lot of customizable options for players. Everyone is special though, how unfortunate. I didn't realize the game setup had that sort of feature; I hated games that made the player seem like the center of the world with everyone else waiting on them to breathe. That's why I played MMOs.

"I hope you won't mind, but I need to save my character as is and come back to finish this process later. I think someone spilled something on me, and I need to go back and clean up. It's my first vacation day in a while too. Ugh."