Esmie the Calamity Chapter 2 (Patreon)

Hello and welcome to Virtual Reality! Our system has detected that this is your first time entering virtual reality, so we have taken the liberty of automatically generating a body and VRhome for you based on your personality profile!

I phased into existence within a small room that was barely four meters by four meters. It had no windows or doors, just a big fluffy carpet and a soft yellow light coming from a frosted bulb. In the corner were a bunch of neatly stacked duvets and pillows. Wow, it was totally right about the room. This was cozy! I loved it already. Did I have to play the game? Couldn’t I just spend eternity all cuddled up and warm under the blankets?

Well, if it had gotten the room so right, what had it done with my body?

I looked down, and was immediately overwhelmed by a wave of confusion. Was I a girl? Surely not? I reached down between my legs and… found it there. Okay… so I was still a guy? Why were my hips so damn big then? And why did I have long hair? Wow, what kind of crap had I been browsing that had led to this strange body? I was short, that was for sure. Maybe a few inches above five feet, and I had cute fingers and tiny little feet and toes… damn this was strange.

I kept trying to call it bad in my head, but every time I found some part of me raising a quiet hum of dissent. Like I wasn’t entirely sure? But… no the algorithm was definitely wrong. I was keen on being big and strong and all that crap. I had yet to start working out, but I was planning to!

With this body, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to stay in the VRhome anymore… so I spoke up. “Um… can you please like, start Cora?”

Silence.

“Play Cora?” I asked.

“You do not have a Cora account, would you like to create one?” the pod AI asked.

“Um, yeah… that would be cool,” I nodded. My voice sounded a little high too. I was like, significantly weirded out now.

“Account created using your FTLN identification. Thank you for waiting, we will now launch the game,” the pod AI said.

Wow what? I didn’t even have to go to a website or anything myself? The pod just did it for me? That was wild! AI really were the future… I just hoped they remembered to leave a little corner of it for us humans when we got there.

My safe little room shifted, and some text came up telling me about how I was playing Cora now. I was honestly too distracted by the beautiful stars and stuff around me, until my fear of  large open indoor spaces kicked in. There was too much, it was too big and open, vast in a way that even the sky didn’t encompass! I needed a wall, oh god please give me a wall or two fuck, fuck, fuck!

“Skip, skip, skip, skip,” I pleaded with whoever was listening, keeping my eyes glued shut.

When I finally had myself under control again, I took a peek around me out of one eye, and found myself in a small room. There was a note of text hanging in front of me that read.

“Sorry! I’ve edited the space a little to make it feel better for you! Hope it helps!”

I eased my muscles out of their tense state one by one and looked around the room with cautious curiosity. The room was maybe ten meters on either side, and in the middle stood a grey figure that looked like it was made of clay. Around it, a bunch of holoscreens hovered in the air. Oh my god is that… sliders?!

I rushed over to the sliders and grinned. Oh yes. Character creation! I wondered if I’d need food… I would be here a while. I knew right out of the bat that I was going to make a healer, but… what kind? I wanted something fun… a little different to normal.

I sat down on the floor where I was and made a gesture to bring the holo screens down with me, and then started to think. So… what type of healer? Alchemy and stuff? Nah, too unreliable, especially with my shoddy hand eye coordination. Normal throw a spell and heal things? Too boring… been there done that in every normal game ever. What about… plants?

Maybe.

Plants were also kinda unreliable, and the whole druid shtick wasn’t really my thing. Damn, I wish I knew what Lynna was playing as, then I could tailor my build to her. Damn. Alright so… what was left? Well, there was a lot of stuff, but I couldn’t think of it. Pain healing? Heal my allies with the pain of my enemies maybe? No, that was too gross for me.

Oh, I knew exactly what I wanted to do! It was a variation on the normal caster type deal, but I was going to be using a lot of geometry and shields. Yes, this would be great. I knew how I was going to do this. I was like, really damn good at pretty much any cue sport, like snooker or pool… so I was going to do that, but healing!

Which meant… now I needed to start making decisions. First I needed a race, and my word there were a lot of races. I ruled out anything in the human category, because that was too boring. Then I ruled out the angel like Aurellings, because that was a little too… churchy for me. Darklings were too edgy for me, which left the category of lizard people, faeries and fuzzy people.

Something about the fuzzy people drew me to them, maybe it was the promise of cute tails, I don’t know, but they sounded good. When I opened the category, I was inundated with options. So many! I wonder if there was a way to like, filter this list down a bit.

I did a generic search for “healing” and it narrowed down my options a little. Didn’t look like there was a proper affinity for healing or anything, but there were races with a predisposition for casting. I still had so many options in that regard, but the one that leapt out at me was called an Lopunnda. It looked like it was meant to be based on a mix between a bunny and a red panda.

I selected it, and watched as the clay form shifted to match. It was apparently defaulting to the weird appearance that I’d been given by the pod, but altering it to fit the race. The race looked great! Two long fluffy ears sticking out the side of the head, almost as long as my forearm currently was. Both were quickly overcome by the forces of gravity, flopping down until they almost touched the shoulders. They looked like lopped bunny ears, which I guess was expected since the race was meant to be part bunny.

The tail that went out the back was big and bushy too, but it looked almost manicured. The hair, ears and tail were all a deep, dark reddish orange colour with white stripes on the tail and white tufts down the edges of the ears.

The tail needed to change, I couldn’t have a well trimmed tail. It needed to be wild and all over the place! I shuffled my butt over to the sliders and got to work, making it bigger, floofing it out and making it look slightly dishevelled and fluffy. Next, I made the ears a little bigger, and the tufts on the end longer, causing them to gently brush the shoulders. If I was going to have big fluffy ears, I may as well have big fluffy ears, you know?

Next I moved to the human features… and that’s where things fell apart. No matter what I did, I just couldn’t seem to get the figure into a place that satisfied me. I’d immediately narrowed the hips and broadened the shoulders, making the face more masculine over the decidedly feminine face I wore now, but nothing was working.

I sat there for hours and hours tweaking and tweaking the appearance until I flopped backwards in defeat. What was I doing wrong? What could I possibly be doing wrong?

“Reset to the default appearance please,” I sighed in frustration, and watched as it reformed into that boy that looked like a girl.

The body I was wearing now.

What if… I mean, the pod had generated it based on my profile right? What it thought I might like to play as? I mean… I’d usually played as girls when I played regular games. Sadly, I couldn’t even claim the excuse of looking at butts to explain it away, since I was entirely confused by attraction in general. I just… played as girls sometimes. I mean, I also played as guys too… when it suited. But maybe here… maybe this healer I was going to play as needed, maybe she needed to be a girl?

I moved to turn the slider to female, but I pressed too hard and it exploded into this big gradient thing that was way too much for me, with femininity-masculinity on one axis, plus a whole lot more different things to choose from. Overwhelmed, I pulled my finger back, allowing it to go back to the normal male-female toggle. Okay… carefully, I switched it to female.

And there it was. The missing piece. Damn, I should have thought of that earlier! I was too focused on the fact that I was going to be playing with my best friend, who knew me as a guy. It was a game? Why not branch out a little?

I got to work again on my character, carefully selecting just the right shade of green for the eyes, something deep like the green of Pounamu, or the native New Zealand jade. Then I made the fur a little redder and less orange, as well as my hair. It ended up as this dark red with a tinge of brown to keep it away from being too scab red.

The face was easy, I just made her cute! Small nose, round cheeks, big eyes, I did the whole lot. She was so adorable. I kept most of the body configuration that the pod had done, but this time the whole junk situation was swapped. I decided to keep the breasts small, but noticeably there. I wasn’t used to having them, so best to keep them manageable.

There was a moment in character creation, when you knew that you’d done it… made the character as they were intended to always be… and I found it. I smiled and leaned back, stretching just for the feeling of it. Stretching was nice. Looks were done, the hard part was over! Now onwards to the stats!

I began to sift through the ability trees first of all, I could pick three, and they needed to count. It ended up being a hell of a lot easier than I’d thought though. I picked the Arcane, Ranged Cast Magic, and Vernal Healing ability trees.

The Arcane tree was all about manipulating magic in some fun and interesting ways, and I’d need it for general odds and ends, shields and that kind of thing. The Ranged Cast Magic tree was all about using projectiles, and I could find the bouncing component in there. Then there was the Vernal Healing tree. It was all about healing via the power of spring. It wasn’t a full on plant style tree, but more of a, “the power of spring,” type deal, if you get my meaning.

Which brought me to stat allocation. I threw all the crap I had into casting related stuff, focusing on spell complexity, raw power and the speed of my casting. Which fell under the Intricacy, Power and Urgency stats respectively.

Leaving me with just the final hard choice to make. My name…

Randomise!

Nope, that one was hideous.

Randomise!

That was just keyspam… what the hell?

Randomise!

Esmeralda… Sure. I’ll shorten it to Esmie… yeah! Yeah I liked Esmie. I definitely liked Esmie… I loved it actually! Esmie it was.

So now it was time? Should I assume my character first and see how it felt, or dive right in? Who was I kidding, I was going to dive right in!

Accept Character! Begin!