Character Creation

The blinding light faded, and you found yourself in a space of fluffy white clouds. Except, you couldn't actually find yourself. You couldn't see your body, you couldn't feel it, you couldn't feel anything. When you "turned" your head your vision would move, but it was completely without sensation, and every way you looked was just more clouds. Your breathing would have quickened, your heart would have pounded, if you had either of those. Instead you experienced purely a-physical panic.

Was this a dream? Had you had a stroke in the basement? Had the prototype gaming console exploded when you went to start it, and now you were drifting through the afterlife?

Without ceremony, a videogame textbox popped into existence in front of you.

{letter}

Welcome to Ultimate Fantasy, the most immersive fantasy RPG ever created.

{endletter}

You had to have hit your head, or been electrocuted by a faulty controller when you hit the start button. Maybe you'd been spiked at the party and the effects had suddenly kicked in, or you'd been hypnotised somehow. No way this was really happening.

{letter}

Please remain calm. You have not died, been drugged, or hypnotised. The game's system has linked to and taken control of your consciousness. This process is harmless and fully reversible. To end this link, you will have to complete the main storyline of Ultimate Fantasy, achieve Level 100, or contact support at '#### ### ####'

{endletter}

Presumably a phone number had been intended to be at the end of that message, but it was corrupted, removed, or simply not added in the first place. The rest of the message was reassuring, but you still worried that it was some construct of your dying brain, like your subconscious was lying to you.

What was also odd, besides the whole "sucked into a realm of clouds with floating text" thing, was that the message stayed stubbornly centred in your vision wherever you looked. The clouds rolled and moved behind it, but it remained fixed. Something about that static quality made you think that you might not have been dreaming after all.

While you were still struggling to decide if all this was real, another text box rolled in.

{letter}

This is the character creation menu, it will allow you to craft your perfect character to journey through the lands of Drotatha.

{endletter}

"Drotatha"? It sounded like the first option from a fantasy name generator. This whole thing was insane. An immersive fantasy game that hijacked your consciousness? Ridiculous! Patently absurd. There must have been something you were missing, there must be something more to this interminable nightmare. There had to be a way out from this game, an escape, an EXIT!

Another textbox popped up, taller and narrower than the previous ones. White text appeared on a semi transparent background, like words painted on stained glass. This one wasn't paragraphs or even sentences, it was a list, a menu, and there at the bottom it said exit. Your heart rose, and then sank. It was greyed out, just like the four player option had been before.

Above it, though, was an FAQ, and that was available to select. You had opened it before you even realised how you were navigating the menu. You didn't scroll through options, or click them, you merely thought to open a selection, and it opened. It was obviously the fastest UI you had ever used, satisfying and unsettling in equal measure.

Pushing past those feelings, you looked to the FAQ, only to see a seemingly endless wall of text. Apparently someone had asked every question imaginable, or the devs had prepared an answer to for every possibility. For a second you thought of reading the whole enormous thing, but instead, you tried thinking again.

"How to get out." The words barely formed inside your head before the FAQ swooped down to a relevant section. To your dismay, all you saw was the same boilerplate text from before about beating the quest or levelling high enough. It was clear that you weren't getting out of the game before you'd at least engaged with character creation. With a single mental impulse, the FAQ closed, taking you back to the character creation screen.

For "the most immersive RPG ever created," it was disappointingly restrictive. When you had played the demo, you had been able to hand craft a badass bearded warrior, jacked and tall, with a jagged scar over one milky white eye. This time, the appearance tab was locked. Already expecting nothing, you tried to mentally select it, just to be blocked by another text box.

{letter}

Appearance will be determined by biometric player data, combined with selected stats. Strength will increase physical endowment, constitution will affect weight, etc. To see further stat effects, consult the FAQ. All these effects will also alter how you interact with the world of Drotatha, so be careful.

{endletter}

So strength would make you tall and constitution would make you fat. That didn't exactly help you get out, but it was still good to know.

With less than a thought, you closed the textbox, to be presented with a complicated list of stats. Strength, constitution, intelligence, endurance, perspicacity, intuition, dizziness tolerance?

Some of these seemed self explanatory, others were niche, and most of the rest seemed pointless. Would your character's blood pressure and circulation really matter that much?

Fortunately for you, there was another option available to the left of all these esoteric stats. "Premade stat sheet."
Typically, you wouldn't lean too heavily on a crutch made by game devs to make the game easier, but when you were facing down a menu this complicated, it only seemed reasonable.

Opening that option with an impulse, you faced another list of rolling options. From Animal Tamer to Zonkey Warrior, you were flashbanged with such an exhaustive list of possibilities that, despite your inability to feel anything, you felt fatigued at just the thought of scrolling through all of it. Instead, you resorted to parsing through it with single thoughts instead.

Almost every RPG phenotype that you could think of was represented in the list, leaving your class choice firmly up to you.