Of FAR Too Many Windows

John groaned, rolling over as sense returned to him. A cloud lay over his mind, his entire existence stuck in a murky quagmire. He breathed heavily for a moment, waiting as the fog passed.

Pushing up on his forearms, John slowly recalled where he was. The Gamer was halfway sprawled across his bed, though he hadn’t even made it far enough up for his head to be on his pillows. It looked like he’d basically fallen onto his mattress from the doorway and gotten KO’d instantly. Rubbing his eyes, he **** himself to roll the rest of the way to the edge of the bed where he could sit up comfortably.

Welcome back to the land of the living.

“Urgh… Thanks,” John groaned, blinking away the spots in his vision.

’How long was I out?’ he wondered, pulling his phone from his inventory. ’I never actually checked what time it was when I got home, did I? Just around five now… Maybe a couple hours then. Mom wouldn’t be home yet even if she wasn’t late.’

John scratched the back of his neck, stretching his legs a bit. ’I feel a lot better now. Always just nice to be home.’

He quickly shot off a text message to his mother, asking when she would be home and if she wanted him to order any food for the evening. After that he wandered out of his room, getting his bearings again. When he’d first gotten back, he’d stumbled through the house so mindlessly that he hadn’t even turned on any lights or anything. His jeans were on the floor of the upstairs hallway and his shoes looked like he’d kicked them off halfway up the stairs.

’At least I remembered to re-lock the front door,’ he thought, having finished retracing his route from earlier.

With that checked off his list and his scattered articles of clothing thrown in the laundry, John next sought to take the edge off of his returning hunger, searching through the kitchen for some kind of snack. Eventually, he retrieved a bag of chips and a sports drink to hold him over until he got a response from his mother and could finalize dinner plans.

With food acquired, he sat down on the couch in the living room, turning on some mindless rerun of an old action movie he liked as background noise. As he scarfed down his findings, The Gamer began to turn his mind towards the hefty stack of notifications he’d been left with. An unfortunately familiar pang of anxiety ran through him as he thought about how long he’d been putting it off.

’I’m way too used to putting off stuff like homework…’

The Gamer sighed, finishing off his snack and leaning back on the couch. ’I just don’t want to mess up… myself? I guess that’s the right phrasing. Considering the number of near-**** experiences I’ve had in the last couple days since I got this magic, I need to be cautious.’

John willed his UI into focus, ready to finally see what all had happened and what all he’d been holding on to. The Gamer had already gained two levels since the morning, and now noted that he was most of the way through a third, yet he still had a dozen windows awaiting him. He tapped the red button on his UI, opening the mass of his notifications. Mercifully, they stacked themselves quite orderly, sorted by the time he’d gotten them.

He thought back through the events of the day; after they’d been trapped, what could the first thing he’d have gotten something for have been?

His answer brought an echoed scream to his ears, a pained wail that stained his mind still. As his first window came into view, he seemed to fall back through time hours and hours, to the morning, when he’d closed his fist and ended a man’s life.

’I guess I didn’t really do much before this…’

He shuddered as he read through it, a chill tingling at the base of his spine. In truth, he wasn’t sure what he could have hoped for or expected from an achievement for that act. It would have been a foolish pipe dream to think any words could have really made him feel better.

John could have sat there, stunlocked for hours as he ran through the situation over and over, reliving that moment in perfect detail - every splatter of blood, the sound of his spike tearing through flesh, the scream, that unending scream, but he **** himself out of the memory.

’Stop. What’s done is done.’ He clenched one of his fists until his fingernails bit into his palm, the sensation helping to ground him in the moment. ’Just… just keep going. Take my mind off it with something else.’

John quickly realized that the windows he was going to go through were going to remind him of only pain and misery for quite a while. ’Above half health…’

He shook his head. ’We all made it. I don’t need to worry about that anymore. I only need to focus on the numbers.’

The window itself was interesting - he’d never even seen the quest pop up. He furrowed his brow, trying to think back to his run out of the library towards the administration building. The Gamer wasn’t sure if he’d been so focused on trying to rush where his eyes guided him that he’d missed it or if it had simply come into existence minimized.

’Not sure. Not like it matters now.’ He quickly tapped through that window, crossing over the threshold for this third level up of the day. ’I’m gonna have a lot of points to distribute after this.’

There wasn’t anything important to note on the window showing that he’d completed the quest, so he moved on.

’OK, so the first quest broke me over level ten, then. At least I think that’s what this implies if these windows are in this order,’ he thought, re-reading the text. ’So… what’s this new thing, then?’

Once he’d accepted the reward window, a red dot appeared next to the button for his character sheet on his UI. When he tried to open it, he found a dropdown - one option for his original character sheet and one for the new “Physique” menu. Opening it, he was greeted with a much larger screen filled with bars and graphs surrounding an image of his own naked body. His eyes narrowed in confusion as he slowly deciphered what was in front of him.

“Wait a second… These aren’t just telling me things, they’re options! This is a customization screen!”

Arrows pointed from various sliders to parts of his body, which he now realized were all different settings that he could mess with to change parts of his physique, hence the menu’s name. Unfortunately, the majority of the options were completely grayed out and those that weren’t were still mostly limited to small deviations.

At the top, one of the enabled options was a dropdown menu for his hair, though he couldn’t change its color yet. Of the selections he had available, he only had his current, relatively well-kept hair, and a longer, shaggier look he’d let grow out over the last summer while he was in an MMO-coma.

’OK. If I had to make a guess based on games, I need to grow my hair out or go to a salon or something to get more. That’s fair enough, I suppose.’

Out of curiosity, he tried toggling the option over to his long hair, immediately shuddering at the strange sensation that ran down his scalp. It wasn’t painful or really even uncomfortable in any way, but he could feel mana running beneath his skin as it seemed to stimulate his hair follicles. The strangeness passed as quickly as it began, finishing by dropping a set of bangs over the sides of John’s vision.

He brought a hand up and ran it through his hair, feeling the familiar tangles of his old haircut.

The memory brought a smile to his face. ’It was pretty nice being lazy and letting it get all shaggy, but there was no way Ashcroft would have let me get away with it. Plus, it got pretty hot over the summer.’

Shaking his head to flop the hair around for a moment, he finally decided to move on, switching back to his more well-kept, Ashcroft-approved haircut.

Focusing back on his Physique Menu, The Gamer quickly found a pair of sliders for muscle mass and body fat percentage, pointing to his biceps and stomach respectively. The body fat percent option would barely budge in either direction, which he supposed made sense, given that he’d been a lanky stick most of his life. The muscle mass slider actually had a little more give in the upward direction, which he attributed to the points he’d allocated to strength the previous day.

Testing what he could do, John immediately maxed out the option, once more feeling the strange flow of mana through his body. He stood up, shaking the jitters away, and took his shirt off, allowing himself a better chance to inspect his body in person. Frowning somewhat, he noted that the changes seemed to be pretty limited in scale. To be sure, his biceps were now much more solid than before, but, as a whole, he was still quite lanky.

The faintest hints of muscle filled out the previously loose skin of his limbs, at least, which did somewhat move him more towards a more healthy looking body.

’If I was guessing that ten was an average strength value, then shouldn’t I be a little more defined than this? The scaling has to be tuned for the Abyss or something. Gives me room to grow with more and more stats, I suppose.’

Moving on from those options, he continued working his way down, passing over a couple more locked options and a pretty silly slider for body hair that he could only turn slightly up and down. Eventually, John passed just below the waistline of his picture, finding a trio of sliders that he hadn’t realized he’d been hoping so badly to see.

A single arrow traced from a set of curves towards his genitals. ’Wait, those are bell curves!’

With that bit of information, The Gamer was able to translate each bar to his body, realizing that he had two sliders for his dick (length and girth, if he was reading the indications correctly) and one for his balls. Unlike the other settings he’d found so far, though, he had a good amount of wiggle room on these. Each curve was marked at several breakpoints, which he guessed were the standard deviations, and he had access to the entire first breakpoint.

John’s ‘default’ setting was as low as it could go in that zone, just above four inches in length, but he could scroll all the way across the mean towards the top of the average zone, topping out at around five and a half. His heart thumped in his chest and he maxed these options out, feeling the mana in his core begin to flow towards his groin. Rapidly, he hardened as the strange, tingling sensation ran down his length, filling out his boxers.

He shook, nearly falling over as he waited for all the strange feelings to pass. ’OK, that one’s definitely more weird than the others.’

Deciding to get a better look at the full scope of his changes, John headed upstairs to his bathroom. Once he was standing in front of the mirror, he unequipped everything he had on so that he could see the results of his upgrades. All the small changes had really made a difference over his entire body. He was still distinctly John Newman, but a John Newman from a world where instead of being a skinny shut-in, he was an average, healthy individual.

The outlier of that analysis sat between his legs, his now quite impressive dick dangling down in front of him.

’Holy…’ he thought, beaming.

You know, I swear there is no woman in the world who thinks about penis size like the average teenage boy.

John flushed at that, both from the teasing and from the realization that the almighty goddess of the world was watching him basically measure his dick in a mirror. ’Listen, it’s good for… confidence? Yeah. It’s good to be happy with your own body!’

So, Mr. Confidence, that means you’re ready to ask a girl out now, right? Maybe see if Ela wants to get lunch before you both go to the manor?

That deflated him immediately. “Um, well, uh…”

Giggling echoed through his head, growing ever distant as the voice of Gaia faded away. The Gamer stuck his tongue out, hoping the master of reality would see it, before turning back to himself in the mirror. John really did feel better looking himself over. He’d never been someone all that concerned with looking good or having muscles or anything, but he also wasn’t someone who’d ever planned to have this much interaction with other people face-to-face.

It offered some measure of comfort to take away some of his anxiousness about his body, even if he was sure that he’d still wither under pressure from other people.

’Maybe that’s something some charisma could help with… I’ve got quite a few stat points. Ah, I still need so many points for stat breakpoints, too.’ He blinked, remembering how he’d acquired his new [Swirling Mirrorjade Barrier] spell. ’Oh, yeah, I guess I’m missing a few of my old spells now, too. I forgot about that.’

He shook his head, processing all that he still needed to evaluate. Turning back to his Physique Menu, he shifted his gaze towards the bottom now. There was a grayed out dropdown box for markings and tattoos, which he obviously had none of, but also one for scars, in which he had a single option, highlighted to indicate that it was new.

’Burn marks…’ John thought, reading the option over again in his head. It was accompanied by a small description blurb. ’”These are the burn scars that [Gamer’s Body] healed after the phoenix’s dive bomb on you, which was mostly shielded by Ela Grzmot.”’

Out of curiosity, he toggled it on. Tingling ran up his hands and feet, halfway up his limbs, intense enough to make him recoil as it began. He could almost see the mana - flaring red - as it ran underneath his skin, leaving behind gnarled red scars and burned distortions along his skin, all intensely sensitive. He looked down at his hands, somewhere between sickened and fascinated by the uncomfortably smooth and pale lines that the toggle had left behind.

Then, he remembered Ela’s pained wince as she tried to sit down earlier that day. ’...These are the parts of me that Ela couldn’t shield when she dove in front of me. Does she have scars like these on her back now? Because of me?'

Clenching his fists, he let a fresh wave of guilt wash over him. ’If [Gamer’s Body] could fix me, maybe the Order’s magic was able to heal her, too. If not, I’ll just have to improve my healing magic until I can do it. I owe her more than that.’

With that final thought, he quickly turned back off the scars, re-equipped some casual clothing, and moved back to his living room, where he continued checking out the last few windows.

John winced again at that one. ’Yeah, this quest was a catastrophic failure. We got so close to being home free with those knights… so far away, in the end.’

He closed that window and another announcing formal quest failure and yet another indicating that he had had a concussion - the result of the crash, he had no doubt. A chill crawled down The Gamer’s spine as he remembered the utter despair he’d found himself in after they’d been trapped again. He couldn’t actually remember having gotten out of the wreck, just wandering in a circle nearby until Moira had gotten his attention.

’I really need more durability, too…’ he thought, scratching the back of his neck. ’I wonder if it’s just endurance that gives me resistance to getting zonked out like that, or maybe if it’s like a D&D system where I need different attributes for different “saving throws.” Would that mechanic even apply to real life?’

He chuckled to himself, moving on. ’Where’s the instruction manual for reality?’

He blinked twice, confirming that he understood the wording correctly. He now had a third inherent slot to socket a skill gem in, without counting slots provided by his equipment.

’Oh, nice, an extra skill slot is massive. Well, it will be, once I have enough skills to make use of them all again. I dusted a good chunk of my best ones today.’

With that, he moved on to his last three windows. The first was the expected conclusion.

John smiled wide as he read the quest. This one, he’d really succeeded at. Everyone had made it back. He tapped past the window and the one that followed - the congratulations for completion - bringing himself over halfway to a fourth level on the day. He sat back and sighed, allowing a tinge of pride over victory to bloom within him again, before remembering that he had one more window to go.

’It really did pick me then? You didn’t do anything to give this egg to me?’

You would be surprised how much a little compassion means to someone starved of it. All I did was give it a little nudge to make sure it was reborn successfully. It almost didn’t make it.

“Thanks,” The Gamer said below his breath, wordlessly drawing the egg from his inventory into his hands. The ball of light thrummed with mana, pleasantly warm to the touch. He ran his fingers down its vibrant surface, letting the pretty oranges and reds dance along his arm. “Don’t worry, little buddy. I’ll keep you safe. I can’t wait to introduce you to all my friends.”

The moment was interrupted by the text tone he’d set for his mother. She’d finally answered his questions about dinner plans, agreeing to a set of sandwiches, but wondering if John could really pay for it. He assured her that he would be fine, and accepted her order, pulling up the delivery app on his phone.

“Alright, let’s get some real food ordered,” John said to himself. “I’ll put my points in while I’m waiting.”

...I ought to finally check out that blood magic gem, too…’