Quinn, male, straight, 20, gamer, college student

“That motherfucking raging shit-hat. What the fuck am I supposed to do against a broken character!? You aren’t even playing the class right, you’re playing it cheap!” Quinn yelled at his computer screen and resisted the urge to hurl his expensive gaming mouse against the nearby wall of his apartment. Instead he cut his losses and took some time to calm himself.

He had no idea why he bothered to play this game, its classes were broken and the scaling was FUBAR. The endgame content was trash and the game mechanics were nothing spectacular.

Actually, Quinn knew exactly why he played this game, the female characters. It didn’t matter how hard he tried he couldn’t make a female toon that looked ugly. They all were cute and/or sexy and had revealing outfits. Even the early game stuff showed a lot of skin. And the jiggle physics, just perfect.

Quinn stood up from his computer and walked over to the kitchen. His apartment was pretty large, larger than it needed to be really. It had three bedrooms, a kitchen, a livingroom and even its own laundry room separate from the bathroom. Two of the aforementioned bedrooms were empty. He called them “guest rooms” even though he had yet to have a single guest in the entire year he had this place.

For clarification, the young man didn’t decide on this apartment. When he expressed interest in moving out of the house his parents just chose this place at random. Money was no object, especially when Quinn’s mother was the CEO of a major software company. His parents were shocked when he said he didn’t want to buy a house. Truthfully, Quinn just didn’t want to have to maintain the place himself. At least with an apartment it’s the landlord’s problem. He wasn’t lazy, just selectively active.

After grabbing an energy drink from the fridge, he took a sip while peering at the clock on the wall that read 2:35 AM. He probably woke up his neighbors with that shouting. He probably should go to bed, but why bother? He didn’t have class tomorrow and sleeping alone in a giant bed was depressing.

He very easily could have gotten a girlfriend. His parents were filthy rich, he had pretty good genes, high metabolism, nobody in his family was balding. He had to wear glasses but who the fuck cares, it wasn’t that big of a deal anymore. The real problem was that getting a girlfriend would require him to start working out and getting a social life. And he didn’t really want a social life… or to work out. Selectively active. If he didn’t do one of those two his only option would be to seek out online relationships. Quinn considered himself a gamer, but Russian roulette was the one game he never really wanted to try.

Quinn blinked, and the only reason he even noticed that he blinked was because something new appeared in his vision. Something blurry in the corner of his eye. He blinked again, the blur didn’t disappear, instead it seemed to grow a bit clearer. He rubbed his eyes and kept blinking, each time his eyes closed and opened again the thing became clearer. Now it looked like a small, blue window.

“What the fuck?” He looked at his energy drink, reading the label to make sure there weren’t any psychotics in it… not that he would know what ingredients were hallucination-inducing.

The window wasn’t going away, and by now it had become crystal clear in his vision. He curiously took off his glasses to find that the image was still there, perfectly clear, even though the rest of his vision had gone expectedly blurry. The window was following his line of sight, but it looked like it was part of the environment, like something he could reach out and touch.

Feeling like a complete idiot, he lifted his hand up to roughly where the image was projected and tapped the air. To his surprise, the blue window grew larger, now taking up the entire right third of his vision. There were words all over the semi-transparent window, at the very top the words read “Character Creation”.

He had to be dreaming right now. He must have fallen asleep at his desk and was now having a really weird dream about making a character.

Well, whatever. He thought. Quinn read somewhere that if you were aware that you were dreaming you could control the dream or something. He may as well have some fun with this.

He looked through all the text at the side of the screen, he found it kind of difficult to read without moving his eyes but he managed. There was a little option for “male” and “female”. Just for the hell of it, he pressed “female”

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a woman was in his living room. There was no noise, no special effects or fanfare. She just popped into existence.

Quinn nearly shat his pants. He visibly jumped with fright with a loud “GEH!” and almost dropped his drink. Just to be safe, he put the drink down on the counter.

The woman was now just standing there in his apartment and was staring into the middle-distance, her only movements were subtle and the bare minimum. She breathed, she blinked. That was about it. Her eyes remained fixed on a single point. She looked… ordinary. Like the kind of woman Quinn would see on the street and think nothing of. Not beautiful but certainly not ugly. She was barefoot, and had nothing on except a pair of shorts and a plain white tank top.

“Uh, hello?” Quinn greeted the intruder warily.

There was no response. The woman didn’t even look like she heard him.

Quinn walked up to the woman and touched her shoulder. The skin gave way from his touch, but her body didn’t move. He tried giving her a light shove but learned he couldn’t, it was like she was bolted to the floor. This dream sure was getting weird.

He had to know. He lifted a hand up and grabbed her breast with it. The flesh was incredibly soft against his palm and fingers, even through the tank top. The breasts weren’t large, maybe a B-cup, but they were still incredibly satisfying to feel.

The woman gave absolutely no reaction from his invasive touching. He noticed something else strange when he looked at the girl. Hovering about a foot to the right of her head was a barely visible blue circle. It was so transparent he probably wouldn’t have noticed it unless he was looking right at it. Everything else had done something when he tapped it, so why not?

He reached out and “touched” the circle. Suddenly it became less transparent and larger. There was a flat line at the top that kind of reminded him of a minimize button on the computer and a little check box with “bind UI to character” next to it. Ignoring the checkbox for the moment he pressed the line. At first it seemed like the box had vanished, but it really just turned back into the nearly invisible circle. Interesting.

Now his curiosity about the checkbox was piqued. He opened the box again and pressed the checkbox. To his infinite surprise and satisfaction, the strange window that had been hovering with his vision suddenly appeared to the right of the woman. It looked exactly the same, except it remained static next to her instead of moving with his line of sight. This made reading the various options much easier since he could actually look at the words.

The options displayed on the window seemed to be about the woman’s appearance. There were specific buttons for height, face, head, torso, arms, pelvis, and legs. Curiously he tapped the height button. Suddenly the button opened up to reveal a little sub-menu of options. The only option here was a slider with a measurement next to it. The measurement currently read 5’4”. Quinn was 5’9” so that seemed about right, looking at the woman. He pressed the slider and began to drag it. As he did, the numbers next to it changed, and so did the woman, in real-time.

He slid it all the way up and saw that the max height was 6’6” The woman was now towering over him, making her feel just a bit more intimidating than before. He slid it all the way down and found that the minimum was 4’6”. Now he towered over her. When he changed the height all of the body proportions seemed to change with it. He spent about a minute just sliding the bar all the way up and down rapidly, watching with amusement as the woman shrank and grew over and over. He stopped eventually, worried he might accidentally break something. He decided to leave the slider set on 5’6” for now.

Quinn went into his dining area and dragged a chair in front of the woman, setting it down and sitting down in it. He peered at the woman with his chin in his hand thoughtfully. He was still not convinced this wasn't some sort of bizarre dream, but he was pretty intent on having fun with it if it was. He didn’t even really want to consider the implications if this was real at this point.

The way he saw it, he had made a fully grown woman, who really seems to like his apartment’s paint job, pop into existence like she was always there. Her skin felt real and he could adjust things about the way she looked with relative ease. There were also a series of tabs on the top of the window, one of them being “personality”. He literally was given the power to create a human being. That was incredible. He wondered only briefly what he should do with this ability.

Create a girlfriend. What else would a single, socially awkward bachelor use a god-like power such as this to do? Since he was convinced he was in a dream, Quinn didn’t even bother thinking about any real-world implications, or even think about anything less selfish.