Taylor, male, Straight, 18, Last year of High School

It was a long day at school and Taylor was relaxing at home in his room after quite the study session in the school’s library. Currently he was lying on his bed reading. He couldn’t be bothered with booting his computer up to browse the web so he just lounged in his room until dinner.

His mom was downstairs in the kitchen and his dad had yet to come home. There was no one else living here as he was an only child. His parents decided that they only wanted the one and made efforts to avoid having more.

Some days Taylor wondered if he was lonely being the only child and on other days he was grateful after seeing his friends with their annoying siblings. He didn’t have to argue and fight with anyone other than his parents. But sometimes the house did seem a little empty.

But Taylor could appreciate peace and quiet. And quiet helped when you were trying to read up on some manga. In the small town he lived in it was difficult finding many places that would sell Japanese products. And the places that did only had the pretty tame stuff. Since, well, Japan was known for risqué stuff.

But that’s what the internet was for.

Right now though, Taylor had gotten his hands on the latest Fairy Tail volume. Or at least the latest translated volume.

It was getting good when Taylor needed to blink because of some dust in his eye. But when he tried to go back to reading his vision still seemed blurry at the top left corner. So he blinked some more, only to open his eyes again with the same blur.

This time he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to make his eyes water to help clear it up. Maybe that did it? He opened his eyes again.

“What the hell?” He whispered.

Where the blur was in the top left corner of his vision was now a floating blue window. It didn’t take up all his vision as it was only in the corner, even when he looked around the room. It seemed to follow his sight around as if it were attached to him. But for some reason it looked like it was floating in front of him.

Taylor tried touching his face near his eye, then the eye itself, but couldn’t tell what was happening. After blinking away a tear from his poked eye he got up. The manga volume lay forgotten on his bed.

Taylor stepped out of his room and hurried into the bathroom. In the large mirror he could see himself… and just himself. The weird floating see-through blue… thing wasn’t visible in his reflection.

“What the actual fuck?” Taylor swore under his breath.

Looking closer into the mirror he couldn’t make any more sense of it. It was visible so the mirror was useless. He walked uncertainly back into his room. The blue rectangular thing following along.

He closed his door and just stood there looking at the weird object. He realised that he could in fact look at it. It seemed to be stuck to that part of his line of sight rather than his eyeball itself.

“Seriously… what the shit?”

It really did look like it was floating in front of him though. Like some sort of hologram. He tried lifting his arm to touch it, not knowing if there was any point to it.

It appeared to be within his arms reach. He tried touching it with his left hand but couldn’t feel anything—

All of a sudden, the blue see-through window expanded into what looked like a drop box with a number of tabs on the side. Even now it still only took up a small portion of Taylor’s vision but he could now make out words on the transparent window.

“Create a character…?” He read from the top. “Huh?”

This was beyond weird, he thought. The window, and the wording made him think of all those RPG games he’s played. The ones that allowed you to make your own character before jumping into the story.

But he wasn’t playing a game right now. In fact, none of his consoles or PC were on right now.

He read more from the floating window.

“Male… or female?” He asked to no one in particular. The first thing underneath the title was a choice of Male or Female, with what seemed to be tick boxes next to each word.

Not knowing what else to do Taylor tapped on ‘Male’ to see what would happen, but couldn’t feel anything on the ski—.

“—Holy shit!” Was all Taylor could exclaim as he backed into his door with a thump.

In front of him, staring blankly in Taylor’s direction was a guy. A guy that just popped into existence right in front of him. No sound was made. No movement could be seen. One moment there was empty space on Taylor’s carpet, the next a boy roughly his age wearing a plain white t-shirt and shorts was standing facing him.

“W-who are you?” Taylor asked cautiously.

“…”

Taylor waited for a response but none was given. He waited some more…

“…”

It didn’t even seem like the guy was looking directly at Taylor. He just seemed… like he was staring intently at the wall by Taylor’s head.

Taylor gulped nervously and shuffled away from the door and around the strange intruder. Taylor quickly found the baseball bat he kept behind a bookshelf for emergencies and hefted it before he did anything else. All the while his eyes were on the strange generic looking boy.

The stranger really did look rather generic with short dark brown hair and blue eyes. His face looked like any face you’d see in a crowd. Totally unremarkable. He wasn’t very tall either. And he was barefoot.

This whole scene was just bizarre.

Not once did the boy look elsewhere from the wall that he had been staring at the whole time.

With the bat in his right hand, Taylor glanced at the floating window again. The boy only appeared when he pushed on the window by the ‘Male’ tick box.

What that implied had Taylor’s head ready to explode.

If the boy appeared because he pushed a holographic button, then what would happen if he pushed the other one?

So, he tried it out. He reached out once again to touch the transparent window. This time he pressed the tick box by ‘Female’.

He watched with wide eyes as the boy turned into a girl right before his eyes. Once again there was no movement. No sound, no nothing. One moment the boy was staring into space, the next a girl, who resembled the boy somewhat, stood in his place, still staring at the wall.

Taylor’s head actually very nearly exploded.

“What the hell is going on here?” He voiced. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

Again, the stranger, this time a girl, didn’t respond to the spoken words. She just looked intently on.

Taylor slowly moved towards the girl. With trusty baseball bat in hand and approached her from the side.

She looked just about as generic as the boy, only slightly shorter and with noticeable curves at the chest and butt. Nothing spectacular though. She also wore the same generic white t-shirt and shorts.

He got a little closer and could tell that she looked quite real to his eyes. She had everything, like pores in her skin and individual strands of hair. He was half expecting some sort of game graphics to go with this weird game mechanic. But no, she looked as real as anyone else.

…just unresponsive.

Cautiously he reached out with his left hand to see if she really was real. He also watched for any kind of response to touch, if not sound. After hesitantly moving closer he managed to touch her cheek with a finger.

She was real! She felt real! He could feel the skin of her cheek as he trailed his finger up and down her face.

“Holy shit, this is strange…”

And then an unfamiliar scent was picked up by his nose. For a moment it didn’t register until he breathed a particularly big breath. For a moment he was confused as to its origins but then wondered if it was coming from the girl.

Taylor leaned in, just as cautious as before, and took a whiff.

Sure enough, that new scent was indeed coming from her. Which meant that she had a scent, for someone that just popped into existence, she had a real body that was giving off its own smell.

“I don’t get it…” Was all Taylor could say as he absently patted the vacant girl on the head. He was busy trying to make sense of this… out of nowhere experience.

He took a step back and sat down at the end of his bed. From there he examined the girl and the weird pop up window with the tabs on the side.

Just for the heck of it Taylor pressed the ‘Male’ option again.

The girl turned into the guy.

He pressed ‘Female’.

The guy turned into the girl. All this with the smoothest of transitions.

Taylor rapidly pressed both buttons.

The image of both boy and girl cycled at a fast rate. One overlapping the other until Taylor left it on ‘Female’.

He laughed.

He couldn’t help it. It just seemed so funny and weird.

He looked further down the holographic display and saw the basics of character creations. Height and weight, among other things.

Taylor eyed the girl up before trying to increase her height. The default seemed to be on 5’3”. He tapped on the arrow to the right of the height number. It increased to 5’4”.

The girl seemed to appear just a tad taller than before. Though, the difference was just barely noticeable. He tapped a few more times and watched as she got taller. He also noticed that a few other numbers on the list of various properties were also changing as she got taller. But just by small amounts. He supposed that the rest of the body was trying to compensate for the new height. But he really didn’t know since none of this made a lick of sense.

For the next minute he fiddled with some of the settings, discovering that he could change her hairstyle and even her clothes. Bust size was also another discovery. Now the girl in Taylor’s room was 5’6” with a set of C-cups, light brown hair just past her shoulders, and wearing jean shorts and a light blue tank top. She also had a healthy tan.

Taylor had to admit, if only to himself, that he was getting a little turned on by this whole “Customisation” thing. Making a girl look however you want… That had a very understandable reaction from his nether region.

He was looking through the tabs on the side of the window to discover that the customization went very deep with even various facial structures like nose length and earlobe width being on a list.

Another tab was labelled ‘Personality’ and had a bunch of empty spaces. He had no idea what to do there so he left it alone and looked at more tabs.

Another tab caught his attention because as soon as he touched it an entire list of names came up. They were all in alphabetical order and there were even sub tabs for this page. Plus, there seemed to be a search box in the corner.

The title for this particular page was ‘Saved Presets’.

Intrigued, Taylor tried scrolling through the names and came to the realisation that he knew them all.

These were famous people. At least the female ones.

He was looking through the B section and recognised Beyoncé and Britney Spears, among others.

“Wait. Are you saying… that I can make copies of people? Famous people?” Taylor asked the girl in front of him. Not that he expected her to answer.

Looking back at the list he silently tapped on Beyoncé.

And now Beyoncé was in his room…

She was wearing some kind of short black dress that showed off her legs, and high-heeled sandals.

Taylor just stared at the beautiful singer, with her long legs and dark hair with light brown highlights.

She too was just staring at the wall. Which had Taylor laughing again.

“What the fuck… I really don’t get it. Beyoncé? In my room?” He said, breathing a bit unsteadily. “Maybe I’m dreaming. Yeah, that would make sense…”

Still, his boner was trying to say otherwise. And even if it was a dream, he at least should be able to enjoy it, right?

But he had to wonder why these women were showing on the list. Of course, they were good looking. It’s just that he wasn’t all that interested in them for the most part. If this was a dream, he could think of many other women he’d rather… customise? Why would I dream about doing that?

Taylor looked at the list again and saw the sub tab that was labelled ‘Real’ just above the list. Next to that was another sub tab labelled ‘Fiction’. Getting curious again, he tapped that one.

The previous list disappeared and was replaced by one filled with names both English in origin and Japanese. But there were mostly Japanese names. Ones that seemed incredibly familiar.

Just about all the names seemed to come from some manga, anime or game that he had read, watched or played.

Which gave him a thought.

He looked back at the manga he left lying on his bed behind him.

Fairy Tail.

Taylor looked back at the window and tapped on the search box. A similar see-through looking keyboard popped up in the bottom centre of his vision.

“Am I some kind of high-tech computer now? What the hell?” He asked, shaking his head.

Ignoring the senselessness of it for now, Taylor typed in a name in the floating keyboard.

“Lucy Heartfilia.”

Because why not? Fairy Tail had some of the most sexy and bodacious girls. And Taylor did have a thing for Lucy.

He pressed enter and the list went from showing many to showing just one. He tapped on it and his jaw dropped.

Of course, he realised now that making an anime character wouldn’t make much sense since they would be a drawing, essentially. But what this weird character creator did was make a Lucy Heartfilia as close to realistic as possible.

What appeared in front of him was a cute and well-endowed blonde girl who looked remarkably like her anime/manga counterpart, almost as if this were an incredibly talented cosplayer. And she was wearing one of Lucy’s outfits. The blue skirt with the white and blue top.

“Ah, fuck me… What is happening?” Taylor whispered, although he couldn’t help but grin like a mad man.