Chapter 2 - SUBCUTANEOUS 1.1

Ok, gonna go write some RfR after this, so we'll have a chapter either done or mostly done soon on that front. I'm not going to neglect my main boo just cause some side-thang wandered by! But ain't nothin wrong with a lil lookin!

Jokes aside, enjoy, and I look forward to doing more of this later!

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Immediately, two pathways appear before Ilia, glowing in the air, written in that same metamorphous calligraphy of glowing veins.

MODEL and STATS.

Appearance can be… tough. Comfort in your own skin is hard enough, and frankly, she’d rather wait to find out that the game is disappointing in that front for after she falls in love with the stats, rather than lose enjoyment on the way in. She moves her avatar’s hand over to the STATS button.

The arm of her avatar is still visible, interestingly. The game seems to try its hardest to completely negate the shape of the controller, putting it into something more realistic. Points for immersion for sure, but Ilia gives a mental chuckle at the idea that she’s more comfortable with the pallid, slightly off limb that is the default more than she’s comfortable with the idea of making a version of herself in the game. Nothing to explore there, no sirree. 

Slowly, the glowing polyp rises into the air, glowing above almost like a bulb or a far-off satellite, letting down a bit of red color to the void all around. In its place directly in front of her, a series of words begins to form, each one with a small box right beneath it with a little 0 in it. Overall, there are seven stats, with a large number 18 floating above them;

• Vitality

• Agility

• Strength

• Endurance

• Intelligence

• Sensitivity

• Synchronicity

Right away, there are a lot of interesting possibilities. Synchronicity especially points to a lot of potential mechanics, and she wonders what it might mean. Hovering over the word, she smiles wide as the veins of the word react, pulling back and unfolding like a flower to create a description of the chosen character stat.

Vitality unfolds into a bright, deep red, the veins dripping thick and heavy fluids as if soaked and saturated with different oozes. 

Increases base health, resistance to physical damage, and grants a larger biological resource regeneration rate.

She pulls back, switching to Agility. There are paler lines right alongside the vein-writing, like a highlighting, and they twitch on occasion. Tendons, maybe?

Enhances speed, reflexes, muscle memory generation, and range of motion.

How in the hell are they going to simulate a range of motion in a VR game? Maybe some sort of mechanic or longer reach? Shaking her head but deeply curious about what the stats are prompting, she turns to Strength, watching as dozens of fibrous tendrils wrap around the veins, which feed back into said tendrils. 

Boost physical power, ability to carry and use heavier items, and ability to exert torque and force.

Again with the physics talk. Torque? How are they going to work that into the game? Again, the game promises to be as creative as any she’s met, a true blue breath of fresh air- but at the same time, it promises that this will be either the best-made gaming system she’s ever seen or a buggy, overcomplicated mess.

Endurance rolls out as she hovers over to it, fatty tissues, scarring and thicker veins than the rest making a dense picture. 

Improve stamina, increased resistance to environmental hazards, decreased resource consumption.

Again, resource generation and consumption are both tied to stats usually tied to a tank or melee build. Ilia loves a good hack-and-slash, but the call of the caster just keeps serenading her, so it’ll be interesting to find out how she can spread her stats around and how XP will work.

Intelligence has a web-like weave wrapped around the veins, pulsing and glowing a bit brighter. Neurons, maybe? The description reads: Enhances cognitive capabilities, improves effectiveness of abilities, unlocks advanced crafting options.

Crafting options? Seriously? This isn’t a triple-A game. How long have people been working on this? Crafting is famously a make or break situation- either great or a useless mess. So just like the rest of the game, then.

Sensitivity comes up next, and this one is particularly weird. Long, thin hairs extend out from the words, twitching slightly as if in an invisible breeze. 

Ability to detect stimuli, keep track of information, and widen the range of sensory input.

Tantalizing overlap with this one. Maybe there’s a way to specialize, focus in on the ‘keep track of information’ part for a full caster build? Plus the stealth and scouting capabilities of the ‘range’ comment. So much to think about!

The final stat though- that one’s special. Distinct even from the others in that it’s not just a biology-coded term for a stat you usually see in a game like this. It’s called Synchronicity.

Increases player ability to interact with organic matter, improving adaptability to the environment, effectiveness of organs, and ability to manipulate organic technology.

Ilia can only imagine that this one is going to be a joy to play with, especially if the crafting options are any good. 

Ilia’s first idea, as always in a game, feels like it’s inherently unsuited to the game. It’s hard to make a true glass cannon if whatever this game’s mana-equivalent and spells are are somehow tied to the endurance and vitality stats, but the temptation of overwhelming violence remains a joy. For the first playthrough it’s always been her norm to find the strongest, most damaging way to play, winning less by learning patterns or surviving hits and more by glassing the earth. Exploring the mechanics, experimental builds and trying to find new ways to understand the game are for playthrough 2-11, if the game is good enough.

Either way, it’s time to choose.

One by one, she picks out her stats.

Slowly, eighteen points reduce down, down, down to 0.

• Vitality

  • 2

• Agility

  • 2

• Strength

  • 2

• Endurance

  • 2

• Intelligence

  • 3

• Sensitivity

  • 3

• Synchronicity

  • 4

A nice even spread for the ‘physical’ stats, enough that nothing is specifically lacking, but saving the real goodies for the later stuff. It’s interesting that the game allows you to have a 0 in a stat, and that could be a fun playthrough in and of itself. Like in New Vegas, where having the minimum in a speech stat gives a bunch of unique dialogue options and possibilities. Though it’s still weird. What if she put all 18 points into just intelligence, and a 0 everywhere else? Would she start off as a weird slug or something?

This is great. She’s getting invested.

Now to see if the rest of character creation is going to break her interest.

With the stats selected, she looks around, trying to find a way to get to the “Model” part of character creation again. There’s no button for it, but… hmm.

She points her controller up at the bulb above.

Immediately she notices a difference. The color of the bulb has changed, growing thicker and juicier in the process, but most of all, it has a lot more movement in it. Like the inside of it has turned from a translucent liquid into something more like a thick glowing goop, full of fibrous materials and dense with a much richer glow. Does it respond to the character creator? Did someone code distinct animations for every possible number combination on the stats sheet? Damn does that bode well.

But it also does begin to glow brighter when she hovers her avatar’s hand over it. She clicks the button on the controller, and immediately the screen shifts, like she’s moving in a great distance. The polyp, in all its fleshy glory, grows until it’s almost the size of a person, bright and filling the screen. The veins that made the earlier words spread out and begin to flow around the space, like little tendrils in the dark, or thin little eels. Distinctly creepy and deeply fun to watch.

Floating next to the polyp, the tendrils and veins all flow back together and turn into a humanoid figure. Its looks match the limbs that the game has given for her avatar- thin, almost skeletal, and so white they look like porcelain. It’s hunched, malshapen, uneven, with lumpy bits like tumors all over it. There’s a face, a thin, lipless mouth framed over two round and lidless eyes. 

Ilia raises a hand, and the figure mirrors her exactly. 

Above and to its right, another menu forms, a series of options popping up. Height, Curvature, Muscle Definition, and Weight make the main stats, with additional sliders and details for facial features. It goes deeper, though, and she quickly finds herself truly dizzy at the possibilities presented. Markings, piercings, talons, coloration, even sliders for the amount of fur and feathers. Interestingly, there are only limited options for scales, but they’re there too, and the number of varying features offered for teeth, eyes, and hair patterning are absolutely dizzying.

A sense of mixed joy and dread rise up in her gut as she stares at the massive array of options. She sighs, the memory of Cyberpunk 2088 and the hours she spent in the character customization screen eliciting both fond nostalgia and worry at just how much fun this is going to be.

She rolls her neck. Cracks her knuckles. Does a little shimmy in her furry socks to shake out the willies.

Time to get to work.

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3pm is long gone. 

To look at a clock? In the midst of enjoying an all-new gaming experience? Sacrilege. Apostasy. But… admittedly, she doesn’t really need to look at a clock to know that she’s been here for hours.

And as a consequence… she has achieved perfection.

Well. Not really. But it’s pretty good!

Ilia sighs, popping open a can of vibrant green energy drink and tossing it back without even needing to remove the headset. 

“I need a life,” she grumbles.

Then she gargles the carbonated mix of carbs, caffeine and raw sugar and looks back upon her glorious creation.

The white homunculus is long gone. While the options don’t offer as much variety as she’d hoped (no making her character 9 feet tall), they do have a pretty wide range, and she’s done her absolute best to make use of it.

The body remains humanoid, that much remains the default, but she won’t begrudge her creation its mild faults. Standing at a good 6ft, the creature in front of her has two long, slender arms, terminating in multi-jointed fingers with short and curled talons at each end. The creature is fairly fit, but the options were limited by stat selection in the end- some muscle is visible, but it mostly just makes her avatar look lean, ready to strike. It seems to default to a crouch, but it’s legs are long as well, giving it the advantage of reach, and there are small patches of feathers that grow in patterns of red and purple along its joints and parts of its body. Pure white skin has been swapped for something darker, like an overly red sort of tan or russet color, and both eyes now glow with bright purple pupils in their center, the rest of the schlera kept all-black. In a sort of idle animation, the avatar makes a growling noise and clicks its teeth together, exposing a mouth full of predatory canines.

Nothing crazy, really, but a very fun combo nonetheless, and there are so many options that whoever she makes next will almost certainly look completely different.

Or very similar. Ilia is, if nothing else, a woman of taste.

She scrolls down to the end of the list of options, looking for a button to confirm her selections- and finds something she hasn’t seen yet.

There’s a grayed-out section of the settings menu, with an unmarked checkbox right above it. Hovering over the box, a series of wriggling veins swim from out of the void around her and form a new sentence.

18+ material ahead. Check box to confirm legal age and increase to full immersion.

A brand new flashback hits her dead in the memory cluster, going right back to Cyberpunk 2088.

These motherfuckers got themselves some gibblies. Some goolies. Some gaba-gaggling grinders. 

They got a dick slider. She can feel it.

And all that’s keeping her from it is one unchecked box.

Oh yeah.

She checks off the box the moment she’s done processing, watching it light up and fill with blood in a funky little animation. The box fades back in with the rest of the menu- and then, to Ilia’s surprise, that same blood streams out of the box to color in the game’s options, lighting up and letting her see the final pieces on selection.

Sure enough, there it is. The Reproduction menu.

 She almost giggles as she opens it, ready to look upon the abominable horrors that an indie-developed set of VR genitals will most certainly be. She prepares to behold a mess of rearranged pixels and awkwardly formed 3D modeling software-

And actually recoils a bit in surprise.

If there are genitals in this menu, they’re certainly not the kind that comes up in a health class. And, for once, not because of how violently politicized and underfunded american schools are.

There is certainly a wide selection, and very little gender binary to speak of, in large part due to having to actively stop and puzzle out what in the fuck (literally) some of the options are meant to do. Either nature has way more forms of genitalia than Ilia’s ever heard of, or whoever coded and modeled these should be working at Bad Wyvern. Or putting them out of business. 

Even if the game ends right here, frankly? Two hundos well spent, if only to glimpse such artistic fervor. 

Another twenty five minutes of browsing and confused imagining later, she’s picked her selection.

Almost immediately, the menu fades away, dissolving back into the amniotic void surrounding her. Slowly, the character creation menu and the model she created fade into nonexistence, and the camera angle comes in closer, closer, closer…

Again, the haptic feedback goes wild to emulate the experience of falling into a glowing sack of goo.

For a while, there is silence.

She moves her arms, noticing a slight delay in the game, a pushback from her haptics telling her there’s some kind of resistance.

Gradually, she finds where the resistance is strongest, pushing against it-

With a wet, incredibly viscous ‘pop’, Ilia emerges from the fleshy womb into someplace beautiful.