PARTY-STREAM/CHARACTER CREATION.
“C’mon man, did that thing seriously just kill you?”
My friend Tod and I were playing an Old MMO game from back in our high-school days. He was edging on being drunk, and I was streaming, it was the perfect combination for a ‘shenanigan’s video’ later on in the week.
“Uhh, what?” Tod’s player character was lying on the floor with their hand outreached. “you’ve died 30 more times than I have this whole session.” I walked over to him while preparing my comeback.
“Nah dude, you’re just mad because you forgot how to play the game.” There was movement on the other side of the arena we were in but I Ignored it for the sake of the little bit I had going on.
“Oh is that so?” there was a shuffling sound on the other side of the mic, Tod’s voice became louder but muffled. “Hurry up and revive me so I can kick your Ass!”
I made my character do a dance as I responded to him. “Sorry but I have other things to use these items on, like for that Boss over th--” I suddenly remembered that we were in the middle of a boss fight. “—OH SHIT!” a giant suit of armor suddenly thrust out of the left edge of the screen while swinging its huge axe around.
My character was still in the dance animation and in the split second I tried to cancel it into a dodge, the axe had already caught up to me, and my character was ten feet into the air with half of their health bar missing. I did an aerial recovery and landed some ways away from Tod’s dead Body and the boss.
I ran to the other side of the arena to guide the slow moving enemy away from Tod’s character. Speaking of which, Tod was surprisingly silent. I changed my focus from the Knight slowly lumbering its way towards me to the top right corner of the screen. Under my HP and MP bar, was a mini version of Tod’s HP and MP along with a little symbol indicating if he was online or not… It was blank.
“Hah, serves him right, I bet he’s too busy laughing at me to even realize his internet cut out.” I sighed a sigh I didn’t know I was holding as I looked to my left to check chat. There were only two messages, one from me and, one from Tod from when I was still setting up the stream. Truth be told, I wasn’t a super popular streamer on anything like that. I mostly just streamed today so I could show my other friends, who sadly couldn’t make it, how much fun we had without them.
To further elaborate: This month has been nothing but golden for me, I’ve moved out of my parents’ house, the person I like at work asked me out, and to top it all off I even got that promotion I had been needing to actually stay in the house I was renting. Instead of throwing a little house party and wasting the money I earned, I decided to just play games with my close friends, although Tod was the only one with a free schedule.
Before I could get to busy reminiscing how good this month had been, a new message appeared in the chat: it was from Tod.
[THE Todinator]: My Innertet 0ff.
[FinalflaresX]: What the hell is an ‘Innertet’, Tod?
[THE Todinator]: u no wut I meen.
[FinalflaresX]: yeah, yeah sure
[FinalflaresX] I’m about to end the stream anyway so go ahead and get some sleep.
[THE Todinator]: K
I Yawned a little bit as my eyes flowed down to the bottom right corner of the screen to look at the time.
“Ugh, its nearly 2:00 AM, I’ve been streaming since before the sun went down so…” I looked down at my hands to count my fingers. “…I’m too tired to count, either way it’s going to be a hell of an editing session.”
I yawned again as I changed the streams view to my webcam. “Dang, I didn’t realize I was this tired… ah, well it’s not like anyone watches these anyway.” I looked over at my streams analytics to look at the current viewer count. There was a two next to the little viewer icon. “Oh never mind then, I hope my yawning hasn’t pissed my two viewers off.”
I sighed while suppressing a yawn. “yeah I think this is the perfect place to end the stream.” I quickly closed out of the Game. “See you guys on the flip side! Oh and don’t forget to check my PeepVid channel for the highlights in a couple days!” I clicked the end stream button and almost immediately slouched into my chair.
I looked over at my computers clock again, it read: ’1:57.’ ‘I don’t wanna go straight to sleep but there’s not much I feel like doing.’ I stood up and walked away from the computer, I was tired at looking at the screen. ‘well I guess I could try and work on that project a little.’ I did some stretches while the computer went black in the background. “Phew, no, on second though I’m too tired for anything.”
I walked across the room to my Bed, and was about to lay down, when a sudden realization came to me. “Wait a second, normally it counts the streamer as viewer.” I sighed as I moved to lay on my back. “then I guess the other viewer was just the bot, oh dear god, I’m an idiot.” I moved the rest of my body unto the bed and closed my eyes.
“Well there’s no use crying over spilt milk I guess.”
--
I was known to have pretty boring dreams if any at all. Out of the ones I could remember they all just seemed to be strange recaps of the day beforehand. I was also never much of a lucid dreamer, if I could get myself to dream in the first place, that is.
I bring this all up because I seem to be in a black dreamscape… well I could just be dead but I’d rather believe the optimistic option.
“Ok, now wha—” I was cut off by a loud computerized voice that came from all directions.
“INITALIZING…” as soon as the voice stopped talking I lost all feeling in my body and, before I could say anything else the voice continued. “...STARTING FEATURE NUMBER ONE...”
I wanted to complain about the unneeded loudness but, before I could my vision became cloudy and the black void was replaced by a ‘screen.’ Well it wasn’t really a screen per say, and it definitely wasn’t like one of those blue text boxes you’d find on certain websites. It was closer to a character creation screen from some new MMO game.
At the top of my vision sat the words ‘customize/ create character’ in huge bold print. On the left of the screen from top to bottom were the words: Race, Gender, Appearance, Abilities, and Special. Each word was surrounded by a box, which I guess was supposed to signify that they were selectable.
This all but confirmed that I was dreaming, you see I fancied myself a world-crafter and character builder, this could’ve been considered my very own wet dream. “Oooh, if this was real I’d be having a field day right now!” I suppressed my eagerness to get started, and tried to pick one of the side options and then came to the sudden realization that I had no idea how to.
‘Hmmm maybe I just have to think the word… uhhhhh RACE!’ Just like that, everything to the right of the word shifted, and the whole screen was full of information. At the top left corner (Next to ‘race’, but below the giant customize.) was a 3d model of a featureless mannequin. Underneath the model was a list of fantasy races, from Top to bottom it read: HUMAN(no-category), BEAST-KIN(sub-races), ELVE(sub-races), DEMONIC(sub-races), OTHER(no-category) and, RANDOMIZE.
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
I “selected” the ‘human’ option and the screen changed again: The black space to the right of the mannequin suddenly became filled with words and mannequin itself became a reflection of my own body. I was used to looking at myself already so I decided to focus on the text for the time being.
It read: ‘HUMANS: Humans are tenacious creatures who often find themselves surviving even in the direst of situations. While Humans lack special traits that other sentient lifeforms have, they make up for it by being jacks of all trades, and working well together. They’re also interestingly good at “talking.”
I groaned at the text. “Seems like the generic human stuff, BORING.” I changed my focus to the model of me and found that I could move said model with my mind, like everything else so far…Yep it was definitely me, even down to a little scab I has recently gotten. My own body bored me so I went on ahead and ‘unfocused’ away from the model, and unto the next race.
The other three big race options weren’t any better, for instance: the beast-kin option went down the route of having each sub-race borrow from their specific animal type. As an example, a bunny-kin would have the distinct and unique ability to jump higher… among other explicit things.
Whenever I picked a different option, the representation of my body would alter itself to resemble race I was looking at. It was pretty cool to look at the changes that occurred but I was tired of looking at my own body. I selected the ‘human’ race again and put my focus back to the original menu where I quickly selected the ‘gender’ option. The 3d render of my body instantly changed to that of the opposite sex.
“Cool.” I selected the gender option again so my body returned to normal and went on to the next menu. (I would’ve gone the extra mile and called myself ‘cute’, but I wasn’t particularly interested in selfcest.)
When I moved on to the ‘appearance’ menu nothing changed at first, but then it suddenly zoomed into my body again. There were no sliders, no options or anything just the render. “Aww man, this isn’t like the games of old I see.” I ‘sat’ confused for a second but then I had a sudden realization. “Wait a second… if it’s like everything else here then I should be able to just think about the changes I want to make.”
I fought myself over what to change for a second but quickly decided. “Alright then, make my right eye color red.” as soon as I finished the thought, I willed the render to be zoomed in and, wouldn’t you know it, my eye was red. “Hehehe t-this is… this is PERFECT!”
With the realization that I could edit and change the body instantly with just a thought my mind started to go a thousand miles a second. I started by making my hair a little longer, then I changed my skin color slightly but stopped before moving on because I didn’t like how it looked.
“Ok back to the drawing board, hmmm… make me look like as generic as possible.” After another second or two my body changed in its entirety: most of the muscle mass I had built up returned to my body, the hair that I had made a little longer shifted to a more normal length, and both my eyes changed to a generic black.
As I looked over my ‘masterpiece’ I tried to get back on track “So I can use this guy as a base to build my…” But it was no use. “…No… what powers can I give him— I wanna look at the Abilities menu— show me the abilities Menu!” The ‘screen’ quickly shifted away from the render, and was once again full of text. Unlike the ‘races’ menu there was more than 6 options, it looked like there were hundreds of them. the Abilities themselves ranged from simple things like ‘sword mastery’, to complicated sounding things like ‘agriculture.’
As I worked on making this guy I found that I could pick two ‘abilities’ as long as I choose one negative ‘special’ option as well. While I was at it, I also figured out what the ‘special’ option was in correlation to the ‘abilities’ option: Basically you can think of ‘abilities’ of skills that grow with you, change, and get stronger, while something that’s ‘special’ stays stagnate in terms growth, its specific effects may be more noticeable though.
As an example: Let’s say there’s an ability that allows the user to shoot fire from their hands. After some practice, you may be able to shoot other types of energy from your hands but, you’d only ever be able to shoot the energy from your hands. On the other hand, let’s say that there’s a special skill that allows the user to control ALL fire, it could be come from your hands, a camp-fire… it wouldn’t matter where it came from — you’d have full control over it. But you’d only ever be able to only control fire and that’s it.
In this case choosing the special skill sounds like the way to go, especially if you were a pyromaniac, however there are also ‘bad’ special skills for instance: there’s a special skill that allows the user to speak with, and control animals at the cost that you’d be unable to speak any ‘human’ (or I guess any other type) language. On the flip side of this, there’s the beast tamer skill, which allows to user (with enough practice mind you) to control even the scariest of monsters around, with no language barrier in sight either!
With all that in mind, all it would take to succeed in this case would be to take two abilities that work well together, and one negative special skill that you could get to work in your favor… or at least one that doesn’t royally screw you over. Or… you could be like me and, choose based on what you think would look good from a writer’s perspective.
Anyway, while you were reading all of that I finished creating my soon to be master piece: “His name shall be… ‘Gen’eric McChar’ter’, he has the basic ‘sword mastery’ ability, as well as the ability to use weak electricity Magic. Oooh but it comes a deftly Cost, for you see… HE’s SO CHARMING THAT HE KILLS PEOPLE— ok I have to stop.” I erased his special skills and abilities and went back to the drawing board, even going as far as to change his appearance back to an exact copy of mine.
--
After going back to the drawing board, I went through many different revisions, hell after the 3rd he wasn’t even the dashingly handsome ‘Gen’eric McChar’ter’, but instead the Rock demon ‘steve stone: the crusher’. I was totally far gone, wanting to see every single option available. I combined lots of different abilities with many different special skills. I created many different characters as well: from a golden monkey man who got stronger with each fight, to a hydro maniac who had to be in water constantly to survive. I’d been through every major race, except one…
“ugh, I guess I should stop beating around the bush but...” thoughts of my irrational disdain flashed throughout my head. “Elves are kinda…boring though.”
The last set of characters I’d create would be in the elven family, I didn’t care much for them though so I attempted to make it go by quickly. “ok let’s just follow the stereotype of a young elf…” I paused for a second, realizing how cringe I was about to sound” “…Make this one look like a little girl, well, I guess young in elven standards, give me a 37-year-old elf.”
I watched in horror as one of my previously perfect creations turned into one of the worst Fantasy races. The previously strong and cool looking vampire king I had envisioned shrunk a whole 3 heads. His hair grew longer and changed color to that of a golden hue. Both eyes changed from a royal purple to a generic green, and so on. It only took a second but my previous masterpiece was gone and was replaced by one of those, dare I say, anime lolis.
I refused to comment the actual appearance of my creation as if to move faster. “Ok so, whats something generic that elves are good at?” I paused to actually consider that for a moment. “ I guess this elf can be a magic user… uh, she doesn’t look like the real dangerous type so I guess um…--” I absentmindedly gave her a set of skills that typical elf party members had in RPG games I’d played.
“So in conclusion, before I get rid of you, forever, you are a normal elf girl with the strong ability to use all types of white magic’s, with a particular boost towards Healing…” I paused for dramatic effect even though I lacked an audience to be dramatic too “…HOWEVER, overuse of your magical powers causes you to feel powerful migraines most of the time.”
I laughed to myself. “I feel kind of bad for this one not gonna lie...but whatever.” I exited out of the ‘special’ menu and attempted to move back into the ‘appearance menu,’ But the loud computerized voice from earlier cut me off.
“ERROR, ACCESS IS DENIED.”
In my confusion, I asked it a question. “What?! Why?!”
“THE USER #5200891 HAS OVER STAYED THEIR WELCOME, AND HAS NOT MOVED ONTO THE NEXT FEATURE.” There was a pause but before I even got the chance to think the voice continued. “THEREFORE THE USER SHALL BE FORCEFULLY MOVED UNTO THE NEXT FEATURE.”
“Wait a second, I’m not ready!” I hoped my attempt to reason to the voice would work. “Literally give me two minutes and I’ll be done. I have this really cool Idea that—” the voice cut me off though.
“ERROR, THE USER #5200891’S OPINION IS VOID.”
“But I—”
“BEGINNING START OF FINAL FEATURE IN .5 SECONDS.”
“Shit.”
The render, this time of the elven girl, suddenly grew bigger, and bigger and bigger, until it covered the whole of my vision. Speaking of which, my vision is starting to get real blurry.
“aww man, this was such a good dream too, guess I’ll just try to remember all the good parts for tomorrow—”
And then everything went black.