Axel opened his eyes and found himself in a small wooded glade, which was still and silent except for the occasional buzz of a bee meandering from one wildflower bloom to another and the sound of trickling water. He stood barefoot in a white tunic and trousers at the edge of a gently rippling pool fed by a small stream. He looked down at his reflection and considered the menu that popped up on the surface of the water next to his face.
There was a huge list of features and settings that combined to perfectly recreate his appearance, including his six-foot-two height, brawny musculature, various tattoos, and numerous scars.
Axel briefly considered changing some of the settings and reached out to select the option for race. As his finger touched the pool, ripples dispelled the main character menu, and as the water settled, a number of race options appeared next to his reflection instead. Axel went through each race, but each had a different starting area than Limina’s central region, where Alice had said she played.
Of those in the area he needed, a player could also choose to be a human, but there were two other options as well: sun-sired or antreborn, the first being a sort of softly luminescent humanoid with golden lines traced across its skin and the second being a hairier-than-normal person with two horns rising up from its forehead and two smaller ones protruding downward off its chin. A cursory glance at the description for each revealed some bonus affinities and resistances for each as well as the inability to use different sets of “techniques.” Humans appeared to be the generalist option, so Axel stuck with that, tapping the water “screen” again.
When the calming ripples brought back the main menu, Axel tapped the “Facial Features” option out of curiosity, which opened up an endless menu of preset patterns and sliders, some of them set to perfectly recreate the scar on his left cheek and the other above his right eyebrow. He went back to the main character creation without fiddling with anything. The system-generated settings captured his real-life appearance to a T, and he didn’t see a point in making himself harder for Alice to recognize.
He hit “accept,” and the menu shifted to a stat display and a welcome message.
Name: Unannounced
Echelon: 1
Experience: 0/725
Health: 1000/1000
Magic: 0
Body: 0 [Strength: 0] [Speed: 0] [Stamina: 0]
Mind: 0 [Memory: 0] [Perception: 0] [Focus: 0]
Soul: 0 [Will: 0] [Presence: 0] [Pneuma: 0]
Development Points: 1
Specialization Points: 1
Traits
Memorized Techniques
Item Effects
Greetings to you, new one. Welcome to Limina, the realm between realms. Your existence here will be defined by the choices you make and the path of development that you choose. There are many ways to power, so do as you please. However, should you fail to grow, know that the world is unforgiving to the weak. Be the millstone and not the grist, new one.
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Now, take your first step along your chosen path.
The options for “body,” “mind,” and “soul” were all gently undulating, some unseen force rolling the water right where those words appeared. Axel took that as an indicator that he should choose one of the stats to apply a point, and he spent a second considering the options.
From what Alice had told him about the game, he knew mind and soul chiefly affected things like magic potency and quantity, skill slots, resistance to casting disruptions, and interactions with non-playable characters. Body, however, affected how one interacted with the physical environment. With nothing in that stat, a player would have the physical prowess of a scrawny couch potato. While starting the game like that was a viable play style if you leaned into the benefits afforded by the other two main stats, Axel didn’t see that working for him.
Realizing that he felt weaker than in real life now that he was thinking about it, he decided to give himself a little strength test with nothing in the body stat. He got into a plank position and tried doing some push-ups, but to his horror, he barely managed ten. Ten measly pushups. The reps had also felt slow and sluggish. He quickly tapped the body stat, the awful thought of trading in his real-world athleticism for the physique of an untrained high school freshman making the decision for him.
You have chosen to develop your body. May your flesh never fail you.
His total development points dropped to zero, and his max health rose to 1,100. The strength, speed, and stamina sub-stats all rose by one point as well. Then the undulations in the display shifted to the three body sub-stats. It seemed the game still wanted him to select one of the three, and he recalled something about specialization points being used to gain a bonus point in one sub-stat per level or “echelon.”
He did a little shadow boxing and felt a little slower than normal but not by much. Then he dropped and did twenty push-ups easily but struggled to hit thirty. Still not quite good enough. He opted to increase strength, bringing it to two points total, and as he touched the stat display in the water, the specialization point field dropped to zero as well. He tested his push-up abilities once more and managed to hit sixty-two, falling short of his real-world best—but not by much.
He nodded in approval. “That’ll do . . . to start.”
You have taken a step down the path of strength. May your might clear your way.
After that, the stat display vanished as a deep rumbling shook the still pool and the surrounding glade. The bottom of the pool, murky but discernible before, gave way. The water frothed and roiled, and once it settled again into its former stillness, the pool seemed to open downward into nothing but darkness. Axel took in the eerie abyss before another message appeared on the surface.
Come, new one. Immerse yourself in the waters and join your fellows at the threshold.
Axel did as instructed, stepping into the waters, first up to his ankles and then quickly up to his knees, waist, and shoulders. Holding his breath, he pushed away from the steep bank entirely and sank downward. After his head had sunk five feet under, his feet surprisingly struck bottom. Axel waited for something to happen, but he just floated there in the underwhelming situation until his lungs started aching for air.
He wondered if he was supposed to find something along the bottom, some tunnel or portal, and he briefly wondered if the game meant for him to drown there as part of the startup process. He regretted not paying more attention to this portion of the game when researching and just decided to return to the surface for air, hoping that doing so wouldn’t spoil anything or cause him to backtrack through the character creation.
As Axel broke the surface and gasped for air, he suddenly realized he was no longer in the glade. Rather, he was treading water in a lake about twenty feet from shore, where a washerwoman was scrubbing some linens in the midday sun with what looked to be a small fishing hamlet up the bank behind her.
“Crows on a corpse! Another one!” the washerwoman exclaimed as she dropped her linen and ran up the bank of the lake past the fishing boats and toward the little village.
Axel swam toward the bank and crawled out of the water, his sopping tunic and trousers clinging to him uncomfortably. He wrung what water he could from his clothes and left the rest to the rays of the sun as he made his way up the bank. As he approached the village, a couple men with spears jogged out to meet him, hollering for him to stop. He complied.
The washerwoman he’d startled trailed behind the pair of guards as they approached. She was half bent over so she could see him from behind one of the men, and she eyed Axel with a mixture of curiosity and fear until she seemed to get a good look at him. Then she straightened up and came around to stand no farther from him than the guards, suddenly less wary of him.
“Oy, you, what’s your name?” one of the guards demanded tersely.
Axel thought about providing a pseudonym as this was the character-naming process if he recalled correctly, but he always took too much time with these things in other games.
“Axel,” he replied.
“Well, Axel, you’re a new one by the looks of it,” the guard explained as he propped himself up with his spear and relaxed a bit. “Thankfully, you’re of the right sort. Not one of the sun-sired, that is. Not much goodwill around here for them, those crow-worshiping bird feeders.” The man spat on the ground. “You’ll be wanting to talk to Gerald, the blacksmith, about a weapon and then Moll at the Bony Loach Inn about lodging ‘til you’re ready to be on your way. Both take coin, mind you, which by the looks of you, I reckon you to be a bit light on.”
“Moll needs some ale kegs brought up from the cellar,” the washerwoman interjected, using the back of her hand to tap the arm of the guard who’d spoken. “Usually, Wendel does that, but he’s been bedridden with a fever these last couple of days. This new one's got a look of strength about him. Maybe he could help, eh?”
“I don’t suppose she’d be willing to pay a ‘new one’ to do the task?” Axel asked with a smile at the unexpected help.
“Maybe a copper or two,” the woman answered with a shrug. “Could just put you up for the night.”
“And you’d certainly have my gratitude either way. Was looking forward to a couple pints at the Loach after work, but I’m not inclined to do any lifting like that. Bad back, you see,” the guard who had been silent so far said as he massaged his lumbar area and grimaced.
“I think I’ll go see Moll then. Thank you,” Axel replied as he nodded to the woman and then the guards, who let him pass as if some random person popping up out of the lake and waltzing into town to do odd jobs was an ordinary, everyday occurrence.