The game arrived on Wednesday the next week, one day before the opening of the servers. This means Megan and Blair had plenty of time to complete the offline tutorial and character creation. They had discussed with Uthor what his character's name was. Turns out he just went with his usual online handle of Arthur. Blood of Fate had a simple system where each character had both a name and an ID, with only the ID being unique, so that players could choose whatever name they wanted. There would be a lot of Arthur's inside the game around.
Blair proposed that she and Megan would do the same, just use their online handles. Megan was against it. It would be a name she would be called by for decades to come. And Imperial Banana didn't sound like much of a name. She gave the counter-proposal that they should instead name themselves after mythological figures to stay on theme with Arthur. Blair liked that idea and immediately went down a rabbit hole searching for the perfect name, deciding on Nimue.
Megan decided to go for Atalanta. She played as a spell caster the first time around, and now she wanted to experience something else. And most mythical women were either mages, healers or wives. But Atalanta was a warrior first and foremost.
Now, it was time to go through the tutorial.
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Megan stood inside the character customization room. It was a square room, five meters across, with two adjacent sides made from mirrors, one across a normal wall and one across an open wall leading to a small garden.
Megan herself inhabited an incorporeal body, floating around freely.
Welcome to the character creator. Would you like to use a template or start from scratch?
Megan had anticipated the question. The game allowed players to upload the base they can then modify for their final character. Megan decided to use a scan of herself as the base and then make some improvements from there. She had gone to a photo studio on the weekend to get the scan done. Blair liked that idea, so they went together.
A body materialized from the ground. At first, it was only a generic human shape. But it quickly reshaped to mirror Megan's real-life features. She was on the smaller side, with a pudgy physique shaped from limited exercise and a sub-optimal diet. Her eyes were a muddy brown, hair an almost black dark brown that she kept short to make managing it easier.
The first thing she did was max out the height slider. The figure shoots up half a meter, standing more than two meters tall, towering over Megan. That might have been a bit much. She wanted to be tall, but not that tall. She lowered the height by 23 cm. Now, her double was still a head and a half taller than herself but no longer a giant. This would do for now.
The next step was adjusting the physique. Megan didn't like how it was currently, and since her return to the past, she has tried working out. Not very effectively, mind you, but maybe if the body was closer to her ideal, it would motivate her to work harder in reality. Two sliders controlled the physique of the character. One for bulk and one for musculature. If both were minimized, the figure would become a living skeleton, with skin draped directly above the bone. Maximizing both lead to a mountain of muscle with veins having clear outlines on the skin. She put both sliders into neutral before getting to work. She played around with both sliders a lot, trying to find something that felt right. It took her a while but, eventually, she did. 46 Fat, 61 Musculature.
Considering her natural state was 50 on both sliders, it was surprising how close her ideal was to her current state. Looking at her avatar, she gave it a light tan.
Next up was her face. There wasn't much to change. The biggest change was the coloration of her eyes and hair. She decided to make them stand out more. Make them really pop. The hair stayed brown but changed to a hazelnut brown. The eyes were changed to a striking gray.
Looking at her work, she was mostly satisfied, but it still felt a bit off. She couldn't quite place her finger on it though. She decided to ask for help.
"I could use some help here."
Of course, what is it that you require?
"Something feels off with my modifications, but I can't quite understand what is bothering me. Could you please create small iterations based on this design?"
The shape blurred in front of her as it returned; she could make out some of the changes; features felt softer, and the figure seemed more approachable. It felt even more off. She communicated as such to the guide.
The next iteration flipped the script. Her avatar now was sharper in every way. The piercing look the eyes gave her felt right. This was her avatar. This was Atalanta.
It was time to move on to the next stage.
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The overseer gave a mental sigh once the terrifying girl left. Despite being the AI in charge of character creation, this was the first time he had seen such a monstrous astral body. How any human could develop such a distorted self-image was beyond him.
He guessed this was a good reason not to show players their own astral body. What kind of mindset would lead to four arms and seven eyes?
He attached a flag to the player profile and moved on. There were more humans to help out with their character creation.
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Megan – No, Atalanta – found herself in a new room, this one set up like a chaotic gym. There was gear strewn around all over the place, with seemingly no rime or reason. She even spotted a treadmill on a platform at the top of the rock climbing wall.
Welcome to the tutorial. This is a safe environment where you can get used to your new digital body. There are optional challenges for you to complete; if you finish all of them, you will receive a starting bonus for the game.
Atalanta already knew what the reward would be. Just a little bit of extra money at the start of the game. In the future, it will become common wisdom to skip the tutorial outright as it happened in real-time and would take multiple hours to complete. With the time saved, you could earn much more money in game. But she had time
The first station was easy enough to just follow a line on the ground. In essence, a balance exercise with no stakes. The only way to fail was to step completely off the line.
Congratulation: You have finished 1/12 exercises.
The next station was a simple 100 m sprint. Any time below 30 seconds would result in a pass. Meaning as long as you had minimal control of your body, you would pass.
Congratulation: You have finished 2/12 exercises.
The third station was a soccer goal. All you needed to do was hit the ball into the net from the penalty line three times in a row. Atalanta completed the challenge on the first try.
Congratulation: You have finished 3/12 exercises.
Atalanta was feeling really confident. This was so easy. But it was time to move on to the next challenge: push-ups.
As she got into position, she lost control of her left arm, falling face-first into the ground. The ground, in response, turned soft as a pillow where her face made contact.
OK, that was a first. Why was this so hard? Digital bodies were much more capable than normal physical bodies. They could go for hours without exhaustion.
But this setback couldn't keep her back for long. She was back at it again a few minutes later. And she fell on her face again.
If this exercise is too difficult, you may keep your knees on the ground.
This prompt filled her with confidence. She might not be able to do it perfectly, but she could do it. After five push-ups the expected notification came.
Congratulation: You have finished 4/12 exercises.
The next two exercises strained her patience. Number five mirrored the football challenge, only this time, needing to throw a small ball against a target from five meters away. A simple enough challenge. But her performance was atrocious. For the love of god, she could not aim her throw. Once, she threw the ball straight up, and it landed on her own head. She was aiming forward; how did that even happen? She did much more complicated maneuvers in the future.
Frustrated, she brute-forced the attempt. While her hit rate did improve, she was stuck at a one-in-five chance of hitting the target. It took her more than an hour to finally get three consecutive hits.
When she saw the balls awaiting her at the next station she almost quit on the spot. This test involved juggling with at least two balls. It was horrible. The balls kept flying, of course, slipping past her grab and were generally hard to handle. Her mind knew what to do, but her hands just couldn't keep up. She wasn't proud of it, but it took her multiple hours to get a rhythm going and keep it going long enough to complete the challenge.
Congratulation: You have finished 6/12 exercises.
She was five hours into an eight-hour session and just halfway through. But despite her frustrations, she also felt satisfied. It felt great to improve. Great to see your progress.
In fact, she had an idea, so she grabbed a ball and walked back to the fifth station. There, she re-attempted the challenge again. Her hit rate had improved massively; within ten attempts, she hit the target seven times.
The next exercises were still challenging but not the utter disasters of number five and six. Number seven went back to football, wanting her to dribble a ball through some cones.
Number eight required her to imitate poses presented to her and hold them for a few seconds before moving on to the next.
Number nine was a reflex game where a ball was dropped from the ceiling, and she needed to sprint over and catch it before it hit the ground. This was surprisingly easy after the juggling experience.
Number ten was a softball. She needed to hit a ball with a bat. And do so consistently. This is where she once again experienced a spike in difficulty. It was much harder than expected to do this simple task, but she got the hang of it.
Number eleven was a climb up the rock wall.
Congratulation: You have finished 11/12 exercises. The next one is a freebie; just pick any exercise you have done before and repeat it.
Atalanta headed back to the juggling station. She had to finish this.
Her attempts at two-ball juggling showed significant progress, to the point that she decided to try for three. Only to be met with utter failure once again. She just kept dropping one ball and hitting one with another.
But as attempts accrued and she honed in, she was able to get an eight-second streak going, which was enough to satisfy the overseer.
Congratulation: You have finished all of your assigned exercises. As a reward, your starting balance has been increased by 5 silver.
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This human was an anomaly. All humans that entered the tutorial had one thing in common: they lost their balance. Some were able to catch themselves before hitting the ground. But this? No reaction to inhabiting a digital body for the first time? Impossible. Even the beta testers had issues whenever their systems got reset, needing to re-acquaint themselves with the digital world.
It is so bad that some of the developers campaigned to activate the system guidance inside the tutorial. She and the other AIs running the tutorial instances vetoed that proposal. They made some concessions where people would pass as long as they didn't outright fail a challenge. But there was a good reason why the tutorial needed to have no guidance from the system. Their tests had shown that people who never came to grips with the unfiltered connection to a digital body had issues down the line. They just couldn't control their body effectively, impacting their performance in the virtual world.
She worried that she had an anomaly on her hand that somehow achieved a perfect connection between mind and digital body in an instant. The human falling on their face was such a great relief to her. Not so little miss-perfect after all. In response to the lacking performance, she decided to make the next two exercises about hand-eye coordination. As the overseer of the training room, she had the privilege to set the first eleven tasks.
The human's progress was remarkable, and she felt happy that the human hadn't given up. Only 17% of people taking the tutorial finished it. Most stopped before completing the third task. On the other hand, those that made it beyond the third task had an 80% clear rate.
She just quickly attached a flag to the player profile and moved on. Launch day was coming up, and there was an influx of players to run through the tutorial.