I fluttered my wings and reconsidered my earlier assessment. There was another downside. The teasing I was going to get when I showed up as a fairy priestess. Yes, -ess. My character in DVI was going to be a girl. Okay, shapely young woman, albeit not much more than ten or eleven inches tall. Granted, that was a risk I had faced regardless …. Having a female character, that is, not so much the diminutive height.

My only hope was that maybe Mika or Susie had such a good class roll on the Path of Fate that they might have had to have accepted having a male character in order to keep the class. Granted, it would have been good-natured teasing rather than anything hurtful -- at least from them. Some of my classmates might try a little bullying, but Mika would knock them to their senses if it got out of hand.

But, still … a figure like Jocelyn’s Barbie dolls, but with wings and prettier hair.

Ah well. It was balanced out on the whole by everything else. Either Desi had really interfered with Fate or I had rolled a bunch of nat twenties in a row. Not only was my race Ultra Super Rare, but my class was, well, unique.

I wasn’t just a priestess, but rather a High Priestess -- the High Priestess of whom was yet to be determined, however.

Technically, High Priestess in and of itself wasn’t a unique class. It wasn’t even a real class, but as Desi explained, “It’s a proto-class, just like any priest or priestess. Someone serving the Skylord is going to have different abilities and inclinations than someone following the Lady Beneath the Waves.”

“And actually,” Desi continued, “None of the Blue, Green, or Grey Pantheons have any priestesses or priests yet, much less High Priestesses.”

“Really? Why is that?”

“The Concordance Update added them in five weeks ago. Before that, religious-type classes like priests and templars were assigned to one of the Triumvirate.”

“But other servers have opened between then and now?” I asked. “You said Skamokawa came online last week, right?”

“Yes, it did. And two others the week prior. But religious classes are very uncommon. People tend to stick to their beliefs from their outside lives. Or they don’t have any beliefs and thus their healer classes are more alchemist and medic than priest or shaman.”

“I see …. So, do I choose or is it chosen for me? Which god, goddess, or pantheon, that is. You said that people prior were assigned to the Triumvirate.”

Desi nodded. “You do choose, just as they chose which of the three to follow then. You just have more options. This, and a couple other spots, are where you get to customize your character before playing.”

“Ah, so which god, which weapon, which starting spells, or something like that?” I asked.

“Something like that,” Desi agreed. “Your choice of which god or goddess to follow will influence your weapon and spell selections. You will choose your deity, a stat focus, and spend any merit or flaw points you have available.”

So. A god. Or goddess. I wasn’t particularly religious myself, but had often played religious-based characters in games, since that was generally the only way to get a healer-class. DVI, at least since the Concordance Update that Desi had mentioned, apparently featured a wide variety of possible beings of power to follow.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

The Triumvirate were the basics, modeled after current and relatively mainstream, real-world religions -- no flying spaghetti monsters or invisible pink unicorns. There was an “Our Heavenly Father” sort derived from the Abrahamic faiths, an “Honored Ancestor” sort, and a “Judge of the Dead” sort. None of the three sounded particularly appealing.

Were this a regular computer or console game, I would have probably spent a bit of time looking through each of the gods in all the pantheons trying to find one that was the best fit. Not exactly min-maxing, but rather making sure I wasn’t missing out on a good opportunity by choosing the first thing that caught my eye.

However, DVI being VR meant that Mika and the others would be waiting in game for me to finish up character creation. It’s not as if they could be doing something else and wait for me to text them that I was ready to meet up.

So, I set myself a limit of five deities to investigate, with the decision to choose the best option of those five. However, I didn’t even make it to all five, as the third goddess that I looked at was the one I chose: Sirae, Goddess of Nature and the Wyld Harvest -- that is, seeds, nuts, and berries rather than fields and orchards.

In other words, a bit druid-like, as I had been considering if I had needed to fall back to the Path of Action. “Nature” encompassed a lot of things, but regrowth and regeneration were thematically tied to Sirae. As, of course, was life itself. That should make her perfect for me, with my preference for heal-over-time mechanics.

“So, as a Priestess of Sirae, sorry as the High Priestess of Sirae, what would my weapon be?” I asked Desi. “A staff? A book? A wand …?”

“You’re not a wizard,” she said. “You’re a priestess of nature. You have a connection with the natural world, and that means a connection to all living things.”

“Um? So I get a summon or familiar instead of a weapon? Wouldn’t that be more like a beastmaster class?”

“You’re no beastmaster, hun,” she said as she continued to float lazily around me. Although, the effect was somewhat spoiled given that I was now much smaller than her … and already hovering in the mists myself. “You’re a worshipper of Sirae, her High Priestess. That means you get a ‘pet,’ yes, but it’s a lot more than just a pet.”

Then, from out of the mists, a white shape bounded out on four legs. As it got closer, I could see that it was a unicorn, though not a creature of flesh and blood. Instead, it was a wooden unicorn, moving in every way as if it were alive, with a flowing mane and tail of spanish moss. The wooden unicorn was small for a horse, being about pony-sized, but its beautifully spiraled horn was at least as long as I was tall ... although as I was now a fairy, that wasn’t necessarily as impressive as it sounded. That spiraled horn was probably an effective weapon, though nothing like a sword, or lance, or polearm.

Granted, I wouldn’t have been using a sword, lance, or polearm anyway. Even if I had wanted a real weapon (as opposed to a stat stick to boost casting), a fairy-sized one wasn’t going to do a whole lot of good against anything other than fairy-sized opponents.

I glanced over at Desi, “What’s its name?” I asked.

“The system can randomly generate a name, but it would be better if you chose a name for your pet to respond to,” she replied.

I looked over the unicorn again, and my only immediate thought was that my little sister, Jocelyn, was going to be insanely jealous. For a while, a few years back, everything she had was unicorn themed, from backpack and school supplies to birthday cakes and curtains. If this had been a regular game, I would have been tempted to name the wooden unicorn after her, but given that we might very well meet up and play together in DVI, that was a non-starter. And for obvious reasons, I couldn’t really borrow the name of her favorite unicorn, Twilight Sparkle.

“Um? How does ‘Daybreak Gleaming’ sound to you?” I asked the unicorn. That still kind of was borrowing the name, but it was tweaked enough that it shouldn’t run afoul of name filters.

The wooden unicorn looked at me with eyes that seemed far too wise for a living, wooden construct. Then it nickered and lowered its head. I got the impression that it both liked the name and liked that the name was derived, in part, from my little sister’s preferences.