She opened her eyes to blackness. Words hovered in the darkness in front of her.
> Your race has changed. You may reconfigure your appearance to suit your new race. Change appearance?
>
> Yes/No
She blinked. Every now and then Veritas announcements had text in Very Important Red, but she’d never seen pink before. And why was ‘Yes’ almost twice as large as ‘No’?
“Um, no?”
The words vanished, but nothing else changed. A moment later, they were back.
> Your race has changed. You may reconfigure your appearance to suit your new race. Change appearance?
>
> Yes/No
She frowned. Now the ‘Yes’ was even larger, and the ‘No’ barely legible.
Still. “No,” she said, firmly.
The text shifted one more time.
> Your race has changed. You may reconfigure your appearance to suit your new race. Change appearance?
>
> YES/No
Ava ground her teeth. “Look,” she said, “I worked really hard on my appearance. I like it, and I don’t want a race change. Why don’t you go pick on some other player, and just leave me alone?”
A girl appeared in front of her, floating in the darkness. The pink from the brilliant neon ‘YES’ painted the left side of her face, but Ava recognized her.
“You!”
Amy’s moss green eyes widened in mock innocence. “Me?”
“You,” Ava tried again. “You murderous, thieving, b-”
Amy held up her hand and Ava found that she could no longer speak. “No foul language, please,” the young woman said, primly, though her eyes were laughing at Ava’s efforts to break free. With a flick of her fingers that looked like she was turning a key, Amy motioned for Ava to continue.
“-anana!”
Ava froze. That was absolutely not what she’d meant to say.
Amy leaned back on an invisible seat and crossed her legs. Her top foot bounced idly. “Because Veritas runs faster than the human brain can process, we were able to code in several neat features. Automatic foreign language translation, for instance. Also, because some players are minors, there’s a foul language filter. Yours is now set to ‘On’.”
Ava spluttered. “What? Who? How can you…?” Her brain caught up. A little. “What do you mean, ‘we’?”
Amy spread her hands. “Allow me to introduce myself. GM Amythyst at your service. I’ve been around since Veritas was a dream in someone’s little strawberry-blonde head, though my role has, ah, changed recently.”
Ava’s mind defaulted to the only thing she could think of to say. “I want to talk to your manager.”
Amy… No, Amythyst’s finger tapped her chin, and her pink lips pouted. “Nope. My manager is currently on her honeymoon, and no way am I bothering her. I mean, she’d probably be okay with it, but she married my brother, and I don’t even want to think about what I might interrupt. Hard pass.”
Ava’s mouth opened and closed a few times. “But,” she said, weakly, “I don’t want to change my race. Or my appearance.”
Amythyst waved a languid hand, and a large, throbbing, pink LOG OUT button appeared next to her. “Then just don’t. Walk away. I mean, you knew Veritas was a game where other players and the world could affect your character just as much as you affect them. Plus, we, Veritas Corporation, can do anything we want to you, as long as we believe it’s in your best interests. See?” A seemingly infinite scroll of words played through the blackness, starting out just large enough to read and then vanishing into the distance.
Amythyst’s finger tapped the feed, and it stopped. “Riiiiight here. End User License Agreement, section twenty-four, paragraph six, sub-section twelve, point one hundred and eight. ‘Veritas Corporation retains the right to alter any player character - including, but not restricted to: race, skills, stats, and appearance - as needed in order to improve game play and game play experience.’ And right here,” another flick sent the words scrolling away again. Several seconds passed as Amythyst kicked her leg and tapped her chin.
Finally, the words slowed and then stopped, showing a pattern of swirls. “Okay, here, is your fingerprint, indicating that you have read and understand the EULA, and agree to all terms and conditions contained therein.”
“No one actually reads the EULA,” Ava protested. Eighteen year-old her certainly hadn’t. She had skimmed the beginning,then signed, too excited to dive in and start playing.
Amythyst poked the thumbprint, which stuck to her finger. She bent the digit, scooping the print up before giving it a spin. It wobbled wildly, but then stabilized, looking like nothing more than a slowly-spinning solar system balanced on the end of the woman’s forefinger.
“But, legally, you did read it. So, legally, I, GM Amythyst can, in the interest of improving your experience, do practically anything to you. Or at least your character, AlphaOmegadon.”
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The space beside Amythyst shimmered, and there was Ava’s half-orc character, clawed hands dangling limply, tusked mouth hanging loose, staring blankly into the distance. Amythyst closed her hand on the spinning thumbprint and instead reached out to gently close Alpha’s jaw. It dropped open again as soon as Amythyst took away her hand, and the GM sighed.
“Surely,” she said, looking back at Ava, “you don’t really like looking like that.”
Ava clenched her jaw. “I do,” she insisted. “No one bothers me. No applesauces stare at my chest, or comment on my ‘jiggle’, like it’s some kind of compliment.” She paused, playing her words back in her mind. Applesauce?
Amythyst’s cheeks flushed. “Sorry, I’m a little hungry. I’ll try to mix it up.”
“Um,” Ava said, aware that she hadn’t said anything about the word change. Not out loud, anyway. The Veritas system was supposed to be able to integrate with the player’s mind, not read it.
Amythyst cleared her throat, looking away. “Sorry. It was just super obvious what you were thinking. Like, ‘banana’ and ‘applesauce’? Anyone would notice the theme.”
“Sure, maybe.” Ava said, slowly. “But you said you’d try to mix it up.”
“Whoops,” Amythyst muttered. “Word list. You know, the substitutions are pulled from word lists. That one was food. I’ll, um, change it. How do you feel about construction equipment?”
“Whatever,” Ava said, frustration getting the better of her. “Just… leave me alone! I was fine. My ‘game play experience’ was fine, too. Why don’t you go away and bother someone else? I’m sure there are a ton of players who’d like to make friends,” or whatever this is, “with a GM.”
“Nope,” Amythyst said cheerfully. “The Cursed Dagger was used on you, so it has to be you. I can do a lot - I mean, a totally normal, reasonable amount - inside Veritas, but there are some rules I can’t break. This is affected by, like, six of them. Well, kind of seven, but that’s only if you look at it a little bit sideways.”
“Then why didn’t you use the dagger on yourself? Or just take it and use it somewhere else, on someone else? Why did it have to be me, right then?” Ava exploded, taking a step forward without thinking about the fact that she didn’t have a body at the moment.
But then she did. And it was her own. Ava Gardner, from her messy blonde hair, to her ‘creepy’ eyes, to her stupid height, and the broad shoulders and stupid long arms and legs that went with it. All around her, the blackness gave way to the Character Creation room, where Emily met new players and guided them through choosing a race and appearance. Emily herself, the Automated Learning Program Interface for Veritas Online, even stood there, though she was as frozen as the AlphaOmegadon avatar.
“What the hydraulics?” Ava looked at Amythyst, who was the only thing that hadn’t changed. She was still lounging in mid-air, though now it was next to Emily, rather than in the blackness of space.
Amythyst stretched as if standing, and when she stepped forward, her toe met the floor. Once she was firmly settled onto both feet, Ava could tell for the first time that the other girl was fairly tall herself. Probably a little over five and a half feet, though Ava would have sworn she’d been shorter when they were crouching in an oversized eye socket together. Then again, the woman was a GM. She could probably look however she wanted.
Amythyst pointed at the bright pink YES that was all that remained of the notification Ava had seen when she logged in. “I was really hoping you’d take the hint,” she said sheepishly. “I mean, most players would kill for a race or appearance change. After you’ve played for a while, you get kind of tired of the same old-same old, right? But you don’t want to have to wipe your character and start over. Like you did.”
The GM looked faintly impressed. “And you did it without any help. Usually, people make the change, and their friends and guildees help them level back up, and give them new equipment. But you cut off everyone, so all you had were your old items, which your new character couldn’t even use, for the most part.”
Ava shrugged. It was her turn to look away. “That was plenty. I could sell that stuff to get things that worked better for Alpha, and physical classes are easier to level. Just kill something slightly higher level than you, and then do it again.”
“And again, and again,” Amythyst said. She pointed, and numbers appeared in the air beside her, partially blocking Emily’s bland face. “You killed over forty thousand Wood Slimes, twenty-six thousand Forest Wolves, and nearly a hundred thousand Small Sewer Rats. That’s… ridiculous. You never talked to anyone unless you had to do it for a quest. You just logged in, slaughtered things, and logged back out. You sold items and equipment through the auction house so you didn’t have to interact with anyone, even though making individual sales would probably have made you more profit. When you reached level twenty, you took the Porter sub-class - which is one of the least popular, by the way, in spite of the very nice boons it grants to inventory - and spent every gold you had on spatial storage bags. You pulled your first job as a Mule that day, and you’ve never looked back.”
That was definitely admiration on Amythyst’s face. Ava blushed hotly. “I just did what I had to do,” she muttered. Looking back up, she glared into the green eyes watching her so closely. “And I need to keep doing it. Whatever you’re up to, you need to leave me out of it. If I don’t work, I’ll lose everything. In game, and in the real world.”
For the first time, Amythyst’s confidence cracked. “I… suspected that. But what if I tell you I can make it worth your while to try? If you succeed, you’ll never have to worry about working again. If you decide you want out, well,” she shrugged, “there’s an escape clause, of sorts.”
She pointed at Emily. “Let Emily here walk you through creating your ‘new’ character. You’ll get to keep all of your levels and stats, though your race, class, and skills will change. You can even keep looking like that, if you really want to.” She wrinkled her nose, pointing at AlphaOmegadon. A drop of drool trickled from the avatar’s slack lips, and Ava was absolutely certain Amythyst had made it happen.
Ava’s eyes narrowed. “It’s not anything illegal, is it? I mean, I don’t want to go to jail.”
Amythyst didn’t answer right away. Instead, she took a few steps away from Emily and Ava, circling around behind Alpha’s still form. When she was fully concealed by Alpha’s tall, brawny form, the avatar’s eyes flickered open, watery yellow gaze locking on Ava’s. Her voice was the gruff one Ava was so used to hearing come from her own lips.
“Really?” Alpha asked. “Do you really care? You live in a part of town SuperBat would be afraid to patrol, and you mostly eat half-rotten food. Your apartment is a death trap, and you won’t even tell your only friend what your life is really like. Would jail really be worse? Three meals a day, a cell larger than your whole apartment, and eight full hours of sleep every night? Plus, the odds that you’ll be stabbed or shot would go way down, statistically speaking.”
Alpha’s eyes closed, and Amythyst walked back out from behind Alpha’s once-again lifeless shape. “If you have to walk just a tiny bit on the wild side, does it really matter? I can promise that it’s very, very unlikely we’ll be caught, and if we are, and if you’re somehow convicted, I can make sure you go to a really nice prison. One of those places they send rich people, with massages and golf.”
Ava’s jaw had been dropping progressively lower and lower, and now Amythyst pushed it back up, just like she’d done with Alpha’s earlier. Ava shut her mouth with a click. She swallowed hard, feeling a thrill of… something. Something she hadn’t felt in a long time. Maybe something she’d never felt before.
“I… What will you pay me? What’s the escape clause? I want to know everything before I say anything.” A shiver ran down her back as Amythyst took another step, this time sliding behind Ava herself. She felt a gentle push between her shoulder blades, and the soft, warm scent of honeysuckle tickled Ava’s nose. “Talk to Emily. Create a new AlphaOmegadon. When you’re done, just say my name, and we’ll talk.”
Ava spun, but there was no one there.
Emily smiled, though her eyes remained oddly distant. “Welcome, Traveler,” she said in her emotionless contralto. “My name is Emily, and I’m here to help guide you through the process of creating your new character. Please, ask me anything.”