“I wish to congratulate you on your successful digital migration to the Epsilon System and am happy to inform you of the many different options we have for colonization. Currently, your balance after the migration is 1,734,528 UC and 193 karma. This amount is not sufficient to get our high-end plans, but there are many medium-range plans that are well within your means.” An ethereal voice said the moment I regained consciousness.
Jerald felt strange as he heard the voice talking to him and it took him a moment to try to remember what was going on. A few moments later he realized where he was, and what he was doing there. He was an outcast who was exiled from not only his country but his world, and he was outcast because he dared to fall in love with somebody he shouldn’t of. The woman was not a nice person either, but he couldn’t help his feelings, and like clockwork, she betrayed him and threw him away when he became an issue.
Jerald wasn’t given a choice to die or not, because ever since the people of Earth were brought into the Altran Alliance of worlds they had found a better way of dealing with criminals. They would have them judged and sent to the digital crossroads. The process was extremely painful, but if the process was successful they would be sent to one of the hundreds of systems to a digital purgatory where they could work their way back into the good graces and they could even have their souls placed back into a physical body at one of the many Altran worlds in the alliance.
He had no idea how it worked, but the pain was overwhelming, and he felt like his body and soul were compressed to the size of a grape and then burst. It was a horrible experience that no rational person would want to live through again. He had just survived that exact experience and his thoughts were interrupted by the voice again.
“Since this is the first time you have digitally transmigrated you have no digital body, and because of that we have provided a temporary body at no cost to you. The form will dissipate after 5 days, so I suggest you create a transitional body for any future digital transmigrations. Any further temporary digital bodies will cost 500 UC per day in the future.”
Jerald felt a strange sensation as suddenly his senses appeared from nowhere. He raised his hand and saw a gray hand without any definition in front of him, and when he looked down, he saw he was in a gray body that looked to be thin and gangling in nature. The first thing he thought of was the alien movie about creatures in gray that abducted people to do strange experiments. He also noticed his hand only had four fingers longer than what he had before.
Suddenly information about the form streamed into his mind and he knew that this species did not speak with vocalization, but with their mind. It was awkward but he could live with it, and even though he wanted to vocalize Jerald finally pushed the word out of his mind toward the voice and said. “Hello.”
“Good, it seems you adjusted nicely to the body.” The voice stated. “Now there are a couple of options for you. You could take the time to create a permanent body that will be held here and will be connected to your soul core, or you could just jump ahead and pick a path and complete your transmigration to your new sector in the Epsilon System. Whatever you choose you must bring up your soul interface by awakening the system in your soul core. This type of command is based on your intention and not the actual words you say, but to focus your intention you can use triggers as simple as thinking awake my interface with the intention being on doing just that.”
“Awaken interface.” Jerald thought focused on doing what the voice said.
Suddenly a screen popped up in front of him, and there was information in a language in what looked to be English. On the left side of the screen in the box was the gray gangling form of the body he was inhabiting, and on the right were seven tabs that were arranged vertically in the box. The names on the boxes were Core, Personas, Financial, Followers, Seeds, Bloodlines, and Sanctuary.
He looked at the screen and picked the first category which was core, and he opened the first thing it had was a picture of a small crystal that was rotating around, and to the right, It had some statistics, and he focused on them to see what was there.
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Name: Jerald Mercer
Title: Digital Transmigrater
Age: Day 1
Soul Core: Base Level 1 [15%]
Soul Energy: 123 Units
Soul Sanctuary: None
Personas: 0 (Temporary Persona Remaining time: 8957 minutes)
Soul Talents: Charismatic Essence, Eidetic Memory
Soul Shards: 0
Jerald looked at the information and didn’t really understand much of it, and to be honest with himself the only true things he understood were his name and age, because those were obvious. The title he had some understanding of because the voice had called him that, but he didn’t know what being a digital transmigrater truly meant.
The other thing he noticed was that his temporary body had almost 9000 minutes, but 5 days would be 7,200 minutes at the start. If going by 9,000 minutes that would be 5 days at 30 hours per day, and then he was shocked at how easy that was to figure out. He would have been oblivious to it in his old life, but it was clear as day now.
He backed out of the core category and then looked at the second one which was personas and he entered. Currently, his gray alien body was again on the left side, but on the right were some more tabs. The top one had Create Core Persona, while the second one had transient Persona. The third AI persona and the last box was the Persona Directory.
Jerald had no idea what to do, but he finally decided to take things one step at a time and make a more comfortable persona. He was confused about what to do, but then the moment he asked the question of how to make a permanent form here the information seemed to flow into his mind. He blinked as the information settled there and he tried to pick through it Finally he, understood that this was currently his temporary core body, so he needed to create a core persona. He focused on the create core persona button and the screen changed and suddenly things became much more complex.
There was so much detail in the creation of a persona, and every little detail cost money or reduced the cost. He wasn’t sure the reason why, but the base male human model was 10,000 UC and that was without hair and pale as chalk. When he added color to the skin the price increased with each tint, and when he added hair, eye color, muscle mass, and so forth it kept on increasing. It didn’t increase a horrible amount, but when he finally made a persona, he liked the total ended up being 84,230 UC. The issue was that the look of the persona wasn’t the end of it, because there was an option that gives the core persona added traits and abilities.
Jerald wasn’t sure what the purpose of the traits and abilities but the moment he entered a message came up and it said that because this was the first core persona created there would be a one-time only 40% discount on traits and abilities. Jerald sighed because it truly interested him, and he spent the next day going over all the talents and traits and what they did. He wasn’t sure if this was a carryover from his past life, but he felt excited when went over them. The problem there were just too many options, and they all cost some serious UC even with the discount.
The lists were broken down into three different categories which included talent, abilities, and bloodline. The talents were knacks that the person naturally had and didn’t require an action to do. They included things that made the person charismatic, intimidating, thrifty, and a hundred other types listed there. The abilities were different, and these things were things that you had to put into action or do. They included things like telekinesis, energy manipulation, communicating with creatures, invisibility, and many more. The last category of bloodline was different and why choosing one would give you some talents and abilities They were all racial abilities or familial abilities that opened certain pathways that would be unattainable otherwise.
Jerald had no idea what to choose and he slowly went through the different lists listing a few that he wanted to have. The first time through he picked five talents, four abilities, and two bloodlines. He looked down at the list and sighed as these were the ones, he felt he truly wanted.
Talents:
Friendly Aura: 13,358 UC
Advanced Comprehension: 14,627 UC
Mental Fortitude: 7,334 UC
Fortunate Attractor: 18,303 UC
Unusually Lucky: 29,352 UC
Abilities:
Healing Touch: 72,934 UC
Temporal Sight: 63,582 UC
Body Control: 31,257 UC
Shape Shift: 93,421 UC
Bloodlines:
Demonic Bloodline: 173,559 UC
Belmarion Bloodline: 183,523 UC
The total that came from his choices was 698,250 UC which was a huge chunk of his UC that he had. Though according to his understanding, these things being part of the core persona would always be in all other personas he created. He looked back over the list and thought about if there were any more that he wanted and sure enough, there were, but in the end, he only picked two more talents because he wasn’t sure how much more UC he would need and how long the remaining UC would last. He added the Familial Bond and Danger Sense to the talents racking up another 23,128 making the total 721,378.