Pain, and the mildly dulling effect of painkillers, had been a constant companion of Seraph's since the day she'd been shot at home; when she woke up beneath the embassy... the first thing she noticed was the lack of pain. She felt... amazing. As she slowly crawled out of the glass tube she'd been laying in, a nurse in set of green scrubs was standing over her; he was holding a bathrobe for her to put on, which, with a brief flush of embarrassment, she slipped into to cover herself, as she slowly rose to her feet.
She felt so.... light. Amazing. As if she could walk on a cloud.
The nurse looked her over... and gave a nod. "Ma'am. You've got a set of paperwork... new IDs, new bank accounts, complete with the payment of your bounties inside.. that will be coming to you... I don't handle any of that, they just wanted me to give you this packet with your room key, and you can talk to them upstairs about it. I'm here to give you a few warnings and clean up."
Seraph nodded, and stretched a bit, feeling the softness of the robes... and looked up at him. She... didn't like the loss of height. "Some sort of downsides to the new form I wasn't aware of?"
"A few. You currently weigh about forty-five pounds, and without any training, can easily lift over four-fifty. Your bones are both lighter and more durable than the original equivalents, as are the muscles. You might be tempted to try a few feats of strength, lifting couches, people, all sorts of things. Don't. You are like a feather. You can easily lift my weight, but if you tried to pick up me, you'd fall right over and maybe hurt me. Most heavy-grav folks wear weighted clothing in normal gravity conditions, and generally train and bulk up a bit; I'd say a peak for your frame would be maybe eighty pounds, with a max lift of two thousand; you could probably get more, but at a cost of flexibility. If you want that, though, you'll need to work out and build muscles for a few months."
A low grumble. "Fine, fine." Images of superheroic lifting of cars flickered through her mind, only to be dashed. "Anything else?"
"Your appetite is going to be constant. For peak health, I'd recommend you just consistently eat small amounts throughout the day; carbs and oils are a must. You can get by on three meals a day, but you'll always be hungry; I'd recommend eating a box of donuts and a few pounds of jerky a day until you reach your target weight, scattered throughout the day."
"That... sounds amazing!" Jerky was okay. But having a nurse recommend donuts? She'd already been recommending some delicious meals for the former augment, this was nice.
"And go to a gym. Lift at least a few hundred pounds, every day, at least a few times, for a few months... or get some weighted clothes that are a couple hundred pounds. You can lift more if you want, but thanks to how your genotype is made, that'll be enough to get you to the ideal."
Two hundred pound weighted clothing. It was hard to imagine what that would even look like... but she'd try. She accepted the plastic packet. "Okay. Do I have some clothes to wear out? My old ones won't quite fit anymore."
"Head back to your room. Security will meet you there with some clothes, more information, and some advice."
She thought for a moment. ".....Could they be weighted clothes? Might as well get started now." If she wore them from the very beginning, she'd be used to them. And if she ever did need to throw her weight around, it'd be best to actually have some weight to throw around.
"...Will do." The nurse nodded. He might appreciate that she was following his advice... but it was hard to read him behind the surgical mask, as he started cleaning out the machine.
She stared, for a moment.... and the smell hit her. Good lord. That.... was that her? There was a vile, semi-organic sludge being pumped out of the machine, mixed with hot soapy water... which meant... the last stage was a cleaning cycle. The other... what, sixty pounds? of her weight had just fallen off of her while she lay there, converted into... that stuff... and then she was rinsed off.
And this poor nurse had to deal with it. No wonder he was being abrupt with her. She headed out the door through the embassy; not a soul batted an eye at the woman waltzing through wearing nothing but a bathrobe, which... might have been concerning under other circumstances.
***
She'd been a bit anxious after an hour passed, and started watching one of the local sims; it was about some lunatic who had his brain-chip installed in a feline body so he could spy on people; when a knock came at the door.
She opened it, looking down at a heavyset security guard in the standard United Worlds blue uniform.. dragging a cart behind him. As she held open the door, he wheeled it in... and glanced at her. "Alright, miss. I've got a fitted suit for you, the training variety... it won't look too out of place, tons of heavy-worlders wear them on normal worlds just so they won't feel as bad when they get back home. Its actually moderately durable armor, though thats not what its for, and made to fit over a skinsuit, or under a set of coveralls. Got a random handful of outfits for you to choose from, a photo ID and a set of credentials, names, passwords..."
He extended the ID. "Now. I've also got something we give folks to help with your situation, if you want, but you probably won't need. If you're going to be around people you once knew, we've got an earpiece and choker combo... basically filters out your old name. Makes it so you won't react if someone mentions it, or accidentally say it. You'll feel a faint buzz for the choker, but the earpiece won't alert you at all, audibly, just record it and message you on a delay so a watcher won't connect the response."
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
"...And what's my new name?"
"Erica Grayson. Feel free to get a legal name change to whatever's comfortable for you; your new ID belonged to a young woman of your age from the Sirius sector who died several years ago; no surviving family or known contacts. She was from Adamant... a heavy-grav world that was about four Gs at the lowest and five Gs at the highest. "
She nodded slowly. "Well then. That's... it? I've got a new ID, a new... comm-unit keyed to my new genes, a good-sized bank account... and I can do what I'd like?"
He chuckled. "I have it on good authority that you'll be receiving a job offer from a mercenary organization, soon. You already have enough money to retire comfortably here, don't match your old appearance, not even height or build, have the wrong genetic profile, your implant has even been coded with Erica's ID... so long as you don't do something stupid.."
He focused on her, dead serious. "Like log into one of your old accounts, either to chat with old friends, or for a Sim game like that one you play as a ranger, or use knowledge from your old life to your advantage in them..."
His tone lightened up again. "Then you'll be fine. At this point, the only risk of you being discovered is your own actions. So... do good. We've got you a hotel room, and can quietly drop you off at the lobby, with a trace showing you arrived from the Sirius sector on a transport today. There's a whole convention out there, filled with like-minded people. I'd recommend going out, making some new friends, building a new life... and if you want to work for our... associates... just accept the job offer when it comes."
***
On the plus side, the gaming scene was generally a local affair. Your various digital worlds people played around with were restricted by the simple fact that, even with FTL communication, lag between star systems made playing with someone light-years away impossible; so it would be an entirely new community no matter what.
On the downside... the most popular games used a galactic, cross-border network that would have instanced, NPC copies of you that acted based on your history other people could interact with in limited ways, and would let you carry your progress to new places. If she were her old self, she could login and play as her ranger here, with all of her progress.
Which meant... she needed to start over from square one. Should she do it here, though? Did the ASU work out of Tybalt, or somewhere else, closer to the Alliance?
Well. She should check things out, at least, see if there were anything new, fun. If there was a brand new game, she could start off new with everybody else.
The 'Sim Expo 300' was an enormous event; she could see a holographic projection over the convention center of a globe, with "SE300" spinning around it... and a train running around the convention center, with diagrams, directions... she could spend days walking through this place and never see the same thing twice.
People were wearing costumes and armor, showing off different designs; ranging from classic antique military designs to modern equivalents to fantasy designs; elves and cat-people were the two most popular themes, and two people in Vegeta costumes were using field emitters and holographic projectors to stage a fight flying over the convention floor; she shook her head, amused, as she slid through the crowd.
Some of these people were wearing costumes. Some had actually had themselves altered; surgically or genetically; to look like fictional characters, or just fictional species. The 'Elf' sector of the convention always promised to be amusing; less because of any particular creativity, than because the people in it who, one way or another, had made themselves into pointy-eared humanoids, always had a loud argument over whether any given species of long-lived pointy-eared people counted as elves.
That section was right next to the new release section, so she stopped for a few minutes to admire the costume... or engineering.. designs. Women had used these things as an excused to show off sexy outfits for longer than humans had traveled through space, and the Shade Children cosplay from a property released just a decade ago looked distinctly like the centuries-old Drukhari cosplay across the hall; and the two women, who wore outfits closer to bondage gear than cosplay, were both decrying the other's costume for absurd reasons.
She shook her head in amusement as she entered the 'New Release' section... hoping to find something to her taste.
First there was a whole section for modern-day combat sims; where barely fictionalized versions of the real world military factions were simulated in varying levels of accuracy. Hardcore gamers could play a game where the pain felt real, the weapons and armor all felt like the real thing, and they were fighting against, essentially, enemy soldiers given a dumbed-down AI with a coat of off-brand paint.
For a moment, she was startled at all the brown uniforms.... there were actual, Directorate military people here, watching and observing everything like hawks... but then... these people were the ones who wrote the Petrov convention after the second galactic war, and were paranoid that someone might try to use video game AIs to program real-world self-replicating killing machines.
She frowned. That... was actually a problem. The rules forbade self-replicating AI, and they forbade giving AI control of weapons, the ability to shoot without human intervention. But... there were heat-seeking missiles. Landmines that ignored people with the right IFF. Where did you draw the line?
She shook her head as she kept walking. She didn't want modern military simulations. She wanted fantasy. Magic. And as she entered the Fantasy section of the new release hall, she stopped to look around... the cosplayers were just as prevalent here, but now it was far more of the fantasy element. She could make out at least six Jonin the wise copies, surprisingly well done, and several Aragorns who were so good she could even tell which version of the ranger they were cosplaying, from the original, ancient, version done by some human actor name Viggo; who one of them might actually have had surgery to copy the face, he looked so lifelike; to the most recent version where a band of lunatics actually got enough fans together to build real armies of Gondor and Mordor and have an actual war, really killing people... though of course, they'd make sure not to use any weapons that could destroy a brain-chip.
She sighed... and stopped focusing on t he people, the politics, the nonsense of reality... she was here for the games! What sort of absurd obsession was she going to be spending the hours she should be sleeping on for the next decade?