As I stood there, puckering up my mouth from a lingering burst of sour from the calibration and wondering just what was coming next, a new sound entered the room. From behind me, a soft feminine voice boldly inquired, “Well, what have we here? Another wannabe adventurer?”
I turned, saw her, and opened my eyes widely in surprise. Hovering at about eye level was a small girl, maybe about six inches tall, with a inquisitive-but-friendly expression on her face. Though her words could have been snide or snarky, they weren’t said in such a manner, and the spark in her tilted eyes and the smile on her coral-coloured lips showed her friendly intentions.
I couldn’t help staring, though. For while she was a faerie of sorts, she was quite a bit different from the butterfly-winged girls of fantasy art or the winged specks of light from a certain video game franchise. To begin with, she was more mermaid than faerie!
From a bit below her bellybutton upward, she appeared (mostly) as a normal girl, albeit one quite a bit shorter than average: fair skin, two arms ending in hands, proportionately large breasts (though not overly so), a cute face, and blonde hair almost the shade of mine. Downward, though, where there would be hips and legs and feet, she had the tail of a fish—proportionately wider where a girl would have hips and tapering downward before flaring out in a wide tail fin. Her scales were tiny and delicate, a pale seafoam green that was faintly iridescent and shimmered as if still wet. Her tail fin, the two fins along her sides, and the large wing-like fins on her back were just a shade darker than her scales, and the spines giving them form were coral-colored, like the halter-top bikini top she wore and matching to the coral accents on my pajamas. All in all, her appearance seemed calibrated to be complementary to mine. If my twin’s assist thus appeared in pink and plaid, she may end up having words with me...
Slack-jawed, I gawked for a long moment before gathering my wits. “Ah, well, I guess you could say that,” I responded. “The message said to wait for character creation; are you here to help with that?”
The faerie-slash-mermaid fluttered her not-quite-wings and floated closer until she was a bare two handwidths from my face, and with that the irreverent half-formed query of my sister’s faerie’s appearance fluttered away. Or, rather, half-formed thoughts were superceded by the fully formed faerie in front of me. “That, and more.” She then peered into my eyes. “Possibly much more.”
“Uh… what…?” I’m sorry, but I’m not at my brightest when distracted by a pair of well-proportioned faerie breasts right in front of my face. Well, a little lower than eye-level, since since she was looking me eye-to-eye, but still….
With a giggle and a hint of a wink, she fluttered backward to a more reasonable conversational distance. “Besides character creation,” she explained, “we AI assistants help you adventurers with all sorts of behind-the-scenes stuff: inventory management, quest log updates, experience tracking, bug reports, the menus.... You know, all the meta stuff that makes Elemental Chrysanthemum Homeland Online a game rather than just a digital playground. We help manage your home instance, and if the adventurer gets a certain feat, we can even join him or her in the world as a companion.” Forestalling that description from giving my distracted mind the wrong impression, she clarified, “Think ‘witch’s familiar,’ but without the whole ‘deal with the devil’ contract part.”
“Ah.” I nodded. “Well, then, how should I cal— ah, address you? ‘Miss Assistant’ or ‘Madame Mermaid’ don’t seem especially polite. Speaking of which, do the other assistants look like you? My sister is playing, but she’s not really big into mermaids.”
She smiled, but a little wryly. “To answer your second question first, no. Each AI assistant is generated by a complex algorithm that takes into account user appearance and preferences as determined during the synchronization process. With no small amount of randomness for good measure. As for my name,” she continued, “my system designation would be mostly meaningless to you, and human speech and auditory systems are not really configured to process the language of my people. I will take a name to complement yours when your character is created.”
I shrugged. “I’ll accept that your system identification is probably a long sequence of letters and numbers…”
“Four hundred and eighty-four hex-encoded alphanumeric,” she inserted.
“...but I’d still like to hear your proper name before you go renaming yourself for my benefit. If that’s okay?”
She giggled again, sounding a fair bit younger than her figure suggested, but if she was only created moments ago when I started logging in, I guess she would be relatively young. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” What followed was a stream of chirps, trills, and clicks that hovered just at and maybe above the upper limit of frequencies I could hear. It was almost more felt or sensed than strictly heard. It was probably meaningful and poetic to a dolphin, whale, bat, … or another mermaid-faerie hybrid. However, to me it was just as meaningless as if she had recited her system identification. Prettier, I’m sure, the way birdsong is, but unintelligible.
“I’m—Well, I’m sorry. You were right. I didn’t understand anything, and probably didn’t even hear all of it, but it sounded pretty.” I pouted slightly, “I wish I could have understood it, though.”
She smiled at the implied compliment but then her expression took a serious turn. “That could be possible,” she nodded slowly, “but it would require you to give me permission to modify your hivatar, and there are costs associated.”
“Hivatar?” I hadn’t heard the word before, nor had it been in the information I had browsed today.
“The word ‘hivatar’ is short for ‘home instance avatar.’” I don’t know how she did it, but a chalkboard replaced the shiny monitor wall and she used two colors of chalk, pink and white, to write things out and draw diagrams, as if she were a school teacher. She even was wearing a pair of black-rimmed glasses and had her hair up in a severe bun. The bikini top spoiled the schoolmarm presentation, however.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
“The home instance is a place between the non-virtual world and the game world of Elemental Chrysanthemum Homeland Online. It is not the game world but it is still virtual reality. The home instance serves as a buffer and allows players to take care of game-related tasks such as creating game avatars, checking contact list and messaging, reading patch notes, and the like.” She went on for a bit longer, explaining that banned or financially-suspended players could still access the home instance but not the game and that the the home instance was private to each player and his or her AI assistant.
“If I understand you correctly, I naturally log in looking like I do when I climb into the FIVR pod, but that can be changed for a cost, the game’s version of non-pay-to-win, cosmetic microtransactions, and the home instance can be changed the same way plus through various rewards earned in-game?”
“Very good, B-plus answer.” She drew a smiley-face, a star, and a B+ on the chalkboard.
“Not an ‘A’?” I inquired.
“Say instead ‘macrotransactions,’ and your answer would have been better. Also remember that hivatar customization can only be done once every one-hundred and eighty-two point five non-virtual calendar days, with a cost dependent on the scale of customization. Purchases for the home instance are likewise limited, but to a currency amount rather than just once.”
“To prevent people from spending too much too quickly?”
“Indeed,” she said, nodding. “Studies have shown that a sizable number of players in other games grow disillusioned and quit when there is not a limit on purchases using non-virtual currency. Therefore, the limits.” She fluttered her wings and drifted over from the chalkboard to me. As she did so, both the wall and her appearance returned to normal. Well, if a diminutive winged mermaid could ever be considered ‘normal.’
“What is the limit, then? And, wait, that chalkboard didn’t cost me, did it?”
She giggled again and shook her head. Honestly, some others might find a giggle rather than a regular laugh to quickly get annoying, but I found it cute and endearing. “It was a transient manifestation to illustrate a point. It has no more a cost than the interfaces you will use to create a character. And the limit currently is,” a slight almost unnoticeable pause followed; perhaps she was doing a behind-the-scenes query or calculation. “Two thousand, forty-eight dollars; that is a maximum cost of one thousand, twenty-four dollars for hivatar customization and the current maximum cap of one thousand, twenty-four dollars for home instance purchases. Knowing this, do you still wish to allow me permission to modify your hivatar? The payment will be deducted from your financial institution of record.”
I blinked, a bit taken back. True, for a millionaire, a mere thousand dollars shouldn’t seem like too much, but I had grown up poor, and instincts are still instincts. Furthermore, even thousands add up quickly if spent frivolously. It only takes a thousand of them to make a million, after all.
She fluttered around as I hesitated, “You don’t need to make an immediate decision. Besides, you really should begin to create your character for the game world. Remember, the company’s product and what they want you to spend your time in is the world of Elemental Chrysanthemum Homeland Online and not the home instance buffer between the non-virtual and the game worlds.”
“No, that’s okay. I was just considering things. I don’t have to spend to customize the instance yet, and that will be unlocked via gameplay anyway. I can afford a thousand or so to be able to understand your language and speak your name properly while I’m in between worlds. It’s only polite.”
As I said that, a holographic screen appeared in front of me. It was pale seafoam green bordered with pink, which the game apparently decided were my colors, and the text was predominately white outlined in a much darker seafoam green to provide contrast:
Please confirm the following transaction:
* Authorization for hivatar modification (quantity 1/1) -- cost $1024
WARNING: This purchase is time-limited. A countdown of 4,380 hours will begin after payment, and subsequent purchases of this customization option will not be allowed until the countdown expires.
Both the word ‘warning’ in its all-caps and the number of hours were in red. Below the text were two buttons, one for ‘authorize payment and permission’; the other for ‘cancel transaction.’
Decisively, despite my earlier hesitation, I tapped on the button to authorize. There was a brief animation of an hourglass spinning while the company’s servers contacted my bank to process the payment; then, the window updated to show the payment was accepted and the countdown had started. Simultaneously, the AI assistant spoke.
“To confirm, you wish to authorize me to modify your hivatar so that you are able to speak, hear, and comprehend the language of my people?” She smiled, but there was a hint of mischief sparkling in her eyes, as if she knew something I didn’t. Well, beyond all the obvious stuff, anyway.
“Yes,” I nodded, and in an instant, things were vastly different. There were no sparkles of pink and seafoam, no spotlight beams of light, no sudden upsurge of theme music, or anything else to signify a change. But she was now a little bigger than I … or, rather, I was a little smaller than her. Startled, I looked down at myself, and saw … a girl who could have been the AI assistant’s little sister or younger cousin. Where the AI had scales and fins of pale seafoam green, mine were closer to pink than coral. Where she had coral accents, mine were a slightly darker seafoam. Where she wore a halter-top bikini, I wore a pink bandeau that sparkled like silk woven with starlight. We both were blonde, and while hers was loose and free, mine was in a high ponytail and tied off with an overlarge pink ribbon.
While the bandeau was probably clue enough, the smallish curves it concealed made things indisputable. While I was closer to flat than to the AI assistant’s curves, I was definitely a mermaid rather than a merman! Argh, my manly pride!
I looked toward her, a glance that was probably more than half pout, and she responded to my implied question. It took a moment for my mind to catch on, but she wasn’t speaking in English and I was understanding it, despite the trills, clicks, chirps, and other sounds of her decidedly non-human language.
She flew close and, hovering, flared wings and fins, introducing herself in her language. It would translate to English roughly as
Then she named me.