“Turn a little to the left, please, and raise your left arm about five inches.”
I was in VR, but once again it wasn’t either the home instance or the game world. This was something like a fancy portrait studio. The half of the room that I was currently in was all green—floors, walls, and ceiling—generally a uniform bright green, but there were faint, darker green grid lines. It made me feel like I was in a weird holodeck set up with green screen technology. Which, in a way, I was.
The other half of the room had half a dozen people, most of whom I didn’t know, but Victoria Delacroix was supervising from where she reclined in a director’s chair. The only other woman was a muscular young dwarf of some sort, looking very out-of-place in her frilly and fancy maid’s uniform. Everyone else were trim and lithe butlers, albeit with fashion tending more to form than function. They all definitely took their style guidance from Victoria’s overly fancy outfit.
From the waist, I turned a bit to the left and raised up my sword arm as directed. Yes, sword. I was doing my first modeling gig as a mascot for the game, and the project that they were working on was to portray light, medium, and heavy armors in assorted rarities. Technically it was for a page on the game’s website that discussed classes, with a distinct focus on the easy-to-obtain, common classes like archer, elementalist, shaman, priest, and knight. So it was more like “newbie knight,” “low-level knight,” “mid-level knight,” “high-level knight,” and “decked-out-in-legendary-equipment knight.” And then the same for several other classes.
We had started with the heavy armor classes since metal armor—even bare-bones metal armor—took a lot more work to get into and out of than caster robes or ninja leotards.
At the moment, I was portraying a mid-level knight, wearing something like the proverbial chainmail bikini, except it was more like a chainmail, halter-top tankini. A metal collar called a gorget supported the weight of a swath of fine-linked chain mail. The armor was tapered narrow at the neck but broadened to cover the whole chest at the top of my currently non-existent bustline. From there it hung to just below the navel, providing perhaps adequate protection from attacks from the front. The chain mail was secured by four equally-spaced leather straps. The highest rested where the band of a bra would be, and the lowest was at the natural waistline.
The lower half of the armor was effectively a short, A-line skirt reaching from just below the “hem” of the top down to a little above mid thigh. Of course, a metal skirt was much heavier than a fabric one would be, but it would provide at least some degree of protection. More than might be expected, even, since combat in ECHO was a cross between hyper-realism and game systems: the Defense attribute contributed even for parts of the body that weren’t covered by layers of protection, which is how magical jewelry worked as well.
Of course, unlike the fantasy images of pin-up art, this chainmail tankini wasn’t worn against bare flesh. Never mind the chafing that metal against skin might cause, the chain links moved slightly in relation one to another. This left the possibility of pinching, and as anyone who’s ever caught themselves on a zipper knows, skin caught between two bits of metal HURTS.
No, instead the metal armor was worn over a thin, but padded, leotard-like leather outfit, a bit like a wrestler’s singlet except with sleeves—and laces. Leather, being far less stretchy than modern fabrics, couldn’t just be slipped into in a one-size-fits-most manner. Instead, the back of the leotard was laced from waist to nape. So, too, were the sleeves laced, from wrist to elbow and elbow to shoulder, leaving enough slack at the joints for mobility.
This was the role of the dwarven woman, to help me into and out of the assorted outfits and to make sure they fit properly. Outfits that laced or buckled or buttoned up the back are generally terribly difficult to manage without assistance—not that I had much personal experience with such outfits myself. Since we weren’t in the gameworld itself, I didn’t have access to the game systems to quickly equip and unequip the armor. Actually, despite being in my game avatar, I didn’t have access to any of the game systems at all, not the character sheet, not the menus, not the messaging, not the map.
It was a little disconcerting at first, especially with no visible way to log out, but just as the behind-the-scenes mechanics of virtual reality meant that I was comfortable and moved naturally in the drastically different bodies of my hivatar and game avatar, I didn’t feel “out of place” in this section of virtual reality, either. And while there was no visible way to log out, Victoria had explained to me that I could leave at any time simply by willing to do so. Alternatively, I could walk out of the studio and back into the waiting-room-slash-office-area that I had arrived in and return to my home instance via the transfer pattern in the corner.
That had been more than a bit strange when I had first encountered it. When I had logged in to ECHO after returning home from the library and a few other errands, I had arrived to see a new structure in the home instance—a small, wooden hut a bit like a changing booth. An oddly subdued Jasmine had told me that Victoria and Nazhai had arrived to have it installed, giving me a relatively permanent (so long as the building existed) way to go between the home instance and a section of the office-like work area of the development staff. All I had to do was enter the hut and fly down to touch the glowing mandala-like inscription on the wooden floor. And poof! from flying mermaid in my home instance to human schoolgirl in waiting room.
“Okay. Perfect. Just like that.” The man who had directed me to raise my arm was speaking again. He looked and sounded almost human, but something that I couldn’t quite place my finger on was off. He didn’t appear to be elven or Faetouched, so perhaps he—like the Ratkin GM—had a non-playable race as his GM avatar. For all that Victoria was present and supervising, this guy seemed to be running the show. I didn’t catch his name, but all the others present were treating him with deference.
I held my pose, trying to ignore the discomfort radiating from my outstretched and raised sword arm. What occurred next was by now familiar, since prior to the chainmail tankini outfit for a knight, I had already modeled two different sets of banded mail, one incredibly heavy set of half-plate bronze mail, and a couple basic leather outfits with daggers as props instead of the current sword and shield. Three concentric circles appeared on the floor around my feet and rose, slowly rotating as they scanned upward. I was reminded of a photocopier. Then, when they faded out above my head, one of the other butlers ducked beneath the blanket of an old-fashioned and very steampunk-style camera while a third used a different camera, one that looked like an expensive lens attached to an overlarge cell phone, to take photos from different angles and positions.
“Good. Good. Good. Okay, take a minute to rest that arm. Then I want you to step backward with your left leg and raise your shield so it looks like you’re peeking over the top of it at me.”
I had asked Victoria why they really needed me to do this. The whole shebang seemed a little low-tech for a system that could create avatars and images out of nothing. I mean, photographs and even a scanned 3D image were kind of … behind the times even for technology before VR where fully posable and deformable computer graphics models could be created. Couldn’t they just take my avatar data and construct an image using whatever armor and pose they wanted?
Her answer had surprised me. “Well, first,” she had said, “it’s a matter of publicity rights and personal privacy. A virtual reality avatar is you much more than a traditional on-the-screen game character ever could be. For many people, you not included of course, their game avatar is exactly or almost exactly their own out-of-the-game appearance. Sure, sure, we could have negotiated a contract that covered those rights in that manner, but that leads into the second point. A manipulatable model of you would lack that certain something, that ‘ineffable spark,’ that makes you, you.”
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She smiled, “In other words, a doll doesn’t have a personality. And a mascot is more than just an image, a mascot has personality. So, you see, it’s you and not just your appearance that will make this work. Finally,” she raised a third finger, “it’s fun.” Seeing my skeptical look, she laughed, “You’ll be surprised, I think. And, in the end, if you don’t think it was fun, I’ll buy you dessert.”
Somewhat to my surprise, I was discovering that she was right. I took the lunging, sword-thrusting pose that was requested and followed that up with minor shifts to the placement and angle of my feet requested by one of the other men. As I did so, I realized that while I may technically be working, I was also having fun. In that way, it wasn’t too far removed from the volunteer work I did in the library: kids like Noabelle would have made any teacher’s job fun, but I enjoyed working with even the quietest, most withdrawn of the children. True, it was work and not play, but it was something I enjoyed doing.
Likewise, even though I, myself, wasn’t doing much beyond wearing what I was told to wear and posing as I was told to pose, I was having just about as much fun—albeit a different manner of fun—as anything else I had yet done in virtual reality. It made me have second thoughts about the Modeling skill that the system had prompted when Tabitha was helping me shop for a new outfit. If I had had access to the game systems just now, I might have just given in to impulse and taken the skill. But third and fourth thoughts occurred long before I would have a chance to get into the game. Common sense dictated that I’d have to make use of the skill frequently enough to level it up in order to improve my attributes and level up myself. And just where and when would I be able to do something like this in the gameworld? Maaaayybe it could become a future secondary skill, but it wasn’t really primary skill material.
Nevertheless, even if I couldn’t make use of it in the game, I could relax and enjoy myself now. It didn’t even bother me that much anymore when—
“Okay, that’s it for this set. Please switch to your primal form and take the first pose again.” Immediately after the scanning circles and the photographer had finished with the lunging pose, right on cue with my thoughts, the guy directing the project requested that I take my other form. Since the intent of the project was to display various rarities of armors in the different weights, it made sense to have more than one character model. I don’t know if they were doing something similar with a male model or two, but because my game character’s normal form was diminutive and petite and my primal form was anything but, using me gave them two different figures to use.
Unlike in the game itself, there was no weird subjective time or shifting of perspectives. When I concentrated on switching to my primal form, it just happened. One moment I was short and small and the next … I was not. Also, unlike the game, there didn’t seem to be a limit on the duration. Modeling for several poses had to take longer than five minutes per outfit, yet the form never expired on its own. When it was time to switch to a new outfit, I concentrated on returning to my regular game avatar, and it occurred.
As a consequence, I was starting to get used to being tall, buxom, and solidly built—even beyond the “everything feels natural” effect of virtual reality. It helped, I think, that I didn’t “watch” my own transformation. It probably helped even more than none of the guys or even the girls present “ogled” me in my primal form. In other words, neither the systems nor the others around me drew any attention to the way that Hidden Nature changed me.
The process was almost exactly the same as with my character’s default form: “turn a little more to the left,” “raise your arm a couple more inches,” and so on. There were only two differences. First, I changed back to my regular, small self before changing outfits, so there was no “getting dressed” in my larger form. The dwarven woman would have struggled to deal with laces and buckles on someone approaching three meters in height.
The other major difference was that the outfits did change somewhat, though not as dramatically as my newbie outfit had, when I transformed. Everything did scale upward with me, which was unlike what I had encountered during the fight with Sar’Glagalth. The shape and materials also adjusted for the change in my own shape and size. This chainmail tankini, well halter top and skirt, still offered nearly the same coverage as it had when it and I were smaller, but the leather underpinnings were a bit more skimpy: higher cut over the legs, wider gaps where the parts were laced together, and a deeper neckline at the back, where it wasn’t covered by metal or straps. Further, since my primal form had hooves instead of normal feet, the laced-up leather boots became something more like shin guards—or the leg equivalent to bracers, greaves … if I remembered the terminology correctly. Who said gaming experience would never be helpful?
Apparently, according to Victoria anyway, metal armor was primary for protection and cloth outfits were primary for fashion—with leather striking a balance between the two—so metal armor didn’t necessarily become revealing on “sexier” frames whereas leather did to a degree and cloth changed much more. It was possible to craft non-revealing cloth and leather armor for more “heroic figures” (her words, not mine), but it required deliberate intentions.
By means of example, she spoke of a leather outfit I was familiar with. “Those leather half-curiasses your young friends wear,” she said, “they’d be much the same on boys or girls or anyone with a smaller, slender frame. On the ghost friend of yours, they’d still provide the same protection but not the same coverage. And on some big, buff, muscular guy, they might very well manifest as a strappy leather harness, the sort seen on fantasy barbarians and the like.”
It made me a little worried how the dress and leggings of my new outfit would react, but that was a concern for another time….
Time progressed … strangely both quickly and slowly. Like I mentioned, I was having fun so it wasn’t like the whole process was dragging on, but every time I looked over at the stylized grandfather clock at the back of the room, it’s hands seemed to have barely moved at all.
After the variety of metal armors with their assorted props were done, we moved on to leathers and the cloths. Even there, though, the outfits didn’t change too drastically in the shift from normal to primal forms.
The “worst,” perhaps, was a cloth-wearing, eastern-themed character, using a long, curved blade on the end of a staff, a polearm a bit like a naginata, I suppose. This class wasn’t one of the easy-to-obtain ones, but was rather an example of a hidden class. Known as a Sun’s Ray, the class’s fighting style was a combination of light and fire spells coupled with a graceful, flowing, dance-like martial art using bladed staffs. Her higher-level outfit was gold-embroidered scarlet silk: an ankle-length dress with a high collar, cap sleeves, and an almost-indecently-high slit up the right leg. Embroidered flats wholly unsuited for outdoor combat and embroidered wrist and ankle bands, three fingers’ width long, completed the outfit. Transformed, however, the dress became almost immodestly short, sleeveless, and with a cleavage cutout almost big enough to turn the top into straps of a sling rather than the bodice of a dress. It really was not that much different from some of the over-sexualized outfits worn by some characters in fighting games, but it felt much worse to be the character wearing it rather than seeing it on screen.
Nevertheless, by then I had become almost accustomed to it….
“Okay. That’s a wrap. Good work, everyone.”
Finally, after portraying a score or so of different classes including such diverse playstyles as Tinkers and Tailors or Soldiers and Spies—with five outfits and several poses each across both of my character’s forms—we were done, at least for now. As the guys were leaving, the dwarven woman helped me out of the last outfit, something that was almost more straps and laces than it was concealing fabric. And in no time, I was back into the outfit I wore in game: short, Asian-themed dress and opaque tights. While I still preferred to think of it as a tunic and leggings, over the course of the modeling session I had worn enough dresses and skirts (many of which were actually leather or metal armor), that it was now almost natural to recognize the dress for what it was.
“So…,” Victoria said, approaching me after the dwarf, too, had left. “From where I was sitting, it looked like you were enjoying yourself. Was I right, or do I owe you a dessert?”
“It surprised me, but, yes, it was kind of fun. You were right, Miss Victoria.”
“See? I knew you would have fun. Well then, that means that you owe me a dessert, instead.” Then, she placed her hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she continued, forestalling my objections, “the place I have in mind is here in our virtual offices, so there’s no money involved. Also no calories, which is important!”
With one hand in the crook of my arm as if I were escorting her, she led me out of the studio. And as I stepped over the threshold into the hallway, my form shimmered and changed as I once again was no longer in my game avatar, but rather the schoolgirl-ish form apparently based on my hivatar. This time, however, rather than a blouse and a pleated skirt, I was wearing a blouse and a pair of pants: girls’ pants, with a distinct lack of any pockets up front and only the tiniest of belt loops, but pants nonetheless. The braided leather belt accompanying it was almost more ornamental than functional.
Seeing my startled look, Victoria smiled. “I took a moment to adjust your ‘formal attire’ while you were modeling. We can talk about it over dessert; we’re almost there. Take the next right, and it will be the third door on the left.”