After hearing Jux’s ominous last words to them, Marty and Rayne were forced into character creation. They had a plan and no way of contacting the AI directly until they got into the game and found a shrine or something.

So Marty went to the vault world in a semi-corporeal humanoid body to pick their starting items.

At the same time, Rayne went into the menu for actual character creation. She had created an androgynous elven looking body with small breasts. She was in the middle of trying to find a skin tone that would fit the half-dark elf and half-human heritage she had in her mind for this character. when the world's most ugly future punk spacesuit appeared on her, it looked like someone making a human-size suit from 15 smaller suits.

{My god Marty what are we wearing?} She sent in a horrified mental message to her husband.

His return was confused. {My Martian Master Summoner gear, I know it won’t provide as many minions as other summoner gear, but I can squeeze the most damage and efficiency per summon. This build makes for the best passive defences while we build our starting base and gather resources early on.}

{I thought you said we would pick our outfit together} She sounded a little hurt.

A sudden realization hit Marty {Ohhhhhhh, yes and no. I said we could pick you an armour set as well, we can get a second set using our cosmetic clothing slots. If you don’t want something to try your own fighting style you can just pick purely cosmetic “armour” anything in those cosmetic item slots visually overrides the armour that provides our stats. Just a sec I’ll show you.}

A moment later they were wearing a suit of blue and gold fantasy plate mail with an aquatic motif.

Marty sent her an explanation {So right now we are wearing the same space suit for it’s summoning stats. Then we are also wearing a suit of armour that gives melee bonuses in underwater fighting but we don’t have those stat bonuses because the aquatic armour is in our cosmetic clothing slots.}

Now Rayne sounded liked she figured something out. {Oh, so by pick clothes together, you meant that you would min/max your clothing choice for combat stats. Then let me pick our visual outfit because you can’t fashion.}

His mental voice sounded brighter. {you can pick the dyes too! I wonder if I can hand that functionality over to your menu.}

He sent his voice out to Jux, {Hey since Rayne is doing our visual character creation can you add the clothing options and dyes from the vault to her menu?}

{ Pretty please, just this once?} Rayne added sweetly

Jux didn’t respond audibly or mentally. However, the flashing clothing menu that had been added to her character creation display with a timer showing 1h 39m 56s showed she had given the option a strict limit.

They each split back to their respective tasks. Rayne going back to perfecting their new avatar’s body before worrying about clothes yet, finding a clothing option to hide the visuals of each item, for now. This all added to her menu’s existing choices about underwear and bras.

Marty continued hunting down key items for his builder/summoner build that he thought could carry them through any fights or difficulties in the game until around the middle of Apocalypse-mode.

He had no plans to allow the activation of Apocalypse-mode until they had strip-mined everything easier to get from the world. You had to beat the devil king in a running battle across half the hell biome at the deepest part of the game world to activate Apocalypse-mode, which would then change the whole game world. making the easiest forest biome at the start almost as dangerous as the depths of hell had been before the mode started.

Later versions of Terrania made it so you could upgrade items from earlier in the game to late game items by merging them. This is how he merged the Ankh Shield that blocks most early game status effects, with the alien Captain’s Ultra Alloy Shield which was similar but for apocalypse mode. Then that special fused item could have modifiers in the title to boost attack speed or defence.

Then another game had a workstation that let you fuse a low tier item in to replace a title modifier. This let him make dozens of the Ultra Alloy Ankh Sheilds with situational bonuses like Lucky to prevent fall damage. Or Toasty which prevented damage from blocks that burned naturally and lowered the damage from magma. Those were a bit basic as his wings and shoes prevented fall damage and provided some heat protection respectively. The hard part was picking what his last 2 accessories for his combat build should be, then he could smuggle some extra accessories for utility and discounts from NPCs in his cosmetic accessory slots.

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Then he looked in a chest with an item that gave the person who used it an extra accessory slot, bringing him from 5 to 6, then he remembered they were going to be playing on the hardest difficulty setting which granted an extra accessory slot as well giving him 7 equipped and 7 cosmetic items in total. This let him load up enough items to have the shield boots and wings plus 4 items either for boosting summons or 4 items for making quick construction of buildings easier that he can switch to, plus both items that provide discounts from NPC merchants, and the coin that made monsters drop a bit of money per hit rather than just when they die.

Thankfully each accessory could be hidden, So his Speedy Eruption Sneakers were currently visible, alongside the Speedy Rainbow Fairy Wings he had dyed black and purple, making them exude black and purple light effects that only really worked cause it was a game. The sneakers looked like volcano themed Jordans(running shoes) until you got running fast enough. Then, they would glow and give a boost of speed that deals a bit of fire damage to creatures that touch you. He left the shoes and wings visible for now so that his wife would know that they were parts of the look she would have to work around. He used another vial of black and purple dye on the shoes making the swirling magma flow design look like a wave of dark energy.

He messaged his wife about the accessories. {We can hide the wings and boots like other accessories, but they will appear when their visual effects happen regardless. Like if we fly or run fast. So I figured it would be better to let you work around them, The rainbow fairy wings are gaudy as all hell, but with this dye, I thought you could work something like a dark fey theme in addition to your dark elf thing, elves are often a type of fey, so maybe the wings are a sign of our noble blood or something.}

He continued on. {There are other possible boots with similar effects, but the visual effects of an item are also affected by the dye so when we run or fly fast enough, the boots will wreathe us in black and purple flames, that will spread to any foe that touches us.}

He could feel the dripping sarcasm coming from his wife {Oh no! my humble Drow princess character idea will have to be worked around to fit the fact that we can what? fly at someone, burst into black flames and drop kick them in the face. Which then what, it lights them on fire too?}

She could hear his self-consciousness replaced by a smug grin. {That’s just our utility movement Items. Sure we will almost always be wearing them, but the real fun comes from the dozen micro-brain tentacle horrors that will be shooting/devouring everything that looks at us wrong}

She laughed. {Ok I’ll bite. Explain}

He happily explained. {Well we’re only going to have 6 actual summons, one base plus 2 from armour and 3 from summoner specific accessories. Many of my actual summon based bonuses are to damage, attack speed, and movement speed. Most summons either have ranged attacks or charge foes and run into them, dealing damage. So they won’t get the most out of all those bonuses. However, my summoning Item, the Demonic Twin Hemisphere Staff; summons two little baby versions of the CyberBrain of Cthulhu Boss from early in apocalypse mode. The Real Boss Splits the two hemispheres of it’s brain at half health. One getting a powerful psionic blast attack, while the other grows a big mouth full of sword length teeth. The tentacles covering it get spiky, transforming it into a fast, flying, melee threat.}

He continued oblivious to the excessiveness of his explanation{The summoned version immediately splits into two halves, and since I can summon 6 copies of them, we will actually have 12 creatures, 6 ranged and 6 melee. So the melee little bitey brains will make the most of the movement speed and damage buffs. While the little brain halves shooting will make the most out of attack speed and damage buffs.}

She decided to Clarify before she went back to picking what they looked like. {So, we are going to be some kind of dark fey person with wings that exude dark energy, boots that wreath us in evil-looking flames and a swarm of micro eldritch horrors to battle for us.}

He sent an affirmation. {Ya, to start at least, we will eventually have dozens of outfits and fighting styles based on what we equip. However, this gear will make it easy for me to gather or make all that stuff in our new game world.}

She had envisioned a more humble start, but her husband had spent thousands of hours playing the Terrania games and they weren't going to use console commands, cheats or anything like that. So it would make sense to be able to wipe the floor with the early game combat so they could focus on exploring, base and town building, and how all that mixed together with the sex games she had added.

Marty's gear would probably only help with the pure combat or crafting parts of the game. So she would get a more humble start for the parts of the game world that she had contributed.