The echoes of Roger's scream and the mine's explosion faded away and they paused feeling the adrenaline slowly ebbing out of their system as they listened to the dripping sound of Roger's blood sliding down the walls and off the tunnel's ceiling.
They had a fair amount of viscera on themselves, and they shook their arms to try to clear it away, but to no avail. LEO hadn't given any indication of when the polls would be completed, but whatever a gore-free aura was it was sounding pretty good right about now.
As if in response they heard a ding~! noise in their head and LEO's voice echoed in their mind.
You now have seven viewers!
Poll 1: Genital Selection Complete
Votes
Male
2
Female
6
None
1
They felt an odd shiver through their body and abruptly, the sound of a balloon inflating as their shirt suddenly felt slightly tighter. Glancing down she saw she now had breasts and with a quick genital check she confirmed the rest of the bits were now present.
Shifting her body to get a feeling for the changes, she noted that things were otherwise the same. She didn't feel any physically weaker and her breasts were smaller than Sophia's had been, not obstructing her movement. Mentally she tried to probe her feelings for any feelings of gender dysmorphia and eventually shrugged not feeling much of a reaction to her forced genderization.
Ding~!
Poll 2: Ethnicity Selection Complete
Votes
Caucasion
2
Hispanic
1
Venetian
5
This time it was more of an itch than a shiver as a ripple of light blue spread across her skin as she took the standard Venetian skin tone. Her previous color had been an industrial gray so she was more at ease with a familiar human palette.
Ding~!
Poll 3: Hair Color Complete
Votes
Blue
4
Green
1
Red
2
Blonde
0
Brown
2
Black
1
White
2
She felt a burst of pain from all over and collapsed to her knees as hair burst out from all over her body. Screaming, she rolled on the ground clutching at her scalp, the short hairs elsewhere only took a moment, but the hair on her head just kept coming inch after inch and each second felt like her skull was some sort of demented spaghetti-press.
Gasping for air after the pain finally stopped, she stood and inspected her new locks, despite how long it had felt, the length was only a bit past her ears, giving her a bob cut. Contrasting her light blue skin, the hair on her head was dark blue. Quickly inspecting the rest of her body, she noticed the hair was lighter in shade and hardly visible against her skin. Venetians were an artificial ethnicity, and they didn't have a standard hair color, with parents selecting whatever color was their preference during the design process, so her hair color wouldn't have stood out at all back on the colony orbiting Venus, but contrasted the orange that Kyle had had.
Ding~!
Poll 4: Height Complete Votes 5' 1 5'2" 0 5'4" 2 5'6" 2 5'8" 3 5'10" 4 6' 1 6'2" 0 6'4" 0 6'6" 1
She braced herself after the hair-color fiasco and sure enough, an instant later it felt like she'd been shot with a cannon in her spine as the bones abruptly grew a few inches. Staggering from pain, the process repeated itself with her left leg, then her right arm, then her right leg, then her left arm, and then like a machine gun hundreds of tiny pops of pain coursed through her body as her fingers, toes, and hundreds of other places subtly grew.
Narrowing her eyes, she resolved to kill LEO someday.
Ding~!
Poll 5: Name Complete Votes Gen 3 Leif 0 Selene 0 Asher 1 Tessa 2 Avery 1 Logan 0 Daniel 0 James 0 Charlotte 1 Luci 1 Morgan 0 Theo 2 Celeste 1 Val 1
After the previous ones, this one was rather anti-climactic. There wasn't really any change in particular that she could see. She assumed other actors would see "Gen" floating above her head now like she had seen Roger's name, but beyond that, there wasn't much to it.
She spoke out loud, trying the name out
"Gen… Geeeen… GenGenGenGen… Generated."
She frowned, had the audience seriously just named a generated person Gen? She had no context of how long this nonsensical reality 2.0 business had been going on, but Roger had mentioned being 10th generation so at the very least it wasn't brand new. In that time, how many generated had been created? More importantly, how many of them had the audience named Gen? Was she a meme?
Luckily her thoughts were interrupted as another poll completed.
Ding~!
Poll 6: Ability Complete Votes Summon Iguana 4 Weaken Matter 2 Human Body Part Projectile 2
She wasn't sure how to feel about this selection, of the three options, this one was the only one she felt like she could imagine what it did, but also of the three abilities it was the one that she least had an idea of how it would actually be useful. Still, there was a small rush of excitement about getting a magical ability, she had four lives worth of memories, each one was incomplete but overall she had twenty-thirty years of life experience rattling around in her head and being able to do actual magic blew most of those fragmented memories out of the water in terms of novelty.
With the new ability, she felt an intuitive sense of how to use it and concentrated for just a moment, triggering a quiet pop noise in front of her.
A green iguana appeared facing her. Their eyes met and she searched her newfound knowledge for anything else she could do with the power and nothing came to mind.
Hesitantly she spoke, "Hello?"
The iguana turned its head, inspecting a chunk of Roger next to it. She watched it inch closer to the meat, smelling it before it leaned forward, eating the chunk. She had thought iguanas weren't big meat eaters, but maybe this one was just really hungry.
Trying to remain friendly she smiled and asked, "Can you understand me?"
The iguana had no reaction as it took a few steps forward, lapping up another chunk.
She frowned, evidently her power was exactly what it said on the box, she could summon an iguana, but couldn't control or even communicate with it. It also seemed to be a completely normal iguana rather than some sort of fantasy or sci-fi variant.
Crouching, watching the hungry iguana she spoke aloud, "So this is motherhood…"
Sophia had had children, but Gen didn't have many memories of them other than the desire to murder them, which as far as she recalled she hadn't actually done… probably.
Looking at her iguana progeny, she again confirmed that, unlike Sophia, she wasn't a complete sociopath and felt no desire to murder the animal. Her thoughts were still a bit disjointed as the souls meshed inside of her, but overall she didn't feel like she had multiple personalities or separate consciousnesses, she was Gen and Gen just happened to have four separate sets of memories that joined into one starting less than an hour ago.
Her iguana had found the big chunk of meat that used to be Roger's torso and she considered her options while watching it. While it might not be an obviously useful ability, there should be some options, maybe if she used Roger's meat as treats, she could train it? People had kept iguanas as pets, so presumably, they were somewhat trainable and maybe eventually it would shape up to be some sort of spunky sidekick?
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BOOM!
One of the many landmines next to Roger's body detonated as the iguana stepped on it, the animal was blasted into small pieces that splattered on and around her, adding to her gore-soaked appearance.
Embarrassed, she looked around to see if anyone had seen that and then remembering her situation she addressed the viewers above, "That wasn't my plan! I do not endorse animal cruelty! Roger was one thing and I would argue in court that that was mostly self-defense, but the iguana's death is on you guys, not me."
Worriedly, she tried to activate her iguana power, would she get a new one? The power wasn't clear if it was to summon a specific iguana and now would only summon the desiccated corpse of her former familiar, or if she could get a redo and hopefully find a baby gate or something to keep the new one from killing itself.
Another pop noise was heard and she breathed a sigh of relief as a fresh iguana appeared, the splattered bits of the original were still present so it hadn't reset the first one, but it did look more or less the same.
Giving it a weak smile she said, "I don't know if you have the memories of the first one, but I want you to know that it wasn't my plan for you to get blown up."
The iguana, much like the first, looked at her for a few seconds before losing interest and inspecting the gore around it. Her smile twitched as it started licking what she was pretty sure were iguana fragments rather than pieces of Roger.
She felt a feeling of weary trepidation as it lost interest in the small pieces around it and started ambling over to the same big chunk of Roger that had been its predecessor's undoing.
Hurrying after it, she tried grabbing it around its midsection and said, "I get you're hungry, why don't you eat his legs instead of his chest, there's less mines over that way."
The iguana reacted instantly to her touch, hissing and whipping its head around to bite into her arm, shrieking in pain, she swung her arm, flinging it off of her and into the distance.
BOOM!
She didn't react as pieces of meat once again rained down on her from above.
Her arm throbbed in pain and she inspected the bite that was trickling a small amount of blood. It still hadn't been on purpose, but that one might have deserved it more than the first.
Stepping away from the mines, she moved in the opposite direction in the tunnel, quickly reaching a dead end. She could still see the mines and Roger's body, but the new location at least had his legs closer than his torso so Iguana-The-Third would hopefully last longer than five minutes.
With a popping noise, her power was activated again and she stared at her newest child.
"Hello there, now some people might have a negative outlook on your life expectancy, but I've got a good feeling about you."
The iguana stared for a second before ambling toward Roger's legs. Smiling at her plan's success, she watched it tearing off strips of meat and really going to town. She didn't really know what to do next, their cryptic mission statement had been to kill an evil gnome, and more than likely that required going further down the tunnel, but there were a lot of mines and she wasn't exactly in a rush to start jumping around them when she was still adjusting to her new body and height.
She idly shifted her weight around doing small lunges and hops to get used to everything. This reality show seemed disturbingly violent so she needed to be ready. CJ was the only set of memories she had with combat, but a lot of it had been focused on using the various guns and cannons built into their mech, which wasn't applicable.
For inter-mech combat she recalled a lot of physical confrontations which focused more on pinning and disabling heavily armored mechs before using a plasma saw to terminate their pilots. The throw had worked on Roger at least, so she hoped more of the memories would come in handy, she just had to make sure not to expect her human arms to block attacks like the mech's had.
Growing bored of her practice, she looked at the iguana again and it was done eating, having fallen asleep next to the body without a care. Curious, she activated her ability and with a pop a second iguana appeared. The sleeping iguana didn't react and seemed unaffected.
Rather than having a staring contest with her newest child, she activated the ability again, creating a third iguana next to it. The two iguanas eyed each other with the first giving a small hiss, causing the newest one to back off.
An hour later, it occurred to her things might have gotten out of hand.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Hundreds of iguanas were scampering around, setting off mines, and then desperately trying to escape from the crowded tunnel and echoes of explosions only to set off more mines.
Sitting in the furthest corner, she was petting one of the more docile iguanas while the two of them watched the ensuing chaos. Through her brute force experimentation, she'd found the iguanas weren't all the same, they'd come in different natural hues and varied from 4 to 7 feet long.
"One death is a tragedy while millions is a statistic."
She shrugged, she certainly felt bad for the dying iguanas, but she hadn't forced any of them into the minefield, they all had the freedom to choose where they walked, and if it happened to clear up the tunnel for her all the better.
Ding~!
Poll 7: Augment Complete Votes Photographic Memory 5 Gore-free Aura 2 First Strike Defense 2
Gen frowned as she took in the basic knowledge of how to use the new augment. The name had given her a misconception of what it was.
Focusing on the carnage of still exploding iguanas, she activated it and felt a click in her mind as she took a photo of her vision.
Mentally she could feel what Victor would consider a folder in Windows file explorer system. It currently held a single image file with a randomly generated name.
Playing with the mental file explorer and taking a few more pictures, and even a video, she found she could organize or name the files as well as search them based on name or even what was pictured.
How well the image search worked, she'd have to practice on, but searching for iguanas, lizards, or even animals correctly filtered the images.
Done with all of the previous polls, she relaxed slightly. She was starting to get a feel for how things worked here. Victor had a lifetime's worth of memories of playing board games and tabletops, and it was helping to categorize her abilities and know what to test.
She had expected that using the abilities would use some sort of mana or energy, but they appeared free to use as long as she concentrated. Trying to take a continuous video was difficult, as if she lost concentration, it would stop, but she started trying to develop the habit so that hopefully someday she could leave it on and never miss recording something.
The only limitation for summoning iguanas was the concentration involved, and if she really focused, then she could summon one per second more or less. The iguanas could only appear within a foot of her, however, and got rather feisty if she summoned them on top of each other. They also did not seem to enjoy being summoned in midair.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
With a final burst of explosions, the minefield seemed to be exhausted as some of the braver iguanas started scrambling down the tunnel unimpeded.
LEO's voice echoed in her head, Wowee! That's a lot of dead lizards! Did you know that all the other teams got through this section in the less than a quarter of your time with not only no deaths but also no injuries? Including Roger you've caused 584 deaths! The gnome is evil, sure, but even he couldn't imagine someone using human wave tactics instead of playing hopscotch! Your genocidal tendencies deserve a reward!
Poll 8 Iguana Augment 1 Reptile Rhetoric 2 Teamwork Makes the Dream Work 3 Reptilian Detonation Protocol
Gen frowned, she felt rather judged, especially considering the fact that there wouldn't be a minefield in the first place if LEO didn't make it.
Setting her iguana down, she followed after the more adventurous iguanas down the tunnel.
It didn't take long before she reached a heavy metal door with a panel at its center with the outline of a hand. Shrugging, she maneuvered around the hissing iguanas and placed her hand on the panel.
The door slid open with a chime and she walked into a hexagonal room. Eight people were eying her as she walked in. They were split up into small groups and above each of their heads was name and a level. She noted that the levels were all either 2 or 3 except for one nervous man at level 1.
What her own level was or what a level represented she had no idea.
Smiling at the crowd, she said, "Sorry I'm late, somebody put a bunch of landmines in the way."
Her comment elicited some murmuring from the crowd as they whispered to each other.
A level 2 woman named Morna with purple hair stepped forward with a confused expression and said, "You're a freshly generated right?"
Gen's smile faltered, but she maintained it. She wasn't completely sure, but Roger didn't seem alone in having this new flavor of racism.
Considering her options, she didn't answer and instead asked, "What makes you think so?"
Morna frowned and said, "Well, you're level 0, which is weird for a difficulty two scenario like this, and your eyes are the default gray of a generated."
LEO's voice echoed in her head
Poll 8: Eye Color
Poll 9 Eye Color 1 Amber 2 Violet 3 Teal 4 Crimson 5 Glacial 6 Hazel 7 Obsidian 8 Verdant 9 Pearl 10 Gold
She internally cursed the timing, but before she could respond to Morna, a level two man with dark hair and deathly pale skin named Jacob stepped next to her with his arms crossed and added "And your name is Gen, no normal person names their kid the number one most common name for generated."
She mentally cursed both LEO and the audience.
Looking at the two of them and the crowd behind them that was watching the interaction she shrugged and said, "Does it matter if I am?"
Morna looked worried as she glanced at Jacob before looking at the door Gen had emerged from, where several iguanas were wandering out from, and said, "Well, to start with, where is your partner? We should have spawned in groups of two."
Gen glanced at the tunnel and shrugged, "Ah Roger… it was rather disturbing. He said something about death not mattering because it was only hiatus and nobody caring anyway."
The two of them actually relaxed slightly at the response and she heard Jacob mumble something about a "Commercial break."
Pushing her luck, Gen asked, "Could you explain what exactly hiatus is? LEO was a bit light on the details."
Morna's guarded mood shifted to one of excitement and asked, "So it's true!? You actually got to talk directly to LEO? I've heard that generated get the privilege when they first appear!"
Gen flinched back slightly at her enthusiasm and tried to recall her conversation with LEO, she wasn't sure she'd classify it exactly as a privilege.
Jacob was still tense, however, as he narrowed his eyes and said "Are you an aberrant?"
Morna gasped and looked at him like he'd just said something offensive.
Gen kept up her poker face, Roger had mentioned something about that as well before his unfortunate accident, he seemed to think LEO would care, but LEO himself hadn't reacted and she had no idea what it even meant so it was easy to look confused as she asked, "What is an aberrant?"
Jacob looked frustrated as he gestured vaguely in her direction, "They're generated that are menaces. Everyone knows that generated are made from soul fragments, sometimes they get a bad batch of souls and come out as monsters that harm society."
Gen's thoughts flashed to Sophia, there definitely was a bit of sociopath floating around, but she didn't think she was in particular a menace to society aside from having a small goal of killing the god of reality 2.0 if it was convenient. Even Sophia with her compulsions had managed to be a law-abiding citizen.
She shrugged, "I don't intend to harm society if that's the question and my soul fragments seem to be in order."
Jacob didn't seem convinced, but another woman stepped closer, her eyes glowing blue, "She hasn't lied yet for what it's worth."
She was level three and her name was Flora. Jacob glanced at her and questioned, "Ability?"
She nodded, "I can see lies."
He grudgingly accepted that, but still shot Gen a look, "She is weird for a fresh generated right? Usually they're more loopy and not all there."
Flora nodded, but shrugged, "LEO is always refining the process, maybe this is just what they'll be like from now on, other than that maybe her soul fragments were just unusually adaptable or compatible."
Morna had a pleading look on her face as she tried to edge back into the conversation and begged, "Teeellll me about LEO please!"
Gen was saved from the fan girl as LEO's voice spoke from above.
"Good job everyone! You managed to avoid stationary highly visible mines with only one human fatality!"
At the emphasis on human fatalities, Gen felt some glances her way that she did her best to ignore. Five total iguanas had entered the room at this point, the gathered people didn't seem that surprised with most ignoring the reptiles aside from one bulky bald man who had picked one up and was petting it. He gave her a thumbs up as he noticed her glance.
She returned the gesture with an enthusiasm she did not feel as she turned her attention back to LEO.
"With the intro done, you all know what's next! Complications~! Next phase will have three tunnels, and the complications of anyone who enters each one will be applied! Stay together, split up, I don't care it's your funeral!"
With that, he went silent and Gen saw a new poll appear in front of her
Poll 10 Complication 1 Movement 2 Gravity 3 Freezing
From nearby, some people groaned as they looked at their polls while others stared silently. The one level 1 man, named Billy, was crying, "What does torture even mean in this context? My viewers hate me, they'll pick that for sure."
A level 2 brown haired man named Frank, next to him patted him on the back, "I feel for you man, but my worst one is slime so no offense go in a different tunnel from me, I'll ask some of my viewers to help you out if you get sent on vacation."
Billy was still sniffling, "You think my girlfriend will wait for me?"
Frank smiled, "Not a chance."