He looked at the formless void of the character creation screen with a sense of nostalgia. He was playing Galactica, a sci-fi massively multiplayer online roleplaying game he had spent quite a lot of his high school and college years on.

The darkness wasn’t just black, it had an inky quality to it like the void he was in was an ocean of thick roiling black ink. The more he tried to look at it the more he got the feeling that something was trying to reach out to him. Reach out and what? He didn’t know and didn’t want to find out.

Nathan with great effort ignored the void that permeated the space around him and looked forward to the silvery console prompting him to enter his character’s name. He thought about that question. He could just use his own birth name after all his was a perfectly good name.

Ultimately he chose to go with Tem, short for Temujin aka Genghis Khan one of the most ruthless people to have ever existed in the history of mankind. He usually played a pretty vanilla character and that was ok for the most part but he wanted to take a different route, a more Machiavellian aspect of himself that was always viscously shoved to the corner of his mind. Chained and guarded by a slavering guard dog from hell.

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The console seemed to get dragged back into the void as he confirmed his name and a humanoid shape rose from the nothingness to rest ahead of him. He chose the option to make his character look as close to him as possible with the race he would choose in mind. He didn’t want to know how he’d look like as a Myrtonan but considering that they look like a more human praying mantis he was sure he made the right choice.

Haven chosen his character he confirmed his selection and suddenly he lost all control of his body effectively paralyzed as his avatar inched its way toward him. Blackness enveloped him as it melded to his being becoming him and him becoming it. Some part of his brain could instinctively tell that his avatar had imprinted his being and he wasn’t sure he liked that.

He decided to log out and call customer service about this, thinking it was an error in his virtual reality implant when he realized that the melding was complete and he could move again. Turning his head to look at his body he didn’t notice the inky void creep its way ever closer to him making steady progress.

Suddenly a sharp pain in his head rocked him to a breathless agony as he reeled from the shock. He grasped the sides of his head pointlessly bracing against some imaginary tormentor. Then he felt a “thickness” for he could think of no other word to describe the sensation, surrounding him, enveloping him, pulling him.

Darkness, inky, thick nothingness held him in an ever tighter embrace and he blessedly knew no more….