When school ended, Sera went directly home for a change. Normally, she’d stop by the restaurant and help her father with the evening rush, but he’d just have to handle it by himself this evening. Her V-RIG should’ve came, and been installed earlier today. She was finally going to be able to log in and see what the fuss was all about!
Getting home, her very first order of business was to check the kitchen to make certain that the oven wasn’t on, or that her mother hadn’t gotten distracted and left the faucet running, or anything similar, once again. Seeing everything was in order, her second order of business was to hunt down her mother just to see what she was doing. Fanny was in her study, furiously scribbling away in several different notebooks. Sera didn’t bother her. When her mother was like this, she was “in the groove” with some creative idea for her writing, and her mind was almost completely focused on her work.
Going upstairs, Sera made a beeline to her room and half bounced when she saw the new V-RIG CustomX99 in her room. The main box, which housed the operating system was sitting back in the corner under her window – that might make it a pain to open the window when warmer weather came around, but it was fine where it was at for now. The whole thing was about the size of a three-foot cube, and was much larger than the one in Kyle’s room. Sera had ordered the best that she could, customized it, and the insides of her V-RIG console actually had the equipment which one would normally find in four different boxes!
Secretly, Sera was hoping that someday, some of her friends might come over and want to play with her, so she purchased what was basically a V-RIG server, capable of allowing up to 256 people to connect at a time through it! Of course, they’d have to have their own helmets to establish a connection, if that many people showed up. She’d only bought four of them for herself – one custom pink, one custom blue, and two snazzy black colored helmets. Normally, nobody from school ever came to visit her; they thought she was a poor girl since she worked at Franklin’s a lot of times in the evening.
The sad truth was, not counting her parents and Kyle, Sera had never had more than two other people in her room at a time with her. Four helmets seemed more than enough to her way of thinking. If by some miracle of luck, she managed to have more girls over for a sleepover or something, she could always buy some extra helmets if needed. Four was plenty for now.
Going over to the machine, Sera clicked the power button on, and then started undressing. Taking everything off, she rummaged in her closet until she found a nice long button-up shirt and slipped it on. She fastened a single button down near her belly button and then carried her school clothes out and tossed them in the laundry bin at the end of the upstairs hall.
Shamelessly heading downstairs dressed in nothing more than her shirt, Sera went into the kitchen and pulled a couple of boxes of shrimp and frozen French fries out of the freezer. Turning the deep cooker on, she set the desired temperature and timers, and dumped the shrimp in one side and the fries in the other. Since they could cook with the timer, she went on into the bathroom and turned the shower on so it’d warm up. One problem their old house had was with the shower; it always seemed like it took forever for the cold water to get out of the lines and the hot water to start coming out.
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Looking in the nearby bath closet, she gathered herself a couple of nice thick towels for stepping out on and laid them in the floor so she wouldn’t drip water when she got out of the shower, and then she gathered two towels for herself and a wash cloth and laid them across the top of the shower for easy reach once she got in. There was a can of Veet in the closet, so she grabbed it up along with a bottle of shampoo and a bottle of body wash, before finally getting in the shower.
Taking her time and enjoying a long scrub, Sera enjoyed herself thoroughly; even taking time to let her legs and underarms soak in the Veet for several minutes, until it started to burn slightly, before washing it off. Sera liked trying to keep her legs hairless, but she didn’t like to have to shave since she often cut herself, so she used the hair removal gel once or twice a week instead. The longer she let it sit and work, the less often she had to use it, so she took time to indulge and let it soak for a while this time. She was just in the mood to be pampering herself.
Finally rinsing off, she dried off her hair and wrapped one towel around it to keep it from dripping, and then used the other one to dry off and buff any lose hair which remained, away. Finally, she slid back into her shirt and lazily buttoned a single button at the bellybutton, and then she went into the kitchen to get her shrimp and fries. Rummaging in the fridge, she pulled out the milk and sniffed it once, before pouring it down the sink and turning the water on to wash it on down!
PEE-EW! That was an odor that’d put hair on your chest, as her father would say! Dropping the milk jug into the recyclables’ bin, Sera opened the fridge again and this time simply pulled out a can of soda to drink with her meal. Good old soda! Bad for the hips, but not often too bad on the nose like that milk was!
Taking a few moments to sit and eat, Sera tried hard to remember what Kyle had already told her about his experience with the game. If she decided to play an “Alter-Race”, she was going to have to be careful and watch her points a lot closer than he did. Stats were spent on a one to one ratio, but skills and such wasn’t, and when she ran out of points she was automatically entered into the game. Kyle had made himself a female elf, who only knew how to heal. She needed to make something to take advantage of his limited skillset, and offset his glaring weaknesses.
After finishing her meal, and washing up the dishes and putting them up, Sera went back into the bathroom and hung up the towel which she’d been using to help her hair dry. After that, she went upstairs and quickly brushed out her hair before picking up the pink helmet and sliding it over her head. Laying back on the bed to get comfortable, she finally clicked the button on the helmet and connected to her system – it had the same black background and blue screen which Kyle had described to her.
“Winter’s Tale, Log In,” she commanded, and the darkness faded away and the game slowly faded in.