What… just happened?
Had I gone blind?
I tried to move and felt nothing. There was no sound, no smell. I felt neither cold nor hot.
It reminded me of something. Sometimes, at night, I would lie awake in bed after I had turned off the lights, feeling as though an invisible ceiling was pressing down just above my face. That if I reached out, I would discover I was in a perfectly sealed box, from which I could never escape.
At times, in a surge of adrenaline, I would sit up in a rush and thrown on the light, and the illusion would disappear. Other times I would stare into the darkness until somehow I had fallen asleep, and the next time I opened my eyes, sunlight was faintly filtering through my thin curtains, into my tiny apartment.
I did not think that I could turn on a light right now, nor would I wake to find that morning had arrived.
“Hello?” I called out. My voice barely carried. The words sounded muffled. “HELLO?” I screamed.
Glowing text appeared before me.
… since when was this game Virtual Reality? I was going to beat up Lee Wai Meng the next time I saw him.
I didn’t appear to have any hands, so I couldn’t reach out and touch the options. “Yes?” I said, before wondering why it had asked me that. I thought it was an all-ages game.
The text vanished and five glowing pink circles now appeared around me. Each had a css title within them.
The gut reaction was to reach for
, but my sense of self-preservation tapped the inside of my head.
Something weird is happening. Don’t just blindly do whatever. Try to work out what’s going on first.
So I thought.
Maybe I was having some kind of seizure.
Maybe I was hallucinating or experiencing psychosis.
Maybe this was a prank and somehow I was still in Poppy’s living room, only everyone had gone really quiet and –
No.
Maybe I had transmigrated into the game.
I tried to call out again. “Hello? Guys, are you there?”
No response. The five circles hung around me, waiting.
I couldn’t feel or hear anyone else nearby.
I looked at
.
“… Info?” I asked, hesitantly.
A new textbox appeared.
Wow. This game system was a jerk. Was Lee Wai Meng the one who wrote these annoying words?
I looked at each of the other csses in turn.
By this stage, I was ready to backsp whoever had written these descriptions.
How much time had passed? The darkness showed no sign of abating, and I still couldn’t hear or smell anything. All I could see were the five waiting circles.
I felt the inescapable box slowly crushing me.
The smart thing to do might be to carefully consider each of the csses, weigh up the pros and cons, then make a choice.
But I was beginning to find it hard to breathe. I looked at the
option.
It was the one I was most familiar with. One hundred percent completion rates in multiple games with this css.
“Select
,” I said, the words sticking in my dry throat.
With a rush of air, the
circle suddenly zipped under where I thought my feet were, and the other circles disappeared. A new set of glowing circles repced them, each a different colour.
Above my head, a question appeared.
Was this… a personality test? A fucking personality test?
Poppy loved personality tests. She was forever sending them to everyone in the online group chat. Myers-Briggs, 16 Personalities, Blood Type Personality, even random ones like Which Sanrio Character are You? Poppy sent them all and badgered everyone for their results afterwards. She knew if you had simply clicked whatever answers too. I wondered if she kept a database on us all.
I had to take it seriously this time, though. Who knew what could happen?
I answered each question carefully, focusing so hard that by the end of it, I was shaking, brain scrambled like I had just retaken my final university exams.
The circles disappeared, and again, new text came into view.
This didn't really tell me much, other than the fact that my Strength was abysmal and my Charisma oddly high. At least Endurance and Intelligence were stronger skills too.
This time, a series of sliding bars appeared, allowing me to slide between various sizes for everything from the length of my legs to the size of my forehead. I pushed them back and forth, feeling a little ashamed of my vanity. I even fiddling with the bars until I had created an approximation of myself in a male form, just to see what it would be like. Eventually I chose a form that was fairly simir to my actual appearance, but a little taller, with slightly rger eyes, a fractionally smaller nose, and marginally more defined hips.
But what if I needed to fight a lot? My Strength stat was the worst.
Before confirming my body form, I added a little more muscle and hoped it would boost my Strength.
A gradient colour picker appeared. I momentarily considered picking a pale green but ended up going with a hue simir to my own in real life. <#efbe98> fshed momentarily.
Don’t act like this is something I should be enjoying, you damned game.
… I am actually enjoying this. Dammit.
At st, I had a body again. I could see my hands and arms, the familiar skin colour more reassuring to me than I would have expected. I patted myself experimentally. I hadn’t been able to resist replicating the usual avatar appearance I would choose in games – blonde hair, brown eyes, heart-shaped face.
I felt self-conscious of my vanity but stubbornly confirmed my choices and tried not to think on it too much. I wondered what everyone else had picked. Would I recognise them if I saw them?
Tommy would probably be an Artificer. He loved messing around with things, taking them apart and putting them together. Poppy said she would be a Cleric. I had no doubt her avatar would be immacute. Rohan… probably a Mage. Lee Wai Meng was always pying a heavy armoured css, so he’d be a Fighter. As for Calvin… well, if he hadn’t mentioned being a Magic Swordsman before we started the game, I wouldn’t have been sure. He never seemed particurly interested in anything.
It occurred to me that, now that I had a body again, my spatial sense had returned. How was I feeling everything so accurately? Was I really in a game? Or hallucinating?
Not that I’d ever seriously hallucinated before, but doesn’t this all feel a bit too… realistic?
Were the others facing this too?
Before the entry box had even finished loading, the name was out of my mouth.
“Maria.”
“Yes.”
Just let me the hell out of here. Let me see my friends.
“Good luck, your father,” I muttered sarcastically to myself, as I once more found myself floating alone in the void.
A string of white text began to appear in front of me.
Disconnecting additional pyer.>
The text disappeared and was repced with a logo and a loading bar. It was clearly the logo of M?rchen: Tales of Magic.
The bar filled quickly, and now I was standing in warm sunlight.