FeyKitsune

  Inside my pod I was warm, enclosed, and safe, and I took some time to just... breathe.

  My heart was thumping wildly in my chest and I was fighting the nausea that was rising up from my stomach. My best friend… My girlfriend… They were gone now weren’t they? Not just from my surroundings but from my life. The two most important retionships I had in my life just destroyed in a stupid instant of questioning. Now I had no idea who I was or wanted to be, and I was alone.

  What the fuck have I done?

  I had to figure my shit out, but how? I couldn’t go back to the real world like this. The idea of being alone in my messy apartment with my dull and empty life back in real life sounded horrible right now. I needed to keep moving or the looming chaos that had been unleashed on my life would consume me whole.

  Maybe it was crazy and it was certainly impulsive, I acknowledged to myself, but I knew what I had to do.

  The introductory space of Infinite Stars slowly came into focus outside the window of my spacer pod. A craft that spacers were cloned into when they "respawned" that conveniently resembled the full-dive VR pods we used in the real world. It was mounted in the lobby of what looked like a doctors clinic crossed with a high end sci-fi hotel in a space station somewhere.

  The main room had high ceilings and was made of a mixture of steel and what looked like a polished grey stone. On the right were huge floor to ceiling windows looking out onto a bustling space port where I could see immense ships resting and coming into dock. It was sort of hypnotic how they came in and out constantly, or some titanic behemoth craft - shining in the light of a nearby sun - would just zily slip past slowly in the far-far distance.

  In the centre of the room was a long counter below the name ‘Infinite Stars’ in rge metallic letters high up on the back wall. The counter was being operated by two receptionists that I knew were AI handlers here to immersively direct pyers through the part of the system that was the least immersive - character creation and the introduction to the massive universe of Infinite Stars.

  Finally ready to exit my pod, I pushed my hand - too rge, veined, and manly - against the panel to open the lid. It opened slowly with a drawn out hiss of hydraulics and I stepped out into the lobby that was empty except for the two receptionists. I did my best to ignore the way my body felt as it moved. I was hyper aware of every inch of it in an uncomfortable way that I hadn't been aware of before.

  I passed a few settings of couches and tables - meeting areas for groups of pyers - and felt a pang of mixed guilt, fear, and sadness as I remembered sitting on those same red-and-grey couches with Cara when we first joined the game. We’d held hands and marvelled at how pretty the ships were outside just before we went down to the port and met up with the crew of the Hare. Now here I was, alone.

  I pulled myself out of my muddied nostalgia and approached the kind looking dy behind the front counter - she was dressed in a neat pencil skirt and white button up blouse. She smiled at me as I got near.

  "Welcome to the main lobby of Infinite Stars!" she greeted me professionally, "how may I help you, spacer?"

  "I'd like to start a new spacer," I said as politely and calmly as I could in my current state.

  "Of course, sir!" She said as she began to type something on her dispy's keyboard. I flinched ever so slightly at the title and she looked up at me with a worried look on her face.

  "I'm sorry, are you okay? You seem rather distressed." She raised a hand halfway up as if to reach out to me but wasn't sure if that was a good idea.

  "I'm... just going through something right now... I'm sorry," I said uncomfortably. I had no idea how to expin everything that had just happened or that I was going through internally right now.

  With eyes full of concern and her eyebrows furrowed she continued.

  "Hmm…” she looked at me with that worried look for a bit longer than I thought normal for a receptionist AI but then continued with the process as normal. “Alright. Well first a discimer. Are you aware that due to Infinite Stars policy you are only allowed one spacer registration?"

  "Yes, I am." I said simply. The developers of the game wanted people to get invested in their characters and the adventures they went on. To emphasise this, pyers could only have one character at a time to avoid them jumping between adventures and leaving others behind - reducing the gamification of the pyer's interaction with the world.

  "So by re-registering you agree to permanently dissolve your current spacer registration and all of its attached holdings?" She asked with a sense of importance, her bright blue eyes firmly searching my expression - making sure I understood the gravity of this decision.

  "Yes. I need… to stop being like this…" I looked down and weakly gestured to myself.

  She nodded sympathetically. "Then just continue through the door to my left,” she gestured to a metal door to the side - between the end of the counter and the big windows.

  She gave me a meaningful look but I had no idea what the meaning was. “Also, an administrator wishes to see you… she’ll join you in registration.” She gave me a smile and finished her typing before hitting enter, opening the aforementioned door with a quiet electric whistling sound.

  I was confused by that st bit but I forced a smile of thanks and made my way over to the door. She watched me go for a while before she turned back to her dispy. What would an administrator want with me?

  Walking through the door led me to a hallway of elevator bays. As I crossed the threshold one of them opened with a sweet “ding!” I entered the metal and gss elevator and - being the only button lit up on the dispy on greyed out floor names - hit ‘Spacer Creation’. The door closed with a “ka-clunk” and the room gently began to fly upwards. Light and shadow washed over me interchangeably as struts and ptforms whizzed by outside the clear window that made up the back of the elevator. The spaceport below was breathtaking, but I couldn’t appreciate it properly with the nerves that were swirling around inside me like a hurricane.

  The elevator came to a gentle stop and the doors opened with the familiar hydraulic whir that most mechanical doors seemed to make in this world.

  I was greeted with the sight of the spacer registration bay. It had been so long since I'd been in character creation but it hadn't changed much since I’d made my big manly-man of a man for Cara.

  The registration bay was a gently lit hexagonal room walled by smooth white panels over the familiar grey stone. It was sleek and looked very impressive, but the soft lighting and comfortable size made it feel almost cozy despite all the cold metal - like a sci-fi science b mixed with a living room. In the center was a lowered pit that was lined with comfortable looking couches in a ring facing inwards to where a low ptform glowed with projector lights dispying a scale 3d image of a humanoid form that slowly rotated in space above it. The floor and ceiling lights were subtle and gave the room a soft whitish-blue glow. In the back of the room on the other side of the pit was a pod I would get into to have my current consciousness transferred over to the spacer body I would create. The room actually reminded me of a sanctuary room I saw in the city once, where people of any faith - or those just in need of a quiet pce - could come and sit in quiet contemption. It was serene and it was safe.

  I descended the stairs into the central pit and admired the hologram as it spun round. This was it. It was time to decide what I was going to be - who I was going to be. The silly reminder rose up in my mind that this was all just a game and yet it felt like so much more to me right now.

  I didn’t know if I was… a girl. I wasn’t sure if I’d earned the right to call myself that or if I even wanted to. I did know, however, that I didn’t want to be a man and that this current form I was in - a hypermasculine realisation of my body in real life - was not me.

  Maybe my form in real life didn’t properly represent me either.

  Back in the southern districts of New Melbourne during primary school, I'd regurly told all my friends that I was secretly something else. I thought I was a monster, then an alien, sometimes a character from a game or other media I'd identified with a lot. It changed regurly but I always felt it to be true in some way - at least as far as I knew that something was wrong with my physical body and I had to actually be something else the whole time as a logical conclusion. I just couldn't quite decide on what it was. The st thing I decided on, now that I thought about it, was a girl.

  That was an interesting memory to resurface given the current situation.

  I’d always felt different to other guys. Wrong and off in a way I could never quite put my finger on. When I got close to girls I always craved a connection with them that I never quite had with the boys. It’s like part of me knew what was wrong this whole time.

  Nice of my dumb brain to let me in on the secret. I thought wistfully to myself.

  Reaching out to the interface panels in front of me, I pushed the ‘female’ body type button without hesitation. I felt that tight core deep within me loosen again but this time it went quietly. Gently. It was still tightly coiled and I knew it held things within it that I couldn’t see from where I was now, but for the moment it almost felt peaceful.

  Suddenly another panel started pinging and fshing from the other side of the table. I made my way over and saw a yellow fshing “administrator” button. Unsure of what else to do, I pressed the button.

  The hologram - a now obviously feminine bodyform - turned yellow and fshed a few times before minimising itself into the holodeck before yellow console text appeared gradually in its pce.

  [Administrative access: granted (/Admin.PixelHeart)]

  [Subliminal data /Pyer.401008295_”ALEX”: found]

  [Creating new spacer.form custom preset “Crack”]

  [Starred items added: 2]

  [Message /Admin.PixelHeart: “<3”]

  [Administrative access: removed (Admin.PixelHeart)]

  A second after the final line finished itself the text vanished and the blueish white hologram reappeared - only this time it looked different.

  I looked up at a holographic image of the picture I had in my mind of an ideal woman's body. Thinking back, I realised she wasn't my type - she was who I would choose to be if given the choice. Just like I was being given right now.

  I hit ‘accept preset’ before I was consciously aware I was doing it. I didn't know why PixelHeart had named it Crack but it didn't matter to me right now.

  I stood in awe for a moment as I stared up at the miraculous body I would soon inhabit. That was going to be me.

  I looked away, guilty. I felt wrong for running my eyes over the gentle slopes and curves. It seemed gross and I felt like a perverted guy leering at her. Beneath that, though, there was also a sense of calm and resoluteness. That was going to be my body, it was okay to appreciate it, right? It wasn't creepy to like how it looked.

  I looked back up.

  Her soft, rounded face was cute and sweet, and mixed with her big, bright-pink eyes she looked both really pretty and a little bit mischievous. Her hair was a fun mess of reddish light-pink long, thick, curls with bangs framing her face nicely.

  Her shoulders were narrow and soft looking, leading down to slender arms and small hands with dainty fingers. The thought of being able to really get inside small spaces with such a tiny figure made me suddenly excited. My job was going to be so much easier - and comfier.

  Looking inwards, her boobs were decently sized - rge without being overly cumbersome. I guessed maybe about a D cup? I didn't really know much about boobs though.

  Moving down, her waist was a gentle dip that fred out into nicely rounded hips and - as the model spun around - I saw, a nice butt too.

  Her thighs were decently thick and complemented the slender legs nicely.

  I took her in as a whole and was giddy with the knowledge that that would be me in a matter of minutes. She was small and cute and really really pretty. I felt light headed and nervous at the idea that I was allowed to just be her without a catch. I could just be a girl - a woman. I felt butterflies in my stomach and couldn't wait to hit ‘finish’ and get in the pod to become a much better and cuter me.

  I stepped back up to the interface eagerly and began inputting the rest of the details for character customisation.

  As I blew through the css and skills segments, choosing the same engineer and drone specialisations felt satisfying and right in a way I almost couldn't put into words. It was always so me, but this time it was properly me.

  I dumped most of my points into agility, wisdom, and intelligence. I only resisted the urge to leave strength at a 0 out of spite by the realisation that I'd need some strength still to work with the tools and materials I'd be handling regurly.

  I put points into all the relevant skills and took drone tamer and mechanic sense as my two perks - letting me better handle and possibly hijack rogue or enemy drones, and also get better hints from the engineer css AI to help me with my mechanic tasks.

  With that done I was about to head over to the st phase of character creation - starting station - when I remembered the admin commands listing “starred items”. I moved back around to the appearance panels and moved to the starred items section where I found two items I hadn't considered before. A fox tail and fox ears.

  In Infinite Stars, spacers were all based on humans. There were plenty of deviations from humans in the form of things like basically space elves, or people with tentacles or horns, or really long, thin bodies. Basically while there were no outright ALIEN options for pyers, there were plenty of meta human choices. I'd never bothered with them because Cara wasn't interested in them. But now…

  I selected both the ears and tail and my jaw dropped when I saw them on the body. They were adorable! The tail was fluffy and soft looking and the ears stuck up and out from the curls in the cutest way. I had to have them.

  With the biggest grin on my face I literally skipped over to the st section of character creation again.

  I knew roughly where the Hare was, and had no desire to risk even a slight chance of running across them any time soon. This meant that two of the spacer hubs - Talos IX and Kallum’s Landing - weren't an option for me, leaving the other two which were both much further away from that region of known space. The remaining two - Station Infinité and Terminal Zelda - were both good options, but Infinité was located in a very internal and safe sector of space while Zelda, though still new-pyer friendly, was much further out on the fringes of a much less safe and comfy sector.

  Wanting a bit more dangerous fun than the inner sectors would offer, I chose Terminal Zelda as my origin station.

  With that, I was done.

  I took a step back from the terminal and looked up at my character. She was perfect and I was ready. I went to turn around before I realised I'd forgotten something. A name.

  I'd need a new name for myself now. ‘Alex’ was technically gender neutral but it felt wrong to start this new phase of what was basically my new life with the same name I'd used for my old one. But what the hecc was I going to choose? I thought back on my life, searching for a name that had some kind of meaning to me. Initially all I could think of were guy’s names and threw them immediately into the trash can in my brain. I thought of the names of girls I'd gone to school with, characters from my favourite games, shows, and books. I wracked my brain when I came upon one that stood out.

  When I first thought I might be a girl as a kid, there was a girl in a show I loved named Gwen. I'd always loved the name and it regurly showed up as the name of my characters in games I pyed (all of which happened to always be female, of course… I could facepalm myself into oblivion now that I was noticing all the signs).

  I approached the name panel on the holodeck and began to type.

  Full name: Miss Gwenyvere Alice Morgan

  Nickname: Gwen

  Now, finally done, I sprinted over to the pod at the top of the stairs in the back of the room. It was simir to a spacer pod but it was sleek, round, and white with a clear window rather than an opaque one. I pressed my hand - still too rge, veined, and manly, but now it was likely the st time I'd see it and that filled me with spiteful satisfaction that brought me more joy than I realised it would - to the ‘open’ panel. The pod lowered itself until it was ying horizontal and the hatch was open. It looked like a big white pill-shaped coffin.

  A coffin for my old life which would give way to the new.

  Climbing in, the hatch closed automatically once I was in pce. As the brackets slid up around me to keep me still, I felt my heart race once more as a fire of apprehensive joy and fear swept over me once more. It was time to figure out who I really was, and for a chance to finally be truly happy for once in my life.

  The pod began to whir to life as my consciousness was being copied and transferred. As the world began turning bck as my mind was torn out of the dedicated shell that was my old form, the st thing I felt that body do was smile.

  FeyKitsune