"You remembered to drink water before you began, right Lucas?" Judy passes you the VR Helmet. "The direct mind-machine interface can be easy to lose yourself in, especially when you take the whole time dilation thing into effect."
The rec room goes dark around you as you slip the helmet over your eyes. "I'm not going to let myself starve to death with a bucket on my head," you tell Judy.
Damon starts using that tone of voice he reserves for making fun of people. "That's what everyone says when they hear that one hour is one day in game, then after three straight months of adventuring they suddenly wither into a pile of dust IRL. Just... take the water bottle." He yanks a plastic bottle out of the picnic cooler, and you do the same.
Brenda relaxes in the loveseat next to you, arms folded behind her hair. "I bet you there's already some guy who's plugged himself into a saline drip so he can stay in cyberspace longer. This is the same tech which started with the inventor performing brain surgery on himself and forgetting how to talk for several months."
"Yeah," you tell her, 'I think I'll stick with these non-invasive helmets." You briefly flip the visor up to get one last good look at everyone. The mood lighting is bathing everyone in a violet glow. Brenda and Damon seem to blur into the background, while Judy shines like morning dew. With one last gulp of water, you try to sit back and relax. "I'm ready to go if the rest of you are."
You don't see Judy approaching you with your visor back down, but you do feel her press something into your hand. "Bite down on this, all three of you. A little bit of hospitality from me to all my guests." With your thumb over the object, you feel... another one of her little scarab beetle tokens she's always selling. You stick it in your mouth, and thankfully it's only a hard biscuit in the shape of a beetle instead of another jewel carving. You don't exactly believe in magic- or at least you don't believe in sorceresses who sell lucky charms at the town fair along with soap and scented candles- but it would be rude to turn down free snacks, wouldn't it? Chewing on the biscuit fills your mouth with an odd, clean sensation like all your impurities have been stripped away. Maybe it was cilantro flavoring... eew.
Switching on the helmet brings up a low-resolution logo which slides across your vision, looking like something out of the early 1990s rather than cutting-edge technology. And then- WHOOSH. All you hear is the blood rushing in your ears. The sensory blocking is mandatory for good virtual reality, after all.
You appear bodiless and voiceless, waiting in the crew quarters of a æther sailing ship in the Astral Plane. The logo for Dungeon Heroes hangs over your head, and right before you is a character creation menu. A few seconds later, you load in as a human male Fighter, a character so plain that vanilla is too spicy for him.
Oh, this won't do at all.
Right away you switch the gender to Female, because why the hell not? To your genuine surprise, the default human female body has reasonable proportions which looks like she can actually carry armor and swing a sword. This doesn't stop you from increasing her breasts by about two cup sizes, but you still silently applaud the developers for their efforts regardless. You enter the color picker and turn her hair a violent shade of red usually only seen on corn chips, then add a black tribal tattoo around your left eye. What tribe it might symbolize, you can't say; the menu called it "Tattoo 04", so you have to assume it's the the fourth tribe of... something.
You never quite liked playing as a Fighter in older virtual reality games, your character model always ended up clipping through whatever monsters you were supposed to be fighting and it made you motion sick. Your virtual finger hovers over the Wizard...
"Hey, I picked Wizard," says Damon. "And Brenda's taking Cleric because she's just that cheesy."
Dammit, of course. You resort to your default second choice and pick a Rogue. The plasteel scale armor and magna-pike the Fighter starts with blink out of existence- leaving you in a bikini made of thermal bandages for a split second- then just as quickly get replaced with a rubbery, black Shear Suit which hardens in response to physical trauma, along with a high-frequency machete in a back scabbard. You suspect that the male version of this outfit doesn't have a v-neck which leaves their cleavage exposed. You can feel Damon's eyes burning holes in your skintight clothes...
"You know what," you say to him, "If you're going to keep undressing me with your eyes I'm not going to be a sexy character." sliding all the way to the bottom of the species list, you hit "Goblin, Common" and HEY, what do you know? Dexterity bonus, super hearing, night vision, fits in small places, literally everything a Rogue could want. One click later, you're disoriented as you are suddenly three feet tall without getting any narrower or even decreasing your breast size from before. Your skin- at least what's exposed in your space armor- is a shade of light green similar to shield lichen, with fine, nearly invisible peach fuzz. You retain the red hair and tattoo but you decide that the default yellow irises Common Goblins have suit you well. They shine... like diamonds.
What you don't appreciate is the six-inch nose getting in the way of your face. Very quickly sliding nose length to minimum, you internally wince as it is now "merely" four inches long; you increase the length of your bat-like ears instead, so the nose looks smaller relative to them. You take one more moment to reset your voice to something more like a human woman than a goofy space gremlin, and then-
And then you stumble forwards as the character creator no longer holds your legs in place. Behind you are a skeleton in a wizard robe and hat- that would be Damon- and an absurdly tall and thin High Elf guy bedazzled in mithril chainmail, played by Brenda.
"See, Damon? Brenda picked a male character so you wouldn't harass her, which is probably what I should have done in the first place." You lean forward in a sassy manner and grin with a carnivore's fangs.
Brenda gasps and kneels in front of you. "Oh my GOD, Lucas, you're ADORABLE!" She gives you a tight hug, which always feels strange in virtual reality... except instead of weird clipping and phantom sensations, you're really feeling it! This new VR is amazing!
"Uh, guys? The game?" Damon pulls his staff out of his inventory. His skeleton teeth chatter when he talks, not unlike a puppet. "That ominous chanting is the Mushroom Man pirates who attacked our ship and boarded. No idea who sent them, it's supposed to be a different story every time. We have a fight waiting for us as soon as we go upstairs, so whatever skills you chose, prepare to use them now."