Charles looked over his choice of options, wondering to himself who out there might be playing his own Characters. He'd even modeled one after himself, his name, and his look and all. Ah, to be a n00b... but about the time Charles got himself to Level 30, he became bored with playing himself and hadn't touched the character in a month or too. Still, that persona was missing from his usual login screen, which mean someone out there was playing "Charles Hacker", a dual-weilding, sunglace-wearing, Matrix-esc character. Oh, the shame.
Charles glanced over the boards... the uproar had made Twitter and was apparently a single-sentence blurb repeating across the bottom of CNN. Some were calling it the downfall of PHUK, and an end to a Game which hadn't even been out a year yet with a subscriber base just beyond 200,000. No where near WoW, but more than enough make a profit. After all, people like Charles were buying all the special-made peripherals to go with it, and those were all made in-house by Sexist Entertainment themselves.
And now there was this whole thing. He love the Game and wanted to play it badly, but playing someone else's characters was not unlike wearing someone else's underwear. Too personal, and you had no idea where they'd been...
Still, as Charles looked back to the Character Select Screen, he realized he'd see one of the characters before. It was a man standing in a black trench coat, black sunglasses, white shirt, slick-black hair, and had two black pistols at his waist.
Actually, he looked like Neo. Someone must have been a fan of the movies, sure... I suppose if you have the chance to create just about any kind of character, you've got a good chance to make some character you've liked before, Charles surmised.
He checked his bluetooth headset, and that his helmet was tight but breathable, and went ahead and clicked on "Hank Madness," with a shrug. It was an opportunity to play something close to what he enjoyed, so why not. No strings attached, and maybe this guy had some cool equipment.
"Enter the Kingdom," Charles said to himself as he clicked on the button that said "Enter World". Just then, the vision faded out to black and red, gold, and green numbers and letters began scrolling down all around. The usual tingling of electricity over his skin could be felt as the world slowly appeared in around him.
He reached out quickly as he felt like he was falling, and his hands struck glass to either side of him. Whoever had played Hank last had logged out in a phonebook of all places, probably emoting to a friend that he was 'Jacking Out' or something, Charles thought.
He opened the doors and stepped outside, looking up and down the city streets, filled with other Players and NPC's. Who was who, he couldn't always tell, as PHUK let you turn off your Player Identification Tag if you wanted, and lots of people walked around hidden, moving through the crowds as if they were no one special.
Charles took a deep breath, and fixed his Sunglasses. He was in Eastburg, a modern, circa 2000 city somewhere in generic urban America. The neon of the Tokyo district was to the East, the dangerous Inner City to the West, the suburbs somewhere far to the North, and to the south, Dump City and Toon Town.
As always, there was plenty to do in PHUK... Charles just needed to pick a direction.