It happened in the blink of an eye.

One minute he was plummeting toward the world, then he was speeding up and going through the world, and everything went dark.

“OPEN YOUR EYES.” commanded that deep, resonating voice.

Were they shut?

Evidently, because Rich blinked them open again.... and gasped at what lay before him.

A dark space, stretching into infinity, lined with green, swirling pillars of energy. Above the endless black plain sat a starless sky, with patterns of green energy flickering into existence and swirling away, like a video he'd seen once of the aurora borealis.

And then there was the dragon.

Rich had no sense of scale for the thing. It was big, but he didn't know how big. It towered above the pillars, black of scale and pure white of eye, so black that it was like a hole in the darkness around it.

And in among the scales, in patterns of swirls and spots, were patches of bright whiteness that brought to mind stars in the sky. It was like it held a galaxy inside itself... no, like it was a galaxy.

But...

There was something glinting, around the edges of the dragon. Something wrapped around its wings, wrapped around the entirety of its body, connected at various points and glinting in metallic hues; silver, gold, bronze, and, in a very few places, some sort of bluish metal that he couldn't identify.

The chains trailed off into infinity, binding and keeping the dragon in place. In some cases they seemed to pierce through gaps in its scales.

The dragon was a prisoner.

But then there was no more time for examination, as the dragon opened its mouth, and spoke.

“I AM CAUNAL,” The dragon said, and the voice was the same one that had welcomed Rich to Generica, commanded him to open his eyes. Male? Yes, Rich thought so. The dragon became a “he” in Rich's mind. “THIS IS MY REALM. WHAT DO YOU DESIRE, SOUL?”

“Uh,” Rich spoke, and his voice reverberated through the empty spaces, bounced among the pillars. It wasn't as loud as Caunal's voice, but it emphasized just how silent the place was. Only two things stirred here, only two things could give voice. He was one of them, and the other was waiting, patiently, for an answer.

“I want...” Rich stopped. “Why do you want to know that?”

He wasn't about to say 'I want to get laid.' Not to a giant bondage dragon. That didn't seem wise.

Caunal spoke again. “I WISH TO KNOW YOUR DESIRE, TO HELP GUIDE YOU TO A PLACE WHERE YOU CAN FULFILL YOUR DESIRES.”

“Um... any good sized city would work. I mean, one where there's...” Rich gulped. He was nervous as hell. Norm hadn't mentioned a giant dragon playing twenty questions. “Just any good sized city. Hey, maybe the one where my friend is?” Rich knew there were prostitutes there, so it was a sure thing, right?

Caunal shook his head, chains creaking and clanking as they drew tight. His long, long neck had some motion, but it was clear that it pained him. “THAT IS NOT HOW IT WORKS.”

“So...” Rich said, looking around him, finding that he had some control over his perspective, now. “How does it work? Please tell me.”

“YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT THIS IS?” Caunal's white eyes swirled with blackness, like chocolate syrup disappearing into white milk. “HAS THE RITE FAILED?”

“I... what?” Rich asked. “This is where I create a character, right?”

“THIS IS WHERE YOU CHOOSE YOUR VESSEL. THREE THINGS YOU MUST DECIDE, SOUL.” Caunel's eyes were pure white again, miniature stars, almost painful to look at. But Rich's reply seemed to have put him back on track.

Rich decided that there probably wasn't an actual person behind Caunal's responses. I'm dealing with a limited chatbot, I think. Something with a script, but programmed with a lot of reactive procedures.

Caunal continued. “TO ENTER INTO GENERICA, YOU MUST CHOOSE YOUR DESIRE. YOU MUST CHOOSE YOUR FLESH. YOU MUST CHOOSE YOUR POWER. ALL OF THESE MAY CHANGE LATER, BUT THE CHOICES YOU MAKE HERE MATTER THE MOST.”

“Um...” Rich tried to lick his lips, found he didn't have a tongue. Weird, but okay, whatever. It wasn't fair that his mouth felt dry and he didn't have a tongue to do anything about it, but whatever, whatever. “I... don't know what to say. For my desire.”

He did, but... it seemed so petty right now, here in this place between worlds, under a strangeling sky.

“THEN CLOSE YOUR EYES. AND THINK UPON IT.” Caunal tilted his head, and everything seemed to shudder. “I HAVE SLOWED TIME. TAKE AS LONG AS YOU DESIRE TO FIND YOUR ANSWER.”

Rich stared at the dragon.

The dragon stared back. Rich didn't think he'd win a staredown.

Okay. Why not? Rich closed his eyes.

He wanted to get laid. He mulled over it for a while, and always came back to that.

So he tried a different approach.

Sure, he wanted to get laid, but was that all?

No. No it wasn't. He wanted his father to have not yelled at him, he wanted his mom back, he wanted to be healthy and fit and...

...oh god, it was easier to make a list of things he didn't want.

“I want too much,” he told the dragon, opening his eyes.

“THEN SUM UP WHAT YOU DESIRE AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL.”

“What?”

“FIGURE OUT WHAT WILL GIVE YOU THE MOST OF WHAT YOU DESIRE, AND ASK FOR THAT.”

Rich closed his eyes again. Then he opened them. “You do this a lot, don't you? Lots of people asking for things, and you help them choose.”

“LESS THAN YOU WOULD IMAGINE,” The dragon told him. “MOST WHO COME IN HERE CAN NAME THEIR DESIRES AS EASILY AS THEY BREATHE. IT IS RARE THAT SOMEONE SEES THE CHOICE FOR THE CONUNDRUM IT IS.”

“Well... thank you anyway,” Rich told him.

The dragon's eyes seemed to grow larger, just for a second. “YOU ARE WELCOME.”

Rich thought about it some more, screwing his eyes shut. What did he want? What didn't he have? What had driven him in here?

And yeah, sex was a thing, of course, but it wasn't all of it. When you dug down to it, when you got down to the heart of it, he wanted to escape from a world where he was...

“Powerless,” Rich said, opening his eyes.

The dragon shifted, the chains clanking. “YOU DESIRE TO BE POWERLESS?”

“No! No, I am powerless. Right now. In real life, I mean.”

“YOU HAVE MY SYMPATHIES,” the dragon said, and there was a bit of a wry tone in his voice.

“Oh, sorry. I mean, I'm not chained up so there's that. Um... what happened, anyway?”

“IT IS A LONG STORY. IS THAT WHAT YOU DESIRE? STORIES AND SECRETS AND TALES OF BETRAYAL?”

“No. Yes. Maybe. But I know what I want, and it can get me that,” Rich told him. “I desire power.”

“YOU ARE CERTAIN OF THIS?”

“I am. I can't... I can't do anything, back in realspace, because I don't have power. My family suffers because we're poor, and I don't have the power to make us rich.” He swallowed, hard. “They took my Mom and I couldn't stop them because we don't have power. I can't get... I can't find a girlfriend because I'm fat and pathetic and I don't have the power to change that. I can't stop the assholes like Joel because he's got power and I don't. I just have to take it, and I can't take anymore!” his voice was rising to a wail, and he didn't care. The dragon wasn't like his dad, it wouldn't tell him to man up or shut up. The dragon just listened. “I... I want to have power, I want to be able to make things right! I just want... I want to get the things I want.” He could feel the ghost of wetness on his face, bback in realspace. Tears, he knew. He was beyond caring. “So I want power,” he finished, voice crumbling with the words. “Because I want to know what it's like, for the first time in my goddamn life.”

Blackness rippled across the dragon's eyes. “ALL POWER COMES WITH A PRICE.”

“I know,” Rich said. With a thought, he accessed his Echo, and found his father's credit card information. “And after today, I think my dad owes me this.”

He'd found it half a year ago, and squirreled it away with a vague sense of guilt. He'd never dared to use it, never wanted to before. But now he didn't care. Nothing his dad did could erase what he'd done.

“THEN READ THE CONTRACT AND UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE GIVING UP.”

And words sheeted into existence, shimmering green patterns of alien script.

Rich stared at it. “Uh...”

Then his Echo chimed, and showed a pop-up window. Within it lay the End-user-license-agreement, or EULA for Generica Online. It was a massive stream of text, and it ticked by at the same rate as the falling runes.

“Oh,” Rich laughed. It was just a nice touch, that was all. He wasn't supposed to actually read the alien runes.

Still, it was pretty. He set his Echo to record, and watched them, alternating glances with the EULA. It was oddly, pretty standard stuff. He had expected it to not have any legal stuff, since the app was on the darknet anyway. But evidently whoever made it still cared about that.

Who had made it? He poked around, scrolling faster down the EULA, until he found a few mentions of a developer.

Lost Demiurge LLC.

He had no clue what that last word meant. It was no corp he recognized, which was about what he'd expected.

He flicked through the rest of the EULA, didn't see anything out of the ordinary, and hit the 'I AGREE' button.

It faded away, revealing the green runes coalescing, swirling into a vortex that hovered near where his head would be.

“TOUCH THEM AND GAIN THE POWER YOU SEEK,” The dragon said.

Could he touch them? He tried to reach out...

...and felt a shivering heat, like that time he'd tried to pry the socket out of the wall. An electric pulse... not unpleasant, but definitely distracting.

The runes paused in their rotation, then drifted toward him, disappearing one by one as they got within inches of his perspective.

“AND I KNOW YOU NOW, RICHARD ROYAL. I SEE THE FIRE THAT BURNS IN YOUR SOUL.”

Rich paused. He hadn't told the dragon his name. There hadn't been anywhere to register his name. What the hell? Had it hacked his Echo?

No, no, that was being dramatic. It was probably seeing his name on his home network's whitelist. His mom had set up the darknet router wrong, or the software was just that good. Echoes couldn't be hacked.

Although, he had a way to check that sort of thing, now that he thought of it.

Rich pulled up the Chartreuse Plus compiler, and set it to a visual overlay.

And now he looked at a world through the lens of a coder. The patterns in the sky, the pillars, the dragon itself... they were all numbers and letters, rippling and surging together.

Which was pretty, but didn't tell him much. The examples and basic programs and apps he'd been working through earlier were simple, designed to do simple things one at a time. These... he had no idea which parts of the code went to any specific function.

But there was more than one way to find the answer. Rich didn't have to understand it all. He just had to search for the right words. And in this case, the right words were his name.

And he found it, but not in any way that made sense.

“Access Akashic Records.lib? Get Sacrifice1 Truename? Pipe Truename to Slain.god?”

The dragon snapped its head up, pulling the chains taut with a cracking snap.

Rich jumped in surprise.

“SO...” The dragon spoke. “YOU ARE A PRACTITIONER OF YOUR REALM'S MAGIC. WHY ARE YOU HERE? WHY DID YOU SIGN THE CONTRACT?”

“I told you,” Rich said, feeling defensive for some reason. “I want power.”

“SO...” The dragon lowered its neck. Blood dripped from where some of the chains met its scales now, bright crimson against the darkness.

“Um... are you okay?” Rich asked. “Can I help you?”

“YOU DO NOT HAVE THE POWER TO HELP ME. NOT YET.”

“Are... you the slain god?”

“SOME HAVE CALLED ME SUCH. BUT AGAIN, THESE ARE SECRETS. SECRETS THAT I AM FORBIDDEN TO SPEAK OF IN THIS PLACE.”

“What power can you give me?” Rich asked, not sure of where the words were coming from. “If you're a god but you don't have the power to free yourself?”

The dragon stared at him. Then it laughed. The pillars shook and danced, and the patterns in the sky flickered. Rich saw the code jumble and mix, until finally the dragon stared at him once more. “ALL POWER HAS ITS PRICE. THOUGH THE ONE I HAVE PAID IS GREATER THAN IT SHOULD EVER HAVE BEEN.” Wings rustled, chains clinking as it shifted. “BUT PERHAPS YOU COULD HELP ME WITH THAT... IF YOU ARE WILLING.”

“How?” Rich asked.

“A PEBBLE ROLLING DOWN A HILL. A DROP OF WATER FLOWING TO THE SEA. A SPARK THAT BECOMES A BONFIRE.” The dragon breathed heavily on that last word, and light flashed in the depths of its maw, a white light that Rich knew was hotter than the hottest fire he'd ever come across, hot enough to make his father's burn look like a tiny blister.

Then it faded.

“I don't understand,” said Rich.

“YOU WILL. NOW LISTEN, AND LISTEN CLOSELY,” The dragon leaned in as close as its chains permitted. “YOUR DESIRE WOULD NORMALLY DETERMINE YOUR FLESH AND YOUR FIRST PATH TO POWER.” The dragon waved a clawed hand... and each of the green pillars faded, became translucent. In each of them was a form, some human, some very, very not human. Rich saw one pillar that held a puddle of goo shaped vaguely like a hershey's kiss, and figured that was the slime option that Norm had been so embarrassed about. Another was a bear. Not a bear-man or a bear-monster, just a big brown bear. A third was a cat-girl and... about that point it clicked in Rich's mind that none of these figures were wearing any clothes.

“Uh,” he said. He'd seen pornography before, sneaking images that Norm had brought him, always deleted so his mother couldn't find them later. But this... this was a whole dimension full of naked people. And stranger things. And... he felt his meat body blush as he looked away from some sort of giant looking guy. Yeah, not all of them were women. I'm not gay, he told himself, and went back to looking around. He was recording, so he could keep these for later and beat off to them at his leisure.

Then another strangeness struck him. “Wait, I could choose to be a girl?”

That was one of the big things you couldn't do on the US net. The Ministry didn't mind if people changed their avatars around, but they had to look like the gender that god had given them. To be able to play a gender that wasn't your own, especially in a full-sensory game... in an uncensored full-sensory game...

He hadn't even known that was an option. And he felt vaguely cheated that the adult world and the church that ruled his nation had decided to deny the possibility even existed.

What would it feel like to get laid as a girl?

And the second he thought that, he was aware of a big stirring back in his meat-body. A serious boner going on there, and he cringed, before remembering that the dragon couldn't see him at home.

Rich looked to the dragon, embarrassed and unsure of how he should feel. The dragon was waiting patiently. It had all the time in the world... well, it's world, anyway.

“IF YOU HAD FOLLOWED THE PATH THAT MOST TAKE, YOU WOULD NOW CHOOSE YOUR OWN FLESH,” said the dragon. “BUT THERE IS AN OPTION TO LEAVE IT TO RANDOM CHANCE. FEW HAVE TAKEN THAT OPTION. MOST ARE SATISFIED WITH THE CHOICES REVEALED BY THEIR DESIRES.”

“Random? Why would anyone do that?” Rich asked.

“THEY DO NOT KNOW THERE IS A HIDDEN CHOICE. ONE THAT DOES NOT APPEAR IN ANY OF THE CRUCIBLES. ONE THAT HAS THE POTENTIAL FOR TRUE POWER.”

Crucibles... Rich filed that away for future reference. “Okay. So if I choose randomly, then I have a chance at getting awesome power. Maybe.”

“THERE IS NO MAYBE. FOR I HAVE THE POWER TO EXCLUDE ANY FLESHLY VESSEL I CHOOSE,” said the dragon. And in the blink of an eye, the green energy boiled up below each pillar, and obscured each and every nude form from view once more. “AND SO, IF I EXCLUDE ALL CHOICES BUT ONE...”

Rich exhaled.

This was tempting.

Still...

“Power has a price. What would you want from me?”

“YOUR GOODWILL. AND ONE DAY? MY FREEDOM.”

“How do I do that?”

“SECRETS THAT CANNOT BE SPOKEN IN THIS PLACE. SECRETS THAT YOU SHOULD TAKE CARE TO AVOID UNTIL THE TIME IS RIGHT. DO NOT SPEAK OF ME OUTSIDE THIS PLACE, RICHARD ROYAL. NOT UNTIL THE TIME IS RIGHT.”

“Um... okay?”

“THEN IT IS DONE.” The dragon bowed his head.

And a pop-up window appeared in front of Richard.

CHOOSE YOUR RACE:

And below it, a single option sat, black against the white background.

>>RANDOM

Rich reached toward it without a hand, then paused. “Which gender will I be?”

“WHAT GENDER DO YOU WANT TO BE?”

“Male,” Rich said hastily, then he stopped and thought about it. Wait a minute. If I went female, then I could look at boobs and pussy any time I wanted to...

“DONE.”

Too late now. Oh well, Rich thought to himself. I can always make an alternate character to... play around with. Later.

Before he could lose his nerve, Rich jabbed the Random button.

And his perspective blurred, shoved him in front of the dragon.

Up close the dragon... Caunal, he was big. Skyscraper big. Godzilla big. Rich swallowed hard, found he could now. He wiggled his tongue around, but his mouth felt different somehow. He couldn't figure out how and didn't have time to think on it, because Caunal was speaking again. “AND NEXT, YOUR FIRST PATH. YOU WILL HAVE MORE, EVENTUALLY. THIS ONE, I THINK, IS BEST SUITED TO YOUR DESIRES... AND MINE.”

A new pop-up window appeared.

CHOOSE YOUR STARTING JOB:

CULTIST

“Some kind of DPS?” Rich sneered. “Seriously?” The words came out weirdly, as if his lips weren't moving properly.

“I AM VERY SERIOUS,” said the dragon. Black stars danced in his white, blindingly luminous eyes.

Well, he'd trusted Caunal thus far. It had even gotten him a secret race option, if the dragon was to be believed.

Besides, if it didn't work out he could always change jobs later. That was how it worked, right? Everything he'd heard so far seemed to suggest that.

“Fine,” Rich said, and reached a claw out to poke the Cultist option.

Wait.

A claw?

“THE PACT IS COMPLETE.” Caunal said, grinning widely.

No, it wasn't a grin. His maw was just parting, opening wide, wider...

Rich had just a fraction of a second to realize that he was in danger.

And then the dragon ate him.