Carly walked into the swirling misty maw. After after a few meters, she hit a wall that her body both adhered to and started to penetrate. It was like a thick fluidic membrane. Any part of her body that had pushed through, it would not release it back. No matter how much she pulled back. With no other option, Carly pushed into the membrane, gradually forcing her way to the other side. There she landed heavily on the ground, in a new space, it was mostly dark and offered little in sensory stimulation.

After a moment, a message popped into being before her.

Congratulations Extant,

You are now transferring from the Martial Development Programs Hub to the Expanse Foyer. This will entail a transference across networks through a temporary bride.

Remain calm. You will soon lose consciousness. This will assist in easing your transition during this transference process.

Expanse awaits. Good travels.

PURG Liason Team

At first, Carly felt fine. But soon she lost strength in her legs and arms. Within seconds, Carly was flat out on the floor of this interim space as everything went hazy and dull. After she became holly unconscious, her body vanished.

* * *

Carly first became aware of the hard surface she was lying on. The back of her head was finding it rather unpleasant. She began opening her eyes, blinking and blocking the light shining down with her arm. She closed them and rubbed at the small amount of crust that had formed in the outer corner of her eyelids. She took a moment as her surroundings gradually came into focus. When she removed her arm, she was greeted by two familiar faces leaning over her in curiosity."Are you OK young lady?" Asked Roy with concern.

"Can you hear us, dear?" Anne asked, also with a worried expression showing.

"Roy, Anne, I am glad your both alright," Carly proclaimed. "I was worried about what might have happened to the two of you after this morning. Things went so horribly wrong.

"After this morning?" Asked Anne as she looked to Roy. "Whatever does she mean, do you think?"

"I have no idea, but is that all you got from that? How does she know our names?" Roy queried Anne in response.

"That..., that is a good point," Anne agreed. "How do you know our names, young lady? And what is your name?" Anne questioned.

Carly had still been gradually coming too. But now, sitting up, she was suddenly very awake and very worried. "Do neither of you recognise me?"

"Roy, do you know this young lady?"

"No, you?"

"Not at all. Who are you, dear? You still haven't given us your name."

"Damn it. The upgrade must have recked your memory data or something," Carly said while worrying her lower lip for a few seconds, thinking. "Hi, I am Carly, and we used to live together before coming to this,..." Carly took more of a look at her surroundings. "Whatever this place is."

Looking around, the entire area Carly found herself was very bland. Dark grey floor, medium grey walls, and light grey ceiling that was emitting the light that, at first, Carly thought was blinding. But now she realised it was fairly dull.

"Yes, we used to live with Carly on a farm, but that was not you, young lady. The Carly, Roy, and I used to live with looked nothing like you. Who are you, really now." Anne asked with annoyance in her voice.

"What? You don't recognise me?" Carly cried out to the pair while touching her face and wondering if her own look had changed.

Both AI's hung their heads and sadly shook no.

Roy looked over to Anne. She was holding such a solemn face. He couldn't help but slowly break into a smile, then snorted out in laughter.

"Ha, I win," Anne said to him. "As if there was ever any doubt," she then said under her breath.

Carly very gradually started to bare teeth and clenched her fists. "After the shit, we just went through today. This is how you decide it's best to greet me?" She managed to squeeze out between her teeth, pure rage bubbling away. "Think about the situation next time, for fucks sack," she continued, in the same tone.

Turning away from the two, she closed her eyes and had to take a very deep few breaths to release some of the worry and tension. It proved insufficient, so Carly pulled herself up and started walking towards one of the walls. She thought it was the one her feet had been pointing towards when she first sat up. The room looked big but proved to be far larger than Carly expected, after walking for 10 minutes and still feeling as though she was no closer to the wall.

She looked back over her shoulder for the first time and saw Anne and Roy, 20-meters away, sitting down, holding hands while watching her.

"Walked off that anger yet?" Roy asked in his regular calm country farmer voice. "If not, keep going. We don't mind waiting until your ready."

Carly's mouth was agape. "What the hell just happened?"

"Well, in this place, it seems after you walk a few meters from what we assume is the center of the room, you just sort of walk on the spot."

"Or run," Anne chimed in.

"That wasn't running, Anne. Anyhow, you just start to 'move' on the spot. It happened to us earlier while we were waiting around and decided to walk over to a wall ourselves," Roy confessed.

"Now, can we move on from here?" Roy asked in a tone that indicated he was sick of being in this bland space. "We have been waiting for a while now."

"Sure, but first, you are both fine? No issues after the changes required for your compatibility with Expanse?"

"As far as we can tell, we are fine, Carly," Roy answered.

"Neither of us could find any issues with our personalities. Nor could we detect any gaps or flaws in our memories, at the moment," Anne added.

"At the moment. What do you mean?" Carly asked.

Roy looked at Anne and nodded for her to explain. "It is just something Mr. Melos mentioned to us. Nothing to worry about. The upgrades don't seem to have changed us or effected us in any way. But, from what we understand, it will occur when we enter Expanse. We will, for all intents and purposes, be extents. We will switch over to a processing and memory construct that is based upon human neural mapping. We will supposedly feel our emotions in a new, more intense way, and have a fallible memory system. Just like the regular humans transferring across to become extant's."

"You are both OK with that?" Carly asked.

"Sure, its nothing to worry about, just a new type of existence. It will be exciting to explore such a thing. Real emotions, or as near too. It could make life very interesting." Roy answered.

"If it keeps us close to you, Carly. Then we are willing to take whatever risks need taking. You mean a great deal to us both," Anne told her. "Now, can we move along from here? Carly, look towards the top left corner, it is just outside visual range."

It was a weird thing to try and look beyond your visual range. But it was a skill that she was familiar with. Thanks to accessing system menus and the like over the past decade and a half with various games.

"Is that an icon? That's pretty sneaky to place it there and have it almost blend into the grey of the walls," Carly answered contemplatively. She looked up, bringing it into a clearer definition, against the brighter ceiling.

Mentally activating the semi-transparent button, Carly received a prompt that she read aloud.

Welcome

To all extant's that find yourselves in this room, welcome. You are now fully loaded into the Expanse Lobby.

As a cohort, you can all now move onto the next step in your journey.

Do you wish to proceed?

[YES] / [NO]

"We have both selected yes already, Carly," Anne said.

"Done," Carly answered.

The trio did not move to a new location or anything. Instead, the walls of the room they were in grew in height by at least a factor of five.

When the wall growing ceased, a face gradually morphed from one of the walls. Once fully formed, it looked down on the three, and after a few seconds, it spoke. "Welcome, I am the AI named Start," it said in a homogenous voice, sounding like a crowd of hundreds speaking the same thing all at once."

"The first step is transitioning all Extents to Expanse is the process of currency conversion. Namely, you can transfer any, and all, money or assets from Earth to PURG and gain additional Life Points. This will occur at a ratio of one Global to one Life Point. Life Points are a vitally important currency in Expanse. So having more can only be of benefit."

"If you would like to transfer any money or assets and have them transferred, just think, [Financial Menu]. This will call up a menu screen that will provide several financial transaction options."

"The next two hours are reserved for this step."

Carly did precisely that. It brought up her PURG MDP account. Since Carly, like all MDP trainees, had nowhere to go, she had retained the large percentage of the funds she earned while participating in the program. It amounted to $704,876 over the six years Carly was part of the program. What surprised Carly was that there was a second account, this one was labeled MDP Ladder Combat and amounted to $210,000.

Finally, there was the Loop Elimination prize and bonus, of $10-million each. Closely followed by the fine and special transaction charge costing 5-million each.

Having no reason not to transfer the full amounts, Carly did so. After confirming that this was all her known financials and assets, she wished to transfer across.

Financial Menu You may wish to proceed with converting personal funds and/or assets listed into Life Points (LP) for EID#0?

[Yes] / [No]

Carly highlighted both accounts, the only things listed in her financial assets. She then proceeded and selected [Yes].

Financial Menu Transferring all accounts.....

Converting personal funds and assets to Life Points (LP).....

Merging existing LP with transferred LP.....

Calculating.....

Considering that the processing power available could do billions of calculations a second, Carly was impressed by how long she sat looking at the Calculating message on the screen. All that was missing was a drum roll, she thought.

Financial Menu EID#0 Existing LP:

EID#0 Transfer LP:

--------------------------

EID#0 Current LP: 91,216,467

10,914,876

-----------------

102,131,343

Carly was completely stunned.

She knew she was probably going to have a financial account of around 11-million with the prize from the Loop Elimination Event and her earnings. That alone made her think of her self as quite rich. But the 91 million that was already in the account, that was too much.

"The funds were transferred into your account EID#0 at 9:41 am, today."

"Great," Carly said. "That doesn't tell me how that much got there."

There was no further response from the AI.

She could only think back to the conversation she, Ross, and Isaccs had this morning. 'Was that amount really 20-percent of Ross wealth? Damn, that's such a ridiculous amount.' she thought.

Even though it was just her and the two AI who had no funds to perform any transfers with, it seemed like Start was going to make them wait out the full duration set aside for financial transactions.

Anne and Roy tried to talk to Carly, but she instead sat in a daze for a few minutes, contemplating her newfound wealth. She was quite literally stunned as she constantly checked the number in the [Financial] menu screen.

They mentioned Ross and getting skills and achievements. She just wasn't able to pay attention for quite a while.

Finally, Start started talking again, informing everyone that they could now view their current LP from within their [Personal Status] screen.

From there, Start provided a glossary of the world. It began with some astrometrics of the world.

Expanse was a capsule-shaped planet that was ever-expanding due to its nature, and the way that mana worked in the world.

The world was enormous. Within the cylindrical part of it, the Earth could fit inside its diameter slightly more than eight times.

Despite its size, it completed one complete rotation along its axis every two earth days. It had an elliptical orbit that took Expanse four Earth years to complete.

At the height of summer, expanses perihelion was roughly 450-million kilometers from its star, and in winter, its aphelion was around 800-million kilometers distant.

With these basics about the world provided, Start moved on. It informed the trio that all Extant's would be respawning in the square permanently designated for their starting region.

These start regions would all contain approximately the same total square kilometers of territory and basic resources. The monsters contained within each would vary, along with any low tier sentient race.

Each country or alliance from Earth would be placed in their own randomly assigned starting region. There were 180 start regions evenly spaced around the same latitude in the southern hemisphere of the world.

PURG would start in Region 000, the only one that was reserved. Each start region would be unequivocally the most crucial place to an Extant. Because the respawn square held within their region was the only spot, they would ever get to respawn.

The crucial part about this, these start regions could be invaded, and another party could control the respawn square. This scenario made it absolutely vital to defend the start region. Or it could create extreme hardship for the local extant's until they were able to break the control or someone else came along and liberated them.

The information dump lasted for approximately 5-minutes. Carly found most of the information interesting, although extremely vague. She figured it would be more relevant once everyone else arrived.

Right now, she was glad she spent time gathering information from Mal-Chin. Between what he explained and her experience with the Loop Elimination Event, she felt somewhat schooled in her expectations for her arrival in Expanse.

"In 1-minute, we will move on to racial selection," Start informed the trio after finishing its basic rundown on the world.

"Yeah, that sounds much more like getting started," Carly said with some excitement. The three waited around, Anne and Roy with stoic patience. Carly, pacing, and seemingly with excess energy.

"You now have access to the [Racial Selection] menu. Please choose the preferred race you wish to live as during your life in Expanse. This choice will be unique to each start region and permanent. Since you three have early been granted early access, your racial choice will not affect the remainder of the PURG cohort.

The trio began looking at the various races. There was a mixture of classic fantasy and familiar alien races pulled from various media.

They were interrupted by Start after a minute perusing the substantial list. "As EID#0, you have gained access to privileged information. This carries over to include your two AI companions. Each of you selects three different races and accept them to become your racial choice in Expanse. Please pay attention to your system messages."

They did just that and received a system message.

"Oh wow, that's bloody evil," Carly stated. Carly instantly understood the implications of the messages.

"There are two ways to overcome this problem. Firstly, cooperation amongst the cohort by uniformly selecting a race, forming a majority. Secondly, individuals can assign their vote option to another individual. Which means they are essentially giving that person an additional vote for their racial choice.

The vote assigning option can access by calling up the [Racial Vote Assignment] screen.

"Aah, OK. Well, that shouldn't be too much of an issue for us. I can see it becoming an issue with more people. Especially with so many races to choose from."

"Indeed, the task of selecting a countries race could be considered the first regional quest," Start said while nodding a single time, a serious countenance on display.

Carly looked to Anne and Roy and shrugged. "So, how do you two want to do this?"

Anne and Roy both looked at each other and nodded in silent agreement. Going into the [Racial Vote Assignment] menu screen, they assigned their choices over to Carly. "We trust you, kid," Roy said.

Carly scoffed. "You know I am many times your combined ages."

"Really? Then how come I look so old compared to you?" Roy asked. The conversation was then interrupted.

"Racial selection criteria met," stated Start. The AI's statement was immediately followed by a system message.

"Racial selection criteria met," stated the AI for a second time.

< Racial System: 80% of the racial selection cohort elects to assign their choice to a single individual. That individual can give weight to primary and variant traits. That individual can also access the [Generic Traits Addon] menu >

"Racial selection criteria met," stated the AI for the third time.

< Racial System: 100% of the racial selection cohort elects to assign their choice to a single individual. That individual can access the [Biomechanical Systems Editor] application >

"Achievement reached," Start said.

"Did you guys get those notifications as well," Carly asked.

"Yes, I did," Anne asked, while Roy nodded for the affirmative. "That seems like quite a boon that we just happened upon."

"Congratulations, the racial selection process should be much easier to complete with these criteria activated," Start said.

Carly stood silently for a few moments thinking about the situation. Gradually a smile grew on her face. "PURG intends to use insider information and gain a strong race to start with a strong foundation in the world."

The AI Start remained expressionless and completely silent.

"That's fine. You can give me the silent treatment. I know, I am right," Carly stated with utter confidence.

"It does make sense," Anne agreed. Roy also nodded silently.

"Isaccs sure is one slick operator. Still, Anne, Roy, thank you. Let's create a race that is amazingly strong."

"If that is what you want, dear. We are committed to standing beside you," Anne said.

"I couldn't agree more," Roy added.

"OK, so a search function. Can you give us some guidance for using it effectively?" Carly asked.

"Of course. There are many different categories of search criteria you may wish to utilise depending upon what you deem important or unimportant as a race. These categories include stats, skills, fortes, special skills, spells, affinities, and traits. Simply create the query and view the results."

"All right, stats are common muck in RPG's, same with skills and spells. So, gloss over them, I guess. Fortes, I experienced with the Loop Elimination, so I also get them. Can you tell me the difference between a skill and a special skill? And give a solid rundown on what affinities and traits are?"

"Your right about RPG's and stats. Your experience from the Loop Elimination Event should help considerably with understanding them. Stats are separated into a number of classifications. These classifications include [Vital], [Physical], [Magical], [Utility], and [Survival]. [Resistances] can also be considered part of this category, but generally considered as separate from other Stats.

"A Forte is the umbrella of related skills. The Loop Elimination Event was using a version several generations old, from what exists in Expanse. This was because of the stacking effect of bonuses between skills and forte."

"They can both be considered mundane abilities that drain endurance to perform. Once you arrive in Expanse, you will find that actions will link to forte rather than the skill related to it."

"Special Skills are closer related to magic spells. They generally have a physical and mana component released through the medium of a tool or weapon. This medium can include the physical body. Special skills, like magic spells, will require both [Endurance] and [Mana] as resources and are generally released in a more physically related action."

"Spells generally require a smaller [Endurance] component and larger [Mana] component for their resource requirements. This is true, whether directly cast or using magic formations."

"An affinity is a general racial bonus toward a type of magic. What this means is that it will be easier to learn magic your race has an affinity for than others. For example, a racial fire affinity will help any individual of the entire race learn fire magic, such as the most basic firebolt spell. It will also mean that they gain the [Fire Magic Affinity] skill quicker. Both the racial affinity and the skill affinity will work together, to further aid an individual of that race, to become more proficient with fire magic."

"Traits are more about the physical makeup of a race, where they excel or struggle physically and magically. A racial trait could mean that they gain a bonus from the strength stat, making them capable of over-powering someone from another race with the exact same outlay of Development Points into [Strength]. They could have additional organs, meaning that if one is damaged, an individual of that race could continue with an injury that may be fatal to another race. Or, they may have better eyes that simply allow them to see further."

"Traits can also be negative physical capabilities, so keep that in mind when selecting your racial choice."

"That concluded the summary of various criteria available with the search function. Are there any questions?" Start asked.

"I'm fine here, Anne, Roy?" Carly asked her two AI companions.

"I am following along fine," Anne answered.

"No problems here," said Roy.

"Is there any time limit on selecting a race?" asked Carly.

"No!" came the succinct reply.

"Are there any limits or restrictions to what can be selected?"

"Yes!" Start answered. "There is a maximum Development Point limit. Also, for your information, whatever the DP's your racial selection amounts too. You will also be charged the same amount of Life Points for its racial selection.

"What is the maximum DP limit?"

"That would need to be negotiated. At this time, I am not at liberty to say," Start answered.

"So much for that," Carly said. She spent a few seconds thinking about the information Start had given them. "I think it is time to begin trying out some racial searches of our own. What do you both think?"

"We are ready, and with you, Carly. All the way," Anne answered while Roy gave the nod.

"Well, the first, I guess, is to ask you both. What are your intentions when you get into Expanse?"

"Roy and I discussed this for a time while waiting for you to portal into the foyer. We would like to stick with you. Hopefully, we won't be a burden on you, but when we complete the transference into Expanse, we are essentially the same as every other ex-human entering the world. We obviously have no idea how much that is going to affect us."

"How does that even work?" Carly asked them both.

"Well, our current personalities and historical actions and interactions are extrapolated into a human-based neurological map," Roy shrugged.

"Well, OK, that explains it perfectly," Carly answered with a blank stare and dead tone of voice.

"Basically, we get a messy digital brain just like yours," Anne added.

"Gee. Thanks!"

"No problem, happy to help," Anne said with a smile.

Carly vigorously rubbed her head. "Moving on then. From the way Mal-Chin described the beta world to me, the fastest way to progress and get stronger was through combat. Which is also the way every RPG worked that I have ever tried. So, the question is, are you both going to be alright fighting beasts and monsters and killing them?

"We can and will do whatever is necessary. What we can't guarantee is that we are going to be any good at it. When we enquired, we were told our current personalities would translate over without a problem. But, our current AI capabilities will be gone," Anne explained.

"We may well be like newborns when we arrive in Expanse," Roy added.

"We just don't know," Anne finished off.

"Well damn, that's a bit concerning," Carly said.

"I don't know. I think it sounds exciting," Anne said. At any rate, there is only one way to find out. Let us get on with this racial selection, shall we?"

"Sounds like a plan," Carly said as she placed her hand to her chin in contemplation. "So, do either of you have any ideas on what you would like to search for?"

"Well..."

"Hold that thought. Sorry, Anne. Start, can the display thing-a-me show multiple searches at the same time?"

"The graphic visualisation? Yes. In fact, you could pull every race up multiple times if that was your wish."

"Sweet!" Carly said happily. "Sorry, Anne. You were saying?"