I'm briefly weightless once more, completely deprived of my normal bodily sensations, as the game's welcome message fades. After some time, the darkness withdraws, and a rumble of audio trails in from no direction, completely filling me.

With another flash, sound and color return all at once, and I realize this must be the opening video when with no body to speak of, my view pans up on its own. From a grassy ground, up to look out across a field, where humanoid warriors of vaguely distinct races charge to meet all sorts of hulking monsters. Pretty standard stuff, as far as these thing go, I'd say.

“There was no way we could be ready.” A man's voice calls out from everywhere at once. It's rich. Deep. I automatically imagine him as some sort of fantasy army's commander. “The forces of Oblivion poured out of the portals without warning. They overran everything in their path. Inhuman monstrosities; there was no talking or reasoning with them. All they did was kill.”

As soon as he finishes, the scene changes, flashing straight into the battle, creatures in shining dark purple cleaving straight through the charging humans, the extremely realistic sprays of blood and shredded bodies reminding me that this is very much an adult rated game.

In that moment, the scene changes once more, simply focusing on the blood, rapidly pooling in the trampled grass, before fading back to darkness.

“But we would not be beaten,” the narrator goes on. “We tapped into Aura, the power of the world itself, and built the towers.” There's a rumble of deep, booming stone, with a sudden cut to a wall, as if the imaginary camera is rushing up over its surface, before pulling rapidly away, to reveal just such a tower from a great height.

The tower is mostly gray-white stone, with an enormous glowing crystal standing at its peak. A translucent bubble, earthy brown matching the crystal itself, emanates from around the tower, washing over the forces warring at its base.

“They gave us the strength to fight back,” the narrator continues, but something about this scene is starting to confuse me. A couple more towers rise straight from the ground, like they were summoned all in one piece by magic. The human force between them immediately begins to push back the monsters. But this arrangement, they way everything is positioned and how it looks from overhead...

Is this a tower defense game?!

Much of the remainder of the intro is lost on me, the serious narrator going on about the ongoing assaults from the monsters through magical portals and how the only way to combat them is under the influence of the towers. I think he says it's been like this for years, with no end in sight, and large portions of the land have been altered and twisted by the appearance of the Oblivion portals.

Then the view swoops down over the battlefield, and I can tell it's about to wrap up. “We've called on the Guardians to hold back the tides of destruction, will you heed the call?” With his last line in an honestly really impressive delivery, the view reaches a town beyond the battlefield, and I can tell from the subtle shift in lighting, this is realtime rendered.

So gameplay, rather than the hyper-realistic pre-rendered footage from earlier. It's still great, just barely indistinguishable from real life instead of completely indistinguishable. And that's probably just a limitation of my computer having to render it.

Soldiers stream from the city gate, surely NPCs with the generic armor they're wearing. Just past the gate, there's a small plaza where more soldiers are running all over in a flurry of activity. It's easy to pick out the few in better equipment, outfits more fitting for different classes, as the view finally comes to rest on the center of the plaza.

Then it begins to circle, like it's trained directly on that position, right in the middle where the stonework of the plaza converges. Forms of soldiers cross in front a few times as it spins around... nothing. Is it for effect, or did they screw up something in the cutscene? No, for such a big game, how could they mess up something like that?

I find out soon enough. After circling all the way around to look back through the gate and into the field beyond, the camera floats slowly forward, until it reaches the center and... stops. Ahh, crap. It figures I'd hit an immersion breaking bug in my first, like, five minutes playing the damn game...

The camera hangs in place for about five seconds, long enough for me to start wondering if I should force quit or something. I pull up my stream to see that of course I don't even have anyone watching to laugh at this with me. (Or at me.)

Then to my surprise, everything fades to black. Did it work through the issue? Maybe there was just a missing model or something and it still loaded me in correctly. This would probably be the tutorial level, right? I'm guessing it was my character that should have been standing there, lots of games like to do the 'float into the character and become them' at the start. It was popular even before VR games were a thing.

All at once, I blink my eyes open, and I realize I'm lying down. Huh?

The disorientation hits me like a freight train. Where am I? How did I get here? It's nothing like how I'm used to losing time. The fuck?

A blazing red message explodes into my sight, bright enough that I'm forced to shield my eyes until they adjust enough to read it. But I have no hands to shield them. Still no body at all.

Forced Logout

Unmet Physical Needs. Account Locked for three hours.

Please take regular breaks in the future.

Oh.

I can feel myself unceremoniously dumped back into my own body when the VR signal cuts out.

Dumped straight into my fucked body with a blaring migraine, and every corner of my existence screaming for food and water. It only lasts a few moments before I don't have to deal with it.

I'm in the shower. Ok, things don't hurt so much anymore. I must have fed myself too. Did I even have any food left in my house? I wonder how long I've been in here? The glass is all fogged up, so probably long enough. Did I even clean myself? Whatever, who cares?

I get out, heading over to the sink to attack my face with a razor and get rid of the itchy, awful sensation of facial hair. It's hard without a mirror. I don't remember there ever being one here, so I must have gotten rid of it as soon as I moved in.

I wince when the blunt edge cuts into my skin and toss the razer into the sink. Screw this, I look like fucking shit either way. I leave the bathroom.

“Huh.” There's no light coming in through the shades over my tiny kitchen window. How long was I in the game, and how much time did I lose? When I grab my phone, it's already 10 pm. I'm not even sure when I started, and there are so many gaps in the last twenty four hours that I can hardly anchor the remaining memories to anything.

Doesn't matter, just forget it all, it's better that way. I flop down into the seat at my computer desk. Might as well look up the game stuff I don't understand while I wait for the lockout to end. Unless it's over already, it was only three hours and I have no idea how long it's been since then.

Just don't think about it. Focus. I lock my eyes on the screen and push everything out of my head. I'll be fine as long as I don't have to think about myself...

I do a few searches, but what I find is a little... “They fuzz all the numbers. Min-maxing is a nightmare.” Huh, scrolling forums, I see the same thing over and over. Hardcore elites losing their minds because the stat values shown are clearly not the ones that actually get used in various calculations. They're more relative than anything, to indicate who usually does something better. Besides that, there are apparently a whole host of hidden stats that don't come up in the extended stat sheet-

Wait, what extended stat sheet?

I shake my head. Ok, apparently there's an extended sheet, but even that excludes most of the info anyway, leaving players to guess their way through which options would be the most efficient. So like I saw when I was reading through the available Skills, while they're very detailed in what they do, how well they do it is left intentionally mysterious.

I see, so building my character by intuition is... apparently how they want you to do it, I guess. But what about the data-miners? Even the biggest games can get data-mined for the true values of things, right? When I find the answer, I can hardly keep myself from laughing out loud.

“The code is nonsense?” Apparently, the entire game is encrypted, which hasn't been that uncommon in recent years, but the devs took it infinitely further for no good reason.

I don't really get a lot of the technical stuff posted as I scroll through, but from what I do understand, the game's actual code is different on every computer, and every update completely rewrites the game with entirely new encryption.

Even then, scouring and decrypting archived code across multiple versions has turned up nothing. The few times the data miners swear they got it right, the game's actual running code was absolute gibberish.

I don't have any idea how all of that is even possible, but the easy consensus online is that they're using the fancy new quantum computers that run the game's AI to accomplish it all somehow.

Fucking hell. Game devs these days don't mess around, do they? Not that it's dissuaded the data miners, some of whom have taken it as a personal challenge, just to say they did.

Alright, freeform character building it is. This should be new. I wonder if their aggressive information hiding has actually lead to people making unique characters for once? That would be nice after seeing every single build in other MMOs converge on the statistically most optimal endpoint. That's the impression I'm getting, both from the partially pre-built starting Stats and Skills, and the randomized Personal Affinities. It's all there to push people in different directions right from the start.

After working through all that, I pull up what we do know. People have been compiling information the old way apparently, supposedly how they had to do it before we all had everything at our fingertips. That's to say: lots of legwork, cross-referencing between players, and mountains screenshots for proof. Sounds like a massive pain.

So... Characters start with three Personal Affinities, 100 Character Points, and 100 Ability Points. Alright, it's a start. I saw two of my Affinities, so what about the third?

Opening a page on it, I read through. Personal Affinities are as they sound – things your particular character is specialized in, unique to them. They are generated as soon as you start character creation and select your race. They are shown once, right after race selection and before you customize your character, so you can work with them in mind, and then they aren't directly listed in your character sheet afterward.

Also, while it's pure speculation the game company refuses to confirm – because of course they do – the player base has largely decided that the Affinities generated not purely random. They are based on the player's thoughts or desires when they make their character. Even if they're randomized to an extent and come up differently when remaking characters – and also change with race – the ones generated always fit too well for the player base to believe otherwise. They're called Personal Affinities for a reason.

Well... fuck. I lost the time straight through when I was supposed to read mine and can't remember what I got. I don't even remotely know what I would have been thinking at the time to try guessing, if it really is based on your mind.

How am I supposed to find out about my last Affinity? I'm sure someone has had an issue like this before, so I try searching it up. The answer is to find a player who has an Affinity that allows them to see other players' Affinities. They're called 'seers.'

Wait, for real? Why is that even a thing? A little more searching finds an answer. It looks like it's possible to be rewarded extra Affinities for particularly unique or special actions. Even if it's rare, there are enough cases of it happening that the players have confirmed it. Looks like you need a seer to find out the effects of those new Affinities.

With that aside, I go back to the info on the different affinity types, and find that there are a number of them players have nailed down. They are: Stat, Archetype, Skill, Trigger, Reaction, Action, Spell, Familiar, Transformation, Growth, and Curse types. It looks like everyone gets two minor ones and a major one. Mine were a Major Stat type and a Minor Skill, so I should have another Minor one.

I sift through the information on each, ruling out most, since those will either have a visible impact on your character sheet in some way, or are only available as Major Affinities. I'm left with just Trigger or Reaction. Or a Curse, which would totally suck, but it would be my luck.

Looks like Triggers are a kind of... special effect. When you do a specific thing, it will cause an effect. The example on the wiki page is hitting an enemy causing an explosion. Simple enough in theory, but apparently the action can be literally anything. Without knowing how to trigger it, I might be shit out of luck...

Reaction is pretty similar. Not necessarily relying on the player doing something, but on a situation occurring instead. So it could be when you get stunned, the reaction occurs, either to un-stun you, or teleport you away, or whatever.

Based on a skim of the player reports in the mountain of comments on forums where they talk about what they rolled, it looks like Trigger and Reaction affinities should have a pretty closely related cause and effect. So hitting an enemy wouldn't like, teleport you up into the air or something weird. The effects are all sensible at least.

Of course, none of that helps the issue with me not being able to find out what mine is. I sigh dejectedly. Well, I suppose if it's something I don't land on playing normally, I probably wouldn't really have done it much anyway, at least not without building my playstyle around it.

To be thorough, I pull up Curses last. As expected, rather than something beneficial, a Curse will harm your character. “Then why...”

As soon as I question why anyone who rolls a Curse wouldn't immediately remake their character, I get to it. A Curse makes your other Affinities stronger. Ahh, so if a mage rolls a magic buff and a strength curse, their magic buff will be more powerful while the strength doesn't matter to them, so they'll be better off overall.

“Huh...” I mutter while nodding. Of course, it's entirely possible for curses to completely break a character, since according to player reports, they can do literally anything, even stuff like messing up your stat growth or banning you from taking any Skills from entire sections of the Skill list. I click on a screenshot, showing one such player who was locked out of taking any Skills that deal damage. That's pretty intense...

Continuing with the wiki page, the stronger the Curse, the bigger the boost to your other Affinities, so things could get pretty insane in the most extreme cases, like with that one player. It even mentions the possibility of generating multiple Major Affinities, or more than three Affinities if the Curse is bad enough, because it just can't boost the remaining ones enough to cover the difference.

The comments mention most of those characters getting remade anyway, since the extra Affinities still can't truly make up for the pure havoc such powerful Curses wreak.

Of course like anything, there are a handful that slip through the cracks, with the unlikely combination of positives and negatives to be usable, or in some cases, incredibly powerful. I mean, if that one guy wanted to play a pacifist healer he would have been ridiculously overpowered, but otherwise the character's totally unusable.

Sounds like some of the top players (or at least the ones claiming so online) have characters like that, which isn't really too surprising. Hell, they probably rerolled repeatedly to get that. After seeing how people reroll for gacha games, nothing would surprise me.

Scratching my head, I lean back in my chair and stare at the ceiling, done reading. I can probably log in again now, but all at once, the lethargy is setting in. The prospect of standing up from my chair suddenly too much to bear. The moment I get my head out of the internet and back to myself, I'm like this again.

“Come on, you fuck,” I growl at myself. After a few false starts, I put energy into my legs. In one motion, I launch myself over onto my bed.

I roll over onto my back to stare at the ceiling. My mind is steadily reeling. That just happened, I actually did it on my own. I'm panting. I throw an arm over my face. Have to calm down. My chest heaves for a few minutes, but it isn't getting better. My heart is pounding. I can't do this, can't be here. I grab my phone with shaking hands.

I squint my eyes open, completely calm. It's grassy, where am I? I have to sit up slowly, the sensation of myself alien in the strangest of ways before I realize why. I'm back in Planes of Oblivion? I guess I logged in again. How long did I play before I came around? I have no idea, but sitting in the grass in an empty field is so much better compared to my usual existence that I really don't care.

The wind rolls over me for a few minutes, and I let the prickle of the stubby greenery against my palms sooth my heart. When I flop down onto my back, I finally remember to start up my stream again. The tiny dot of light blinks into existence above me and I offer a smile for the camera, suddenly feeling a bit shy.

A moment later, I'm laughing at myself. What is even going through my head right now? I'm smiling at an empty room and feeling shy about it? I should be more worried about the room being empty, I'm fucked if I can't make some money off of this somehow.

“Not the time or the place to think about that,” I growl at myself, mood instantly souring. I just want to forget about all of that for now. Escape at least for a little while. Enjoy being Mei because she's, you know, not Ray.

Unlike usual, there's no feeling like I'm going to instantly fall apart, but that ruined the serenity of this grassy field. Time to go do something else instead.

Popping up, I turn in a slow circle.

Then I do it again.

“So... where am I?” I finally ask my empty environment. The sun is directly overhead, so I can't even make a guess at directions. One way stands a forest. Besides that, it's nothing but endless grass stretching to the horizon in all directions. I... only really have one point of reference, so I start walking that way, toward the forest.

I try jogging and running a couple times to see how it feels. I can really move when I try, but I run out of breath fast too, and the sun overhead is making me sweat terribly. My pace falls back to a walk not long after, and that's one downside of this small body. Short legs mean short steps. Oh well, there's nothing for it. Just have to keep going and see where my new adventure takes me.