Zenith

It’s the name of an old TV company from last century and now it is the leading AI interfaced Virtual community and world.

Okay it’s 2402 AD and things happened on Earth that some folks might have guessed. The Planet got sick for US from the way were we doing things and people had a lot of ideas of politics and the economy and money all set aside when water got toxic and things just melted and global flooding started and weather got a lot worse and things broke down and stopped working and got really bad for like a century before we started to get that we could do more and do it cleaner and smarter and at a certain population point that’s non negotiable.

You can be of what political stripe you want but science and physics don’t change because you want it too.

They just don’t.

And fucking around we found out and we took a hit.

The Ecological Great Depression and it killed rabid version Capitalism.

So we separated the two and we tried as a species to leave politics as just that. Separate and the technical hard science as well. And frankly at varying levels of success because people are well…people.

So we sort of reached a compromise of people living the way they wanted to in countries they wanted to and we left that harder sciences out of opinions that ignore the results because it didn’t favour one opinion or something someone…wanted as opposed to what we as a species needed.

Of course we had to put that into law, and of course we had to fight a couple past conflicts to state that no state or party can enforce its opinions on medicine or the environment.

No climate change denial, it happened, no flat earthers, no anti-mask or anti-vaxxers at least not on a level were they can remotely effect policy.

And we got to the point of global separation of faith and state as no one was going to drop religion and it shouldn’t affect social policy unless you make the choice to live in a theocratic nation or culture.

But legally we did away with them having as much political power too. Of course we couldn’t clear the boards but we learned that people as a culture are very different in needs than people as a species.

And then we came up with better tools and as a way that sort of replaced TV and took a huge hit from Online life as human’s knew it was Virtual Reality and Zenith was at the top of the game one of the pioneers of the genre and it expanded.

VR interface came from a neural linking tool that was to be used in both disabled people and in robotic controls for underseas and in space and someone in Japan figured out if we could access our computers with our minds being read by a neuro helmet then we could play games in our head and that lead to basics like VR building blocks to AI programming enhanced systems that interact with us as we play.

Zenith used people as a resource with a lot of people living here a lot or most of the time as their characters and avatars because time is all signals there so it moves so much faster for us in the system.

Zenith built a fantasy world around its players in a very Dungeons and Dragons way but also like a videogame so you earned experience points for doing things in game awarded by an AI from combat to doing skills and playing and you could apply those points to buy upgrades in stats and skills. You could even buy specific skills from the AI system and say instead of cooking you could buy points for French Cooking.

Or anything really and the system judges if you could and how much the skill costs to buy or raise and skill packages are called classes.

You can buy a class package for less points than the skills and the stat buffs or you can customise.

Custom characters cost more to make.

Classes get skill restrictions but you get stat buff buys in order and rising exp costs but you get skill points at a cheaper rate than if you were buying skills custom for skills within your class.

Now Zenith had real world applications as it became both streaming and a sport and some people became celebs in games and guilds outside of the games and you got endorsement deals and in small scale cases you can get money for coming up with new skills and spells and specialties that couch on and the system rewards you for adding to the whole.

And IRL you can buy gear from people in game and other things so there is a whole game driven sub economy where you can sell people willing to pay the cash anything from new in game items to skills or knowledge or even sell people built up accounts.

That’s my deal. I grind characters and build classes and popular designs and I grind them for a while and build them up until they’re usable and sometimes even unique and I sell these whole accounts to players collecting them or playing and want something new and fast or just new players with money.

There’s ten billion people on Earth, nearly Eleven billion and a huge number of people play Zenith so I pay the bills reasonably in selling those characters while I write third party software for the system that it uses as creatures, encounters and spells and even adventures.

I’m a small fish that was part of the last play test group that tested the world and that granted me a “boon” account where I don’t really have to pay for my account here as my main.

I play and grind every kind of character there is for money and my main character and my OC or Original Character is Vala and Vala has had many incarnations as I’ve wiped a few times and she is a ranger.

I like world exploring and I like having a class where I can do things like hunting and foraging for easy money in game and ranger gets things like cheap game, anti-monster and hunting and tracking and terrain bonuses.
Plus using bows and low level sniping really helps and decent melee skills and magic later on.

IRL my name is Lane Carter and I live in Canada and in the east coast capital of Halifax and I work part time in shipping and am rated with using robotic cargo drones which are our version of forklifts for the shipping containers down at the Harbor and Shipyards and Airport/Shuttle Port.

Basically I have VR goggles for PoV flight and have steering gloves I can link to certain cargo bots and pilot them when I need to and otherwise I just program them and let them do their thing.

Like most things, machines need someone there in case things happen because one thing is out of place and most robots and remotes get confused or thrown off the system like debris in the way of the target area. I can go in and say move the trash bag that messed with the sensor but unless you paid the machines to know how to deal with each thing they come across.

And real functional AI isn’t used on cargo bots and a shared AI problem solver might shelve the issue as not important while it does other tasks and the company loses time.

So it’s easier to hire someone to run the bots each shift and stuff.

And that pays the bills.

Or enough of them I only need part time work as I avoid IRL unless I’m writing for the game.

I don’t really go out or have a whole lot of vices outside of Zenith and just sort of live in the real world to survive so I can thrive in game.

And I’m just a low level gamer that does enough that I can live there better and have a life.

And as an old test player I got contacted to try new in system things and included the New Horizons new hardware with a VR scanning pod that is supposed to be even better and faster. Professional gamers use these and they’re looking at home market builds in these.

It’s a pod though so it’s the size of a big recliner chair with a canopy hood and it’s really bulky but they pay my network bill and my power in exchange for the enhanced data scanning the pod can do with us.

They sent it and hooked it up and I did the reading and then I used it.

I used the bathroom and made sure of it and took some multivitamins and a vitamin and energy drink and ate a couple of gamer ration bars and a microwaved ready meal bowl of Mapo tofu and once I was prepped for the long haul I booted up the pod and got in it and started downloading and scanning myself into the game.

New Horizons was playing with the idea of the neural interface reading YOU the player and transferring applicable skills to your character as free skills from YOU the player.

As long as it was transferable from your mind to code and allowing your character to know these skills.

An utter nightmare to conspiracy nuts.

That took a long time and it actually lulls you into sleep as it scans you and you wake in the starting zone you picked and I went with the country of Valance. Knights and a fair king and ships and an even hand with magic and the light faiths. Valance is a border nation on the new continent of Runica and it’s a coastal port that allows us to explore the whole new continent.

I had that sun in through my eyelids thing happening as the game booted up and my starting avatar here was female.

And I could feel my skin, feel the sun and wind on my skin and feel how soft I am and the weight of my long hair and the weight of new but small breasts and I breathe and I feel like it’s me and I think of the prompts to bring up my game screens and they show including my mirror.

Like a new Character you start in the base peasant look that your race and class has before you spend points and it has a nice mirror feature so I can check out changes as I make them.

The biggest thing is that I feel right more than ever before.

I never let myself think about how all my life I felt wrong and out of place and that I never really ever liked my life too much.

This new scan and pod and VR and being a girl, a woman it felt physically more correct than anything before.

I spent I don’t know how many times going through character classes and races and options playing dress up and any time I switched gender to male I felt like me, like the usual me only playing dress up.

Playing a girl I almost forgot my real life in a good way.

I spent a month IRL trying options and building my character and when I am done I’m a young girl and a starting adventurer and I go with a custom character and I stay with my age and species which is human and I play with my appearance and it costs money IRL or character points to make a hotter character by investing in the Beauty stat.

I spend my bonus points there for being a test player and I buy into Intelligence and Wisdom and Charisma as much as I can and I spend skill points on Foraging and Cooking and Waiting tables and Bartering and I download into the game.

I’m walking off the boat to the new world from The Black Empire of Drace and Drace are the main evil kingdom from the old countries bent on world domination. I’m just one of the endless refugees from their invasions of their neighbours.

I’m five foot even and a little around a hundred pounds and I have chestnut hair and green eyes and I look like a fourteen year old so somewhere along historical human ages to be a starting “adult” out in the world.

I love it, all of it feeling my body move right, feel right even to that soft bounce I have in hard steps or actual steps and I can smell the sea, the kind of rough harbour because of the new realism and I could feel the sway of the boat and it’s literally like I’ve been transported to another world in another body.

I feel right here.

Most players think I’m an NPC at first and that’s fine it pays room and board here and I take my tips and save them up and just live for a while as myself and just as a girl.

Gods and Goddesses what a sanity break for me.

I get invested enough in my new me that I spend real world money on buying in game money for enough to slowly build my wardrobe so I can look cute and feel cute and there’s a real degree of dress up in this and no one giving me grief about being out and in public dressed like this, acting like this.

Free.

Like I get to do my living and breathing and laughing here.

But I do like the actual game enough that after a while I am looking at being an adventuress just to earn enough to buy things that I want.

And as a player things are fine I had the starting money and a set of clothes but that’s it.

No changes of clothes, socks, shoes, underwear even ribbons and combs and brushes all are pretty much not included in my gear so as a woman and a girl I literally have what I could buy IRL and earn here.

I start really small with a dagger and a staff and a sling and I do those herb quests and I go hunting and even if I usually fail because I don’t have the sling skill or hunting there are times that I do get a bird and I do find some decent foraging and there are enough in the real world plants and veggies that I as a player can forage things limited by geography.

So I hunt, gather herbs and wild veg and mushrooms and things I know and slowly day by day I walk the more rural farm places getting wild growing things from pastures and even taking a few labour jobs done IRL by bots but I work hard and I earn some coins by harvesting with the farmers and it’s hard work in the game.

Picked up Farming Labor and points to add towards my next strength and endurance rank.

I feel the dirt and the heat and thirst and the sweat and the weight of the buckets as I pick things and I show up for those often as it’s safe work and it pays crappy but it buys me the sundries like socks and panties and basic things that I need because I care about living here like it’s my real life.

I make a few friends with NPC’s sort of as the system learns as you interact with the cast and other players rarely show in where I’m at unless it’s the tavern and I’m waiting tables and I try and befriend the NPC’s with classes so I can maybe get a teacher in learning skills.

If you find a teacher and put in the lessons the cost of learning new skills or boosting your skills is decreased so it’s worth it.

Also the game learns so your regulars start showing more doing more AI chat which grants RP exp points because the game learns.

I do try my hand in the tavern kitchen and not just wait tables but I try my hand at cooking and that’s based off your skills in character and personal knowledge and unless a player guides the system in making a dish and tasting it along the way and other things it doesn’t know how things taste or understand the recipe.

So they all taste off and bland until a player invents an in game variation of it.

I’m not a great cook IRL since good food is expensive and bars and easy heatable packaged stuff is easier and far more common.

However, players do what to eat in the game and when I cook, I make pretty reasonable chilli and baked beans and fries and hamburger and gravy that we get players in and they buy but more importantly most players are playing adventurers and they tip.

And that lets me buy enough things that I have ten days of clothes and then I buy a decent basic hunting bow and I go hunting and I bait the animals as I hunt with apples and carrots and grain and I get rabbits and other game and cleaning and learning all of that is harder like this because it’s just not done like a game action it’s me doing the skinning and cleaning in character and in person in game.

But all my time playing has taught me how to salvage from kills so I skin things as best and I can and clean them but try and keep feathers and fur intact as possible and that earns me enough money to get a better quality hunting bow and extra arrows and practice in game target shooting all the time.

I end up one day bagging a deer and in getting it back to the city I was attacked by a set of wild dogs and mon-grels which are like little dog men that look like African wild dogs but three feet high and armed and they shot at me with their slings and it was a fire fight as they tried to steal my deer and I won and killed them but it was really hard because they were dead humanoids and so realistic that it challenged you mentally to treat it as a game.

They had some small coins on them and I got a poor but functional few knives a hatchet and a short sword and I cut off their hands for the bounty and I dragged the bodies to a ravine because I couldn’t bury them and I went back to the city and had some money off of all of that and I had a bunch of character points that I brought up my cooking skill, hunting skill, bow and foraging and bought hiking as a skill and then put the rest towards my stats for strength and endurance not going up in ranks but getting there.

The skills I raised like this helped.

Things were easier or took less time or turned out better.

Hunting and Archery were really good choices and foraging being up means that I found more foods and I started buying things to put ingredients that I foraged in like my own herbs for cooking.

Meanwhile IRL was still the shit and I came out only to sleep and bathe and go and work when I had to and I started reading up on camping, hunting, cooking, baking and watching shows and trying to teach myself more things just so I could be better prepared in game and I found a hack.

If I set the pod to scan mode for me it will upgrade my base skills in game and not only that if I use the wireless option I can do the things as I scan me doing them and if I eat food like this IRL it learns what they are and the taste and texture and I played with that some and when I logged back it I gained a new level in cooking right off the start and skill points in the things I studied and as much as I hate the real world I took a break and do some extra shifts at work and I bought more varied groceries that I could afford and I went to the public library a place I hadn’t been too since a school trip and went and got a library card and found out that’s free and that they have like learning classes for teaching things.

I didn’t have a lick of interest in economy cooking as a workshop that teaches people to cook while poor and make things stretch in more of a surviving life skill thing.

I mean I learned my own version just surviving but this is someone actually sat down and went over the basics for people raised like me off of instant and microwaved and pockets and bars and how to make things out of them or with them or just cheap stuff out there that you can make better food for you and your family than just the packets even if it’s just cooking already cooked things to make things better.

I take the class because it’s free and get a whole bunch of books on a whole lot of stuff and I go home and I spend as much time as I can stand IRL in the pod, or wireless in the apartment and I read, I read to myself and learn I read out loud like to the machine and I read about cooking, foraging even we don’t have the same planet as the time the books were written in and I read on woodcrafts and traps and sewing and cooking and holistic herbal stuff and first aid more and it all in game adds to the character points to get my skills to the next “level” or how they rated my skills.

Cooking, Hunting and Foraging and my skills were close enough that they went up and I tried them out and I can make a lot better food now that the system understands it better and the ingredients and we get more players in because we have real tasting food.

I cook things the staff can dish out of the pots and then I usually take off and go for a hike and forage and hunt and even if I don’t get anything I still hike and even try jogging and put in a bunch more shooting practice.

I mean these aren’t huge gains but at the same time the skill points I do get aren’t cheap either if I was to shell out the money and it’s a whole new undiscovered cheat.

And given how popular the game is I could make a bundle off of this and it’d likely be killed by the game.

And I’m not done exploring the glitch or hack.

I do more foraging and hunting but also using some of the kills as bait if I think Grels are around. I keep my kill numbers small those I think I can take with the bow before getting physical and I start reading books on traps in the pod on game breaks and then buying things for cheap traps and snares and if I can catch it in a trap I can take it out with an arrow if it’s game or a Grel. I get a cart after dropping a boar and a push bar with big wheels. That set me back a lot in terms of coins but I needed it and I’m nowhere near having magical storage gear.

I buy some tools and some lumber and nails and find cave from a quest I remember and I hunt the giant snake that was in there and I clean the place out and build and jury rig a canvas and cut logs for a door.

I sold the snake at the guild and bought camping gear and went back out to the cave and made a hunting camp and I started hunting and saving money, foraging, getting monster bounties on low numbers of the light weight foes like Grels and I just save money and build skill points and levels and put experience points towards my stats or buying specialty skills like Cargo that makes doing those things easier to haul stuff in.

Hunting I try for bigger game and monster animals like Wargs and Bears, Giant Forest Spiders and Boars.

I try boosting my melee skills by reading martial art books or watching videos plugged in and I will arrow Goblins or Grels down to the last one and then try fighting hand to hand, daggers, short sword, staff and I get them as new first level skills at least and I finish with a stat grind as in game Winter is coming and I dump hard to my Beauty stat and Charisma and Endurance and with all my hauling and camp living that went up the most and my Strength gained a rank and that was nice because that and Luck are my lowest stats, not penalty bad but pretty minimum to start with.

When I came in for the winter I brought up most of my wilderness skills through hunting and after I sealed up the cave and cut down trees to do it I headed back and got a new place.

A cottage I was renting out from a widow and her children and I needed several trips but I filled her larder and mine with meat, smoked, salted and sausages and other cured ways. I moved in and had the place to myself and it was small just a bedroom, a kitchen nook and a tiny stove for warmth and teas and tiny pans and a sitting room between the two and a “toilet” with “Leaves.” and after I moved in I bought spiced candles and potted lavender and cooking herbs.

I don’t need much, there’s a women’s temple for baths and things nearby and I explore that first as many temple basics are free like the baths and there’s places to do laundry, bake, pray, and of course services and their library and NPC’s and there are times I think that the system honestly wings it because we swerve unexpectedly.

Of course it catches up faster than we ever could but I learn about the temple and get game info dumps and meet NPC characters and I do like the baths here and the steams and the massages that’s offered and meet random women as I do all three things and spend time reading here enough I’m a regular and I donate offerings daily and lounging, meeting women the system has to invent and it gives me the equivalent of a few charisma buffs when talking and finding jobs or clothes and things to buy.

I’m not rich but I’m not working right now and have enough coin I buy some nice things, nice underwear, lingerie in game, I like black lace, perfume, deodorant and toothbrushes, paste, hair removal soap, nail care things and polish and makeup from ladies alchemists and I spent the in game winter just reading, role playing, loads of dress up and house and helping in the temple kitchens and start doing temple missions with built up Npc’s like saving trafficked women, dangerous medical deliveries and temple warrior women battling vs harpy nests in some sort of fight vs their evil goddess.

They get me the lightest warbow they could and then blessed it and pack quivers of arrows and these are bigger foes, humans with the slavers so foes with classes and I flank and snipe fast and hard and when I can I use traps and a trapped foot means I’m sniping to kill and I grind there too and I’m pumping it into Dexterity/Agility and Archery, Stealth, Traps and I buy rapid fire and point blank shot and I get trained by temple people and I grind that for awhile and just save my money and rewards and dump that for December and January and by February I’m dumping stat just to Beauty and sit at between game breaks in the pod reading beauty magazines, fashion magazines makeup magazines and all things beauty industry I could get and I get into it actually because I want all of this…. Even if it’s in the game I want to have this stuff, be good at this.

I’ll honestly sleep in the pod plugged in because I really only dream about over there now.

And I must give the system the loops of sometimes I’ll log in to be me her…Vala and go to my room and bed and sleep.

Yes sleeping in the pod and in the game running full system and REM and the best sleep ever.

That sleep of being one hundred percent comfortable in who you are.

Then more work and pay everything and IRL I use the hair remover soap the men’s one to be baby faced and I get cleaned up all over and smooth and lotioned and dressed in a slip and panties and log into the system and go into full scan updates and just as my brain perceives the game flash in I put on lipstick.

Oh…

Oh…. I can feel the updates and it matches my mood as I finally just figured out why I’m Vala more than anyone else including myself IRL.

Because I was never meant to be a guy, that has always been what’s been wrong with me.

I really cloister myself in the temple for real trying to go over in my head what to do because transition is one of those rich people with health care things where it’s legal and it’s not cheap.

Worse at my age it’s harder and even more expensive and at my poverty level out of sight.

What should I do? Live my real life in the game?

Again like the sleep thing I linked up to the game version and then had my panic attack and mini-breakdown.

I kinda cried myself to sleep in the foetal position and I had strange, strange dreams of both lives and only one do I have a life in.

I remember a full on melt down then looking at the goddess statues and swearing Mystra the magic goddess’s statue was staring at me and then I realised I made a scene and I left and went to my cottage and sequestered myself for a week before coming out after noticing my mana stats and that I picked up the blessing of Mana and blessing of Mystra and was awarded skill points for mana and character points as well and put the character points in Intelligence, Wisdom stats and dump the rest into Endurance and Beauty and I buy skills like Breathing, Meditation, Magic Theory, Trick casting, Speed Casting and Will power and Mystical Battery as as skill I spend all my points on buying the skills and the system has either defined terms for it or needs to extrapolate new ones in new skills, sometimes even it asks me OOG (out of game) for a suggestion of blurb and effects.

It pays me for it in character points or exp or golds.

And that leads me to my trans stuff.

I apply to not just be a tester but I’ll pod test every races and class as data and write for them like suggested skill, class stuff and skills and spells and after a month of getting started I get hired.

An in Zenith sub department hires me for the R&D given my past work and I’m given the job and I move. I still like the region but I move to a suburb and I rent a small house and have a room as a work pod room and a playing pod room and I get decent pay my utilities covered and full benefits and I go through some heavy therapy to make sure this isn’t a game identity thing and I start transition which is much, much better in these days from better HRT and better surgeries and I get started and I get everything I need and started transitioning.

Being trans isn’t hated these days. It's a birth thing like sexuality and other stuff, the problem in health care and the difference between the really poor and I just squeaked into being covered and not being broken because of treatment.

So in my new place I get a rented prefab house and use the living room as just that and as soon as I move in and the pods are hooked up I power mine up and I set my helmet on my pod to scan as I do everything to set up my house from cleaning to setting up my place with decorations and just to see what the system learns from this from my life for my character. I also use my sort of employee status to get some of the old free promotional stuff and I use it to theme out the pods rooms one as a game fandom and my work room and my character one I get rendered game character art designed and I make and paint the place in scenes from her/my life on the walls using an art program to paint by drone.

I bring in themed game stuff they sent me and I make Vala’s room.

My immediate boss is an AI of the big system to sort of manage me and we agreed on calling her Zeni instead of her operating number. And we’re calling this research as well.

I get a nice bonus for coming up with having bio women sell their biometrics on periods and women’s health issues and include an option on playing those with a few character point buffs for research and it can be gamed and medically sold as information studies.

It’s for the game and yeah when they offered “Vala” I took the period package and as bad as it feels it scratches a dysphoria itch and I got enough points in buff and rewards I boost some magical skills and buying spells.

And that’s when I start writing for me but skills use, having spells as skills and you raise them the same way.

I write class spells and I’m doing character full run throughs and converting all my old headset characters and data to the pod and each one has an account number and the playtime carried over and those go out on auction and some I sell to Zenith as Npc’s.

Zeni sends me a recording headset and a wireless kit so I can sleep in my bed as I linked in and sleep in her bed. And yes my idea and I sleep actual real sleep like I’ve never had in my life and it’s making a difference, the treatments and meds and hormones and actually feeling more me and her really heals things broken so much and so long ago you forgot it’s not supposed to be like that.

A trick I do as Vala is “Alex” and it’s a cantrip of me as an illusion over her. Why? Because time is so much faster here if I cheat and learn in here as IRL me then my mannerisms voice training, makeup, fashion…I get to learn it all so much faster,

I do all the character combos and play they out and when it’s done they become adventurer guild Npc’s and then I’m writing the magic stuff and in game I live and study at the temple learning magic from the Mystra sect and I go with it because they have their own clerical spells and they teach. When I’m not doing that I’m doing the temple archer and ranger and doing ops in the field and learning ranger and nature spells as a full cost grind.

But it’s bigger missions and foes so bigger rewards and experience and sometimes they’ll in the end of a non boss fight let me grind for my physicals like sword, dagger, staff, spear and they teach as well so I get some time in their men at arms and knights training and I’m told I’d make a decent starting squire.

I sweet talk a few temple squires in lesions on the horse and jousting and in their duties and I do their work for a while learning. I do some time with the gardeners and beekeepers and just to try things and learn plus they have their own magic and start learning what some of the temple trades do and know and need.

I spend my rewards pretty sparingly save for gear some more clothes but my big purchases were a year of school for my landlady’s daughter and I hire us a gardener for the yard and planting a few berries and vegetables and lots of flowers and a maid and hired a handyman service and it really cost a lot but didn’t when it came to adventuring money.

I let Jessica, my Landlady do whatever she wanted, so her character was evolving because she had the resources and free time to.

We get a little closer as she teaches me manners and local sort of cultural things as Valance as a kingdom had a couple hundred years in now and when it was settled there were people here but in fortress towns because of the Grels and worse the Gnolls.

Gnolls are the size of biggish humans and are humanoid anthro hyenas with an insane kill and eat everything pack mentality and they see all beings as meat.

Gnolls nearly decimated this pre realm culture called the Onai and they only lived by strong clerical magic.

The Onai are bred into the Valance families now and so have old traditions and manners so there’s things in the realm that reflect that and people.

I definitely took Onai as a language and Valance/Onai manners as skills even if some wouldn’t waste the skill points. I take Onai Art as well. Having seen it around I’d like to know what they are and hit the temple books too.

In return I teach her archery as apparently there’s a women's club.

And the bulk of my money is saved except for gear but each mission I give large parts of my shares to the church, our men, our porters and keep enough for expenses and saving but I give half away easily.

I raise morale, I dump loads of money back into the greater temple and I save a tithe just for the goddess Mystra.

And as the missions get bigger I got better gear in better quality smithing and steel and I started filling my low stats and that with my strength going up the kind of bow I can use does and I upgrade my bow and spend likely the most on that and good arrows and new hatchet and daggers and throwing knives and the temple squires get me a temple longsword made but for a ranger so the guard has very good orb of Jade in it. I get hard leather armor made over buckskins and my usual colors are deep ash gray with blue undertones and I’ll have a hooded cloak often a camouflaged one and I bought a really decent staff.

And after listening and training with them I found hidden quests and some of these are out to the deep wilds of the continent where they lost starter temples in raider starter communities and we go clean out the local dungeon as it’s the monster base and I use a magic and arrow combo and use a “Glue” spell to trap feet or other body part and at a decent level as well.

That replaces my traps and I put arrows in it.

And if it’s really big I do my arrow-force bolt where I take the Mystra force bolt cantrip and cast it on my arrow and it strengthens it and adds the spell power to the bow power and I do armor piercing shots.

Add in temple knights that work with me will take advantage of the glue too and will flank it while I shoot and we get a massive kill rate going and it’s a good old fashioned heavy fighting orc lair and rescue mission and a legit dungeon you can register and repeat and I find The Harpy Queens nest run is another and a Troll Fortress was the last one built on ancient ruins.

Each tests true as I can replay all of them and I grind Vala on the first one steady for two weeks and then run new made pod accounts at work through the dungeon and Zeni allows it and we talk about releasing the dungeons to the other players means going public and getting a ranking.

But also this will mean temple exposure and all of that exposed to the general players and I help write the synopsis for this new in game hidden release with temple and knights and paladin options and I have stat suggestions for the system as professional notes and given Npc church development and then all of my notes including fan art I did.

I register as Vala Mystra after her faith and then my professional bio and character art and I’m registered as the discoverer of the hidden set and temple plots and classes and new abilities and gear but also the Orc Quarry Dungeon. I’m allowed to use it privately for a month before it goes public and I’m allowed to invite fifteen players a run and I can run twice a day on my server and time zone.

I announce I and the system agreed on a spaces auction for a week and from the best of those we pick the raid team of fifteen that will run the dungeon raid grinding the remainder of the time and I have the right to cut teams based on behavior and temple standards since it’s a temple mission and the best bone up culturally here by interacting.

The money that comes in is insane and some people add in items as well and I don’t just be greedy. I contact the account, do an interview in chat and I take the ones that seem decent.

Zeni informs me our medical does cover trans nano treatments. Those are basically plastic surgery bots that use your designed look as the render points and they don’t last as they slowly biosculpt you and even with the coverage it’s expensive.

I get it and then go out and get groceries in a hoodie and sunglasses and go out at night renting an auto driver car for the night and I go out shopping at the different food places like 24/7 places and find the ones I like the food from and I take a couple days and stock the place up and get all my waiting player writing ready and edited and I get a digital store and sell my strategy guides and notes there.

At the same time I start running dungeons and I give them a temple primer in person like a guided tour and then we use the practice fields for the orders to showcase our abilities and skills and come up with the best strategies and only my good for the system and team ride or dies will get in the thirty days on the other dungeon releases.

Which had people rereading my bio and they’re seeing Vala and remembering my old headset ranger account and here I am some sort of mystic archer and a ranger with magic as well as clerical magic and knight training. Also there’s a four in my dungeons discovered section and a easter egg section of pictures Zeni cleared to go up and I’m on the board without kill data.

And I’m hot, I’m young as a character goes and is allowed and almost sixteen in game and with all the points in Beauty and Charisma I have the design is… five foot, delicate, light tanned and deep long tumbled chestnut hair and vivid hazel eyes and I’m small but have muscle now, I look like an ex dancer or gymnast and off the field I wear a nice corset push up dress small but nice little jewelry accents and have nice makeup going on and I’m pretty chill and definitely into it.

In the dungeon I’m geared up and in my leathers and we’ve run drills at the temple and we start shaky but more on them and I’m running raid and there’s a lot we’re getting right and more ideas in things and they get my combos and the offers come in and if they give me shitty vibes no matter the offer you’re not getting in and that gets really controversial and I don’t care I’m building a rep as I might be a lightsider player and that’s basically a good aligned player and I avoid the bullshit and people that don’t let it go get blocked, sometimes reported and I get endless requests for PvP or Player versus Player and I say I’ll do that with everyone that made the first cut for a month after my time is up on this dungeon and then I’ll be taking some time off maybe to write while off on med leave.

I was good before with my bow but getting a quiver of holding from a buy in and some spelled and trick arrows from and enchanter player and he’s actually a decent player more into gear than the adventuring but raids mean exp and he can get his skills up and I get him and other players to do stuff in game in rest and heal spots like check our gear and get them to do in game good reasons for using our skills as we role play and I use the language functions and talk to the races in their game language if I know it and my dungeon is known as a fight mecca with the orcs but the rate I get monks and rogues and the combat classes to grind and get experience.

It’s funny because half the adventure is up a burned mountain side and the orcs are in a mining system they made a clan fortress and raid from and we have to get through all that to get through the dungeon and turn them both into a scouting team through the trees and if I cast levitation on both and let them control it… It’s parkour martial arts crouching tyger stuff and flanking rogues dealing out one kill sneak attacks or so much damage our heavies hit and it’s wrecking shop and in the dungeon they’re perfect breach teams and add in my glue holding enemies and my bow and other ranged attacks and casters we can clear fast sometimes and we if we’re perfect we can do two run throughs.

And Arthur the Enchanter gets a slot and I get him to make me more things and he gives me mystical item boots of striding and springing he found ages back and my speed goes up a lot considering the leaping bonus is like fifteen feet.

I have Parkour as an actual skill and a really good Climb skill and now you might as well say I’m airborne.

And a clean line of sight to enemies of all kings but especially casters and I really start taking out problems before they start casting on us and I grind as much as them and start putting it in Dex and Beauty and in Parkour, Climb, Rapid Shot, Force arrow spell and glue spell levels and even spend points to make it blue glowing vines with Mystras flowers and I write a grapple line spell the same way and spent to make it.

And I grind, I grind as much experience for all of us as I can while picking the best for my end team.

They’re my recruits and we guild up and use Mystra’s Auxiliaries so we’re agreeing to being temporary and I get us a temple we can base from in easy reach of the dungeon now and we build everything else to get our skills up like shops and labs as well and we expand the temple.

And bring in Npc’s some who are known and plot related and there’s training and we skill farm in and role play farm it for points while we actually do bond and plan.

Everyone here’s in the pods and most of us are old players and test players so the characters are rather cool or unique.

And we doing this like this because we’re getting ready for serious weeks of us doing this then cutting it and editing it and guild releasing the videos.

And sponsors for that and I let Zeni decide on that and nothing political, just goods and brands that don’t do that stuff.

I go for the bottom surgery and I get implants too and then the nano injections are upped and given extra instructions on my new parts and it’s like they finish the work.

When you’re nano sculpting down to a feminized you it’s rough you lose a lot of tissue in that bathroom way and and it hurts and it drains you and I live through it mostly through the game and plugging off my body from the misery once I took meds to stabilize my insides.

I shrank, a lot and nothing sags because it’s absorbed then it gets released or flushed and if it was a bad day I let them go with the Npc’s so they bond and I sleep and write.

IRL when I’m done cooking it’s a relief on about a hundred levels but it’s like everything about me is right now and I look like Vala if she was a normal human woman of my age.

I’m nice looking. It's in my design.

I publish my stuff and talk in chat with the others and we agree to stay together as I open the other Dungeon/Raid zones and I get knighted as a “Holy Ranger” which isn’t a class but it lets me have my church connections and that of the realm and I’m granted a farm estate in the countryside.

I use my connections and a lot of our savings and buy and use a high level summoning scroll and call forth an earth elemental to fix the roads and then the estate property walls and gates.

Then I close the gates and privately go to work starting at night and I open springs and move land to make a lake and I make lots of fields and training spaces and make sure the woods are lush and boosted like fertilized by the elemental and turn my property’s forests pretty dense and as part of my defenses there’s a lot of thickets, thorns of all kinds and burdocks and burrs and mazes of vines grown thick overnight and making it a nightmare to trespass.

On the other side of the lake from us I build a lakeside temple town and out beyond it and around it elementally started, boosted and fertlized vineyards and orchards.
I planted heavy in apples, pears, plums, cherries but we’re warm enough for figs and apricots and olives and nut trees and as we set up I had the biggest of the temple names show as they bless the town and it becomes a women’s temple refuge town and it’s free housing and farming for them and the more they build the less we have to leave town and our area for.

Then we build our place and I get ready and the others too as we get ready for this rare chance and we skill grind in building our castle and guild hall and train together and more.

We’re pod playing so it’s all hyper realistic as much as it’s fantasy and I have the skills and things. Our food is great and lots of booze and we party and dance, socialize, have barbeques and get to be us, be together and just enjoy it.

I was not expecting Lace.

Lace is a carry over headset playtester who runs a hot, hot, stacked red headed Korean mercenary “Fighter/Monk” multiclass and she danced over and with me a couple of times and got me a drink and we introduced ourselves and I asked if I could look her up and she was amused but said sure and she was a rated player and higher than me by the known ratings.

She leaned on me. “So do I pass inspection ma’am?”

“Sure why?”

She leaned in and kissed me and the world tilted in the best way as it just felt like two women kissing and this felt right, this felt right as she touched me and took me to my rooms and got me and her naked and for the first time I had sex in the machine with someone and it was before in real life and I was helpless in bliss and virgin shock as Lace at my pussy out and made me cum so hard I was screaming and moaning and then she just sank her fingers into my pussy and made me hers as she finger railed me.

She and I and some other couples actually hooked up and we adventured and ground for experience and skill points and having an in game sexual relationship while doing this was pretty much how any of us pro gamers are.

Which made Lace a bit amused explaining to me that I have an industry boss, we have sponsors, we might be low level professionals but we are doing that work.

We slowly reveal ourselves IRL and she is a dyed red headed korean woman with big tits and she is pretty. Not her beefy model character but still hot and funny and pretty and we don’t speak much of our languages without translators but we start chatting IRL and before I open our other dungeons I fly over to meet her in person.

She’s semi known and I am just new and there were a few pictures and reporters. And despite how she was normally she was shy and self conscious. Here she went into character a little and she ended the interview with kissing me and then dragging me to the autocar and to her place.

She might have done it for the game but she still kept making out with me and it was all blushy and cute and language barriers and translators and she was shy when not in character.

She was so hot and was infantry in their army in college and she’s been hitting weights since I said I was coming over and she crunched ab workouts over me.

My shy Korean non english speaking partner made love to me, ate my pussy amazingly and finger band and strapped me and we dated and she showed me around and I wasn’t into sex before Lace part of my brain felt that as impossible as a teen or sometime and never really got it.

Her place was small and it was a bedroom, bathroom, and she had this kitchen closet stack and her pod was in the living room. She’s on the twentieth floor so the views are not bad and she takes me around and it’s sightseeing and shopping and eating out is more a grazing thing everyone does and we do tourist stuff in the day and even meet some gamers over here there’s way more gamers here.

At night she rents a motor scooter and we drive around all her fave night spots and views and just living and making love.

We are literally into each other more and more especially at night, and she’s introducing me to Korean LGBT+ gamers and pod gamers and they recognize me and there’s a bit of buzz generated that I was seen continents from home with my in-game lover in real life. It’s funny it’s more of a deal here because of player density, pro-gamers are like sports or rockstars or both or more.

I stayed an extra four days on a Zeni suggested small press tour and even suggested archery lessons over here as a fan service with my character and I’m up to learn and it was so easy, natural, I did nothing wrong in use and form and never missed once.

It was a very WTF moment, but I set that aside for continuing the lessons on TV and explaining western archer heroes that I played as a kid.

Pure lie because I’m pretty sure I used my character skill.

In, Real Life.

I set that aside until I’m ready to figure that out and I do some promotional PvP matches with Korean rankers in my weight class and they’re hard damned fights because the all multi monk and have evasion and hit so hard and have multiclassed to something else and I give back but I lost most of those.

The ones I won I got to places where I could snipe, you can’t evade what you can’t see. So I salvaged that much of my reputation and it did give me ideas for more spells to write and buy.

Green magic, Elemental magic, Druid magic and more Mystra based spells.

When I got back it was getting time to start and we all boot up, deep scan updates and I relax into it enjoy and relive my time with Lace in her country, being really physically intimate and enjoying that it feels right and normal.

We do our last orc raid and watch in the guild hall as it goes public and we watch them on the feeds but I start talking “The Harpy Queen.” Harpies are cursed creatures born of witches to their goddess Leviathan.

The Harpy Queen is her high priestess and is waging war vs the realm of light and the goddesses of light that make up the Women’s Temple Pantheon in particular and as Temple allies we’re raiding to stop them from spreading into the realm.

It's deep in the mountain region and leading to her massive nest temple, a full on regional raid with a dungeon finisher.

Arthur creates us headsets both as coms but as charm song protection and gas masks or built it into helmets.

They and other bird monsters are vulnerable to sounds such as firecrackers, flashbangs, and any spells that can do that.

And the harpies have stench proof muscle and that’s a whole bottom feeder goblin nest and it slog through the ground mobs as they fly and attack and then you have to go up the mountain just to get to the fortress.

And at no point is there a save-point or a place to camp and rest, there’s nowhere safe until one of us calls an elemental then stays until we release him as a whole fake wall. We still posted one guard and did two rests and then finished the dungeon.

Most people aren’t going to do it and we’re not releasing us camping not until our last day grinding and I show us camping but not how we did it.

It’s a hard, hard, hard dungeon but lucrative as the harpies fly so the nest temple is filled with trash and treasure and a lot of treasure that you almost mine for. Literally dropped off and woven in by zombies that the Queen has as slaves and mobs.

The first time you get a big surface pile.

Every run after that is smaller unless you stay and dig it out of the trash and in character and you have to deal with wandering monsters and both the monsters and treasure stop after twenty turns. It’s empty on raid number twenty one until you get to that empty nest temple and there’s a hole into the Underdark.

We grind and grind and release hint and snippet videos of the group play throughs and pull good numbers and that meant more money and endorsements but it’s enough that we advance in the global rankings and Halifax makes a deal to keep me in the city as it can boast a pro gamer. I get an ocean side apartment and a municipal rented autocar and parking and all my utilities are included and my condo has a gaming room and office and I have three pods, one in Valla’s, one is for work and writing and the new one is for guests.

I do a deepdive and find all the places with delivery AI drones because I don’t like going out alone unless it’s just a walk or my bad attempts at jogging. I buy some home gym equipment and Zeni says the company covers this and arranges for a trainer to come in in the morning and work with me starting small and and it’s worth it as her second hour she does a little tai chi with me and then I’m allowed a massage therapist through work and she teaches me a little yoga and does massage.

I need both because I need more out of pod things to balance all that out and I need to push my comfort zones. I’m still not sure what to buy with the money coming in so I mostly bank it but I do sign up for a private box at the arena and biggest movie theater in town with a private box. I donate both to the two biggest radio stations and are a gift from “our local pro Zenith Player Vala.” Which gives my character decent buzz and media framing.

And I’m mostly banking the rest, getting an investment person that’s easy to take and not pushy and has nice ethical investing lists. That lady, I get looking at a house, property and a yard as well.

It’s that post thirty day grind you ass off pod lag when your brain is working so hard you did a bunch of things just to be doing things.

According to the others then just as the first team wins the first public raid we release the video on run number twenty one and I tease play through video of my discovery descent with the Npc party and I started with that long rappel down.

Down. Down…

Which is Dungeon raid number Three and “Underpoint” is the introduction to the underdark through an underground sea. It’s a port and home to a lot of stuff but to us the characters? More slavers dealing with kingdom slaves.

And Zenith now offers this as a starting zone for underdark race characters and I had written all the guides and class and race notes and sold off the test characters as new Npc’s to the system and I’m getting some talk as a seriously level balanced writer and not just a player as is seen by my crazy freestyles and combos and bringing in my second undiscovered in game zone or rabbit hole and I’m kind of looked at as a ranger player as well as the character.

Everyone leveled and trained and built a designed while we were off and for our geekiness and the fans Arthur had enchanted drone cameras for us and climbing gear and “Selena” our party fighter mage and an Earth and Fire magic specialist gets revealed as a side plot we never knew was coming and she turns out to be an outcast Drow, a noble woman than embraced magic and her brother over the faith.

On the first play through she never said, we never knew she looked amazing and it’s not just slaves but her whole family is a problem the eldest brother some dark paladin, her mother a demon queen spider priestess her aunts and cousins the same and there’s assassins and driders that’s the spider centaurs and her twin.

Gone, escaped and took off with some insect druid into the fungal jungles and there’s a lot of side quests here and we have to save and track the slaves and that leads us to another smaller port that leads up the the surface of a troll city building for war built on ancient ruins.

Where the 4th Dungeon I found started as we were found and wiped as they have rather serious guards for the under dark.

“Trollgate” Was discovered by me and never beaten.

But….. but we play under point first and we don’t just grind if but we chase the side plots and threads trying to find all the stuff there and that’s when we get that it’s a town AI, it’s a new starting zone.

And we take a break and we build a guild base down in Underpoint and in a cave system we vacate and fix up and seal with magic while we’re away.

I write mostly on Underpoint in various kinds of guides and I sell my e-file cleared and published through the game for a dollar. I see like five cents of it but it’s a dollar or setting info so everyone buys them.

It’s weird I can write over a year's pay in a single publication.

Lace and I are still together in game and she’s been over once and I meet Arthur in England and he’s absolutely charming and he’s a young man with long hair a great beard and he sheep farms on the side with his village and family in this sort of english cottage commune and they make all sorts of stuff that sells in the city. England has rules on city spread and urban sprawl vs country life and it’s a nice place, he’s more on the engineering side of the farming but out of pod he’s a very sweet guy and everyone goes down to the square where there’s a bunch of tiny pubs and food vendors and given we’re a fifteen minute car ride from town or a train zip out people come here to chill and eat and even live after working in the city.

I get really, really drunk and was fine and safe and everyone was lovely and charming and Arthur nursed me back from hung over with loads of tea on his back porch and watching the pasture and sleeping in quilts in the sunshine and even smoked a joint and slept some more and we did nothing more than let him take care of me usually in my spot on his porch and in the sun in quilts and then out at night and eating, talking and drinking and we never got together but danced as friends and even slept together in bed as friends and he’s actually not ever been interested in sex but wants to find the one or he’s open to it.

It’s not me but her takes friends to a really personal level and he was the most healing guy I ever met and I went after a really needed week to Lace and Korea and I was designing things on my flight and submit to Zeni a wire sensor set of clothes or pod suit and the wireless feeds and I record me doing things there we can skin my character over and it’s accepted including my three year restriction on other stars not using this rig.

Which is fine, the wireless scanning is more a me thing. Part of my division.

I help her move as we’re both moving into a company building and it’s a sort of working vacation and it’s sightseeing and recording and I’m doing stuff in character as an approved series, and Vala learning Korean culture, food, night food, taking Tae Kwon do classes, which is me taking them which was cool to get paid for but trained by personal trainers for the gym with Lace and I and she does higher level of Tae Kwon do and in real life she’s a beefy femme lesbian. Who is way too cute and way more fashionable than me.

Lots more PvP matches here for money and charity and exposure and it’s better because it’s more than flexing we doing stuff.

I get paid to learn how to drive cars and motorcycles for those product placements and it’s all Vala instead of me which is fine and Lace and I do pair up grinding as a series with another Korean pair and it’s a streaming channel for raids and things.

We kind of do “grindcore” for a while and I impress people by rangering and hunting, foraging, finding the sellers, the apothecaries, new side quests they have for things we can get. New gear, new items, guides and really got back to basic and that’s when I use magnify sight to turn my force arrow to line of sight shots at a mile away.

I tell no one how I mechanically do it and I snipe seven harpies over the forest and stun the community.

And Lace must have had something in the works because at times she’d get a little reptilian and a lot stronger and she started breathing fire.

She somehow in game likely soloing got a hold of something that gave her dragonic powers. Her skills, reptilian shifts in her skin giving her better armor and that look and she comes across as armored and as strong as an Ogre at least.

She became an absolute problem as a PvP player and we didn’t just have our raid team but we’d do Two v Two and they can’t close on me before I’m off into sniping distances and she’ll lead them where she can cat and mouse and let me shoot.

We don’t do a lot of these but we win all of them and sometimes it’s quick and sometimes it’s longer but honestly big fish don’t do any of the vs stuff unless it’s professional and champions.

We’re great for our level but real big outfits and teams and guilds get into real world business stuff and I’ll run this until after this later raid reveals and then I don’t know? Likely I’ll write but travel? It’ll depend on the others and mostly on Lace.

I’ll be done with the raids section of my contract so other offers might come in. And now I’m me, I’m really financially stable and I can take the time to figure what’s next.

Vala’s videos hit streaming a week after I’m there and it generates a lot of buzz it’s treated as PR and I’m told we can’t release the suit and the wireless scanning because it doesn’t work with everyone and that why I have a job because I’m being studied like the others but as a usable tech it’s no point in public release.

I asked Zeni why I was being told and I was told it’s easier and I’m not looking to be much more than myself and writing and gaming more and the system likes my work and my ideas are good why lie to me?

We sit and have a serious talk about things to try in a lab way with this. I’m as curious as they are and I’m willing to go into more professional labs and scans and I’m willing because I have a better life and am myself.

Getting biometric read out chips implanted and doing deep scan neuro science stuff while I’m in VR learning Japanese Kyudo archery and ritual and the Korean versions of it as well for the press and fans, Tai chi, Kendo, Using a Fan, Making tea…. but it’s about how I learn, how I work in the game.

And in system meditation types and at my request nature parkouring and in woods, in the trees, forests and caves and cycling and running stairs and train enough in Tae Kwon Do and MMA and even some kick boxing that I “unlock 2 points of enhanced movement speed at …… cost.” After you have six levels of unarmed training, you still need to buy the skill and it’s expensive.

And all the grinding and lab stuff I do they “boon” it to me.

Add in my movement and terrain skills and all my other abilities I’m fast in the field in a forest. I'm a ghost in the wind.

Arthur makes me a rare material composite shortbow that’s is max strength enchanted and it requires a ring to draw it normally and he makes me a bracelet and two spell storage rings with both force arrow type spells and a magnify sight set of glasses that holds a few castings and on the other hand two rings with haste spells and a Mystra designed enchanted choker that dampens my presence and aura.

We open up the base and grind the local zones and wait until the rest of the guild turns back up and it’s our last big show they bring everyone here to Korea and it’s new apartments, trainers IRL staff and we are going to give them full access for bonuses each one settled and we train to get our groove down and when we start out watch audience was serious and then I take the bottom level.

The way is a series of stairs and gates switchbacks over and over all the way to the lowest hanging part of the Troll Fortress.

I cast “Shadowcloak” turning all my clothes dark and myself tinted in shadow magic and I do “Haste, Climb” spells, add in my skills and the boots and I drop smoke and I start one shotting trolls with Sniper, Point Blank Range archery shots but adding firebolt arrows to the force arrow spell and I blew heads off.

And used grapple spell arrows to drop lines to the monks and the rogues and soon we had the way open and I’m dropping foes that are so line of sight sniped we do some serious damage right up until the much bigger city and it’s a dangerous stealth required raid crawl and there’s a lot of heavy bigger classed monsters here and you need levels here, you need to be able to one shot, sniper, rogue assassinate or just do enough damage to really get through this place and the slaves are mining out the body of a massive petrified eldritch horror.

He turns into a giant mutated version of himself and spawns trolls out of his troll boils and cyst looking things.

We were in the shit he creates mobs massively fast and they’re disgusting and we were almost swamped when I heard the dragon growl and Lace’s reptilian changed skin glowed from heat and she drooled lava and a wave of heat surged off of her as in very clear English she said.

“I would like to rage.”

When she dropped that and she revealed whatever her dragon thing was she took levels in Barbarian she glowed and burned and pulled her greatsword and she screamed fire as she danced sheer death and Korean fans lost their minds as she raged and fought and martial screamed as she unleashed fire on the Troll king’s mobs in a mass area attack and wails directly on him and add in the rest of us and we still have “Selena” on the team and her being a fire and earth specialist caster she’s hitting him and in the end we get our damage timing that on Lace’s next turn she takes his head and after we won that opens the city as an adventuring and exploring location and it’s our all our newest location and we as a team have thirty days to explore it and we decide to stay working together and explore the ancient Osai ruins.

We find out enough clues thanks to my skills that tells us the Osai were a people that were advanced in magical culture that were invaded by outsider planar forces that someone let through.

The gnolls were part of that invasion force and we find a whole bunch of stuff like art, scrolls, things that might be clues we take in addition to treasure we find gathered by trolls and their allies who became static encounters after we killed the king.

Officially I register the find of the place with the guild and set up in game signals and flares and Temple and kingdom forces get the city as a new borderlands central point and we get rewarded and I get my rewards as part of the realm and church and I return to my Landlady’s house as we disband and whatever comes next is up in the air.

We as players are going to level then break and we’ll have weeks of social live work in tours and interviews and have translators as I’m still learning and I actually drop in system to the VR and get the computer to simulate me taking language classes and I learn but when it gets hard I take out a pocket mirror and cast “Charm Person” on myself using line of sight rules and use the mirror to charm myself “This is really important please learn this.” And I cast it every time I get mentally worn out and that actually works and I keep doing it and time is much faster in here so I really push it between interviews and get better and better and start it with other languages and after a talk with the system I’m granted skill levels in “Research” and “Studying.” and using those in here actually helped as all the knowledge and good habits are sticking and that all helps.

Lace is great and we’re not just still dating but we’re understanding each other and we’re dating closer and closer until I finally moved in and she has her contract redone and a new set of her character’s offices in the building and while I’m living here I move with Lace to the Kangam Empire where her character is from and it’s the “Kangs” a fantasy in game nation as Korea with its own servers and the world’s races have ethnic groups like different kinds of humans.

Each nation has a server nation and we sort of represent that in the game to some degree.

And each has its own in game cultures, flavors, classes and game regions and monsters and Lace and Vala rent a manor house and servants as we are here for her backgrounds, promotions and doing things here.

I support her but only go as that, her girlfriend and if she asks me to adventure I’ll do that but Vala is learning martial arts, archery and being a classically trained beauty and I do a show on that stuff while boosting my skills and my beauty stat again.

Living in Korea actually helps as I get teachers hired and try these things IRL and I cosplay a proper made up noble woman for her and she’s into that.

I’m into her.

Lace is tall and beefy for a girl and instead of fighting it she femmed it up to her warrior Zenith self who helped her go from a shy big boned girl to a working out weight lifting online gaming idol girl that does roller derby and women’s rugby and she’s an MMA fighter on occasion and films her rock climbing, weight training and soccer and cycling and she’s a positive women role model for the not born super cute girls.

It’s weird she has way more fame as a player as Asians are more likely to see the gamer as a celebrity.

I’m her white Canadian girlfriend with her IRL so who else would I be? It’s the way I stand out here and I can deal with this non celebrity.

I was just settling in and was going to start learning Korean food and cooking when the mail had invitations to call the Games division of the Canadian government and many more offers both government and corporate.

“Lacey babe? How’d you feel about a tourist trip to Canada?”