What?

  Select a new species?

  That was absurd.

  I read the notification again to verify its contents.

  [Species: Human: Earth-2, incompatible with magic. Please select a new species -Mayam]

  Yup. That’s what it said.

  I didn’t know what or who Mayam was, but the rest of the contents seemed crystal clear.

  The panel flickered out of existence and the pain in my body suddenly exploded. My vision became blurry as my head swirled. It felt like my entire body had deflated and my skin began grabbing at the insides of my body. At some point I fell onto my side putting some pressure on one of my sensitive areas, which released another torrent of pain.

  Despite my vision being a blurry mess, the notification flickered back into existence and was clearly readable. It was like it was being projected onto my consciousness instead of something that I had to read visually. That made sense to me for a virtual or augmented reality headset, the heads-up display didn’t disappear when you closed your eyes in a game. This… wasn’t that though. Or was it?

  I focused on the notification and accepted the prompt to select a new species, and a list popped up in my mind. I could scroll it just by thinking and quickly skimmed through it.

  Okay, quickly was a bit of an exaggeration, there were too many options to be quick. I saw all the normal fantasy races, like elf, dwarf, goblin, orc, giant, etc., and also a bunch that I’d never seen before. Human was also on the list, but when given the option I felt like staying human was a bit dull, so I read through some other options at random. When I mentally selected one it would give me a brief description as well as a silhouette of what their body shape was like.

  The ones I selected were all ones I’d never heard of. Maybe I should have selected some of the standard fantasy races to make sure that their descriptions fit my preconceived notions, but my brain had already made an assumption that I was all too willing to lean in to.

  This was a game.

  More accurately, this was a game my father had made for me to play during my travel between habitable planets. It made sense.

  Or maybe it didn’t.

  The virtual reality staying on even after I’d taken the headset off sealed the deal for me, and this species selection was like a character creation process. Most role-playing games had these, and thus it also made sense that I was in such a bad state and such a lifesaving option was presented to me. Maybe my injuries would persist through the process, but I highly doubted that. This was quite the stellar opening, I had to give my dad credit. I had one hundred percent believed I’d just entered a wormhole and ended up here. In all reality I was, probably, sitting in my pod safe as could be still headed for the next habitable zone.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  So, the pain and defeat I’d felt up until this point suddenly took a backseat. Of course, when I was in this much pain it could only be put so far out of my mind, it was like a child asking, “are we there yet,” ignoring it for a while was easy, but eventually it would catch up with me.

  Regardless, I now felt that I had more time on my hands than I had thought, and a new appreciation for the graphics and scenery around me. I wondered how he bypassed all the restrictions with virtual reality to deliver such a realistic environment, and such realistic pain, but oh well. Questions for later. Maybe I’d meet his avatar or something later in the game and he’d talk to me.

  My fear of death was put away because I figured if I felt my consciousness fading I could just select a something and cheat death.

  Also, game. So. Death not real? Despite my confidence in my assumption, some part of me wasn’t sure about that yet, but at the very least I thought I could get one over on the old scythe man.

  I felt confident in that assessment, so I took my time reading through the races despite the list sometimes flickering out of existence followed by my body feeling like it was trying to collapse in on itself. This, I thought, was because whatever was letting me choose a race was, probably, magic, and my body wasn’t able to handle magic—like the notification said. I wondered why he’d put such a painful time mechanic in place at the start of the game, it seemed… harsh. There were better ways to remind the player they were on a timer, like, say, a timer.

  So, I picked out a few that seemed intriguing and read them over, mumbling the description to myself and Gin.

  “Cattin, subrace of the more generic katia, basically cat people, cool, we’ll put that in the maybe category.” I said, scrolling to the next interesting name. It was the only race I chose that I’d seen before, but I kinda wanted to make sure it was what I thought it was.

  “Mimic, shapeshifting monsters that masquerade as an object waiting for their prey. Wow, it lets me turn into monsters that’s kinda cool, but not my jam, unless like, they’re a super cool monster I guess.”

  Continuing on, there was a rather fun name that I had to check out.

  “Nabigili, frog people with wings like stained glass the match of any master artisan. Interesting, but I don’t think I want to be a frog. Hmm, Rabbin, those are almost certainly rabbit people, let’s keep going. Oh, here’s another neat name. Shaad, humanoids made up of a wispy shadowy substance, and are particularly attuned to magic. Interesting, another maybe.”

  I continued scrolling down the list, near the bottom I found another name, I swear I’d heard it somewhere before, but maybe not as a fantasy species. “Yong, basically a subspecies of dragonkin from what I can tell, interesting that they may or may not have tails. Tails seem like a major part of being a dragonkin to me, but that’s just my opinion, what do I know.”

  This continued as I scrolled back up, flying past a bunch and reviewing my initial knee jerk selections. I ran across a few I’d just completely missed and hadn’t read before including one that particularly piqued my interest.

  “Lumina, child of the light.”

  The description was a set of question marks and the silhouette looked like a normal human. It was the only one I’d come across without a description and I was incredibly curious. It immediately jumped to the top of my list of selections purely out of curiosity. I scrolled a bit longer but didn’t see any other option that simply had question marks as a description, and ultimately the allure of the unknown won out.

  “Gin, I’m going to do something stupid.”

  I was sitting on the description screen for lumina with the question marks in front of me, mentally hovering over the accept species selection button. It wasn’t the brightest idea I’d ever had, but I did particularly like my optics class back at uni and being a child of the light sounded pretty cool. Optics hadn’t been my main focus of study of course, no, it had been faster than light travel, which was similar if you stretched your imagination.

  Both had to do with light.

  I guess.

  Maybe.

  But in different ways. I found optics fun though, and if I was going to play a game I might as well have some fun.

  With my mind made up, I stopped procrastinating, and confirmed my choice.