The capsule had arrived, and the remote workbots had been controlled by the best in the field. After all, why buy such an expensive piece of tech if you’re afraid to shell out the money to get it hard-wired into your house? They had even paid a hefty sum to get the highest grade internet cables run to their neighborhood, just so things would be buttery smooth.

  And now, here they are! They wanted to get up and dance! Except that would interrupt the capsules initialization. They needed to stay in the machine's bed and soon enough a whole new world would open up to them! Their face smiling so wide it looked more like a grimace, their eyes squeezed shut.

  Then they were standing up instead of lying down. They open their eyes and examine where they’ve ended up. It is almost a disappointment to be in a nearly blank white room. To one side, a circular metal gate that is irised shut and covered in blinking lights and rivets. On the other side is the trunk of a tree with a hole leading to a magical portal.

  They had been tempted when the scifi game was first released, except they hadn’t been able to get the capsule at the time. Besides, fantasy is their jive! So, without a single look back, they run into the magic portal.

  Only to run into a lady in a white dress on the other side. The lady doesn’t move, but it also doesn’t hurt, which is nice. They didn’t mind pain, but it sucked when unnecessary.

  The lady rubs the bridge of her nose, “You’re one of those types of people. Anyway, I’m your SAI assistant for character generation. How do you want to do this? You’ve got nearly a hundred character designs saved on the SoulDive website. Are you going to use one of those?”

  A bit curt! “Not even going to ask my name?”

  The lady shrugs, “I must admit, I assumed you would go by your username, May/Hem.”

  They shake their head, “Nah, it’s a good name, but it only causes problems. Besides, most people will assume I’m a lady with a name like May. In a chat, I love confusing people, but when interacting with people face to face, I prefer to just be asked if they aren’t sure.”

  The lady nods, “Well, I guess if we’re doing names, I’m Samantha and this is the last time you’ll see if you keep playing SoulDive. This is just a job for me. If you ever decide to dive into science fiction, that’s where’d you find me. Now, how would you like to be referred to here?”

  “Gem Paroxysm”, They declared.

  Samantha raises an eyebrow, “A gem bursting with emotions?”

  Gem shrugs, “I could spin some nonsense about my autism causing me to have a cold exterior, yada yada yada, but ‘Gem’ is short for Gemini.”

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  Samantha shakes her head, “Classic astrology or maybe the horoscope? Maybe you’re a twin soul?”

  Gem laughs, “Except I shortened Gemini because I wanted to get away from the horoscope nonsense. Oh, and Paroxysm comes from throwing mayhem into the Internet and finding a cool sounding synonym. Mayhem is great, but not as a name. Well, I guess it could work as a name, but it feels like one of those ‘one namers’, like War. You aren’t War Smith, you’re just War.”

  Samantha sighs, “Fine, I give up, where did your name come from?”

  Gem slaps her knee and laughs some more. “That’s the fun part! It didn’t! I literally spent, like, a couple hours surfing the web, looking up unisex names on the various baby name websites. Gemini sounded great, except for the star nonsense and so Gem. And I already told you the origin of Paroxysm.

  “I do have a name I usually go by in games, but it isn’t much better. I chopped some letters off my real name and added a bit to make it sound foreigny. Can you tell I made that name as a teen? Anyway, this seemed like a good place to make a clean break.”

  Samantha’s face is slack from shock, though she soon recovers to yell at Gem, “Then what was the point of this all? Why didn’t you tell me the name didn’t mean anything?!”

  Gem shrugs, “Well, it had all of that meaning to it? And now it has the connection to this interaction between us!”

  Samantha sighs, “Sure honey, whatever you want to believe. Now, how about we move onto character creation? You’ve got so many min-maxed builds to either use directly or at least work off of. Like, I doubt most people even know they can get very specific with what region your character’s genetic heritage comes from and stack on top their cultural heritage and their family heritage!

  “I don’t know what the designers were doing to go that deep. Like, why do you need to have a human who lives in a bread basket area, but their family is from a swamp, but their genetics come from a volcanic island?”

  Gem smiles, “So you can have a character that can handle the heat while being great at growing swamp based herbs?”

  Samantha squints at them, “We know what I meant. Now, how about you show me what broken nonsense you decided to go with?”

  Gem shrugs, “I would have, but you’d be angry with me from wasting your time. While the person was annoying, someone in the chat for new players. Well, I guess, the old chat. An admin had to close it and open a new one.

  “Anyway, an annoying gal pushed really hard for random and so I read up a bit on the subject. Even after that, I wasn’t going to, but I realized it would be a potential path to something I would want over an optimized background. Random gives me a chance of being some sort of dragon!”

  Samantha rolls her eyes, “Yeah, yeah, everyone wants to be a dragon. So a few warnings I’m paid to tell you about. Random does not guarantee anything, including what you would consider a playable character. The character will be playable, mind you, just not constrained by your definition.

  “Also, everyone gets a single chance at random. If you are forced to recreate your character, choosing random has a few possible results. Either you end up with the same result, it is that result with any irreversible changes you picked up, or you won’t be able to pick it at all.”

  Gem shrugs, “Fair enough, wouldn’t want people constantly recreating their character to try and roll the perfect result. Though just as much, now I Have to pick random. Since it doesn’t change, I can check what it is and back out if it is untenable to continue.”

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