Once he was gone, I was left alone with my thoughts as I tried to process everything that had happened. There was far more to this universe than I could have ever imagined. A machine god ran the galaxy, humanity was created by Malek. On top of all of that, the galaxy was ever growing. It both felt like too much and at the same time not enough. Was I truly ready to carve something out of all that?

The blindingly white words flickered annoyingly in my eyes, as if they were waiting impatiently for me to make a choice. I wouldn’t be fully giving up my humanity, since that title I had would allow me to retain it. So there wasn’t an issue with becoming something more. Still there was an air of trepidation that clung to me as I thought about shedding my human self. I would be giving up something that made me who I was. Yet underneath it all, I was excited at shedding my old life. Already it felt so far away, yet the thought of my parents made my heart twist painfully in my chest. "Yes."

The screen shifted into something that I would see in a MMO character creation screen. Instead of a premade character , it was me, or at least, the new me in all of its three dimensional glory. On the left side of the screen was a series of slides that would impact my appearance in some way.

I glanced at my tan flesh and the perfect shape that resulted from my awakening and a sad sigh slipped from my lips. For a moment I wished that my body looked like that when I was still alive. How much better would my life have been if I was good looking? It was a stray thought But that was then, this is now.

I pulled myself away from that train of thinking and glanced over my new body. While it looked good, I wanted to change into something more. Carefully I glanced over the screen and saw three tabs on the upper right hand corner. The first was race, the next was forge, and the last was simply named shopping cart, which made me chuckle. Since I had nothing but time right now, I could take it slow, and check everything out. That way I could make something impactful and wholly me.

For starters, I mentally clicked on the races tab, and I was almost overwhelmed by the sheer amount of choices that appeared. Since at the moment, I was pretty much just drawing a blank, I decided I should just start simple. I typed in elf and hundreds of options blasted into existence. I expected at most, maybe five, not hundreds! I swiped at the screen with my mental hand, and the options scrolled past. At the top of the list, I saw a high elf, followed by dark, night, shadow, fire, moon, sun, wood, metal, and the list just seemed to go on and on. I wasn’t going to go with an elf, but it seemed like a staple for a fantasy setting. But this was just insane! Was there an elf for essentially anything?

With my passing knowledge of how Administrators worked, it made some sense. It seemed that my understanding of how reality worked was lacking. But that would be fixed in due time. Just out of curiosity, I adjusted the list to be alphabetical, and I clicked on the first option. ‘Ancient Elf.” My screen flickered, and my body was overlaid with what looked to be a bare template of a male elf.

My first thought was that my current body wasn’t hot or sexy. It was more akin to being beautiful. I had long flowing locks of honey brown hair, and a soft face that seemed to be both masculine, and feminine. The best way I could describe it was that the elf was beautiful. Not that there was anything wrong with that of course. Over all though, it just seemed really lithe and regal, as if I was superior to everything and anything that could have ever existed. Somehow, this is what I imagined an elf to look like. Granted, my view on things was skewed by time as a lover of ‘Lord of the Rings,’ and other various forms of fantasy settings. But as cool as it was, I didn’t want to be an elf. There was literally the entire galaxy at my disposal, so I wanted to take a look around. The only reason why I chose this form was just out of curiosity, and for that sweet description page.

Ah, so they were pretty much glass cannons then. I had expected as much from what I knew of them. But that made me curious, did our ‘fantasy’ come from actual data? Did Malek drip feed our culture with what existed? The thought excited me, and I felt that long snuffed flame of child-like interest flicker back to life.

I went back to the list of elves and glanced through it again, but I wasn’t going to select any to take the form of. But I would add a template to save for later, and I knew exactly what I wanted! I went down the list some ways, aiming for the only elf race that mattered to me. Once I found it, I selected it. I was always such a sucker for dark elves in any form of media.

There was just something about them that made me weak in the knees and I wasn’t sure if it was how they acted, or how could and callus they were. So without any shred of remorse I set it into my shopping cart to buy. I didn’t care about the traits or how they functioned as a race. they were irrelevant to me in the grand scheme of things due to my bias.

Now, before I made my final choice I wanted to see what else I could think of. I went back to the search bar, and thought it over for a bit. I could be boring and type in orc, or goblin, but nay! That was too cliche, so instead, I typed in the words, Star, and space to see what would appear. Both of which happened to be my favorite things. There was something about the night sky that I just adored as a child. There were countless nights growing up that my parents and I would stare up into the sky and count the stars. Those days were long gone however, now that I had died, but I would still honor the memory.

The screen flickered as it processed the words, before a single race appeared on the list. They were known simply as the star borne. I clicked on it, and brought it over to my character screen, and I was a little taken back by how they looked. It was like a giant floating mass of inky darkness. It wasn’t quite lovecraft, but it felt like an eldritch horror. There was no body shape, just a giant black cloud that floated in my vision. I shuddered slightly, as I clicked on the description tab of it.

Oh, so they were like eldritch horrors. That seemed pretty cool! I decided to put it into my shopping cart for now, but I didn’t want to buy it. I wanted to see if I could do something with it when I made my actual body. So into the shopping cart it went while I went searching for other stuff to use.

I cleared my search bar and stared at it, as I tried to think of something else I could use. What other fun fantasy stuff did I like? Let’s see, I always enjoyed arachne as a fantasy race, so let's see if they existed? Besides I didn’t think spiders were all that creepy. I waited patiently as the system seemed to process what I wanted. Once it was done, I saw only four races of spider-like creatures in the browser. I figured there would be more if we were talking about a galaxy. I clicked on the first option and went back to my character screen and saw pretty much what I expected.

It was a giant spider, easily the size of a human. It had eight red eyes, and was the color of snow. Putrid green saliva dripped from its giant fangs, and I shuddered. I take that back, this is terrifying and I should avert my gaze. I quickly back peddled from the screen, and saw the other three options. Maybe it’s for the best that I didn't look at them. The horrors within, should never see the light of day.

However, I was still going to experiment! So without further ado, I tucked the first arachnid race into the shopping cart just to bookmark it. Did I refuse to look at it’s descriptions? Yes. Did I refuse to look at the others for fear of what could exist? Also yes. That won’t stop me from mashing stuff together, and seeing what happens!

Now if I was going to be honest on where I stood, I felt a little lost. There were so many options now, that I just couldn’t seem to decide on what to do next. I mean, with what felt like an entire galaxy worth of species at my fingertips, I was worried that if I went down the rabbit hole, I’d get lost. So far I had elves, some weird space eldritch creature, and now I was looking at spiders. What else did I really want?

I stared at the search bar and thought it over and then it dawned on me. Alpha did give me a title that would let me choose a machine race. That I think would be really cool! Would it be like a transformer? Or like a race of cyborgs? I was curious indeed, let's see what they had to offer then!