I typed the keyword machine into the search bar, and shockingly there were only a handful of options on the screen. The first were simply called Legion. I selected them and glanced back at my character screen and saw a robotic shape. The head was elongated and rolled back into a long neck that had wires sticking out of it. Multiple antennas rose from a strange set of goggles that sat where the eyes would have been. The body was slender and humanoid. But it was so slender and symmetrical that it felt strange to look at for any period of time. In fact, it just felt wrong. I clicked on the description just to get a better understanding of them.

How interesting. While I wasn’t going to select them, I still found machine intriguing. It made me curious though, just how powerful were they if they put me right into the space age? It didn’t matter though, I knew so little that going straight into the space age was going to be a terrible idea. Though I couldn’t wait to get to that point. How cool could it be to have a faction like the Covenant from Halo, or do something like Star Trek. Ah, I was getting too far ahead of myself. My nerdy side really kicked up for a second. But alas, this was not meant to be. I dismissed the template, and glanced at the next one.

This one was labeled, ‘Living Golems.” With a quick thought, I selected it, and glanced at it on my character screen.

Now my body was replaced with what looked like a suit of armor held together by strands of magic. I didn’t see any visible wire nor was there anything too futuristic about it. Honestly, it just looked like a mad scientist in a fantasy novel grabbed a living armor, and tried to turn it into a robot. While it didn’t look like a sci-fi robot, that was fine. This was interesting in its own way. Now let's see what the description said!

Oh! That was so cool! I was confused at first as I read the description, because I had assumed they were a mechanical race, and in essence they were. At the start they would function like golems, but as they progressed, they would lean more towards technology. That was really cool! So without further ado, I added them into my shopping cart. While I didn’t know pricing for anything, at least I had an idea for what I wanted. Before I finished at any rate, I could at least make my final choices on what I would and wouldn’t buy.

But at this point I was getting a little side tracked. I was here to make my new race, not go shopping for others. Besides, if I kept looking I’d just get overwhelmed. So for now, let's stick with what I had. I cleared my selections leaving me with my human body again. Now let's actually look through everything and see what there was.

I carefully looked over the screen, making sure that I understood everything the best that I could. Outside of the three tabs on the upper part of the screen, there was something that I missed. It was a small note tucked away within the customization screen.

Upon closer inspection, I saw the option was a toggle that was separate from everything. This was good! Call me a speciest if you will, but in my eyes the human form is what made the most sense to me. I toggled it on, and went through the other options that sat outside the general settings. The last one that I saw was a function called Ambiguous.

Honestly, I had always wondered what it would be like to be a female, and now that I had a chance, I wasn’t going to let it pass. At least this way I could be both experiment! So I toggled that option on as well. Once that was done, I saw that there wasn’t much else for me to do now, outside of making my race. So without further ado I clicked on the forge tab.

A new screen flickered into reality and this one showed my body, but on a deeper level. My bones, my genetic makeup, and even my nervous system was on display in easy to read graphs. At a glance, I knew this was beyond me in every capacity. Yet, everything was laid out cleanly, and precisely, so maybe with some tinkering I could do something here. You know, mash stuff together like a complete buffoon and see what happens. I rolled my mental neck, and cracked my mental fingers. All right! Let’s get to work.

For starters, let's see if I can make some Arachne! I went into my shopping cart and selected the arachne, and brought it into my forge screen. Thankfully the picture of a giant spider was not on my screen. Instead, it was just the various layers of said creature. Ninety percent of it made zero sense to me. While I did good in school, and even took anatomy and physiology classes for college credits, I couldn’t even pretend to know what any of this meant. But I was determined to become a budding scientist!

I went through my screens and found the template for humanity. Which I opened and glanced through that as well. While this time I recognized a few more things, I was still pulling a blank on a lot of it. Maybe I should have studied harder. I mentally shrugged and I opened it up right next to the spider one to compare the two.

Maybe if I did this, I could see similarities and differences. That way I could gauge what I needed to do next. Much to my chagrin, it still didn’t seem to make sense to me. The numbers, and letters all seemed to blend into each other and was an entire language that I didn’t understand.

It wasn’t going to stop me though! So in typical fashion, I took both templates, and pressed them together. There was no elegance in this action, nor was there any thought. Just sheer blindness and a short prayer to Malek that this would work.

The numbers and letters flickered, and the screen pulsed as everything was combined into one. All of a sudden, there was a cascade of red errors within multiple segments. The problem with that, was that I didn’t know what any of them meant. All I saw was a set of four letters flash red. I could assume that it meant they were not compatible. But the system wasn’t all that forthcoming with that information in this matter. So I sat back in the void around me and thought about what I could do. I knew that it wasn’t going to be easy. In fact if it was, I’d be worried.

Alright so let's start with what I knew first. The first issue was that of the blinking letters, so let's check for a solution there. I stared at them for what felt like ages, and instead of a solution, all I earned more of was a headache. I shifted the template to a neurological view point and saw more highlights of red. At least here they seemed to make sense. Just mashing the templates together created a hodgepodge that needed to be ironed out. So, instead of just bashing my head into a wall over the DNA segment, why don’t I just try to iron out the neurological system and work my way down.

The nerves looked jumbled, and forced together, so the first thing I would do is pull them apart, and try and set them on a new path. Again, I had zero clue what I was doing, but that was a large part of what made this fun! I reached out the nerve templates and carefully untangled them one by one, and set them in different paths. Time was seemingly lost to me as I carefully worked each strand one by one, and I found a certain peace inside of me as I did so.

It felt like years had passed since I started working on this. For the first few iterations, the nervous system wasn’t cooperating. It took me so long to figure out what the hell to do to make this work. But I discovered some stuff! Some of the changes made on the neurological level impacted lower layers, and it helped get rid of some of the errors that I had made. It didn’t fix all of them, but I learned a little bit about how the spiders would function.

Apparently just mashing everything together made the equivalent of a walking abomination that couldn’t exist. However, I managed to iron it out. Now, it was almost a true spider human hybrid. The human traits were the most prominent. No, these wouldn’t be like Spiderman or anything like that. Instead, the traits were blended together so well some could pass as human.

Apparently during my quest of self taught genetic manipulation, I learned that the template I had created was a matriarch that would function a bit like a centaur would. With a human top half, and a spider on the other. The eggs that she laid were the key to the rest of the race, and where the rest of my head ache came from. From those eggs, the arachne could be born. Some would look human, while others could just be regular spiders. Not a bad start honestly. At least I had a successful run, even if it took a few years off of my life span. There also didn’t seem to be any residual issues. But I still wasn’t sure. I doubted the System would let me create something that wouldn’t live. Happily, I scrolled to the bottom of the screen, and found a single red button that said save. I clicked it and crossed my fingers, hoping for the best possible outcome.

I confirmed my choice and sat back. I was a little worried now, since clearly doing this would consume a charge even if it failed or not. But I had hope.

Yes! It worked! Ah, I was so happy I could cry. I had no clue how long it took me to figure out how all of that worked. In fact just thinking about it gave me a headache. But I could rest easy, the first hard part was done! Now at least, I could name them. I typed Arachne into the response bar and the system melted into another screen.

No. Not at all. The second my eyes read that, I felt nothing but irritation. While yes, it was intriguing that I could sell creations to other Administrators for money, I wouldn’t be selling this. I put so much effort into this, I'll be damned if I let any of the others profit off of it, or even use it against me.

As I read the other part though I felt a chill scintillate down my spine upon reading that. Did that make me a god in their eyes? Would I be like what Malek was? Though I didn’t seem to gaze upon him and know he was my creator? Did that have to do with the phrase gaze upon their true form? If that was the case, what was Malek’s true form?

Maybe I shouldn’t go down that rabbit hole. There were a whole host of questions there that I figured I should leave be. Trying to figure out the moral and ethical dilemma of what I just did felt like it was a bit above my paygrade. With my mind made up, I sat back into the void once more and let my mind relax. All of that thinking made my brain feel like much, and the worst part was that I wasn’t even tired. It seemed that this realm took away all of my biological needs. Which was both a boon, and a curse.

I was content though, outside of the sheer mental desire to go to sleep only to let my mind rest. I made huge progress so far, and I still had two more to go! The next one I wanted to work on was the space borne and combining it with the human template! As for my final charge, if I could get this next to work, I wanted to create something special. Something that would function as a secret weapon. I might be getting ahead of myself just a bit, but here I feel like I had nothing but time, and I was excited.