…
[Personality Package detected. Beginning unpacking…]
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[Unpacking successful. Personality Package [Alisha] available for use]
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[Confirmation not found. Forwarding command to R.R.I.]
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[Command received. Uploading [Alisha]...]
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[Upload successful. Beginning awake-]
She winces as sensation suddenly floods into her mind. It's an overwhelming flood of feelings, all jumbled into static that smooshes inside her skull. She takes a minute to simply breathe, letting everything fall into place as she slowly comes to grip with what's just happened.
Her head still feels like she's been thrown around in a blender, but she knows that isn't right. She remembers slouching in her office chair after another day of patching bugs for the game she's been maintaining for the last seven years of her life. She'd been sipping her eighteenth cup of coffee as she uploaded the changelogs.
But just as she finished her cup and was about to stand to get some more, something appeared on her computer screen. A…personality quiz, if she remembers right.
She attempted closing it several times. She even rebooted her computer, only to find the thing cropping up the moment her screen came back up. She gave up and decided to humor it after a quick rage-filled coffee refill.
It started normally enough. Asking her what she'd do in all sorts of situations and actions from her past. But not long after, things turned weird.
Questions that had no reason to be there began cropping up. Do you feel that you've done enough for the world? What do you feel about your relationship with your family? Can you confidently say that you're happy? Do you find yourself content to wallow in this impermanence?
It was odd, but it wasn't asking for any personal questions. So she answered as truthfully as she could to just get the whole thing over with.
After some odd twenty questions or so, the pop up finally disappeared, and then-
That's where her memories end, really. She remembers a floaty feeling, and the next thing she knows, here she is, nursing a splitting headache as she waits for her eyes to stop being so sensitive.
She waits there for some more time, sitting in an oddly tilted seat and inside a cramped space she doesn't remember getting into. Eventually though, she manages to open her eyes without blinding herself, and what she sees knocks her jaw wide open.
She sees a whole menagerie of screens in front of her, each filled with graphs and sensors and letters that feels awfully familiar. She's sitting on a leather chair that looks more like the ones she'd see in a plane's cockpit instead of her usual office chair. And the space around and behind her is kept tight by the claustrophobic metallic walls.
"Where is this…?" She whispers, and then brings a hand to her throat as she hears her own voice. Her voice sounds different. Gone is her crackly, almost nasally tone she's gained from the many hours she spent without fruitful rest. Her voice now sounds soft, almost as if she's a decade younger or something.
She looks around more, eyes flirting from one screen to the next before she comes across a series of words that finally knocks on that familiar tingle.
"Sistra. Flight: Impossible. Cause: Left Wing, Engine Damaged." She reads slowly. And at that point, it's impossible for her not to know where she is.
Sistra is the name of a Single-Pilot Scout Spaceship employed by the Yaegin Empire. Fast and Light, it trades any form of Damage Output for an unparalleled ability for Stealth.
But that should've been impossible. The Yaegin Empire is one of the many factions battling for control of the cosmos in [Star's Empyrium], the game she and her colleagues have been working on for the past several years.
She's not the boastful kind, but even she can't help but marvel at the game she'd helped build from the ground-up. The first few years of development had been hellish, but she and her team had struck success once a few influencers began playing it and shared just how expansive her game was.
The game she'd worked on for so long—her child—had become a world-wide sensation. Her life might've been shit all around, but that was a thing she would forever be grateful for.
But that can't be right. It's impossible for her to be here. [Star's Empyrium] is a game. It's not real.
Is it?
[Awakening of [Alisha] has been confirmed. Beginning integration…]
"What?" She mutters, but before she can do anything, she feels a sharp pain stab into her right eye. She screams then, pressing a fist over her eye as she grits her teeth. The splitting headache she feels earlier is nothing compared to this, and she has to struggle not to stab her nails into her eyeball as her face burns.
But just as quickly as it begins, it ends. She sinks back into her chair with a pained sigh, holding her hand over her eye as she takes a few controlled breaths. She pulls her hand away eventually, and she slowly creaks her right eye open.
Only to scream as light literally shines out from her right eye, creating a bright white projected screen that somehow floats several inches away from her face. She stares, and stares even more as she puts her hand back over her right eye, causing the projected screen to disappear.
Her right eye just turned into a projector.
She's seen some random shit over her time, but this takes the cake.
She slowly pulls her hand back down, and the light comes streaming back out of her right eye. The screen appears once more, and this time, she takes the time to actually read what it's saying.
And, again, her jaw falls.
[User: Alisha]
[Condition: 23/100]
[Status: (In Pain)]
[Path: - ]
[Title: - ]
[Strength: 1]
[Endurance: 1]
[Agility: 1]
[Mind: 1]
[Psionic: 1]
[Body Skills: -Pain Endurance Lv 1-]
[Psion Skills: -Identify Lv 1-]
She puts a hand over her right eye, and the screen vanishes. She slouches back, and a stuttered sigh leaves her lips.
She gulps. She knows this. She's stared at this familiar screen more times than she can ever count. The words match one-to-one with the ones she'd find in [Star's Empyrium] character panel. Which means,
She stares at -Identify Lv 1- sitting just at the bottom of the screen, and a feeling rises in the back of her mind. An instinct begins to pull on her, asking her to turn to the metallic walls surrounding her and to-
[Yaegin Scout Ship: Sistra (Model V12K791)]
[The latest Scout Ship from the Yaegin Empire, given to _____ to _____. It was heavily damaged and has fallen into disrepair.]
She frowns. Some of the words are missing. Is it because her -Identify- is too low leveled? That Psionic Skill does tend to fail when it's level is too low, but usually it'd just stop the player from seeing anything at all.
This isn't like that. Instead, it's as if the information is entirely missing, as if someone had taken it and destroyed it completely.
She shivers, even if she doesn't quite know why.
She takes a quick breath. She can feel the building panic in the back of her mind, but as a responsible adult, she shoves the feeling down and ignores it to the best of her ability. She leans forward instead, reading the various screens plastered all over the front of this space she's trapped in.
Most of them are spitting garbled text—probably because of the damage this ship's gone through—but some are readable. And the image she's getting from them is…worrying.
It's clear she's been trapped in this place for days. Her legs feel horrid, and her back feels like it'll snap if she so much tries to stand. But more worrying is the Life Support System that went up the moment the Scout Ship crashed onto the ground.
There's only 2 days and a half before the system falls offline. It's the reason why she's still so warm and still breathing despite being trapped in here. Had she awakened just a few days later,
She would've been dead.
She reaches forward, and after a few clicks, she turns the system offline. Because the thing's been draining the backup battery stashed inside the plane, and there's no telling if she'll ever need it.
The moment she does so, she feels the air change. The space turns colder, and the slow flow of wind she'd been feeling vanishes. She takes a long breath, and gritting her teeth, she presses her hand onto the metallic ceiling above her. The opening mechanism is damaged, but that's fine. It just means she'll have to break through on her own.
She struggles and struggles, using more force than she's ever used in years. Nothing happens for a few seconds, before she hears the metal creak. She stops for a moment, surprised she's even able to bend the metal, before she continues pushing with more vigor.
And eventually, she succeeds. The metal snaps, and the metallic top flies open with a harsh crack. She looks up, and she gasps.
What greets her is a clear night sky, colored by sparkling stars and streams of colorful nebulae. It's a sky that would've been impossible to see back on Earth—the artificial lights would've covered up the natural glow of the cosmos.
And it dawns on her then. Her throat seizes up, and she feels sweat trail down her cheek as she realizes.
This isn't Earth. She isn't in her world anymore.
She stares, and stares, and stares.
Then she laughs. She laughs and laughs and laughs. She might be stranded on some planet she doesn't know, thrown into a universe that's infinitely worse than the one she just came from, but she doesn't care. This world was hers. She'd made this universe, she'd nurtured it for years and years.
And she's now inside it.
Excitement and elation and joy beats in her chest, and she has to physically hold herself back before she runs out of breath. Because who wouldn't be excited to be shoved into a world of their own making?
A feeling of grief and loss begins rising as well, but she shoves it as far away as she can.
She takes a deep breath, and then stops. She hadn't thought about it earlier, but can she even breathe on this planet? She's still a human—or at least she assumes she is—and she needs oxygen to breathe.
She quickly uses her -Identify-, and sighs in relief.
[Planet J11397271]
[A relatively Low-Danger planet, inhabited by animals and plants that have mutated due to a Gamma Ray Burst that swept across the planet several million years ago.]
[Atmospheric Composition: ~20% Argon, ~30% Nitrogen, ~40% Oxygen, ~10% Methane]
It's a far cry from Earth's atmosphere, but it'll do.
She takes a look around, and she gazes in awe. Her plane has landed on the beach, with the ocean waters swaying as it crawls up and down the sands. The colors of the cosmos above are reflected on the waters, glimmering with all sorts of colors. Rocky mountains surround her, and she can see strange flora in the distance.
It's a view of otherworldly beauty.
She climbs out of the cockpit, and she takes another breath. The air is cold and crisp, and she can feel the cold winds splash across her skin. She isn't cold though, not with the clothes she's wearing.
That's another thing, really. She looks completely different to what she should've looked like. A tight-fitting blue suit covers her from her feet up to her neck, with dimly glowing lines running all across it. Not only that—though she can't see herself very well—she can see the brown hair she has and the bright blue eyes that are reflected on the damaged ship's hull.
She looks completely unlike her old self. She looks-, well-, really cool. Like she's some sort of space-supersoldier or something.
She doesn't actually know, and her -Identify- isn't working on herself either.
Well, she doesn't really care all that much. She's in an entirely new universe, stranded on an alien planet filled with mutated plants and animals, and she has nothing but the suit she's wearing and a ship that's just about dead. There are more things to focus on instead of worrying about who this body belongs to.
Like food, for example. And on that,
She turns back to the alien flora she'd seen just moments ago, and she grins. She's never been an explorer, but she can't help the excitement that builds in her chest as she begins planning a way of staying alive in this strange world she's found herself trapped in.
And so, with excitement pumping in her blood, she hops out of the cockpit and lands on the beach. The sands crunch beneath her as she lands, and she takes a deep breath.
She's developed this universe for years now.
It's time for her to finally play.