Chapter 5: Chapter 5: A Voice

A flickering rectangle was floating above her when she opened her eyes, popping up cheerfully before her with a soft fuzziness around the edges.

Please select your character class.

The box gave a slight, almost undetectable wiggle as the woman's voice spoke within her mind again. It wanted her to 'select a Character Class', but all she could see on the rectangle in front of her was a field of question marks with some letters sprinkled in.

"Not this again," she grumbled groggily, freeing herself from her nest of blankets.

"I don't know what a Character Class is, nor can I read whatever is on this thing." The words came out with some gravel to them, thick with sleep.

The screen quivered in place for a few moments, emitting a sound she could equate only to a horn.

It seems you are having trouble selecting a Character Class. Would you like us to select a class for you? We will assign you the class that best fits players like you!

Nikola's eyes became slits when the voice referred to her as a 'player'. Hadn't she just been called a non-player last night? Either way, hearing the phrasing elsewhere in the world supported her prisoner's shaky lie of all of this being a game, and she didn't want that lie to be supported. And what's more, without him around, it gave the proposition some validity it hadn't possessed before. She gulped. She didn't know much about games, besides the ones she had played with her father and the neighbour children in her youth, but she knew that there were players within them.

"Alright. You may go ahead and assign me the 'class' that you believe fits me."

Excellent! Would you also like me to set your favoured weapon and abilities?

She surveyed the screen, which had advanced to a new set of question marks. They were spaced differently than before, with the occasional letter peppered in, but it was still nothing readable.

"I can't read what's on the screen. I have no idea who you are and why I'm answering you; you just appeared in my mind one day, and I'm a rather worried I'm becoming deranged because I just keep responding as if you're real. Then again, you are not the first voice that has ever been in my head. If you'll stop speaking to me whenever I wake up, then yes. Set 'my favoured weapon and abilities'."

Wonderful. Your race, class, stats, ability scores and favoured weapon have been set. Please read the text and verify it's what you were looking for.

"What does it say?"

I'm sorry, I don't recognize what you're asking me. Please read the text and verify it's what you were looking for.

"... it's fine."

Are you sure? You will not get another chance to change your selection.

Nikola sighed, and gave the rectangle a harder look. No matter how much she tried to puzzle through it, the shards of text she could see just didn't fit together, like a shattered glass window after 60 percent of the shrapnel washed away in the rain.

"I'm sure," she responded shortly. She hoped that the voice would be sated after this, and that she wouldn't be hearing from it again for a good, long while. The other voice she had spoken to, long before this one, was keeping her busy enough.

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Excellent! Your race, class, favoured weapon and ability scores have all been set. Now, where would you like to begin?

The blue rectangle shifted to sit horizontally rather than vertically and coloured itself with a tarnished beige. The world she had come to know flickered before her, with a marker pointing to where she was currently; Denburrow, a small town seated by a forest that contained one of the world's longest rivers. Her people had settled in long ago due to its proximity to fresh water, and the abundance of small rodents that hid in the loamy ground that lived beneath the trees.
It was the sort of place that had only one or two people of every profession, but it was well trafficked because of its abundance of resources. People would flow in and out, trading all sorts of things for the pillowy white pelt of the frostynose, a cross between a mole and a mouse with rather large ears that lived near the snow capped mountain not far from them. There was a tale that had been circulated since she was a baby that the river that broke through the forest flowed so abundantly because the snow atop the mountain was infinite and would never stop melting and contributing to it. Some said the snow up there would outlast them all.

Please choose a location.

Nikola's eyes wandered across the map, drinking in all sorts of areas she had never heard of. Was this really a map of her world? It had to be, considering her home was sitting nestled in the lower right corner. But to think there was so much out there that she had never seen before, never experienced!

A glittering, golden city with spikes jutting out of it sat on the extreme opposite end of the world, and a cloud of darkness sat what looked like only inches to its right. There had to be some kind of story there.

But what really caught her eye was a settlement closer to the middle of the slab of land her home was sitting on; it was shaped like a butterfly, and its name was ??n???ap. She found it chuckle-worthy that the letters peeking through the question marks spelled out the word 'nap'; when she wasn't partaking in her newfound hobby of murder, naps were tied for her second favourite thing, along with trying to make a loaf of bread that rivaled her father's.

She reached out and touched the 'nap' area.

Excellent choice! Are you sure this is where you would like to begin?

"Yes."

Nikola hadn't been taking The Voice seriously, hadn't expected its nagging to be anything of consequence. She had been answering its questions as quickly and non-noncommittally as possible in the hopes that it would go away for good, leaving her mind to its usual level of relative silence.
Her take on it even appearing in the first place was that her life of crime was taking its toll on her psyche and she was going a little nutso, but when her fingertip made contact with what she had assumed was a hallucination and her body began to hover, everything felt a little more real.

She could feel her body becoming weightless; a similar feeling to passing out, comparable to falling, but sort of backwards. Then, a flash of light engulfed her and when it began to fade, the welcoming taupe of her kitchen wasn't what greeted her.

A total whiteness blanketed her vision, and no amount of blinking corrected it. It lasted for seconds, and then for tens of seconds. Then, her feet found something solid. A floor of some kind? Being robbed of one of her senses imbued her with a sense of helplessness, which only increased when she realized she could feel the graininess of the ground beneath her, almost well enough to count the pores. She was almost definitely barefoot. Had she been barefoot before?

As she blinked frantically, trying to force her eyes to acclimate, the brightness before her faded into a vast lilac, and then buildings began to take shape in the nothingness before her. The nothingness morphed into a somethingness, and everything around her gained more detail. The roofs gained tiles, the eyes on people's faces materialized and the speckles on the pathways glimmered as the light bounced off of them.

One such pathway was beneath her, and other people were walking upon it too, each one trying not to stare at her as they sped past.

Everything in front of her was tinted with a deep purple light. It streaked across the sky and made everything look mystical, touched by magic. She had never seen such a thing before. When her icy eyes traced one of the beams, she found the source; a giant butterfly sat upon a metal pole, and its body was humming with shining energy. It was like a lighthouse, its beams illuminating the streets below.

Another person walked past her. And then another. Each one was looking at her, and now that she could see their eyes, it became all the more obvious that she was attracting attention.

Oh no. Oh nononono.

Was she still in her fucking pajamas?

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