I had a mini-crisis when confronted with the time-limit. After placing my points I also had to select a passive and active ability and buy starting gear. The new screen changed to a large countdown timer and floated away until it was above the single door in the room.

I looked at the stats again. I wanted to put them all in one place to maximize my training stats. I wanted to pick something that had a concrete impact on the values I saw on the screen. But, did I care more about mana or health? The sickening memory of my ribs shattering against the trunk of a tree and the agonizing pain of internal bleeding and then death flooded my mind. I didn’t want to be a glass cannon. I wanted to not fucking die.

I tossed all ten points into Fortitude, pumping it up to twelve and selected Confirm. I took a moment and looked up at my health and stamina.

Health: 142 Health Regeneration: 28/hour

Stamina: 122 Stamina Regeneration: 12/hour

The health I got from Fortitude had jumped from ten per point up to twenty per point after level ten. Also, now I regenerated more health in one hour than my entire health total from just a moment earlier. I wanted to dig into these numbers even more, but I didn’t have time. The game, or god, or whatever was controlling this system was giving me a kick in the ass. If I’d known I was under a time constraint I wouldn’t have fussed over my appearance so much. I stroked my luxurious beard and started looking for a way to move on to passive and active skill selections, but another goddamn window popped up in front of me.

Wowee! You spent all your Character Creation points on a single stat! A truly inspired and nuanced build. As a reward for your foolhardy bravery you have earned the Dumping achievement!

Dumping: After spending 5 or more stat points at once on a single attribute, you are granted 1 additional point in that attribute. This effect is retroactive.

My Fortitude jumped up another point, and I gained another twenty health and four regen, bringing me to 162 health and 3  2 health regen per hour.

Wowee! You have reached a Fortitude of 10 or higher at Delver level zero! You do know that just because you won’t die, shit still hurts, right? You have earned the I Don’t Attack You, You Attack Me achievement!

I Don’t Attack You, You Attack Me: So long as you did not attack first, an enemy becomes stunned for one second the first time they deal damage to you with a melee attack. An enemy who has triggered this ability will become vulnerable to it again at the next dawn. Certain skills and abilities may prevent this effect from occurring.

Heavens to Betsy! Your Fortitude has reached level 10! Your body has transcended the limits of human resilience and simple attacks from non-magical sources now deal significantly less damage to you. You’ve also unlocked your first Fortitude evolution. Please select one of the following:

Like a Rock: Your body acts as though it is five times heavier when determining whether an enemy can force you to move by any means.

Workhorse: You do not suffer the effects of fatigue when your stamina is below 50%.

I Can Do This All Day: Health and Stamina regeneration bonuses from Fortitude are doubled.

My blood pressure shot up when I was presented with even more choices. Don’t get me wrong, It was nice to get more buffs, but I didn’t have time to give it any real thought. I was sure that there were a variety of hijinks that could be had with the Like a Rock ability, and Workhorse sounded good, but, like so much of this process, I didn’t know enough to decide how good it was. I defaulted to picking the thing that made my numbers go up: I Can Do This All Day. I was up to 64 Health regen and 26 Stamina regen.

The window disappeared after I made my selection and I was left staring at the table. Where was the next window? I had to choose abilities and gear and there were only seven minutes left. Then I remembered the book. I reached out and flipped to the next page. Another blue window appeared.

There are an endless number of skills in Arzia and we hope you’ve done your homework! Please select what type of Active Skill you would like:

Offensive

Defensive

I had a theme of defense going on but grabbing a defensive skill seemed like overkill. I selected Offensive.

Poke ‘em, slash ‘em, whack ‘em, or blast ‘em. What type of offensive skill would you like?

Melee

Ranged Physical

Magical

INT looked like my highest offensive stat, so I selected Magical.

From hellish flames that incinerate your foes to vivid hallucinations that torment them, your enemies will tremble at your power as a master of the arcane arts. Or, they’ll freeze. Or collapse on the ground in a fit of giggling. Basically, how do you want them to suffer?

Elementally

Mentally

Dimensionally

Cursedly…

“Goddammit!” I said as the list went on and on. I selected Dimensionally since I already had a bonus to it. There was a single spell, and I selected it after reading the description through once.

Oblivion Orb:

Mana Cost: 5

Cooldown: None

Requirements: None

For the briefest moment you create a small dimensional tear in the shape of an orb in your palm, which transports whatever it touches to another plane of existence. Higher levels of Intelligence increase the size of the orb, and higher levels of Dimensional Magic may unlock additional effects.

I wasn’t sure how that worked as an attack spell, but the window disappeared and I flipped to the next page in the book.

Please select what type of Passive Skill you would like:

Offensive

Defensive

I hesitated. My only form of attack was the odd spell I didn’t know how to use, so it made sense to go for an offensive passive. But would an offensive passive give me another means of attack? Passive skills in games were often force multipliers. Get more of what you’re good at to really excel. Picking a passive to shore up your weaknesses could work at times, but if the passive’s effects were calculated according to your stats or abilities, then I’d be gaining a buff based on my weak offensive capacity and giving up a potential buff based on my much stronger defensive abilities. It was a weak argument, but the logic made sense to me at the time. I was in a rush, don’t judge me. I selected Defensive.

Please select what type of Defensive Passive you would like:

Self

Aura

Self or aura? I assumed self meant the passive only applied to me, but an aura… that would affect my allies too, right? Nobody hated an auramancer. Dude drops into your game with a million active buffs that make everyone stronger? Hell yeah. I selected Aura.

There are three starter defensive auras available:

Mike’s Magic Shield: You and your allies gain damage reduction to hostile magical effects equal to your Wisdom up to a maximum of 25.

Herd Leader: You and your allies gain an additional amount of Mana and Stamina regeneration equal to your Speed up to a maximum of 25.

Who Needs a Cleric?: You and your allies gain an additional amount of Health regeneration equal to your Fortitude up to a maximum of 25.

Easy choice. More health regen. I selected Who Needs a Cleric? and my health regen went up to 90. I could go from the brink of death to full HP in less than two hours. I wasn’t about to be stitching my wounds back together in seconds while slicing my enemies apart with dual katanas and my cutting wit, but I was on my way. As soon as I made the selection I felt power thrumming around me. My body felt great, as though every cell of my being was healthy and whole. My vision was sharper, my muscles were loose and warmed up, my allergies were gone. In fact, my nose was truly clear for the first time I could remember. I took a deep breath and got a little light headed, but the feeling passed in an instant.

Three minutes left.

I flipped to the next page of the book and came to my last selection: Equipment.

Whether you want to keep your insides on the inside or cause immeasurable suffering to your enemies and deep emotional harm to the loved ones who survive them, gear helps you get it done. As part of Character Creation you have been given 10 gold to spend in the Starter Shop. Be sure to spend it, because once you leave the Character Creation room it’s all gone!

Gear Categories:

Starter Kits

Armor

Melee Weapons

Ranged Weapons

Potions

Consumables

I was up against the clock so I selected Starter Kits.

Starter Kits! Don’t feel like putting in the work to choose your items a la carte? Don’t worry! We’ve created designated sets of gear that use all your complimentary Character Creation funds without the hassle of having to do burdensome things like thinking. You even get a little discount! Please choose a starter kit from the following selections to see their contents:

Suckling Sorcerer

Tanky Toddler

Rug-Rat Ranger

Pickney Priest

Ankle-biting Assassin

Baby Barbarian…

I clicked through a couple of the options, taking a look at what they contained. Basic weapon, a couple pieces of armor or enchanted clothes, a couple items, the Assassin had smoke bombs, which was cool, but nothing fit with what I was going for. What was I going for? As I gnawed my bottom lip I noticed a new option had appeared. It was written in what was becoming a familiar, hasty scrawl.

Tiny-tot Traveler

I selected it without even looking at what it contained. A single, small necklace appeared in the air before me and I grabbed it just as my time ran out.

I gripped the necklace as the door to the room slammed open. An immense force surrounded me, like a giant hand gripping my entire body, then hurled me toward the open door. I sailed across the threshold and crashed down onto a smooth stone floor, sliding several feet before tumbling to a stop. I definitely let out a high pitched yelp as I soared, which probably didn’t improve the overall stunning first impression I’d just made on the people in the new room.

There were four of them, and two were gaping at me in open shock. A third merely raised an eyebrow, and the fourth looked disgusted.

“Hi,” I said, sitting up. After recovering from the terror of being manhandled by an invisible giant and having it impress upon me the value of punctuality in this universe, I realized that being tossed out like a bucket of compost hadn’t hurt at all. I hopped up onto my feet and took a look around, my new friends still silently gawking.

One of the wide-eyed looks was from a tall, olive-skinned woman with dirty blonde hair pulled back and woven into a bun. She was dressed in dark leather armor with a bow slung over her shoulder. She looked what I would call, well, handsome. I couldn’t describe to you what makes a woman handsome as opposed to pretty or plain or beautiful or kawaii, but she had it in spades.

The other shocked look came from an even taller person, and seeing them reinforced to me that something truly strange had happened to me. They weren’t human. They were long and lithe, with hands that came down past their knees. They were covered in gray fur and had a long snout, not quite like a dog’s. It was thinner, more tapered, like a bandicoot or a rodent. Short white whiskers twitched to either side of a pink nose, jet-black eyes ran me up and down, and one of their short, pointed ears flicked. They were too real to be someone in a costume and I lost myself for a moment as my mind took a tiny step towards accepting the idea that I had actually, really died. That my home was somewhere very far away and my fiancée was alone. I was alone. I quickly looked away.

The raised eyebrow came from a short and curvy woman with light red skin, which was completely unnatural but after the last person it didn’t trip me up too much. She had a mop of dark, curly hair that came down to her shoulders and she was leaning back on one of the plain stone walls, twirling a scepter in one hand. A small shield was propped against the wall beside her. She wore a long, blood-red tabard with some elaborate and twisting symbol on the front over a chainmail shirt with white robes that looked thick and padded underneath.

The look of disgust came from the tallest of the group who had an entire head on me despite the extra couple of inches I’d given myself and which were suddenly failing to fill me with the confidence I’d thought they would. He was pale–deathly pale–with icy blue eyes and hair the color of snow you might find on the side of the highway. From the waist up he wore only a thin and tight linen shirt, just barely whiter than his own skin. From the waist down he was clad in steel armor. I knew there were nifty names for all the individual pieces of the man’s metal pants, but I couldn’t remember all of them. I remembered greaves. Or were they sabatons? Were those different things? I thought they were. Delightfully, fancy-pants was the first one to speak.

“Sure took your time,” he said in a voice so low I felt it in my bones. I had been staring at his lower extremities for a lot longer than was polite, and I nodded after he spoke, hoping I looked like I was deep in contemplation about something other than his trousers or what might lay beyond them. I looked up and smiled.

“I was just figuring some things out,” I said. “I’m Arlo.” I held out a hand to him. His jaw clenched as he looked down at it, then he sighed.

“Arlo, I’m going to be honest with you. I’m very unhappy with what I’m seeing.”

Left hanging for the second time today, I let my hand drop. Maybe they didn’t do handshakes here.

“Ok,” I began, “why-” He held up a finger and cut me off.

“First, what am I even looking at?” He gestured up and down at me. “You’re wearing rags. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that your gear pack and everything else you brought got left in the room you just fell out of, a room which no longer exists and where everything left inside is now cast out to oblivion.”

I turned to look at the door and found a blank stone wall, the same as the rest of the room.

“If I assume that,” he continued, “then I can believe that you’re just an idiot, and not someone who is either profoundly challenged or, worse, a saboteur.”

I peeked down at my linen clothes, then around at the others who were all wearing some form of armor. Each of them also had a large backpack on or near them and an additional large sack as big as my torso sat on the ground, stuffed full. I nodded.

“Ok,” I said. He tilted his head and clenched his hand into a fist.

“Second, you spent a really long time in that creation chamber. So long, in fact, that we,” he gestured between himself and the other three, “all learned together on this very day that there is a thing called a ‘ready check’ that can force a player out of the room if they take too long. I’ve never heard of a ready check. Sayil,” he said, turning to the tall beast-person, “have you heard of a ready check before?”

“Nope,” said Sayil in a rough and tumble voice straight out of a Clint Eastwood movie.

“See?” said Fancy-Pants.

“So,” I said, “what you’re saying is that people don’t normally take that long.”

“Since literally none of us have heard of it happening, I guess not.”

“Well, I apologize for my, uh, tardiness. It shan't happen again.”

He dropped a heavy hand onto my shoulder.

“Are you taking this seriously?” he asked.

“I think so?”

He hung his head, let his hand slide off my shoulder, then took a deep breath and stood up straight.

“Alright,” he said, “I’m the party leader. Have a problem with that?”

“I don’t suppose.”

The short woman leaning against the wall spoke up, looking to Fancy-Pants, whose identity had now been updated to Party Leader in my mind. Perhaps Fancy-Pants Party Leader. That was too long. Pants Party?

“You should at least ask him for his title,” she said, her tone much merrier than the pale man’s. “To make it official.” Pants Party’s mouth made a thin line but he nodded.

“Fine,” he said. “What’s your title?”

I had trouble deciding how to approach that question. I assumed he was asking me for something along the lines of a noble title, but I had no idea if noble titles were a thing here. If they were, what type of noble hierarchy did they have? Was this a kingdom? An empire? A dictatorship where supreme executive power was awarded by strange women lying in ponds and distributing swords? I decided to take the honest route.

“Esquire.”