Now, one might think that having the anatomy of one’s body magically altered by vast cosmic power outside of one’s control might feel funny, maybe tingly. One would be correct. One might also assume that having their injuries magically healed via the same process would be painless and easy. One would be wrong.

  It seemed the transformation couldn’t take place on my severely damaged body, so it began… repairing me.

  I felt the bones in my body moving around and mending themselves over the course of a few seconds, my mouth opened and closed in a silent scream as I couldn’t decide whether I should be clenching my jaw or screaming my lungs out and ended up doing neither. The brief but all-encompassing pain reminded me once again that while this was a game, it was not following the rules I’d come to know of virtual reality.

  Shortly after I felt all the pieces of my body back in the right spots, I felt the flesh on my body begin to melt away. That was a strange feeling, because unlike the bone mending, it was completely painless. It felt incredibly weird. Slimy. A puddle formed at my feet as all the gelatinous liquid that previously clung to my body in the form of my meat prison sloshed to the rocky ground.

  I watched from a disembodied position alongside my disconcertingly still floating comfy black space onesie as my entire being pooled onto the ground beneath me like cherry ice cream. Once all of my matter had coalesced into that sludgy circle it began shining with an internal light. Beams of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, and indigo flew out from my not body. The mass roiled and undulated like boiling water while it changed from a red hue to an ever-changing rainbow.

  I’m sure if I still had a mouth at this point it would be hanging open.

  Metaphorically I probably was staring slack jawed at this entire display.

  It was quite possibly the strangest thing I’d seen ever. I had to remind myself this was a game, again.

  Despite the absurdity of the situation everything felt too real. Either magic was real, or I was in a virtual reality game. One of those was much, more likely than the other.

  The pool beneath my feet began swirling, colors running together like mixing paints, but somehow staying distinct the entire time. Despite every color of the rainbow mixing together, never once did they stray from their prismatic identity. As the pool spun it began to pool upwards turning into a multicolored spiral spire. The base split in two, forming two twirling cylinders that attached to an oval center. Two large tendrils then split off from the center of mass, still connected near the top, but falling down limply to the sides of the amalgamation. The top then began to taper into a thinner cylinder before expanding back out into a sphere.

  It vaguely resembled… a human.

  I watched as it became more and more humanoid. The limbs turned thicker and fleshier. Digits formed on the arms and legs and the pink pigment rose to the surface forming the outer layer of skin. Soon in front of me stood a young woman. She was a few centimeters taller than I remembered myself being, with strawberry blonde hair that was tied up into two twin buns on the top of her head. A short braid of rainbow-colored hair fell to the side of her face which held two deep amber golden eyes that stared blankly into nothingness. She had a cute face, oval shaped with a small nose and thin lips, her eyelashes were longer than mine—fuller too.

  I moved on to observing the rest of the person in front of me. As I did so, I began to feel a pull towards it along with a feeling of wrongness. Despite that, I managed to take a few more seconds to examine what I assumed was my soon to be body.

  She was overall quite skinny, but definitely had more muscle than I did before confirming my selection. Granted, more than zero wasn’t a high bar, but it was closer to the amount of muscle I had when I was staying active at my VR fencing club on Earth-3 before my dad pawned me off the vast expanse of space.

  She had these mesmerizing tattoos as well.

  They were all pairs of concentric geometric shapes that shimmered like they were covered in glitter and held an internal light. They changed in color as I laid eyes on them, never quite staying the same as the moment prior. It was like peering through a window into a world of shifting rainbows.

  The first set of pairs were squares on her biceps. They were just below her shoulder and turned ninety degrees so that a corner of the square pointed up towards her head. They sat right in the place that one would find their hands should they try to give themselves a hug. The next set were next to her belly button. A pair of elongated hexagons on either side that wrapped around her ribs and onto her back. These looked like someone made a nice, perfect hexagon and then grabbed two opposite points and pulled as hard as they could before slapping it onto my—her? belly.

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  It was getting hard for me to distinguish us in my head. The last pair was on my outer thighs, and they were rectangles, slightly longer than the squares on my arms as they curved around the sides of my legs.

  By this point I was fully inside my new body. I opened my eyes and blinked a few times. I definitely was a little taller. Somehow my black space onesie had followed me and now adorned the rainbow girl I’d become.

  I didn’t feel like questioning that at this point, so I just chalked it up to video game logic.

  I stretched my new arms and legs, feeling incredibly relieved that the horrible pain had completely disappeared with my transformation into a lumina. I flexed my fingers and my toes, feeling my full range of motion was much the same. The sun felt a little gentler even and the air smelled fresher and more inviting.

  Without my pain addled mind and body everything was a lot clearer. My new eyes confirmed the oddities I’d seen earlier with the two suns and the blue grasses, and my fresh brain confirmed that I was still royally out of luck on getting off this planet.

  Another pop-up appeared in my vision but there was something I wanted to check before I opened it.

  I set Gin down at the edge of the crater, did a few hops, shaking my body a little to loosen up, then I slid down the hemisphere and back towards my craft. I vaulted myself inside the smoking craft; I was looking for the survival gear we’d planned for when I eventually landed in the new habitable zone.

  I wondered if it would be in the game.

  Technically I should have around three and a half more years of rations plus whatever amount was packed for initial days after landing. Obviously, it would be less now that my body had to do things rather than just sit in the pod, but it was a substantial sustenance supply that I wasn’t about to just give up on.

  Hang on, was my new body even compatible with the food I brought?

  It had to be right? I mean, food was food. I wondered if I had any new allergies. I shook my head and continued on my mission. That wasn’t worth worrying about.

  It was much easier getting back into the pod now that I wasn’t crippled, though the smoke was still annoying. I found the life support system in rather bad shape which was probably the most difficult thing for me to repair if that was my goal. I grumbled about the broken life support module and hoped this wasn’t some elaborate training mission on repairing the ship and was actually a game meant to be fun.

  I pushed aside a panel to look at the food supply. It looked like about the correct amount of food had been used over the few years I’d been in flight, however the gunk pooling in the bottom of the food box told me not everything was peachy. I saw a piece of metal stabbing through most of the remaining bags, with some unidentifiable liquid dripping down into the food packages. I sighed and grabbed the few that weren’t punctured. It was still a few weeks of food if I had to take a gander. Maybe longer.

  I then opened another panel behind my seat in the cockpit and found the backpack I’d put there years ago, along with the survival tools my dad and I had prepared. It was all as we’d left it, aside from the exact positions, but that was due to the rough landing.

  The tools being there puzzled me because we hadn’t decided all these items until right before the launch. I hadn’t even known I was leaving without him until that very day.

  “Maybe he sent a patch while I was still near Earth-3?” I mumbled as I put the food packs into my bag, alongside the other survival gear that had been in that panel.

  One solar module, one mini terraform kit, instant crops, the laser multi-tool, and some hard rations that were originally intended for once I landed since the other stuff was supposed to have run out. Lastly, I grabbed the laser pistol and its associated belt. I threw it around my waist and turned to jump back out of the spaceship, only to see something I hadn’t expected.

  A message had come in on the communications panel.

  That hadn’t happened ever since I left Earth-3.

  I had just assumed the thing was broken.

  I once again had to remind myself that this was a game made by my father, and thus this development made sense. Of course he would leave a message for me in his game. That would by far be the most normal thing for him to have done with this game that I had seen so far.

  I clicked play on the communications panel.

  A few moments later I hopped back down out of the pod and walked up the slight incline to Gin who had waited patiently at the edge of the crater where I’d left him. I picked him up and set him in my backpack, pulling out the solar module and attaching it to the top of my backpack, letting it charge from the midmorning sun. I wiped my eyes and hardened my gaze.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got.”