Three days after the lottery and party, Drake was overseeing the installation of his brand new VR capsules. While VR wasn't a new technology, these capsules were a lot different, in that they transferred some of the physical improvements he would get inside the game to his real body. It also allows him to sleep and eat ingame, and have it still count as food in real life. As the delivery men carried the old VR capsules out of Drake's house Drake couldn’t help but sigh. His moment of melancholiness was quickly dispelled as all of Drake's friends came in with him to their collective game room to see the setup.

  "Well holy shit," said Matthew with a satisfied tone. "This looks awesome!"

  Indeed it did. The VR pods were a nice silver tone, and were lined up in a row, plugged directly into the power lines in the wall. The group milled around them for a while, before each person picked their own capsule. They looked at each other.

  "Now what," Nick asked. "We still have a day before GreenTree Online is released, what do we do until then?"

  Drake gave a wry smile and replied, "You didn't look at the deluxe key features, did you? We get to create out characters a day early, which means we get to get to claim our usernames and whatnot earlier than everyone else."

  With that Drake got in, and booted up the VR pod. His friends stared at him for a minute before exchanging a collective shrug and following suit.

  Drake smiled until suddenly everything went black. Before he could react he was standing in a giant white space, with nothing around for what appeared to be miles. That was until he heard a voice.

  "Hello."

  Drake whirled around to see a tall man in a nice suit standing behind him. The man smiled and said, "I am the AI of this game, Jonas. Welcome to the character creation. I assume you are one of the five premium players currently logged on?"

  Drake nodded and replied, "Yes, I'm here to create my character early. The other four are my friends."

  Jonas smiled at that statement, before saying "I can bring them here so you can strategize if you want. However know that no matter what, if you don't select the same or a similar race you won't be able to start in the same area or meet up until you are level 5."

  "No thanks, I'm ok. We made sure to strategize beforehand."

  "Very well then." Jonas proceeded to step back, and then a screen appeared in front of Drake with over a hundred different Races. After looking at it for about thirty minutes, Drake had narrowed his choices down to three different races.

  Drake thought his options over, before finally making his decision.

  Drake didn’t think too hard, as he had already decided beforehand.

  Drake took a couple of seconds, but he had thought of his name before entering the pod, and he had no intention of changing it.

  Drake thought about it, before deciding against it. In his mind it would be far cooler to be called Grim by everyone he passed by, regardless of whether they were an NPC.

  “Oh yeah, shit’s about to get real” This is what Drake was waiting for. He quickly changed the Drake-resembling draconian into a slightly taller build, with a more pronounced chin and less crooked nose. He made sure not to change too much, as he knew it would make it hard to adjust. Soon he had a full character set up. He clicked confirm.

  “AHH SONOFA BITCH” he shouted as a bright light blinded him, followed by darkness.

  “What the hell? Jonas? What happened,” Drake asked while slightly panicking.

  Fortunately, Jonas was still there. “Relax,” he said, “Its part of the transformation process, just give it a minute.”

  Drake relaxed, and shortly afterwards he could see again. He looked down and found himself in his avatar’s body.

  “Holy shit! This is awesome!”

  Drake quickly began to do various stretches, then he began to run around and test out his new body. Finding it satisfactory he walked back over to Jonas.

  “So what now,” He asked.

  Jonas looked at him. “Now you wait,” he said before waving his hand.

  As Drake watched he noticed that the timer was ticking down about once every five seconds, which seemed to fit with GTO’s supposed 5:1-time acceleration ratio. He sighed, there was nothing to do for another 12 hours, so he logged out.