[ WP ] You find out that life has a character-customization-menu , and you start to shamelessly exploit it .

I sighed as I regarded myself in the mirror. Nothing seemed to suit me tonight. And tonight I really wanted to look good. My cousin had set me up with one of her male friends from school. I had n't met him before, but he was supposed to be super-attractive. 
 
 My reflection grimaced back at me as my gaze roamed over my body again. I wished that it was easier to change your appearance, so that I could look exactly as I wanted to. But that was impossible. 
 
 I blinked. 
 
 When my eyes opened again, there were several translucent green panels floating in front of me, each bearing white text. I gasped and took an involuntary step back. The screens remained where they were in my field of vision, as if invisible rods were attaching them to my head and keeping them in position in front of me. 
 
 I stopped moving and frowned, moving my eyes from side to side. The screens stayed in position no matter where I looked. Focusing in on one of them, I read the words'eye colour','skin colour', and'hair colour'. A sneaking suspicion crept into my mind. 
 
 I looked at some of the others. One large panel to my right contained things like'height','weight','body-fat distribution', and'body shape'. Another had options for hairstyles and hair length on every part of the body. There was even a small one for freckles and blemishes. 
 
 The nagging thought in the back of my mind finally figured out why this looked so familiar. It looked like a character customisation menu out of a video game. *That's* what this was: a real-life customisation menu. For me. 
 
 I told myself to remain calm. No-one had ever mentioned seeing something like this before, so it probably would n't do to go running to my mother talking about some invisible screens in the air that only I could see. That sort of thing would land me in front of a therapist or something. 
 
 I wondered if this was the result of the thoughts I had been having about it being easier to change. Well, this made it super-easy, if it worked. There was only one way to find out. 
 
 I took a deep breath and studied the menu. It was probably best to start out with something simple. My eye colour, perhaps. I focused on that part of the menu. My eyes were brown, but I had always wanted blue ones instead. I reached out and tapped the green square on the panel. Then I looked at the mirror and gasped again in amazement. 
 
 My eyes were now a stunning bright blue colour. I smiled despite myself. This could be just what I needed. 
 
 I decided to try changing my hair next. I tapped a stylish pixie cut first. Immediately, my hair was cropped short. There was n't even a transition; one moment it was long, the next moment, short. I shivered a little as I felt the cold on the back of my neck. Time for something a little more... me. 
 
 I cycled through about a dozen more hairstyles before settling on some shoulder-length curly brown hair. It looked so different from my normal black, straight hair that for a moment I did n't recognise myself in the mirror. 
 
 Next, I adjusted my height, making myself taller by several centimetres. I also dragged the weight slider down by a few pounds. It felt so weird to see my waistline shrink inwards instantly. After a little deliberation, I pushed my breast size up, giving myself two DD cups. I giggled as I squeezed one with my fingers. This was awesome. 
 
 Next, I tackled my face. I made my nose more petite first, then cleaned up the tiny bit of acne I had and fixed the shape of my eyebrows. I gave myself perfect white and straight teeth before making my lips fuller as well. The general shape of my face changed as well, so that it was slightly thinner and longer. 
 
 I slipped on some high heels and admired my handiwork. The young woman in the mirror was stunningly attractive, if I did say so myself. I gave myself a winning smile. After applying a little make-up ( admittedly almost unneeded now ) I got ready to go downstairs and get in the car. Before I did so, however, I concentrated on making the screens disappear. When I opened my eyes, they were gone, but I could feel the almost instinctive mental command that would bring them back again. 
 
 Satisfied, I left to meet my first date. 
 
 * * * 
 
 I flicked through my list of prepared body shapes and selected one at random: a generic white male in his forties. I loaded that into the menu and waited for a moment as my body underwent its changes. Then I got out of the car and walked across to the bank. 
 
 The gun was ready in my pocket. 
 
 Five minutes later, I was running back out and down the street, my bag full of cash. I ducked into an alleyway and opened my body-menu as I ran. I switched the forty year-old man for a young woman in her twenties and pulled my pace back to a steady walk as I rounded the corner at the other end. 
 
 Seconds later, two police officers came running out from the alleyway behind me, looking around. I tried not to look at them, trusting that my disguise would fool them. And why would n't it? I *was* a young woman now, right down to the bone, and they were looking for a balding guy with a large bag of cash. 
 
 I smiled as I stepped inside the nearest doorway, which happened to be a hotel I had checked the location of earlier. This young woman was one of my favourite bodies; a twenty-something year-old blonde in a tight-fitting blouse and jeans. I had gotten many free drinks in this form, as well as several extremely erotic nights in bed with several men. 
 
 I got the keycard to the hotel room I had booked earlier from the receptionist and stepped into the glass elevator. As I was lifted into the air, my thoughts turned to my life over the last few years. 
 
 It sometimes made me feel a little deceitful, using the ability to change my appearance at will to steal from banks and get free things. But it was so much easier than being boring old me, and much faster than working for a living. The night with that first date had only been the first in a long line of body changes and adjustments. 
 
 I had been everything, from multiple busty blondes to suave young men. I had gone right across the spectrum of skin colours and races, I had been in bed with both sexes numerous times, I had lived at every age from an infant child right up to an old woman. I had been so many people, I did n't even remember what the original me looked like. 
 
 The thought hit me like a freight train as I got off the elevator and began to walk towards my room. What *had* I looked like? Did I have black hair at the beginning, or brown? Were my eyes green, blue, or brown to begin with? I was sure I had been born a girl, I knew that much, but everything else about my original identity had been eroded by the hundreds of other mes I had been over the last decade. 
 
 *Who am I? * 
 
 I entered my room and sat on the end of the bed, opening the body-menu more out of habit than anything else. I stared blankly at the screens, each one representing a myriad number of combinations of appearances. Which one of those combinations had been me, though? 
 
 I screamed out loud in frustration and swiped blindly at the screens only I could see. The icons winked and flashed as I fell to my knees. My hands flickered through different lengths of nails, palm sizes, and skin colours, like a television screen going through its channels at high speed. 
 
 Then a moment of clarity came to me, or so it seemed. 
 
 I stood up with an eerie calmness and reached out to stop the random changes of the icons with one flickering limb. They settled under my fingertips. Then I swept them all aside to reveal a single red screen that I had never seen before, but somehow had always known was there. 
 
 It had a single icon on it, labelled'DELETE?'. In a dreamlike state, I pressed the icon. Nothing happened. 
 
 Then I blinked, and it all went dark.
