The Emperor’s Clothes | Xen & Harrier
Avatars in Elysium lacked a number of options in those days. Though the shop, as it were, for choosing one’s clothing and appearance options would expand greatly over time through user feedback and designer input, the initial options made the small groups of people sometimes difficult to distinguish. Sure, you could tell people apart, but a lot of people liked that red hoodie, and the boys’ hair options left much to be desired. Like an early video game release, the options were being tested and made available over time. The DLC curse, one might suppose.
Xen’s presence in Elysium at that time largely kept to wherever people seemed to be, though in off times it was a habit of the agent to peruse less populated areas, either to see why they weren’t populated, or to get a sense of who did go there. It was on one of these occasions, checking out a nearly abandoned room within the server, that Xen happened upon a young man in the process of customization. But that shirt wasn’t in the catalog. She had seen it in the pages of pseudo content. It might be added in a few weeks but wasn’t finalzied, and certainly wasn’t available to the public.
And she didn’t recognize him. He didn’t work for Elysium.
“That doesn’t belong to you,” she said. “How did you access the alpha page of the avatar catalog?”
To be fair, she often wore a long jacket that wasn’t available anywhere. She could wear it at specific times. Within the beta, as a user on behalf of the government, she had certain administrative privileges, but it was better not to ask why. She did not wear it that day, instead in a more basic, user accessible wardrobe.