by A. J. Markam
SUCCUBUS
Christmas Special
A.J. Markam
A LitRPG Short Story
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Copyright © 2018 by A.J. Markam
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Also by A.J. Markam
Succubus
(Kindle and audiobook)
Succubus 2: Hell To Pay
(Kindle and audiobook)
Succubus 3:
The Good, The Bad, And The Crazy Stupid Hot
Succubus 4:
Gnome Place Like Home
Succubus 5:
Hardcore Dungeon Core
Dead Man Gaming
Zodiac: Operation Zodiac
Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Also by A.J. Markam
Recommended
Foreword
For new readers: this is a short story in the SUCCUBUS universe, and was written so anybody could pick it up without having to read the previous books in the series.
WARNING: there is some seriously naughty and irreverent stuff ahead, so if you’re a devout Christian who gets angry at flippant treatment of the Bible, or an old church lady who faints when people mention sex, you’ll probably want to get out now.
If you’re not a Bible-thumper or an old church lady, then I hope you enjoy it!
For my long-time readers: this book takes place shortly after Book 5. You’ll find I repeat some basic information from previous books, but that’s to give new readers an easier entry into the world. Hope you enjoy the story!
1
“Alright people, listen up,” my boss said. “It’s time for our annual Christmas campaign.”
My immediate reaction?
Ahhhhh, SHIT.
I was sitting in a conference room at Westek Inc., publisher of the online virtual reality videogame OtherWorld.
Imagine playing Dungeons and Dragons, but having it beamed into your head so that everything looked, sounded, and felt real. Real dungeons, real dragons, real dwarves, real danger. Or at least that’s what it seemed like to your brain.
OtherWorld was a place of magic, beauty, wonder, and adventure, not to mention a great way to spend a few hours kicking the shit out of imaginary monsters.
At the moment, I was surrounded by my fellow employees in the Quality Control division – otherwise known as QCers. Our entire job was to play the game and report any problems we found before new material was released to the public.
Needless to say, my Scrooge-like feelings about the Christmas campaign were not shared by my colleagues.
“Sweet!” one guy yelled.
“Yes!” a girl QCer shouted.
“Alright, alright, alright,” said Robert the QC Warlock. He was a colleague of mine who looked and sounded like a Matthew McConaughey clone. In fact, he was the first coworker I’d encountered in the game, and had introduced me to –
…long story. Another time.
As everybody else joined the chorus of approval, I just grumbled and slumped down a little further in my chair.
What was it going to be THIS year? I griped silently. Saving Santa Claus from an evil wizard? AGAIN?
Every year, OtherWorld introduced a thematic adventure that everybody in the game could participate in. There was one for every major US holiday: Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July, Valentine’s Day, Halloween. The company would concoct a bunch of stupid quests with titles like Ho-Ho-Help The Elves, or Rudolph The Red-Nosed Goblin. People would run around filling stockings and saving reindeer and shit. Just utterly pointless crap.
In the past, I’d usually sat out these game-wide debacles. Sometimes I didn’t even log on between Thanksgiving and December 26th.
But now I was a paid employee, so I didn’t have a choice. I was going to be playing the game whether I wanted to or not.
That was when my boss said something that took me completely by surprise.
“This year’s going to be a little different, though. This year you’re going to kill Santa Claus.”
2
There was stunned silence for a split second – and then the room exploded.
“SAY WHAT?!”
“Are you friggin’ serious?!”
“What the hell?!”
Of course, there were a couple of contrarians who grinned from ear to ear.
“Right on,” one of them called out.
As for me, I was intrigued for the very first time. I sat up a little further in my seat to hear what my boss had to say.
“Simmer down, folks. I was being dramatic for effect. No, you won’t be offing Saint Nick. Instead, you’re going to be hunting down this guy.”
The computer screen behind him switched to a picture of something that bore only the barest resemblance to Kris Kringle.
It was an eight-foot-tall, hunched-over figure with midnight-blue skin, matted hair, and bugged-out eyes that looked like ping-pong balls with tiny black dots on them. His massive hands ended in vicious claws, and his mouth was a Joker-like smile filled with yellow fangs.
He also wore a tattered red robe with dirty white trim, and a red sleeping cap with a filthy white puff of fur at the end. The costume was where all resemblance to the Jolly Old Elf began and ended.
Basically, he looked like Nightcrawler from The X-Men got jacked, did a shit-ton of meth, and put on a Santa Claus costume he found at the town dump.
“Ladies and gentlemen, meet Sinter Klaws,” my boss continued, pronouncing it ‘SIN-ter Claws.’ “He’s going to be the ‘Big Bad’ of our Christmas campaign.”
“But… ‘Santa Claus’ in Dutch is ‘Sinterklaas,’” one of the QC nerds called out.
“Yes, it’s a pun,” my boss explained patiently. “Plus, ‘Sinter Klaws’ looks and sounds creepy in English.”
“But in the Netherlands, they’re going to think we’re saying this is Santa Claus.”
“No, in the Netherlands version, he’s going to be named something else.”
“I don’t know,” the nerd whined. “I think it’s disparaging of Dutch people’s heritage to – ”
“SHUT UUUUP!” everybody else in the room yelled at him.
“Calm down, calm down,” my boss said. “Devon’s just doing what we hired all of you to do – raise potential issues before they become problems. But rest assured, we’ve cleared all of this through Legal, so Sinter Klaws it is.”
“What’s the storyline?” one of my coworkers called out.
“Now, now, wouldn’t want to give away any surprises. Just know that when you log in for your next shift, there will be a portal you’ll have to enter that will take you to the start of the first quest. Everything else should be self-explanatory. If you have any problems, write them up in your QC report.”
“Are there separate quests for the adult version?” another QCer called out.
“Yes.”
The vast maj
ority of the room began muttering bitterly.
The ‘adult version’ was the soon-to-be released, X-rated version where you could actually have sex with characters in the game. Only a few people in the company were actively testing it – which caused a great deal of jealousy amongst all the horny nerds who would have given their left nut to bang some elves.
I was one of the fortunate few, and I’d lucked into it. When I was first hired, I was the guinea pig for a long-term immersion system – meaning you could enter a special machine and play the game for days at a time without having to eat, sleep, or go to the bathroom. Only problem was, it was a prototype, it malfunctioned, and I got temporarily trapped in the game. The good news was it accidentally crossed me over into the adult version, and I’d stayed there ever since as part of my agreement not to sue Westek for putting me in a weeklong coma.
TL;DR version: I got to bang hot elves in the game and get paid for it. And I didn’t even have to give up my left nut.
Which pissed off my colleagues to no end.
“Why is Hertzfelder still playing the adult version?” someone yelled out angrily. “I’ve been working here three times as long as him and I haven’t even played it once!”
‘Hertzfelder’ was me. Ian Hertzfelder.
Unfortunately, Mr. Jealous QCer’s sentiment was widely shared.
My boss spent a few more minutes telling everyone that the adult version would launch in the next six months and that they could ALL play it then, but until that point, we were sticking to our assigned tasks, yadda yadda yadda. Then he dismissed everyone so they could go back to work.
I hustled out of the conference room as quickly as I could, ignoring the dirty looks from the other QCers, and went back to the lab where a nurse tech strapped me back into the long-term immersion rig. Lots of electrodes and EKG patches and whatnot.
As I put my head down on the pillow, I wondered what erotic delights the game might have in store for me.
Hot carolers?
Snow princesses?
Banging Mrs. Claus?
I immediately thought of a rotund old lady with a bun of silver hair hiking up her red robes and exposing a pale, gigantic, cellulite-dimpled butt.
In a thong.
OH GOD, NO!
I choked down the gorge rising in my throat, and quickly pushed aside all thoughts of senior citizen sex.
Bowl full of jelly, my ass…
I chuckled at first… and then as the game booted up, I sighed and resigned myself to the inevitable.
The real problem wasn’t that I hated these lame little seasonal interludes, or going around wearing Santa hats and helping out refugees from Rankin/Bass holiday specials.
The real problem was that I fucking hated Christmas.
And I wasn’t getting over that anytime soon.
3
I opened my eyes and found myself on a seaside cliff, right where I’d left the game a couple of hours ago. The salt air was bracing, the sun was shining –
And there was a two-foot-tall naked creature hunched over and staring at me with glowing yellow eyes.
Imagine Yoda’s anorexic, grey, nudist cousin.
At least he didn’t have any genitalia. Smooth as a Ken doll ‘down there.’
“Whatcha doin’, boss?” he croaked in a froggy, chain-smoking voice.
This was Stig. He’d been my companion and helper in the game for as long as I’d had my job with Westek.
Well, to be accurate, he was my helper when he wasn’t drunk.
“I’m just looking out at the ocean,” I lied.
From Stig’s perspective, my game avatar – which looked exactly like me in real life – had been standing there for two hours while the real me was in the conference room. But I couldn’t very well tell him, I was in a QC department meeting. Stig was a construct of the game world. He wouldn’t know what the fuck a QC department was.
“Lookin’ at the ocean,” he repeated in disbelief.
“Yes.”
“For two hours?”
“It’s a nice ocean.”
“It ain’t that nice.”
Stig was an imp, which is a lower-level demon.
Demons in OtherWorld weren’t bad, necessarily – not like in Christianity. They could be good or bad, just like people. Although they did tend to resemble demons in medieval mythology and Hieronymus Bosch paintings.
And The Muppet Show.
But at the end of the day, they were just creatures from Hell.
Okay, that sounds bad. But Hell was basically just another place in OtherWorld (seven different places, to be precise), not a fiery lake of ultimate suffering.
The reason I had Stig was because I was a Warlock – a practitioner of magic who enslaves demons to fight for him in battle.
‘Enslaves’ sounds bad, too, but I’d actually freed all my demons after getting imprisoned myself and seeing what it was like to –
You know what?
Let’s back up a second.
In OtherWorld, you could be any of a number of different ‘classes.’ Warriors, who wore heavy armor and fought with swords and war hammers. Mages, who wielded magical powers. Paladins – holy knights. Priests of many different fantasy faiths, with the powers to heal fellow players. Rogues – thieves and assassins who could turn invisible and skulk around in the shadows. Hunters, Monks, Shamans, Druids, Barbarians – there were over a dozen different classes you could play.
‘Warlock’ was one of them.
It wasn’t my choice. When I got the job, that’s what Westek assigned me.
But unbeknownst to me at the time, there were some prime benefits to being a Warlock.
And here came one of them.
A 5’8” bombshell with killer curves and long, wild black hair came sashaying over to me. She wore a tiny black bikini, thigh-high leather boots, and not much else.
Her name was Alaria, and she was the woman of my dreams.
Although to be honest, I’d never thought that the woman of my dreams would have crimson skin, black wings, horns curling out of her hair, and a prehensile devil’s tail.
You see, Alaria was a succubus – a sex demoness. And, thanks to the adult version of the game I was in, we’d put that ‘sex’ part to a LOT of good use.
“Hey babe,” she said warmly, then gave me a kiss. I loved how she tasted – like cinnamon and vanilla.
We were deeply in love now, but we’d actually started out in a rocky place when we first met. To tell the truth, Alaria had pretty much hated my guts. After all, I was the ‘evil warlock’ who’d enslaved her. It was only after I’d freed her that she –
…long story. Some other time.
“If you’re finished staring off pointlessly at the water,” she teased, “maybe we could go after my next ex-master?”
That was the other thing that bound us together: her mission of revenge. From the first day I’d met her, I’d agreed to help her hunt down and kill nine of her evil former masters.
It was all part of the video game, you see. A connected series of quests. But the next bad guy on her list was going to have to wait.
“We’ll do it soon, but there’s something I need to take care of first – and I need yours and Stig’s help.”
“Great,” my imp muttered.
Alaria frowned. “What is it?”
“I need to go kill a guy named Sinter Klaws.”
“Why?”
Again, couldn’t really tell her Because it’s a company-wide holiday campaign and my boss told me to.
So I just said the first thing that came to mind.
“Uhhhhh… he’s a real dick.”
She arched an eyebrow. “That’s it? You’re going to kill him because he’s a dick?”
“Uhhhh… yeah.”
“She’s not going to help you, boss,” Stig said.
“Why not?”
“Cuz she likes dicks,” Stig snickered.
Well… that part was true. She was a succubus.
Although
Alaria had promised to limit herself only to mine (my dick, that is), she could still sleep with as many women as she wanted. I usually got to join in – a HUGE benefit of having a sex demoness as a girlfriend. However, our open relationship had caused some problems in the past – which, I’ll admit, were almost exclusively my fault. Like the time I’d –
…long story. Maybe later.
“When he says ‘dick,’ he means ‘asshole,’ and you know it,” Alaria snapped at Stig.
“I thought you liked assholes, too,” Stig chortled, then pulled his signature move: sticking his finger through an OK sign and slapping his hands together with an obscene fwap-fwap-fwap-fwap sound.
“Not assholes like you,” Alaria snarled. Then she turned to me. “Even if this guy is a dick, isn’t killing him a little… I don’t know… petty?”
Now that she mentioned it, it did sound kind of petty.
“Well, I mean – he’s an evil dick. Like, a really evil dick. But if you don’t want to go – ”
She put a hand on my cheek. “Darling, I have absolutely no problem going and killing some stranger with you, dick or not.”
There you have it.
The basis of any successful relationship:
The unquestioning willingness to go kill a dick with you.
#relationshipgoals.
Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best basis for a successful relationship in the real world. But in OtherWorld, it made a woman damn near marriage material. And when you wanted to go do something morally questionable, it was always good to have a succubus riding shotgun.
