Stuck in Canny Valley

by Alden Odessa

  “Do you have the game with you, this isn’t a pawn shop," she said, annoyed at me.

  “No, I need to save my progress.”

  She wrinkled her nose at me. “I assure you, sir. I have no idea what that means.”

  Uh-oh, this was bad. I apparently didn’t know the right thing to say to her, so I figured that maybe I needed to spell it out. “My progress, in the game, I need to save it so that I can log out.”

  “Okay,” she said. Maybe I was getting somewhere. She reached over under the counter and pulled out a sheet of paper. “In order for a payday loan, I will need two pieces of identification. A Paycheck stub and a utility bill. Do you have those with you sir?”

  “A what and what?”

  She adamantly pressed her finger down on the sheet of paper. “I need those things before I can issue you a loan.”

  “Why would I need a loan?”

  “I don’t know, that’s none of my business.”

  Frustrated I looked around the room. There had to be a button or lever I could pull. Or maybe a box. In a lot of games, there was a box at the checkpoints or save points where you could stash your items for future use. I wondered if I could store Betty there.

  I didn’t see anything that I was looking for, but I did see a sign, and when I did, the world started to move in slow motion, as if it had been a major plot reveal in the movie I was walking around in.

  The sign read: “Checkpoint. Payday Loans. Fast cash in under ten minutes.”

  “Sir,” the voice from the woman at the counter called out to me. “Do you have the paperwork?”

  “I—” I began, once again unsure where to go with the sentence. “I must be in the wrong place.”

  “I tell myself that every day,” she said, and I could hear in her voice that it was true. “If you can find me a better job, I’m all ears.”

  I looked at Betty; she was just as confused as I was, but for different reasons. She looked to me as if I knew what to do. In fact, she was counting on me to do something, anything.

  “I’m sorry to have wasted your time,” I said to the nice(-ish) woman at the counter. “I will return with the proper paperwork.”

  She sighed and looked behind me. “Next!” she said.

  I stepped out of line, pulling on Betty’s arm as I did so. “What next?” she asked.

  “I need to think,” I said and looked at her. “Are you hungry?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Is that okay?”

  “Well, yeah, why wouldn’t it be?”

  “Bruce didn’t let us talk about being hungry. ‘Hungry bitches, get stitches’ he used to say.”

  “Helluva guy this Bruce,” I said. “You're under new management, so if you’re hungry, you say so.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m hungry.”

  “Me too, let’s find something to eat.”

  14

  Mostly Alley Stuff

  Three doors down from Checkpoint was a diner. It was a simple greasy spoon type place. We each ordered a burger, fries and a chocolate milkshake. Or rather that’s what I ordered and when the waitress asked Betty she just looked at me blankly. She seemed to be afraid to speak to anybody but me. I looked at the waitress and told her that Betty would have the same. Thirty dollars magically disappeared from my wallet.

  The first thing I had done was to check my menu after leaving Checkpoint. The only thing that changed was that now, on my map, it labeled “CHECKPOINT.” I still couldn’t log out; I still couldn’t buy more credits, I still couldn’t do anything. I was stuck.

  I assume that at any moment, my wife will get home and she will take the goggles off of my head. Thus, breaking me free of the game. As great as this game was I would never be back. Today was it for me. She would catch me red-handed, and I imagine things were going to get a lot harder for me at home. So, I figured I had better enjoy this game while I could.

  Our food came, and it was delicious, as I expected it to be. Betty ate hers as if she hadn’t seen a fresh meal in months, maybe years. There was a strong possibility that she hadn’t. From what I gather of Bruce, he didn’t seem to treat his women well. At one point, I had to stop her and tell her to take a breath. I didn’t want her to choke. I didn’t want my last few moments in the game to be spent lodging a French fry out of her throat.

  I was running short on cash, but with my remaining moments, I debated whether or not I would buy another hooker. I could still get one that was somewhat attractive. Not the two-thousand-dollar variety, but a good five hundred dollar one.

  I decided against it, however, because I had no idea what I would look like in the real world while fucking a prostitute in this one. That could make a bad situation even worse.

  The meal didn’t raise my health as much as I had hoped it would and I could feel why. I was exhausted. A meal could only go so far. I needed to sleep, or rather Buster Rockknocker required sleep. In order to do that I needed to find a bed. I also had to figure out what the hell I was going to do with Betty, my tag-a-long prostitute.

  “We need a hotel,” I said. She perked up.

  “Do you need a blow job?”

  Her comment threw me off. “No,” I shook my head. She looked disappointed. “I mean—thank you, but, I need to sleep. We need to sleep. Are you tired?”

  “Very,” she said.

  “Remember, you can tell me these things,” I said as a statement, not a question. Sooner or later she would get the hang of being ‘my girl.’

  “There are a lot of them, how nice of a hotel do we need?”

  That was something I hadn’t thought about, and probably something that she knew more about than I did. “I don’t even know how much a hotel costs.”

  “Depends. A room on this street is probably two to five hundred. Most of them around five hundred.”

  “Really?” I said, shocked.

  “Bruce only had one on this street, you get a discount for longer stays, but he only had one girl in this part of town.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The girls around here are more expensive. Especially ones that come with a room,” she said, and then looked down at her empty plate as the waitress took it away. She took her final drink of milkshake before continuing. “I never got in a room. Not here.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What I was able to earn was mostly alley stuff.”

  “What defines alley stuff?”

  “Mostly quick blow jobs, sometimes anal.”

  I raised my hand to stop her in her tracks. “That’s enough,” I said. This poor woman really seemed mistreated. It occurred to me, just then, that she was still dressed like a whore, and still looked like shit. I wasn’t doing a whole lot better than Bruce at this point. I needed to get her cleaned up and taken care of before I got pulled out of the game.

  “Do you have any—belongings?”

  “I have a bag, back at Bruce’s shack.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Over on Streamline. It’s a ways away,” she said. “Bruce was trying to move his operations over to this side of Barton, start making a little more on his girls. He was trying to get rid of me.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Thank you again,” she said. It was apparent she started to feel herself as a burden. Which, technically she was, but I certainly didn’t want her feeling that way.

  “You don’t have to thank me; anyone would have done what I did.”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Well, I want to believe so,” I said, still trying to figure out what to do. I looked at her. She looked completely wiped out, and I felt the same way. I needed to get her a place to stay and a place to shower.

  “Okay, I don’t know about getting your stuff back, and there’s a lot of details I still don’t understand, but let’s find a place to sleep for the night, and I will figure it out from there.”

  “Okay,” she said, and I stood up, pushed in my chair and took her hand, and we walked back out into the street.<
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  15

  The Regency Hotel

  The Regency wasn’t a particularly fancy hotel. Betty had led me here, it was two blocks further away from the main drag, and she promised to give me a few more details as to the layout of the city later. She even said maybe we could go to a library and see if they had a map of the city, if she could remember where it was.

  The Regency was not as upscale as The Reference and instead of real wood rails and trim, with hard oak countertops, it was replaced with stucco and stone. Maybe stone. Plastic, with stone accents, we’ll put it at that.

  The carpet was plain but clean, and the whole experience was going to cost me one hundred and twenty bucks. Not bad for a night’s stay. Betty said that the hotels got cheaper the deeper you got into the city and then started to rise again as you got to the coast. I didn’t ask what it was the coast of, but I figured I would get to it eventually. Depending on how long I was here.

  I was still waiting to be pulled from the game at any moment. Betty’s sad look was replaced in my head by my wife's look of rage. It would take me days to explain all of this to her, but I would have to, there was no escaping her wrath on this. It’s possible that she will be so disgusted by finding me that she will leave instantly.

  Something I hadn’t even thought of: She may discover me and just turn and walk out. Leaving me there. Who knows how long I will be here? Luckily, I chose a cheaper hotel.

  I had no idea when I would be brought out of all of this, had of I not fallen asleep after Ronette I might be able to guess. Without knowing how long I was sleeping, there is no way of telling how long I had been here.

  We got to The Regency and checked in. We had no bags, so we took the elevator up to the third floor, where our room was. I got to the room and used the keycard to open it. The room was not a lot to write home about, but it was serviceable. A large king size bed, and a small table with two chairs, and a bathroom, just off the main room.

  Off-white walls and floral prints on the bedding and curtains. I opened up the curtains to look outside; I had a lovely view of the building next to us. Which appeared to be a casino. The table and chairs were by the window, so I went ahead and sat down in one of the chairs. I pulled up my stat screen. Nothing much had changed except for the money and the health. I hadn’t gained anything, and the health was slipping a lot. I wondered how long I could go without sleep in the game. Could I go without sleep? What happened when my health got to zero? These are questions that I could ponder at another time. I needed to get Betty taken care of.

  I sat on the chair and took off my shoes. “What now?” she asked me.

  “You need to get cleaned up,” I said, as I took off my other, finely pressed leather dress shoe that my character came equipped with. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my Most Popular’s. Looking at the table, I noticed it too was adorned with an ashtray and a book of matches. I lit a smoke and inhaled deeply. She was still standing there, not knowing what to do.

  “I don’t—” she started. “It’s been a while since I’ve been in a hotel.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said, and I felt bad for her once again. The shit this poor woman had been forced to deal with.

  “Where did you sleep when you were with Bruce?”

  “He had a shack; his room was the nicest, he took a few of his better girls in there, the rest of us slept in a different room, on the floor.”

  “On the floor!?”

  “Yes, we had a few mattresses that we all shared.”

  “How many of you were there?”

  “Only eight,” she said, as if eight women sharing one living space was a luxury. “It wasn’t very nice.”

  “I’m getting that feeling,” I said and then stood and walked across the room to the bathroom. I picked up one of the towels and set it on the sink. “If you want you can take a bath or a shower, or a bath and a shower, it’s up to you; we’re not paying by the hour take as long as you like.”

  I leaned over and started the hot water running and then felt it. It ran hot. “Get good and clean and then tomorrow morning we will either go get your things from Bruce, or we will go get you some more clothes, these are—” I looked at her, “needing to be replaced.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  I plugged the sink and started to fill it up with hot water. “Take off your clothes and put them in the sink here. Let them soak. I will see if this hotel has any sort of laundry service.”

  “I doubt it,” she said quietly.

  I walked over to her and took my hand to her chin and lifted her face to look at her. “Don’t worry; you’re safe. You’re gonna be okay tonight.”

  She smiled, she believed me or at least trusted me, and I was undoubtedly more suave in this body than I was in my own. At home, if something like this had happened, not that anything like this would have, I would have been a train wreck of indecision. But as Buster Rockknocker I was a little more of a take-charge kind of guy. I could get to like it.

  She nodded her head to yes, I could tell that for the first time in a long time; she felt safe. I took my arms and wrapped them around her, comforting her. I pulled back and patted her on the shoulder. “Get clean, you’ll feel better,” I said and then walked back over to the chair to continue working on my cigarette.

  I sat down in the chair and took a drag. Betty stood there as if she didn’t know what to do. I had expected her to go to the bathroom, but she decided just to go ahead and undress in the doorway leading into it. First, she took off her tight pants. These didn’t just slink off of her; it was almost awkward. Blood had gotten on them, and the pants were soiled. It was remarkably unsexy.

  She was wearing a thong, which she pulled off. She was so thin, her pelvic bone was protruding out, she needed to get some meat on her, she didn’t eat enough, and it showed. Her pubic region was unkempt. Like it had once been well shaved, but now it had grown back unruly. She took off her top; she wasn’t wearing a bra, her breasts were small, barely an A-cup. Small nipples. There was no sag at least because there was nothing to sag.

  She was not unattractive, just poorly maintained, you can tell that somewhere in there was a pretty girl that just hadn’t been attended to in a very long time. She suddenly noticed me looking at her and then got very shy. She moved her hands, one to cover her pussy and the other arm she draped across her breasts.

  “I’m sorry, I just—” she said coyishly, “I just wanted to get those off of me.

  “It’s okay,” I said as she leaned down to pick up the clothes, presumably to put them in the sink. “I noticed some razors in the bathroom if you need to shave your legs or anything.”

  “Thank you,” she said and then whisked off into the bathroom.

  I finished my cigarette and then went ahead and lit another one, I then pulled up my stats.

  H: 35 $: 535 BR: 44 T: 38 DOM: 55 PRW: 70 STR: 13

  That health was hurting. It got me curious. This fatigue was from walking around the city, having sex and getting into one alley fight. I had eaten two meals and taken one cat nap. Already I was damn near dead, stat wise. There could be something I am missing, but I am assuming that lowered strength is one of the reasons. My character isn’t powerful, so it takes a lot out of me to pretty much do anything. The worst part is, I have no idea how to move that number up. Does a game character need to exercise? Go to the Gym? What the hell kind of game was this?

  I needed to sleep. It dawned on me just then, as I heard Betty bathing in the tub, humming to herself, that I didn’t have any clothes to sleep in. This was the only outfit I owned. It was probably going to be the only one I owned for a while too since I didn’t have too much money left. Not that it really mattered as I was going to get pulled out of the game at any moment by a furious soon-to-be ex-wife. It was fun while it lasted. At least I still have thoughts of Ronette to think about for years to come.

  I should stop making puns; I’m really not in the mood to laugh.

&nbs
p; Since this was my last night in Hot House Harem Online, I figured I might as well relax a little. I sat down the cigarette and stood up, taking off my clothes. Not to be vain, but I wanted to get just a few more minutes, naked, in this body.

  I stripped down and then sat back down, finishing my smoke. It felt good to be naked. At home, my fat ass wouldn’t be caught dead roaming around the house naked, but in this body, I had no shame. There was a part of me that thought about introducing Betty to Buster’s Rockknocker as I was calling it; but hadn’t that woman been through enough? I know she had offered herself to me, but I didn’t feel like forcing myself on someone right now.

  I stood up and decided to put this bed to test. I took off the top cover and laid on the sheets. It was comfortable. Even in a second-tier hotel, the beds and sheets felt better than the real world. Or at least my life.

  I sunk into the bed as it cradled me and the last thing that I thought about before falling asleep was the simple question: Just how hard would have it been to read that instruction manual to begin with.

  16

  Saving Betty

  When I awoke, I was receiving one of the top five worst hand jobs I had ever received.

  I was still lying on top of the covers, pretty much in the same position I had been when I fell asleep, I was stretched out on the bed, and she had sat down beside me. She was sitting cross-legged at my mid-section. With her right hand, she was tiredly jerking at my johnson, gripping it at the bottom. Mind you, she wasn’t stroking it, but she was pulling it.

  It wasn’t altogether unpleasant, that’s why it was in the top five and not number one most pathetic of all time. I wasn’t fully hard, so my dick just kind of wobbled in the air as she tugged on it.

  She did, however, look better. She was clean; she had spent a lot of time getting all the dirt, grime and blood off of her and had spent a good amount of time combing out all of the knots in her hair. She had shaved as well, her legs and pussy, they both looked smooth and fresh. She was staring at my dick and watching it flop around.