by Alden Odessa
The box had nothing else in it besides the note and the gun. I’m not sure if the gun is loaded. I have never used a gun; I have never even held a gun, other than a BB gun at scout camp twenty-five years ago. They make it look easy in movies, but in real life, those things are scary as hell, almost as frightening as someone sending you one and telling you to meet them in the bar.
I’m pretty sure that this is where I am going to die. In a shitty Best Western look-a-like with only a so-so looking hooker in my bed.
That’s unfair. She and I just had a pretty nice evening, in the moment, it was pretty magical. I felt like we had some sort of connection tonight, but that may just be me being tired or horny or horny and tired… who the hell knows? Kind of hard to think about anything good right now, seeing as how I was going to get gunned down in a crappy bar just because I’m scared of guns.
I walked into the bar, finding it pretty lackluster. It looked like a corporate type bar that hadn’t seen any form of corporate clientele in a few decades. The walls were yellow with smoke, and half of the tables didn’t have any chairs at them.
I had no idea who I was looking for; there was no description or picture to go by on the note. So, I was just going to have to take my best guess. There weren’t many people here, so that would at least help. The people that were here looked a little rough. They were not dressed as nice as people had been on the main street where I first spawned. The further we traveled into the game, the more lackluster the scenery and the NPC’s looked. They also got seedier, but cheaper, so there’s that.
It didn’t take me long to figure out who I was looking for. In games, the people who you need to talk to, or rather the people the game wants you to talk to are usually pretty apparent. They stick out.
In this dimly lit bar, filled with men of questionable morals and women of ill-repute, there was a man dressed in a bright blue suit, sitting directly under a bright bulb. This seemed to be my guy.
I walked up to him and waited for something to happen. He looked normal, nothing special, other than he was wearing a bright blue suit. He was clean cut and had a thin pencil mustache above his upper lip. He noticed me but did not stand up; he simply looked at me with piercing blue eyes. The kind of eyes that seemed to look directly into your soul and see all the shit you had done in your life that was wrong.
He was the kind of guy that could tell you what you did wrong, how you should have done it, what would have happened, and then he would shoot you. He would shoot you for no other reason than he looked like the kind of guy that was just wanting to kill somebody, for no other reason than to do it. He looked like that kind of man.
“Good Evening, Mr. Rockknocker.”
His voice was even more chilling than his eyes. “You are?” I said, with more confidence than I thought I would have been able to muster.
“Please, have a seat,” he said, motioning to the chair on the other side of the table.
I obliged, just because I had come this far, no sense in not seeing the story play out. I paused as I realized that I didn’t know the proper way to sit down. I was still afraid of shooting myself in the ass. I threw caution to the wind and sat down, gently. My ass remained in one piece.
“I am Mr. Wong,” he said but looked nothing at all Asian. He looked more Mediterranean than anything else. He had a dark complexion with dark hair and eyebrows, all of it just making his cold eyes stand out all the more.
“Why am I here?” I asked him.
“In this bar, or the game?”
When he asked the question, I swear I could have heard a pin drop from ten miles away. Everything seemed to go in slow motion again. He said game, as in, he knew I was in a game.
“You… know?” I said, with a newfound shakiness in my voice.
“Of course I know. I built it.”
“The game, you made it?”
“Yes, Doug, I built it.”
How the fuck does he know my real name?! He could see my fear and shock. He didn’t laugh; he didn’t even move. He wasn’t some sort of cartoonish villain, he was playing this straight, and he had me by the balls. I don’t know what his endgame was, but I had a feeling I didn’t want to.
“You cannot leave, Doug.”
“Wh—What?”
“The game, you have to beat the game to leave.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s the game.”
I didn’t know what to say; I just stared at him. Nothing he was saying made any sense. How was I supposed to beat the game? I didn’t even have any new missions. What was I supposed to do? How long was I going to be here?
“How is… How is this possible?” I asked.
“Worry about your goals. Leave the nuts and bolts to me.”
“I don’t have any goals.”
“Wouldn’t you say that’s a problem you’ve had your entire life?”
Oh fuuuuck you, I thought. This dickhead right here was trying to play me. He was going to prey on all my fears and insecurities and failures. For what? What was this guy’s endgame?
“Here are the rules,” he said, without any inflection or emphasis. “Your health counter zeroes out: You die. You die in the game: You die in real life. You tell any character that you are playing a game? Health counter then zeros out: You die.”
He stopped speaking, and it wasn’t for dramatic effect. He just didn’t elaborate any further. “Is that it? How do I win?”
For the first time, he smiled at me. “Didn’t you read the instruction manual?”
Oh fuuuuuuuck you!
He just sat there for a moment and said nothing. He really wasn’t going to tell me how to win. He was going to keep me here and let me figure it out on my own. I looked down at my hands, I thought back to the crowdfunding page, it couldn’t be that simple. I read him back the first sentence from the first paragraph of the pitch on the website.
“Build a harem. Run the city. Win the Game,” I said to him. He said nothing back to me, giving me neither confirmation nor denial, he just sat there looking smug as hell. “Are there others, like me?”
Finally, he spoke again. “The crowdfunding was 3770% funded.”
I can’t remember the exact numbers of the original crowdfunding goal, but it was high, and it obviously exceeded it. That meant that thousands of people were receiving their copy of the game, who knows what place in line I had been? There was no way of telling how many players were already online, or how many more would be.
“How will I know if someone is a player or someone you created?” I asked.
“You won’t.”
“I have a gun, what if I accidentally shoot one of them?”
“Health zeros out. They die.”
“In real life?” I said, gulping as I did so.
“Same rules apply to all players.”
“They can kill me?”
“This is not a game designed for violence.”
I thought about that last statement for a moment. Then thought about the gun in the waistband of my pants. “Why did you send me a gun?”
“Just because I did not design the game for violence does not mean that I can control other players. You are the same person—inside—that you brought in with you.”
“But I’m not a violent person.”
“But there are those who are.”
Oh fuck. When you play a game, especially an online multi-player game, there’s always those guys that just want to blow shit up and shoot other players. Those same people would be here, just wreaking havoc and not caring about real-world repercussions. They would simply be here to watch the world burn, and I was part of that world.
“Is this a competition?” I asked. “Is there only one winner?”
“The goal is to get out of the game before you die, isn’t that challenge enough?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Definitively? No. There are many goals.”
This guy was worse than a troll under the bridge with all of his fucking riddles.
I just wanted to know how to beat the game and get the hell out of here. “Where do I start?”
“You’ve already started.”
At that moment, there was a crash to my left, and I looked in that direction. One man just knocked another man over into a table. Knocking it down, breaking any glasses on the table. “This is my bar! Stay out of it!” The standing man said. The other man picked himself up off of the ground and wiped glass and broken table off of himself. He put up his hands and nodded, then dove at the other man and they continued to fight on the ground, people started to clear away.
“Not a violent game, huh?” I said, turning back to The Man in Blue, but he was gone. Vanished. I scanned the bar, people running to get out of the way, but there was no sign of him. He had left my world just as quickly as he had appeared.
I looked back over to the fight. The man that had originally been on the ground now pulled out a gun, aiming at the other man. “Wait, I’m a—” and then a gunshot rang out, and the first man flew backward.
Then, as people screamed to get out of the way, the man with the gun waved his pistol around the room and backed out of the front of the bar. People froze, raising their hands. As soon as the man had backed out of sight, people ran to the back of the bar to steer clear of any carnage. Some people rushed to the man on the ground. Somebody screamed to call an ambulance.
I sat there in shock, not knowing what to do. Was that man a player? Did he just zero out? Was he dead?
I didn’t know what to do, so I reached into my coat and pulled out my pack of Most Popular’s, lit it up and walked up to the bar. There were very few things that I was all of a sudden very unsure of, but one thing I was very sure of: I needed a drink.
19
Stage One Complete
I entered my hotel room, and those last three shots of Gut Rot and done me no favors. The Whiskey was literally called Gut Rot.
Running low on money and having no idea how to earn more, I had to start conserving capital. Gut Rot was three bucks a shot. This motel was also going to have to go, and it wasn’t even a nice one, and at one-hundred and twenty dollars a night, it would bleed my reserves dry pretty quickly.
I quietly closed the door as not to wake up Betty who was still sleeping on the bed. I didn’t know what time it was, nor did I know if this game operated on any sort of time measurement structure. Another question I should have asked. On my way up the elevator, I had thought of a million questions that I should have asked, but didn’t. I was on my own now in figuring out how to get out of here. I sat down on the chair next to the bed and lit a smoke. I took a deep drag, I looked down at the pack and realized if I wanted to keep up this particular habit I might also have to switch over to a cheaper brand. I was about out.
You’ve already started. The man had said. It was all starting to make sense now. I looked over at Betty sleeping on the bed. The game’s first and, so far, only mission, Save Betty. The game had given me a starter prostitute for my harem of women. Was I supposed to sell off my harem? Whore them out? Is that how harems worked? I guess for the purpose of this game it was. Is that how I was supposed to win the game? Make a bunch of money? Run the town? A brothel empire?
Probably the biggest question that I had, but of course failed to ask, was what was happening to me in the real world? What is my body doing right now? What happens when my wife comes home and finds me? Will she take off the headset? Will that zero me out? There’s just too many questions that don’t have answers yet. I guess there’s only one way to figure it all out, and that is just to do it.
I had learned at some point in my life that the only way out of a situation was to go through it, so that’s what I would do. When you dig yourself into a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. It was time to stop digging and to be proactive. I just didn’t know how to do that.
Betty stirred and looked up at me. She smiled as soon as her eyes focused on me.
“Hello,” she said.
“Good morning, er, whatever it is,” I replied. How long had we been asleep? Hard telling. According to my stats, I wasn’t fully charged so it didn’t seem as though I had gotten much sleep and it was unlikely that I would for a while, my mind was racing too fast.
“Do you need me?” she asked. I had to give it to her; she was obedient and willing to do whatever I asked. It’s hard to test someone's affection, however, when their only goal is to please you.
“No. Get some sleep, I think we have a long day ahead of us.”
“Do you need me to work tomorrow?”
“I may.”
“Whatever you need,” she said without even a hint of remorse or obligation. She seemed that she was happy to do it. Again, obedience is a good thing for a prostitute, but I wanted her to take some time off. She needed it. Plus, how much was I going to get for a used-up hooker that was a few levels lower than most pimps bottom tier.
Is that what I was now? Was I a pimp? It appeared so, in this game it appeared to be the primary objective. Build a harem. Sell sex. Run the town with a brothel. I’ll be honest, it sounded fun, and it probably wouldn’t be all bad, probably have some good times along the way. If only I didn't have to worry about my real life, this life seemed fun. Except for the possibility of getting shot in a bar fight.
I grabbed a Regency branded pen and notepad from the table next to the chair. Time to make a plan.
Build a harem.
Run the town.
Win the game.
TO BE CONTINUED.
The Story Continues…
Before you go there’s a few things you should know!
First all, thank you for reading Book One, but the story doesn’t stop here, you can start reading Book Two on September 26th, 2018 right here!
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