by Mia Archer
Huh. Not the kind of behavior you typically saw in a chunk of stone. Then again this was a video game where reality could be whatever the fuck the game designers wanted it to be, so what did I know?
Still, I wondered if I was seeing things. I mean this was a game so it’s not like it’d be that odd if I was seeing things. I figured that would be part of the whole game experience.
Still, it was just a little fucking weird having a statue coming to life like that and saving my ass and then looking at me. What the fuck had I unlocked? Did this happen to everyone who came through here with a zombie bear on their ass, or was I one of the lucky winners who got a Get Out Of Death Free card?
Either way it seemed like I should maybe be a little more grateful towards the nice statue.
“Um, thank you?” I said.
The statue smiled. That glow was back too, which didn’t feel like a good thing considering that statue had vaporized a zombie bear with that glow the last time I saw it. Only there was something weird about the glow this time around.
I looked down at my skin and blinked. The glow was coming from me. Not from the statue. I figured that couldn’t mean anything good that the glow was coming from me and not from the statue.
“Um… That was nice of you to save me from the scary zombie welcome bear and everything, but if you don’t mind I think I’ll just…”
I never got to finish the sentence. An impossibly delicious feeling shot through my body, and I floated up and through the air.
Okay then. This didn’t seem like the greatest thing, all things considered, but I might still be able to break free. I wasn’t dead yet. That was something.
Sure I was out in the middle of a zone that was way too high a level for me to navigate safely and I was at the mercy of a statue that looked like it could have its way with me, but…
Pleasure shot through me almost to the point of pain. Then it went beyond the point of pleasure and pain and my brain was overwhelmed by the sensations running through me. I cried out, and even my voice seemed somehow different than before.
Then the pleasure was gone. I wish I could say I was relieved to feel that ending, but it was more of a disappointment than anything. That’d been weird, to be sure, but it was a hell of a lot better than any of the other unpleasant experiences I’d been enduring lately.
The statue stared at me and smiled.
“You will go into the world and be my champion,” the statue said. “And you will make your way using the skills only I can bestow upon you. I am the goddess Leliana, and I have spoken.”
Finally that smile turned to more of a frown. Okay. Really not good. I didn’t want the statue that could vaporize me with a thought frowning at me or doing anything that might indicate she was in any way displeased with something I’d done.
“You’re going to need to change that outfit and that class though. My champion isn’t going to be another butch Bladedancer.”
I blinked a few more times at that. The statue almost sounded like she was talking in real world terms. I mean I guess it wasn’t unheard of for a video game to break the fourth wall, but it was a little disconcerting seeing it being broken for the first time within this game.
“Um, sorry?” I said, feeling a little annoyed despite the fact that this lady could probably end me with a thought. “What do you want me to do?”
The smile was back. “I know you’ve seen what kind of game this is. So make a character that’s more in line with that, maybe?”
She waved a hand and I was thrown back to the ground. All that info would’ve been interesting, but I was more concerned with the way the whole consciousness thing was trying to take a little break. My last thought before darkness closed in was to wonder what the hell was up with that goddess and all her grousing about my appearance and class choice which didn’t seem like the sort of metagame mechanics a goddess within a game world should know about, but what the fuck did I know?
Then the world went dark around me and I didn’t have to worry about much of anything for a little while.
That seemed to be happening to me a lot lately.
15
Waking Up
When I woke again I was just a little confused. Mostly becase I wasn’t in my body. No, I was floating around my body watching it being devoured by a zombie welcome bear.
Huh. That was weird. The last I knew I’d been saved from that thing by the statue I could see right fucking there, but that statue was completely stationary now.
What. The. Fuck?
The death animation in this game was a real joy, let me tell you. I got to watch myself getting ripped limb from limb by a giant zombie bear over and over again.
I guess the game wanted to give me time to think about what I’d done wrong.
I shivered. I mean it’s weird to say that I shivered considering I didn’t really have much in the way of a body to be shivering in the first place. No, I was a disembodied consciousness floating in the void over my dead body being turned into a meal by the zombie welcome bear thinking about all the bad decisions I’d made since I started this fucking game, and regretting most of them.
Everyone had been a jerk to me since I started this thing. It’s like the world didn’t care about another noob running around in the starter area. Which made sense. When had a gaming world or community ever given a fuck about a random noob running around a starting area?
The death animation finally ended, and I found myself at a graveyard. So much for some magical statue giving me a blessing or special powers. Maybe I’d hallucinated that, but it’d all seemed so fucking real.
It would’ve been nice to get a little leg up from an in-game goddess, for that matter. Though the more I thought about it the more it occurred to me that the whole thing must’ve been some fever dream brought on by my impending death. Maybe I’d had an in-game out of body experience rather than enduring the pain of the zombie bear chowing down on me, and my mind had invented a more pleasing virtual reality where I was saved at the last moment instead of eaten.
Yeah, that seemed way more fucking likely considering the day I was already having.
Then something pulled at me and the void was gone. I found myself standing in a graveyard that looked like something straight out of the set design for a dark and gritty reboot of The Addams Family or something. Not exactly the most promising location for a noob who didn’t have much in the way of levels or stats or gear to take on a zone like this.
I pulled up my map, terrified of what I was going to see there even though I had a pretty good idea of what was waiting for me.
Yeah. Sure enough I was stranded on the top right end of this nasty zone that seemed like the kind of place that was full of all sorts of unpleasant high level monsters that could end me in one shot. The zombie bear had just been the beginning of my misfortune.
Unfortunately that map also showed me that the part of the map I’d already explored thanks to my run through the scary fantasy horror forest was on the bottom left end of the zone. There was a path of explored territory that wasn’t covered in the fog of war down there, including a helpful marker that showed me the exit to the starter zone, as well as a little bubble of explored space around me where I stood now.
Something howled off in the distance, and the twilight sky overhead was a sickly green color that said there was some bad juju in the air. I was even pretty sure I saw something big with wings that owed most of its design cues to bat wings pass in front of the moon for a moment.
I didn’t hear any wings fluttering to tell me that was a normal sized bat flapping past nearby either. No, that was something big flying high enough that I couldn’t hear it, and I really didn’t want it coming down here to meet me.
“Right,” I said. “I’m done with this shit. Fuck everything about this.”
I was stranded in a zone that was way too high for me, and there was no getting out of the place. I was fucked if I stayed here, and not in the fun way I’d seen some of the people doing in th
at inn that housed some of the most depraved things I think I’d ever seen while playing a game like this. I was also fucked if I tried to walk through this zone since I had no doubt every high level nasty in the place would be attached to my ass killing me and sending me back to the graveyard every step of the way.
Sure I could do a corpse run back to the starter zone like that, getting a little bit closer to the goal every time, but it might take me hours to get out of here like that. Fuck that noise. Maybe I’d imagined that whole interaction with that goddess, but my mind making up that interaction had been right on fucking point.
It was time for a change. The butch Bladedancer had to fucking go, thank you very much. Especially now that the butch Bladedancer was trapped on the other end of a zone I had no hope of escaping.
I thought of logging out and a counter appeared over my head. It was time to start over with a new character who wasn’t in an impossible zone, didn’t have a price on her head, and hadn’t failed the fucking starter quest. I’d tried the opener and fucked it up royally, and it was time for a fresh start.
Something moved and I turned my head in that direction. Huh. Glowing eyes. For a moment I thought those eyes might be more background art, but then I noticed they were attached to a shadow that was darker than the darkness all around it.
Fuck. Something out there was standing at least a good seven or eight feet tall, if the height of its glowing eyes were anything to go by, and it looked like the bastard would love nothing more than to make a delicious snack out of me.
Why not? Everything else I’d met in this zone had wanted to do the same, after all.
No, scratch that. The wood elf hottie is seen hadn't wanted to make me a snack, as much as I would've enjoyed that. She had been more than willing to sell me out to whoever was hunting me though.
I wondered if monsters in this zone could come into player areas like this. I was in a graveyard next to a church, and it looked like there were other buildings that should’ve provided a spot for players to rest in the middle of a punishingly difficult zone.
Only I didn’t see guards standing around ready to kill anything that got too close. It suddenly occurred to me that this might be an MMO where they didn’t have things like guards who were ready to step in at a moment’s notice and help players out if they got in over their heads. At least not in the punishingly difficult high level area.
It would fit in with everything else I’d seen in this zone. That was for damn sure. Which meant if there was something out there that felt like turning a player into a snack then I was going to be taking a one way trip to chow town if it managed to get to me before the counter to log me out reached zero.
Motherfucker.
I looked at the countdown. Only five seconds of a thirty second countdown had gone by. Those five seconds felt like a fucking eternity.
The creature stepped forward out of the shadowy skeleton trees, revealing a fucking werewolf. Because why not? If I was going to run into something then it might as well be a creature straight out of everyone’s nightmares, right? A hairy creature that was staring at me as though it was trying to decide whether or not it wanted to turn me into a snack or do other things with parts that were definitely anatomically correct.
I could totally see that much even in the shadows. Apparently Etherea hadn’t worried about keeping their E for Everyone rating. Either way this couldn’t mean good things for me, damn it, and the last thing I needed was to have some werewolf trying to ravish me.
Though if that was a thing that was actually possible in this game then I imagined the furries would have a field day with it.
The creature leaned against the fence that separated the graveyard from the rest of the zone. The fence was made of thick raw timber. Like the people who built this town didn’t have the time for niceties like finishing their lumber before they tossed it up for a fence to keep the nastiness lurking in this zone away from them.
Not that the fence was doing a very good job of keeping that nastiness away, damn it. The werewolf leapt over the fence like it was nothing, which it really was considering the creature was seven or eight feet tall and the fence was only maybe four feet tall. The furry bastard looked like it would enjoy nothing more than cutting out my entrails with the rather sharp looking claws on its hands and then devouring those entrails while they were still warm and I was still alive to enjoy the entire painful experience.
And of course when that happened I would respawn right here were the werewolf would be waiting here for seconds and could eviscerate me all over again and devour my entrails while I was still alive and screaming about the process, because that was a personal hell that a realistic VRMMO like this with respawn could create for players.
It would basically be a lycanthropic never ending buffet. I wondered if it woud bring some of its friends along for the feast.
“Fuuuuuuuck,” I growled.
I was so. Fucking. Over. This!
I looked at the countdown on my heads up display again. The counter wasn’t moving nearly fast enough for my liking. No, this thing was going to be on me soon enough, damn it, and I didn’t know what the fuck to do.
Someone rode past on a mount that looked like a flaming horse. The guy looked like one hell of a badass. Like we’re talking the mane on that horse was all flames that flickered purple and blue. The hooves were flames. And what wasn’t flame was black as night and seemed to absorb the light given off by those flames.
The guy stopped for a moment, and I was sure this would be it. Someone was finally going to come along and save me. Someone would do the right thing because there was still goodness in this world, and not just a bunch of asshole assfuck gamers looking out for number one.
He regarded me from atop his mount, but it was difficult to say what he thought about my current predicament since his face was shrouded by shadow.
Which was an awesome effect, but it made it difficult to figure out if I was about to get my ass saved or if he was going to stand by and watch as I was sliced and diced and turned into werewolf kibble.
Then the guy shook his head and laughed. It was an otherworldly sound that had to be getting pushed through a couple of different sound filters. I sighed. I knew with that laugh that I wasn’t going to be rescued.
I didn’t even flinch as the werewolf clawed my back and shoved me to the ground. The ground felt nice. The dirt was soft and cool. It was better than the warm blood spurting out of my backside before everything went black and I was treated to another animation of myself being killed, only this time it was by a monster that was clearly setting up to kill camp the graveyard for recently revived meals.
Like the thing had somehow learned that new meals would come along every so often if it stuck around the graveyard. Now there was a disturbing thought I didn’t want to examine too much, because the thought of monsters in a game learning like that was pretty fucking terrifying.
Also? I was so totally over this. Maybe that advice from the statue had been my brain making up stories or something, but it had been right on. It was time to nuke this character from orbit and start over, because fuck everything about this!
16
IRL Scheming
I woke up again and took a deep breath. The first thing I did was to reach around and place my hand on the spot the werewolf had just eviscerated. I’d been treated to a front row view of the thing reaching down and ripping my spine out like I was in an old Mortal Kombat game and then using that spine as the world’s most disgusting chew toy.
I wanted to puke just thinking about it, and watching was definitely no picnic. There was something about seeing myself getting ripped apart like that after feeling it up close and personal that felt wrong.
I sat up. Turned to look at the Etherea crystal. Sighed as the thing glowed fitfully at me. Because of course it wasn’t advanced enough to sense that I was pissed off at it or anything. No, it just sat there glowing like an ancient Wii console flickering in the middle of the night.
I knew because my parents had one that’d been handed down over the years and miraculously hadn’t broken. Which meant I got treated to the thing glowing in the middle of the night and keeping me up much like ancient gamers had a century back.
I stretched and yawned. Despite being stuck in a sort of unconscious rest state I was more than a little tired after everything that’d happened. I took another deep breath just to remind myself that I could, and stood.
After those double death experiences I figured it was time to take a break. I’d head to the cafeteria and get some of my schoolwork done. After all, if I stopped doing that work and my grades slipped then it’d be back down to the surface where I’d attend a university on the ground.
There’d been more than a few times when I’d been tempted to go ahead and do that. A ticket back to the surface would’ve been just the thing considering the personal hell I was forced to endure up here, but there’d always been a part of me that couldn’t help but think I’d be giving up and letting those rich assholes win if I gave up and let my grades slip to the point that I was only going to go to one of the best universities down on the surface.
Which would be nice, but it wouldn’t let me write my ticket on the surface which is what I really wanted. Even if my reasons for wanting to get a position of power down on the surface mostly revolved around figuring out a way to lead the revolution against our masters in the elevators and out in space and putting their backs against the wall.
That thought put a smile on my face like it always did. When I stepped out that pretty Jessica girl was still there. She smiled.
“Having fun?” she asked.
“If you call getting your ass handed to you by a bunch of monsters over and over again fun then sure,” I said, smiling back at her.
