by Alyson Belle
Lacey eyed me suspiciously. “That’s quite a change in attitude, Kromgorn. Finally accepting the reality of your new situation, huh? Well, I like a little groveling, but I can hardly not have my fun just because you beg me. You had your chance to betray your friends and join me, not that it would have made a difference. I was just curious if you would.”
I knew that sack of shit was a lying dirtbag, and I was glad I hadn’t sold my friends out either way. But this was the key moment… I had to sell him hard.
“Wait! What if… what if I told you you could be even more powerful? I’ve learned quite a few tricks with Lacey, and her Charisma isn’t maximized yet.”
Lacey frowned and narrowed her eyes at me. “I don’t need your help to be the most powerful player on the server, you moron. I already am. I’ll get her the last 10 levels to hit 80 soon enough, and there is no gear better than GM gear.”
“Not exactly true,” I protested.
She sighed and rested her hand on her hip. “What is this? Some kind of desperate, last minute ploy? Okay. This is slightly amusing, and I admit my curiosity is piqued. Out with it. If you’re right, you can get fucked for a week instead of a month. But if you’re lying, I’ll clone Fiero and have him fuck you from both ends.”
I swallowed nervously. God, I hope this works. A month of getting spit-roasted? And that’s just the beginning.
“How much Charisma is on that GM headpiece?” I asked.
Lacey blinked at me in surprise. “Okay, I’ll bite. It’s got a very healthy +3 bonus. Not great as GM gear for my primary casting stat goes, but it’s got plenty of other stats on it to compensate.”
“Look at the Tiara you took off,” I choked out. “It’s better. Slightly better. But I’m pretty sure it’s the best item in the game for the Sorceress. Even better than GM gear. You want to have the strongest avatar possible? That’s what you should be wearing.”
Lacey dug around in her bag and pulled out the Fabulous Tiara of the Dragonkin Sorcerers, inspecting it carefully. Her eyebrows climbed as she examined the stats.
“Well, I’ll be damned. That is an amazing piece of gear. I admit I thought you were bluffing.”
“No,” I squeaked. “Please just don’t send me to get sodomized by Fiero…”
She smirked, pulling her hood off. “Too bad I was lying. Why would I reduce your punishment? I can have my cake and eat it too. Tell you what… let’s have Fiero fuck you until you can think of another way to increase my power. That sounds fair to me.”
Lacey laughed with unconcealed glee while she lowered the Fabulous Tiara of the Dragonkin Sorcerers onto her head.
As soon as it touched her head, her body rippled, and her laugh cut off abruptly. She released an ear-splitting shriek, eyes widening.
“What the fuck? What did you do to me?” she cried. “Nooooo!”
Lacey’s hands fell limply to her sides, and she slumped to her knees and collapsed face-first, turning her head at the last minute to avoid smashing it into the ground. She stared up at me, cheek against the cold stone floor, her eyes dancing with fury. The staff fell from her hand and clattered to the ground beside her. At once, all six of our prisons of air dissolved, and my friends and I dropped to the ground, free at last.
I heaved an immense sigh of relief. I couldn’t believe it had worked.
“How on Earth did you do that?” Topper asked, ignoring the string of inventive profanity flowing freely out of Lacey’s mouth.
“We’re not on Earth…” Jazzus murmured.
Erlix ran up and kicked Lacey right in the ribs, and then shook his fist at her. “You’re lucky you’re in my friend’s body, you asshole, or I’d really rip you a new one.”
I walked over and grabbed the Staff of Matter Manipulation, snatching it away from Lacey, even though she didn’t have the stats to use it anymore. Then I held it out toward Saintly.
“Do you know what to do with this?” I asked. “Because I sure don’t.”
He nodded hesitantly as he took the staff from me. “GM powers, sure. But for real, what did you just do? I thought we were done for.”
I glanced down at Lacey, who was still struggling to move. At least she’d stopped cursing. Now she glared at us in stony silence.
“It was Saintly who gave me the idea,” I said. “And thank goodness our buffs hadn’t worn off her yet, or I’m not sure it would have been possible.”
“What was it?” Topper demanded.
“Spit it out, Goldie!” Erlix shouted.
“A bug…” I replied. “Vierdimin might have been a god here, but even with his private server, he’s still bound by the game rules right? When we met Saintly, I remember he mentioned a bunch of bugs that still existed in the code base, including one that shouldn’t ever be able to occur…”
“Unless you have a ridiculously impractical amount of one stat,” Saintly finished. “Amazing. Totally amazing. You encouraged Lacey to boost her Charisma to 100.”
“And it triggered the bug that set all her stats to -1,” I finished. “Not only is that too low to use any gear in the game, but in a physics-based game like this, it meant she wouldn’t be able to move. No strength, no dexterity, no agility.”
“It’s going to wear off!” Lacey roared. “It will, and then you’re all in trouble!”
But Saintly shook his head. “No, it won’t. Not until a GM refreshes your character to drop the bug, and I have your staff now. I’m not planning on helping you.”
“Can we like, seal up the lich or something?” Jazzus asked, rubbing her arms and shivering. “That was a little too intense for me. It’s giving me the heeby jeebies to have him here even if he’s shut down for the moment.”
“Saintly?” I asked. “Could you take care of that?”
“Don’t you dare!” Lacey cried. “I will make you live in misery for thousands of years! I will destroy your sanity! This is my world!”
“Yeah, shut this windbag up,” growled Erlix.
Saintly raised the staff to point it at Lacey, but I suddenly grabbed his arm. “Wait! Uh… Saintly, we’re stuck here for a while, aren’t we?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I mean, that was a damn smart move with Lacey here, but we’re still stuck on Vierdimin’s private server until we can figure out how to get off of it.”
“Then do me a favor, would you?”
I leaned my 7-foot frame down to whisper my request into his ear, and he stared at me in surprise.
“Are you sure?”
I shrugged. “You can always reverse it, right?”
“Whatever, man. Sure thing.” He scratched his head. “This isn’t one of the usual GM powers, but if he followed the same pattern when he coded it…”
He pointed the staff at the lifeless body of the Lich, still seated on his throne, and the blueish-gray color of GM suspension began to spread across the Lich’s form.
“What are you doing?” Lacey demanded in Vierdimin’s shrill inflection. “Stop it! Stop it at once.”
But then she fell silent as Saintly pointed the staff at her again. Her body went limp at the same moment that Vierdimin’s head snapped upright on his throne.
“Noooo!” he screamed, gripping the arms of the twisted, black chair to pull himself up. “You can’t do this to me!”
But he couldn’t muster the strength. The suspension was spreading too quickly, and his muscles locked. As the sound of his cry died in his throat, his body failed him, and he fell back down onto the seat of the throne. Then the spreading, stiffening gray finished its work, closing over his face.
Vierdimin was now imprisoned in a GM suspension, locked into his own throne, his face frozen in a grimace of despair.
We all stared for a long moment, and then Saintly turned back to me. “Last chance,” he said. “You sure you want this?”
I nodded.
He raised the staff once more, waved it in my direction, and for the second time that day, a dizzying sense of disorientation assaulted me.
Chapter 12
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I lazily twitched the wings that stretched out on either side of me as I reclined on my bed in the Shining Army bunkhouse. My breasts and clit were still thrumming with the aftershocks of my fading orgasm, and I sighed happily as I stretched my dainty, feminine fingers out in front of my face. I didn’t strictly have to have my wings out right now—after all, there wasn’t much purpose for them when I wasn’t using them to fly. But Lee thought they were sexy, Jazzus didn’t disagree, and it felt good when the two elves, one dark and one light, caressed them in the passionate throes of the threesomes we’d been having all week.
The two of them now cuddled up on either side of my hot, naked body, dozing after the wild, crazy orgasms they’d both had as well, and I smiled and shook my head at them. Sex was still new to them, for different reasons, and they’d need to build up some stamina if they didn’t want to nod off as soon as they got to their blissful release.
It was so funny how things worked out: Jazzus was into girls, but she didn’t mind if I got fucked while we fooled around together. I half suspected she wasn’t strictly into chicks, the way she checked out Lee’s muscles while he was fucking me, but it could have also been that elves just sort of naturally looked androgynous. Despite his impressive biceps, flat, washboard abs, and giant cock, Lee was so handsome he was almost pretty, between his deep indigo eyes and curling platinum hair that tucked fetchingly behind his ears. Fortunately, it didn’t seem to bother him. And as long as Lee got to be in his male body, he had no problem being with two women. It was hilarious to think about how explosively he’d reacted to my advances in the past, back when he was Lefay, now that he was pounding me on the regular!
After Saintly had swapped me back into Lacey’s body, suspended Kromgorn’s shell for safekeeping, and lifted the stat bug on Lacey by refreshing her character stats without the GM gear on, his first action—at my request—was to permanently flip Lee’s character gender. He probably would have been too embarrassed to ask Saintly to do it himself, but it was obvious to everyone how relieved he had been to have a male form once again, and a permanent one this time. After his brief taste of being a man, I knew he’d never want to go back.
It seemed crazy to me that he wouldn’t want to be a chick with how great the orgasms were, but who was I to judge?
The heart wants what it wants, I reflected, gently disentangling myself from the naked, sleeping elves and rising from the bed to go see what the others were doing.
I found Topper and Saintly standing in the meeting room, having an animated discussion over the glowing purple staff that never left Saintly’s side, now. It was getting harder to tell who was really in charge, these days. Saintly had all the powers of a GM and strong opinions about what our priorities should be, but Topper held himself with a natural presence that made everyone sit up and listen when he spoke. Fortunately, the two had a mutual respect for one another and they’d become fast friends since we’d left Vierdimin frozen in the Plains of Woe.
“I still think we should be focused on rounding up the stragglers,” Topper insisted. “Our missing guildmates should have returned by now. Plus, Wugduz, Nambla, and Haxor are still out there somewhere, hiding from us. And we have no idea how they’re doing that—your GM powers should be able to sniff them out, right Saintly? It doesn’t sit right with me. I can’t rest easy knowing that someone might be out there working to wake that psychopath up.”
Saintly shook his head. “For one thing, why would they? Lee says everyone was with Vierdimin out of fear, and they’re probably just afraid of us now that we have the staff. But for another, they can’t wake him up. They don’t have the staff, and even if they did, they don’t have the coding knowledge. Our priority needs to be figuring out how to get a message out of here and making contact with the real world. It’s the only way we’ll ever get off the server.”
I plopped down in one the chairs, settling my new robe over my legs. We hadn’t been able to collect much gear for me yet, but I was slowly assembling a new set that would be better than the makeshift rags I’d worn to confront Vierdimin. It was too bad I couldn’t wear summoned GM gear like Saintly was, but that was strictly for GMs, and there could only be one of those now.
“Hi, guys.”
Saintly glanced across the table at me and nodded in greeting. Topper shook his head, giving me the same side-eye he had been all week.
“I know it’s been a few days, Lacey,” Topper said. “But I still can’t get over how you chose to stay in that avatar. Being stuck in there is one thing, but this… I just don’t get it.”
I shrugged, feeling a little defensive. “Do I need to explain it? I guess I just got comfortable being Lacey. Besides, as great as Kromgorn is, Vierdimin wasn’t wrong. This avatar is the most powerful character on the server right now. We still don’t know what might be waiting for us out there in Vierdimin’s modified server code, right? We shouldn’t leave our most powerful weapon sitting around on ice.”
“I don’t disagree with your logic,” Topper muttered. “I just don’t understand your choices… not my business, I guess.” He sighed, shrugged at Saintly, and shook his head. “Millennials, am I right?”
Saintly nodded as though Topper had just uttered a deep, universal truth. I rolled my eyes and changed the subject.
“Any luck piecing out the staff controls, Saintly? Being Lacey is fun, but I don’t think I want to stay here forever.”
He frowned at the impressive epic clutched in his right hand. “Not much. I’ll crack it eventually, I’m sure, but… man. Vierdimin did a number on this thing. It’s super-customized and hacked together with a whole host of new functionality. He’d obviously been working on it for a while, which is how he used it to make all those crazy items and start to undermine the game code even before he copied us over to his private server. A third of the GM commands don’t work like they should, and another third don’t work at all, because he moved them and I can’t figure out how to access them.”
“If anyone can figure it out, you can,” I replied, flashing him my most encouraging smile.
He nodded, although he didn’t look very confident.
“At least time is on our side, for once,” Topper remarked. “It’s not like there’s any big rush. You can beat your head against it until you crack the code.”
A loud belch announced Erlix’s presence. He strode into the room picking his teeth with one of his daggers, hopped up into the chair beside me, and rested his stumpy little legs on the surface of the table.
“Yeah, no big rush at all,” he observed. “Just our friends and family waiting for us to wake up from comas while our bodies wither away from lack of use until we figure out how to download ourselves back into our brains from a remote, private server that no one outside of the game has any idea exists.” He looked around the room, grinning. “That’s a good summary, right?”
“You’re such a downer, Erlix,” I complained.
He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. “Oh, relax, Goldie. I’m just trolling you all. I’m sure Saint Whats-his-Face over here will have all of us sprung in a jiffy. We should be enjoying ourselves right now! Think of this as a vacation from the real world.” He nudged me with his elbow. “Who wants to go back to a 9 to 5 when we can be adventuring, stuffing our faces, and fucking 24/7? I don’t even mind being a halfling anymore, now that I’ve learned to handle the enormous responsibility of having a giant halfling cock. It’s not so bad in here without a crazy, sociopathic torture-kiddie running the show, right?”
“I guess not…” I said.
“Damn straight! And you should know. You’re taking to that idea better than any of us with those two hot elves you’ve been boning all week, you dirty little treasure ho.”
I blushed and stared down at my hands in my lap.
“Okay, okay, that’s enough,” Topper said. He looked even more embarrassed than I was. “Why don’t you go make yourself useful, Erlix? We still need plenty of materials to build our guild stores back up, and you
never know when we might need ‘em.”
“I’m not your slave, Topper!” Erlix protested. “Don’t like, be the man, man. It’s a free game out here. Besides, I’m much better at telling people to gather supplies than doing it myself.”
Topper sighed and folded his arms. “Well, we have a whole army of NPC servants you can order around. Why don’t you round them up and put them to work?”
“Now we’re talking! I’m management material, baby!”
Erlix hopped down and scooted out of the room, heading toward the servant quarters, and I smiled and shook my head at the little guy. I’d missed my halfling pal. It was nice to have everyone back in one place, even if we hadn’t located all of our guildies yet.
We might be stuck on a foreign server, cut off from the real world, and with all kinds of unknown threats looming over our heads, but I wasn’t afraid. We’d already come so far and done the impossible by beating the Vierdimin on his own turf. Once you’d taken down a sociopathic, sadistic god who was threatening to torture you for hundreds of years and come out the other end okay, everything else seemed kind of easy by comparison.
Besides, at least we were in this together. Whatever came next, I’d face it side by side with people I was proud to call my friends.
That was what really mattered.
Lacey the Courtesan’s Final Character Sheet
Lacey (PC)
Sorceress (Courtesan) - Lv. 70
Specialization(s): Mesmer/Sorceress
Health: 3,150
Mana: 4,550 (5,550)
Specialization (Lv 30): [Mesmer]
The Mesmer builds on the Courtesan’s inherent abilities to tease and misdirect her foes, injecting a dose of the arcane arts into the class. By focusing her raw charisma, she is capable of using illusion magic from the available Wizard Spell list to misdirect her foes, further enhancing her distraction capabilities, and can buff herself and her allies with alluring charisma-improvement spells. Mesmers have small talents in the use of arcane devices, as they’ve studied magic at a rudimentary level.
