The Wrong Side of Town

by Alden Odessa

  There are many goals.

  What the hell had that meant? Are there level ups? I don’t know any of this. But this is how I see it: Doug is dead. I have to just live by this simple thought. The old me is no more and the only persona I have now is that of Buster Rockknocker. If I had known that this persona was going to take over my life, I probably would have been a little more selective with my name choice. But that’s who I am now, like it or not. So I had to start living as Buster Rockknocker. Which meant that I had to ask myself...

  What would Buster Rockknocker do?

  Buster Rockknocker would get laid. That’s what Buster Rockknocker would do.

  2

  Shower Scene

  Before I could tackle the day (or night, or whatever it was) I had to first attack my hygiene. I’m not sure how long it had been since I had been running around the city, but I’m sure that it felt like a lot longer than it actually was. Either way, I felt the need to clean myself. I mean, if nothing else, I had had sex with two hookers since I had been here. That probably dictated some form of bathing.

  I got into the shower; it was nice, but not fancy. It made me wonder what the shower at The Reference had been like? I wonder if I could get a room at The Reference or if it was just like a home base or launch area? Just a place where all new characters spawned.

  I had to stop thinking of this as a game, I had to stop dwelling on those details. This, whatever it was, was more than a game. It was a reality. I had no idea what had happened to my body back on my... Hell, I don’t even know what to call it. World? Planet? Reality? Dimension? Take your pick, they all apply.

  Whatever it was, and whatever this is, I’m in two places. At least I assume I’m in two places. I seriously have no idea what to think.

  If someone could pull me out of this game, they would have already. I know I’ve been here long enough that my wife has discovered me, sitting at my desk, plugged into a new laptop with a headset on. Wearing those ridiculous pants that the game had shipped with.

  I must look ridiculous. So embarrassing.

  There I go again, thinking like Doug, not Buster Rockknocker.

  I turned on the shower and it ran hot right out of the gate. That was a good sign. I took off my clothes and made sure I had a towel close by to wipe my eyes when I washed my hair. Speaking of which: I looked around and quickly found some hotel shampoo and soap.

  Betty had used some herself I could see, her trash was placed neatly in the plastic trash bin by the toilet. That’s good, she may not be a high-priced hooker, but at least she’s tidy.

  I picked up the bottle of shampoo and took them with me into the shower.

  This felt nice. Relaxing. I did my best to block any thoughts of my old life out of my head. That just wasn’t my life anymore. It would take a while to re-train my brain, but I could do it. I just had to walk around in this body a little longer, get the hang of it. This character was a smoother talker than I was that was the hardest thing to get used to. Words I used to not be able to say, now I could. I guess I could have said them, just not as cool as it sounded coming out of this persona. It’s like this avatar wasn’t afraid to speak in a commanding manner. That was going to take some getting used to.

  The sex stuff, well, that was easy. I could get the hang of that. It was the same general principal I had always known, I just had better tools to do it with.

  I unscrewed the shampoo and put the cream into my hair, closing my eyes so I didn’t get stung. I finished lathering and rinsed, then felt around for where I had put the towel. I found it easily, but it was some place different. I felt the towel, and it was being held. I reached up and sure enough, there was a hand holding it.

  “Here you go,” I heard Betty’s voice.

  “Thanks,” I said, confused. Once again, I had the feeling that Doug would have jumped a little. Startled by the surprise. But Buster, hell, he expected this to happen.

  Doug would have been embarrassed for anyone to see him naked. Buster welcomed all eyes on him.

  I took the towel and wiped my eyes. I then handed the towel back to Betty. She was standing there, innocently, completely naked. She took the towel and hung it on the hook next to the shower. I looked her over; she looked cute this morning, with her thin, shaved body and her slept-in sex hair.

  I still couldn’t quite tell how I felt about Betty and it’s not her fault for this. Over the last day, I’ll just call it a day, I’ve been through a lot, and I haven’t really had a chance to compartmentalize things. I really am trying to accept this new life, this new persona, and that pretty much takes all of my brainpower. The last thing I have on my mind, or at least expected, was to have a tag-a-long with me. I have a tag-a-long in real life; I didn’t need one in my fantasy life as well.

  But there is another side to this, and maybe this is the Buster Rockknocker programming in me; the side that’s telling me, here is an attractive naked woman, standing next to you while you shower. She is looking at you with complete dedication and devotion. She is two feet from your naked dick and she would do absolutely anything to please you.

  So once again I had to ask myself: What would Buster Rockknocker do?

  She had this ability to almost hear what I was thinking. I don’t know if it was in her code or if it had just been a coincidence throughout the experience so far. She looked up at me, with those big doe eyes of her’s and smiled. I was a solid foot taller than her standing normally, but since I was in the shower, the tub being a few inches higher than the bathroom floor; I seemed to tower over her.

  “Would you like a blow job?” she said, as if she was asking me to go grab the morning paper.

  I looked at her, her pretty face, still slightly bruised from the beating she took at the hands of her last pimp, Bruce. She was not being coy; she was not being even the least bit flirtatious; she was genuinely asking me this as if it was just something she could do to help me out.

  I looked down and my own naked body and saw why she was asking this. I had the beginnings of an erection. I hadn’t really noticed it, like I said, it had been a long day. My dick didn’t seem to care, it just recognized a naked woman standing in front of me and the fact that it had been a few hours since it had gotten any action. As mentioned before, this body was built for action. The best kind of action.

  This was another thing I was going to have to adjust to, a body built for speed.

  She continued looking at me, letting her question hang in the air. “I could also do something else if you like?” she said with a smile.

  I smiled back at her and decided to let Buster Rockknocker do what Buster Rockknocker does best. I stood there, with my lower half coming more to attention, and said, “Come on in, the water's fine.”

  3

  Down the Hatch

  I toweled off after the shower and wrapped it around my waist and went back to my pad and paper as Betty took her time in the bathroom doing whatever it is that women do in a bathroom after an, uh, intimate encounter.

  We hadn’t had sex but, well, let’s just say it was lucky that what we did, we did in the shower. It helped with clean up that’s for sure.

  Suddenly I was tired, finally something had happened that took my mind off of my present situation. Post fooling around, I was feeling much more relaxed and wondered if I had time to take a nap, something that was desperately needed. Since I had no way of telling the time, I didn’t know how much longer I had in this room.

  I opened up my menu screen; I had noticed earlier that Betty couldn’t see this screen when I opened it, so there was no fear of her realizing she was a video game character. Something that The Man in Blue had told me to avoid, or else I would zero out.

  I looked at my stats, the only thing that had changed was my health, and it was hurting.

  H: 44 $:535 BR:44 T:55 DOM:57 PRW:70 ST:12

  I don’t know if I needed food, sleep or both. But the long and short of it was that I needed something, I wasn’t sure if I could die from exhaustion or not, but I
felt it best not to find out. I wonder if I could get extra lives? Was that a thing? He didn’t make it sound that way, but I’m sure that there were many things about the game I didn’t yet realize.

  Like the fact that it wasn’t a game at all.

  It was a whole new dimension.

  With everything going on, I hadn’t really sat down and thought about the implications of this reality. Just the fact that it existed! This is a created reality and the people living in it had no idea that they had been created. They had no idea that there was anything else but this. It’s pretty trippy when you think about it and I think I had better spend a little less time thinking about it, there’s only so many rabbit holes you can go down in one day!

  About that time, Betty walked out of the bathroom. She was wearing only a towel. On her head. Other than that she was naked. Interestingly enough, physiology worked the same here. A little bit ago, when she greeted me in the shower, nude, my body reacted. Now, just like my body might be in my other life, I wasn’t interested. My body didn’t react, my need was satiated.

  The baby batter wasn’t on the brain, as it were.

  Here’s the other thing, when you’re horny (even if you don’t know you are) you don’t notice things. The hornier you get the more and more a woman starts to look good to you. It’s like the old bugs bunny cartoons. Bugs would get stranded on a boat in the middle of the ocean with a companion and suddenly, every time Bugs looks at them, they would turn into like a turkey dinner or something in his mind. It was similar.

  With a hard on, anything with a hole starts to look good. Afterwards, you’re just kind of, meh. But I knew that the feelings would return and sooner or later I would be back to my Buster Rockknocker-ing ways. This body really seemed to regenerate the mood quickly. No loss of free testosterone here!

  All this to say, it barely registered with me that Betty was nude. The only thing that really registered was the fact that she really didn’t have any boobs at all. It wasn’t concave, but there wasn’t much to hold on to up there.

  I also noticed her ribcage and pelvic bone. It seemed like she barely had enough skin to cover her bones. It made me sad. Part of this could just be her genetic make-up, but I got the feeling that she was really mistreated by her last pimp. I needed to get some meat on her, especially if I planned on making any money off of her.

  What was I saying? Am I really considering this? Hasn’t she been through enough? Was I really going to go out and make her work the streets?

  No, there was another way. I had blown through my money pretty quickly on sex and then the down payment on Betty. I may have “saved” her, but she did my money bank no favors.

  I wasn’t going to look at her like an investment. She was my responsibility; I was not hers.

  “Now that that’s out of the way, what’s on the agenda for today, boss?” she asked.

  I’m not sure how I feel about her referring to me as boss, it gave me the feeling like what we just did in the shower was very... transactional. I know she was just being cutesy, so I decided to not worry about it much. At the end of the day, did it really matter?

  “Well, it looks like we have a long day ahead of us,” I said.

  She walked over to the chair on the other side of the table and sat down. Still not wearing clothes. She adjusted the chair, so she was facing me. Her pink nipples staring me in the face as she leaned up on the table, resting herself on her elbows, trying to get a look at my list.

  “Boy, that list does look menacing,” she said, referring to the fact that I had a pad and pen, but nothing had been written down that wasn’t scratched out.

  “It’s more of an existential list,” I said, smiling.

  “I don’t think I know what that means,” she said, wrinkling her face.

  “Ya know, I don’t really think I do either. But I’m learning it as I go along.” I doubt that she had any idea what I was talking about. I’m sure in my life before I had felt like I was having an existential crisis, when in reality, I had no idea what one was actually like. Now I do.

  Boy, do I really know what an existential crisis is like now!

  “So, what do we do first?” she asked.

  “Well, I’m going to need your help.”

  “Do you need me to go to work?” She asked, her voice was slightly different than her usual peppiness, but still way more excited than she should be to go do some back alley blow jobs.

  “No, we’re not there yet, but I appreciate your willingness.”

  “Whatever you need.”

  “I’m hungry. Are you hungry?” I asked.

  “A little, I kind of just had a snack.”

  I let out a quick burst of surprised laughter and then embarrassment. She was, of course, referring to our little episode in the shower. One thing about sex, is sometimes it’s kind of dirty, especially here, were I let myself cut loose and do the most inappropriate things I can think of. When the sex is dirty and you’re no longer in the moment, well, the thought of what you just did can be a little—embarrassing. That’s really the only word that seems appropriate.

  “I’m surprised any of it got in your—”

  “It went everywhere,” she said with a grin and a giggle. “Including down the hatch.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s fine, it was fun,” she said, smiling. “It was a lot.”

  I laughed at her. Betty was fun, up for anything and didn’t complain about a thing so far. As far as companions go, I could have been stuck with a much worse one.

  “I’m sorry I’m not—” she started, crinkling her face to the side and then not finishing her sentence.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Well, better—at that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you had to... you know?”

  “Oh, that. Don’t worry about it. It was fun, I clearly enjoyed it.”

  She smiled. “Last night was nice too,” she said, but I could tell that she instantly regretted it.

  Before I let her get any further in her regret and nodded my head and smiled. It was a simple gesture on my part, but she registered it. I could tell that she had accidentally said those words, and that she had felt awkward about last night as well.

  It was the first that either of us had mentioned last night. There was something there, I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was a certain exchange of emotion between the two of us.

  Emotion may be a poor choice of words. A better choice may be that there was a certain need that each of us had that was not specifically sexual in nature. She needed comfort, and I felt the need to comfort her; I felt the need to be needed. That it came out the way that it did is of little consequence.

  I’m glad that she just brought it up, I felt odd about it last night. I knew that there had been something different in the exchange and I knew there was more being exchanged than just bodily fluids. I wasn’t sure if it had been just me or if she had felt something different, about last night as well. I found comfort in that she had felt something too.

  But honestly, us acknowledging it was all that needed to happen, and now we can move on. I don’t think either one of us wanted the other to pursue the topic any further. No reason to make it weird.

  Because what my life needs right now is not more weirdness.

  “Okay, so food. We need to eat, and we also need to be a little more economical with our choices here. We’re about out of money.”

  “I can always—”

  “I know, but let’s put a pin in that for the moment.”

  “Okay.”

  “But we do need to start earning and in order to do that, we need girls correct?” I didn’t mention to her that I was going to be a pimp because until recently I had no intention of that happening. It wasn’t until my meeting with The Man in Blue last night did I know that I had to. I have to somehow build a harem and run the city. I don’t know how that makes me win the game, I’m just going to have to assume that I will eventuall
y figure that part of the story out.

  “If we go deeper into the city, we could maybe find some girls that are unrepresented,” Betty said.

  “Unrepresented?”

  “One’s that don’t have a master.”

  “A master? You mean pimp,” I said as a statement and not a question.

  “We usually refer to them as masters. They do own us.”

  This part was really starting to bother me, this whole master/servant aspect of the game. “Look, I’m not your master, okay.”

  She gave me a confused look as if she had lived her entire life one way and I was trying to change that.

  “I’m gonna take care of you,” I said. “Push comes to shove, I may need you to work, but for right now, I want you to start thinking outside of the box.”

  She thought about what I was saying, but did not respond. She seemed to be touched by me saying I was going to take care of her, and I meant it. She just needed to know she was not my property.

  “As long as you are with me, you are with me, you’re not my property and you’re not my servant.”

  “Then what do I do for you?”

  “Beside let you wear my sperm as a sweater?”

  She laughed abruptly, thinking back to our shower incident, where things got a little out of control. “Seriously, that was a lot!”

  I smiled at her. “Look, you’re with me. Your part of my...” I couldn’t think of the right words for what we were. She wasn’t my girlfriend, and she wasn’t my servant.

  “Your harem?”

  “Yes, for lack of a better word, you’re part of my harem.”

  “But doesn’t a harem have more than just one girl?”