by Mia Archer
“What the fuck was that?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“That is the kind of thing that would never happen in the real world, but happens all the fucking time in the game world my girl,” the woman said, eyeing me up and down with a look that said she wouldn’t mind doing the same to me. “Clearly you’re new here.”
“Yeah?” I asked, looking down at my starting clothes. “What was your first tip there Sherlock?”
“Just a feeling I had about you m’lady,” she said, raising her glass in salute and taking yet another pull from that glowing green stuff. “You’ll get used to it soon enough if you take part in the community, and you’ll quickly discover that things don’t work in the game the same as they do in the real world. I’d also advise you to avoid this part of the game entirely if you don’t want to fall under the big boss’s stripper heels.”
I got the feeling this girl was just a little drunk. I’d read somewhere that the game was pretty good about simulating that sensation, and I got the feeling she was going to give me this info dump whether or not I wanted it.
“The big boss? Stripper heels? Do go on,” I said.
“It’s simple,” she said. “You have a bunch of people who are self-selecting to have a good time. And you have a situation where everyone is painfully attractive, seeing as how the game won’t let you make an ugly character even if you try, and on top of that you have a situation where everyone who comes to a place like this is looking for a good time with someone else who’s painfully attractive.”
I looked out over the room. What she said made a certain amount of sense. In creating a game world this realistic, a game world where people could fuck, the game devs had created the ultimate hedonistic potential pleasure palace where people could go out and have a little bit of fun without any of the usual consequences that were associated with that sort of thing in the real world.
Not that there was much in the way of that kind of consequence in the real world these days with nanobots that could repair just about anything, up to and including the oldest STI in the world, but there was still the barrier of how good you looked. There were a lot of people who couldn’t afford the nano reconstruction to make themselves look good, though that didn’t apply to the rich people who were behind the avatars for the moment.
“Damn,” I said, a goofy grin spreading across my face as I saw some of the hotties moving through the place. I stepped forward to enjoy a little bit of that fun, but an arm appeared on my chest barring the way.
“You might be surprised what you find if you try for that lassie,” the woman said, her slurred voice switching into a sort of approximation of Jimmy Doohan’s Scottish accent there at the end.
“Whatever,” I said, that goofy grin still on my face as I saw the possibilities spreading out in front of me. Possibilities that would put an end to the two year dry spell I’d suffered since coming to the Academy. “I’m gonna have some fun tonight!”
“You’re gonna learn something special,” the woman grunted, but then I was into the crowd and forgot all about her.
I walked up to a pretty elf woman who looked like she was all on her own. She had shining dark hair that flowed down past her shoulders in a single braid. Two pointed ears revealed her heritage. She had a cute button nose and a lithe but curvy frame.
I grinned as I walked up to her. It looked like the art design team had a hell of a time putting together the elven form, and I was enjoying their handiwork. The only problem? She looked me up and down like she was staring at something she’d just tracked in on the bottom of her boots.
Though she wasn’t exactly wearing boots. No, they were more like soft silk that didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would be good for adventuring, but this was a game world and not the real world so what did I know?
They ran up to her thighs that were shown off because she had on a skirt so short that it would’ve been more appropriate for a visit to the OB/GYN. Her top was barely there as well. It showed off her tight flat stomach below and the curve of her cleavage up above.
And there were those eyes. Piercing blue like ice. Ice that glared at me.
Shit. That’s right. She wasn’t interested in what I was offering. At least she was acting like she wasn’t interested in what I was offering.
“What do you want?” she growled.
“Um, I was thinking maybe we could have a little bit of fun tonight?” I said.
“What kind of girl do you think I am?” she asked.
That was enough to get me to take a pause and think about what I was doing. I looked around the room to verify that people were actually, in fact, doing what I thought they were doing. Sure enough there were people bumping and grinding to an invisible beat. Presumably from some playlist they’d imported into the game that only they could hear.
Bumping and grinding was the least of what was going on in here though. No, there were people sucking face and doing everything leading up to the kind of behavior that might get them a ban for being a little too forward in public.
And then there was this girl in front of me dressed in that sexy mage getup. I mean sure I was aware that a girl dressing sexy didn’t mean she was asking for it or anything. I didn’t buy into that kind of ancient alpha bullshit or anything like that.
Still, if she was dressed like that and in a place like this then it stood to reason she was interested in having a little bit of fun with someone. Only if she was reacting like this then it also stood to reason she wasn’t interested in having that little bit of fun with me in particular.
Fuck. It was just like the Academy all over again, only this time around the problem was I was a total noob with no good gear to my name and not that I was a rizon that everyone looked down on because of where I’d been born.
“This guy bothering you?” someone asked.
A big beefy barbarian type with a sword slung over his shoulder that looked like it could easily bisect me without dulling the blade even a little bit came up behind the hot elf chick. He grinned as he put an arm around her, and she turned and nuzzled her face against his well muscled frame.
Well fuck. I guess she really wasn’t interested in yours truly. She wasn’t interested in my gender at all, which was something I hadn’t had to deal with in awhile.
Even back on the surface where people were a touch more conservative than in the elevators there’d been plenty of girls who were willing to experiment, even if they weren’t willing to make their walk on the wild side a lifestyle change.
“Never mind,” I muttered, moving away from the couple and trying to ignore the way their laughter filled the air behind me. I was just happy the asshole wasn’t using that sword on me.
It was quickly becoming apparent to me that the only way to get ahead in this game was to be a higher level with some cool gear. Otherwise I wasn’t going to get any sort of attention.
Though at least I could get those levels by going out and adventuring, which was a hell of a lot better than being stuck at the bottom of the social ladder in the real world.
Whatever. At least I could do some more exploring before I headed out. So I walked over to some stairs at the edge of the room. I figured there might be something interesting going on up on the second level. Maybe I’d find some nicer players, or at the very least maybe I’d get a good show.
I moved up the stairs. They creaked underfoot. I got a couple of weird looks from an impossibly attractive woman who looked like she was a half giant who was leading what seemed to be a halfling male up the stairs in what had to be one of the weirdest pairings I’d ever seen, but I thought nothing of it.
Most of the people moving up those stairs were couples. Or, if there were an odd number of people moving up then it was clear they were a group going up for a little bit of fun together and not a lone person like yours truly.
I reached the top and found something even more interesting waiting up there. A player, the person was obviously a player, stood behind a podium with portals appearing behin
d him every time he took money from people and waved a hand.
The people stepping through those portals would be there one moment, and then the next they’d shimmer like someone just asked Scotty to beam them up and then they were gone.
My eyes narrowed. What the fuck was going on here? A couple of very dangerous looking dudes stood behind the guy behind the podium, and they had the look of the in-game equivalent of hired muscle, if you will. They also wore an insignia that looked like horns up top with a whip in the middle.
Weird.
“How many in your party?” the man asked, sounding bored.
I was standing behind the half-giantess and the halfling, and I hadn’t thought anything of being near them until the moment that guy, he was clearly a mage from the way magic danced all around him, looked at us like I was part of their group.
“Never mind,” he said with a sigh. “I can see you have three with you. You’ll be joining Calixia’s party, no doubt?”
Calixia. Wasn’t that the name that drunk girl down below had mentioned? What the…
“Well yeah,” the half-giantess who’d given me the weird look earlier said. “But we only have…”
“Enjoy yourselves,” the mage said, sounding about as bored as someone could when they were talking about magically whisking a party away to what sounded like one hell of an orgy already in progress.
The only problem with that was when he waved he included me in the party. One moment I was standing at the top of the stairs in a hall that looked like it led down to a bunch of rooms, and the next moment the whole world shimmered and swirled around me as I was sucked into a portal, no stopping to ask whether or not I wanted to be sucked into said portal, and my character was teleported off to parts unknown.
Parts unknown that sounded like it involved showing up, uninvited, to an orgy where there were half-giantesses and halflings and other characters who probably wouldn’t be all that happy about me crashing their party.
Fuck.
7
Wrong Party
The first thing I noticed was the smell. Like that’s not the kind of thing that anyone ever talks about when they’re discussing an orgy in the real world.
Not that I’d ever had much occasion to be around someone discussing an orgy in the real world, but still.
Whoever had designed the smells in this game had clearly gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to make sure everything was as accurate to the real world as possible, because the scent of pure sex that assaulted me was staggering.
Then there were the sounds as the world resolved around me. Splorching noises. Wetness. Bodies smacking together over and over again. Moans. Gasps. All the sounds you’d expect from a bunch of people having the kind of hedonistic parties that probably went out of style back when Rome fell, depending on which fall of Rome you’re talking about.
Then my vision fell into place as whatever teleportation spell that mage used on me finally snapped me into place and my mouth fell open.
I was surrounded by bodies in various states of undress, and all those bodies were doing things to each other that you always sort of fantasize about but never think you’re actually going to see without a computer monitor between you and the action.
At least I hadn’t been able to imagine anything like this without a monitor between me and the action since I came to the Academy and found myself buried well beneath the bottom rung of the social ladder.
I guess in a way there was still a computer monitor between me and the action, but in this case that computer was in my head beaming a vision of everything that was going on here, so it was like I was right there in the middle of the most intense orgy I’d ever seen.
It was also the only orgy I’d ever seen, to be fair, but still.
“Holy shit,” I said.
There were beautiful women. Beautiful men too, though I didn’t care as much about them. The only thing about all of them that was in common was they all were much higher level when I inspected them.
At least that was the case with the dudes. Clearly these were guys with a bit of influence. That wasn’t necessarily the case with some of the ladies, though. No, it looked like they were just there based on looks alone if some of the levels attached to them were anything to go on.
I guess the same was true in the virtual world as it was in the real world. If you were a dude and you wanted an invitation to a party like this then you needed to have power or connections, whereas if you were a lady and you wanted an invitation to a party like this then all you had to have were the looks.
Though a lot of the beautiful women had the kind of bored detached look that said they might not exactly want to be here.
One of those achingly beautiful women looked up at me and smiled, but it was an empty smile. Her skin was a bright blue color which was a bit odd, and she had bright white hair that was done up in a sort of Leia hairstyle. She wore practically nothing.
As I looked at the room full of people doing all the kinds of things that you might hope to do passing an evening at a virtual reality orgy it occurred to me that this was the kind of thing I might want to document. Both because of all the hotties doing their thing and because there was something that felt weird and off about all this.
It was a pity there wasn’t an easy way to take a screenshot like…
As though thinking about it was enough to make it so, there was a clicking noise like a camera going off near me, and then a rectangle appeared that showed my entire field of vision and a brief recreation of what was going on in the room. I could even inspect characters and everything.
It was better than a screenshot. It was like I’d frozen a memory in place, and I could step into that memory whenever I wanted and relive it. A moment later that memory flew down to the bottom of my heads up display and disappeared in a folder than then faded away as I didn’t think about it and the game figured I no longer needed it.
Well then. That was interesting. I could think about a user interface thing and it happened. Talk about a handy bit of information!
“Good evening and welcome to the Ca…”
I turned to find myself staring at another beauty. This woman appeared bright red and had a tail coming out of her backside. She looked like a succubus or a demoness of some sort, and from the way she carried herself she was a demoness who was well aware she was the hottest thing in the room.
Which wasn’t all that far from the truth, and that was saying something considering all the hotties on display in here! She had leather strips running around her body that covered all the essential parts, but other than that small nod towards preserving her modesty there wasn’t much being covered.
Not that I was complaining, thank you very much.
Her skin was illuminated on one side by a fitful purple light. I glanced in that direction and saw myself staring at a portal that looked like the ones the mage had been creating back in that hallway. No doubt the way out of this place. That was good to know, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave this place anytime soon if this was the kind of fun that was going on!
Also? The impossibly hot demoness was frowning in confusion as she looked from me to the other two who’d come with me when we were teleported to this place. Wherever the hell it was.
“Was that the click of a screenshot?” she said, not sounding happy about it. “You’re not supposed to do that in here, you know.”
I didn’t know, but I figured maybe I could plead ignorance or something.
“Uh, I didn’t know?” I said.
“No, I mean you’re not supposed to be able to take screenshots at all,” the demon succubus woman said, her tail lashing behind her showing just how irritated she was. “The agreement forbids screenshots in this zone. How did you get in here without an agreement?”
“Um…”
I glanced around the room, though I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to find. Certainly not any help. Clearly this place was designed to look like a room at the inn we’d just left, but i
t was also clearly not a part of the inn we’d just vacated. Not unless this suite was bigger than the entire top of the inn, which didn’t seem likely.
No, what seemed far more likely was that mage was running a business where he used his teleportation powers to move people to player housing of some sort where they could have a custom built facility that was designed for whatever it was the clients needed.
The abundance of swings hanging from the ceiling and mirrors all over the place was proof of what sort of accommodations this party had asked for.
“Who are you?” the demoness asked. “I don’t recognize you.”
“Um, I think there’s been a mistake,” I said. “You see I was just coming up the stairs and the mage up there…”
“Intruder!” she shouted. “She took a screenshot!”
That didn’t sound good. All the noise in the room stopped. I turned from the impossibly sexy demoness in her strips of leather to face the rest of the room.
A room filled with high level players who looked like they could do some serious damage to a noob like me. A room full of high level players who were suddenly going from completely nude to clothed as they equipped an impressive assortment of high level armor and weapons that no doubt had all sorts of bonuses that could really ruin my day.
“You crashed the wrong party bitch,” a mage on one end of the room said, fire dancing from his fingertips.
“Totally,” a guy in dark leather armor that seemed to bend the light around him said. It didn’t help that he’d pulled out daggers that looked like they could do some serious damage.
“I tried to tell that mage there was something wrong!” the half-giantess said, glaring at me and pulling out a sword that looked like a letter opener for her, but would’ve been a giant two-handed monstrosity in the hands of the largest human barbarian.
In short, it was starting to look like I was good and fucked, and not in the way someone might hope to be good and fucked when they found themselves in a room like this surrounded by a bunch of impossibly hot people doing what the impossibly hot people were doing here.