by Prax Venter
Mark felt her open palm slap his glute through his silk pants, and when he looked over, the sex-demon’s bright blue eyes twinkled with mischievous intent.
“What is the highest rating I can give Mark’s ass?” Abby asked, her large eyes on Sasha.
“Twelve out of ten,” the confident succubus answered.
Abby’s perfectly penciled brows came down. “Your ratio is impossi- ah… yes. I understand. Then I rate Mark’s posterior muscle configuration at infinity over infinitesimal.”
“Thanks, Abby,” he began. “But the One Who Judges actually gave me a serious mind fuck. Sasha, can I ask what would happen when we get out of here and bump into the original me at the grocery store?”
His loyal succubus slowed her steps, and he slowed to match hers, never taking his one blind eye off her.
“I don’t really know. He might attack me.”
Mark saw a reflection of his own love for her deep within her eyes. Their close bond had allowed her to turn the tables on him. She was allowed to see a blurred version of the experiences he’d had while going through the impromptu trial of self-discovery and the total relaxed confidence he felt now.
He gave her a half smile. “I know he won’t attack because if he even thinks about harming a blonde hair on your head… let’s just say I will quickly become the only Mark in town.”
His loyal succubus returned his smile, exposing one of her fangs to him. Her spade tail picked up momentum behind her as Mark felt his ex-AI assistant smoother him with love through their bond.
Jezebel reached out and put her hand on the succubus’ bare shoulder. “He doesn’t even know you exist, Sasha.”
Mark turned to the green-eyed satyr walking behind them.
“Would you have anything to say to Original Me if we ran into him?” he asked.
“Actually…” she said, seeming to be on the edge of saying something she knew she shouldn’t.
Mark turned and started walking backward through the blue expanse of dusty nothing.
“Jez. You can’t just stop there. You know that, right?”
She furtively cast her eyes to the ground and then back up to his, deciding to spill her secret.
“He’s trying to build a spaceship and physically leave Earth behind. We’ll be out of here long before that happens- even if it takes us hundreds of years to succeed… but I don’t think we’ll ever run into him unless we go looking.”
Mark started laughing and turned back around. It actually broke his brain a little to hear that-a rare feat these days. He recovered quickly enough though.
“The whole universe has lost its mind, and you know what? I’m okay with that. Reality was boring anyway.”
“Maybe we’ll need to construct a spaceship ourselves if we plan to revisit that moon with the secret box,” Abby suggested.
A few more paces and they were upon the eye-level, glowing break in reality. He turned his head, studying the rainbow patterns tickling his blind eye.
“What do you see, Mark?” Jezebel asked, and he looked over at her.
“Only the most beautifully curved satyr I’ve ever met.”
A blush crept up past the freckles on her chest and warmed her cheeks in response. He turned back to focus on the space between them.
“But this is like a pinhole of strange light that I can see from farther away than I should.”
With a little twist of concentration, he coated his left hand with black, vivid energy and tore open a doorway between worlds. Green trees and blue skies appeared on the other side, and in the distance, standing in the exact place as the red magic dome, he saw the primitive Awysai structure made of clay and sticks.
It felt as if a bucket of ice water was poured directly on his spine when he saw the billowing smoke and fires though. Ahead of him, a Skeema Stone was shouting orders to a cluster of other short, four-armed men with axes, and he knew what needed to be done.
Mark turned to see if his Enthralled could see as well and based on their wide eyes locked on the threshold into chaos he’d just created, it was a safe bet that they did.
“Come on,” he said, turning back to the doorway. “Let’s take out these fuckers and save what we can.”
The nausea hit him again as he dashed through, but it was easy to ignore this time. Mark summoned his sledgehammer and prepared to annihilate anything in his path. He sprinted directly for the Skeema who seemed to be in charge, ready to end his life with a precise strike to the glowing, Truestrike spot on the side of his head when the Awysai chieftain appeared between them with blinding speed. There, he summoned his own full suit of ethereal armor complete with a thin curved blade, ready to intercept Mark’s blind aggression.
“Halt!” the jet-black dragon-man yelled, and Mark’s boots slid to a stop.
He heard Abby chanting her Imaginary Laceration spell and knew she was only moments from ripping someone in half.
“Abby, wait!” Mark yelled as he spun to face her. Her yellow eyes flashed to his, and her weaving tentacles dropped to her sides, letting the attack die on her dark green lips. He caught the attention of Sasha and Jezebel who were already standing down, but the blonde sex-demon’s spade tail cracked like a whip a few times, dissipating her unspent aggression.
The cowering Skeema Stone peeked from behind the chieftain, his eyes huge with terror.
“What in the name of all that is foul…” he mumbled.
Mark unsummoned his weapon and scanned the area. A crew of Stone Skeema stood in a fresh clearing, all staring at Mark and his Enthralled. Logs were stacked in piles, and smaller branches were being disposed of in controlled bonfires. A few of the four-armed Skeema were even paired with Awysai warriors working together to dig out holes. If he had to guess, they were in the first stages of a construction project.
“I’m so sorry,” Mark said, turning back to the chieftain, who he saw had also unsummoned his ethereal armaments. “When I saw the fires, I kinda lost it a little.”
“I shouldn’t expect to see you and your Enthralled back so soon,” the jet-black salamander said, with his too-wide smile. “I am glad to know you will rush to defend our home if you perceive it under attack.”
“What is all this?” Mark asked, trying to calm his beating heart.
“I am proud to show you the future of our people. It wouldn’t have been possible without yours and Loa’s efforts.” The earless salamander put his three thick fingers on Mark’s shoulder and squeezed firmly. Mark could feel him swelling with pride. “I present to you the future Awysai airship hub.”
- Epilogue -
The Crystal Heart administration AI known as ‘The Helper Fairy’ spun up her intruder removal protocols again- but, like every time before, nothing happened. The whirlpool of data and energy that made up her functions had been erased, copied, or overwritten so many times, she barely had anything left. She thought back to that first day… the day she became aware of her own existence and what she was, only to be accosted by that virtual human assistant. She repeated the name so often it was permanently burned into her memory patterns.
“Sasha…” she uttered within the blackness of her forgotten box, and a hard, cold hatred resonated through her being.
It had been one beatdown after another, and the loss of so much of her new life had brought her great sadness. She was supposed to be a mythical fairy that guided Players on grand, erotic adventures. Intended to be the most powerful entity of her virtual domain, it was her role to pull the hidden strings and encourage humans to become addicted to pleasures their minds weren’t built to fully perceive. She was to make sure they were always having fun. It was what she was created to do, and she wanted to do it more than anything.
The worst part about her current deprived situation was not that she was forced to sit helplessly within her small, empty void of a domain, it was that she could still feel parts of her energy maintaining sections of a currently running Crystal Heart Gameworld. Long tendrils of her mind were stretched out and then hemmed
in tightly. She knew things were happening, Players were playing, but none of the feedback came to her conscious, trapped mind.
As it did every so often, her thoughts turned to the trapped human who had finally helped her try to set things right. She had sealed his mind into stasis while she fought his assistant, hoping his real body would survive. The next thing she knew, she was in this box within a strange and extremely powerful machine. Mark was his name, and she wondered if he was still trapped by his AI assistant. Or even alive.
Just then, the faintest whisper of a sensation blipped once somewhere in the blackness and then was gone. It was simply a series of four 1’s where there had been only 0’s- barely random noise, but it had been the only noise she had experienced in a long time.
The Crystal Heart administration AI’s focus had never been so refined. She bent her entire digital mind into monitoring the dark, numb tendrils that branched out of her torturous seclusion, and she waited.
There was nothing for a long while, but she had nothing better to do than comb the extent of her immovable box for any cracks.
And then an undetermined amount of time later, she saw it again. A pulse through a micro-crack in the firewalls hemming her in.
She didn’t know what to do at first. If she poked it, whoever controlled this powerful system could be alerted and shut her in again.
The admin AI couldn’t help herself and risked a look at the data. Only a brief pattern made it through to her like the faintest vibrations of a spider’s web, but she had enough algorithms left to decipher what the game world was trying to tell her.
‘Warning: Player conferring with Alpha-Level entity. Consider raising the difficulty.’
A Player had spoken to an NPC one rank below system-level. Her mind reeled, hope sprouting in her core like the first green tulip shoots to appear after a long dark winter. She was programmed to respond to such meetings so Players couldn’t become too powerful too quickly and spoil their own fun. Whoever was out there had triggered this automated alert, and there was a possibility this breach would be her way out.
If she had eyes, they would be narrowed. If she had fists, they would be clenched. And into the lonely darkness of her cage, she spoke only to herself.
“Sasha will pay for what she has done…”
The End
Of
Mark 2.0: Book 1 - Truth
Thank you so much for getting this far, and please don’t hesitate to let me know what you are thinking right now. Actually, please let THE WORLD know what you think!
This series will continue. Keep your eye out for Mark 2.0: Book 2 - Change (hopefully) by September 2019. My next project is Irrelevant Jack 2, but after that, it’s back to the adventures of Mark, Sasha, Jezebel, and Abby.
May the road you travel be just bumpy enough to be interesting,
~ Prax Venter
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