by ilo man
The letters XdCeX swirled around Vinnie’s mind, softly spoken by the gorgeous creature.
“Discreet Celebrity Encounters,” Felicity whispered in his ear. “The buy-in is eye-watering, but the trade-off is exceptional. One hundred percent discretion, and with your rig, you’ll get one hundred percent sensation. In theory, you find your match anonymously, bang each other to bits in the virtual world, and no one’s the wiser. Or, in your case, the anonymity to improve…” Her lips curled as if a sour taste swilled around her mouth. “In your case, get better at it, learn, and become the best.”
Vinnie’s mouth watered. His legs started shaking in eager anticipation. “Where do I sign?”
“It’s not quite that simple,” Felicity turned and looked at the screen where the elf-like creature waited patiently.
Silence fell momentarily, and then the elf began speaking again.
“Vincent,” her words rolled over him like a rippling orgasm. “You will begin your virtual life in Hartsfelt to the south of our land. You can choose to stay there, or you can explore. Know this though, only by gaining esteem and experience will your worth in the land be enhanced. You can earn esteem by being a considerate lover, and experience by accepting quests and helping strangers. Both will elevate your position in Hartsfelt. Beware though, we can take esteem away, and the consequences can hinder your journey.”
Vinnie’s mouth took over, his mind still fully focused on the gorgeous creature—she had something about her, though he couldn’t quite tell what. “So, I get esteem, and we’re on the right path. Do I have to pick a class? You know, Mage, Warlock, Fighter, that kind of thing?”
She hesitated, but then smiled at him. “That depends on what type of game you want, what alliances you forge. It is a choice you make as your time with us progresses. Different options will be offered to you along the way, accept or refuse them depending on how you feel. There is no right or wrong way to play, just your way.” The creature smiled out from the screen. Vinnie stared into her memorizing eyes, positive he was picking up on something, sure he could see some out of place emotion.
Was that fear? Could he see the fear in her eyes?
The beautiful creature began to fade.
“Wait!” Vinnie shouted. “What’s your name?” but too late, she’d vanished, and the scene switched back to the village of Hartsfelt, a Germanic looking place, embraced by towering ridges and snow-capped mountains.
The screen blanked, just the thin blue line, the blue heartbeat pounding away, slowly, slowly, and finally flat.
A final gasped breath burst out like a spent wave.
“That’s the spirit,” said Felicity, clearly unaffected by it all. “Now how about hopping in and getting started.”
Vinnie had to tear himself away from the screen.
He quickly weighed up his options but didn’t take long. The elf-like woman had tugged at his heartstrings, and he suddenly knew what it was. He was sure there had been fear in her eyes, but more than that, sorrow, sorrow had been the overarching emotion.
She had been smiling through her tears, an emotion Vinnie was all too familiar with.
He undressed, not in the slightest bit self-conscious—dressing rooms had been long-term acquaintances of his—a hazard of the job, besides he had nothing to be ashamed of—in that department anyway. Pulling himself up, he swiveled around and eased his ass into the blue gel, eager to get on, eager to see the lush creature again.
Gasping as the cool gel enveloped his skin, he held his breath as it seeped around his balls, his cock and up his ass crack. He lowered his whole body in, slowly lying down, the last bit being the worst as his head sunk under the cold blue gel. On instinct, he held his breath, fighting, trying desperately not to breathe, but wanting to sit up, to jump out, to forget everything. The light above narrowed as Felicity slammed the lid shut.
Panic set in.
He struggled, his mouth set in a firm line, lips tight, but his lungs were afire, pain arching right across his ribs. His back convulsed, his stomach hitting the lid, straining against it, as his arms reached out, pressing on the coffin’s side, cramped by its top. His whole body contorted in one, last, futile display of resistance, and then the cool gel entered his mouth, rushing down his throat like water from a burst pipe, filling his lungs, forcing the last of their hidden air out.
He felt his bladder empty as his mind switched off and he accepted death.
The familiar speck of blue light pulsed in his mind’s eye. He reached for it. Grasped it. Clung to it.
Wetware connection initiated…complete.
Bio tanks activated, initial flush commencing.
Game loading. Character selected. Race = Human. Gender = Male. Calculating esteem.
Allotting attributes. Initiating guide.
Game loading…
Vinnie’s eyes snapped open, but he could see only the night, a night as deep and black as obsidian. He had the sense that he was traveling. Traveling across a starless sky like some Roman God on a magical chariot. The pulsing blue dot reappeared, growing, becoming a four-pointed star and gradually pushing the blackness to the margins of his conscious until the star vanquished all, his canvass now a dazzling white.
A small black speck appeared on it, accompanied by a buzzing noise. A bee? A fly? It was a fly. But the fly grew louder; the black turned to pale blue, a tiny imp became clear.
“Whoa!” Vinnie exclaimed, seeing the imp in all her naked glory. It was so real, so life-like. He tried to reach out, to touch it, but he became acutely aware he had no body.
“Hello, Vincent.” The imp fluttered her long, black eyelashes. Her large blue eyes were the same pastel color as her skin and blinking like a beacon with every wash of her eyelids. She wore a coquettish smile, one that both enticed and held a measure of amusement. She had her chin tucked into her body, into the flesh at the top of her pert, perfectly proportioned breasts. Her nipples pointed out either side of her clasped hands that pressed tight in her cleavage, right against her heart.
Silver wings fluttered so fast they lent her a shimmering aura, like a halo surrounding her short, black, spiky hair. At first Vinnie’s eyes lingered on her face, searching out any hint of fear, of sorrow, as he’d seen in the elf, but soon they were drawn back to the imp’s pert breasts, her flat stomach, and lower to the smooth, blue of her groin and the line of her lips.
She giggled. “Never seen an imp before?”
“Not one as gorgeous as you, babe,” Vinnie said, as slack-jawed as he could be, given it was all in his mind.
Your status with Astral has altered. You have risen from 0, indifferent, to 1, still indifferent, but better.
“Keep that up, and we may get you some esteem soon,” Astral told him.
“Are you my guide?”
“I have been assigned to you, yes. Guide?” She cocked her little head one way and then the other. “I suppose so, though only for your intro. I’ve got my own game to play, but the only way to fly around as a sexy, naked imp, is to volunteer for a bit of noob work. So here I am. What do you need to know?”
“What are you normally?”
Astral flew closer, hovering right by the bridge of his imaginary nose. Vinnie caught her scent, her sweet, jasmine scent, and something else, something that he couldn’t quite grasp. It was like he could taste her mood, and that taste was excitement, tension, and verged on arousal. But that didn’t quite do it justice, somehow those tastes mixed and became like strands of attraction just waiting to be reeled in.
He sensed her esteem and knew it to be immense.
He knew that she was incredible.
“That would be telling,” Astral smirked, and then perked suddenly. “To business. You will land in Hartsfelt and wake in a simple room in their local tavern. Before you go anywhere, you should allocate your attribute points. Now, the game itself isn’t too stat heavy, but the attribute points are important. We have some unique attributes, but there are also the usual ones; health keeps you alive, stam
ina gives you energy and intelligence is for your magic-play. These are standard and act in a standard way. Enhance those three wisely for they are the master stats and are affected by others and vice-versa.”
“Health, stamina and intelligence—got it.” Vinnie couldn’t tear his eyes away from Astral’s breasts, they were just so perfect, so small, and button-like, with a cute, pert nipples dead center.
He imagined each hard bud rolling off his tongue. “Just perfect,” he whispered.
She giggled again.
Your status with Astral has altered. You have risen from 1, indifferent, to 2 still indifferent, but getting there.
“Phew,” Astral said, wafting her hand in front of her face. “Is it getting hot in here?” She fluttered away and sat on something, but in the brilliant white, Vinnie couldn’t make out what. She continued. “So, the other attributes. Let’s take strength first. Strength helps you wield mighty weapons, of both varieties.” She gave him a sly wink. Vinnie felt his imaginary cock perk. “It helps you vanquish foes, but more importantly, it adds the oomph to your pump. Without strength, you can’t perform properly. As health feeds strength, you need to balance both.”
“Balance,” Vinnie muttered, staring into her eyes, getting lost in them, drawn to her by those magical strands of esteem.
“Agility, again, it helps in combat, but more importantly, it lets you, let’s say, become a master of technique and position. If you wanna bang your way through the Karma Sutra in an afternoon, you’ll need agility, and that’s linked to stamina in the same way health and strength are linked.”
“So,” Vinnie was desperately trying to listen, but she was just so damn distracting. Had he a body, he’d have been as hot and horny as hell. “So, I need strength and agility to fight and fuck. Got it.”
“Such a quick learner,” Astral purred. “Now to virility, this one’s just for the sex. The higher your virility, the more you can pop your load. You can’t gain virility points; they’re fixed—(((Total Health + Total Stamina) x Total Mana)/100).” She inclined her head. “Don’t worry, it’ll calculate for you,” and she winked, seductively. “Intelligence generates mana, and mana is linked to virility—use your mana, lose your virility. A tired magician is a lousy lover. An exhausted warrior, a lousy lover. See the pattern? Understand it?”
“Kinda,” Vinnie replied, his head a bit fogged by all the math, well, any math.
“Levels,” she then said. “You gain levels as you gain experience in the game—like 90% of the games out there. You gain it by performing functions, by completing quests, by passing milestones. With each level gained, you get another two attribute points to distribute.”
Vinnie nodded, he got it all so far, apart from the complex equations. He felt good to go. Apart from esteem, she hadn’t mentioned that. What the hell was that?
“What about this esteem thing?”
Astral stretched and yawned, a display that instantly rid him of his confusion and put his mind right back on its usual single track. Virtual Mini Vinnie perked.
“Esteem,” Astral said, clearly unaware of his imaginary drooling. “Affects everything. One point of esteem enhances your stats by 10%. A score of 2 enhances your stats by 20%, and so on. Negative esteem affects them adversely, so beware of ever falling into that. Esteem also acts as charisma. The higher your esteem, the better looking you are, the nicer you smell, the better you’re dressed. Put simply; esteem is everything. Without it, it’s harder to get laid, to get given quests, to do just about anything.”
“And how do I get esteem?”
She fluttered up and hovered over to him. “Think of it like reputation. The better folk think of you, the higher they hold you in their hearts, the higher their esteem of you. You give pleasure to folk,” she whispered, “You make them cum.” Her blue began to dissipate, to fade until she became invisible. Her jasmine scent thinned. “You make them cum, over and over. Make me cum, Vinnie, make me cum.”
Vinnie blinked and opened his eyes.
Chapter Three
The scent of cedar-wood replaced her lingering jasmine, each of the room’s walls clad in the rich, amber timber. He lay on a simple single bed, nowhere near as comfortable as his double-queen sized. One side was pressed up against a wall, its open window letting in a gentle, fresh breeze that had just a hint of a chill on it. The breeze caressed his naked body, curling over his chest, his groin, around his genitals, and along his legs.
He was pleased to see his body had retained its strong physique—he’d put a lot of hours into lying in the pod exercising. He double-checked his cock, equally relieved when he felt the familiar contours of Mini Vinnie. Running his fingers through his hair, he jerked in surprise at finding it was cropped short. He glanced at his chest hair—jet-black still.
“Makes sense,” he muttered to himself, rubbing his cropped head. “Some form of disguise for discretion.” He then wondered about his name. Was it still Vinnie? But could gain no clue whether it was or not.
The cedar-wood-feel spread all around and fitted with the sense he had of being in a mountain valley. Clothes hung on a hook on the room’s sole door, a pair of boots placed to its side. Vinnie swung his feet off the bed, but then stopped, swung them back and searched out the game’s menus.
Astral had told him to allocate his points before doing anything.
He saw his attributes all in a line, and next to the line he saw a blinking number twelve. He searched the menu for his esteem value and noted it was 0.
Fair enough, he thought, neither good nor bad.
In truth, when the game prompt had told him it was scanning to assess his esteem value, he’d expected the worse.
“I’ll take that,” he said to himself. “Start again, neutral, fair’s fair.”
The other stats—health, stamina, mana, strength, agility, virility and intelligence—were all set to zero. Seven stats, twelve points to allocate, Vinnie thought, but knew he couldn’t allocate to virility, so six—two each? Two to each would be the easy way until the next level.
Vinnie had never been a fan of the easy way.
He tried allocating a point to health and spotted it took two points, one slotting into strength. Linked, he remembered, strength and health were linked. He added a point to agility, and his suspicions that stamina would have one added were confirmed.
With one point in each of those four, he noted that his virility was still zero.
“Can’t be doing with no virility,” he growled. What had Astral said?
“Virility, this one’s just for the sex. The higher your virility, the more you can pop your load.”
Vinnie wanted to pop his load a lot. What was the point in playing a virtual sex game where no one knew him, could blab to the press about him, if he wasn’t unleashing his load like the Boston Pops Firework Spectacular? He added one point to intelligence and gained ten in mana—TEN! —And interestingly, he’d only used up one point.
His virility shot up to a giddy .2, (((1+1) x 10)/100). Vinnie added another point to Intelligence. As he anticipated, his mana doubled to 20, clearly multiplied by a factor of 10 to his intelligence value. His virility went up to .4.
Vinnie growled and dumped another 3 points into it, making his intelligence 5, his mana 50 and his virility 1.
The minute his virility hit 1, his cock pulsed and lengthened a little. Vinnie jumped up, looking down at his dangling appendage. Sure enough, it had grown.
Reaching down, he touched it, stroking its length. Yep, it felt much bigger than the old Mini Vinnie. He scratched his head. “Hmm.”
He had used 9 out of his 12 free points. He tried adding a point to mana but couldn’t. So, 12 points but only five attributes he could allocate to, what to do with the three spare ones? If he put them into intelligence, he found the maximum virility he could achieve was 1.6, but…if he put them into health or stamina he had to pick one and one only, as another point would automatically be added to either strength or agility.
Vinnie’s hea
d hurt.
He played around, adding a point here and a point there until he settled on the maximum virility of 1.8. His stat sheet then looked like this:
Health: 1.
Stamina: 2.
Strength: 1.
Agility: 2.
Intelligence: 6.
Mana: 60.
Virility: 1.8.
Pressing accept, he glanced down at his cock, but it didn’t budge, didn’t grow, nothing. He surmised it must only happen if he hit a round figure, and vowed to get to 2 as fast as possible. His stat sheet looked wrong though, and he realized that in his math-induced fuzz, he’d allocated health and stamina wrongly. Initially, he’d need more health, more strength, than stamina. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t let him change.
Studying his sheet closer, he saw a couple of grayed out options. The first was perception, in brackets next to it the words, available above level 3. The second, compassion, was also grayed out and only available after level 5.
Vinnie guessed the game wanted you pumping your points into health, stamina, and intelligence to start with, get the virility up, the juices flowing, get right into the game.
Satisfied, he reached out for his clothes. As he did, his body morphed and shrank, his muscles withering, his shoulders sagging and his skin became stretched over his now bony frame.
“No!” he screamed, looking down at his scrawny legs, his stick-like arms, and his pathetic chest. Shear panic coursed through him. He was a weed, a skinny weed. Nervously, his eyes darted to his junk. There, like a jewel glinting out from dull scree, his handsome penis shone, all pink, healthy, with a ruby red tip, pulsing, ready for action. A smile gathered on his sallow cheeks. “I’ll just have to fuck my way back to a nice, strong body,” he muttered to himself and reached out for his new clothes.