Bounty Harlot
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Bounty Harlot:
A World of Brutalia LitRPG
by Alexei Tripmiov
Copyright 2018 by the author and Brutalia Press. All rights reserved.
And I awoke and found me on this cold hill’s side…
The words of the poem rattled through Tasha’s head like a pop song. It had been one of her father’s favorites; she had heard him mumble it to himself dozens of time, usually when despondent or worried…which summed up her feelings about her current situation.
She was, quite literally, just waking up, cold, and almost naked in the dewy grass of a hillock, a grey wet morning overhead. She was soaked to the bone, frightened, and wondering at the odd changes in her body.
Her figure seemed…more voluptuous, that was obvious. She stared down at the mounds of flesh that were now her breasts. Wrong. All wrong. Her body should be coltish, waif-like, a classic supermodel body, her agent had told her more than once (before he had sold her to those mafia vermin; recollections came to her through the fog of confusion). Now she was built like a stripper, or a Victoria’s Secret model, with D-Cup breasts and curvy hips. Only a bit of which were covered, she mused as she stood, running her hands along her creamy white flesh, over the little bands of bronze…metal? armor? metal armor that looked like lingerie?…that barely sufficed to cover her more feminine parts. That was all she wore, save for a piece of jewelry around her neck, some kind of loose collar. Yes: It was like a slave collar, which she had some experience with. Only this one bore a large precious stone at the front, bright red, like a ruby. The gemstone glowed.
One thing ‘Tasha did not want or need was a slave collar. She had experienced that sort of thing one too many times…enjoyable enough the couple times it had been consensual, but the last several times…the last few months…no. She tried to remove it.
It wouldn’t come off.
The ring of metal was just small enough that it refused to slip over her head. Her slender fingers felt around the entire circle of it, searching for a clasp, some way to undo it. Nothing. For the moment, she was stuck with this piece of hardware around her neck.
What the hell was going on here?
I awoke and found me on this cold hill’s side…John Keats. “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” About a knight and the witch-woman who destroyed him. But she, Tasha Magnova, was the woman awakening on this cold dreamy day in the middle of nowhere. Was she the Knight, or the Witch?
Pertinent questions, she decided, striding to the top of the hill to survey the surrounding area, trying to spot some sign of civilization, a house or a convenience store…the autobahn…
The autobahn. She remembered that. Jumping out of the car as she realized what was about to happen to her. The pain of landing…then nothing.
Tasha looked around at this brave new world and realized she would not be spotting a convenience store anytime soon.
In one direction stood a forest of brilliant purple trees, not the purple of autumn – they were not leaf-bearing, for one thing – but the brilliant violet of psychedelic art.
In another direction, water, a large lake, or perhaps the sea; anchored near the shore was an elegant ship with multiple masts, bare spars designed for furled sails, and what looked like cannon poking through holes on its side. It was like something out of one of those Johnny Depp pirate movies.
In yet another direction – figures, tiny in the distance, but moving in her direction. Her heart leapt for a moment in elation, which was immediately replaced with concern. This world was…not her world. There was no other way to think of it, to describe it, not yet, anyway.
She changed position on the grassy hillock and her feet bumped something hidden in the grass: a medium-sized backpack. Torn between fleeing from the figures that approached and stopping to examine the pack, she chose a path that vacillated between the two and opened it while moving quickly down the side of the hill away from…whatever they were. Pursuers. Predators. That was a class of man she understood.
Inside the pack: A dagger in a sheath that, she quickly surmised, attached to the sexy metallic g-string around her loins. A six-inch blade, brilliantly silver, in a slender pommel that fitted her hand perfectly. Nice. The heft felt familiar, though she had no recollection of ever picking up a knife for anything other than cutting a piece of meat or buttering bread. Words tumbled through her head as she gripped it: “crouch” and “stab.” A wave of familiarity pulsed through her body, gone as soon as she sheathed the blade. Whatever, she thought, continuing her inventory.
Food and drink in the form of muffins, hardtack, and a flask.
A leather-bound book. She opened it, pausing for a moment, and – boom!
A small explosion and a puff of smoke emanated from the book. The smoke coalesced into a face…a face she recognized.
Yuri. The bastard who… Damn. The bastard who had “bought her contract” from her agent, who had told her exactly what her new “modeling” career would consist of.
Yuri had been in the car she had jumped out of, riding in the back seat with her, about to force her to…do things to him as he took her to her new “home,” a caravan park off the autobahn outside Berlin, Germany, where she would work as a prostitute for as long as her new owners had use for her.
Yuri, in a cloud of smoke.
His sharp features pointed at her like a bird of prey. He was laughing. “You thought you could get away from us, little Natasha? You thought that leaping to your death would save you?”
She hadn’t been planning on leaping to her death, as he put it, when she jumped out of the vehicle. She recollected that she just wanted away from him, away from all of them, all the vermin who had preyed on a foolish young girl with dreams of success in western Europe, who had believed the oily-voiced, well-dressed men who had told her all her dreams could come true, modeling, acting, well-paid gigs because she had it, the indefinable something that got you into magazines selling clothing and perfume and make-up. Lies. All lies. After she was in their clutches they let her know what she would really be doing, servicing up to a dozen men per day in a little trailer park off the autobahn outside Berlin, working ten hours a day as a common prostitute as she “paid off her debt” to them.
She remembered the smell of Yuri’s pungent cologne, felt his powerful hand on the back of her head as he tried to pull her down into his lap. She remembered lurching away from him, finding the door to the BMW unlocked, jumping out of the moving car, not thinking beyond the moment, just the need to get away from him, from all of them. The cold, wet day. The wet, hard pavement.
“You are not dead,” Yuri’s voice continued, emanating from the ghostly smoke that made up her former pimp’s visage. “You did not escape,” he laughed. “And you are still working for us. Welcome to the world of Brutalia.” He finished the last, ominous sentence with an equally eldritch laugh, then his smoky visage dissipated in the clean air of the rural landscape she found herself in.
Tasha had no idea what he meant, but she knew she was in a bad situation. The figures behind her were less than a couple hundred yards away now, and more distinct. One was a normally shaped man, from what she could tell, a sword in his hand as he ran in her direction. A freaking sword, she thought. The other…she had no idea what he was. A huge, misshapen beast of a man, a head the shape of a canned ham, but three times larger, with what seemed like tusks protruding from his mouth, from what she could surmise at this distance. He bore a huge axe, one that was definitely not designed for chopping down trees.
No, that was an axe men went to war with.
Natasha Magnova had always been a girly-girl, and not the slightest bit ashamed of it. Nails, hair, make-up, clothes. Those things were all certainly important to her, but they just as certainly did not define the totality o
f who she was. She was also a fairly integrated member of her time and her age, or at least she had been before smashing herself against the pavement of the autobahn and ending up in this bizarre land, and as such she had seen her share of TV shows and movies, including a decent number of action, war, and historical adventure flicks. And from what she could see of the two men running toward her – well, one man and one whatever – they were straight out of a fantasy movie, with their garb and their weapons.
She also knew there was no way she could outrun them. She could draw her small dagger and try to fend them off…which seemed equally as impossible, considering how tiny her weapon was, and how ignorant she was of its use. (Well, she thought, not entirely ignorant. She remembered how she had felt when she had drawn it, the first words that came into her mind had been “crouch and stab,” and her body had tensed up at the thought of it, as though the words were embedded somehow in her muscles, or, rather, in the muscles of this strange new body of hers.)
No, weapons would not save her. And neither would running. That only left…knowledge. Tasha opened the book again, hoping for something, anything, that might enlighten her in some way, might even save her.
The book fell open to a page that read, Harlot Spells, Level One. The first spell on the page jumped out at her, a glowing runic letter next to the words, “Cloak of Deceit.”
“Cloak of deceit,” she muttered…
…and she heard a sound like fairy tale windchimes, then felt a warm burn up the length of her buxom body. And then that body disappeared. Her legs were gone, her arms, the book and backpack she carried, all were invisible to her eye.
She was in the same place, still on the expanse of greensward that bled in one direction into a sandy beach, and in the other to a purple, technicolor forest, but her body, she could tell, had disappeared. That was certainly how the men running toward her reacted. The human figure stopped abruptly, shouting, “Hey harlot, how long does that lame-ass spell last, anyway. Thirty seconds? Forty-five?”
As if his words triggered some new awareness, she suddenly noticed a glowing bar to the upper left of her field of vision, counting down with a digital timer next to it, from 57 seconds to 56, 55, 54… She would probably be invisible to their eyes for sixty seconds and no longer. And she was quite certain she should be as far away as possible when she reappeared.
“Come on now, girlie,” the man called to her. “Show yourself and we’ll make it quick.”
“Quick?” The huge man-beast next to him said. “What do you mean, quick? That no fun!”
As the man tried to quiet his companion, a word popped into Tasha’s head: Ogre. That thing was an ogre. This was like one of those games her boyfriend Misha used to play, years ago, when they were both young teen-agers, him hunched over his terminal bashing away at monsters, exotic fantasy music playing in the background, while she studied for school or leafed through fashion magazines. Up in his room, his mother downstairs cooking, the bedroom door open so she could keep an eye on them. Tasha would occasionally watch, when Misha was in a particularly exotic locale, a grand castle or an enchanted kingdom of some sort, or if the creature he was fighting was particularly awesome looking.
Yes, this was an ogre. And she, Tasha, had just cast a spell that made herself invisible to the two of them for…she checked the timer bar at the edge of her field of vision: For another forty-some seconds.
She started running towards the thick forest, their words chasing after her like hunting dogs: “We only want the bounty, harlot! We won’t rape you, just a quick death, then be about our business!”
“No! I want the woman first, then we kill her!”
“Would you bloody well shut your hole, you idiot?”
“Look,” the ogre shouted, “the grass is moving where she’s running!”
It was true. Tasha winced as she saw that the grass was up near her knees. The path she made was clearly visible to her two wannabe murderers, rapists, whatever they were – both, it sounded like.
They were after her, gaining, and she was still at least a hundred yards from the forest when the timer bar, blinking ferociously, ran down to zero. As her form reappeared in the world a blow struck her in the back, knocking her to the ground. It was a pierce like a knife, but with all the force of a heavy fist, knocking the air out of her lungs; Tasha cried out in agony. She remembered how the pavement felt as she went face first into it…this was as bad. Whatever had struck her spun her around as she fell to the earth, and the last thing she saw through the blood-red haze of pain was her murderers, the ogre grinning lasciviously at her near-nude body, the man holding a crossbow and grinning through his drooping black moustaches. The ogre bent to loot her body and said, “Damn, only one platinum piece.”
“She must be Level One or Two.” The human shrugged. “Guess we should have captured her, banged her a few times first.”
Total revulsion for the two pigs swept through her, almost overriding the pain as she bled to death. She tried to reach her dagger as the ogre’s huge, hairy hand moved toward her breasts, but she couldn’t move.
Then, before she could experience the degradation of the hideous thing’s touch, life left her. Tasha died beneath a gray sky, alone save for her murderers.
……….
And I awoke and found me…in a Hobbit hole? A shop at a Renaissance Fair? The fellow standing on the counter – not behind the counter – looked a bit like those Bilbo/Frodo thingies she had seen at the movies a few years ago. Hobbits. Short, funny looking. Big, hairy feet. Puffing a pipe and grinning up and down at her. Tasha glanced down at her body, the same curvaceous one she had the last time she had awoken in this bizarre land, full and intensely feminine.
“Might I interest you in a tincture of aphrodisiac, young harlot?” the hobbit thing was saying to her. Tasha didn’t know whether to laugh or tell him to piss off.
“Could you please just tell me where I am?”
The creature’s face froze then – everything in her field of vision did, becoming a black-and-white background for a screen that appeared before her. It contained text and numbers both, lots of statistics, and a picture of herself, nude, spinning slowly on a pedestal. “Welcome to Brutalia,” an ominous voice said. “Enjoy your time here hahaha…” The laughter was menacing, but slightly tongue-in-cheek. The voice continued in a more explanatory tone. “You have one base point to allocate. You have five skill points to allocate.” A sound like eldritch windchimes shattered through her ears and a new screen popped up in her field of vision. She read the following, trying to make sense of it:
Race: Human
Strength: 1
Agility: 2
Dexterity: 4
Intelligence: 1
Wisdom: 2
Charisma: 10
Class: Harlot
Secondary: Rogue, Enchantress
Level One Spells:
Cloak of Deceit: 1
Level One Skills:
Seduction: 1
Diplomacy:1
Level One Rogue Skills:
Pickpocket: 1
Stab: 1
Level One Enchantress Skills:
Sow Confusion: 1
The thoughts tumbling through Tasha’s head froze her into place, unable to act. This was just too weird, all of this…it was so much like the games Misha used to play. But this was all so real, so very real – the pain when she had…died?
Surely she had died. And when she did, just as in one of these fantasy games, she had not really died. She had reappeared here, in this place, a merchant’s shop where she could make purchases. “Money,” she said aloud, and saw the figures:
Copper: 0
Silver: 0
Gold: 0
Platinum: 0
Okay, worry about money, or lack of it, later – as she had done throughout all twenty years of her existence. For now…points to allocate. The Base Point probably went into her core statistics, like strength and intelligence. She seemed lacking in all of them… Just a dumb w
hore, she thought. Yuri must have set her up with these statistics, and was letting her know exactly what he thought of her. Dexterity, ha. Always good to be flexible when you’re satisfying a customer. Dex was at 4. And Charisma, wow. She was off the charts in Charisma: Only one point in Strength, but 10 in Charisma. After flailing her hands about a bit, she figured out how to work the screen that floated in front of her, basically using her index finger as a pointer. She put her single Base Point into Strength. “Is good to be strong, Natasha,” she heard her grandmother’s voice saying.
Five Skill Points… That must be the things that were specific to her class. She had already seen what Cloak of Deceit would do, and it had been pretty awesome. Maybe more skill points in it would cause it to act longer. But there were the other skills. Harlot? Rogue? Enchantress? So which was she? The way she understood the charts and the information, Harlot was her main thing, but the other things that described her, Rogue and Enchantress, were secondary to that. But they both sounded a lot more useful. Stab? That definitely gets a point, she though, fingered the hilt of the dagger sheathed at her waist. And pickpocket…that could always come in handy. Sow Confusion, too. She put the two remaining points in Cloak of Deceit, figuring being invisible might be the best thing available to her in this world until she figured out what the hell was going on.
She studied the rest of the screen floating above her. Quite a bit to take in. She wished she had played those games along with Misha when she was younger. Inventory, Messages, History, Contact –
Contact! She activated that: “Contact Support,” it said, but when she tried the message came up, “Function Disabled.” Great. Then she saw, “Text.” She clicked on that, then activated “Send Text Message.” She tried to remember Misha’s phone number. She hadn’t seen him since his parents had moved away from St. Petersburg, when he was sixteen. They had dated for a couple years, had been inseparable, more pals than boyfriend/girlfriend, though there had been some of those activities as well. Almost inseparable…and now she couldn’t recall his phone number… She had always used muscle memory to key it in. She pretended she was typing his number on a keypad, let the muscle memory return to her, then typed in the number: