Bounty Harlot

by Alexei Tripmiov

  “My pleasure, soldier-boy.”

  It had been a pleasure, too. As much as she hated the idea of selling sex for money, it had been rather pleasant with Sergeant Orlando. He was a tough, tender lover, and practically worshiped her with his eyes and his hands as he took her. And she had really needed the money. “I need to zone out for a minute,” she said.

  The sergeant nodded. “Meditate?”

  “Is that what they call it?”

  He looked at her quizzacally.”

  “When players like, you know, check their inventory, or their strength stats or whatever.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Meditate.”

  “Well excuse me for a couple minutes while I meditate.”

  She accessed her control screens and while looking for the text function saw that she had gained experience. Apparently screwing around bumped your experience up. She wondered if that was just for harlots, or for everybody. Probably just harlots, she decided. That would encourage players to take on that character. She was again struck by the perverse punishment Yuri had inflicted on her. She might escape her fate in the real world, but here in the game called Brutalia she was condemned to be a prostitute for the rest of her days.

  Maybe not, she thought. Maybe I’m still alive out there somewhere, and Yuri has me hooked up to some kind of fancy gaming equipment.

  She found the messaging function and sent Misha a text, taking up almost all the money Sergeant Orlando had paid her. It read: “Dear Misha. You will not believe me, but every word of this is true. I have been kidnapped and forced to live in the role-playing game called Brutalia. I am a harlot in the city of Elsinore, currently at the harlot’s guild. Please help me. Contact the authorities to find where my real world body is, if you can. If I am still alive. The Berliner Woche newspaper has a recent article about my ‘suicide.’ Or meet me here in this world, if you are still playing these sorts of games. If I am not at the Harlot’s guild in Elsinore I will try to be at the main gate of the city at noon every day. Please Misha, I don’t know who else to turn to. My mother would be too confused by all this. Also, you must be careful if you do look for me. Very bad men kidnapped me, and they will kill anybody who interferes with them. Love, Tasha.”

  She thought about revising it, then, after attaching a picture of herself from her inventory, fired it off without thinking about it further. At least she had warned him of the possible dangers. If that scared him off, then so be it. She couldn’t lead him into danger without giving him fair warning. And maybe she shouldn’t have signed it the way she had. True, they had loved each other once…they had lost their virginity to each other. But time had passed, and their lives had moved apart.

  God, she could have revised that text to death. Maybe she should have had him contact her mother. But there was no way Mother could have processed all this. Tasha’s parents had been older when they’d had her, both in their mid-forties. Her father had died from a sudden heart attack a few years ago, and Mother lived frugally on a pension. Her life revolved around the Church and television programs. She was a kind woman, but there was no way she could have understood anything of what was happening to her daughter.

  Misha would get it, though. He was an expert on computers, doing something with his skills for the military, and had played games such as Brutalia ever since he had been a child. He would know about this world, and what was possible in it. Even Tasha had heard something about the new interfaces between people and computers, and how it made online gaming so much more realistic. At the time she had assumed it was something like virtual reality, Google glasses or some-such virtual reality bullshit. She had no idea it was this real.

  And real it was, she thought for the hundredth time as she exited the inventory screen and returned to herself on the bed, a soft, smooth sheet over her warm, voluptuous body, her stalwart lover staring appreciatively down at her.

  Flipping the sheet from her nude body, Tasha patted the bed beside her. “Let’s get started on your second night, Orlando.”

  “Fine by me…just give me a few minutes to undress.”

  “Do those trousers have a fly?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A way for you to take your cock out without –”

  “I know what a fly is,” he chuckled.

  “If you can be careful with that armor and not scratch me too badly…I’d like to give it a go.”

  He stroked the stubble on his chin and said, “Try getting on all fours. Shouldn’t be a problem like that.”

  It wasn’t.

  ……….

  She had been drowsing when Orlando went off to work, but was fully awake when he returned, just beginning to wonder what to do with herself. The bedroom in the guild hall was a perfectly safe place to be, and Tasha decided that all she wanted, except for getting back to the real world, was to be safe. Just a few months ago she had craved adventure, new places, new experiences, but such youthful desires had led her right into the arms of the master manipulator Yuri. Though hesitant to even leave her room, she decided she would venture out into Elsinore in the protective custody of Sergeant Orlando of the City Guard. Maybe go to another tavern. That had been kind of fun.

  When he returned, though, she saw that fun was not to be on the agenda. His hyper-masculine features were drooping, downcast in a woebegone look that pained her to see it. And he was no longer in his armor. He wore civilian mufti, a simple woolen tunic that she had seen solely on new players. Also gone was his sword — at his belt hung a small dagger that didn’t look much larger than her own. “What’s wrong, babe? What happened?”

  He brightened just a bit at her spontaneously given term of endearment but the momentarily cheerful grin disappeared as he spoke. “I’ve been kicked out of the Guards.”

  “Wow. Just wow. How does something like that happen?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows. My superior told me I angered the wrong people.”

  A sinking feeling came over Tasha. “Oh dear, I think it might be my fault.”

  “I don’t see how it could be.”

  “That creep you killed yesterday, Drogar –”

  “Drogar the Assassin,” Orlando said, a wry smile crossing his lips.

  “Him. I didn’t think guards were supposed to intervene in squabbles between player-characters. At least that’s what I gathered from looking at some of the game tips in the inventory screen.”

  He looked at her blankly. “I have no idea what you just said.”

  “Mmm…that kid…I think he might be more powerful than you knew. Some of us, a few of us here, are what could be called ‘players,’ and they have a little more clout than, uh…non-players…” It sounded odd to her even as she said it. Tasha had no idea how Sergeant Orlando – scratch that, just Orlando now – how he processed the world around him, doing the same job every day, for the most part, standing at his post, doing whatever he was tasked to do. The artificial intelligence program that propelled him through his tasks was a marvel to behold, enabling him to chat, to flirt – and the interface with her own immersion in the game made it feel as though he was actually touching her, and last night, even actually making love with her. But he was still a program, with no knowledge of the outside world. Everything was viewed through the lens of what he had been programmed to think about the game world of Buralia. It was impossible for him to think outside of that box.

  “He looked like just a down-and-out scoundrel to me,” Orlando said. “But regardless, I’m out of a job…and it gets even worse.”

  “How so?”

  “I’ve been banished from the city, ordered to leave within 24 hours. Under pain of death. And…”

  His downcast look prompted her to ask, “There’s more?”

  “There’s a price on my head. A bounty. Anybody who kills me gets 10 platinum pieces.” He glanced suddenly from her sympathetic visage to the dagger at her belt, perhaps wondering if she was tempted to try to cash in on his corpse then and there.

  She raised a hand to his g
rizzled cheek. “There’s a bounty on my head, too, babe.”

  “Truly?”

  “Truly. A pimp named Yuri put it there, when he banished me to this virtual world. I’m sorry, I guess you don’t know what I’m talking about again.”

  “Anyway,” he said, “I’ve come to say good-bye to you. You’ll be safer here in the city, in your guild hall, than you would out in the wasteland.” He opened his coin pouch and removed some of the money. “I’ll share what I have with you, and with what remains to me I will purchase what equipment I can to face the great wilderness outside these walls. Please know that you will always be in my thoughts…and in my dreams.”

  Tasha stood and grabbed him by his thick arms. “I’m coming with you, Orlando.”

  “But…why?”

  “I’m no safer here in the city than I would be outside the walls with you. Less safe, actually. At least with you, we can watch each other’s backs. I read something about ‘grouping,’ it’s called, making it easier to kill ‘mobs,’ rats and bats and the like.”

  “Well,” he said, uncertain, “it would certainly be more pleasant with your company.”

  “And you need me, bub.”

  “Bub?”

  “I can still go into the city, even though you can’t. I can sell our loot to the merchants here. I’ll probably get more money for it than you would, too, with my off-the-charts charsimsa score.”

  Expressions flickered across his face like shadow and light, from disbelief to pure joy. “I knew you were one of a kind,” he said. “I just knew it.” He bowed to her. “You are as brave as you are beautiful, Tasha. The cold ground shall be our bed, and the stars above our canopy.”

  “Sure,” she said, grinning at his poetic turn of phrase. “Let’s do this thing.”

  ……….

  She learned fairly quickly that Orlando had lost a massive amount of experience, and at least one level, when they began fighting outside the city gates. She was striking for three or four points of damage with her little dagger, and at best her big tough city guard was hitting for seven or eight points. Still, though, by staying with the rats and common desert snakes they were able to farm a fair amount of pelts and bones. Orlando had hung on to two backpacks, and it took at least a dozen kills to fill them. By the end of the first day they had amassed three gold coins and a pair of coppers between them, along with a full larder of food and drink.

  They found a spot near the city walls for the night, Tasha a bit closer than Orlando, as the guards had orders to slay him on sight, should he come within their aggro range. She shook her head wryly at how casually she used the gaming terms now, picking them up while meditating to bring her health back, poring through the gaming info available to her when she was in inventory mode. Orlando just looked at her blankly, though, when she used such terms.

  “Aggro?” he had said.

  “Short for aggressive. When you get too close to them, their aggro program kicks in.”

  “You mean if they see me, they try to kill me.”

  She realized they were both using the same tone of voice with the other as they framed this world in their own terminology, equal parts condescending and incredulous.

  As they found their spot for the night, a flat stretch of ground far from the guards but not too near the hunting grounds, Orlando raised a hand to his lips, cautioning her to be quiet. She had learned while hunting with him that his senses were good, better than her own, as though being of this world made him more attuned to it than she was. Words came to her on the cool night air, a high-pitched whimper followed by the sound of male laughter. Icy fingers played down Tasha’s spine. She had a feeling she knew what she was hearing.

  She repeated the fingers-to-lips motion to Orlando, whispered, “Wait here for a minute,” then muttered the words of the Cloak of Invisibility spell. She felt herself fade from the world – that was the only way she could describe it – as the hard earth, the starry sky, and the massive walls of Elsinore morphed into a black-and-white daguerreotype. She stepped lightly toward the sound, further down the stretch of city wall, her dagger at the ready.

  Yes, it was what she had expected. They were easier to hear as she grew closer, the sobbing of the woman, the grunts of the man who lay between her spread legs, the laughter of the other two who held her feet apart. Damn you, she thought.

  They had no idea she approached, stepping up silently behind the one nearest her, s slender male in a gray robe, some noob mage of some sort. He wouldn’t know what hit him. She had practiced her Back Stab skill throughout the day, a gift from the Rogue sub-class that was apparently her birthright, and she knew how much damage it could do. Young Merlin here found out as her blade slid between his ribs, a critical hit, and the scumbag fell to the ground.

  Invisibility vanished at the moment of her attack. “Now!” she called out to Orlando, launching herself at the other antagonist who remained on his feet. The rapist between the girl’s legs, she was happy to see, suddenly had his hands full with the girl on the ground, who launched her fists at him, punching and clawing. She wasn’t doing much damage, but it distracted him, at least, and his weapon wasn’t equipped as he had been relying on his confederates in crime to cover that front.

  Tasha’s next opponent looked to be a straightforward warrior, human, like the other two, and carrying a sword and buckler. She stabbed him once before he could ready himself for her attack, but then began taking merciless damage as he swung his sword and bashed her with his small shield. Over half her hit points were gone in just a few seconds. She stumbled back, knowing the pain of death was imminent, but before her health bar hit zero Orlando was at her side, using his dagger and dodging the warrior’s attacks.

  Ha, she thought, turning to the girl and her assailant. He was on his feet, his pants down at his knees constricting his movement. The girl had found a dagger and they faced off. She saw Tasha approach and maneuvered herself to position her opponent with his back to Tasha.

  Excellent. Back stab time…

  The slender blade slid between his ribs in a most satisfying manner. He gasped, the breath taken from him. “Bastard,” she muttered as he fell to the ground.

  Orlando had dispatched the young warrior he had dueled with and, after casting a solicitous glance at her and the other girl, bent over the body to loot it. Tasha did likewise with the warrior and took a sharp, straight short sword from him, a few coins, and a hodgepodge of crap he had looted from rats and snakes. The other corpse, the magician, carried a couple interesting scrolls – spells, she saw – that could be used by any low-level spellcaster. Snare was one, and Distant Viewing another. She stashed them in a backpack and said to Orlando, “Anything good?”

  He grinned. “Money. A lot of money.”

  “What’s a lot?”

  “A hundred platinum coins.”

  “Wow. Just wow.” Tasha sat on the ground to speed up her health regeneration.

  “How a cad dressed like a pauper gets that kind of money is beyond me,” Orlando mused aloud.

  Tasha thought: Probably bought it back in the real world. Orlando pocketed some and handed her a portion, then, after thinking about it only a moment, handed the rest to the girl. Tasha felt a surge of warmth for him. Not all men were assholes, she thought. At least the digital ones were okay, some of them.

  “Thank you so much,” the girl said through the occasional sob. “Both of you. For everything.

  The girl was dressed much like Tasha, she could see in the soft light of Brutalia’s twin moons. Metallic lingerie and sexy, silky garments. The features of her face were not readily apparent in the night, but she was obviously beautiful. Orlando, though he might be currently smitten with Tasha, couldn’t help but notice the young harlot’s attractiveness. His smile was about twice as large as normal, moonlight glittering off his pearly white teeth.

  “I will be forever in your debt,” she said, “and I doubt if I can ever repay you.”

  “Tell us your story,” Tasha said. “That
would be a good start.”

  The girl, Kat, like Tasha, was Russian. Tasha wondered what sort of person would choose intentionally to play a prostitute in this game…and the truth came as no surprise. “I was so foolish,” Kat began, “thinking a music career was right around the corner, that all I had to do was give myself over to that awful man and he would make all my dreams come true.”

  She told a painfully familiar story. She meets a hot young guy, sharp and sexy, plenty of money to throw around, who tells her she’s the most amazing singer he’s heard in years. The guy hooks her up with “a really powerful music industry executive,” a gentleman named Yuri. Of course.

  Tasha interrupted her. “Squat, bullish man? Balding? Thick, rubbery lips.”

  She nodded at each of her descriptors. “Yes! You know him?”

  “Unfortunately I do. Or did.”

  Yuri paid for her to travel to Germany, where he told her she would be recording a demo and performing at clubs, but when she arrived she discovered, of course, that she would be working for him as a prostitute.

  “They drugged me. They kept me on a diet of heroin and speed, shooting me up twice daily, sometimes more, to keep me pliable. They raped me repeatedly, then started selling me to men.”

  Tasha put her hand on the girl’s. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I tried to escape, and when they came after me there was a…a bad accident. I fell out a window. Or maybe I jumped…it’s all kind of a blur… I came around long enough to know I was paralyzed. They told me that just a year earlier they would have killed me, but now I would have a new life in a new virtual gaming world…but a world where I would be a second class citizen…where I would be used by the men who enjoyed frolicking in that sort of world…”

  “And here you are,” Tasha said. Kat’s story broke her heart. She imagined the two of them lying in beds side by side somewhere back in the real world, on life support, one of Yuri’s guards molesting them whenever he felt like it. Her sorrow changed to anger, then a stern resolve. Some way, somehow, she would put things right…