by Yuli Ban
Unfortunately, the sparkles left behind an aftereffect: pain.
Finally, a notification hurt my eyes and reading it felt like dragging my brain across a thousand miles of needles and broken glass. Though it was foggy and only getting foggier, I was able to discern the little curves and swirls of English quick enough before my conscious intelligence started to hurt.
What. Sort of bullshit. Was that.
I wasn't warned. There was no notification to tell me anything. But that's when I realized that of course I hadn't seen anything— I had orgasmed when it probably came up. And because I wanted more poon, I didn't read a damn thing. The only thing I wanted to read was those holes. And now I was damned to suffer crippling pain for 24 hours.
I forced my mouth to open and made my reedy vocal chords spit something resembling a sound, and it had to have been something like, "Spt.....Kckl.... Gck...." but I was trying to say, "The game just told me that I spent too much of my sexual prowess on you and now I've been kicked from playing for one in-game day. Please help me, you beautiful women." I tried to turn my head but I may have imagined it. It still hurt either way. "You too, Olga the Elf." That definitely came out as some gurgly noise.
Olga said, I don't know.
Anyway, the whole room flashed red and all of the girls looked to the sky as if demons were about to erupt. It was no different than demons. Lights appeared in the sky, and I felt the faint vibrating thump thump thumps of helicopter rotors through the ground. Spotlights scanned over the base, and I could see the edges of billowing pillars of smoke.
Ana helped me up, letting me fall over her shoulder. The raw, savage pain of her fur igniting against my skin filled me with such black pain that I felt like vomiting, but the vomit stayed right where it was because my body was in too much pain to cause any retching.
Who would make a goddamn game like that, honestly? You'd get sued right out the ass and back up the dick. But if there was any plus side to it, it was that my hands rubbed against Ana's puffy kitten labia as they dangled lifelessly over her body.
Tatiana pulled out a gun from I don't know where, because having any clothes at all meant she still had a hammerspace inventory. Thank God for anal.
She had an Uzi not much different from my own in the many hours earlier, and she used that to lay down some fire on the helicopter. At least, I'd like to believe she did but since I was staring straight down at Ana's vulva the whole way, I could only see the flashes and hear a few thumping gunshots and deduced from context clues that's what happened.
When Ana laid me down on that gloriously cold metal floor, I saw her grab a Panzerfaust from a locker and fire it straight at the helicopter. That machine vanished into a cloud of yellow and white fire, then succumbed to black smoke. Yet we weren't getting off that easy because another helicopter rushed from over the horizon.
And then came the worst notification of my life.
That certainly got a low, morose sound out of me. I didn't want to die. I didn't know if dying in the game almost meant that old Matrix gambit as well, and I didn't want to find out. Maybe I'd respawn somewhere, but maybe my eyes would go out one last time and the memory of me would be kept only with a few NPC scripts given names for the rest of time.
With all my strength, I forced my mouth muscles to form a word and I forced that word from within me.
I said to my harem, "Alive."
They all looked at me. One by one, they crowded around and kissed me right on the lips. Even Olga the Elf. And I knew right then and there that I was in good hands. They weren't going to let me die. Ana rushed out first and Maria followed, leaving Tatiana and Olga to carry me out of the base's husk. However, the gunmen ripped some fire at the ground, and I went rolling forward. Maria looked into my eyes and I looked into hers.
I was so happy to have them as allies. That pain opened my eyes to something I'd never considered before and I regretted all of my earlier bitching. These girls weren’t just a harem of tropes that I had met a few hours earlier. No, they were loyal to me and wanted the best for me. That they orbited around me was a side effect of their loyalty. And of course it only takes a collective half an hour of bonding for four individual, fiercely independent women to become loyal to a whiny little bitch boy and I should probably stop thinking about all the logical gaps in this before my brain started to deny I was in a video game again.
'Please. Just get me outta here.'
And Maria, while carrying an STG-44 and shooting at the next copter that came in, turned to me and said in a perfectly legible voice,
"We will, big man."
She tossed her gun away and carried me out herself.
To be cont—
The last thing I remembered before passing out again was that Nazi biker with the MP40. Seriously, what happened to his gun? Where did it go? Why did it disappear? That was well before any glitches started to happen, so there was no reason at all for him to glitch out. That gun’s going to bother me until I die. It was like I saw Bigfoot but my smartphone conveniently died at the exact moment that out-of-focus monster appeared, or maybe like a gun that glitched out of reality when a newspaper stand hit its wielder.
Where.
Did.
His.
Gun.
Go.
To be continued!
With weapons!
Commercial Break…
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(Re)Load…
I woke up feeling like I had just been born. My new birthplace was a city by the name of “Amville”.
Who chose these fonts? At least I already knew I was still in the game. But that seedy smell, now that was pure motel stink. You know that new car smell? Mix it with new carpet smell as well as the odor of decade-old beer stains, cockroach corpses, and fumes. Fumes that accumulated from very nearby. So nearby that it absolute had to be— yep. I pulled myself out of the covers and saw some tailfins and hubcaps right beyond the windows.
“Are you serious? A seedy motel?” There are so many pop culture references I could choose from that I felt overwhelmed. Which was going to be my first? Actually, I don’t care for pop culture references like normal people. And just beyond my hearing, I heard what sounded like voices. Very familiar voices alongside voices that weren’t voices. As I took a single step away from my bed, my legs gave out. But that wasn’t from pain.
Maybe I really had just been born!
“What the hell!” I did a push-up because lo
rd knows I didn’t get on my feet from that pathetic effort. The bathroom door opened and I saw Ana peek out. Is it a bad sign that the first thing I noticed about her was that she was once more clad in that shiny, skin-tight black leather?
She seemed to pop out of her clothes as she waved and said, “Oh! Hey, Boss! We’re just making a deal.”
I blinked and shook my head, trying to keep the tangy taste of waking up off my tongue. “Deal? What kind of deal? Wait— where are we? What are we doing here?”
Two hairy insect legs reached around the door frame, and a second later came a giant cockroach’s head. That alone didn’t freak me out as much as the pornstache above its pinchers.
“You the perp? Ey, listen, uh, tell these broads that our rates go thirty an hour. Yeah, see? Yeah. You don’t fuck wid us, we don’t fuck witchu.”
And the cockroach had a ‘30s-era Jersey accent. I couldn’t believe it. Not only could I not believe it, I refuse to believe it. I wanted to physically reach into my skull and rip the experience from my neurons.
A second roach walked out, its leggy ‘hand’ shaking Ana’s.
“Exactly, darling. Recruit more pimps. We need a pimp-roach in every motel in the state.”
"Recruit more pimps?" I forced myself towards the girls, but then one of the roaches pulled a switchblade on me.
"Back up, good man. Back up if you know what's good for you."
I didn't back up. At this point, I was no coward and wasn't going to take being threatened by a goddamn bug. Luckily, my stomps and sudden motions forward caused the roaches to back away. Even the one making the deal with Maria pulled away.
"Tell your muscular friend here to calm himself." I didn't like the way its antennae moved. Didn't look natural.
Maria rolled her eyes and looked to me.
"Come on, big man. You don't need to be so alpha at a time like this. We're making real progress here."
"Yeah, how about you back up and tell me where 'here' is."
The roaches turned to each other, muttered something in an incomprehensible squeal, and bowed to the girls. The main one turned back and said, "In cash. Remember— pimps in cash. Killkamesh."
Once they stepped out and shut the door behind them, I checked the floor for any of their droppings or disembodied legs. Apparently, giant roaches keep themselves held together better than the vermin that infest the walls.
"What the hell was that?"
Maria pushed me and said, "Damn it, big man! We were close to a deal!"
I didn't push back, but I wanted to. "Deal? What the devil is this about a deal? What happened? Where are we?"
And because it must have been funny to God or the Devil, thunder rolled. There was a damn rhombus of sunshine on the floor when the roaches stepped out, so I knew that the clouds had to have been racing across the sky.
Except that the girls all said in tandem, "Oh wow, you cheated!"
They pointed at me, except they did it in that coy way where they were aiming their fingers like snakes with their hands on their hips.
I shook my head. Of all the things that had happened since I awoke in the game, that had to be one of the weirdest. And though my mouth kept flapping, no words came.
Finally, Tatiana said, "You said some magic words! And as a result, you activated the thunderstorm cheat."
Olga added, "It's been a while since there have been cheaters on the servers. I love it when it rains!"
I can't lie, I also love the rain for as long as I'm indoors, but I figured I'd enjoy the moment with my harem later. "No, don't change the subject! I just woke up from some dystopian-ass nightmare of a nightmare fulla commercials, and the first thing I see are a bunch of Joyzee Roaches!"
Ana grabbed my arm. "You oughta know that the roaches are gonna help us get a good revenue stream in, especially once we trounce some more masts! And that dream of yours was prolly just the natural ad-filled loading screen that passes whenever you sleep in the game."
Maria pulled Ana away boob-first to say, “Go check on the roaches for me, sweety.”
She saluted and said, “Aye-aye, capitana!” First of all, Maria was wearing pure silk. Black silk jacket that poofed around her wrists but was damn tight everywhere else and made sure to accentuate the mindnumbingly deep gravity wells of her breasts; white silk leggings that did the same thing for as her (and she went out of her way to make sure I got a look of those curves because of some certainly very creepy programmers’ design); even silky boots that stretched past her knees. So the only red skin I got to see on her this time was from her face and the generously-sized boob window in her jacket. I can’t say that it looked particularly classy but it certainly carried more of an old-school lady’s swagger than Ana’s ‘60s catsuit that left nothing to the imagination.
Because learning where I was had become some sort of special epic quest in and of itself, the girls started talking over each other just to make sure I couldn't be heard. Even when I screamed, "HEY!" over and over about five times, they got louder. They were doing this on purpose, goddammit. Except Ana wasn’t even in the room anymore, so that meant the three were making up for lost volume. Soon, they were literally yelling at each other. Not even saying anything— just making short staccato monkey yelps with stupid grins.
And it wasn't until I went back into my bed, threw the covers over my head, and started chomping on some Reese's Pieces that I realized all my candy was mysteriously gone and those weren't Reese's Pieces.
That was the LSD.
I hoped that I packed my bags because I was about to take a long trip.
Just to troll me, the girls came bouncing in and the first thing I heard was, "So you wanna know what happened?"
When I said, "Yes!" the words echoed throughout time and I fell into a room a thousand years wide. As I walked a thousand years to the coasts of being, I strummed and riffed along to a trillion-year-long guitar. All of the notes lifted off the strings and grooved along cosmic radio waves. Everywhere I looked, there were auras emanating from auras, circles begetting circles, and machine elves jumping through— that wasn't LSD.
The machine elves were the ones who had to tell me that I had dropped half of a pound of pure DMT and my brain was about to give out as the fractals began to become sapient. I was able to taste my own memories and see into the future. I was Superman.
The ultra-strangeness was too much for me and I found a nice hole to die in and found myself falling out of it back into reality.
Yep, like that, the trip ended. There I was, shivering under the covers, dribbling on some milk— milk?
I spat it out. When I looked at the stain on the sheets, the whiteness proved to me that it was indeed milk and not the other white liquid. And it definitely tasted sweet. But when had I found the time to drink milk? Why was my psyched-out mind driving my body to seek a little of the old moloko-plus?
Tatiana stuffed her exposed breast back into her jacket and said, "You're welcome, Alex!"
A little bit of milk dribbled down my chin as I stared right at that leaky tit for a solid minute.
"You didn't."
"I did!" She looked concerned, brow lifted and standing back like an anime girl about to point at— yep, there she went. Pointing at me like an anime character. "You devoured some bad chemicals, so you had to drink some of a maiden's milk! That's the only way to reverse it!"
Maria stepped in and said, "That's also how we were able to heal you so quickly. Without Tatiana's plentiful milk, you'd still be in a multiverse of pain right about now after you so foolishly activated your El Sexorcisto state."
All of which made me anxious, finally unbearably so.
I had reached it again. That frustration so perfect, so beautiful that I had no words. All I could do was stand and fall back into my bed. The momentum at which I fell propelled another pill of DMT right onto my tongue and I went, "Oh, not again," right as reality broke itself off of itself and exploded into itself for a thousand years.
Luckily, Tatiana still had some
breast milk left for me. It tasted sweet, like ice cream. Should breast milk taste like vanilla ice cream? I’d have been more concerned, but I started using the game world to explain everything away a hundred Nazis ago.
How Tatiana even had any breast milk to give me, I could only chalk up to video game logic. What’s more, she was clearly wearing something different. In fact, as I got a good look at her clothes, I noticed something oddly familiar about them— they were made out of silk like Maria’s! It was even a similar get-up, complete with the tit window to show off her cleavage. The only difference was that her jacket was a bit longer, so her ass curves were constantly teased whenever the skirt-tail lifted. Speaking of tail, Maria’s tail was wrapped around Tatiana like a belt.
"This is all messed up," I said, but I smiled one that felt ginger on my face. Felt ginger? Felt vanilla, in all honesty, because I started to crave more of that breast milk. It really did taste pretty damn good. Tatiana winked at me.
Olga stepped up, and it was her bright red silky harem pants and Arabian vest— also silk— that reminded me that the last time I was conscious, they were all naked. Now they were all clad in silk. Since there was a lull in talking, I tried to speak and that immediately kicked off a wave of conversation about the roaches. Once that passed, I forced my way into the center of the room and clapped.
"Alright! Alright! How about you give me some time to speak?"
Ana danced back into the room— perhaps she had been finalizing some sort of deal with the roach pimps— and said, "So who else—"