The building at the address Dana had been given didn't exactly scream 'high tech virtual reality studies lab.' In truth, it looked more like a doctor's office. A parking lot half-filled with cars and the front of the building being mostly glass and allowing a glance in at a waiting room filled with women who were conspicuous just by how inconspicuous they were attempting to be along with a perky woman in business casual at a check-in desk separated from the room by a glass divider. A look at the side of the building, a concrete surface rather than glass, would reveal clean spots in the shape of letters where the name of the business that had previously occupied the building had been removed. Specifically: 'Greater City OBGYN.'
The was some evidence that it might be the place she was looking for, at least. The invitation had asked her to arrive well after typical business hours and any normal office would've been closed. The sign at entrance to the parking lot, one that once likely sported the names of the practicing doctors, was blank except for a street number which matched the one on the invitation she had received. Finally, once she got close enough to the door she would be able to read the sheet of laminated printer paper reading 'EGG Testing Location 8' they'd hung on it. It had to be the place.
Dana simply needed to conquer her shyness in order to cross the perilous waiting room, already filled with its own fair share of other woman awkwardly and nervously waiting and oftentimes looking to and fro like deer being stalked by something, and speak to the woman at the desk to get herself started.
I was originally going to take this a bit further in and get Dana to a tech, but thought it might be a bit more fun to give you a chance to play out a bit of RL Dana's personality when confronted by that most exciting of settings: a doctor's waiting room.
Well. Someone was playing a bad joke on her, but how? That invitation came via an internet friend, and nobody there knew her real identity - she’d carefully crafted an alternate version of herself that lived one city over.
But here she was, with an invitation to test the EGG, and the invitation led straight here: To the address of her first gyno doc, the only place she'd ever wished would just go out of business. Shivers crept down her spine as she remembered: her mom had been away for extended work travel, and her dad had to get her an appointment. She never told anyone, the shock too raw - coming in for a routine checkup and getting a tissue sample taken instead.
But still, she had to go. On the off chance that this did work out, man, real VR? How do you pass that up? Besides, even if it was a set up, the invitation had come via Jake, the cutest healer she'd ever had in a raid. If he was involved, it was worth going, at least… And she knew she couldn't leave without figuring out what this all was about.
As she finally got there, she realized she'd gotten her wish. She left her bike along the wall, right below where those big, awful letters had been. Turning the corner to the entrance, she saw the laminated sign, and rolled her eyes: "No expenses spared, I see." If this was a prank, she'd give them hell over being cheapskates - she was half surprised the waiting desk wasn't cardboard and marker.
And then froze, as she looked inside and saw the waiting women. "People. Why did it have to be people? Nope. Can't deal. Nopenopenope." Shaking her head, she walked back to her bike. Along the way, she remembered the argument she'd had with Michael, her raid lead - tonight was first unlock of DZF, she had to cancel, and he had to go find a substitute tank. Even worse, she couldn't give him a good reason why she couldn't go. Sure, RL takes precedence and all that, but it still sucked. That all did mean she would be bored this evening, because if anyone in her guild saw her log into some online service now, she'd never hear the end of it…
Okay. Fuck that. That sucked more than listening to some potential catfights in a waiting room. Taking a deep breath and sighing, she inadvertently gave two boys at the bus stop wet dreams for the next few nights, as her boobs wobbled in her comics tee. Never noticing all that, she upgraded to a week as she, and her butt, swivelled around and marched back to the entrance.
Not stopping her momentum, she burst through the door and marched right up to the check-in desk. And then realized her newfound momentum didn't extend to actually talking to people without a headset, so she just cleared her throat, slid her printed-out invitation through the document slot, and waited.
If told to take a seat, she'd try and find a seat in a corner, or at least backed by a solid wall, preferably facing as many doors as possible. All the way, avoiding eye contact with anyone and trying to shrink into her seat, wondering what she'd gotten herself into this time...
Hope that wasn't too much / too verbose, I just figured I'd try to bounce the character off a few spots I picked out. This should get more focused as we get through introduction.
Formatting note: I'm doing italics for self-commentary / "muttering to herself" style stuff, but I can edit that if you'd prefer that those match her regular speech style.
The receptionist proved almost cruelly oblivious to Dana's crisis over dealing with so many people unshielded by the comforting glow of a monitor. "Ah, Ms. Miller," she announced to the room at large once the invitation had been handed over to her, ensuring that the bevy of similarly shy women in the waiting room all knew the family name of their latest fellow in perversion. Overall, the receptionist proved just a notch too cheerful for a woman who probably spent eight hours of every weekday dealing with men and women seeking to fulfill their darkest fetishes in the safety of an immersive VR environment.
"Just fill this out," she handed over a clipboard with at least six pages of material on it including everything from physical conditions to psychological ones to emergency contacts and liability waivers. "And make sure to sign here, and here, and here," she pulled pages back one after the other and tapped the sheets with such practice that she didn't even need to look in order to accurately pinpoint the signature area. "We won't be able to keep you as a tester unless all of those are signed and dated," she added. That was apparently to serve as Dana's dismissal as well, because as soon as the woman had the clipboard and pen firmly in her hands the receptionist went right back to what she'd been doing before Dana had approached her -- specifically FreeCell, if the reflection on her glasses was any indication.
Dana would at least be given the opportunity to retreat to an empty corner. The seat she found was on the wall to the left of the main door and gave her a direct line of sight over it and two doors situated on either side of the receptionist's divider. As a bonus, it was neighbored only by an obnoxiously large fake plant and a table covered in magazines that looked so dull they had to have been left behind by the previous occupants. But even if it had been flanked by chairs, the other occupants of the room seemed to be doing their personal best to stay as far out of sight and away from each other as possible, making it perhaps the only time the personal space rule had ever been so closely followed in a waiting room.
It would leave Dana to navigate the maze of legalese and tick off her nos, yeses, and not sures. The contents of the clipboard were enough to spark another unfortunate trip down memory lane, as the various papers weren't dissimilar to what she'd filled out on her solo trip to the gynecologist who'd previously practiced in the very same building. The most notable difference came in the form of the liability waiver; the fine print in it was so thick that it almost looked like someone had just painted the page with a roller dipped in ink. If the renovation budget was lacking, it might well have been because it had all been reallocated to some enterprising law firm's drafting fees.
After she'd finished it and signed enough times to make her hand cramp up, she'd have to brave the gauntlet of social interaction again in order to return the clipboard. With a cursory glance to make sure everything was in order, the receptionist would smile and offer a line that she'd obviously practiced as much as pointing out the dotted lines. "Okay, I'll just get this all entered in and they'll be out for you right away." And like when she'd tapped the various x marks, it too was apparently supposed to double as a dismissal and a signal for Dana to return to her seat.
Or perhaps it was a signal to hurry up and wait, as Dana would be left to do her fair share of it. At least fifteen minutes would pass in which she had few options for entertainment beyond thumbing through decade-old magazines and watching the comings and goings of others through the waiting room. People who'd been waiting before her trickled in through the door to the right of the receptionist -- Dana's right, specifically -- as they were brought back by a total of three women who alternated between calling for testers. Two apparent testers would exit the door in that time as well, consisting of a busty brunette woman who looked like she'd rode a bull and a dark-haired man in his early twenties who might've passed as handsome if he hadn't looked so utterly embarrassed.
Eventually it would be Dana's turn as that same door was opened and her name was called, ensuring that everyone remaining in the waiting room knew both her family and given names. "Dana?" The voice belonged to the third of the women who had been calling people back. She had an appearance that could be easily summed up as 'married to the job.' Black hair tied into a quick ponytail, a skirt and blouse that clashed with her shoes which were obviously designed to look like high heels but consisted neither of height nor heel and had the benefit of being relatively comfortable, and dark circles under her eyes that she only thought were well hidden behind her glasses. She was a little on the chubby side, though she certainly took enough care of herself to be able to use curvy as her preferred adjective.
When Dana presented herself, the black-haired woman would usher her back, leading her down the very same hallway she'd been down the last time she had visited the office, although under different circumstances. "We're going to the last one on the left," she pointed out as she moved. This time, when they reached the end of that hall and the two women moved into the room, Dana was not confronted with an exam table and stirrups but a white pod that bore an almost exact resemblance to an egg.
"So, uh, my name is Lauren" Dana's guide began, closing the door behind her as she spoke and then offering her hand for a handshake. "This is normally where we go into this spiel about the functionality of the EGG and how it's going to revolutionize everything ever and its proper use and what to be careful about, but I like to start with question and answer. You ask any questions that spring to mind and I'll answer, then we can get into the boring script."
All her momentum collapsed back on itself as Dana stood there collecting the paperwork, and she all but fled into an unoccupied corner and cowered down over the form, never even registering anything that was just said. She slowly made her way through the twisty little maze of checkboxes, all different. "No, I am not entering the united states planning to commit a crime," she muttered to herself. When she got to the large legal disclaimer, she just quickly leafed through it and signed the bottom. "Yes, I agree to sacrifice my firstborn son to your beta, and I will self-destruct if I try to talk about anything I see here. Sure. I've been part of the original testers of BTnRG, your puny legalese does not frighten me."
As the worked through the medical section, hands slightly shaking from her memories, she had to keep herself from blurting out to the room "Why the fuck would you need to know if I've ever lactated?" Faithfully filling out all the "have you ever" questions (except that one) with "No" and the "can you imagine" questions with "Yes", she went through endless pages without much emotion, just mechanically reputation-farming the beaurocrats to gain the dungeon key.
When she was done, she waited until everyone in the room looked distracted, and got up to hand in her completed forms. "Sure, the old techsupport 'right away'. Gotcha, I'll just go sit here until patch day then…" Going back to her seat, she pre-emptively hunted for stuff to do. Grabbing one of the old magazines and blowing the dust off, she dropped it like it stung her once she noticed it was one of those "25 sex tricks that will keep him coming back for more" women's mags.
Picking a safer "30 garden ornaments your neighbor is guaranteed not to have," she flipped the magazine over, and with a fingernail drew the boss room where her raid kept wiping, and started going over boss phases and positioning maneuvers. She found that putting the healers over by the fountain meant they'd never have to dodge any AoE, and made a mental note to send the idea to her raid lead. Once she was convinced she wouldn't get any more out of that, she flipped to a random page, and on top of a test review of a motorized lawn-mower-and-mulcher combo she went through some character builds for that RPG she got into last week. Yeah, she'd need to try a ninja-engineer hybrid sometime, that seemed to have some fun opportunities for horribly broken ability combos.
When she got bored with that, and her fingernails threatened to completely break down if she kept it up, she instead watched the other people who got called up, and decided to build a fantasy character and backstory for each of them. There went an ice mage from high Nevalla, coming to the barbarian lands for an ingredient to save her husband. That one was a dwarven thief, forced to use her skills for the local lord to get her lover out from prison. This one was clearly a naive cleric newly out in the wilds. The annoying one who had come in after her, but somehow got called up first, was clearly a prostitute from lake country that was trying, unsuccessfully, to fake being an aristocrat in Mountain City.
Finally, she got called in, relieved that it was by the goblin guide. Once she passed through the door, she visibly relaxed as she only had to interact with one person at a time. Suddenly breaking the floodgates, she almost bubbled over with questions as they were still walking down the hallway, barely having the social controls left to realize her tech was trying to say something first. "You ask any questions that spring to mind" was all she needed to hear, and out came the pent-up results of this being her first real social interaction of the day:
"So, I'm sure you're not actually allowed to answer this, but are you really using PowerPC-based clusters? That is sooo cooool. Is that a fiber connector? I've never seen that many connect into one thing. Is that spheroid what I get into?" Breathe. "So I read that when someone dies while in the simulation, remains of their consciousness is left in the system and can be used to improve NPC behavior. Is that true? Oh, and there were stories of catching some weird virus or parasite and carrying it out, that's not true, right? Is it true the game can make you orgasm until you pass out?" Finger to her nose, thinking. "So, are there classes to pick from, or do I just go in as myself? Speaking of myself, I get to customize my in-game avatar, right?"
A brief pause would give Lauren a moment to get a word in edge-wise, if she wanted, while Dana took in the room and its contents properly for the first time. Too soon, she would continue her barrage once she got control of the "conversation" again: "Do I need to strap on anything, or strip off anything, or how does this work? The guys in my guild always drool 'cause they imagine me playing topless - what I'm not telling them, sometimes I actually am. It's comfy, I find I have the best luck ever when I do, and it's just less bother when I just rolled out of bed. Oh my god, I can't believe I'm telling you this - must be my anticipation of what's coming next."
Briefly flustered as she realized what she just said, there was another opportunity for answers, but of course it didn't last: "And I get to configure my adventure, right? I read the gore is supposed to be super realistic, but I'm really not into that, so I'd like to turn that off. I mean, other than that, I'm probably open for anything, but I'll know it when I see it. Oh, right, and I read you're supposed to take regular breaks - how do I know it's time, and how do I get out?"
Finally, this was the end of her flood, and she would hungrily drink in any details she got, patiently repeating any question that got lost in the jumble. Listening, but always sneaking in glances at the EGG, like a child stuck at a dinner table while there were presents waiting under the christmas tree.
"Alright, alright," the tech said as Dana besieged her with the first round of questions, holding her hands up to halt the eager woman. She didn't act bothered by anything that the woman had admitted, but it seemed that she was rapidly falling behind in keeping track of the eager gamer's questions. "Let me see if I can answer these all in order...." She put a finger to her chin and her eyes wandered upward in thought as she ticked items off of a checklist that was entirely in her head. "Proprietary. Yes. Yes. Heavens no... multiplied by two. That's relatively rare, we've only had it happen at a rate of about one in seventy testers and usually there were extenuating circumstances such as inexperience or stumbling upon something they really, really liked, if you catch my drift. You wouldn't be in danger if you were that one in seventy, at any rate, the EGG is nice and comfy and your vitals will be monitored while you're inside the EGG for any abnormalities."
"We haven't implemented any hard classes but we intend for them to be an option in the future. We're currently working on a specialization system intended to form the base of them. You'll be playing a fantasy module with those specializations. They're pretty neat, actually!" The tech paused for just long enough to take a deep breath, the only precursor to the half-rambling and half-memorized features sales pitch that followed. "You see, when we started messing around with the fantasy-slash-RPG line of settings we realized both that A, our focus groups loved leveling up and gaining new abilities as a core experience of those games, and B, the old fashioned way of implementing levels and abilities wasn't going to cut it on fully immersive hardware. If you're moving like you would in the real world you don't want to have to pull up an interface or use some mental hotkey to cast spells or use abilities, right? It should come as naturally as if you could do outside of the EGG."
The woman stole another quick breath as she transitioned into part two of her spiel. "So we ended up coming up with the specialization system! The EGG keeps track of how many times you've done something and, in proper RPG fashion, it gives you appropriate boosts based on your experience at it. So if you, say, swing a sword at an enemy a hundred times, maybe you won't have personally learned a thing from it but the EGG will start helping to guide your swings by altering your perception of how you swung because it'll consider you as having leveled up at it. You'll get to choose one specialization and you'll use that same perception-altering technology to customize your in-game avatar, both in character creation."
"We have a few different models of EGG in testing. We're trying to figure out what people prefer and if there's enough of a split in opinion to make it worth pushing out both options at once when it goes live. This particular model I'll just open up and you can step inside, though some have seats and other accessories. I'll close it behind you and the fun will begin. Well, actually the settings menu will begin. You can customize most elements of what you'll encounter, we want to make sure that everyone can take things in the EGG as slowly as they like, after all. If gore isn't your thing then set it low or off in the initial settings and enemies will just fall over and eventually disappear after you beat them. You can always access the settings and change them at any point in the game, too, or whenever you start playing after a break. For the purposes of testing you'll need to take a break once every hour. We'll be giving you a ten minute warning before we pull you out and then you'll need to have a short discussion with our psychologist just to make sure you're not having any adverse reactions."
"Right, I think that just leaves one question!" Lauren announced with a tangible hint of pride in her voice that she'd managed to take on so many of Dana's questions at once. "Clothing is totally up to you. I will warn you that, um, your body will react as if everything is real, because as far as your sensory organs are concerned it will all feel real. So if your body's reactions to arousal are... let's just say a little excessive, you might prefer going in naked to spare your clothes. We also have hospital gowns available, the doctors who used to practice here left a bunch of them in one of the closets. I can bring you one if you'd like, some people have preferred them over wearing their clothes in or complete nudity," she offered.
As Dana offered whatever answer she would to that, Lauren would move to the white pod and press a discrete button, causing the thing to separate across the middle and open on a hinge, revealing a padded interior that looked like something out of an early 2000 science fiction movie. She didn't seem to intend on ushering the gamer into the EGG just yet though, instead turning back toward Dana and continuing to talk, her voice a bit more worn for handling all of the questions at once. "I think I covered them all. Anything else you're curious about?"
Dana hid an inward admiring smirk at how the tech caught all her questions - Damn, that woman sure can take a load at once. Then again, if they have the staff alpha testing this thing, and half the stories I heard are true… She's had some practice, one way or another.
She rolled her eyes at the one hour recommended break interval - she remembered when her dad had tried to make her take breaks when she was a larval powergamer. He'd finally relented when she pointed out her various lady lumps, and that they stored enough fat that she wouldn't starve for weeks - and for some reason he hadn't been able to look her in the eye for a month afterwards. Oh well. It was a beta, and whatever the test called for won over her personal preferences.
Her eyes went wide when Lauren brought up the hospital gowns. After a few shocked seconds, she blurted out: "You get one of those within ten feet of me, I will FUCKING CUT YOU." Another shocked pause, as she realized what she just said: "Oops. Sorry. I didn't mean that - I just REALLY don't like hospital gowns, sorry. Personal story."
Fortunately, the opening of the pod provided a brief distraction, as Dana immediately went to try and find all the fancy-electronic bits and pieces visible on the inside. Finally, she sat down on the rim, dangling her feet down the outside.
"Only one question: When can we start? I'm sure we can talk about mechanics all day, but all good games these days are intuitive, right? Besides, the best way to learn is to find all the 50 different ways to wipe to Hogger, so you know what not to do in the future!" Suddenly, she realized the clothing question hadn't yet been answered, and she grew self-conscious as she realized her situation - nudity when she was alone in the half-dark on her chair was one thing, but undressing in front of another person something else entirely.
She pulled back into the middle of the egg and sheepishly said: "Um, I still need to change, can you pull it almost closed and I'll just drop my clothes outside?" Completely oblivious of how prude she looked from that request, she'd curl up in the bottom of the EGG until she had her privacy. From the outside, all Lauren saw was a hand dropping socks outside, followed by jeans, a shirt with some colorful internet reference, and a plain white bra that clearly showed Dana hadn't had a proper bra fitting in her life. Just as it seemed that was the end of it, out flew panties with a big "403" printed across the butt, followed by a quiet "Sorry, I just didn't come prepared with spares, and I can't soak these - if there's one thing I learned, it's that biking commando is a REALLY bad idea. Okay, ready. I think. As ready as I'll ever be, anyhow."
As the pod pulled fully closed around her, Dana would sit cross-legged in the center, giving it her best "meditating" pose, waiting for that most essential part of any game: The options menu. I wonder if there'll be an FOV slider...
"Whoa, whoa. No need for that, I don't think. If you don't want to wear the gown then you don't have to wear the gown," Lauren would remark at Dana's outburst. She raised her hands defensively but after the initial surprise wore off she seemed more amused by the reaction than ready to call security.
"We can start right away," she would answer without missing a beat. "Though I will say that while you won't need to make a corpse run if you lose in the EGG, you might want to avoid managing it fifty times in a row anyway," she remarked with a little smirk. Dana's ensuing retreat into the EGG would only widen that smirk, though her tone was entirely professional as answered the woman's next request. "No problem," at which point she would close the EGG far enough that Dana had just enough space to slip her clothing out. And by the time she'd tossed out all her clothing and apologized, she could practically hear the smirk in Lauren's tone. "Don't worry about it. I assure that we're all professionals here, Ms. Miller. Good luck, have fun!"
Just like that the pod would close, leaving Dana in darkness. The gamer would hear the telling, rapid fire clicks of a mechanical keyboard being used on the outside of the pod she was stranded inside. Soon after the loud clacking stopped she would hear fans and machinery whirring all around her and then... nothing. She was completely without any noise and everything was blackness. That state of affairs stretched on for several minutes until suddenly a distant star popped into existence. It was followed by another, and then another two, then two after each of those, the number exponentially increasing until it looked like she was in the middle of space itself. And then Dana began to feel like she was floating.
After the last star had winked into view, Dana would be confronted by a floating menu in front of her that she could physically touch and interact with complete with a virtual keyboard below it for adding notes and extra options.
Switches
Temporary Futafication: ON/OFF
Bad Ends: ON/OFF
Difficulty: Easy/Normal/Hard/Insane/Legendary
Player Extras/Player Notes
Type your extras/notes here.
[Done] [Reset]
Once she was done filling in those settings and clicked done she would be given a confirmation screen, and once she clicked through that the letters of the menu would vanish and be replaced by a fully three dimensional picture of herself. She was able to change and tweak aspects of herself by physically touching the picture and molding it and in addition there were more sliders, preset hair options, and colors that she could play with in customizing her appearance than she'd ever seen in a character customization screen before. Each change she made to the 3D character showed up instantly on Dana herself.
In addition to being able to make changes to her VR body through the menu, she also had access to a clothes tab, an armory tab, and a perk tab. The clothes tab allowed her to select through a seemingly infinite amount of preset clothing and customize it as easily as she was able to customize her avatar before putting it on the 3D model, at which point it would appear on her VR body so that she could preview it in the flesh, so to speak. The weapons tab allowed much the same, though it limited her to fantasy options consisting of swords, hammers, bows, axes, spears, magical staves, and the like, and would only allow her to keep one. The traits tab consisted entirely of specialization traits relating to the weapons she had the option of choosing.
Once she was done customizing her avatar, picking her clothes, and choosing her weapon and trait and confirmed her choices, the menu would disappear entirely and four motes of light would spawn a short distance in front of her. Each mote had its own series of floating letters above it, but all of them shared a larger sign that read "Touch a point of light and choose your adventure." She could read each for as long as she liked, and once she was finished she only needed to float toward her selection and grab it to move on to the next step.
The Fox and the Mayor's Hound
The King's Labyrinth
Undersea Lab
The Hundred Tower
Dana got increasingly annoyed the more smug her tech got: "That's what I get for dealing with people - they always shove it in your face that they've got this all figured out…" Not that there was much she could do, sitting in the pod. As things blacked out, she wondered if the power cut out - but she'd had power cut in the middle of a game often enough (downside of parents) to recognize that wasn't the case here - no fans slowly whirring down, no gasp from parts desperately sucking the last bits of power they could get.
Still, this blackness couldn't be right. Surely a system capable of full VR would have some sort of loading screen? Aw, heck, that bitch of a tech must have thought it funny to leave her here for a while, that must be it. Of course she'd say it was mandatory calibrations or some bullshit like that. "Finally, we get the old star field. And here I thought it was going to be 3D pipes growing through space…" Unsure if it was a screensaver or a loading animation, she experimentally waved her arms around to see if it would do something. It did, it caused her to wave her arms. Woohoo!
At last, a menu. She was glad they hadn't tried to be modern and do voice input, it always got awkward to be alone yelling at a computer three times until it got what you were saying. Well, let's get to it. "Subhumans" - what's the point? Not like I'm going to fuck their ears, right? Anthro, fantasy… I can see where this is going. Well, saw last weekend - that was one GOOD manga find. Mythological - hell yeah, nobody quite came up with sweet, perverted shit like the greeks. Animal - let's get it while it hasn't been lawyered into the ground by prudes yet! VR is great. Soo many options. "It slimed me!"
Parasites got a brief pause. On the one hand, eww keep your needles out of my body. Then again, if they put the option in, they probably got plans for it, so would be a shame not to let them, right? Symbiotes, that's just parasites without the downsides. I am superwoman!
Okay. That first half could have almost been any RNG-dungeon config, now it got interesting. Onwards to smut! She had to readjust a bit because it wasn't "what would you like to watch" but "what would you like to participate in" - only one way to find out, right? She went a little light on the group options, "for now - I just want my first time to be with a friendly, nice slime, not immediately hammered in every nostril by ugly orcs..." The pregnancy cluster got a little note - she didn't mind having a bloated belly for a while, but didn't look forward to lying pushing in pain for an hour, or taking care of her offspring afterwards. "No pain, no kids" said the note. "That's what she said," thought her mind. But let's see what these mammaries are capable of in this game…
Bondage, hm… Not something she was super fond of - she didn't like the idea of being tied down, or made to do stuff against her will. She was just here to explore the virtual countryside, with all the joys it had to offer. Body modifications got a "temporary only" note - she didn't want to run around like a freak teleporter accident by the end, or have to go through endless fetch quests of "collect ingredients for the de-catform potion".
Roughness was set to "variable" - she was imagining she could take it, but didn't want things to be only roughing her up. Gore was set fairly low - she knew it was all virtual, but she didn't want gore splatters anywhere near her hoo-hah. Though there could still be flying body parts, enemies fading into dust was maybe a bit silly. Futafication? Hell yeah. Besides the fact that some of her all-time favorite mangas featured futa succubi or the like, some chance to see the other side of the fence, how do you pass that up? Bad ends? Nah, maybe she'd restart after some break, but she didn't like the idea of "sorry, that trap was fatal, lose all your progress".
Difficulty. "Ah, right, the old 'don't worry, you're not a wimp' normal. Game, slap me when I'm doing things wrong, don't cuddle me." Almost went to "Insane", but figured maybe she'd take it easy the first time around. Okay, okay, yes. I already pressed OK, you don't have to ask me again. And then, as the settings locked, she realized with a drop in her guts that the list she'd just cheerfully pushed up wasn't going to parade on a screen for her amusement, it would actually go at her - inside her - at some point. "Wait, I'm… Aw, hell. Only one way through now." Some slick sounds from her nethers showed that her body, at least, didn't have that many reservations, anyhow.
Switches
Temporary Futafication: ON
Bad Ends: OFF
Difficulty: Hard
Player Extras/Player Notes
Pregnancy/Birth: No pain, no kids.
Ghost: No full loss-of-control possession.
Aphrodisiacs: Body reaction yes, psychological/hypnosis no.
Body modification: Temporary/expiring only.
Roughness: Situational
Note: No more notes.
[DONE]
"Okay, let's see here. Cute, you got a character customizer. Wow, this is actually fairly detailed. And you defaulted to my scan, with all my flabbyness. Great. If I wanted to disappoint some NPCs, I'd be looking for GW2 endgame quests." A press of the "default female" button fixed that, but didn't make her any happier: "Oh, great. Let me guess, the only actual girl in your character design department is the texture artist? I'm NOT running around like a freaking barbie doll." She spent about ten minutes tuning body proportions to her liking, ending up at mostly her real-world appearance, with maybe just a tad more muscle definition and a bit less flab around the joints. She kept her bits of belly fat though - real women, and all that. As she finalized the settings, she went back and with a smirk added just a bit more kadonk to the already sizable badonk.
Clothes. She gave some experimental shakes to her shoulders and torso: "I see those guys got their breast physics from DoA, and the girl testers didn't bother to correct them." She was happy about that - she didn't mind some bounce, and if it meant no more pain from physical activity without a sports bra, more power to the horny dudebros. That gave her an idea - a while back she'd gone to a LARP, and one of the guys had tried to convince her to go no-underwear "for authenticity". A thin excuse, but this would be the one chance to actually try that. So she just went for a green skirt-and-tunic combo that put femlink to shame, some comfy leather boots, and nothing else but some hair pins. She liked the outfit, and maybe if it didn't have to be ripped up for easier access, maybe she'd actually keep it intact for a while.
Weapons. In that same LARP session, she'd been told to try an axe. Some "low center of gravity" dig at her, but she was used to that - not that it stopped the guy from working on her stance, which involved lots of repositioning her hip… Anyhow, axes for the whirling death. Besides, her inner hipster kept her from going for the "mainstream weapon" of a sword. For her specialization traits, she picked the obvious axe spec - something improving ability to crit, if there were multiple.
A few experimental weapon swings with the (beautifully detailed, but she wasn't looking at that) axe that just materialized in her hands, and she was all set. Glancing over the provided choices, she decided to go for the Undersea Lab - a research facility would offer plenty of possibilities, and the undersea was a nice touch, why not add some swimming to the fun. "If this does anything to my real muscles, I'm going to be sooo sore by the time I'm through… Will there be a lab in the lab, though?"
All set up, she only had to lock in her selection. With a chuckle "touch, right…" she threw a quick roundhouse kick at the mote.
Dana's roundhouse kick at the mote would be met with sudden darkness and the sensation of falling through nothingness. That falling feeling would be just as abruptly replaced as she felt herself laying on a dry but cold piece of cloth. The air around her was chilly against her bare skin and the scent of a cheap air freshener -- specifically a cinnamon-scented one -- permeated her nostrils. The darkness gradually faded as she laid there, revealing a cold, grey metal ceiling and walls illuminated by fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling. Pipes and conduits ran the length of the ceiling as well, but there was little else of interest up there.
If she looked around, she would quickly discover that she was on top of a white blanket draped over a metal gurney. Her awkward bed was parked in a far corner of the room atop a smooth concrete floor. There were seven other gurneys just like hers that had been haphazardly left in the corner opposite her but none of them were occupied. She would find the axe she had chosen in character selection propped up against the table she had been laying on, which she could freely reacquire.
There were a few things of potential interest posted on the wall. Beside a 'Hang in There' poster featuring a kitten holding onto a piece of rope with its front paws was a whiteboard. The whiteboard had been marked in aggressively large letters written in black dry erase marker about the testing schedule for a subject D.
Whiteboard
Subject D Schedule, Week 1:
0900-1100: Jellyfish Tank
1200-1400: Mermaid Tank
1500-1700: Alraune Pod
1800-2000: Giant Squid Enclosure
Don't forget to have her fully processed and disarmed before the procedure wears off.
Beyond that, there was little else to the room but a heavy, swinging door made of thick, tempered glass surrounded by a metal frame. It was built into the wall in front of her, and from her position on the gurney she could see through the glass that it opened into a hallway that led to a four-way intersection. There was a sign over the unopened door indicating that the cafeteria was straight ahead from the room she was in, security was forward and then to the left, and stairs were forward and to the right. It even helpfully noted that she was currently in Holding. The door wasn't locked or barred in any manner and there was nobody in sight, which meant that Dana was free to grab her axe and set off down the hallways in whichever direction suited her.
Sorry it's so short. Have been having a bit of a struggle with coming up with ways to make this post more interesting, for some reason, so kinda just getting it out there to keep things moving for you.
As the stars blinked out around her and gravity took a breather, Dana wondered if her unconventional selection method had crashed the menu software and she'd be stuck in blackness again - and then she felt the cold linen against her bare arms and legs, which made her jump off the gurney as soon as she oriented herself enough to know where up and down was. "Brr. Is some heating too much to ask for? If I had any tattoos, I could make a sweet suicidegirls photoset out here, at least…" As she peered around the room, she picked up the axe, and felt instantly safer with the reassuring weight in her hand - although it hadn't proven its worth in combat yet, she had trust in the game engine and its promised ability to make her inept swings into something that would kill little weevils.
As she read the whiteboard, she thought to herself "Ah, I see. I guess I'm subject D? I gotta say, though, guys - leaving my axe right next to me isn't the best 'disarming' strategy ever. But I guess if you've got mermaids rolling around in M1A1s, that might not your biggest problem. I guess I'd want to know if I'm here by choice or by force, but that'll have to wait..." Mystified by her situation, she tried the door and found it unlocked. "Guys. Guys? Your holding cell isn't. Where is everyone? Am I doing the old suddenly-abandoned-station campaign? Sweet, more loot for me!"
With that thought, she took in the layout and decided to set off for the cafeteria - she'd been so nervous before heading into the EGG that she hadn't eaten for half a day, and she was curious how eating in here would feel. Besides, there would be answers - either this place wasn't as abandoned as it looked, in which case there'd always be someone hungry to find, or it was, in which place the food supplies might have hints about the circumstances under which the place got abandoned.
She took one last look around the room, and decided to smudge the whiteboard so it read "Don't forget to have her fully armed before the procedure wears off." With nothing else worth taking in the room, she rested the axe on her shoulder and set off to find something to chomp down on.
Moving through the hallways toward the cafeteria didn't provide much insight on whether she was dealing with an abandoned lab or just an extremely lazy staff. Between the constants of fluorescent lighting, gunmetal grey, and concrete surroundings it was also entirely possible that they might've just gone completely insane and were somewhere deep in the lab wearing their pants on their head and gibbering at each other. There were a few portholes located through the hallway though and they offered some insight as to the size of the facility, if nothing else. It was difficult to get any exact grasp due to the darkness of the surrounding waters, but from what Dana could see she would be able to tell that the undersea structure was four stories tall and was sprawled out enough that it dwarfed a small town.
The first clue she found regarding the population of the facility in her hunt came as she came upon the cafeteria door. It was similar to the holding room door but with the inclusion of a large valve knob on both sides. The heavy steel and tempered glass portal was slightly ajar and from beyond it Dana would be able to hear shouting and a stream of cursing, punctuated by the occasional crash or slam of something heavy bowling into unseen obstacles. "I fucking hate scientists!" A gruff but clearly female voice yelled just as Dana came close enough to the doorway to make out words.
The source of her ire would be readily apparent if Dana ventured a look inside the room. The cafeteria proved to be about four times the size of the holding room Dana had arrived from and was lined with plain metal tables and benches for eating. Inside it two figures, a black-haired male and a female with long blonde hair, both wearing stab vests over black security uniforms and armed with stun batons, were facing off against an unusual beast. The creature was quadrupedal and shared many similarities in its gait to that of a tiger. While feline may have been the inspiration though, its designers had strayed in several aspects. It was smooth and black but without any apparent fur and its upper body was enlarged with muscles. Its eyes were pure gold and seemed almost alien. It also appeared to be about twice the size of an average male tiger, which meant it was massive even compared to the other humans in the room.
A point which the blonde woman would gripe about as the weird thing lunged at her and forced her to dive aside onto the concrete floor, the beast itself careening past her and slamming onto one of the steel tables, causing the sturdy furniture to bend slightly under its weight. "What fucking purpose does this thing even serve? Who would breed something like this, this many miles down?" The beast righted itself then and then took a second leap at the duo which was side stepped leaving it to land on a bench, causing whatever bolts were holding it in place to loudly snap and the entire thing to fall over spilling the creature onto the floor. The two guards would quickly advance on it, taking a few swings with their batons which served mostly to irritate the beast as it scrambled to its feet.
"If I find out which dumbass screwed up the testing pod locks I'm going to stick this baton up their - ah, son of a bitch!" The blonde's latest round of cursing was cut short as the thing swiped out at the male half of the duo with a meaty paw, sending him flying out of sight behind one of the tables and leaving the blonde in a duel against her much larger opponent. Dana, thus far, had gone unnoticed, and as such could quietly sneak away from the scene before she too had the attention of the monster and the security personnel or enact some other plan if she so preferred. Her snack dreams might well have been ruined by that point, anyway.
Dana had a brief nerd-out moment as she spotted the portholes, and looked outside to see deep-water fish confused by the light spilling out into the darkness. Past those, she saw rows of lights flickering in the distance, which could only be other parts of the facility. "Well, hats off to the level designer, this is certainly lab city."
The crashes let her know that the place wasn't quite as abandoned as it seemed, and she moved the axe from the relaxed carry-on-shoulder back to what she thought of as a "battle-ready" pose, keeping it out front in easy way of anything that would lunge at her.
"Girl, if you hate scientists that much, do not go to nsfw reddits..." She mused to herself as she walked up to the door and peered inside. Taking a look inside, she watched the uneven battle of stun batons vs. massive paws, and was happy to just watch the events from a distance - up until the tiger took out one of the guards, that is.
At that point, she couldn't just abandon the remaining female guard - sure, it was just a VR person, but she LOOKED so real, and besides - who would she be if she abandoned the first person she met to be ravaged by some overgrown cat?
Opening the door, she lifted the axe over her shoulder in both hands, and yelling "Leeeroooooy Jenkins!" charged and wove her way through the desks, hoping to land a solid hit on the feline before it adjusted to the added combatant. To that goal, loudly announcing her charge was maybe not the best idea, but hey - style points!
D vs Beasty Beast: 10+1 vs 1+2, hit. 99.99%, repeating of course, chance that getting hit with an axe angers mutant tigers.
Redshirt vs Beasty Beast: 10 vs 19+2, miss.
Beasty Beast: No action.
Dana's approach would, in fact, prove not to be the stealthiest. Its effectiveness wouldn't suffer, however. The momentum of her charge and a swing that was timed just right saw the gamer's axe slice downward into the air and into the cat's side with enough force to bury it behind the strange beast's shoulder before it could do anything to prevent her attack. It would also served to turn her target's attention and fury toward Dana, and as it reoriented to take a swipe at her she just barely managed to pull the axe back and keep it in her hands to bat her attacker's paws away.
But the blonde would act before Dana needed to figure out how to best parry a mutant tiger with her axe. The apparent security guard took a few swings at the beast with her stun baton. She wouldn't manage to find her target with her strikes but she did manage to force it away from Dana and herself, causing it to leap away. The duo's respite would be momentary, however, as moments after landing it reoriented itself toward them and fell into a crouch, looking something akin to a massively overgrown house cat about to pounce on a toy mouse but with Dana and her ally in the unenviable position of the latter.
"Hi! I think I'm Subject D, maybe?" said Dana to the guard by way of introduction, before turning her focus back on the Bear-Tiger-Thing. She knew she was supposed to be intimidated by its bulk, but given the situation - the adrenaline from her charge and the endorphines from her first strike landing right where it should - she was perhaps a bit too excited to be scared of anything right now.
So she was only mildly annoyed at the beast bounding away and being out of range for further axing for the moment. "Should have gone for a spear..." She muttered to herself, and to the guard: "You wouldn't happen to have a laser pointer on you, would you?" With her attention back on the cat, she would stand in a slight crouch, axe at the ready. While it perhaps wasn't the best weapon to ward off a pouncing predator, she was determined to at least give it a good swipe as soon as it got back into range.
"That makes this awkward then," the blonde security guard replied to the former comment rather than the latter, not taking her eyes off of the genetically modified beast as it finished setting up to pounce on them. "I was supposed to grab that axe from you earlier this morning. Guess I'm glad I ended up too busy to get to it."
Dana would have all of a second to make any response before a flying blur of fur-less black muscle came bounding at her. Her counter strategy left something to be desired, as it turned out. She managed to whack the creature in the face with her axe, but the blade wasn't straight on and as such she only managed a jagged cut under the creature's eye before she was pinned by several times her own body weight. The EGG proved merciful, at least, and rather than any of the significant pain that real world physics would've probably demanded being placed on her body she only suffered a dull, stinging pain as a result of the massive thing that had just crashed into her.
The blonde wasn't about to let the big cat diaries reject do as it pleased to Dana though, and struck a series of blows against its back as it was occupied with pinning the supine gamer. This combined with Dana's two successful blows against it would apparently be enough to make the creature decide that it wanted nothing else to do with the two women, as after a few moments of the blonde's barrage it stood up and went dashing for the door that Dana had left completely ajar in her charge. The blonde security officer made no effort to chase it, instead offering Dana a hand to help her back onto her feet.
"Right, well, technically I'm supposed to confiscate your axe and arrest you now," she remarked, though despite the nature of her comment her stun baton was lowered and her stance was casual. "But technically I'm also supposed to go out there and secure rooms one at a time, regrouping with the security team and protecting non-combat personnel along the way. Given that there's yet another sin against nature out there wandering the halls now, think I'll just lock the doors and secure this cafeteria until I figure out a way to get past the new tentacle infestation in the stairwell. And since I'm ignoring one rule I'm just going to pretend that I've never heard of this test subject program, maybe I'll pretend that you were a stress-induced figment of my imagination while I'm at it," she offered.
Ah, so the guard was supposed to secure that holding room. Not that Dana had much time to react to that, let alone formulate a response, before she found herself thoroughly pounced. Her axe did some damage, sure, but that was probably more raw momentum and physics at work than any particular skill on her end.
Buried as she was, she couldn't really make out much of what was happening through her buzzing head, but there were some louder BZZTs that couldn't quite be figments of her imagination - "Yay, sure, let's shock the big tiger with the little stun prod until it passes out - and falls right on me. Get ALL the nonlethal takedown points!" Not that she'd say that out loud to the only one helping her here, of course.
Surprising her, the zapping did have an effect, however, and the cat got off her and bounded out the door. "Bravely taking to its paws, it beat a very brave... ow, my arse..." Taking in the tired guard's speech, Dana was alternatingly afraid and relieved: "That's great! Man, I love technical people. Umm... So, since I'm being a figment of your imagination and all, do you mind if some snacks disappear from this place before you lock it all up? I mean, if you do mind, that's cool, I just figured I'd try and take the chance before I head out and be a ghost somewhere else."
Whatever happened, Dana would take care to step around the guard's partner, in case he was a) still alive, and b) blessed with a stricter sense of rules than his counterpart. If nothing odd happened on her quest for noms, Dana would head out the cafeteria, making her way down towards the left, where the sign said there were supposed to be stairs. Security post would be interesting, sure, but she'd risk running into guards that might be a bit more arrest-happy, plus what would she do there? If calling for help did anything, someone probably had done so already. She wasn't going to find a gun in a pressurized facility, and she had the feeling wearing bulletproof vests would hinder more than help against Tigger and his bouncy friends anyway.
So she'd set off towards the stairs, keeping an eye out for the beast (or any random Finkle Einhorns), or any variants of the good old half-life ceiling tentacles. "Why is it that gamers never look up, anyway?" Sure, the stairwell might scare off the technical guard with this supposed "infestation", but she was an adventurer! Fighting through the peasant-scaring jungles was her job, after all.
"Who am I to stop my imaginary friend from rummaging through the kitchen for chips or whatever it is they're keeping back there?" The blonde shrugged. "In fact, feel free to stop by whenever you need. This room should be pretty secure." She motioned her head toward the two doors, the first being the one that Dana had entered and the second standing directly across the room from the first. "Plenty of food too. You might need to knock though, 'cause as soon as you leave I'm locking the doors and barring them."
With that, Dana would be free to pillage the kitchen as the blonde turned her own attention to closing both doors and dragging her male colleague out for first aid. The axe wielder would find the kitchen and its refrigerators, freezer, and pantry well stocked to an almost unreasonable degree for an underwater laboratory. But unless she was willing to fuss with the industrial microwave to heat some of the readied personal meals she would find her options mostly limited to quick junk food, which the place had in abundance. The spread ranged from chips to ice cream and everything that could be found in any self-respecting supermarket's snack and candy aisles.
Whatever she selected, eating in the EGG would be a bit of an odd experience. The taste was all there, just as if she was indulging in the real deal, but it never provided that feeling of fullness. For all the EGG could simulate perfectly, it would prove unable, or perhaps just unwilling, to make her hunger truly go away.
Afterward she would be free to head off toward the stairs. By then the blonde guard had managed to get her companion, who appeared to still be breathing, onto a table and followed Dana to the door. "Feel free to send anybody else you run across here too. The more people who are here, the more I just have to do my job by staying here and protecting them, yeah?" Whatever the axe wielder's response to that, once she had turned to leave the blonde would close the door behind her and begin to turn the valve knob until the cafeteria door was fully locked.
That left Dana to walk to the stairs to investigate the tentacle infestation. The walk from the cafeteria to the stairs was relatively short and went uninterrupted by surprises of either the barnacle or the tiger sort, which meant that she was able to get a first-hand look at the infestation in no time at all. Unfortunately, the stairwell was in such a state that without the sign conveniently hanging right overhead that read "Stairs" it would've been impossible to tell that she was, in fact, standing in front of stairs.
Instead of any distinguishable staircase, Dana had ended up standing in front of a figurative ocean of slimy, moss green tentacles of varying lengths and thicknesses. They sprouted from the walls, from the ceiling, and from the floor in such quantity that there was barely a hint of the gunmetal grey that the designers had been so fond of left visible. They twitched and moved in ominous, even almost hypnotizing waves. On the bright side, they didn't initially seem to react too much to Dana's presence, at least not while she was out of range of the longest. Whether or not Dana wanted to heft her axe and try to rid the lab of its peasant-scaring tentacle jungle would be up to her.
After some deliberation, Dana settled on a pair of energy bars to satisfy her munchies, holding them in her left hand and munching while her right lugged her axe around. Perhaps investing into some kind of axe-holster would have been a good idea - oh well, maybe she'd come across something that she could mcguyver into that...
"Oh, right. Infestation. Ohkay." - well, that was going to be a problem. These things could be harmless, but what were the odds of that, and was she going to take her chances? Also, the stairs being effectively blocked meant the big cat of the lab may not have come through here, so it might currently be prowling somewhere behind her - not the greatest thing to have in your back when you're dealing with a bunch of tentacles.
Experimentally, she'd toss her remaining snackbar into the writhing mass, to see how violently they'd react to movement and contact. If that was inconclusive, she'd try to walk up slowly until she was just in range of some tentacles, and jump back to safety just in case.
Either way, she wasn't about to go swinging her axe through the stuff, that would likely be the one thing that'd certainly piss the thing off, and if her manga experience was to be believed, being around an angry mass of tentacles never ended well.
If it turned out to be aggressive, she'd cycle back, quickly checking into her holding room for hidden cats, and head over to security to find Tomcat and/or something to remove tentacles with a bit more reach than her axe.
If the tentacles seemed benign and passive, just decoration really, she'd try to carefully push through the mass until she'd make out which direction actually had stairs, paying attention that she wouldn't accidentally cut anything with her axe, and being on the lookout to jump back out and/or struggle her way free if any of them did decide to get fresh after all.
Dana's first test with the tentacles would prove plenty conclusive as several tentacles lashed to grab the energy bar and pulled it in until it disappeared in the writhing mass. If she still desired more information, however, edging toward the tentacles would cause the ones in closest range of her to tense. Moving even closer than that would cause them to begin orienting themselves in her direction. If she got any closer than that their next step they would probably give her the same treatment as the energy bar and do their damnedest to turn her into an H doujin heroine.
Returning to take a quick glance at the holding room would reveal that there were no big genetically modified cats present, at least not currently. The gurneys had been turned over and scattered across the room but the perpetrator was no longer present. Returning to the intersection and trekking the lone direction she hadn't been in, she would find that the hallway to the security room was almost three times as long a walk as it had been between the holding room and the cafeteria and even between the cafeteria and the stairway. It was also woefully bare of much entertainment beyond a few portholes, at least unless Dana developed some sort of fascination with concrete, metal, fluorescent lighting, and conduit.
Right before the security room was another intersection leading off in four different directions. From the side she'd approached on she determined that security was, perhaps unsurprisingly given that she was literally in sight of the door from her position, straight ahead, to the right was marked 'Armory/Rec/Dorms,' to the left was marked 'Brig,' and the way she had come was marked 'Cafeteria/Holding.'
The security door, which was identical to the ones she had seen in holding and at the cafeteria, was closed but didn't appear to be locked or barred. The brig was similarly in view to her left and the entry door in much the same state as the security door. She couldn't see the armory specifically, but the hallway to her left had a few intersections in immediate view of her, the first opening up to the left and marked with 'Armory' and the second similarly opening up to the left and marked with 'Rec Room.' She was currently tiger-free, and how she wished to prioritize her searching was up to her.
I was going to push through and describe the security room 'n stuff but given the new room options and her apparent objective I thought it best to give another choice first before barfing room description all over the place.
"Well, enjoy your burst of energy that'll last your entire workout session!" Was her parting words at the wall-o-tentacle before Dana went off to look for options that didn't involve re-enacting Spy of Darkness without the grenades.
A cursory check on holding showed that either the cat or something else had been through there since her last visit, so it was probably a good idea to stay on her guard. With that in mind, she wandered down in the direction of "Security", jumping several times at the random clunks and echoes that were part of life on a deep sea station, as she was perhaps a bit too strung-up on nerves than she could keep up for very long.
As she found out this wing was significantly bigger than the signage had initially suggested, Dana decided to go ahead with her plan anyway and check out this security room first. A strict sweep would dictate checking out the Brig first, but she was convinced there was probably some smooth criminal in there that would charm her, help her for a while, and then inevitably betray her - and she wasn't quite feeling like that one, so she gave it a pass.
Besides, if her h-gaming experience was anything to go by, searching jails always ends up with someone locking up cells as you're searching them, and that'd just be annoying.
At least security might have a map of some sort, keys or something else helpful, or at least some monitoring to give her a heads-up on stuff she'd run into. In case it was occupied, she did make a mental note to avoid telling people that she was Subject D from now on, it seemed like playing an innocent survivor was less likely to get her in trouble...
