G.I.R.L.

  Simulux Online 1

  Zoey Archer

  Contents

  1. Strange New World

  2. Character Creation

  3. Useless DPS

  4. Kill Steal

  5. Quest Completion

  6. Starter Town

  7. Naughty Inn

  8. Shot Down

  9. Naughty Party

  10. Expeditious Retreat

  11. Hiding Out

  12. Welcome Bear

  13. Run Away

  14. Goddess?

  15. Waking Up

  16. Character Creation Redux

  17. Starting Over

  18. Prices

  19. Payment

  20. Revenge

  Subscribe

  Frat Girl

  Zoey Archer

  Copyright 2017 Zoey Archer

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Individuals pictured on the cover are models and used for illustrative purposes only.

  First digital edition electronically published by Zoey Archer, October 2017

  Let your fantasies come true with Zoey Archer…

  Thanks for downloading this story and supporting me!

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  Created with Vellum

  1

  Strange New World

  I cradled the box in my hand like it was precious to me. In a way I suppose it was. I’d saved up for so long to be able to enjoy this game, and now here it finally was.

  The only problem was I had to dodge all the usual characters who inhabited the underbelly of the city. I had to make sure I kept far from them.

  Sure I was carrying a nondescript brown box that was covered in paper and made to look like I was carrying something like groceries, but even food could be something people would kill for if they were desperate enough down here on the ground level.

  I glanced up, but only for a moment. A thin sliver of light shone down through the darkness above. A perpetual twilight created by the sheer size of the buildings in the megalopolis, constantly lit by the neon lighting that advertised all the wonderful grey to black market offerings that people could enjoy down here.

  I looked back around. Made sure to give a bum sitting in his bottles a wide berth. Maybe that was a bum sitting there so far into the drink that he couldn’t think, or maybe that was a mugger who wanted someone to think he was a bum. Right up to the moment that he sprang into action like an ambush predator and threatened someone with a knife or a neuro-interrupter.

  No thanks. If I was far enough away from the dude and he did mean me harm then that distance would be enough to make him think about whether or not I was worth it.

  Finally I reached my goal. My building. It wasn’t much to look at all the way down here. Run down bricks that crumbled off revealing the shining nanotube construction that had to be in place to support the massive building that reached for the atmosphere up above.

  Once upon a time some stickler for historical accuracy had insisted these buildings look like they had back when the city was a lot more primitive, hence the brick facade. Then people had stopped giving a damn about the lower levels, hence the crumbling and no one coming along to fix it. Unless there was an issue that could affect the rich and powerful who lived above the lower slums.

  I sighed. Looked around a couple of times in the neon twilight to make sure there was no one waiting out there to get a free ride into my building. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had been mugged for access, for all that it would do the muggers any good since all the apartments in these buildings were individually keyed to someone’s biosig.

  It looked like the coast was clear. For now. So I thumbed and stepped through the airlock as quick as I could. I made sure to hold the package out in front of me. If someone did try to knife me for what I had then at least I could rest assured the rig would be inside the building while I was outside dealing with an attacker.

  The airlock closed behind me and I breathed a sigh of relief. The air inside was the antiseptic recirculated air of one of the blades. Not at all like the real world outside which smelled decidedly less pleasant.

  Still, it was the smell of home. I felt a small but subtle shudder as the lift moved me up to my apartment pod. There were no windows on the lift. No point in seeing what the insides of the building looked like around here. A bunch of single use apartment pods stacked on top of one another. People packed in as densely as possible because you had to be super rich to afford the good stuff these days.

  Finally the door dinged open. I sighed in relief again. No one had hacked the lift to bring me to their pod where they could have a look through my stuff and see if there was anything I owned that they maybe wanted to own themselves.

  Sure that was a rare thing that usually was only talked about by breathless news anchors trying to get eyes on their channel, but it was still something that happened from time to time.

  I didn’t want that to happen today. Not with the rig I held in my hands. One of the only ones I’d been able to get down at Azir’s shop. One of the only ones I was aware of that was down here, though who knew. There could be some people with money slumming it down here in the pods.

  I stepped into my tiny one room pod and sighed with relief again as the doors closed behind me. Then I made sure to activate all the security measures I could. Including a couple of off the market security measures that weren’t strictly legal, but then again it’s not like the cops were going to come around and hassle me about something like that.

  They didn’t care about anything that happened in the pods, and that was a two way street that gave a surprising amount of freedom to living down here even as it made life down here constantly more interesting and dangerous.

  I sat down on my bed and started the food processor. I dialed up a hamburger. Something nice and light because I had a feeling I was going to be busy for most of the night.

  Then I pulled out my pocket knife and ripped into the box. The thing was surprisingly light, for all that it was so large. When I pulled out the headset my breath caught.

  The thing wasn’t nearly as big as I would’ve thought. A simple circlet that went around my head. There were other pieces to it as well that went at various points around my body. I couldn’t wait to strap into the thing and see what there was to see.

  I looked around at my pod. At the food processor, and then the shower in one corner. The toilet that came out of the wall when I needed it and folded back. There was even a screen at one end that provided entertainment of the ancient variety.

  Right now it was projecting a nice mountain view off in the distance. The whole scene was only ruined a little bit by the way the scene flickered with static every once in awhile. I frowned. I was going to have to get that fixed at some point.

  I looked down at the rig in my hands. Then again maybe not. If this worked as well as I hoped it would then I wouldn’t want for entertainment options for a good long while.

  My hands shook as I went through the motions of putting the thing on. I took a short break to scarf down the hamburger, then kept going. When I was done my body was covered from head to toe in straps that fit to me without much in the way of adjustment.

  “Mirror mode,” I said.

  I stood up as the screen on my back wall turned on a camera that showed me a view of the room, complete with yours truly standing in the middle of that room looking like something from the future.

  I mean sure I knew I was basically living a cyberpunk future that had been imagined by people in the late twentieth and early twenty-first, but this was a piece of technology that was new.

  Somehow that made it all feel different. More amazing.

  “Yeah, you look like a dork,” I said to my reflection in the screen, but I was a dork who was about to log into the most immersive VR gaming experience any game company had ever created.

  I’d look like a dork all night long if I got to do something amazing like that!

  I moved back to my bed and carefully positioned myself so I wouldn’t have to worry about falling out. The game was supposed to control that by naturally activating the brain centers that paralyzed a person through the night, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

  I grinned as I reached up and hit a button on the circlet. This was going to be fucking amazing.

  The world went dark around me, then exploded with light. It was time to enter the world of Simulux.

  2

  Character Creation

  I faced a pulsing point of light in the middle of the blackest darkness I’d ever seen in my life. Like we’re talking real “middle of the void” type stuff. What I imagined it would be like to be floating in a ship that’d somehow been spit out of a wormhole in the middle of the Bootes void or something.

  Look it up.

  “Um, hello?”

  “Greetings adventurer, and welcome to Simulux Online! Let there be fun!”

  I rolled my eyes. Though of course when I looked around I didn’t actually have a body I was attached to, so I guess I didn’t really have eyes to roll.

  Whatever.

  “So are you the character creation helper or something?” I asked.

  “Of course! Choose your adventure!”

  I chuckled. That reminded me of books I’d read when I was a kid, though of course this promised to be an adventure that was way more awesome than anything that happened in my
imagination reading those books.

  I flipped through the options. Class creation was easy enough. There were a lot of different classes. A few healing options. Some magic damage dealers. A few tank options. I finally settled on the Bladedancer though.

  The tooltip told me I’d be using the power of the shadows to deal heavy damage to my foes before they even know I was there! Oh yeah. That sounded pretty badass to me! I was going to be the most awesome shadow slinking surprise killer Simulux had ever known, bitches!

  A figure appeared before me dressed in an all black black. I grinned. Or I would’ve grinned if I had a body. I felt a surge of adrenaline spike through me, at least. Yeah. That guy looked badass! That was the kind of shit that would have me kicking ass before I was even a couple of levels into the game!

  “Yeah, that’s definitely it,” I said.

  “Class accepted,” the point of light said. “Choose your gender.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Dude, of course.”

  As though there was ever any question. I’d heard of dudes who played lady characters, but I was all man thank you very much.

  “Gender accepted. Please customize your appearance.”

  The robes around my character disappeared and I was treated to a series of sliders that gave me all sorts of options for creating a character that would be badass. It looked like the game started with a version of me that, if I’m being totally honest, was just a little more attractive than the me in the real world.

  The dude standing in front of me looked like he hit the gym, is what I was getting at. We’re not talking Arnold huge, but he was still pretty big.

  I messed with the settings for a little bit until I had something that I figured would be pretty awesome. A guy with broad shoulders and rippling muscles. Think Conan the Barbarian but on steroids and you’ll start to get the right idea. The dude still looked a little like me if you squinted your eyes and looked from the right angle, but muscle dude was pretty far from the real me.

  I didn’t have that kind of money to spend on a gym, and I didn’t have enough room in my pod to do much in the way of exercises. Dodging bums who might try to knife me so they could thumb some booze credits from my account didn’t count as exercise in my book.

  “Are you finished with your character creation?” the floating point of light asked.

  “Yeah, I think so,” I said.

  “Choose a race.”

  This screen was even more interesting. It had the usual fantasy fare, but it turned out that choosing my race had an impact on what my character looked like.

  My options were high elf, wood elf, dark elf, half elf, human, dwarf, and halfling. I guess when they put together the game world they didn’t spend much time doing more than a copy and paste from Tolkien’s stuff. Then again there had been so many different versions of Tolkien ripoffs these days that they were just generic fantasy stuff.

  The people who made the game might not have even read the master. Whatever. Their loss.

  I flipped through a few of the options, but the only one that really looked right was a human. Sure I would’ve gotten some bonuses to my stealth abilities if I went with a wood elf or a dark elf, but I figured looking badass while I was sneaking around with my daggers killing people who didn’t even know I was there was more important than having a few extra stats.

  Finally everything was finalized.

  “You have chosen human Bladedancer. Is this correct? Once these choices have been made your character slot will be filled, and you will not be able to change this without deleting your current character on this account and creating another.”

  “Yup, totally correct,” I said, not thinking of a single reason why I would want to do something stupid like change up my character. “Let’s do this!”

  “Choices finalized! Welcome to the world of Simulux Online! Let there be fun!”

  I groaned inwardly at the cheesy tagline, but the character creation screen didn’t seem to care that I was mocking its parroting of marketing department pap. It merely flew towards me and I was surrounded by an impossibly bright light that resolved to a bright world all around me with a blue sky overhead.

  I stared at that blue sky overhead in wonder. I had trouble believing it. I mean I knew that a blue sky was something that’d existed in the world once upon a time, back before someone had the bright idea to seed the sky with junk to cool everything down and sort of save civilization, but this was amazing.

  Someone must’ve gone into the archives and done some color grabs from old photographs of the world back before it was dimmed. Add on the fact that I lived down on the ground level and you had a situation where I’d never seen a sky like this before in my life.

  It was amazing. The bright light burning overhead was nearly blinding when I looked at it. My eyes watered and I had to look away, and I wasn’t sure if they were watering because of the pain of looking at that light, or from the sheer overwhelming emotion of seeing the sun in the sky.

  Even if it was a fake virtual sun created by some game designer.

  I took in a deep breath and let it out. It felt weird to take a deep breath like that. That wasn’t the sort of thing that was possible when I was wearing a mask while I was out and about in the city.

  Sure I could do that sort of thing in my pod, but it’s not like breathing in antiseptic dry recirculated air was the sort of thing I wanted to do when I could avoid it.

  “This is going to be fucking amazing,” I said with a grin, and headed out to see what there was to see.

  There was a large tower off in the distance, and if I didn’t miss my guess then I needed to go there if I was going to get some quests and level up!

  3

  Useless DPS

  “Oh hero! I am so glad you are here!”

  The woman stared at me and she seemed out of breath. The way her clothes were ripped and torn all around her told a story of someone who’d seen better days, but for all that she was quite attractive under all the dust and grime.

  I leaned against the tower door and grinned. I wasn’t above looking at a pretty girl, thank you very much.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” I said. “So what’s this going to be? A fetch quest? Gathering a bunch of ingredients or something?”

  Her face screwed up in obvious confusion. We were speaking the same language, but we weren’t quite speaking the same language if you catch my drift.

  “We are having trouble with goblins who have been stealing gold from local caravans bringing gold ingots from the mine to the keep!”

  She looked up to the tower behind her. If this was their idea of a keep then it was a wonder anyone ever managed to defend anything in this world, but maybe the game designers had been a bit lazy with this.

  “Um, right,” I said. “So you need me to go out and kill some goblins? Bring back the money?”

  Her face lit up in a smile that warmed me all over, and I found myself considering what kind of fun I could have with her. She was curved in all the right places, and those curves were practically bursting out of her tattered outfit.

  “That would be wonderful!” she said, bouncing just a little as she said it.

  Someone in the art department had obviously had a hell of a good time putting together that animation. I wondered if they went to the trouble of doing motion capture, or if someone had to animate it from existing video.

  “Right,” I said. “So can you point me in the…”

  The little minimap in the top left corner of my screen made a ding. I looked up at the thing and it brought up a bigger version of the map.

  “Okay then, I guess that answers that,” I muttered.