Chapter 3 - SUBCUTANEOUS 1.2

And here we are! Another chapter, and, incredibly and strangely, I am genuinely enjoying the strangeness and mechanical nature of this little LitRPG of mine! Woohoo! This'll be the last freely available, open-source chapter, everything after this will go up on the All-Seeing patreon tier until we get some posts up on RR!

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Ilia’s first experience entering the game world is defined, first and foremost, by shock and awe. VR games are a wonder of the modern world, but graphics are a struggle that only climbs onward. Pushed by corporate interests and head honchos looking to find new taglines to deliver shareholders and avoid actually working on creative endeavors, higher pixel counts and graphical fidelity are a never-ending race, one that’s gradually crippling people’s ability to actually play games. VR headsets, by virtue of the sheer amount of things that need to be animated, usually don’t tend to bother too much with making things photorealistic, relying on immersion through movement and engagement instead.

It would seem that whatever absolutely insanely hyperfixated or deeply passionate creator designed Meat did not hold to that particular philosophy.

Ilia’s avatar emerges from a strange sort of bulb, or some sort of pulpy fruit full of goop. A long and slender hand, multi-jointed as it was in character creation, breaks through the thin, translucent skin of its surface, and a flood of fluids make her a bit dizzy as her character’s POV spins and collapses out. 

She can see individual waves of goop rolling over the ‘camera’. The frayed edges of biology, streaming and scattering after her act of tearing it open. As her ‘eyes’ focus, she sees a massive skybox, roiling above, like a distant ceiling in a deep and horrifying cavern. There are long stalactites above, reflecting against a surface that might be stone or might be some other form of dark, strange meat, distant and hard to glimpse. Some of the stalactites are so broad and so long that even from what might be miles away, she can see them reaching down from above, and from several of them there are long, drooling strings of something like saliva or foam or… maybe pus? Dripping down onto the world below.

She turns to look at that world, using her controls to finally catch sight of the arena she’ll be playing in, the place she’s intending to dedicated many more hours of the day to experiencing.

It’s… prairies.

In what feels like a twist on old-fashioned RPGs, or callbacks to something like Zolda, Ilia finds herself and her avatar in the flesh-equivalent of a grassy field. Small fronds of… what might be fur? Coat the terrain entirely, washing over soft hills and subtle bumps. Every few hills there’s a tree of some sort, bare of any leaves, just jagged protrusions of what look like maybe bone, and all around, like she’s in a weird sort of caldera, there are mountainous peaks surrounding her.

Looking to where she ‘came’ from, Ilia watches as a long, thick tendril slowly pulls itself back into a sort of cut or seam in a hillside, the deflated polyp she emerged from sucked along with it. With a disconcerting ‘schlorp’ sound, the tendril vanishes, the cut closing over, and just like that, she’s just… laying there, looking at a hillside basically indistinguishable from any others.

And then-

OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE

SIDE-MISSION 1: FEED

SIDE MISSION 2: GROW

Three boxes appear, floating horizontally one above the other. They feel kind of disorienting compared to the constant organic look all around, but they don’t look like just floating squares either- they are made of a sort of bluish-grey material, the writing on them that same jagged and archaic font written with blood vessels for ink.

She waves her controller / hand at them, trying to select them to see if there’s anything else- but they dart away, shifting like they’re using the same physics engine as everything else. Now that is immersive- fuck a videogame stat screen, they just put floating biocubes that write stuff to you. Weird? Absolutely. 

She presses the button for a menu to appear, and the boxes vanish, then reappear with a click. Cycling through, she gradually finds a way to select other menus, and the boxes shift, fusing and reforming into a single larger one with more writing.

Lo and behold, the character sheet.

{MANIFESTATION OF [00000000]}

EXP: 0/???

GENUS: ESURIATIO AUTONOMIA 

SPECIES: FLESHLING

STATS:

• Vitality

  • 2

• Agility

  • 2

• Strength

  • 2

• Endurance

  • 2

• Intelligence

  • 3

• Sensitivity

  • 3

• Synchronicity

  • 4

SKILLS: N/A

MUTATIONS: N/A

ORGANS: 

• CUTANEOUS

  • FLESHLING SKIN

• SKELETAL

  • FLESHLING BONE

• MUSCLE

  • FLESHLING MUSCLE

  • FLESHLING TENDON

• CIRCULATION

  • FLESHLING CIRCULATION

  • FLESHLING PUMP

• RESPIRIUM

  • FLESHLING LUNGS

• GLANDULAR

  • FLESHLING LIVER

  • FLESHLING ADRENAL

• NEUROLOGOS

  • FLESHLING BRAIN

  • PARASITIC INFESTORICA

• SENSORIA

  • FLESHLING SENSORIA

• DEGUSTATION

  • CYCLIAL DIGESTER

This, like all good character sheets, raises questions right alongside potential answers. While the title at the top of the character sheet is interesting (calling her a “manifestation” of something that’s crossed out), it’s the organs that she’s most curious about. Hovering over them one at a time, she checks the description that pops up, words that spiral off from the pre-existing veins of the original words.

SPECIES: FLESHLING expands as she hovers over it, forming into a short description that really doesn’t say much.

A Fleshling is a weak and hungering thing, bound to inadequate form. Humanoid, this species sits barely above the ranks of bottom-feeders, existing only to be hunted by greater hungers and to populate the least important parts of the food chain. Passingly clever and holders of complex graspers, they come in a variety of forms, all of them delicious, most of them weak.

Scrolling down, she tracks into the ‘organs’ section of the sheet, hovering over them one by one. For the most part, the descriptions are all quite similar, tracking one-to-one with the descriptor of the overall species;

FLESHLING SKIN: The outer covering of a Fleshling, possessing base flexibility and little else. It holds in the other systems without contributing much against offense or infection.

FLESHLING BONE: The internal framework of a Fleshling, maintaining its overall shape and allowing it to move and survive impacts. Weak, porous, and overall quite weak.

FLESHLING MUSCLE: The strands which allow a Fleshling to create force, motion and torque. Tire easily and have minimal density.

The trend goes on like that for a while, basically just describing what the organ’s function is and then insulting it. Whatever a Fleshling is, it’s pretty clear that the system or gameplay designer has a rather low opinion on the starter class for the game, and every single description goes into detail about how lackluster, unimpressive, or bare-minimum level they are. There’s something to be said for a starter class being the weakest point in the game, that’s basically how you make the progression actually work for most people, but Ilia’s had a bit too much negative experience with hating her own body over the years to be fully comfortable with the descriptions. Then again, just like in real life, it might well just make for good motivation to start playing the game to potentially change these organs, or her species, as fast as possible. 

There are, however, two exceptions. Something called a CYCLIAL DIGESTER and the PARASITIC INFECTORIA both stand out as dramatic exceptions to the rule that all organs are to fall under the same type as her base species.

CYCLIAL DIGESTER: An unnatural addition to a pathetic Fleshling, this digestive organ allows its host to gain more than the base level of nutrition from what it consumes, and grants the Fleshling omnivorous eating habits.

Sounds simple enough, though the note about a “unnatural addition” stands out to her. Something meta, maybe? The game itself finding an immersive way to explain why she can (one would assume) eat crafted items or other things in the game? But then… why not just make Fleshlings omnivores in the first place? A weird distinction, one that doesn’t quite feel like it’s needed without being an intentional choice.

The other stand-out organ, however, is even stranger.

PARASITIC INFECTORIA: A fragment of one of the great Flesh Beyond, remade into a tool for a replica of its purpose. The Parasitic Infectoria remolds a body that it might feel the influence of strange outer beings, though all but the strongest of wills are erased at the touch of that which it channels.

Now that fucks. 

A lovecraftian horror sort of explanation, one seemingly intended to explain the player’s own presence, transforming metanarrative into actual narrative. Apparently Ilia, and most likely any other players in this game, are perceived as some sort of outer beings, entering the game’s world through whatever this organ is. The fact that it’s in the NEUROLOGOS category right next to a Fleshling brain (which is treated just as harshly as every other Fleshling organ by the game’s descriptors) likely indicates where it’s located, and the reference to something called a “Flesh Divine” is tantalizing in and of itself. Is there actual lore to this game? Beyond just the experience? Every time she finds something new, it makes the game-world seem larger, the amount of production time and effort required higher. It doesn’t quite seem possible that this could be an indie game, which only furthers the mystery of it all.

To put it simply, VR games advanced enough to even have these sorts of mechanics and graphics have only existed for what, five years? The sheer amount of effort required to do this on one’s own, or with a small, unfunded team would need… probably double that, and prophetic knowledge of exactly how to code ahead of time for things that didn’t exist. Frankly, Ilia would be stunned if she found a big-budget triple-A game with this level of detail and complexity, and those have teams of dozens, sometimes hundreds of employees. Every time she finds some new incredibly advanced detail about the game, the lingering threat that she’ll hit a wall where production just stopped or couldn’t be maintained gets further away.

Who the hell made this?

Closing out of the menu, Ilia looks around. It takes some balancing, her controls seeming a bit weirdly delayed, but she manages to get her avatar to its feet, turning its head to look around. The objectives were clear- survive, with the sub objectives of feeding and growing. Maybe she could ‘win’ or meet her objective by doing a stealth build and hiding out somewhere, but the other objectives seem to push for exploration, something she’s more than happy to deliver.

As her first step, she reaches down, using the haptic controls and buttons to see if she can pluck some of the ‘hair-grass’ that flows along the hillside she’s on, its purple-blue juxtaposing the pale skin and bright red fluid still coating her. To her delight, her avatar easily plucks a handful of the material, though it still feels like there’s a slight delay in responsiveness. Almost immediately, a prompt appears in the corner of her vision.

MATERIAL ACQUIRED: Decorative Filament type 1a.

1a? Seriously? There’s enough variations that they need numbers and letters? 

She looks around her menu for any sort of inventory system, but nothing appears, none of her buttons prompting one’s appearance. And, seeing as her avatar is a naked homunculus, she doesn’t exactly have pockets in this form.

Which leads to an easy conclusion about what to do with this new material. She eats it.

There’s a weird sort of humming, her haptic feedback sensors going wild trying to translate something, and Ilia experiences the disorientation of her camera angles shifting as her avatar chews. It takes a few seconds, longer than she expected, but she’s rewarded immediately after with another popup.

GENERAL EXP ACQUIRED: +2

MASTICATION EXP ACQUIRED: +5

Ooooh, another good tidbit. General exp, but also specific ones. Maybe like a Sky-Rimmed setup, something that forces you to actually practice a skill in-game to level it? Or maybe a way to acquire skills, still obviously missing from her character sheet? Possibilities, possibilities.

However, getting +2 general exp isn’t as rewarding when she doesn’t know how many she needs, and her total sits at an awkward 2/??? at the top of her character sheet, prompting a frown. Maybe she needs more synchronicity points to unlock it? But she’s started at a pretty focused Synchronicity build already…

Graaah! Nothing’s getting answered by just sitting around and thinking! She has proof of a way to get xp and a way to meet one of her secondary objectives at the same time, what more could any good gamer needs? She pops open another can of Monstrous, feeling the artificially colored caffeine flood her belly, and sets off.

Interestingly, she notices that her camera wobbles again as soon as she does. She tries walking again, but the distortion fails to appear. She takes another sip and- there! The eating animation plays again!

Weird. Did someone code in for the animation to play when the player leans their head back? Or is it somehow sending her swallowing or something? That shouldn’t be possible, but the idea that someone took the effort to do something so small is invigorating, and she can’t help but laugh.

“Whoever made this needs a prize,” she mumbles to herself. “And probably a lot of therapy.”

She walks down the hill, taking the occasional bite out of the hair-grass as she goes. By the time she reaches the bottom of the hill, she’s gotten a full twelve more xp, though it seems like the more she does it, the less chance there is for xp to proc. Or maybe she needs to do something more engaging, vary it up. Possibilities, possibilities! 

Reaching the bottom of the hill though, she starts to notice more little details here and there. The one that stands out most is a kind of swaying coming from the grasses in certain patches, usually at the low points between hills. The hair-grass sways as if there is something moving through it, indicating most likely an exceptional physics engine and an equally likely source of further xp. 

Enemies!

With a smile and an mouth full of both spicy chips and fantasy hair-grass, Ilia waddles her avatar towards the closest source of movement, eager to see how the combat mechanics play.