Chapter 1 - SKIN-DEEP

Ok, so this is at least partially a fanfic, but I like to put my own spin on it so we'll just say it takes inspiration from it! Welcome, ladies and gents, to my first genuine attempt at a litrpg, and watch me free this maniacal little story gremlin from my joyous delightful brain-stem! Also, if you know where the title and "fanfic" claims come from, kudos on your good taste in podcasts!

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It’s here. At long, long last, it’s here. 

Slowly, Ilia unwraps the box. Her knife glides through tape, carves open carboard, pulls apart paper and styrofoam packing. It’s a lot of packaging for such a small, well, package, but considering how much she’s paid for it, she’s not overly bothered by just how well-insulated it is. Most of it’s recyclable anyways, so not the end of the world- better tape, cardboard and paper than packing peanuts and plastic wrappers at the end of the day.

Slowly, with something like reverence, she takes the cartridge out of the box.

Three inches wide, half an inch across, equipped with a port to lock it in directly and fuse its code to any compatible system, of which, at the moment, there is only one. Its casing is pitch black, perfectly simplistic, bereft of any stickers, paint or marker- but on the back side of it, carved in so small that she has to run her fingers over them to feel them, are letters. They spell out a single word in sharp, jagged, knife-born shapes-

MEAT.

Three months of searching for it, proving that it was real, another three weeks of finding someone who could get it for her, and then another two whole months waiting for the fucking thing in the mail. Apparently it got shipped to New Zealand, Madagascar, and then Hawaii before it even landed on the continental US, only to get half-lost wandering across a dozen different major cities before it ever reached the sleepy town of Hollow Springs. She tracked it across no less than five different mailing websites before it got to UPS, and it was agony the whole time.

Holding the cartridge reverently, she gets off her knees to walk over to her desk and the headset planted upon it. 

There are three different openings for a cartridge- one for the operating system and two kept empty, bereft of content. She’s made sure to admin-level delete the memory from every other game she’s put on here, now carefully arrayed on the edge of her desk in places of reverence and distaste, depending on the game. She wants nothing to interfere with the data on this thing, considering what a nightmare it was to acquire it.

For the last three years, Ilia has been a hardcore gamer. Well… not entirely true. She’s been gaming a lot longer than three years, starting with Fallout: New Vegas all the way back in the mid-2010s, a gift from family (pirated, of course. She sends up a metaphorical kiss towards her uncle and his obsession with remaking old computers and coding). That, in a lot of ways, was an awakening, and it’s still one of her all-time favorites, but she’s grown since then. Doomed, Warframing, Apex Legendary, a hundred more games over the last few decades, though only a few of them really stand out. Prototypes, an old favorite, was integral to helping her awaken her love for messy, delicious biohorror, and nothing’s really scratched the itch in the same way ever since. 

Then they came out with VR mechanics that actually work, and it’s all been a beautiful adventure since then. 

But… well, it’s new technology. New machines, new coding, overworked game developers and programmers being driven like slaves by a bunch of money-grubbing producers- the games industry is a hot mess at the best of times. For every Inner Wilds there’s a thousand new Call Of Guns that come out and flood the market and mainstream perception to help a bottom line, and that goes about quintuple for something as complex and difficult as a VR game. Most of them are little better than vertigo-inducing physics simulators with mediocre graphics, making the few exceptions genuinely stand out- and also making those exceptions even rarer. It’s been years since something really juicy came along, and out of a mix of boredom, frustration, and curiosity, Ilia started looking up discussion forums to see if she could find a place to share her complaining.

Boy howdy, were there forums.

She weeded out some of the messier ones and eventually found some places more for the discussion of indie titles, well-developed experiences worth the grind or the money, and discussions of what mechanics and changes are needed to really make these games work. Theoretical improvements, game-theory, and wishlists all fill the space with discussion, usually positively, even with all the moaning and groaning. She found some good titles here and there even.

But then… then there came the rumors. Some game that blew the others out of the water. The most immersive, reactive experience ever coded, entirely indie, developed over years and years. Someone claimed it was a bootleg of an upcoming major-league title, others that it was just a rumor, some even saying it was born from the depths of some unhinged scandinavian programmer. Knowing programmers, the latter seems most likely, even now. Everyone who talked about it would not shut up, earning more than a few closed discussion threads or canceled forum accounts, but even still, no mod group seemed able to actually shut down conversation of the topic.

The next Full Life: Alexi. Something to remake the industry and prove the real limits and capabilities of existing software, compatible only with the very latest version. 

Three months it took, to find someone whose account she could verify and whose story felt believable. Three weeks, following some links to their old comments, to find the discussion boards and others who had managed to play the game. It became a background obsession for a while- work, sleep, game, and research, almost every day. 

And then… two hundred dollars. The most expensive game she’s ever bought, the most dramatic purchase- she agonized for days over the price tag! All for one game! It took the most strenuous recommendations from her most trusted sources about price-ranges and how much they’d heard about it. This wasn’t X or yamblr; for something to go this viral on this many discussion boards and forums, sans bots? That takes real passion, genuine enjoyment.

So, she dipped into her savings for the last fifty, cashed in some piggy-bank money, and went all in.

And now it’s here.

MEAT.

Almost reverentially, she plugs it into the headset.

It’s 3pm on a saturday. She has no plans and no one to chat to for the next two days. She’s got bright red spicy chips, green soda, and hot-pocket pizza poppers all prepped. She’s in the most comfortable clothes she has- the loosest, baggiest t-shirt in the world, loose boxers, and fuzzy socks. Bills are paid, bank account is starving but no longer bleeding, and she’s got all day tomorrow to recover from whatever hazy binge she falls into with this game.

She’s ready.

Slowly, she slips the glove and joystick control onto her right hand, then her left. She places the haptic feedback sensors on her shoulders, stomach, and thighs. She takes a long, delicious sip of delicious, monstrous caffeine, burps loud enough that she hears it echo, and reaches for the headset.

It’s already warm as she picks it up. The battery is fully charged, but it’s plugged in to ensure the longest gaming session possible, and she can feel the complex circuity powering up, the whirring fans coming to life- and then she hears nothing at all as the sound-canceling buffer slips over her ears.

She clicks the power button on the side of the device, and watches it begin to power up.

At first, it’s just a black screen. It raises brightness slowly, ensuring that the user’s eyes can always adjust, and begins to color in. The tech ain’t perfect- if you look closely enough you can still see places where the pixels get a little blurry. That being said, it’s HD graphics, and they stand a cut above any laptop or desktop she’s owned yet. 

Gradually, the screen begins to run.

Dripping black ooze shifts and falls across the screen in front of her, slowly succumbing to gravity and running off the walls. She looks down, seeing a puddle of it forming around her feet, the viscous matter moving gummily as she pushes it with her avatar’s feet and waves a controller over it.

Then, there’s a tearing sound. Ripping, bright and nasty, like an ugly cut that is as messy as can be. She turns like a whip, startled by the noise, and sees-

A line. Carved into the white wall from which the ooze fell from.

Behind her, a void. At her feet, the strange tar. Before her, a blank white wall, white as snow, with a single line of burning crimson carved into it.

Then another one. Diagonal-down, same length as the first. Another, diagonal-up. A third, straight vertical.

It keeps going. Inch by inch, scarred line of bloody flesh after scarred line of bloody flesh, a word is carved into the wall.

MEAT.

Metamorphous font, she’s pretty sure. Bright red and dripping. For a while, that’s all that’s on screen, long enough that she starts to worry- and then another two cuts, diagonally crossing each other. They make an X shape, gaping open and drooling blood.

Beneath it, another, smaller word is carved, with an arrow pointing from it up towards the red X.

BEGIN.

Slowly, Ilia extends her hand out to the wall in front of her. There’s a sense of warmth and vibration from the haptic feedback sensors as she touches the wall, and it only gets more intense as she touches the still-dripping blood from the cuts, an arterial crimson. The wall shudders, ever so slightly, like gelatin reacting to stimuli- or like flesh, responding to touch.

Oh yeah. This is that good shit.

Without further hesitation, she plunges her avatar’s hand into the carved-open sigil, eliciting a fresh gout of haptic feedback from the controller-

And then she’s yanked. The feedback does its best to emulate the sharp tugging sensation, but it mostly comes across through the visuals, the morbidly pallid arm of her avatar sucked violently forward. The wall comes closer, and even as she steps back in the real world, it only approaches more, until it starts taking up the whole screen. It bends and warps around her as it pulls her in deeper, deforming and opening and tearing wider as it swallows her whole, until her whole screen is red and glistening and full of muscle fibers and blood.

And then it gives one last yank, something responded to by her haptic sensors giving her a full-body jolt of motion, and the screen goes black again.

And stays that way.

For a while.

Which yeah, sure, if that’s the experience, that’s the experience, and it’s phenomenal- but not, like, two hundred dollars kind of phenomenal. That was like, what, five full minutes of gameplay? More like a tech demo than anything.

She’s about to hit the button on her headset that brings up the settings and options menu when, abruptly, she hears something. 

A heartbeat.

Bum-bum. Bum-bum. 

She looks around, trying to find the source- there.

A small, glowing little nodule. Bright red, same as that arterial spray, but almost bursting with light. It’s so bright that she can see through it, a translucent membrane illuminating a vague and hazy shape beneath it. 

Above the glowing polyp, words appear, made out of artful, curling veins and bright red trails in the air as opposed to the violent tearing of the previous example. They say a simple, straightforward sentence that sends a little thrill through her body and fills her with the joy only a true gamer can know.

Begin Character Creation.

Oh yeah.

This is that good shit.