Hell's Glitch (initial draft)

4 Hard Ass

Sam's viewpoint went from looking directly at his character, Sarem, to swiveling around to the back of him, then travelling inside his head until Sarem and Sam were one. It was like Sam had predicted, the simulation was a first person one.

Sam looked down at his digital hands and noticed that he was moving them. It was initially a weird sensation, like he had never had hands before in his life. The ones he was looking at weren't his—well—now they were. He flexed his long dark fingers and heard the crunch of the supple leather when he balled his hand into a tight fist. The leather felt good, and so did the wind. A nice breeze was blowing on a relatively quiet night. There were no manmade sounds to be heard, only the sounds of tiny forest creatures. There were actually tiny spiders and crickets moving around on the forest floor seemingly alive in a nightly dance, just like in real life.

"This is sick!" Sam whispered to himself.

He couldn't believe that such minute details were rendered inside of the game. It was almost indistinguishable from a real forest. He looked above, and through the trees could see some of the moon's radiant glow. He wanted to see more so he moved his feet for the first time. It was another funny sensation, a strange tingling travelled through his whole body. He moved to the middle of the clearing to look up at the gorgeous full moon. It was a much more beautiful sight than any moon he'd seen in real life. The hugeness of it, its purple tint, and the glow from it made it otherworldly and its mere sight made Sam frightful, yet excited for the journey that was to come. He let out a shaky breath in an effort to calm himself and thought about his next plan of action. He wasn't just some mere player. He still had a job to do. He had to remember to think of this like work, like every other game he'd playtested. At the moment, that seemed impossible, but he had to get over it.

He walked around in a circle to get accustomed to the walking. He stayed in the same area so as not to rouse any enemies that might be nearby and talked to himself.

"So my method is the same as always. I need to first find the bug. That requires extreme testing of the game's systems or one of its features. I'll need to even go outside the bounds of reason and explore every inch of the game that I can. I'll have to test it and repeat the test to make sure that it's a repeatable flaw. Either way, I'll report what I find to the developers. They'll check it out and let me know if they want me to test it further. Hopefully I can do this quickly and move on so that I can get five glitches before anyone else."

Sam was satisfied with his method. He prepared to check his gear when he heard a voice that didn't fit with anything else he'd seen in this world so far. The liveliness of her voice broke his concentration and immersion with the world.

"That's a good method, tester number forty one...Sam Nagai, is it?"

The woman sounded young, maybe close to Sam's twenty-seven years as there was a hint of maturity in her tone.

"Who are you?" Sam asked.

"Oh sorry. I'm one of the level designers for this area, The Forest of Woe. Fun fact: it's also called the Assassin's Forest by many of the NPCs and Murderville by many of us on the design team. My name is Alex Madura." she said, joviality in her tone.

"Nice to meet you, Alex. So this is a Planes game? The character creation and even the name of this area makes me think it is. Is it a sequel or a remake?" he asked.

"Sorry Sam, at this stage of the game, I'm not authorized to answer those kinds of questions."

"That's a bummer. But it's kind of obvious that this is that same sort of game."