Tevun-Krus #29 - Punk Wars!

Virtual Feelings - A Short Story by @KingBritain

We stepped out of the fog and entered a dungeon full of bones.

Spiderwebs stretched between the dark corners of the wet, stinking room, crawling with pale white arachnids that glanced at us with blood red eyes, each of them the size of a fist. Skeletons littered the soaked cobblestones, their empty eye sockets swallowing light, their open jaws swimming with the kind of black empty space that makes you think of bottomless pits and the distances between stars.

'Can we have some light?'

I nodded, blowing into my hand, then rising my palm out to the darkness. A pulsing orb of light, barely the size of a candle flame, drifted up into the middle of the dungeon. At first, the darkness swallowed my spell, but after a few seconds, the orb expanded, the pulses growing stronger and stronger until a mini-sun was floating ahead of us.

What it revealed wasn't pleasant. The bones littering the cold, wet cobblestones shifted, lifting themselves off the floor, ghostly breaths rattling from their empty rib cages. The pale, red eyed spiders, almost translucent in the light, crept back into their corners. If they didn't look like they were about to charge, it might have been uplifting.

Bella moved beside me, pulling out her guns. Bella wasn't her real name of course, but neither was the one I'd told her, or any of the others in the group. We all assumed different identities because we all wanted to be someone different.

It was precisely why we were playing the Game.

Bella wore a long black tailcoat trimmed with gold, and a loose white blouse underneath it, the kind that nineteenth century pirates might have worn. The only clue that she might have been from a thousand years plus that were the glowing pistols in her hand, both powerful enough to disintegrate the rising skeletons into fine clouds of dusts. She captained her own ship that sailed the vast black ocean between the planets in a distant galaxy, and had got filthy rich doing it. She tagged along with us for the pleasure of it, not the loot – which was exactly why I was there.

Tackling the Ruined Undead Dungeon for the rare treasures it contained on my own was out of the question. Too many traps, too many enemies, and if I'm honest, too much darkness. You spend enough time in the Game, you forget that the monsters are just incredibly accurate pixels, that the sword going through your gut is just an illusion, that the ruins crumbling on top of you are just a preprogrammed set piece.

Anyway, I needed the loot, and there was no way I could get it by myself. The rest of our group – officially logged as the Lonely Hearts Club Band – had promised me that they'd help. Vincent Strader had taken time out from hunting down dangerous simulants, owing me a favour after I'd helped him out in his world a few weeks back. Gregory Knapp needed the money for the Steam that powered the tiny cogs and gears of half his body, and I promised him whatever we made from the loot that I didn't need. And Bella, well, she was just happy to be having fun.

The skeletons were standing now, small blue dots hovering in the black pits of their eyes. I'd thought similar creatures in my world plenty of times, but a huge chunk of my mind still couldn't process that what was happening wasn't real. The rational part of me screamed it's a game, it's a game, it's a game, but the rest of me, that could touch the damp walls, smell the stagnant, dripping water, feel the weight of my sword and armour, just couldn't believe that. My mind knew that that everything ahead of me was the product of hugely intelligent computers, but as far as the rest of me was concerned, I was about to fight the undead in a dungeon full of scurrying, fist sized spiders.

And so, obviously, my heart went into fucking overdrive.

Bella notched the first kill. A skeleton with a hole in its skull the size of a yawning mouth staggered out from behind a pillar. She turned, rose her gun, which looked and felt like a eighteenth century flintlock pistol until the barrel glowed blue and a whine fizzed the air before firing, and turned the skeleton into a loose collection of atoms.