Chapter 1: Welcome to Fantasy Adventure Quest!
What the fuck?
Opening her eyes, Lexi could hardly believe the sight that greeted her. The last thing she remembered before turning in for bed last night was curling up under the covers with her phone, mindlessly scrolling through some of her favorite imageboards until sleep eventually overtook her. But now, not only was she definitely not in her bed, Lexi was starting to question whether or not she was even on Earth — or even alive.
Rather than finding herself nestled within a pile of pillows and covers in her small dorm room, Lexi’s gaze fell upon a scene that could only be described as magical. She stood upon a perfectly circular small-island, maybe five yards across, itself set within a perfectly circular lake. A single bridge, wrought of white marble lattice extended from the edge of the island across the lake — all of which was set within a grove of the most peculiar trees Lexi had ever seen.
While far from being an outdoorswoman, Lexi was fairly sure that pine trees — which, judging from the flaky bark, long needles, and pine cones, these certainly appeared to be — did not have pastel pink colored needles. And they definitely did not float several feet above the ground, bobbing gently in place with their tangled root-balls dangling in mid-air.
The whole sight was surreal enough that Lexi rubbed her eyes, thinking for a moment that she might be caught in the tail end of a dream. Any such illusions were completely shattered when a ray of sunlight coalesced into the ethereal form of a faerie.
“No. Fucking. Way.”
Before the utterance escaped Lexi’s lips, the transformation being enacted before her was complete. The faerie, wrought from pure light itself, now stood before her in the flesh – and, what sumptuous flesh it was!
The faerie floated down from the sunbeam within which she had materialized, gracefully riding the light on delicate wings of gossamer, that looked like something belonging to a butterfly, only sized for a fully-grown woman — who just happened to be fully nude. The faerie girl to whom the wings were attached was stunningly beautiful. Built like a dancer, the fae had long balletic limbs, whose effortless lines served to magnify her intrinsically lovely form.
The pert and compact breasts of the faerie girl jiggled ever so slightly when she touched down on the island’s grass in front of Lexi. Lexi could see the smooth muscles in the girl’s legs flex delicately as she stepped towards her, her eyes being drawn incessantly upwards, taking in the faerie’s luscious form. Everything from the perfectly smooth vulva, the slim waist, iridescent skin, and matching green eyes and hair spoke to Lexi of a beauty that was wholly otherworldly.
Any doubts she might have been holding onto that this was her former world of college drudgery evaporated like dew drops in the morning sun.
“Welcome to Aeternia,” the faerie girl said. Her luminous green eyes locked with Lexi’s, holding her in place. “We’ve got a lot to go over before you start the game, Lexi, so let’s get started!”
As soon as the faerie girl spoke the word game, her face blossomed into a cheerful smile, whose warmth shone on Lexi like the sun itself, drawing her inexorably into wanting to like and agree with this heavenly beauty. However, an icicle of cold logic pierced the veil of seduction wrought by the fae, clearing Lexi’s mind.
“Three questions,” Lexi began, the incongruity of the scene in which she found herself gradually transmuting into a low-simmering anger. “One, what fucking game are you talking about? Two, where the fuck are we? And three, who the fuck are you?”
Her cute smile never faltering, the faerie girl cocked her head to one side, and winked, her loose green curls falling slightly over one breast with the motion.
“I’m here precisely to answer those questions, and any others you might have,” the fae said. “If you don’t mind me going backwards in your list, my name is Felicity, and I’m one of the system administrators here responsible for orienting new players. The other other two questions both have a single answer.”
Instead of speaking the answer, Felicity deftly hopped to the side, and mimed pulling on an imaginary cord. However, the cord must have been anything but imaginary, because the motion caused a giant animated scroll to unroll itself in mid-air where Felicity had just been standing, directly in front of Lexi. It read:
Welcome to Fantasy Adventure Quest! The alternate-reality multiplayer role-playing game (ARMRPG) where players pit their wits against hordes of monsters (and each other) in the high-fantasy realm of Aeternia.
Lexi sank to her knees, oblivious to the metallic clinking sounds which issued as a result of the sudden motion. With a mixture of awe and disbelief, she gasped, “I’m in a game…like in an isekai novel?”
A cute winking nod from Felicity was the only answer forthcoming, but the realization swept over Lexi like a gale. How many countless hours had she spent devouring isekai light novels, manga, and anime. All the telltale signs were here — the utterly bizarre setting, the gorgeous faerie girl, and the floating welcome scroll — and they all pointed to one of two conclusions. Either Lexi had suffered a complete mental breakdown and was in the midst of a full blown hallucinatory psychosis, or the faerie was telling the truth.
“Fuck it,” Lexi shrugged. “Alright, Felicity, give me the skinny on this game. How do people end up as players like me?”
Felicity waved her hand and the welcome message that had formerly graced the floating scroll disappeared, and was replaced by an icon of a server. From that icon, Lexi saw numerous lines which she — as a computer science student — immediately recognized as representing network connections, each terminating in what appeared to be icons representing typical user devices like laptops and mobile phones.
“Although the game’s central AI exist primarily in this world,” Felicity explained, “it has discovered a means of making connections to the internet in yours.”
“So,” Lexi reasoned, “does this mean we’re in some kind of virtual reality environment hosted on a system somewhere?”
Wrinkling her nose in an adorable smile, Felicity said, “Yes…but not really. As a system agent, my perspective is naturally somewhat myopic and limited in scope to my primary function — introducing new players to Aeternia. However, I can say that it is not quite correct to think of Fantasy Adventure Quest as a virtual reality in the way that term is used in your world. Rather, it is an informational reality which manifests the ability to both draw in suitable candidates as new players, to reshape these individuals into new characters based on their deepest desires, and to provide a fully tactile world in which these new identities can be lived.”
Tactile is right, Lexi realized, noticing for the first time that not only was she experiencing the sights of Aeternia, but that all of her senses were not only fully engaged, but appeared to be operating at a very high degree of sensitivity. The fully range of sensory engagement was not only as vivid as any normal experience, but was somehow even more acute. It was as if the smells, tastes, sounds, and sensations of the wooded world around her were almost more real than what she had only a few hours ago taken for granted as reality.
This world, Aeternia as Felicity called it, was clearly no mere phantasmagoric VR experience. No, Lexi decided, this was something very different — something more like the old stories of people being spirited away to the realm of the faeries. As if reading her mind, Lexi glanced up at Felicity while this realization dawned on her, unsurprised to see the face of the faerie girl beaming down on her like a beatific miniature sun.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
Lexi decided to throw her reservations and cautions to the wind, and just go with it. Whatever this was, it was too good — too insanely interesting — to not fully embrace and explore.
“How are players chosen by the AI?” Lexi asked. “I get that there’s some mechanism to effect connectivity with my world’s networks, but what are the criteria for player selection? I’m assuming it’s not totally random.”
“Oh, indeed,” Felicity nodded. “Nothing about player selection and character assignment is left to chance. It’s all very carefully planned by the system architects.”
The faerie waved her hand towards the scroll, wiping away the iconographic depiction of the game’s central AI, and replacing it with a photorealistic depiction of Lexi herself. The scroll became a veritable window into the dark dorm room, illuminated only by the electric glow of Lexi’s laptop screen. The petite eighteen year old girl sat hunched over the laptop, her light-brown hair pinned back in a loose bun, large hazel eyes flickering in the screen’s light. The image of Lexi was clad in her typical nighttime attire, a white tank top and a pair of comfortable boxer shorts. She sat cross-legged on the desk chair, her petite frame flexible enough to be totally comfortable.
“Tch,” Lexi grimaced, not overly fond of what she saw as an almost boyishly slim body — her too narrow hips and overly small breasts wholly unconcealed by the loose night clothes.
“You see,” Felicity continued, “through it’s connectivity to your world’s internet, the AI directs the system architects to profile suitable candidates based on behavioral profiling algorithms present in the digital data each person generates.”
“Kind of like a beefed up version of targeted ads?”
“Precisely! The difference in the game’s case is, however, both that the data being collected and the sophistication of the algorithm are orders of magnitude greater than anything companies in your world would currently be capable of performing.”
Rolling the idea over in her mind, Lexi asked, “What kind of profile are you looking for? Like, who’s the ideal candidate?”
“In general, the algorithm matches player profiles against potential candidates who meet three criteria. First,” Felicity said holding up one finger, “they must be relatively isolated from any friends or family, almost existing in a vacuum.”
Check!
Lexi’s parents had divorced almost ten years ago, and that had left an indelible mark on the then eight year old girl, causing her to build up emotional walls that had ultimately led to her being walled off from almost everyone in her life. Any communication with her parents these days typically consisted of a few pro forma text messages, and her high school friends had all gone off to different colleges, leaving Lexi in a largely self-constructed bubble of isolation.
Rather than seeking out new friends at her university, she had dug in deeper, intentionally maintaining a distance from her classmates and professors. As a result, the closest thing to any human interaction that Lexi received on a regular basis were wholly anonymous conversations on the imageboards she so often frequented.
Holding up a second finger, Felicity continued. “Second, we look for individuals who are properly acclimatized to the right kinds of media. We’ve found that those best suited to be players tend to be obsessive consumers of Japanese anime, manga, light novels, or J-RPGs — or usually, some combination thereof. Essentially, the candidate will be what you would recognize as an otaku if they happen to be Japanese, or more commonly if they’re American, a weeb.”
Double fucking check!
If ever a weeb had walked the Earth, it was Lexi. Although not an uncommon obsession among deeply introverted teenage girls, Lexi embodied to it to the extreme. Apart from school assignments, she could hardly remember the last time she voluntarily read anything that wasn’t a manga or light novel. Likewise, she could hardly count the number of nights she had spent curled up on bed with her laptop, watching a fansub of an anime series that had just hit the net, or grinding through adventures in the pixel art terrain of a J-RPG. Calling Lexi a weeb would be like saying the sky is blue.
“Lastly,” the faerie concluded, “the system seeks to identify potential players whose sexual frustrations are both extremely deep-seated, and are of such a nature as might be remedied by the game’s core design and mechanics.”
Hold up…what!?
“W-wait a minute,” Lexi sputtered. “What kind of a game is this?”
A singularly lewd smile split Felicity’s face, and Lexi was suddenly and intensely aware again of the faerie girl’s nakedness — her eyes roaming hungrily over the nubile body floating gracefully before her.
“As you’ve probably guessed,” Felicity giggled. “Fantasy Adventure Quest is an erotic game.”