1 A Terrible MC

Uncurling from his fetal position on the floor he attempted to wipe the slime trails off his face before giving up after seemingly just spreading it around. His shirt was ruined, it had been for several days now. Discarded cracker wrappers lay around him on the floor, along with several empty mineral bottles. He was done. He was now officially over her. He had lain down on this marble floor five days ago with a bucket and two boxes filled with crackers and water which were almost empty now. He'd spent the last few days sorting through his grief, which mostly meant a lot of crying and making weird sounds.

He stood up on shaky legs and stood in front of his alarm which was counting down the last minute of his allotted grief time. He felt fully refreshed mentally and had spent the previous night slowly falling into acceptance. He was ready to go out and embrace the world, or his piece of it anyway. He was honestly annoyed that this minute was taking so long. It came down to the last few seconds and he raised his hand above the button to turn off the alarm. The alarm rang out and it was the chorus of the song Mr. Brightside. He slammed his hand quickly down upon the button. He'd forgotten about that. He was both depressed and had a terrible sense of black humor going into this.

He turned around. Looked at the floor, looked at the mess, looked at himself and cleaned up.

He had a hot then cold shower, exercised, ate a proper breakfast which the maid had slid under his door as per his request. He chose his outfit with care, something too formal would look like he was still grieving but too garish and people would think he had completely lost his mind. He chose a blazer with a polo shirt and corduroy trousers.

He went to his desk, learned about the news he'd missed, a plane had gone down, a colonizer had found a larger water source that was previously measured. Nothing important. His shares had taken a turn for the worse, however, but he'd gained some large dividends last year which made up for the sudden loss.

He brought up the holo display and looked at the building, no deaths, no flashing red alerts, nothing. There never was, this was a high-class Tower and he was a high-class Owner. Nevertheless, he noticed a discrepancy between sign in times for one of the workers and realized that one of the porters had decided to have a late night rendezvous with one of the temporary customers. Fair enough. While he was supposed to be working. He sent a notice to his team leader that he was fired with extreme prejudice.

The kid thought that just because he was grieving that he could get away with this shit. He pulled up the feed of him being thrown out the building, literally, before smiling and sending a notice to his cousins to warn them about it and left it at that.

He logged into his messaging service, he'd had one made for the tower exclusively via contractor (Alice) as he was worried about security at the time, recently other owners had begun to try something similar and it worked. It also increased the sense that a tower was a real community rather than a large hotel. It used the holo display that all rooms had, from the employees to the guests. His avatar, a little cream colored ball of light with legs joined his favorite room. He raised his hands and the sensors noticed and projected the images around him with projectors in the room showing the other avatars, and his own avatar was cast onto himself so it vaguely followed his movements.

They were all sitting in chairs in a circle like a self-help group of monsters. There were 22 seats but only 5 including his own had occupants in them. This was surprising as there was normally at least ten people active in the room at any time. Most people simply left their avatar active in case somebody wanted to talk and went off to do something else unless someone called a meeting.

He called out to the 'people' in the room."What's going on?" One of the occupants perked up at my question. A giant red dragon, twice my height with tiny red wings and arms but a huge round snout/head with round teeth. It had similar body proportions to my own except for the huge head which doubled its height. Only one person in the whole Tower had such unique aesthetic tastes and she designed each avatar tailor fit for every person, with zero regard for their own opinion.

"Leonard! You're back. And you're not dead!" Disregarding Georges worrying point about his impending death Leonard asked where everybody was.

"They're playing that URPG, the one Pegasus Corporation released." He saw my even more blank expression through the blob of light somehow, "It came out literally a week before you left?"

"Rings a bell somewhere."

"And an angel got their wings."

"What?"

"Nothing, anyway after you went off on your sabbatical the Corporation unlocked the broadcasting ability, letting people record what they saw. According to The Financial Times sales figures were below expectations so maybe they wanted a boost. I don't know. But they only let you publish clips they've approved and there's a really long waiting time so the release of what few clips there have been has been little and not often. But that's a whole other thing and- "

"Get to the point."

"Here, let me show you. This is one of the clips I found that isn't crap." One of his tiny red arms gestured over at me and a rectangle of light flew over and floated in front of me. It showed a man, young with a thin mustache and black hair wearing a long trench coat and facing a horde of mud monsters, he was holding two guns with huge magazines and spraying them into the group. Each bullet hole was huge, almost a meter in diameter as well as penetrating several meters behind them, but the monsters were just collapsing to the ground before quickly reforming and getting up again. They were relentless and the distance between the horde and the gunman was quickly narrowing. Just as the monsters got within two meters of the man and their arms were grasping at his, the ground around him bulged and all the monsters collapsed into the ground, turning into liquid mud. The camera changed perspective to see the man's eyes widen slightly before a column of mud directly beneath him rose up, flinging him into the air, the column chased after him gaining features to become a huge snake. The man did, something … I couldn't see what as the perspective changed to a distant one. Just before the snake reached the man it jerked in the air, before exploding. The man rolled when he hit the ground, before getting up without a hair out of place. I flicked the rectangle back over to George who was practically vibrating with excitement.

"So?" I took my time replying.

"It's just Gabriel being Gabriel. Making everything look easy again. Doesn't mean the game is good." George literally deflated in size, shrinking until he was my size.

"Doesn't matter anyway, I can't afford it, not on my income." I leaned forward, I was interested and I already knew about George's situation but I was waiting for him to say something about it.

"I might be able to help with that." George crossed his arms and perked up restoring to his full size.

"I'll want-" I cut him off, George put on a good show but he was weak to direct confrontation.

"No Negotiation, here are my terms."

I lay down on my bed and let the learning foam mould itself around me before putting the headphone like objects into my ears and putting the black box beside my bed. I pulled the sheets over my body and pressed the button on the box.

My eyes closed involuntarily and when I opened them again I could see murky pink water in front of me. I couldn't move for a while so I just closed my eyes and enjoyed the warm, comforting sensation all around me. After a while, I don't know how long I felt stronger so I raised my arms and looked at them. They were black which was unusual as they'd been white all my life but I'd been forewarned about this by George through Gabriel so I just flailed around until I felt something hard hit my hand. I reached out for it, the lever, it was a lever. I pulled it towards me and felt gravity grab hold of me and the liquid let go as I fell away from it like it was jelly. I saw my pod, I was in a pod? Alongside it was many others, as I was falling I realized I had fallen past thousands of pods just like mine, some full of pink liquid and some empty but most full. I wondered where I was going and If I was going to die when I hit the inevitable bottom. I was glad I had fallen backwards.

And then… I stopped falling. I felt a soft, wet and sticky sensation around my head before it fell away and all I could feel was cold metal pressing into my body. I got up brown and completely naked. I was surrounded by a metal grating on the floor around me and a wall behind and ahead of me which seemed to be impossibly high, I saw a non-grating area ahead of me with a faded white arrow pointing to the left. I stepped onto the pathway and started walking along it, George hadn't told me about this part, Gabriel hadn't told him much apparently so I didn't know if what I was doing was right. As I walked I looked around and saw children slowly appearing encased in goo where there was none before, it seems we all fell from our pods and the goo rose up to catch us. It covered some of them all the way up to their feet (they all fell head first), some up to their waists and some just up to their heads like me. As I walked along they slowly got up as the goo sank into the grating and walked along next to me.

The road had an end, I could see that at least so I walked towards something that was shimmering in my vision like a mirage. I didn't think my eyes were working yet with how young I was, based on my height I'd say I was between 4 and 6.

Slowly the procession of children grew, In silence, we walked, like a horde of zombies. I looked around at the other children, most of them were taller than me and they looked between 6 and 8 years old. They were walking unsteadily and stumbling along, often spending more time lying down than walking, but they never cried out, no tears or whimpers. Just the soft sound of feet and bodies echoed around me.

The sheer steel walls on either side of us seemed to be pressing in on me as more kids arrived on either side and joined the procession. It got to the point where first I was occasionally rubbing elbows with some of my birth brothers, but then a few minutes later they were all jostling into me.

The whole crowd dipped and swayed every time someone tripped, however, if you fell on the outskirts of the crowd then you were abandoned. Some fell and didn't get up, the crowd and me helplessly forced to step on them in order to proceed, to survive I really didn't want to have to redo this.

I first felt helpless, I was always in control of my own fate, I controlled almost every aspect of my life and I felt… angry. This was the game giving me a message, you are not in control. My entire life, my only job was to be in control of myself and my surroundings and I was good at it too.

So realizing I could do little but walk, as between me beginning the game and now there had been no form of tutorial or settings or menu to change my character or even to let me know how to log out, that's what I did. After a while, the rate at which children were joining was reduced but our speed remained steady.

More than an hour of walking later (I think), my new feet were feeling sore and tired but everyone around me seemed to have gotten the hang of walking as the last time someone fell was more than ten minutes ago. Slowly I could feel the crowd around me had slowed down. I couldn't see ahead of me and it infuriated me. I tried to climb the children around me to get a better look as they'd been acting like zombies so far but anyone I tried it with just shrugged me off and in one case pushed me away.

I resigned myself to wait. So I waited. Eventually, we started walking again.

Soon I could see it. The shiny steel walls around me had been replaced by black walls with what looked like crane arms sticking out. The crowd was walking forward at a slow and steady pace and the cranes seemed to move with us rotating slightly so I only ever saw them head-on.

I began to be aware of a beeping sound. It was sounding out from different locations ahead of me multiple times every second.

It got louder and louder but I still couldn't see anything. Suddenly I could feel cool air waft in towards me from ahead. I hadn't really noticed until that point but it was hot and all it took was a cool breeze to realize.

I didn't have much time to appreciate it before the person in front of me disappeared into a tube? I tried to wait and assess the situation like I normally would in a foreign scenario, but I was pushed by my horde of zombies from behind.

I slammed into the glass wall of the tube feeling an immediate, sharp pain for the first time since being in this world. I was whisked away upwards quickly while cursing George for not telling me how to access the settings. It must have been revenge for making him Sign.

I was traveling in the center of the tube, which was made of a slightly glowing glass, and the pressure on my body was so strong I couldn't move my fingers, which I was glad for as the glass walls were close enough that I could see a dim, blurred reflection of myself as I was whisked along. My whole body was lurched around, my new stomach rolling over every other second.

After what couldn't have been a minute of travel time, I was traveling upwards when the pressure cut out, and I paused briefly in mid-air before falling for half a foot before landing on something cold, hard and black. It felt like further due to my small body size though.

The tubes surface in front of me slid open, revealing a large warehouse, with metal walls towering above me and dim lights far overhead in the ceiling. Ahead of me was another group of kids, where a line of maybe thirty children had formed. I walked towards them and joined the line, although I felt it was just adding insult to injury forcing a Tower owner like me to wait in line after being pushed and suffocated, I joined the line anyway. I could see more of those crane things hanging out of the walls, although I knew what they were now. They were pre-war turrets, highly inefficient, but still extremely deadly to bare human flesh. My Tower was equipped with state of the art energy sentries, but my defenses were mostly just immobilization mines, all of it carbon neutral, built from recycled cars. The ones used here would serve their purpose though. Still, I wanted to test them, I was curious about this new world, how far ahead of us was it? So I waited until I reached the middle of the line before not stepping forward when the person in front of me did so.

At first the person behind me, who I'd chosen because he looked like the easiest to provoke(he was taller than most of the people around close to the height of an average adult male, while I was still tiny even though I could still feel my body growing at an incredible pace, I could tell that I was firmly older than 6 now), didn't respond. A couple of minutes went by before he was annoyed and prodded me on the shoulder, I didn't respond and my back was to him so I couldn't see what he was doing. His options were limited here, he couldn't speak yet, or at least I didn't think so and I was hoping pretty hard that violence hadn't entered his thought process because he was massive.

To my relief, he decided to step out of the line and walk around me. As he took one step to leave the line, a small beep sound rang out and echoed around me. The big one suddenly collapsed. I was surprised, they weren't pre-war turrets. There was no blood coming out of the big one, but I was still sure that he was dead. Pre-war turrets fired physical shots and also took some time before firing to speed up. My energy turrets installed on the Tower used high-temperature bolts of energy to destroy targets. This was something else. George was right, this game was fun.

I kept walking and rejoined the line.