Is this the Real Life?

Before I get you wrapped up in my little world, let me ask you; Have you ever wondered what it was like to be a part of something you dreamed about, and then realized that you might've bit off more than you can chew? Like, how would you try and handle it? It's your dream life, but the responsibilities and reality of life as a whole would always be something you'd have to deal with. Let's say that your newfound life and status gave you the chance to unite dozens of thousands of people. Would you take that chance, despite the possibility of others trying to corrupt and take advantage of your image and power?

I never really thought about it much. Before now, I mean. After all, why would I? Juggling college and keeping up with my friends and habits with the inevitability of becoming an adult is a nightmare in itself; Why would I want to add another ball to juggle?

I wish I had thought about those kinds of things much sooner, to be honest. But something tells me that even if I had, it still would've never prepared me for something this bizarre.

———

"Miss Fox!!!"

I shot my head up, my hair stuck to my face. Looking around in a fast daze, I saw most of my classmates staring back at me, snickering and giggling away. Jackals and hyenas, lapping at the sudden burst of momentary entertainment. I give them all a half-chocked smile and a raised eyebrow, before I locked eyes with Professor Boone. Naturally, as you'd probably expect from a teacher or professor, he didn't look very happy.

"See me after class," he said in a calm but stern tone. Nothing more, nothing less.

The bell had rung for the period almost immediately after he spoke, and the students around me quickly packed their bags and started scurrying like the ants they are out of the room. Packing my stuff up into my own sack, I sighed and made my way down the stairs of the room to meet the professor.

If I could use two words to describe Alex Boone, it'd be the words 'Punctually Casual'. He almost always comes to class well dressed in the most relaxed fashion. A suit top hung off his chair, a rolled sleeve grey button up shirt, an unbuttoned sleeveless vest to match the suit, black slacks, and a loosened tie. Always with a half brushed, half disheveled style to his sandy blond hair, and a strangely piercing but almost always relaxed look in his eyes.

I'm honestly impressed with the fact that he's even a professor now; he was a senior at my high school when I was a sophomore, and back then he never looked like this or even seemed to show interest into anything except video games.

"Are you listening, Miss Fox??"

I snapped out of my thoughts and looked back at him. "No Alex, sorry. I zoned out for a sec... and you know you can just call me Emma now, right? We've known each other since high school, dude. None of the other students are around."

Alex sighed, and ran a hand through his hair while leaning back onto the smart board, giving me a confused look. "If you were wondering, Emma, I didn't really call you up here over you sleeping. Honestly, I could give maybe half a fuck on if someone sleeps in the class. I'd be lying if I said that listening to me rant about the fundamentals of graphic design wasn't boring. Instead, I called you up here because I'm worried about your current grade."

"Alright," I humored while taking a seat by his desk, which led to him sitting down as well. "So what's up with the grade?"

Alex flipped through his papers, and pulled out the folder he had with my name on it. "So far, from what I've been able to calculate, your grades have been gradually dropping since the second month. You were doing a steady A to B average, but now your grade is at a solid 65 percent. I know you're not stupid or ignorant, considering you were helping kids two years above you back at East Side High with math homework like it was child's play. That, and given that you used to never be this exhausted during class, makes me believe, as much as I know it's none of my business, that you're probably going through something personal either with another student or back home."

I felt my fingers unintentionally curl into a loose fist on his desk, my brow cocked. He nailed it right on the head.. I went to say something, but my voice only caught in my throat.

Alex watched as I tensed, and then held his hands up passively. "I don't wanna start anything, or get into something you don't wanna talk about.. I'm just letting you know, there are people here you can talk to if you want to. And based on your grades, if your predicament is causing it then I'd suggest at least talking to someone about it, as soon as you're comfortable... I'm not gonna lie to you. At the rate you're going, I'm worried you're probably gonna fall so far behind that you won't be able to catch back up."

I nodded in understanding, having a hard time even looking up at Alex. I knew if I did, I'd probably cry or something. And especially now, I wouldn't have the energy to even try and explain why.

"Anyways, I won't keep you any longer," he said with a sigh. "You're free to leave."

Nodding quickly, I started walking out with my stuff in hand. Exiting the classroom, I could feel the other kids looking at me again. I didn't need to lift my head, their whispers and the way they pretended to do their own thing was more than enough evidence to me.

In case the audience in my brain hasn't caught on, my name is Emma Fox. I'm twenty two years old, and I'm a mess. I'm pretty close to six foot, and because of that, I'm compared to a bean pole a lot since I'm one of the only tall girls in my class. I can draw and make stuff on a regular basis. I'm a socially awkward nut with a work in progress for an I.T. degree.

I have a lot of hobbies, but I don't think I'm really good at any of them besides playing video games and messing with some code every now and then.

I used to be good at dealing with a lot of the problems I have, like dealing with other people. There's only one thing that made a lot of that really difficult, which I'm surprised Alex didn't bring up since there shouldn't be any way that he doesn't know:

I have been labeled as a whore, and my neighbor started it.

I've come to the conclusion that people majorly underestimate how easy it is for someone to be labeled for something like that, even if they didn't do anything to deserve it. I mean, yeah, some people do sleep around a lot. But I haven't even slept with anyone like that, and yet everyone thinks that I've slept with everyone… I've just learned to accept it. There's nothing I can really do about it, but it stings every time I hear it. You'd think it would hurt more from people that you don't know, but honestly it hurts the worst from the ones that have known you for years.

While I'm talking to my remaining brain cells, I felt some sort of resistance as I accidentally run into something. Or someone, apparently. Jack Pierce, one of my few friends that haven't run away from me.

I look down and realize I knocked him over, and instantly start trying to help pick up his papers.

Jack was an interesting guy, to say the least. He got into schooling for a lot of the same classes I did, but he's trying to become a lead programmer for Bethesda or something. He used to sleep through every class and still pretty much pass everything, even though half the time he cheated off my math papers back in high school. I never could get my head around how he acted, but he was always pretty nice.

"Guessin' you were stuck in your thoughts again?" the brown haired hood said with a chuckle, getting up after grabbing what he could.

"Maybe," I said in as cheerful of a tone as I could muster up, handing the papers to him. "Are you alright?"

"Yeah, I'll live," he joked, shrugging his shoulders. "I was actually gonna come find you, but I guess you bumped into me first!"

"Oh ha ha," I said back, starting to walk with him. "What'd you need, anyway?" He grinned and pulled out what looked like a game case, with an all too familiar title: The Elder Scrolls Five, Skyrim.

"Okay, and what about it?"

"I'm challenging myself," he said with determination. "I'm gonna try and completely rewrite the game with as many mods and encoding from the other games' files as I can to make this single game support Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind, all in one!"

I could feel my brows perk up. "All in one?? That game would be close to about thirty gigs, probably a lot more than that if you wanted the graphics for each area to match Skyrim's or better," I thought out loud while considering what all he'd have to do to get it done.

Jack smirked and gave me a sly grin. "I figured you'd be interested," he remarked before putting the game back in his bag. I rolled my eyes and shrugged it off. "Something like that would take a while for just one, or five, or even ten people," I told him dismissively.

"Unless that one person has already been working on it for a while!"

I look back at him confused, and he continued to explain. "The finished product is in a beta test right now. It should be completely playable, and every mission from the other games is linked into it. I added some unique specialty mods that you used to use, like Realm of Lorkhan and some flying mods, new weapons, some aspects from other games that are still lore friendly, all that fun stuff. I came to you first because I needed someone to test it!"

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't impressed, or interested. There's no way he was working on anything like that for longer than a year; I honestly have no idea how he would've gotten it done on his own. But if it's really this close to being done, I'd definitely wanna check it out.

"…Alright, what's the catch?" I asked, giving him a knowing look. He grinned back nervously, and shrugged his shoulders again. "I only invited some other people over that we used to hang out with! Including Cole."

As soon as he said that name I instantly stormed off in the opposite direction away from Jack, which he very quickly caught back up.

"Hold the hell up!" he said as he speed walked to keep up with me. "I know you two have some sorta beef, but you're both my friends! Can't you just stop it for one night??"

I stop in my tracks and look Jack in the eyes, clearly pissed. "Stop it? Stop it?? Jack, I'm not sure if you somehow forgot, but he told everyone I was a fucking SLUT! Do you think that everyone judging me, even right now with me yelling at you, is just gonna 'stop it for one night'?! I don't wanna be anywhere NEAR his ass, before he tries to make up something else about me again!"

As I yelled, I could hear the kids around us start talking quietly. Not like I didn't expect it.

Jack took a breath, then his cheerful joking appearance suddenly became serious. "Em, I'm sorry. I was outta line… But please, just come tonight? You won't even have to talk to him. Eric, Gage, Damien, Monica, Adela, even Cameron, everyone is going to be there. It's not just gonna be you, me and Cole. I want everyone to be there, to see that I actually did something this awesome, and I'm asking you to showcase it because you were one of the best Elder Scrolls players I knew of, and you're one of my best friends. Please."

Looking into Jack's annoying puppy dog eyes, I can't help but sigh and keep moving. "Fine… but if he does anything, then I'm burning your PC to the ground and throwing him onto the fire."

Jack looks at me like I'm some kind of super genius when it comes to Skyrim and Oblivion, and he's honestly only partly right: I'm a genius at breaking the games. Finding bugs, using exploits, making the game do things for me that it was never intended to do? That was my thing. Jack always played it the 'proper way' as he puts it, being a two handed basic Nord with shouts for days and courage of steel.

And then there were the others. Gage the dual wielder, Damien the perverted healer (which I never understood as to how the hell he managed to beat the game using just healing spells), Cameron the necromancer, Monica the nature goddess and queen of the bears and wolves, Adela the archer and low key assassin, and Eric the god smith. And then Cole… the guy with followers out the ass. He used only one exploit, to get as many followers as humanly possible. He was practically a gang leader in the game, and often completely black screened the game just because he had too many people in an enclosed space. He usually only used illusion spells outside of that, but he was pretty good at it, as much as I hate saying it.

I know exactly why Jack wanted all of us there. Apart from sharing his victory with us, he knew if there was anything broke with his beta, we'd be able to find it pretty easy.

When I said yes, that decision changed a lot of things for me… I still can't decide if it was for the worse or the better.

——————

Author's notes!

Hey there, and thanks for reading the first chapter of Elder Scrolls: Insertion!

I've been working on making a story like this for a while, and even though I'm not extremely fast on updates, I do still wanna write all this down and maybe share my thoughts with others.

I had a bit of a predicament with coming up with a motive for not being as socially connective for the main character, Emma. I honestly can't say that I went through what Emma did, being labeled as something like that, but my friend had a very similar experience and it was the first thing she suggested.

Anyways, I'm sorry if it seems like a lot was packed into this single chapter. It's been a while since I've written anything in general, and I know I need to work on my plot spacing.

If you're interested in the story, please feel free to subscribe, and also feel free to ask questions or give suggestions if you have any!

Have an epic day! ✌🏼