Author: ConfessionOfLuke

Beta Test – Part 3 [F][nc]

Ahhhh, but vows can be fickle. After spending the rest of her Friday night pampering herself with a long hot bath and a quiet evening in bed, Erin woke up Saturday morning feeling restless. She had spent basically all of her free time the last three evenings playing the game, and she had been really looking forward to playing all day Saturday. She would have been able to make some real progress at the academy…

Erin was still pissed as hell at Hayworth for what he did and at the box for abusing her. If she had any idea how to contact the game makers, she would have screamed at them last night and threatened all sorts of law suits. But her anger had cooled, and she also started questioning herself. How dumb and slow had she been to let Hayworth beat her like that? And, if she had kept her wits about her and just ordered the game to stop, would it have let her go? Read more »

Beta Test – Part 2 [F]

By the end of the week, Erin had become quite an expert at controlling her avatar. She played late into the night on Wednesday and into the wee hours again on Thursday. She hurried home after work on Friday, ready to spend her entire weekend in front of the black box.

The box had proven to be amazingly versatile. It produced a plastic handgun for Erin to use while her avatar was being trained at the firing range. It unfolded various loops and bars when Erin and the other recruits were running the obstacle course. A full police baton slid out of a side compartment when she was taught various crowd control techniques. And the coolest feature so far had come out during hand-to-hand combat. The whole top of the box opened to unfold a full-size mannequin, complete with a padded torso and mechanical arms that Erin could physically spar with.

Erin had quickly decided that the people who made this were freaking geniuses. Even without all the nifty gadgets that popped out of the box, the game would have been incredibly cool. In just the two evenings that she had been playing, she had guided her avatar through 2 weeks of training. That was possible because she was automatically fast-forwarded through all the boring parts: law interpretation, report writing, conflict resolution, and of course sleeping. Read more »

Beta Test – Part 1 [F]

The large box certainly looked out of place. Sure, it was sitting on the stairs where the mailman usually left packages. And sure, it had a clear address label on its top. But it didn’t look like any package Erin had ever received before. The 2-foot wide box was shaped like a cube and was jet black, with no apparent flaps or openings.

The box did have her name clearly printed on the top: Erin Feston, 119 Palm Blvd, and so the young woman who had just gotten home from work bent over to pick it up. The box was made of some hard plastic material and was heavier than Erin expected. She was able to get it up and into her house, wondering who on earth could have sent her such a box.

Erin set the box down in her living room with a grunt of relief and set about trying to get the thing open. There wasn’t a single discernable opening on any of the box’s six sides, and the hard plastic felt like it might be quite difficult to cut. There wasn’t even a return address listed, just the label with her own address. Since that label was the one thing that seemed removable, Erin pulled it off, and was rewarded by finding a note on the back that read: Read more »