Mentorship
By VivettaVenray
(WARNING: Contains
cruelty, cruel language, vore, digestion, monstergals, and violence
among other things.
This story also contains futa
content! It's a big feature in the story starting around the halfway
mark. There will be a warning in the chapter it first makes an
appearance as well.)
(NOTE: This story is
loosely inspired by an RP I did quite some time ago, among some other
inspirations perhaps.
Although this fictional story may
poke fun at certain features of MMORPGs and perhaps some
player-tropes, it isn't intended to offend. Any of that stuff was
just intended as good-fun jokes.)
--------------
Chapter 1: Couch
The strong ogfolk warrior heaved
up his mighty ax. As the long beaked raptor screeched, the tall, wide
man swung a deft blow clear into the great beast’s wing. It would
take more than that to stop a bird three times the size of a man, and
the creature jabbed the warrior’s side with a pointed thrust of its
beak. Thankfully the warrior, built to tank blows, withstood it
thanks to equal parts fortitude and good armor.
He countered with a cleaving blow
to the monster's outstretched neck. His ax struck a critical hit, and
the beast fell limp. Now a corpse, the raptor provided him with its
talons and 500 experience points before it slowly faded out of
existence, an act that made room for more of its kind to spawn soon.
The warrior flipped up his visor
and cheered. “Just 10 more of those and I’m level 12!”
“Nice.”, said a mage nearby.
She was clad in a bland oversized robe which shuffled as she readied
a spell towards a formidable looking ram foe of her own. As she was
about to let it lose, a great tremor wracked the land and a shadow
over it grew.
The two lost their balance and
fell to the ground.
“Dammit.”, said the warrior.
“Our mentor is putting her feet up again.”
The mage looked up to the sky,
now partially occluded by the light blue sole of their megaworld’s
supposed benefactor.
“Looks like it.”
She found herself staring at the
foot for a few good moments of contemplation. The myriad wrinkles of
it seemed to rival her world’s rivers in width. She wondered how
many thousands of feet the ped was. The appendage was so big she had
to fling her head up to see it all, and even then that was only
possible given the distance to the body-part.
It actually took the mage a bit
to notice the other foot behind the first one, resting atop the
ankle. A noise rung out over the landscape. It was the subtle sound
of one naked foot idly shifting against the other, albeit made
decidedly less subtle by the sheer magnitude of size difference
between her and the foot’s owner.
Ten towering toes softly
scrunched: another idle, thoughtless movement most likely. The mage
wondered how many of her world’s mountains could be shifted by such
a simple, thoughtless gesture.
It made the mage feel small. She
was very small, as a matter of fact. And, as she continued staring up
at that foot in a contemplative trance, she couldn’t help but
wonder if this was the best way to spend her time. She was in a
veritable bubble of a world, itself conjoined with a few others in a
slightly bigger bubble. All was under the careless gaze of the
powerful player whose feet were presently invading their sky-space,
yet even that gigantic blue brat was in a bubble of her own: the
normal game world.
The mage wondered if perhaps
she’d be better off logging out, taking off her headset, and doing
something more productive with her time. Maybe she could catch up on
some movies or something. Perhaps she could read a story: or even try
to write one.
A ferocious “baaa” broke her
trance. The mage’s little rectangular menu flashed into her view
briefly, and in red. One of the ram-beasts respawned and aggro’d
her on proximity: that is, she was close enough to the enemy that it
attacked automatically.
“Ah, only 4 more of these till
level up I think. Might as well...”, mumbled the mage to herself.
She raised her staff up in the air and started casting a fire spell
while the beast readied its next charging strike.
--==--==--==--
The purple-eyed nekojin woman sat
on her couch, her own menu opened in front of her as a bright blue
rectangle of interactable light. Her legs were bare up till the cuffs
of some loose, dark blue shorts. Past the waistline, her flat tummy
and more were bare until reaching the bottom of a gray and rather
short crop top with straps over her shoulders.
A lot of players complained about
outfits like that. Foremost Phantasia was a fantasy game, after all,
so casual and modern garbs might seem out of place. But, that ship
sailed long ago when the real-money store first sold that
bikini-outfit which was still a best seller. So, the owner of these
particular garbs didn’t feel the least bit guilty about wearing
something comfy in her own virtual home, especially since she brought
it with zril as opposed to real world money.
Despite the name of her kind, she
was far more human than cat. She mostly just had the cute features
like upright cat ears, a prehensile tail, and some striped, darker
blue facial markings which didn’t intrude into her actual face all
that much. If players wanted to be a fully furred, ferocious humanoid
then they could play the shishijin, or “lionfolk”. She didn’t
much care to be covered in fur. She just wanted those cute catlike
features like the ears and tail, and the sharp fangs in her mouth
among a few other subtle features she found very aesthetic and
fitting.
She had deep blue hair on the
head and for her tail’s hair-fur as well. Her head hair was short.
Not so short that it was a boy’s cut, but not styled to anything
fancy. Just allowed to exist out of her way and not so atrocious that
it was an issue to any onlooker. Very much a tomboy sort of style and
approach to hair.
The cat-like ears on the top of
her head, too, were a shade of blue to match the head hair. Keeping
with the theme of blue, her skin was a shade of light blue: a few
shades past the safety point where gray becomes lighter blue.
Unambiguously blue, except when it wasn’t. In rare niche locations
of her own world, sometimes the shaders could glitch out and it could
seem the tiniest bit gray. Even a game as advanced as Foremost
Phantasia had a few bugs from time to time.
As with any skin complexion, the
shade varied at certain spots and her skin was no exception. For
example, it was a bit lighter blue at the palms of her hands and
soles of her feet; the latter of which were positioned precariously
close to M-Megaworld E1. The E stood for her first name in-game:
Euki.
Euki hadn’t intended to loom
her feet over the minuscule megaworld in her care. On the other hand,
it wasn’t as though she didn’t know her feet were there; it was
in the back of her mind. The nekojin just wanted to kick up her feet
on her in-game coffee table in her in-game home. At the least, she
was aware enough of the sprawling landscapes rife with minuscule
players to not prop her peds atop them all.
With her menu open, she had
access to numerous features for that little megaworld. She could
access views from the ‘ground-level’, so to speak, and monitor
any public chat room going on down below. In this way she could take
great care of her assigned worlds.
Euki wasn’t doing any of that.
Her in-game menu was open so she
could do her daily scratch off mini-game. It awarded GP, gold points,
which could be used for exclusive rewards that Euki desired. You
could get GP lots of ways, but you couldn’t buy it with zril, which
meant Euki actually had to grind out the damn points. That didn’t
matter much, as she had both zril and time in excess.
Much as she wanted to ignore the
cries of protests from the multitudes at her feet, she couldn’t
entirely. As more people spammed the mentor-link chat, the more that
chat-box flashed and scrolled in its spot on her menu. With a curt
grunt she gave it a look and noticed the general trend seemed to be
people complaining about the proximity of her feet to the megaworld.
She gleamed this both from the rapidly scrolling chat and from the
most upvoted “sentiments”.
When the mentorship system was
designed, it was understood by developers that it might be hard for a
group of hundreds or more to gain the attention of their mentor. So,
certain chat messages could be sent as sentiments and if people liked
them they would upvote them and make them more visible: up to and
including the point where they would pop-up forcibly on the mentor’s
menu, as they did at that moment.
At the time, the most upvoted
sentiment was “move your feet please; it’s dark.” A rather
innocuous statement Euki nonetheless took offense to.
“The nerve of those
entitled runts. They don’t pay my game subscription...”, she
mumbled to herself.
Euki had half a mind to send that
message, verbatim, to the chat. However, then she’d get reported
for being rude, and she couldn't have that. She could of course say
whatever she wanted aloud. She figured it would be a booming,
poignant chastisement to all the tiny mite-sized players below. Vocal
communication wasn’t reportable or punished by the game’s terms
of service. This was because logging it would cost more server space
than the developers were willing to spend money on.
Still, Euki decided against that.
She thought it might offend all the players enough that some might
log-off or otherwise get bummed and be less productive. If her
mentees weren’t leveling, crafting, or harvesting as much, then she
wouldn’t gain benefits from the fruits of their labor as much.
So, she did what all players did
in times like this and settled for the good old-fashioned strategy of
passive aggression. Perfect for skirting the game’s terms of
service, or ‘ToS’ for short.
Euki turned away from the
mini-game to will a chat-field open on her menu screen. She tapped
the empty text box, and then thought up the message to send.
‘Oh wow sorry everyone. I
usually put my feet there and it’s not often an issue lol. Like,
people don’t usually complain they just do their own thing. I’ll
try and move them when I can ^-^’
Her thumb hit the send button
which, despite being made of light like the rest of her in-game menu,
offered a bit of resistance to her finger.
The message was sent as a special
“Mentor Message”, meaning it forcibly popped up on the main-menus
of everyone in M-Megaworld E1. This of course irked a few people,
some of whom were a minority that were passive aggressive towards the
people who originally complained. This sudden pop-up took them out of
their very busy mining patterns, or experience farming patterns, or
interrupted their story quest with an intrusive notification.
Others of course spammed the chat
asking Euki to just move her feet right away. Euki of course could,
but she didn’t no matter how much the mentees protested, and they
would protest quite a bit.
All the better for Euki, as the
polite, non-ToS violating seething in chat gave her time to finally
finish her mini-game.
She re-enlarged the mini-game
screen on the very dynamic menu of hers.
“Now where was I.”
A
series of squares were arranged in a 3 by 3 grid. You had 3
opportunities to pop the opaque squares to reveal numbers beneath.
Some numbers were pre-revealed so the player could strategize which
squares to pop. Euki was good at this mini-game, and most of the
others really.
“Let’s see, 7, 8...”
If the last number in the row was
a 9, she’d win the most amount of GP. The highest rewards of GP
came from consecutively increasing numbers, and the higher those
numbers, the higher that reward.
Euki popped the last number in
the row. This was her last chance today to win more than a meager
amount of Gold Points.
“6?!? Dammit!”
In her frustration at the cruel
wiles of RNG, the blue nekojin let out her tame expletive, uncrossed
her legs, lifted her right foot up, then quickly stomped it down. It
all happened fast in a fluid series of motions. Not too quickly
afterwords, Euki’s main menu flashed red with alerts. She sucked
her teeth and grumbled.
“Ah son of a...”