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...”