Chapter 5: Poke

Euki walked towards her kitchen, passing a few small side tables with a world or few each set atop the surfaces. If she checked her menu, she might see the chats from them complaining about the tremors of her footfalls, but she didn’t care to do that.

As she walked into the kitchen, the colder floor tiles there hit the soles of her feet. It was interesting to her sometimes how the game could provide such vivid and detailed sensations at times. On the other hand, she didn’t want her feet to feel cold, so the blue-skinned nekojin opened her menu and quickly adjusted the ambient temperature of the floor to be a degree or two higher. The tiles would've warmed up in proximity to her soles just like in the real world, but she was impatient on the matter.

That done, she moved over to a circular piece of furniture in the corner of the kitchen. It was a small table, sitting only four max, designed for eating breakfast or the like. Atop it was just one world, M-World E8, the eighth world under her mentorship.

Though the table wasn’t huge, it wasn’t so small that it could fit just one measly world. However, for immersion’s sake, Euki sometimes fancied to eat her stat-boosting food there before she embarked on a raid encounter. She wanted the table to be mostly clear for that, so only one world dotted the smooth light-blue surface of the furniture.

Euki took a seat and pulled up the menu. It occurred to her she hadn’t read the request before walking over. She would’ve walked over anyways to do it, so that didn’t matter much. As she pulled it up, she crossed her leg and bobbed a foot up and down above the floor while her blue tail swayed side to side.

“Oh, that’s easy.”, Euki said.

The world shook with vibration: not from her footfalls this time, but from the chair sliding across the tiled floor below. Euki pushed it back and stood up out of it almost as quickly as she sat down.

“Just another world boss huh. Let’s see where they are.”

Euki, now standing, loomed over the world as she leaned in. Squinting, tried to focus on the area where the world boss monster was. It was in central Anuzea. Anuzea, of course, was the main continent of the FP universe. The central and southern region of it compromised the 1-50 leveling zone as well, and that first zone was the game’s biggest time sink. Not that the level of the region mattered much to Euki, as a level 50 or level 70 world boss each fell just as easily when pressed against even the smallest parts of her body.

“Ah, there, bit north of the main city of Lormdah. Of course.”

The main city was a bit to the north. Since the miniature world was on the farther edge of the table, that meant Euki had to lean in a *bit* more to reach that area.

As she did so, the edge of the crotch-high table pressed into her nethers just a bit more. She felt the subtle tactile pressure of that, and shuddered lightly. Still, mentorship points were more enticing than any lewd thoughts at that moment. So, she reached over and shadowed the world boss with the tip of her index finger.

--==--==--==--

The fields north of Lormdah were a temperate region hosting some of the more formidable foes of the game’s first expansion. It was rife with people grinding out those last ten or twenty levels before moving off to Hrisgar. All of them could all look up to the sky and see Euki’s looming index finger. Blocking up a majority of the game-world’s light, it dangled above them more threateningly than the mightiest mage’s meteor spell.

They spammed the chat with pleas.

“Wait wait we’re not out of the area yet!”

“Just gimme like 10 seconds to tag the boss c’mon”

“You’re covering about half of Lormdah with your finger!”

Euki didn’t give her menu a single glance though. Her eyes were bearing down at the game-world as her finger tip did. The digit plummeted into the ground, flattening the formidable 6 legged monstrosity alongside thousands of other players who showed up to help fight it, or just be near it.

--==--==--==--

Euki effortlessly popped the boss monster like a bubble. She didn’t even feel it much among the other sensations of shearing earth and crumbling city. To her credit, she didn’t destroy all of Lormdah with her finger: just a bit over half. Her aim was a bit better than her time with M-world E3’s Jima region moments ago. It would’ve been even better if the blue-skinned nekojin had longer nails to more strategically puncture the boss monster, as some mentors did for these situations. She preferred her nails short though, and typically unpainted.

Just to be extra thorough, Euki gave her finger a small twist side to side. She wasn’t really sure why she did that; it was a thoughtless gesture really, as in she didn’t think much about it. In the real world, if she flattened a bug, she would've done the time. That was probably why, she reasoned.

In any case, this ended up shearing more of the terrain, breaking a few more Lormdah buildings, and catching a few more unlucky players beneath her index finger.

Euki moved her hand away and eyed the rubble lining her finger print. She could actually make out a lot of the buildings of Lormdah, still mostly intact against her blue skin there.

The nekojin moved her menu closer to her face. It had opened automatically by now, both to notify her of the mentorship points she gained from the request fulfillment, and to flash red to notify her about the damages. She didn’t much care for that, no, instead she hit a few buttons to access the player cams.

Player cams could provide a third-person view following a specific player, with the player’s permission. It needed consent of course, but usually one player would just mindlessly click yes. There were also ground level cams, and those near the cities and buildings therein for mentors to watch their mentees do stuff, or get a more ‘down to earth’ view of someone they were chatting with.

Euki never used it, as the last thing she typically wanted to do was interact with a bunch of tiny newbs. Yet, something compelled her to get a view. It was an urge she, ironically, couldn’t quite put her finger on, so to speak.

The catgal ended up getting a view above a player who was miraculously still alive on her finger. He was a healer, and was frantically spamming spells on himself to heal his injuries. Euki figured he probably gave her permission to view over them without knowing what he agreed to, as he wanted to close the menu pop-up so as to not distract himself from casting those healing spells.

Euki affixed her eyes to the virtual-cam screen section that popped on her menu. She was entranced at the sight.

There were actually quite a few players still alive on her finger, miraculously. They were mostly tanks and healers, but there was also the occasional crafty dps who managed to find some safer spot to huddle down in. Plenty of people were still in the buildings, alive by luck as they were affixed to her finger on its re-assent. All in all, Euki figured there were probably at least a thousand, if not more, stuck to her finger.

All of them were utterly invisible to her normally, but with the special view, Euki could see them all dusting themselves off, healing themselves and each other, and in general trying to find footing on the slightly sloped surface of her finger. Buildings were buckling and players casted shield spells to save others from death via rubble. Players helped each other out of the trenches that were the whorls of Euki’s finger print. There was a lot of uplifting sentiments to be found in the ruins on her finger.

Euki didn’t care for any of that though. There was a certain appeal to seeing those players stumble about, but there was something that really got her attention. Something else was getting her body a bit warm, getting her mouth to salivate a bit. Something prompted her to lightly nibble at the corner of her lavender-blue lips with one of those two fangs of hers. It was another view. It was the view of herself.

“I’m huge!”, she whispered.

As she did, she saw her purple lips move and shake the air around the mentees. A few blew away against her breath, bumping into each other or rubble, or just falling over into a whorl of her print which they may had just clambered out of.

“How have I never used this feature before? This is amazing.”

A smile stretched on her face. From the view she had, it seemed like it went on for miles. She was utterly megalithic. Unstoppable. The lives of hundreds were at her fingertip and she had little consideration to spare. A feeling of intense power tickled about in Euki’s body, and there built an urge too.

It was a sudden urge. Not the most logical one, but in the heat of the moment she acted on it.

Euki parted her lips, popped her index finger into her mouth, and slurped everything and everyone on her finger right off.

--==--==--==--

“What is she doing?”, asked a martial artist to her wizardly friend.

“I-I’m not sure.”, said the fellow as he clambered back up after Euki’s words near blew them away.

They looked on the horizon as they saw their mentor’s teeth gently poke at those light-purple lips. The tip of her tongue snaked out, larger than any in-game leviathanian beast, to quickly and coyly wet said lips ever so slightly.

Then, it wasn’t much longer till she opened wide. The finger stirred, the ‘ground’ shook. All the players atop the digit erupted in a scream. A scream that, even if it could be heard, would surly be ignored.

The confines of Euki’s mouth were so large as to be completely and utterly disorienting like almost any other part of their careless ‘caretaker’. In normal circumstances it’d be pitch dark, but the game developers knew full darkness was rather scary to immersed players, and so lighting was typically fudged a bit. The magical lights from the Lormdah buildings turned on, and shined at once not bright enough to be blinding yet somehow bright enough to light up a good deal of the giant nekojin’s region-swallowing maw.

Thanks to that, the players could see the rivers-wide strands of saliva dangling from above. A brief warning for many as droplets of the spittle rained down, drowning some and capturing many more players. Buildings were washed away with ease in the slightly vicious fluid.

They could see, too, the reddish flesh of her inner cheeks. A sight more disturbing than some of more eldritch-inspired foes the game could offer. A humanoid body was rather weird this close up, and standing within such moist, humid confines with walls of dimly lit flesh on either side had a certain scare factor to it, mundane as Euki’s mouth may have been to the catgal herself.

With her slurping gesture, there wasn’t too much time to take in those sights. The suction effect created in her mouth ripped almost everyone and everything off her finger. The force itself was almost crushing, and a few players without full health bars were simply torn apart in the tumult. Buildings broke up a good deal more. Ironically, the world boss’s body had despawned around this time, so it wasn’t even a part of the ongoing chaos that it had catalyzed.

The scant few players and rubble still on that finger were crushed against the bottoms and tops of Euki’s upper and lower lip, respectively, as she slid the finger out.

--==--==--==--

Pressing her lips tightly, Euki assured the only thing staying on her finger once it was free was naught more than a thin coating of her own saliva, quickly wiped off on her gray crop-top to dry not long after.

--==--==--==--

Players landed all over her mouth. Some landed on her teeth, wounded fatally or near. Some landed beneath her tongue as it lightly wiggled, but most landed atop the slick, squishy, and bumpy surface of the muscle outright. A region unto itself, the players wouldn’t have much time to explore.

--==--==--==--

Euki swallowed soon as her finger was free. After a quick and satisfied smack of her lips, she turned back to her menu to observe the sights going on inside her body.

--==--==--==--

Swallowing was another intense suctional force that many players didn’t survive. Yet, if they made it this far, their odds were good. The tongue tilted at the same time, chucking everyone inside Euki’s mouth down her throat. A quick swish of her tongue near her teeth ensured that any stragglers were also along for the ride or, perhaps, smeared beneath the comparatively gigantic tongue’s bulk.

The trip down the throat was lit up like some twisted in-game ride. Her throat gently carted them down, pulsating, and dripping the normal lubricating fluids all around them as they were brought deeper into Euki’s form. The game developers took a lot of body simulations very realistically, and they could hear the rhythmic thooms of her earth-rattling heart.

Still, the most ominous sounds by far, getting louder as they drew closer, were the gurgles of her awaiting stomach.

Passing through the sphincter into the catgal’s gut, the pitiful swallowed mass plopped down into a spacious and mostly empty organ. Undulating walls of mucus-lined rugae dripped slick acids to pool below. One boon for the swallowed mentees was that Euki hadn’t ate yet, which meant her stomach wasn’t as gross as it could be. A downside of that though was that her stomach was primed for ‘food’, and they fit the bill far as Euki’s body was concerned.

The actual amount of digestive fluids was only enough to cover just a bit of the stomach floor. To the comparatively minuscule mentees, ‘just a bit’ still meant a veritable sea of enzymes and acids. Even the most subtle churn of Euki’s gut ripped up formidable waves that inundated players. A few managed to clamber atop the buildings but those, too, were not immune to the acids. The lights of the dissolving buildings still lit up the nightmarish confines of an active stomach, though many at this point would’ve preferred total dark.

Acids didn’t just burn on contact, but continued to damage the player until cleaned or ‘dispelled’ off via magic. However, the acid was constantly applying with every splash, and there were splashes with every minor movement of the gut. Even between churns, the settling of the ‘waves’ meant more splashing, and by the time that was done another churn often came up. This meant there was no chance for even the fastest casting mage or healer to keep themselves safe. Those washed away by the fluids got quicker deaths while those holding out suffered slower stinging pains as they dissolved.

Eventually, though, their hp hit 0 and they were granted the ‘mercy’ of respawning somewhere back on M-World E8.

--==--==--==--

Euki, of course, was watching the whole time. The sight of her gut breaking apart and melting down entire buildings was awe inspiring to her. Thousands of players were crying out, spamming the world chat, as they sizzled away in her stomach.

The blue-haired, blue-skinned nekojin affixed her purple eyes to the buff section on her main menu. Players could get buffs from doing certain things in game or using certain items. She noticed she had an experience buff that lasted about 10s and started counting down before her eyes.

Certain foods in Foremost Phantasia gave the consumer powerful stat boosts for some time. However, any food in the game gave, at minimum, a buff to experience. The buff’s duration was proportional to the amount consumed.

Euki couldn’t help but chuckle. Then, thinking on it more, a rumble vibrated in her throat as she more or less purred.

All those lives she just ate, those mentees suffered and KO’d in the stomach: it all amounted to a measly 10s of a buff.

‘A buff I don’t even need! I’m max level in everything!’, she thought to herself, revealing in the notion.

She moved her hand towards her taut stomach, giving it a few taps and shaking the view for the last player still inside. Soon the cam cut out, and her eyes drifted to the world chat. By now all those players had respawned and she decided to deign to read their messages on the events.

‘It could be amusing’, she thought.

She of course saw a lot of players complain that Lormdah wasn’t fixed yet.

“As if I could forget with the UI flashing red at me like this.”, she mumbled.

Plenty of those she ate were complaining about the pain they felt. Pain existed in FP, but it was reduced and ‘capped’ at a low threshold. It existed just as a warning for players, really.

“Bunch of wimps.”, she muttered.

Euki was liking the descriptions of her insides some gave. Her right hand trailed down towards her crotch, gently nudging at the exterior of her shorts.

Then, some more text caught her eyes. The conversation had shifted.

“Uh guys I can’t log out.”
“Yeah me neither. I was ticked off about the whole getting-eaten thing so I was gonna break and cook, but I get an error trying to log off.”
“You get an error? The option doesn’t even do anything for me.”

“Now that you mention it, yeah. I don’t even get a warning anymore.”

“What the heck is going on?”