Episode 2.4 - Everyday like the last, with a Demon Girl

"Hiyah!" Ko's usually soft, but today excited voice, shouts as she strikes. To say we've been progressing in our training is to put it lightly. Having been given specific weapons, we now train against these hazy apparitions our ‘lady’ summons for us.
    Ko has gotten fast lately. After her initial troubles with footwork, she suddenly improved dramatically. She charges low at the haze monster, coming into range of its little shortsword before kicking the ground and cartwheeling through the air. The tip of her foot catches the monster in the chin, rocking its head backwards. She lands in a low pose, legs coiled like a cat ready to strike. She shoots upwards, the gauntlet weapon Lila decreed suits her best, comes around in an uppercut slash, right into the shadow monster's solar plexus. If it were real and had bones, I bet you could hear the ribs shatter on impact. A moment later, it dissipates into smoke.
    It's pretty badass, honestly, only slightly spoiled by her cat emote activating to give her a tail and ears. Although the way the tail pokes out from her gym shorts, exposing–

“Hey, Hey!” I moan as sword swipes rock down on me. I've got one of my own appirations to fight. It leaps at me, blade overhead, "Urk!" I nearly slip as I retreat backwards, raising a boxy rectangular shield to block. The creature doesn't let up, hacking away over and over against the shield while its hazy mouth snarls and spits at me like a dog with rabies. I've got a sword too, but it's useless, I can't make a move!

Eshu is faring much better as usual. She waits for her monster to strike at her, at which moment she seems almost to disappear, sliding elegantly to one side, she twists around and arrests the poor thing in a headlock. No time wasted, with absolute minimal movement, her dagger comes up and slits its throat. A puff of smoke is all that leaves her grasp. Her usual bubbly personality is replaced by the blank eyes of deep concentration and skills that would make you think she'd always been some sort of assassin.

"Argh, come on!" I shout as my arm begins to hurt from each reverberation of the shield being battered. My eyes half-closed, I swing my weapon out and-- "Huh?" The relentless onslaught has stopped; my sword pierced the enemy’s heart just like that. "I-i-I got one!"

"K’, alright, alright, lunch time," Lila calls over my excitement.

"Did you see, I got one!" I exclaim, turning to her.
    She fixes me with a steady glare, but then smiles more kindly, "It's a start, I guess, good work, all of you."


We have lunch in a plain little room just next to our training 'dojo'. It's small, just some crates, chairs and cushions inside a stone-lined room with thick wooden buttresses. For some reason, we seem to gravitate to smaller rooms; I'm sure some know-it-all psychologist might have something to say about that, but I think it's just a restful space.
    Technically, this being a game world, eating isn't necessary, but it's been set up in such a way that you naturally get hungry like the real– or rather, the ‘old’ world. There's a setting to turn off hunger entirely, but there's something unnatural about that...

Food is whatever you want. Since our bodies are fixed avatars, one can edit with simply prefix adjustments; there's no such thing as dieting or eating to bulk up. Lila agreed early on to let us eat as we pleased, as long as we agreed to share interesting foods with her to try, that is.       Unlike us, it seems she does need to eat, or at least all NPCs seem to think they need sustenance. Since they are code, I can't help but wonder if that's just a programming thing for immersion. Would they lose weight and die if they went on a hunger strike?

I find even in this world, I have a pretty big appetite. It has crossed my mind that I might be better at fighting if I adjusted my avatar to be less of a muscle-bound chad. My clumsiness could be due to the fact that I have no muscle memory for this body. It moves with a strength and freeness, my old form never imagined. But then the thought of being anything less than this statue-like physique makes me rather uncomfortable.

"Munch munch," Eshu says, sitting beside me. She has a bad habit of making audible eating sounds when she's having something tasty. She pauses long enough to shoot Lila a question: "Is the tutorial really that interesting?"

She's referring to Lila's everyday lunchtime hobby. She sits floating in mid-air as ever, eating away while reading page after page of the game's inbuilt tutorial menu.
"You humans really ignore such a great repository of information?"

Ko shrugs from her place atop a crate across from me, "I mean, most gamers would just use the Wiki if needed. Right, Sek?"

I nod, "More or less. This is a one-way VR world, so I mean, you might use the tutorial on occasion, but it's not exactly a complicated game in the first place, ya know."
    Escape was panned as an actual video game. For a fantasy, it's extremely lacking; no races past emotes like Ko's cat form. No magic, few weapons or abilities - it's exceptionally light outside of loading up temporary quest scenarios - but then, that's sort of the point.

"Well, information aside, it has some pretty fascinating entries, especially considering you guys mentioned there shouldn't be anything 'sci-fi' in here, right?"

""Huh?"" Me and Ko echo in chorus, and even Eshu looks intrigued.

Lila beckons us closer, “Looks like nothing I've ever seen.” The page she shows us really is something different. For one, it's stylised differently; metal texture, shell casings and gears run along the edges. And then the entry itself, “An Arc 57 chain gun emplacement?” I say, baffled at what I immediately recognised as a gun from the studio’s sci-fi shooter apocalypse game.

“And not just that, lookie’ a page about me even,” Lila adds and looks very smug when we all eagerly lean in closer.

Grand Imp - A Grand Demon class species, and the highest form of demon with the ‘Imp’ tag.
A maximum lvl300 tier 3 class. The Grand Imp is markedly more powerful than any other classification of Imp kind. They are also exceedingly rare, estimated to be as few as one in a million. This enemy type warrants significant caution, highly proficient in many kinds of magic and, despite appearance, also physically capable. Often encountered leading battalions or advising demons as high as the Lord rank--

"I don't much appreciate it calling my entire species ‘enemies’, mind you," Lila grumbles, "but it's pretty spot on." She scrolls down the gold embellished fantasy tutorial pages, and there are reams of stats, spells and other details. It's definitely something that wasn't in the base game of 'Escape'.

"One in a million, huh?" That line lingers with me.

"Oh yes," the 'one' in question puffs out her chest, clearly happy to finally have some appropriate veneration from her subordinates, "In fact, as far as I know, I'm the only one that exists presently."

"Is it very hard to achieve? You're not like, born into it then," Ko adds.

"I wish! Super hard - you have to reclass so many times, levelling, requirements, specific niche goals - real pain in the ass. As to why it's quite that rare thought," she pauses, floating carelessly around, arms crossed, "Well, imps are one of the lowest classes of demon races. Half-imps, our base species, are pretty much just cannon fodder or disposable servants as their masters see fit. Those of us who do manage to live a long life often struggle to do so while also getting stronger. A larger number do get to the class one below me, Imp-Elder, which is decent itself, but not much compared to one such as I. Some others turn their back on being an Imp and race change to Lich or Succubus or Ogre - but none of those can match a Grand-Demon like me either, heh-heh."

"So you're like really special awesome then?" Eshu's eyes might as well sparkle.

"More or less. Lotta' hard work, but I think it was worth it."

"Pft, you would," I mutter, perhaps a little too loudly. The others all look at me, surprised.
"I ah," well, I can't back down now, can I, "Look, I just mean, we should have expected it right, she's 'special'. You both know what I mean."
    Realisation dawning, Ko and Eshu both glance downwards awkwardly, suddenly becoming very interested in their shoes. Lila looks lost, "I don't follow?"

I sigh, feeling a bit annoyed at that confusion, the 'haves' are always so oblivious, "You're different to us. Born into money, or a good adult in your life, or nepotism or just a lucky bounce the likes of which the world would never give us. We're not like that, we don't fit the world, it doesn't play fair with us."

She looks perplexed at me, "Huuuuuuuuh? Says who? What's to stop you guys from achieving something right now?"

"You wouldn't understand," I scowl. I'm the tallest one in the room, but I feel like the smallest, and I hate that so very much.

"No, no, I wouldn't," she snaps back, floating closer and raising one finger accusingly, "I was born a half-imp punk, lowest of the low. Money, family, luck? I worked hard, really, really hard, just like any of you guys ca--"

"Save it. We've heard it all before, I don't need a pull-yourself-up by your bootstraps lecture from some rogue NPC in a friggin game,” I feel my temper completely slipping away. It happens so fast, so easily. I suppose my pent-up anger from ever since we met Lila finally getting the best of me. Or perhaps it's just an old habit, but whatever the case, I can't find it in me to stop.

"No, no, of course not," Lila scowls right back at me, "You made up your mind to just give up any time anything is hard long ago, right? Sold your whole ass lives to a company to run away from life."

"Ya, so what if we did? That's our choice, a choice you're messing up day after day with these stupid collars and this stupid slave roleplay BS."

Lila takes a deep breath. I don't. "Alright, sore spot, getting heated like this is unbecoming of me, I'll only say things I don't mean. Look, I might understand how you feel better than you give me credit for. All those stats and power, K? They put me in the middle of the pecking order. There's a class of Grand-Demon for most species, and almost all of them outpower me, not to mention demon lords and sovereigns. I'm maxed, level three hundred out of three hundred, nowhere higher I can ever go and what does that equal? Serve a lord loyally, lick his boots every day for a few decades well enough, and survive a hundred battles along the way - and I might some day get to rule a tiny plot of land, be a Vi-vi-vi-vi-vi-countess, you get it? All that work, and I'll still never have the power of the ones at the very top. But that doesn't matter, right? It's about how I use what I do have, how I choose to live and-- are you even listening?"

"You think you understand? You hoe, you are literally some lines of code in a game! A program in a computer, you don't understand shit! You could be a countess? All my life 'potential' ever amounted to was count of a single fucking box room with frisky aircon and bad lighting, leeching off my parents!"

"Sek, that's enough," Ko says, finally butting in.

"Is it?" I counter too roughly, but I can't stop anymore, "I'm just saying what we're all thinking! We gave up everything to come here, our bodies and our minds, and this bitch struts around trying to control us? Pretending she's like us, acting like she's even alive! What right does some pathetic coded-program hussie in a video game have to do that!"
    I snarl, feeling so heated, so worked up that I don't so much think the words as spew them out, "You sure you didn't reclass into a succubus and forget? ‘Whore’ suits you much better than Grand Demon--"

Slap

Even though pain seems to exist in this world now, Lila's strike barely registers on my cheek; her thin, ever-so-small and gentle hand is softer than anything.
    "Go back to training," she says without making eye contact and floats out of the room. That hand of hers can transform into a grizzly claw, one that could probably 'slap' my head right off. I wonder why she didn't do that?

"Ow!" I cry as a much heavier punch hits me in the shoulder, "Baka," Eshu decrees.

"Come on, not you too?"

"Sek," Ko says sternly across from us. Her voice is always relatively soft, but now there is a sadness to it. "That wasn't right."

"Seriously, Ko! Don't go all PC on me, she's code in a digital world. Do I need to remind you she enslaved us, En-Sl-Ave-Ed--Us," I point at the thin black collar around my neck.

"Even so, she's good to us, isn't she? She feeds us all sorts of cakes and watches anime with us, and really pays attention to our training. Ever since the cave, she's never used the collars to command us, not even once."

"That... that's just cause she knows we know she can at any time."

"Maybe. Or maybe the slaves thing is more bluster than anything. Maybe she's just really bad at socialising like us, did you consider that? She's kind to us, Sek, and training with her is fun, it's like having an actual purpose in this world."

"You've got to be kidding me? She enslaved us! And anyway, she's a friggin NPC, an object, she's just pretend."

"Even so, you shouldn't talk like that. Would you talk to us that way? It scares me to hear you like that Sek..."

"Oh, for crying out loud!" I throw my hands up, utterly exasperated, "She's an object, an obnoxious female-coded waste of data, don't be such a prude."

Ah. I think I may have just crossed a line. Beneath that wonderful white hair, below Ko’s pretty eyes, an orange colour not dissimilar to Lila’s amber, tears are welling. Since when have they been there? Why didn't I notice sooner?
    "You're such an ass sometimes!" she shouts before stalking out of the room.

I slink back, "I don't get it… Hey, that hurts!" A punch right in the gut this time,

"Baaaaaaaakkkkkkkkkkkkaaa."
A moment later, Eshu's head flops onto my shoulder warmly, her magenta locks against my arm.

"Ok, now I'm getting mixed messages."
She frowns up at me through those pretty eyes of hers, "My baka. Don't be an ass."

Well, what am I meant to say to that? For a while, I just sit there, Eshu continuing to lean against me quietly. It's just words, right? Lila isn't even a real person; she's just a thing, a bundle of naughts and ones. Was I really so wrong to say what I did?