Chapter One - Not LAERP

Something stinks like a portable toilet, I thought as I slowly came to. Or, more accurately, a portable toilet dumped in a sauna. The air was stiflingly hot and damp, and I was laying on something wet and disgusting. My eyes flickered open, and I found myself in a metal cage about the size of a large dog pen in a pet store. My arms were shaky and sore, but I finally got one under me and pushed myself up, my palm slipping deep into the damp straw covering the bottom. Ah, I thought, everything smells like a toilet. How delightful. I blinked several times and glanced around.

Where in the hell was I? This was most certainly not my apartment, nor a hospital, ambulance, or anything else in Seoul. The room appeared suspiciously like a dungeon. There were a number of cages similar to the one I sat in lining the room, the flickering firelight from the torches along the walls played on the fearful and miserable faces staring out from many of the metal boxes. I stared for a long moment as a blubbering, pleading man was dragged from a cage toward a wooden cross in the center of the room. It was all very realistic.

This was most likely one of those LARP events Eun-ha was always talking about. Honestly, the whole idea seemed kind of embarrassing to me, but had I known the level of realism these things achieved I would have at least gone with her once or twice to watch. Especially with the quantity of nudity to be had. Maybe it was like a LAERP thing? Possibly some hedonistic subgroup that went for hyper-realism. I mean, it honestly seemed like he was in pain and his makeup was incredible! I would have to thank her for bringing me. Right after I beat her senseless for kidnapping me, of course.

Admittedly, the man they were dragging didn’t look exactly like the elves you’d see in anime or hentai but was amazingly close. He was painfully thin and naked as two burly men in chain armor dragged him toward an X-cross erected in the center of the room. The fact they were guys didn’t really do anything for me, but I wasn’t against a little BDSM play with the right partner. I hadn’t ever actually had any BDSM play or…well, any other play for that matter, but I saw it all the time online or in the hentai I watched so I knew enough. Fake it ‘til you make it, I supposed. As I watched the play elf being dragged our eyes met for a brief instant. He grew silent and the corners of his mouth curled into a delighted smile. What the hell? Did his eyes glow for a second? The moment passed almost immediately, and his screams returned full throat.

At that moment I happened to glance down, and my fascination turned to horror. I was naked. While that was humiliating enough, I also apparently had lost what little boob I had. I wasn’t well-endowed. My mom claimed it was genetics, I think it was a product of growing up in the middle of nowhere subsisting off cabbage and rice most nights. But over the years I’d developed a respectable 79C pair of breasts. They were now gone, replaced by a set of As. And barely that. I gaped at them in mounting disbelief, wrapping my thin fingers around the small globes, the light pink puffy nipples poking through my fingers pertly.

Please let this be a body suit, I pleaded internally as the man was finally strapped to the cross. I let my eyes wander over the rest of my body and pushed myself backward in a panic. This wasn’t my body at all! I was lithe and lean with thin yet muscular arms and legs and small, delicate hands. I’d always wanted amazing thighs, mine tended to be pudgier than I was happy with, and now I had them, but how?

“What’s going on?” I whispered, my voice not sounding like my voice in the least. I had pressed myself back as far as I could against the bars of the cage and stared around me with widening eyes, my hands squeezing my small breasts idly like a pair of stress balls. None of this made any sense.

The man on the cross screamed, his voice echoing through the room. I turned my eyes to where he was and found my mouth growing slack in disbelief. I’d seen some BDSM hentai, but this was too much. It seemed like they were actually torturing him. I heard a sickening crack as a huge iron hammer carried by one of the torturers connected with the man’s femur and snapped it in half. His tortured screams grew louder and more frenzied, his throat tearing with the force of them.

“Don’t worry, rat,” a rough, gravelly voice said. I turned away from the horrible sight of the man on the cross and found three men approaching my cage. While all three were quite bulky, the one who’d spoken to me was probably two meters tall and ridiculously muscular. “We’ll be skipping the cross for you today. You’ll be going straight to the chopping block.”

“Wha-?” I managed. I pinched my cheeks, hoping to wake up from this horrifyingly realistic dream.

“After we have some fun first, of course,” The man chuckled, opening the lock on cage. “And don’t think I’ll be letting you off with just your mouth this time. Although if you scream nice and loud for me, I might not miss with the axe the first time.” He chuckled as the two men with him reached for me.

Axe? Mouth? Wait! Was this guy suggesting what I thought he was? Hell, no, I did not! This was obviously a dream. Yes. I’d had an aneurysm brought on by too much pent-up disappointment or something and was even now in a hospital room. The reason my cheek hurt when I pinched it before was simply an autonomous response to hitting my head when I fell. This was a dream brought about by a serious medical condition which I would wake up from as soon as the immediate danger had passed, and they brought me out of the drug-induced coma they’d put me in to reduce swelling in my brain. I’ve seen tv shows.

Since, plainly this was a dream brought on by propofol I could very easily sit back and wait for it to be over. No. Even if it was a dream, I refused to simply be passive. I had to do something to get out of this. The two smaller men reached for me through the open door of the cage. Launching myself forward using the bars I slipped effortlessly between the two, one nearly grabbing a fistful of my tousled silver hair before I was past them. I feinted to the left, the big man looked surprised for a moment and fell for it. I leapt effortlessly to the right and was past him in an instant. I raced past the surprised men torturing the screaming elf and toward the large wooden door at the far end of the room.

I was not much of an outdoors type of person if I was honest. There were too many bugs and heat variations and sudden rainstorms for my taste. Back home in Goesan I’d been outdoors quite often, but only out of necessity. If you wanted to do anything besides lay on the floor in the living room, you had to go outside and when your parents yelled at you for lounging about all the time it became necessary. However, that all went by the wayside when I went off to college and discovered the joy of the internet. The muscles I’d developed as a child gave way to instant ramen fueled anime binge fluff. I wasn’t fat, just not exactly skinny. I fell somewhere in the middle and was clearly in the out of shape club.

This dream body, though, this was powerful. I swept toward the door faster than I ever imagined I could run. It could have to do with the fact I was dreaming, but even still, my dreams had given me a Ferrari of a body to work with. A shame about the boobs, but the rest of it was amazing! I leapt easily over a flaming brazier and reached the door. I pulled hard as I heard the guards in the room behind me begin to finally start to close. With a strength born of desperation I managed to slowly move the door open. One more hard pull and the door cracked open just wide enough for me to slip through.

My older sister gave birth to her first child last year. Her husband was away for work so my mom and I and my youngest sister, Moon, were there for the birth. My mom went on and on about the blessing of life and how beautiful the baby was. I, however, was less enthused. It looked like it hurt like hell, shoving something that big out of something that small. The blood, bodily fluids and screaming scarred me for life. My sister kept howling for drugs and telling the doctors to get the parasite out of her while my mom simply grinned like a lunatic at the “miracle of birth.” Several months later I found out she was pregnant again and I had to ask why. Why go through that again? Moon had been so traumatized she couldn’t sleep for three days and I had nightmares about giving birth to a full-grown human in a panda suit for months and there she was, going through it all again.

“You forget,” she said. “I’m sure it was the worst pain I’d ever felt and worse than I could have imagined, but I don’t remember. One day when you give birth the same thing will happen to you, too. It’ll feel like you’re being ripped apart, but you’ll forget.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her the likelihood of that sort of thing happening was slim to none. The reason this came to mind at that particular moment was that I hoped the part about forgetting was true because, as I stared down at the 20cm of a sword blade protruding from between my not so ample breasts, I began to understand the pain she felt.

“Gods damn it, Rupert!” The big man growled as the blade was pulled free. My legs didn’t seem to move properly and even though the door was right there I knew I wouldn’t be running free down that stone hallway. Agony spread through my body and my knees buckled. I looked down, pressing my small hands over the bleeding cut. Apply pressure to the wound, right? I’m not sure that advice was usable when you’d been run through. My breathing had become a ragged gasp as agony spread through my body. My fingers were shaking as blood rushed between them, becoming a rivulet down my belly. I coughed as my lungs began to fill with blood, a fine spray painting the door red. Why was this happening? How was it happening? Why wasn’t it stopping?

“She was gonna get the block anyway!” The guard named Rupert protested. “Ugh, now my sword’s got animal blood on it.”

“She won’t scream as well when we fuck her now,” the big man chastised Rupert. “She’ll be dead in minutes at this point. Best get to business. Not nearly as much fun with a corpse.” I was dragged upright by my hair and flung against the wall. I drooped immediately to my knees, gasping. “I get her pussy first. Grint can take her ass and you, Rupert, can wait your turn since you fucked up.”

“I hate sloppy seconds!” Rupert pouted, wiping my blood off the sword onto his greasy trousers. The big man lifted me up by the hair until my face was even with his. I writhed weakly in his grasp, gasping for air as my body began to shut down.

“Just hold on long enough to scream once again for me, rat,” the big man grinned, his breath smelled of rot and decay. “For old time’s sake.”

“Fuck you,” I whispered. He slammed my head back against the stone wall and stars exploded in my vision, I tasted blood in my mouth and felt it trickling down my chin. This was the worst dream ever, I decided. Whatever drug they used; I think they used too much because this was a seriously bad trip. If I could wake up at any time, now, that would be ideal. He laughed as he undid his trousers with one hand, still holding me against the wall with the other.

“If you insist, rat,” he grinned.

“What, exactly, do you think you’re doing, Drudge?” A woman’s voice demanded from the open door.