Tempest Crossing
The Grand Challenge - Chapter 3 (Here)
[HERE - LOG START]
Without realizing it, I had closed my eyes without intending to, and when I opened them again, I woke in a black darkness. The only light source was me, as if a spotlight was following me around, and no matter how much I walked, I never bumped into anything or found any semblance of an exit. As I began to try and feel around where I was, I started to realize WHO I was. Usually in most VR games you have a nondescript pair of floating hands to represent you as the character, but in some of the better titles the character model was more fleshed out and something you could even design the character to your liking. This game seemed to be of the later varierty, and I started to size up just what kind of character I was. I appeared to be a female character of a smaller build, wearing a simple garb with only two colors: a cyan primary color and a red color to repsent the chestpiece of my garb. As most VR games lacked the necessary haptic feedback to respresnt 1-to-1 touches, my favorite pastime was to wave my hands around my VR body and see how ridiciulous it was to be floating in a virtual body.
“Oof”
My body uttered a quiet grunt as the hands I slammed into it produce to stop short of crossing in and out of my body, and stayed at its exterious. The blow was pretty impactful as I knocked the wind out of myself and felt a ripple of pain move through the front of my body.
Wait, ripple? Pain? My hands stopping in front of my body because there was actually a body there it couldn’t pass through?
…
They did it, those bastards at the VR game development companies finally did it - they made the games realistic! I stached myself to celebrate, and found myself with my left hand balled to my side hip and my right hand point up towards the sky in celebration.
Huh, I don’t know why I chose that motion to demostrate elation, but I thought little of it.
Come to think of it, I wasn’t really sure HOW my VR headset was able to replicate all these senses of touch. The VR headset only came with a pair of lenses and some pretty basic hand controllers, but this was entirely something else. Did these game designers… hack into my brain?
As an avid reader and an even bigger sci-fi fan (I loved reading about future possiblities because it gave me hope that maybe one day I might find myself in one), I read a particular tale where if you die in the game, you die in real life. The game was also new and novel and ahead of its time, but once players of the game realized there was no logout button, they were whisked away to the game’s starting plaza where the game creator revealed they would have to fight through the game in order to escape back int othe real world. The initial reaction of the players trapped within the game was varied, but for the most part most its was overwhelming negative and obviously so.
But not so obviously for me. In fact, I wasn’t event sure if I would WANT to leave if this game gave me the chance. Testing this theory out, I moved my virtual hands towards my head and tried to remove my headset in the real world. I made a gripping motion withm y heads a couple of different ways, but everything I lifted, I only felt the edges of my hair rise and fall as I tried to take out the headset. Very interesting…
Now taking deeper stock of what kind of game I was in, I tried to peer around my peripheral vision to see if I had some sort of HUD or GUI that told me what to do next. Unfortunately, my eyesight was a clear as the black fog before me, and thats when I tried to open the game menu. Making the finger motion for clicking the menu button on the VR controller, I once again found myself tapping thin air as my clamped right pressed up and down into the opening of my first to no avail.
Finding myself on the verge of impatience, I was about to utter an absolute trail of hayness curses when a calm yet booming voice made itself known before me.
“Ah, I see you have finally arrived, dear Hero. Or should I say, Heroine?”