You’ve been anticipating the new virtual reality ‘Wyvern World’ game for the past few weeks, splurging $1000 just for the headset alone, Having beat the crowds at the local Gamestop and in the comfort of your room, you quickly booted the game up.
Having already played all other entries of the series to completion, you skipped all tutorials and instructions presented to you, including an ominous warning about permanence, whatever that could mean, and continued onto the world map.
Being a remake of the third game in the series, you were surprised at the fidelity VR allowed for as opposed to the stylized sprites of the original, before soon encountering a level 1 goblin and initiating a battle.
If not for her underleveled nature, seeing the foe at eye level gave a level of perspective that fully justified the purchase of the headset. Imagine the ferocity of an Ogre you would need to crane your irl head to see, or even that of a dragon!
Thinking to the future rather than your current battle, you swiftly swung your sword to slay the goblin… Only for the blade to fail to connect with flesh. Initially thinking the goblin vanished, for some reason you had been transported to some strange place, massive trees surrounding you on all sides.
Or at least you thought they were trees, them quickly revealing themselves to be the same blades of grass you had been standing near, magnified to an enormous size. Your character had shrunk to a microscopic size.
Momentarily forgetting that you were still in a video game, you looked forwards only to see two massive feet, each the size of the starting town. Each microscopic wriggling of her toes was seen as well as felt, the vibrations shaking the dirt you stood upon.
Looking upwards to meet her visage, it appeared as though the goblin had nothing to do with your shrinking, craning her head around in confusion as to where you had seemingly run off to. Not to say that her current enormous form posed no threat.
Assuming the shrinkage to be a bug, you tried opening the menu to reload your save, only for nothing to show up once the button was pressed. Confused as to why the game didn’t respond to your actions, you failed to notice the goblin resetting to her idle animation.
In an attempt to intimidate new players, the usually weak goblin was programmed to periodically kick at the ground and growl, This otherwise minuscule action was enough to launch you into the air along with similarly sized specks of dirt as though you were nothing.
Floating in the air alongside the rest of the dust, it was impossible to control your momentum as you slowly drifted towards the goblin’s continental thighs before crashing into them. The force of the landing felt all too real, and you finally decided to exit the game.
But as you motioned towards your face to remove the headset, you instead poked yourself in the eye instead of feeling the mesh cover. Whatever link you had to the ‘real’ world seemingly severed, you quickly realized that somehow, you were trapped inside the game.
While this would have been an escapist fantasy to your level 124 character in Wyvern World XII, losing the comforts of modern life to become a mite trapped upon an otherwise insignificant goblin was a trade nobody would choose, at least by their own accord.
But this was now your fate, and while you tried to come up with an explanation for how this could be possible, be it digitization or magic, it wouldn’t change the reality of your situation, being trapped on the planetary body of this disgusting, filthy beast.
Somehow able to stand on the surface of her thighs as if bound by gravity, individual specks of dirt or grime became boulders and lakes scattered upon the green landscape, the digital world outside of the goblin seeming as distant galaxies, impossible for you to reach.
In horrific awe of your surroundings, you failed to notice a tidal wave of a single sweat droplet until it enveloped you, trapping your minuscule form within the globulet through surface tension alone as it raced down the thigh.
As you drowned, you hoped that you would respawn back at the starting village, giving you means of escaping the game and returning to the real world. But when you reappeared back on the body of the goblin, whatever was left of your HUD vanished entirely.
Any separation between the game and real life erased, there was nothing you could do but endure in the vain hope that you would eventually find an escape from this hell. but as days turned to weeks, long since your real body should have starved, nothing changed.
The developers of the game not expecting players to spend this long around a low level enemy, only three idle animations were programmed for the goblin, looped endlessly while you were stuck on her; Kicking her heels, picking her nose and lightly giggling.
As the game barely treated you as an NPC, let alone a player, there was no reason for her to transition from idle into a battle, and as such the world never progressed, all enemies and vendors looping endlessly, but at least they weren’t aware of their existential fates.
The closest you ever came to progress was in battling the bacteria littering the goblin’s body, but as leveling never scaled with size, the rewards would require killing millions to gain a single point of XP. Your inventory remained equally empty, unable to even open it.
Years turned into decades, and you had long since forgotten that you were even inside a video game, this parasitic life being the only one you knew. The company behind Wyvern World had long since closed, and the franchise became a forgotten memory.
And yet you remained.
Without need to eat, sleep or drink, you barely made it past the goblin’s bosom, the cleavage alone requiring a year of trekking through the swampy marsh. Her sweat, germs and involuntary actions caused your death thousands of times over, coming back every time.
Your single drive was to gain her attention, a seemingly impossible task due to your microbial size. If you could just reach her pointed nose, perhaps the proximity to her eyes would allow the Goblin to notice you, hopefully causing the game to re-initiate the battle.
Of course, it likely wouldn’t amount to much. The Goblin was programmed as an enemy, and would be unlikely to listen to reason. She would spend her turn simply licking you off her nose to devour you whole, erasing all of your progress through another respawn.
But you still had to try. Something inside the game got you into this mess, and something had to be able to get you out of it. You were immortal, and with enough time, trial and error, you would surely escape your seemingly eternal fate upon the goblin.
After all, through everything you have lost, time was the only thing you had left.