Girl Meets Boy (2)

"Welcome, User."

The moment I logged into virtual reality, a maid greeted me. Not a real person, of course — just the management AI assigned to every VR headset.

Why a maid, you ask? Because it turns me on.

It's not like I have a thing for other women. Not exactly. But this fetish of mine got its start from some manga I read, and… well. It does get me going. Just imagining this pretty girl getting put in the kind of situation I like — getting put through it — how filthy would that be? I don't think about it all the time, obviously. Only when my libido hijacks my brain. And right now, that's exactly what's happening.

"Yeah."

The instant I answered the AI — which had pulled up the prompt based on my play history — the world around me began to change. The all-white space darkened in a single wash of black, and then the view resolved into a bird's-eye panorama: a vast green continent ringed by endless ocean, hanging in the open air.

This was the continent that served as the default stage for World Maker — WM. The fun of the program was how freely you could reshape it. Pile on the right extra settings and that same landmass could be swallowed by war, or sprout floating islands in the sky, or take on any number of other transformations.

"No. I'll start a new game."

The last time I'd played WM, it had been a standard fantasy setup — the Demon Lord's army invading — and I'd starred as the Hero. I'd bottled up the fetish and everything else that came with it and played that run dead serious, fighting to save humanity.

"Understood. Would you like to configure a new world and scenario?"

"No. Keep the world and the scenario as they are. I'll just make a new character and do a second playthrough."

"Load Serina as an NPC, and apply the WM setting Achievement Character."

That was exactly why I'd gritted my teeth and played an adult game so diligently last run.

WM let you, on a subsequent playthrough, take the character you'd played last time and install them as an NPC modeled on their behavioral patterns, starting from the top of the scenario. Other users apparently used this to build NPCs that matched their tastes down to the last detail, then go after them. You did have to clear one full run looking the way you wanted and acting the way you wanted first — but I'd heard more people did it than you'd think. Since it was illegal for a VR device to interfere with a user's thoughts, nothing you thought on the inside got reflected. You just had to watch your behavior, clear one short scenario, and you were done.

I was combining that function with the points you spent every time you rewrote the world, stacking on the Achievement Character setting, all to build an eroge world tailored to my tastes. Achievement Character made it so that an NPC'd character would still accomplish every achievement the player had unlocked on the previous run. Last time, my Hero Serina had beaten the Demon Lord — which meant that even if I cranked the Demon Lord's power through the roof in this world's settings, the future in which Serina defeated him was already locked in.

And the reason that suited me was this: after trying a bunch of different scenarios, the one I'd found most fun to actually play in was The Demon Lord's Invasion. It had a decent amount of tension, heroes popping up all over the place, and yet the rear lines — after a long war — had lost their sense of wartime crisis and were living out a relatively peaceful daily life. I liked that. The problem was, if I dumped everything on the NPCs and just goofed off, the front would gradually get pushed back and even the rear would start having to grind for real. So I set Achievement Character to make sure the war would get resolved even if I played around to my heart's content.

In other words: I could enjoy myself with zero worries. WM did have a setting called Peace, and you could still travel under it, but literally nothing ever happened. It got boring fast.

"I'll now begin the remaining WM settings and character creation. Please look at the next screen."

I finished the WM settings according to the plan I'd already worked out, then slapped a character together in rough strokes. I'd already registered several character models in my preferred style, so even a random roll landed somewhere in the strike zone.

A quick rundown of a few of the settings.

First, Convenience Mode. Exactly what it sounded like — a setting that handed the user a bundle of quality-of-life perks. The first time I played, I'd worried picking it would make the game too easy. Once I actually read what it did, I realized it didn't lower the difficulty at all. If anything, it made the game feel like a game. Leave it off and the environment went fully realistic. Fantasy worlds meant a lot of time in forests and mountains and other rough terrain, which sounded like nothing when you said it out loud — until you pictured an actual mountain. Sweat pouring off you like rain. Skin that stayed sticky no matter how much you wiped it. Insects materializing from nowhere to buzz in your ears. If you were unlucky, you stepped in animal shit as a matter of course. Maybe some people would tell you that all of that added up to the true flavor of a hike. Did I really need to experience that in a game? So the setting stripped the realistic grit out of the environment and daily life and made everything properly game-like.

Then there was the other setting: Eroge Worldview. This one was genuinely essential if I wanted to turn the whole thing into an adult game. Put simply, it applied a world where male-oriented fantasy logic was fully implemented. You could corrupt a woman through the pleasure of sex. You could ram a cock all the way up into the womb. You could control pregnancy, so you could creampie to your heart's content without consequences. None of it would fly in reality, but in male-oriented adult fiction it showed up often enough to be familiar — and now all of it would work. It was a setting tilted pretty hard toward the tastes of the one doing the fucking, but it had a few effects that weren't exactly unwelcome from the receiving end either. Things like semen tastes good.

There were a few more settings besides those, but I'd explain just one last one: Mana and Beauty. A world-level rule that the more mana you had, the more beautiful you became. Heroes and the handful of people strong ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠enough to stand among them naturally turned into stunning men and women. And unlike Earth, this was a world with mana — so even a nameless extra was guaranteed a baseline of looks that reality simply didn't provide. NPCs deliberately made ugly for the sake of violation play might have been the exception.

As for character ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠creation — I already said. Even a random roll would land me a character in my taste, so I tweaked a few things and left the rest to chance. That's all!

I'd also spent WM Points to set the skills and abilities my character could use… but explaining those too would take forever, so I'd save it for later.

"I'm done. Let's start."

The management AI finished the countdown, and the world around me ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠went black again. My virtual-reality avatar began to shift, little by little. Changing into the character I'd made, no doubt.

By the time the avatar had finished transforming and I was starting to settle into the new body, the darkness lifted and a new landscape unfolded around me.

"This is… a forest?"

Trees on every side. Sparse enough that sunlight filtered through here and there, and there was a path people had walked — so not a deep wood. More like the outskirts. Starting in a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠forest was uncommon, but it wasn't unheard of. I filed that away for later and decided to take a look at my avatar first. I'd left a fair number of elements on random, after all. I mean, I was curious.

"Purple hair, huh. Purple's not bad."

I grabbed a handful of hair — it fell to about my shoulder blades — and pulled it in front of my eyes. A vivid purple. No — not vivid so much as a slightly pale purple? Not the color I'd expected, but it was prettier than I'd thought, and I liked it. If it had been a truly weird color I probably would have restarted. Hair color was a big deal, you know.

And then.

I gave them a squeeze.

"A little bigger than mine, huh…"

My chest was a bit larger than my real one. No — only a very little bit larger. Even in reality, steady exercise and self-care meant I wasn't exactly small, but the avatar had still outdone me. Then again, thank god this was a game. If I were this big in real life, my shoulders would have been killing me. The best size for actually living in reality was mine. Yeah.

I wanted to check my height and my face too, but I had nothing to measure with and no mirror to look in. That could wait.

I opened my inventory. The default starting items were already inside.

There had been a setting that let you start fully geared, but I'd stuffed the point budget with horny options and run short. What? Hey. The horny stuff matters.

I took the dagger in hand and gave it a few experimental swings. Brand-new start, so my stats and proficiency were both rock-bottom — but I could still swing it decently enough. I couldn't bring over the Hero's stats or weapon proficiency from last run, but the techniques my body had learned were still there.

Weapon next, then armor. Over the short white shirt and skirt that female characters were given from the start, I pulled on a thin cloth cuirass. It was so thin and worn I wasn't sure it would actually protect anything — but it had to be better than nothing.

"Kyaaah!!"

I was still taking stock of my situation when a scream cut through the trees. A young woman's scream. I could smell a cliché coming.

I took off toward the sound and found the scene surprisingly close. Three goblins stood in a loose circle. In the middle of them, a woman trembled, white with fear, sitting on the ground and clutching her ankle with a face twisted in pain — hurt, then, and somewhere that mattered. Beside her, a man lay collapsed, taking hits from the goblins. Two goblin corpses and a short club lay near him. Reading the scene, he'd clubbed two of them down and then gotten done in by the rest.

Ah. Right. I got the picture.

A story that opened on Boy Meets Girl — the rescue-from-crisis kind. What a conveniently contrived cliché. Or in this case, was it Girl Meets Boy?

Either way, I didn't need to investigate to know what I was looking at, so I started to step in.

No. Wait.

Maybe I should watch for a bit?

This was my first time enjoying WM as an eroge. I might as well see how it actually played out, right?