Immersion Playground
Book #2: Arena
Chapter 5
"Hello, Paul, I'm Charlie. Thanks for stopping by on such short notice," she says, extending her hand. She'd contacted Paul's agent on Monday, and here he is, just two days later. Her hand disappears into the bear-paw-sized grip of the sharply dressed man.
"Nice to meet you Charlie. Call me Coy. Only my mother calls me Paul."
Paul Coy Bell, six foot five and two hundred sixty pounds of muscle, shakes Charlie's hand with just enough of a grip that it couldn't be called limp. She forcibly pulls her attention from his stylishly cut blond hair and dark blue eyes, forcing herself to focus on the task at hand.
"Come on back and we'll get started," she says, opening the door to office area. "Can I get you anything?"
"No ma'am," he says with a hint of Texas twang, "I'm good."
When they sit down at the conference table, she expects to hear Coy's chair groan under his weight. "Coy, I have to admit, I'm surprised you agreed to stop by to talk to me. You're a much bigger star than I ever dreamed would be interested in our little operation."
He gives her a grin that makes her heart flutter a little. "Naw, I'm no star. I'm just an old bullfrog," he says, kicking his voice down a few octaves and laying on the accent.
Coy's an aspiring actor that just received his first big break. After playing second string football for the University of Texas, he tried out for several NFL teams, but never did better than making the practice squad. While bouncing around looking for a team, he was offered a bit part in a no-budget action vid that featured lots of naked bodies and bad acting. He was on the screen less than three minutes before being gunned down in a hail of bullets.
Six months later he was offered a co-star role in another vid by the same producer, and this time he actually had a few pages of dialog, though it was obvious to everyone that the main reason he was hired was for his heart-stopping good looks. Through the first half of the movie he, and three other impossibly good looking commandos, wandered through the jungle shirtless, killing baddies and saving equally impossibly good looking, and well-endowed, female slaves from the drug lord they were ostensibly sent to kill. This time he made it halfway through the movie before dying. In the vid, after being captured and thrown in a dirt pit, he was forced into fucking yet another stunningly good-looking slave by the sadistic drug lord. Just as he and his bosomy co-star begin to orgasm, they were run through with a spear, pinning them to the dirt wall of his cell like butterflies on display. He joked with his friends after the vid's release that he came and went at the same moment.
What his friends didn't know is, despite the vid avoiding an adult rating by the skin of its teeth, and all the sex was implied with no actual penetration seen in the vid, Coy and his heavy-breasted starlet actually did have sex while the scene was filmed. For realism, according to the director. Coy's always suspected the full, uncut, version of that scene ended up in the director's personal collection of other such 'realistic' scenes.
While no one will argue that
Jungle Snow
is an awful vid, that scene catapulted Coy to the top of the 'Sexiest Men in Hollywood' list, and it's that list that helped land him the job as the voice of J. Edgar Bullfrog, a wise old bullfrog in Disney's kid vid,
Leapfrog.
Charlie laughs as Coy becomes J. Edgar Bullfrog right in front of her. "My husband, Todd, and I watched that vid after I found out you were willing to come in. You stole every scene you were in."
"Why, thank you, ma'am," J. Edgar says, "but for some reason I think you are less interested in my friend Coy's voice than you are other parts of him."
She laughs again, "Okay, you found me out. You're right. I also watched
Jungle Snow
. What a dreadful vid, but your sex scene while trapped in the pit, that was pretty hot. You certainly sold it because it looked real."
He flashes her another one of his mega-watt smiles. "I'll tell you a little secret that I will deny saying if you repeat it, but it
was
real. Soletta and I, along with the director and cameraman, we can all get in a lot of trouble if it gets out, but Soletta and I were... physical... in that scene. I kept saying 'Wait a minute' when Soletta started getting a little carried away, but the director kept saying, 'No, no, go with it.' Well, you saw what she looks like. After a while I forgot about it and we did... what we did." J. Edgar comes back. "Coy, sometimes he ain't real bright, you know."
She smiles. "I assume you know what type of immersions we make here?"
"I do. If I can be involved in an immersion with the type of impact that
The Proposal
has, I'm in." He smiles at Charlie again. "Unfortunately I don't have a Giselle to work with, which means you have something else up your sleeve."
"We do, but before I go into the details, you're going to have to sign an NDA. Are you okay with that?"
"Standard NDA? Can't talk about the project, blah, blah, blah?"
"Pretty much. You can't talk about the immersion, whether you're in it or not, until the immersion is released," she explains as she sends the non-disclosure agreement to him. It's back, digitally signed, in seconds.
"What we are doing for our next immersion, Coy, is sexual gladiators." She pauses, waiting for his reaction, but he's stone-faced, giving nothing away. "We'll be pairing a man and a woman up, putting them in a replica of a Roman stadium, and the last person standing is the winner. No scripts, no games. The first person to submit, loses."
"Submit?"
"What we're thinking is, it's all about the conquest, the sex is just the method. You go into the ring and you fu—you're physical with the woman. If she calls it quits before you do, you win. If you can't get it up, or no longer wish to continue, she wins. Simple."
"So there are no wrestling pins or anything like that?"
"Nope; you can pin her fifty times, but if you can't get it up, you lose."
"Kind of sucks to be a man, doesn't it?" he says with a smile. "What about oral sex? Does that count?"
"Look, let me make this simple. Eventually one or the other of you will know when you're beaten. Until that time, the contest goes on," she explains. "Have you experienced
The Proposal?"
"Yes. It's the only reason I'm here."
"Then you know the sex is only a part of the immersion. A small part, actually. We hope this will be the same way. Where the sex came in at the end of
The Proposal
, this time the sex will come at the beginning, but at the end we're hoping it's that sense of victory for one of you that will make this immersion. The sex is just a means to get there. You played football. Think of this as a game, but with a more intimate field of combat."
He rubs his chin, thinking. "Pay?"
"You'll be compensated." Coy frowns at Charlie, clearly indicating that answer isn't going to fly. "We're still negotiating with Sierra, but we've agreed that you will each be paid the same amount."
"Sierra? Sierra who?" he asks slowly.
"Sierra Pederson. Do you know her?"
"I might know of her," he says, clearing thinking of something. "Anyway, about the money, give me a ballpark. If you say a couple of grand I can stop wasting your time."
"Not less than fifty-thousand," she says flatly. "For what amounts to one day of you having the time of your life."
"One day?" he asks, not understanding.
"One day, plus a few days here and there before the capture. This is an immersion. We capture what we capture. We'll do it all in one day... unless you think you can keep it up for more than twenty-four hours. If we run into a technical problem and we have to recapture, I'm sure the company will make any necessary adjustments to pay."
He pauses, rubbing his chin again, thinking it all over. "Okay, I'm in," he says finally. "Subject to us coming to an understanding on the money."
She reaches across the table again. "Deal."