Coromandel

Note: This is another piece I had written but not submitted over the past year or so.

There are several more chapters written, unlike Take a Chance. Yes, the NerveGear comes from an anime/manga series, Sword Art Online. The series raised some questions, I thought, that could not be explored in that format, because of the age of the target audience. The world of Coromandel itself, however, is mine - though you may be able to figure out what part of a bleak, post apocalyptic future earth it's placed in with a quick google search.

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Chapter 1

When I booted up my NerveGear helmet, my nighttime bedroom vanished. I no longer felt the cheap sheets I was lying on, or the pillow under my head; I no longer smelled the familiar scents of my apartment, or heard the sounds of the air conditioners running.

The NerveGear cut all of that out, instead interfacing my nervous system directly with the high end gaming computer I'd booted up a few moments before. For a moment, there was only blackness, and then I was connected with the Coromandel Main Server. The MMORPG interface loaded quickly, displaying the Character I had created two nights ago, Lucien Ashfall, a Level 4 Deathknight in service to the Undying Queen of the great Domed City of Coromandel. Lucien rotated in front of me in glorious high resolution, his dark, gothic plate armor fanciful and dramatic. As cool as he looked, Lucien hadn't been working out the way I wanted. Instead of selecting Lucien, I choose the option to create a new Character.

In front of me, a featureless 3D model of a male body appeared, colored a soft, inoffensive gray, again rotating slowly. I contemplated it for a long moment.

Coromandel used the same VR technology a host of fantasy and sci-fi MMORPGs had employed over the past few years. While you were playing the game, you saw, heard, smelt, tasted and felt everything just as if it was happening to you in real life. Set in a post-apocalyptic far future world that blended fantasy, science fiction and gothic sensibilities, Coromandel looked beautiful, with a visual style quite distinct from the other VR games I had played. I had been looking forward to playing it ever since the first screenshots appeared, and I had even tried to get in on the closed Beta test, without success. What really set this game apart, however, was that it was an adult game.

In other words, Coromandel allowed its users to experience sex with each other. In theory.

I'd spent my last two nights looking to try out the function, to no avail, and to my great frustration. After thinking it over all day at work, I'd decided that there were a couple of things contributing to my problem: first, there were flat out more male characters than female characters in the world. I would put an estimate at a 2:1 ratio, if I had to guess, which didn't really surprise me. The game had suffered from bad publicity, from using porn actors to record sensory date, to being reported as some kind of virtual swingers club. The game designers repeatedly had stated they were merely trying to give players a complete virtual experience, but maybe it wasn't surprising that men with poor social skills far outnumbered women in the first week after release.

Secondly, a significant portion of the female characters who were in world were charging in game currency for sex. Yep, they were essentially playing prostitutes. And as a starting character, I couldn't afford their prices. I also didn't like the idea of grinding away at quests and dungeons for hours just to throw all the loot I'd earned at someone else's character.

Third, and the reason It had been awhile between dates for me in real life, was that I just wasn't very good at talking to people. I'd always been shy, and so my attempts to pick up another player, to try the function out, had just been overshadowed by the other, more socially adept guys I was competing with. Yeah, it wasn't all bottom-feeding trolls - there seemed to be some pretty good talkers in there.

Which brought me, after a day spent stewing over my problem instead of concentrating on my actual job, to my current experiment. My virtual finger hovered over the 'Sex' menu for a long moment, and then I scrolled down from the selected 'Male' option, ignoring choices like 'Hermaphrodite,' 'Asexual' or '?', and selected Female.

The rotating body changed, shoulders, arms and legs slimming, hips widening, and the chest reforming to include modest breasts, all still rendered in gray. Using sliding bars to the left of the body, I began to adjust the height, weight, and dimensions by memory. Five foot seven, check. 103 pounds, check. 34A bust, 20 inch waist, 34 inch hip. I'd always thought Audrey Hepburn was absolutely stunning when I'd seen her in movies or pictures, and so I'd used a quick web search to find me her measurements, and I modelled the body after hers. The only change I made to the body type itself was to up the bust to a C cup. I briefly toggled it even hire, I suspect like most guys would have, but it just looked top heavy and weird, so I brought it back down. When the general shape of the body was completely defined, I moved on to the color palette and quickly settled on a pale Caucasian skin tone, black hair, and bright, ice-blue eyes. With a few more tweaks, the naked body acquired coral-pink, perky nipples and a closely trimmed patch of black pubic hair just above the vagina.

I rotated the model, looking at it from all angles. I wasn't sure about anyone else, but I certainly found it attractive - found her attractive. The hardest part done, I began to run through the rest of character creation rather quickly, having just done it with Lucien two days before. I gave her a pistol and the gun-slinging skills to go with it. I picked the most attractive - by my standards - starting clothing I could, within the game's aesthetic, a sort of light gray and black Victorian dress with wide skirt and close fitting jacket. Around the hips sat the gun belt and pistol. Beneath the clothing, I'd chosen a black corset, stockings and panties that looked more like a modern interpretation of Victorian.

The next set of choices to make was... a little surreal. When I'd made a male body, it hadn't felt as strange to choose a penis size, but now... I set the slider for nipple and clitoral sensitivity to its maximum. After all, I wanted this to feel good, right? Then, I set the slider for vaginal diameter to the minimum. Those uncomfortable choices made, I scrolled through lists of suggested surnames until I found a few I liked, choose one, and then gave the Character the first name of the woman who had inspired her. Everything finished, Audrey Anne Blackthorn stood before me. I examined her for a long moment.

Up until now, this was all just theoretical. It was fun to design a woman that I would be attracted to, and dress her up. Hell, there were games that just let you do that. But if I hit 'start,' I would appear in Coromandel's tutorial module as Audrey. I would feel everything she felt, and the other players in the game would see her when they looked at me. Was that really what I wanted?

I'd wanted to experiment with Virtual Sex, but as a man. The plan I'd come up with today was that I thought I would have an easier time hooking up with a woman as Audrey, but I wouldn't actually be able to have sex with this theoretical other woman - not in the way I thought of sex. I mean, I could kiss her, touch her, go down on her, finger her, and that sort of thing, but not actual sex. It could be like the ultimate case of blue balls.

My hand hovered over the green start button for a long moment. Next to it was a blue button labelled 'preview.' I hadn't used that at all with Lucien, but now I hit it. There was a moment of disorientation, and then I was in Audrey's body - or rather, I was Audrey. It felt strange: the breasts were a weight that I was conscious of on my chest, and something about how my hips were different made standing just feel... not right. My sense of balance was off, and I wondered if I would even be able to walk.

The preview mode didn't bother to render my clothing or equipment choices, so as I looked down at my body I saw pale, smooth skin and the swell of my breasts, capped by little pink nipples. My stomach was flat and toned, my hips swelled out to either side of me, and there was a fashionable gap between my legs where my thighs did not touch. There was a 'v' of close trimmed black hair there, between my legs, and without even thinking about it I reached down with my right hand, cupping this strange vagina that I was suddenly the owner of. There was a sudden, intense spark of pleasure, and I gasped. It was like touching my penis, but... different.

I hesitated for a moment, then pressed one finger between my labia - not all the way inside, just kind of pressing in. There was another jolt, and my legs trembled. I drew in a shuddering breath, and curled my finger further in, moving it back and forth, in search of the next jolt, and here it was, here came another.

I began to rock my finger back and forth, still not fully penetrating myself, and it got easier and easier. Was I getting wet down there? I felt warm all over, but particularly warm between my legs where my finger was rocking around, and I reached up with my left hand to run it over my soft breast. When I touched my nipple, lightning coursed between it and my pussy.

I realized the preview was filled with the sound of shaky breath, a high pitched moaning, and wet squelching sounds, and that all of those sounds were coming from me. It was getting awkward to try to do this while standing up, so I sat down, spread my legs wide with my knees up in the air and my feet just beneath my ass, and supported myself with my left hand while my right went back to work.

I was slippery now, and it occurred to me that I could put a finger inside myself.

I shouldn't. I wasn't really a girl, I was a guy, and guys didn't do stuff like this. But those sparks of pleasure felt so good...

I slowly pressed my middle finger up into my vagina, first one joint, then up to the second knuckle, and then past: there was maybe, maybe two inches of finger inside my body, and it felt wonderful. I began to saw my finger in and out of my pussy faster and faster, as those sparks of pleasure came more and more quickly. Suddenly, there was a tightening in my chest; my body clenched around the finger inside of it, and I couldn't breath as I came.

It took me a moment to catch my breath again, and I realized that my hips were thrust up in the air, my ass off the ground. I settled back down, and carefully pulled my finger out. I shouldn't have done that. In a sudden panic, I hit the 'save character' button, and then logged out.

On my own bed in my own room, I felt a flash of shame. My cock was standing straight up, hard and straining against my boxer shorts. That hadn't been the idea, I told myself as I disconnected the Nervegear. The only reason I made up a character like Audrey was to improve the chances of picking up women in Coromandel, not to experience sex as a woman myself.

Though, the thought niggled at the back of my head, what did you think was going to happen if you hooked up with a lesbian? That you're going to do nothing but touch her, and she isn't going to want to get you off?

I pushed that thought away and looked at the time. It was still early; not even nine o'clock, but suddenly I didn't want to log back into the game just yet. Instead, I took a long shower, trying to calm down, and tossed and turned in bed for a long time before sleep would come. Every once in awhile, as I lay there, restless, ashamed and frustrated, my hand strayed down to my cock. Just to make sure it was still there.

The next morning, thoughts of Audrey and Coromandel were pushed aside by the fuzzy-headed rush of getting ready for work and my morning routine. I stumbled through the apartment in the dark, took another shower (to wake up), brushed my teeth and dressed for the day while my bagel toasted. It wasn't until the drive in that thoughts of what I had done last night began to creep back into my head.

There isn't much to do but think while you're crawling through rush hour traffic: that was how the whole idea of Audrey had come to me, while I'd been trying to practice pick up lines from dating advice websites. It had occurred to me how ridiculous this was - an entire virtual game world that was about sex, where people specifically came to get laid, shouldn't have given me such a hard time.

But now that the idea had been replaced by actually doing, I wasn't sure how I felt about it. The character I'd build, Audrey, she was hot as hell. Exactly the kind of girl I'd always dreamed about fucking. For a moment, I remembered the feeling of my fingers between my - between her - legs, and the way it had made me feel. I pushed those thoughts aside as I pulled into the parking lot and turned my car off.

I work in a call center at an insurance company - no, I'm not going to say the name, but you'd recognize it if I told you. My desk is in a little cubicle, with other cubicles around it to every side. It's basically hell on earth, with one exception: the cubicle to the left of me is occupied by Natalie, who is an absolute ray of sunshine in this fluorescent lit torture chamber. As I walked down the center aisle, she was just taking her jacket off and hanging it off the back of her chair. Strands of her brown hair fell at an angle across her right eye, and I could see the back was still damp from her morning shower.

"Good morning, Nattie," I called out as I came by.

"Hey! Good morning, Devin," she responded with a smile. She was wearing a black hoodie against the morning chill, and as she slipped it off I could see the sparkling gold of a thin chain around her neck. It supported a small gold heart that hung down just touching the scooped neckline of her purple blouse.

I took off my own jacket and put it over the back of my chair. "Another day in paradise," I joked as I flopped down into my chair and began to boot up my computer. Natalie rolled her eyes.

"Ugh," she sympathized. "I can't wait for the weekend."

"Doing something fun," I wondered as the computer chugged along.

"Not yet," she admitted, sliding into her own chair. "Probably just binge watching something on Netflix."

For about the millionth time, I considered asking her out. It would be so simple: Me either, I could say. Why don't we go out and catch a movie together? But my tongue was as dry as a dead sea sponge, a lump of ice sat way down at the bottom of my stomach, and the moment stretched on and I knew I wasn't going to do it.

I thought about Audrey all day, while I answered one call after another. I kept coming back to the dilemma, at lunch, over the course of the afternoon, and on the ride home. I'd made the character. But did I actually want to play her? Did I actually want to put myself in that body again, feel the things she felt again? And if I did, did that make me... weird? Did it make me some kind of closet tranny?

In the end, the prospect of another night of frustration decided me. Besides, if I didn't have any more luck this way, I could always go back to Lucien tomorrow evening. That was what I told myself, anyway, as I finally stopped pacing and laid down on the bed, reaching over to the nightstand to pull on the Nervegear. I set the game's timer to remind me to log off in time to get ready for work in the morning, and entered Coromandel. This time, when I was given the option to choose between Lucien and Audrey, I choose quickly - so I wouldn't have to dwell on it any longer - and then hit start before I could second guess myself.

I stood on a white beach, where dark waves lapped at the sand perhaps twenty feet away, and a dim white sun in the sky overhead couldn't produce more than a sort of continual twilight. My boots shifted in the sand, and my skirts rustled as I moved. I gasped.

Everything felt so different than what I was used to; the preview mode hadn't included clothing. My silk stockings, so close and smooth on my legs. I was aware of the straps resting against my upper thighs on their way to my garter belt, and the steel boning of my corset pushed my shoulders back and my breasts up and out. I looked down at my gloved hands, and the fingers looked so delicate and birdlike.

"Your first time," a gruff voice asked from my right.

I turned, hand falling to the butt of my pistol before I remembered this was a safe zone. No PVP - player versus player violence - would be allowed here. The player - the character - who had spoken to me was huge, a mountain of muscle and armor, with chromed cybernetic arms and several days growth of beard. I thought about how to respond for a moment - did I want to come off as a newbie?

"Not my first," I said, then paused, a bit shocked at my voice. It was higher than I was used to - a woman's voice. "But it's always something when you step into a new character for the first time, isn't it?"

Cyborg-beard nodded. "Yeah. I'm Razor." I let my gaze linger on him long enough to pull up his Character name, and found that it was 'R4z0r XXX' to be precise. Someone wasn't here for immersion into the carefully written world of the game. He extended a hand, and I put mine in his, somewhat afraid he would crush my delicate fingers, but he didn't.

"Audrey," I answered, momentarily worried he would catch the reference and the resemblance and laugh at me, but instead he just shook my hand, and either didn't get it or let it drop. I looked around at the half dozen other characters who were acclimating on the beach, trying out their bodies. "Let's get out of here. I don't want to deal with newbies, and I want to finish the tutorial."

"Fine by me," Razor said with a laugh, and we turned and walked up the beach to the road. As explanatory text began to flash through my view, I dismissed it with an impatient swipe - I'd already played the tutorial once, and I knew what to do. I pulled my pistol, stuffed it with a charge of black powder, and loaded a ball. Razor extended a pair of short blades from his cybernetic arms and looked ready to go.

"You can't have gotten all that with starting funds," I commented with a raised eyebrow.

He shrugged. "Yeah, I dropped some real world cash at Character Creation," he admitted. "You didn't?"

"Not sure yet if I want to keep this Character," I told him as we started on the road to the domed-city. Of course. You could make micro-transactions within the game, depositing money from your real paycheck to get in game funds. If you were willing to do that, on top of paying for the game and a monthly subscription fee, it gave you a significant advantage. But it doesn't get you experience, or level up your character, I reminded myself. Just better gear. And the really good stuff is only available as loot anyway.

He shook his head. "Well, if I get a vote, I say keep it. You look amazing, even in junk gear." With a shock, I realized Razor was hitting on me. Of course, I thought. He doesn't know I am a man playing a female Character. He's here for the same thing I was, all the nights that I played Lucien. It was uncomfortable - was this how women felt, when someone came onto them all of a sudden? What am I supposed to do, just ignore it, or make a joke or something?

But there wasn't much more time to think about that, because that was about the moment when the mutants came out. I was surprised to find myself having trouble with them, but when I had a chance to catch my breath it made sense. With my first character, I'd built a combat monstrosity. When I built Audrey, I actually wanted her to look good, and the system balanced for that: she was relatively quick and lithe, because of her build, but not strong, and not optimized for combat. Thankfully, my build synergized well with Razor's: I took a shot while he was rushing in for the kill, and while he finished off the mutant I'd wounded, I had a chance to reload and prepare for the next target. At the end of the Tutorial, I was grinning, we both levelled up, and the pop-up translucent textbox kindly informed me that until I had finished adjusting my character no NPCs or PCs could interact with me. Next to me, the Razor avatar had a glazed, motionless aspect as his player made adjustments.