Reyna stared down at the small addition to her Deep Dive setup. The device was a small box attached to a mouthpiece. The box attached to a desk or a chair or whatever a player had and inside they could place 3 meal nutrition packs. Make no mistake, the actual packs tasted abysmal in real life and just tasting the foul sludge would be enough to vomit because it was, in essence, a slurry of all the balanced food groups one needed to live through another day. But that did not matter because once someone was under they could eat in O2O and still gain nutrition from it while tasting the in game food, which was typically about as good as one could make it.
Much like rabbit starvation, there was a far more dire malady in O2O where players would spend so much time inside without any nutrition. They could eat food in the game but it would never actually offer them any value. A few people wasted away inside before the company had to introduce vital scans into their tech that would forcibly log someone out if they were literally starving or dehydrated. The addition of that feature made it possible to detect a persons nutritional levels by piggybacking off of the gear's scans. The nutritional device was a third party system that simply drip-fed horrible sludge and allowed someone to basically live in the game and only leave to change the packs once every 24 hours or so. It was a perfect solution for people with no life. Though, it was also used by virtual office workers who were forced to take their lunch inside of the world.
"Why'd you gift me this?" She messaged Zern.
"What? You don't like it? A lot of people would kill for this thing." He was not wrong. The actual device was about as expensive as a game console and came with a subscription of slurry that would essentially last a lifetime. The makers were able to do that because, apparently, if one was no concerned about adaptability they could create cheap, nutritional food very cheaply and easily. The fact that they could find anyone that was willing to buy or eat it at all was a miracle.
"It's fine, I guess. Still. I asked why."
"You're unemployed, right? Living in the game is probably better than whatever stupid shit you plan on doing outside of it. I heard from your one guy friend Jack that you barely have anything going on." Reyna silently cursed Jack and noted that Zern was on speaking terms with her friends. Some of them, at least. She would have to be careful.
"I mean, I could fix that if you wanted to meet up in person."
"No, no... That's fine." She looked on the bright side. More time spent in the game meant that she could spend more time grinding or making money. Plus, it was a legitimately much better world and in theory, she could save money by getting food in game while allowing the machine to feed her cheap slurry outside. It was efficient if someone was attempting to no-life the game.
"You know, its crazy how much better this version of you is." Zern commented. His hand rested idly on Rey's head. She glanced up from what she was doing. Her lips were halfway around his cock because she wanted to practice making him feel good. There was a skill for every action in the game and all of that was not raised through points but through repetition. She slowly drew up the shaft until her lips reached the head, then circled it with her tongue a little before allowing it to pop free from her lips.
"If I could be as good outside as I was here I would. Sorry." She said earnestly. It felt bad to become a completely different person once the game turned off, but at least she was able to spend more time inside thanks to the device.
"There is." He said simply. Reyna perked up.
"How?" She was definitely interested and did not look at any of Zern's antics as sabotaging herself. To the Rey in the game, she was the right version. The one that they should be.
"I'm gonna let you in on a little secret." Rey leaned up as he said that, intent on listening.
"I don't look different outside the game. No part of me does. It doesn't really matter how you look in this game if you got power, so I use a one-to-one avatar." Rey nodded slowly. She thought that was interesting but did not immediately follow. He picked up on that and continued.
"Alright. So there's a few things about this game that are interesting. First, you actually keep some portion of the skills you learn in game as muscle memory, but it's really slight. But you also keep your memories." He stared down at her with a patronizing smile, waiting to see if she got it. Rey did feel like she understood what he was getting at. He essentially wanted to make memories that would extend out into the real world and affect Reyna's mind. She opened her mouth to say as much but Zern quickly cut her off as soon as he saw she was going to speak.
"It's okay, sweetie. You're a girl. It's fine for you to not understand these things."