The answer to the question of what to do next came the next day, as Noah and 32 were spending another afternoon together after the Game. She was on her back underneath him, calves on his shoulders and heels hooked around the back of his neck while his thick cock plunged into her warm depths. It was slow, lazy going, both of them touching and kissing each other with gentle motions, unburdened by the intense emotional rawness of the previous day.
It was as Noah was settling into a groove, building towards his peak steadily, that he felt an electric ripple through his body and froze. For a moment he thought he'd finished all of a sudden, until 32 pulled back a little and looked him in the eye. "Did you feel that?" she asked, a little out of breath and sweaty.
Noah settled his weight against her, holding himself up with his hands. "Yeah," he answered. "I wonder what-"
32 froze, then spasmed underneath him. Her pussy clenched around him like a vise, enough to force Noah back out of her. "32?" Noah said. "Hey, 32!"
32 went cross-eyed for a moment, then sagged into the sheets. A moment later, she jackknifed up into a sitting position. Her eyes were wide, the pupils shrunk to little dots. "What the fuck just happened," she said in a flat voice.
Something hit Noah on the head, a light tap. He looked beside him on the bed to find another rolled-up piece of paper similar to the first one 32 had handed him days before. He took hold of it, then scooted over to her side and put his hands on her thighs. "Are you okay?"
32 patted herself down. "I feel fine. Fantastic, actually." She flexed her fingers into fists. "Like I did a few days ago before everything went weird and I got narfed."
"Nerfed," Noah corrected.
"Right. That."
"Well...that's good I guess." Noah leaned in and kissed her nose. "So long as you're sure."
She kissed back. "What does the letter say?"
Noah leaned into the kiss, letting his tongue slide into her mouth. "In a little while."
32 shifted, her legs twining around his waist as he bore her back down to the bed. "Ah, right. Priorities." The last word trailed off in a breathy moan as Noah slipped back inside her, his hands finding her breasts and squeezing.
After they were done, they lay together panting for a time, 32 curled into the crook of his side. Her lips ghosted along his neck. "Okay,
now
what does it say?"
Noah fumbled about at his side for a moment before finding the paper. He shook it out with a flick of his wrist. The message this time was much longer than the previous one.
Greetings, Mister Welkin. This is Vivian Peters, aided by your friend Edwin Bernadotte in writing this. (Hi Noah! It's Garthex! Ignore my doofy real name!) We successfully received the message you sent us from inside the developer room. If you're reading this, that means I've successfully managed to consistently deliver messages to you in the game, which is vital if we're to facilitate your rescue. The actual 'how' of that, mind you, is still beyond me. But it stands to reason that if you were put in the game somehow, there must be a way to get you out. The police and FBI are doing all they can, but it's been over a month with no leads. (They've talked to everyone in the lore group, but none of us knew anything.) In order for us to better help you, I'll need you to do as the following things for us.
First, return to the developer's room and make another message for us. Recount your experiences over the last month, down to the last detail, as much as you can remember from before and since you became trapped in the game. Not only will the information help create a clear timeline of events, the video can be used as proof for if we need to enlist the help of the authorities.
Second, continue to leave messages on the Run as much as you can. They leave small little bits of what you might call 'junk code' hidden in the map data. The more of those that you leave, the more I'll be able to isolate you within the game code, to facilitate extracting you.
Third, as a continuation of the former task, it might help if you probe the boundaries of the area around you. Try to see if the world of the game, as well as the hub you reside in, behaves differently for you than it does for the other Primes. Lean against walls to see if you fall through, that sort of thing. Experiment.
The two of us are dedicated to getting you out safe. Hopefully soon, if all works out well.
-Vivian Peters and Garthex
Noah read and re-read the note several times, feeling 32's eyes looking down over his shoulder. He waited for her to speak first. "This Vivian person sounds quite official," she said.
"I mean, I've never met her," Noah said. "Garthex was one of my friends on the outside, though. If anyone can help me out, it's him."
"Does he play the game?"
"Yeah. He uses Nala a lot, he's really good."
32 nodded. "Right. Do we still have time to make it to the hidden room today?"
Noah ran his eyes over her naked body, gorgeous in repose. "I mean, that depends on whether another go is on your mind."
32 threw a pillow at his face with a giggle. "Come along, stud, we had our fun. Let's go."
Vivian Peters had barely left her office over the past three days. She'd gone home long enough to shower and change each day, and
tried
to decompress, but the strange situation she found herself wrapped up in now had a magnetic pull over her whole being. As such, she always wound up going back and putting on another pot of coffee and returning to the new task before her.
She'd been a game developer for a decade, a career spent flitting between various indie studios making maps and worlds for games of all kinds. Getting hired by Mechantix to design the map for Sinner's Run had been her big break, the major success of the game allowing her to make consistent money for the first time in a long time. She'd finally been able to move out of her tiny closet of an apartment into a much larger flat. The first week she'd lain directly underneath her new air vents and marveled at the majesty of central A/C.
The game had grown beyond her expectations, hanging around and experiencing consistent upward trends in player numbers and cosmetic purchases. So much so that expansions were in the works, and Vivian's main project for the past six months had been the prototyping and base programming of an entirely new map for the game. It was set to be unveiled at an awards show at the end of the year, and she'd been so busy with it that she'd neglected to pay attention to her precious original baby.
Now, with the revelation that a real human being was trapped inside Sinner's Run, her priorities had taken a hard left turn. She knew that sooner or later the head game designers would be asking her for progress reports, and she had none to give. Her entire working days had been subsumed with solving the Curious Case of Noah Welkin, as she'd come to think of it. It helped dissociate her mind from the reality that Welkin was likely going through trauma equivalent to that of someone going to war. Worse, if what she surmised about the nature of his experience was right.
That surmising occupied her mind as she lay on her couch, trying and failing yet again to get some sleep at home. After an hour of tossing and turning, she gave up, threw on a blouse and jeans (it was Friday after all), got in her hatchback, and drove to the studio. Mechantix was a medium sized operation, tucked into three floors of an office building in Houston. In the middle of summer, it was still balmy outside at three AM, and Vivian began to sweat in the time it took for her to get from her car to the door.
She nodded to the janitor as she went inside, taking the elevator up to the Mechantix offices. Her small kingdom was in the far back, off to the left next to the conference room. Several workstations had been left on idle, which made Vivian frown. They were supposed to shut down at the end of every day. She sighed and shut down the computers that had been left on, then went to her corner office and turned her machine back on.
Vivian slid a pen between her fingers, tapping it against the desk as her workstation booted. In addition to the normal OS boot, it had to synch up with the office servers, which often included at least a gigabyte of data that included emails, build compiling results from the main programmers, as well as her own teams' projects that got left to cook overnight.
She went straight for the in-house build, opening it up in the programming software. With a couple clicks she accessed the changelog, then sat bolt upright in her chair. Something had been changed just a few hours ago, long after everyone had gone home. Another message from Noah.
Vivian moved her mouse with a hand that only shook a little, finding the long, seemingly random string of letters, numbers and characters and carefully copying the whole thing into a Notepad file. She minimized the programming interface, then pulled up the in-house video maker tool. Though she wasn't a part of the team that used it, she still had access to it on her workstation because it helped provide a more cinematic perspective to the map as she and her team tweaked it. Sinner's Run had grown due to community videos, YouTube especially, and the higher-ups wanted to make sure montages could look as good as possible. Vivian didn't necessarily agree, but then she thought about the central air in her current apartment and reasoned she didn't necessarily have to agree with everything every department did, so long as it didn't step on her toes.
The source code string went into the compiler, and Vivian resumed tapping her pen against the desk as it recompiled into a video. The process took a few minutes, and to pass the time Vivian went to the kitchenette down the hall to make some coffee. She made a disgruntled noise as she discovered that someone had used all the French Vanilla creamers in the drawer. The only other options were cinnamon spice ones left over from Christmas. They'd have to do.
Grimacing at the acrid faux cinnamon flavor of her coffee, Vivian walked back to her office and sat back down. The video software had finished compiling, the finished file sitting on her desktop. She dragged it next to Noah's first message, then double-clicked to play it.
Just like the first message, the screen was black at first. Then the image flickered into view of the off-white developer room, with the guns from the game hanging on brackets behind Noah as he stood in front of the camera. Welkin looked about ten years her junior, though he looked different than the picture she'd found of him while doing research. That image had been a family photo, and he'd looked like a guy who had left college but hadn't dropped the freshman fifteen yet. In the video, the softer edges of his body had been sanded off. There was noticeable definition in his upper body that hadn't been there before, a little less thickness around his waist. He was handsome in a youthful sort of way.
