Team Player

* Author's Note *

Literotica Draft 4/20/25

This is an extremely explicit erotic *novel* (so it's long!) written by FrigOfFury. You should not read it if you are not of legal age to read graphic depictions of sex.

Erotic content: Bimbofication, breast expansion, semi-consensual body transformation, light prostitution, lactation, milking, futanari, brief bestiality, in-game incest of sorts, pregnancy, cum inflation, excessive proportions, group sex, and various instances of dubious consent: mostly well intentioned misunderstandings but not always. Also contains (but does not describe or eroticize) sleep rape.

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---Team Player---

--Tutorial--

-Tradeoffs-

"Yeah, I suppose that makes sense," Lacey said with a shrug. Beggars couldn't be choosers, and she felt extremely lucky to have gotten sponsored into a party full of big-time players right at the start of the public release of Fantasy UltraCraft. If they wanted her to be a utility character, that was fine with her.

Though it kind of rankled a little bit. In previous UltraCrafts, the games sometimes ran for literal years before resets, so if Lacey didn't like her character, she would have to live with it for a long time before she had a chance to change it. On the other hand, being sponsored onto this party was her first shot at earning enough to choose her own character in the future, and really to do all the things competitive-tier players got to do. And while many people thought utility players were boring or demeaning to play, they still got a share of loot, and the loot drops in Arvina's party were bound to be just massive compared to anything Lacey had experienced in the past.

"We're at the party max on intelligence points," JeffA told Caper. JeffA was a warlock and Caper an artificer, so they both needed high INT.

"One more point and I get a guaranteed bonus spell at each level," JeffA said.

"I don't think I can give up any more points, though," Caper said apologetically, "I'm planning on controlling dual golems and it's already going to require a lot of concentration."

"Yeah, that's fair," JeffA said, and looked around at the rest of the party. "Can anyone else spare a point?"

"I could," Lacey said. One nice thing about UltraCraft is that in many cases the penalty for low character abilities could be compensated for by the player's abilities. Strong people could make up for their characters being weak, and smart people could make up for their characters being dense. Her character already had one of the lower INT scores in the party, but she was a bard-like "Performer" class character, so it didn't matter as much. At least, the game's character creation interface hadn't highlighted it as a problem, so there was probably at least one subclass within Performer that didn't need much INT.

"Really? Thanks!" JeffA said. "Do you want charisma or strength?"

"Oh, charisma for sure," Lacey said. That was her character's most important statistic and the one for which Lacey had the least to add, being a generally shy and tongue-tied person. That was part of the reason she hadn't been so chuffed to have been pushed into being a Performer in the first place. But Lacey was determined to be a team player.

"Do you want another point of charisma?" Caper asked hopefully.

Lacey laughed, because Caper was so cute and friendly. Arvina was fascinating, supremely confident, and quite generous, but also intimidating and hard to read, so Lacey always felt stupid and embarrassed around her even though she was the only player she'd known before joining the party. Meanwhile, Lacey immediately saw that Caper was funny and low pressure, and had done more to set Lacey at ease than anyone else.

So, while giving up another point of intelligence was maybe not the wisest move, Lacey really wanted to repay Caper for being so cheerful and welcoming. "Yeah, let's do it."

"Really?" Caper asked with surprise. "I was mostly joking."

"I think I can cover for a lower intelligence," Lacey said, as if it was no big deal. She wasn't sure if this was true for Fantasy UltraCraft, but it had been true for UltraCraft: Beyond The Furthest Star. Lacey's ability to memorize clues and solve the puzzle minigames had been how she'd been able to rank high enough to reach the arena finals fight against Arvina despite being a free player. Naturally Arvina had utterly wrecked her, but Lacey had evidently put up enough resistance to earn some respect from a globally-ranked player, and maybe she'd be able to do it again.

"Fantasy UltraCraft doesn't have minigames, you know," Arvina warned her, as if she'd been reading Lacey's mind.

"No, but there's still puzzles and whatnot, right?" Lacey said.

"I don't know, actually. I'm not sure anybody does; the beta didn't get super deep. I assume they'd have to do something like that, but I'm really unsure because of their big focus on everything being organic," Arvina said uncomfortably. Seeing Arvina unsure actually made Lacey feel better. Even if she was making a noob mistake, they were all noobs together.

"You can have the INT back if you think you'll need it," Caper offered.

"No, it's fine. We know you need INT, but we don't know if I need it, so it seems like a good trade," Lacey argued.

Everyone seemed to think that was a very smart way of looking at the issue, and Lacey felt good at how seriously all Arvina's top-tier player friends were taking her. Above all, she was glad she wasn't embarrassing her sponsor, who was also the coolest person Lacey knew.

Once they had finished the party-wide character stat trades, it was time for them to work on character creation individually, which, given that it was an UltraCraft game, was going to take a long time and be quite important.

More important than ever for Lacey. Not only had she never played a full Extreme-Dimensional game where it was, in sensory terms, indistinguishable from real life, the same financial situation that prevented her from choosing her own character in the way paid players did was just one consequence of an arguably more dire situation in realspace. She'd been evicted from her flat and wasn't going to be able to pay any reconnect fees. Lacey's whole plan was to be live as this new character in the personal playpod 24 hours a day until and unless her financial situation changed significantly. If she stopped whilst she still owed money then UltraCraft might not even let her rejoin. She'd always read about things like this happening, but she'd never expected to be in this position herself. Though, given her opportunity to play in Arvina's team, Lacey felt cautiously optimistic that she'd be able to sell some of her loot for enough to pay her game and pod fees while digging herself out of debt. In the late game she might be getting gear worth enough to pay for a new flat.

But that was going to take months at least, and in the meantime, she wanted to be happy with how she looked, her starting supplies, and all the other aspects of her life for the foreseeable future. One in particular presented an irritating parallel with the housing challenge that had made her realspace life so unaffordable.

"Come on, team. Do we really have to live in the most expensive part of Rampart?" Lacey complained to herself. Which wasn't strictly true, of course, but the party received control bonuses over their home tavern by living nearby, and they'd settled on the Burning Sun next to the eastern gate. Lacey could see why: quick access to missions in the eastern wilds, lots of travellers, and so on. However, all the unoccupied residences nearby either required UltraGems, or were on the outside of the gates where they could get raided by other players.

Of course, some residences were only a token amount of gems, just enough to push players over the mental barrier of paying at least a little real money, so probably it didn't even occur to the other players that this could be a real barrier for Lacey. She had never explained how truly broke she was, not wanting them to have second thoughts about letting her in the party, so she really had only herself to blame.

She walked as a ghost form through the tenements outside the gate for a bit to more closely inspect what there was to choose from, which led to her becoming even more dispirited when she saw the schedule for the gate closing at night. So if she lived out here, there would be times at night when she wouldn't even be able to join the party. It would be so awkward.

Setting that aside, she decided to focus on other aspects of character creation, starting with her subclass. Well, Bard was right out; it relied almost as heavily on intelligence as it did on charisma. Dancer leaned heavily on stamina, and Gymnast on strength. Entertainer, though, leaned most heavily on charisma with body as a secondary stat, and Lacey had taken a fairly high body score because that had given hit points in previous UltraCraft games. Fantasy UltraCraft had been marketed as no longer using hit points, but Lacey was sure it would do something similar.

The next big conundrum was whether to choose a noble background or a brothel worker background.

Nobles got boosts to charisma, education, and 20% extra earnings, whereas brothel workers got bonuses to charisma, body, and 20% extra earnings, though they took a education penalty. That didn't seem fair to Lacey until she saw that brothel workers were the only character background allowed to live in brothels, which would solve her living situation without needing to buy any UltraGems, and a review of brothel housing showed that it had excellent comfort stats and modest but acceptable storage capacity, which increased with level.

That was enough that she would have chosen it if it wasn't for the obvious connotations. The background description specified that she had "once" been a "brothel worker", but that was transparently intended of the thinnest of covers for the obvious implication that she had been a prostitute specifically, and the lodging itself was situated and furnished in a way that implied this brothel work was less previous and more current. Also the education penalty wasn't great.

Belatedly, she noticed that she could actually select both backgrounds to get "fallen noble". That eliminated the education penalty and combined the bonuses from both. That seemed way overpowered, but after checking through every page of stats and the equipment pages, the only other penalty was that it removed the 'noble house' perk, which really only helped money players.

Once again it took her a while to notice that this was marked as a "sponsored build" available to "qualified players". The help menu was frustratingly vague about what exactly this meant, but reading between the lines brought Lacey to a tentative conclusion that these were particular characters UltraCraft wanted filled by higher-tier players in order to add the right ambience. Though it also sounded like perhaps it would mean she was going to be shown adverts by some company that had paid to sponsor the build. It came with a preset 'look' that was much more evocative of a vapid 22nd century influencer who had decided harem outfits were the latest fashion than a medieval noblewoman brought low by traumatic calamity.

Lacey thought this was pretty stupid until she played with her stats sliders a bit to show how they were reflected in her character model, at which point she realized that it was because the game engine needed to show her as someone with a sky-high charisma and low intelligence, and that didn't fit for a traumatized noblewoman mortified by her debasement. Evidently the game decided that a bimbo who was too stupid to grasp her situation could still be attractive and charming.

Once again she asked herself if she was really willing to do this, but looking at her stats and the ability to live right next door to the tavern reconciled her. She might look a little silly and prurient, but it would be a big advantage in contributing to the party. And a 40% gold bonus seemed especially helpful for her as someone who couldn't spend real money.

After waffling for a bit longer, she got a message from Arvina asking how it was going.

"Well, I found a character build that seems pretty promising, but I wasn't sure how the party would feel about it," she said, trying to figure out if there was a way to explain why she had chosen to make her character so gratuitously hot without admitting that she'd accepted a sponsored build.

She was still trying to decide what was most embarrassing when Arvina popped into her space, which wasn't something she'd even known was possible. Despite having a mediocre charisma stat, Arvina was gorgeous, which implied that she was pretty in realspace as well. Or maybe she was just really good at XD modeling; either was enviable. She was also a noble wolfborn, it appeared, which explained why she was so big and muscular.

They stared at each other in shocked approval for a moment, which simultaneously embarrassed Lacey that she was drooling over her new friend, and reassured her that Arvina didn't think Lacey looked vulgar.

"I didn't expect you to take the sponsored build, but it looks great," Arvina said.

"Oh! I... You know about..." Lacey stammered, demonstrating why she needed a high charisma stat in the game: she wasn't going to be able to smooth talk her way though challenges.

Arvina pokered up a bit, and Lacey was reminded that elite players like Arvina sometimes got little peeks behind the scenes from the developers, though they weren't meant to talk about them.

"Sorry! I don't mean to try to get you to tell me about anything you're not meant to," Lacey said hastily. "I didn't even notice it was a sponsored build at first."

"Oh, so you just liked the way it looked?" Arvina said, seeming a bit relieved.

Lacey suspected that she'd narrowly averted Arvina's suspicion that Lacey chose a sponsored build because she was a free player. Would Arvina have felt compelled to kick Lacey out for the good of the party? The thought made Lacey hasten to reinforce the impression that she had chosen the look for her own reasons. "Yeah! I know, I look like a ditz, but I think that'll just make enemies underestimate me."

Arvina cocked her head as if she hadn't thought of it that way, though the subtly canid features of her wolfborn face also made her look faintly reminiscent of a puppy tilting her head when hearing a strange sound.

Lacey swallowed hard. She needed to not be weird around Arvina, and it was getting more and more difficult because instead of getting used to having a semi-famous pro gamer friend, she was becoming ever more infatuated with her. Why did she always do this?

"Well, I'm glad you like it," Arvina said. "Why are you worried about the party? Because it's a bit saucy?"

"Yeah," Lacey said, letting out a slightly relieved laugh that the topic was out in the open.

"Well, Caper doesn't judge, and JeffA will love it. He's all about saucy bitches. I hope you don't mind him saying shit like that, though. You might not think it because he's so butch himself, but he enjoys outrageously femme stuff."

"He's gay?" Lacey asked.

"You haven't even looked at his intro page?" Arvina asked with a laugh, before continuing. "Yeah, super gay. And also he'll love your look."

"What about Dark?" Lacey asked, referring to our fifth party member whom she knew the least.

"Well, he wouldn't judge either, but he might think you're playing the ero layer as well, so if you aren't, you might want to tell him so."

"The ero layer?" Lacey asked. Previous UltraCraft games had had companion 'ero worlds' where characters from the main world could be taken for both romantic dating and more straightforwardly X-rated activities, so she had some idea of what that word referred to, but she had no idea what 'layer' meant in this context.

"You haven't heard about that, then? Well, I'm glad I could warn you. Well, 'warn' isn't the right word because there's nothin bad about it as far as I'm concerned," Arvina told her with a smile that would have been more reassuring without the long wolfborn fangs. "I should say I'm glad to clue you in that in Fantasy UltraCraft everything that used to be over in the ero world is now integrated directly into the game, but with a layer filter so that you just don't experience any of the ero content unless you opt in."

"Oh. Wouldn't that be distracting to have happening all over the place while you're trying to play the normal game?" Lacey asked.

"Not really, because the world handles it totally realistically. Like, people aren't just getting it on in the streets because they'd be arrested and all that. Some activists think it's too realistic because they bring back medieval prejudices or whatever, but that's not really true. Like you get in trouble in the game for being caught cheating on your spouse or whatever, but you pretty much have to want to be caught, and the game lets anyone marry anyone and you don't even have to get married to have babies. So, I don't think it's super restrictive; mostly it just gives it a bit of period flavour."

There were multiple surprising aspects to Arvina's mini-lecture on the topic, the biggest being the simple fact that Arvina had so much to say. But there was no way Lacey was going to inquire into Arvina's involvement with the ero layer, so instead she asked about the second most surprising element. "Wait, babies?"

"Yeah, it's pretty crazy. They have a whole in-game genetics system and everything, so they inherit stats, and appearance, and supposedly they're even going to have AIs that train on the personalities of their parents."

"That's..." Lacey edited out some less complimentary ways of describing her astonishment before going with, "Very ambitious, don't you think?"

"Oh, insanely ambitious. But they're closer than you probably think," Arvina said.

Clearly this was more than idle speculation on Arvina's part, but again it felt like territory Lacey wasn't meant to be asking about.

"So having sex in the ero layer makes in-game babies? I'm not sure people would like that."

"It's only like ten gold for birth control tea, so no one has to have babies unless they want to," Arvina assured her. "Still, I think it'll make the ero layer feel less like a porn game or fanfiction and more like, well, real life."

"Even if I look like this?" Lacey asked, bouncing one of her sizeable boobs as a joke. Except that it didn't feel like a joke. It felt just like she had bounced her own breasts, and not the unremarkable ones on her realspace body, but the nice big firm ones on her in-game body.

Arvina laughed at Lacey's stunned expression. "This is your first fully Extreme Dimensional game, isn't it? Don't be embarrassed; it is for most people. It's just that the party has been in test cohorts since the first alpha so we've experienced that part for almost a year now. We still don't know much about the world story or even a lot of the game mechanics, but that part we've experienced loads, and as someone who also tried out Monster Garden and Thousand Suns, I can assure you that UltraCraft's implementation is by far the best and most natural. You'll forget you ever had another body."

Arvina set that topic aside as well. "But, have I set your mind at ease? About your character, I mean."

"Oh, yeah, definitely," Lacey said, more because that seemed to be the response Arvina wanted than because her mind was actually at ease.

"Did you want to ask anything else?" Arvina asked.

By that point Lacey had become painfully aware that her in-game body was so realistic that her in-game nipples had hardened in arousal at Arvina's presence, and Arvina would probably know that that meant if she noticed through Lacey's not-very-concealing top. "Nope, that was it!" she chirped.