Post by Gam3r4LIEf 1:45 AM April 2nd, 20XX

You have to try the PPVS! It’s amazing! Like a real life fantasy adventure but gamified enough to fall in love with! And the best part? It’s free to play and accessible to literally everyone!

Post by D4rthV4d3R 4:52 AM April 2nd, 20XX

Wait?! You’re in some kind of fantasy world? I’m in a scifi world with small purple aliens! WTF?

Grace’s POV:

Fury made everything turn red for a second as I stared at the too small number plastered on my bank’s website. A whole 250 less than it should have been?! I slammed my laptop closed.

My Uncle Greg sat in our one bedroom apartment’s living room/his bedroom, staring at the news.

“Greg!”

He turned. “What?”

I put my hands on my hips and tapped my foot. “You stole from me. Again!”

“What? It’s in our shared account.”

Because I really wanted to bash his head in, I forced myself to breathe in and out. I didn’t have a separate account, which he knew.

“My 18th birthday is tomorrow.”

“So?”

“I’m going to cancel that one and get myself my own damn personal account!”

“Grace, sweety. There is no need to do that. I just needed a little bit of money. Look, this Mark of mine is ready to bite. I’ll pay you back when she does.”

I stomped my foot, utterly disgusted. “Get a real job!”

“What? You want your poor old uncle, who can barely walk, to work at McDonald's or Walmart?”

A vein popped on my forehead. “Don’t give me that shit. When you’re not watching TV, you’re at the gym working out like some kind of dude-bro.”

He shrugged and adjusted his tie with a grin. “Your uncle’s got to look good for the ladies.”

“So you can steal their money!”

“It’s not stealing when it’s a gift!” He grinned and waggled his eyebrows at me.

I rolled my eyes, and they landed on the news. It showed the traffic in San Francisco. There was a flash. Giant skyscrapers tore apart. Windows broke raining shards of glass through the streets. The camera went dead. After a second of silence, they switched to another camera and showed a massive fiery cloud of destruction. I couldn’t breathe. Fear and horror froze my limbs in place. From the center of the San Francisco cityscape, a mushroom cloud grew. This couldn’t be happening right? That had to be some movie or TV show right?

But Greg only watched the news because it helped him come up with cons.

“What?” Greg turned and gasped.

When they switched to a camera farther back to get a better view, something truly bizarre happened. The cloud started to turn solid. It compressed into itself and turned into an actual giant mushroom, the shitake kind with gills and all.

I frowned. “Today’s April 1st. You think this is some kind of weird joke?”

The view switched to a news anchor, her face had gone ghost white, her hands shook, and her wide eyes bore into the camera.

Greg stared at the headline. ”No. It’s the North Koreans. They finally did it.”

A disembodied voice spoke in my ear, and I jumped. So did the news anchor and Greg.

“Welcome to the Passivity Precept,” the joyful, sexless voice said. “Your world is now our client. Under our bylaws all violence and acts that we consider violence will be eliminated. All those responsible for violence will be taken for re-education and returned at a later date. The amount of time will be dependant on the severity of the intended crime and how long it takes to properly re-educate the perpetrator. For the people of the United States. Do not mourn.”

The mushroom turned back into a cloud and reversed itself. The buildings that we thought were destroyed erected themselves. The windows repaired as if watching a movie in reverse.

“We have restored the infrastructure and returned your people to their original locations. We have also taken care of all radioactivity. All is well.”

I stared at Greg, awe clear on my face.

Greg’s pale features turned red.

“We understand that violence and war is part of your world, so we have developed a way for you to experience it without harm to yourself and others. To make it easy for you to understand, the violence simulator is close to one of your world’s massively multiplayer online role-playing games.”

A translucent green box with rounded corners appeared in front of me. Startled I stepped back. The menu followed, so I read it.

Welcome to the Passivity Precept’s Client Menu, and Violence Simulator(PPVS). If you have any questions just ask. To access the menu, use your index and middle finger to swipe in the air from left to right.

Greg’s hand flew through my box, and it broke up.

“What did you do that for?”

“Ignore it.”

“What? It said it was just an MMO.”

“I know you like MMOs, but I don’t trust these guys.”

“What? Because it seems like they just want our world to be peaceful?”

He didn’t say anything, and I snorted. “Yeah. That’s what I thought. The conman doesn’t believe in altruism.”

“Damn straight.”

He looked at his expensive watch, a gift from a mark two years ago. It helped make his new victims think he was rich. “I gotta go. I’m meeting Ms. Linda for lunch.”

“Wait. Isn’t she the opiate drug lord you were telling me about?”

He grinned. “The cops can’t prove it.”

“Tell me she isn’t your mark.”

“It’s not like she can go to the fuzz.”

“You’re going to get yourself killed.”

He looked back at the replay of the mushroom disappearing on the news. “I doubt it. See you tomorrow. And if I don’t see you, happy birthday.”

He hugged me briefly and walked out the door while humming, “Closing Time.”

My uncle knew I liked MMOs, but he didn’t know that playing them and selling gold and rare items online was how I made most of my money. That was because I kept near everything on the website where I traded. Of course, that meant I couldn’t access most of it until I had my own bank account because Greg would just take everything and give me a shitty excuse as usual. But if this PPVS was an MMO that everyone had access to, I needed to get in on it and find the best items so I could sell them for cash.

I looked at my sparse room with its second-hand futon and closet with only a week’s worth of clothes hanging in it. Of course, I also needed to pack since I planned to leave this hellhole tomorrow and not tell Greg. Freedom was my birthday present to myself.

Sighing, I packed my suitcase with clothes, various chargers, and my all-important laptop then hid the whole thing in my closet. I’d buy myself new furniture as soon as I rented the studio I’d found across town so this was all I needed. Greg could sell or do whatever he wanted with the rest.

I sat on my lumpy bed. The metal bars under the mattress dug into my butt. I accessed the PPVS menu, and the green screen appeared in front of me with the options, Create Your Character, Spar, Request Help, and Report a Situation. The option to Return to Game was grayed out.

“How am I supposed to find out what the best character classes are with a menu like this?”

A helpful voice said, “For more information, please enter character creation.”

Confused I touched the option. For a second I felt like I was falling until I landed in a tote’s cliche white room.

A naked elven man sitting in the lotus position appeared before me.

“Hello?” I said as my cheeks burned.

He said nothing.

I walked closer. Still nothing. I got on my hands and knees and studied his ageless face. When his eyes finally opened to cool blue irises, I jumped back and scooted away.

“Grace Winston?”

“Y-yes?”

“Welcome to the PPVS.”

“Thank you?”

“I am your administrator.”

I swallowed. Couldn’t he at least wear some damn pants?

“What do you want?” He said.

Right, don’t get distracted by dangly bits. “Um... the character creation menu?”

“Unlike the games, you’re used to, the PPVS starts, not with looks, class or stats. It starts with what you want because your character will be unique and untradeable. It will be a second life for you and allow you to get your silly lizard brain aggressions out. So, I ask again, what do you want?”

“From the game? To play a character that can make a lot of money.”

He frowned. “That is what you need to survive in your world. But what do you want?”

I smirked. “I’d like to kill the bastards responsible for the Nuclear Blast.”

A sea of people appeared behind him.

“Very well. Kill them.”

Aside from the face of the two political leaders, there were a bunch of ordinary looking people in the group. “Wait. I thought it would just be a bunch of politicians.”

“And the news anchors who egged them on. The people who were too scared and escalated it. The podcasters and YouTube hosts who profited from that fear and compounded it. The scientists who designed it. The miners who fished the uranium from the ground. Go ahead kill them all, multiple times if you wish. You won’t be the first today who has.”

I froze.

“But killing them isn’t what you want. You don’t even know anyone who would have died from the blast if we hadn’t fixed everything. Well, not anyone who wasn’t a victim of your uncle. What you want is something more personal.”

The people disappeared, and I was honestly relieved.

“I want to be free of my Uncle.”

“You’ll get that tomorrow anyway. That is not what you want.”

I clenched my fist and found the answer deep inside of me. It was crazy, and there was no way they’d have an answer for me but being facetious I said, “I want to know everything about the fire that took my father from me. But mostly who started it and why.”

He chuckled. The laugh surrounded me, and I had a sinking feeling in my gut.

“There. That wasn’t so hard, was it? In that case, I give you two choices. One. Enter the game as a character you create, go through the simulation, be happy and possibly never find out. Or two, enter as a character I create for you and start on the path to discovering the information you desire. But I warn you, the second choice is far more pain filled and heartbreaking than the first.”

I stepped forward. “You know what happened to my father?!”

“Of course we do. We know everything.”

“Then instead of making me play through your game, just tell me!”

He stood, and I looked up and to the left so I wouldn’t get an eye full. When he was close enough, I peered into his blank face.

“Would you be okay with us telling people that your first and only sexual experience was with a pretty faced young man who befriended you, seduced you, got what he wanted and didn’t speak to you again?”

My face burned as the shitty memory invaded my mind. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

“That’s what I thought.” He stared into my eyes. “We know everything, Ms. Winston. But we never share the information we know, unlike your internet which claims to be private and is anything but.”

I clenched my hands into fists and thought hard about punching this administrator in the face.

“That said, we also understand the need for closure, so, if the information exists in the game, we point those interested people in a general direction.” He sighed and sat back down. “In this instance, we have no directive to not inform you, but we also cannot assume to know the will of those with the knowledge, so we are left with this option of putting you on a path where you may find the information you’re looking for. Are you satisfied?”

“No.”

He scowled up at me. “Are you ready to choose?”

“Apparently, I don’t have much of a choice.”

“There is always—“

“Yeah. I’ve heard that.”