The Forest

[Cavernio]

Cheesy title is purposeful. Starting of a story idea I came up with sometime this past year. I don't think it will end up being novel-length (if it gets finished), but I'm quite attached to the idea. Just wrote some of what I posted actually, my mood suited it. I feel that writing style is going to be very important for what I want to capture overall in this piece, and I feel that wording and style is one of my weakest areas as a writer. Comments, criticisms, etc all welcome. I posted it for a reason afterall :-p

edit: post doesn't like tabs, reformatting it a tad


The Forest

The wildness was tangible. There was no repetition. Every tree, every leaf, every blade of grass, every scrap of bark-unique. The sphere was indefinite, a barely noticeable fog obscuring the distant. The trees weren't dense, but sunlight didn't stream through breaks in the canopy above to sparkle off the droplets of water on the mossy rock in the brook or to make a rainbow in the mist of a non-existent waterfall. It wasn't designed using the stereotypical visual beauty like the most popular resort spheres. Here the canopy didn't exist and the sun was ill-defined, sometimes not even there, light instead existing everywhere and nowhere, no area brighter than another. Green pervaded every eyeful. Yet it wasn't dark. She did find it a little dim, but that just made it all the more appealing.

Everything, except herself, was damp. The mossy smell perfectly matched old memories of traipsing through the small wooded area in the park close to where she grew up as a kid after a rainstorm, playing make believe that she was an explorer discovering new land that only she had yet to experience. She was neither cozy or chilled or dry, but a perfect temperature of unnoticeable, seemingly the only standard design choice this sphere used. The wetness seemed like a sort of tribute to water, showing it off like a God, a simple compound that possesses the power to create life with its mere presence and so, by necessity, also has power to end it.

There were more unnatural things. Grass stood motionless in knee-high patches next to moss-blanketed rocks and trees whose trunks she could have hid behind. A patch of green but impossibly crisp leaves lifted and swirled around at eye level without drying anything near it. The forest possessed a muffled, dense, pitchless sound that felt very distant, and she couldn't tell if it was actually hearing it or if it were only mental...not that that distinction was clear.

Despite the lack of distance and sky, despite the sound, despite the air, this place breathed into her everything she longed for. The opposite of oppression; freedom, discovery, uniqueness, wildness, importance. Peace.
Longing.

It took her breath away, literally, and she found herself gasping after a deep inhale of breath flooded her hippocampus with the childhood memories. Suddenly the game she had plugged into this sphere for was trite. All she wanted to do was sit down and let the sacredness seep into her pores. Then maybe walk, and explore every crack of the pebbles in the brook, let her fingers slip into the cool flowing water. Caress moss covered rocks. See if the ferns had speckled spores hiding on their undersides.

She heard rustling and voices coming from her right and she made a quick decision to remove her body. It came with regret, her senses dulling. She took an aerial presence and saw three elves come into view. They were all lithe, long straight hair, narrow faces, pointed ears. A mage, wearing a long iridescent robe, gripping a gnarled staff with a luminous bulb, faint paint around his eyes; an archer, a quiver of arrows slung over her shoulder, sensibly wearing long soft pants and loose tunic, but adorned with gold armbands. And a warrior, neck to toe in leather mail with a long sword strapped to his back. He wore no helmet, for that would hide his elven beauty, instead wearing a medallion on his forehead, the silver glinting despite the lack of light. She was supposed to be their fourth, a thief in a shifting robe, with enough daggers and knives strapped around her body to break twenty on foes' ribs in fray and still have one left on her so she could spin around and throw it at one last attacker who had only seemingly been felled.

They didn't fit in here. They looked animated. Perfect ideals. So fake. They seemed so pretentious. She only felt the faintest hint of self-deprecation at this, not because she felt that she was better than them when she gamed, or that she had somehow outgrown such a thing in a breath's time, but because she lived in the moment and viewed her current state as being unembellished by this past. She was merely separate from them right now.

'I don't think she's going to show up. We should continue without her,' the first sentence she heard spoken. It was the mage.

'It's still not like Ariadne,' the archer said.

They had stopped their walking twenty feet from her position while the warrior filled a skin with the brook's water. It looked tantalizingly pure.

The archer's tone changed. “I'm worried. She hasn't been herself lately, she definitely hasn't been as active either. And she almost died on our last quest.” He didn't mention the long talk she and Ariadne had after their last session, out of character.

The warrior drank deeply from the skin and then in full character proclaimed a decision. “Tis unfortunate, but we haven't time to wait or search for her longer in these ensorcelled woods. If the wind blows our paths together, we shall welcome her with open arms. Come, I feel eyes on our backs here, it is not safe.”

Did the warrior feel her presence above them as she watched, or was it simply a coincidental turn of phrase? She didn't care that he might know she was actually here, but she wondered how far plugged in he really was. He walked away a different person than the facade he had walked towards her, her perception that he might be more deeply ensconced than she in this world made him attractive, and made her wonder more about who he really was.

The thought of being connected even deeper to the innerspace lingered as she once more began to drink in the atmosphere. With regret she kept herself formless; the adventure was well underway now, and if she were to take a human, or elven, form she might trigger story events and would get herself involved. Right now the last thing she wanted was to role-play vapid fantasy that relied on social context and social roles.

She took her time now, slowly trying to separate all the senses that had been thrust upon her violently when she first arrived. The tree beside her dripped. A beetle crawled off the trunk to the ground with the faintest thunk. The brook had always been making noise, but she hadn't noticed above the roar of the trees. Soft trickling. Oh, how she longed to give herself a body so she could have tactile sensation as well.

'Become a leaf'. Gentleness came with the words sent directly into her mind. So intimate. She had never experienced this sort of direct communication before. Stunning. Coming to her senses from the contact, she wasn't quite sure what to make of it. She was muddled and scared and confused now. Was the request metaphoric, or did someone who seemed to live in this sphere really want her to assume the form of a leaf? The rational part of her head warned her that she should leave now. Direct contact was known to have dangers, but unauthorized, unexpected, tantalizing direct contact was fodder for sensationalist news that realists used to epitomise how evil the innersphere was.

She lingered. This place, more than any other she had ever experienced, touched her. The contact hadn't been sexual or painful. It was the very definition of gentle. Against her own caution she waited to see what would happen. Her periphery caught the beetle crawling over moss a good five feet away. How did it move so quickly? Had she ever seen a sphere beetle before? Had any other sphere felt so real? Could any other sphere bring her back to one of her favorite childhood experiences?

Minutes of worried enjoyment passed. Nothing happened, no more voices, directly contacting her or otherwise. Her caution waning, her desire heightening, she began to assume a leaf form. Tried to anyways. She could hardly make herself small enough, much less change her body into something two dimensional and flat.

It irked her to no end how clumsy she was at manipulating spheres. By all accounts she possessed all the necessary requirements and skills to do not just a decent job, but a spectacular one. She had a vivid imagination, or so she thought, that she could direct effortlessly and creatively, so long as she wasn't trying to share her thoughts. In any other situation where she needed to focus, when she wanted to, she could buckle down and not let anything distract. Most importantly, she had spent thousands of hours in the innersphere, and was very familiar with most aspects of them. She mainly only took part in other people's spheres, but that was because she eventually gave up on trying to create her own. Countless attempts with washed out, unrealistic, unstable (and therefore dangerous) spheres were interspersed with using boring premades with little personal detail that she quickly tired of.

Frustration set in quickly as the body she tried to project and become wouldn't hold. She could become flat but not small, small but still heavy, curled and light but larger than her own form. It was useless. Feeling a swell of emotion that would mean tears in reality, she firmly took on her own body wearing her favorite, well worn shirt and soft pajama pants. She breathed in the cool moist air and then picked her way to the brook. She stepped in with her whole foot, dislodging pebbles and digging in until her foot was covered in loam. The sensation was overwhelming. Better than real. In reality, one always ignored what one felt, even when you didn't really want to. But this sphere thrust itself upon her in such a way that she couldn't ignore it. Almost like someone was getting into her mind and taking control of her senses.

The thought brought a jolt of fear that was heightened as she felt a thousand grains of sand fall away from the foot she quickly removed from the brook. The warrior's words sprung to mind as she pulled herself out of the sphere. These woods really were ensorcelled.
* * *

She was almost surprised to wake up to her unmade bed. She had been ready for a struggle from the person or people, the presence trying to keep her there or trying to take full control of her mind. But there had been nothing, the only thing odd about her leaving was her own fear. Few things scared her, real or imagined. She couldn't even remember the last time she had truly been scared. The horrendous sensation ebbing, (did anyone purposefully go into spheres designed to scare of their own volition, without someone tricking them?), she turned off the wiring. Another first, this time from actually enjoying her senses thudding to normalcy, the buzz going away. She quickly detached the dozen or so wires stuck to her head, slid over to her computer a foot away, and started to search for what people said about The Forest sphere.

Immediately she knew her search was fruitless. Everyone and their dog had created a forest sphere called The Forest. The vast majority of them seemed to have used the same premade forest, one she recognized herself as having tried out. It must still be free.

She needed that forest's SP address. She chewed her lip, ludicrous thoughts jumping in her head. What if they had tracked her as she left? What if, next time she entered even the sphere menus, they would know she was there and could take control of her body there? It didn't seem possible, but neither was the sensation of individual grains of sand on her foot, unconsciously rubbing it as she stared at nothing a little to the left and down. She had always purposefully avoided or scoffed any warning or discussion about the dangers of the innersphere. She didn't want to know about how dangerous her life was. You didn't decide to take crack after carefully considering the long and short-term effects. You took it because you wanted a high.

Her fear still lingering, she delved into previously glossed over and avoided articles and forums. She found herself reading many thoughts of realists who vowed to never succumb to such a fraudulent, fake life, people who proudly showed pictures of full heads of hair or perfectly smooth baldness as their avatars, next to her personalized ads for wigs. There was a lot of sensationalism and people saying that it can happen easily, and of course there was the infamous serial killer who was finally caught a couple years ago, news she had avoided before.

In fact, hits about it were everywhere. One could not read about the most basic description of the innersphere without him being brought up. However, her fear had dissipated, and her standard mindset was now in control. She hesitated to finally read about his victims and how he had done it, her cursor hovering over a link that offered opinions and research from some leading spherologist.
A lot of what was attractive about the innersphere was the mystery. She didn't want to know the nuts and bolts of world-creation and mind-sharing. She was worried she'd lose the sense of wonder that came along with understanding. Like a baby to whom the entire world is new and mesmerizing, but as adulthood approaches, everything not horrendously complex becomes dull as every aspect of life becomes understood. Like when her parents thrust her into music lessons because she loved music so much, but as she mastered the guitar and could label every chord and progression and write every rhythm she heard, her once favorite songs and then favorite genres became boring, tedious, unimaginative, even grating. Nearly the only time she enjoyed music now was when she was so high that she couldn't follow it properly.

She abandoned the screen and laid down, unwashed clothes her pillow, mulling over her dilemma. There was no rush. There would also be no dilemma if she simply didn't go back into that forest. But she wanted to. Badly. And she knew herself well enough to know that current lingering doubts wouldn't exist next week, maybe not even tomorrow. The only way she was NOT going back there was if she fully saw and understood how dangerous it might be. But to find out anything with certainty required learning. If The Forest was completely safe and she found out for certain, she risked ruining those sensations it offered regardless. And likely those of any other sphere along with it.

She stared at her yellowed ceiling, then at the large crack in the plaster next to where she slept, then across at her 'kitchen' table a couple feet away, dirty dishes haphazardly stacked in a tiny sink. A bold cockroach sat a top them, moving its antennae. The only thing nice about her home was a picture she had lovingly framed and put above her computer and sphere connectors drawn by a friend nearly a decade ago now. It was a simple nature scene, a sunset, a palm tree, rippling ocean. Not her idea of paradise, but it was his.

Dying didn't frighten her. At many points in her life she had welcomed death. Dying while being tortured for a stranger's perverse pleasure did. Losing what made her happy did too. Sleepiness overtook her suddenly, and she rolled over and curled up. Tiredness, she had brought herself to read, was normal for everyone after a visit to the innersphere, although it usually didn't hit her quite so suddenly. Before drifting into sleep, she knew she wouldn't read whatever that doctor had to say about taking control of someone else.

Her dreams were beautiful and filled with forests and beaches and her old friend and the elven warrior and curious-acting insects. Her dreams had once been as dull as her life, no matter what event happened in them, good or bad. But since becoming a spherehead, they had slowly become alive again. It was hard to say what she liked more, the best spheres or her best dreams, being so different from each other. Both brought her once depraved life full of wonder.

[Cavernio]

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[Syhto]

this is one of the best works of comedy i have ever had the pleasure of reading