Exhausted, Rebecca stretched and snuggled up tightly to Matthew’s chest as he slept soundly in the huge bed in the room she’d awoken in earlier. Tired almost beyond belief, she was still too sore and too shocked to try and go to sleep with the chaos that was her own thoughts rattling around inside her head. Resting her head on Matthew’s shoulder, she slowly chewed her lower lip as she stared up at his sleeping face.

Much like with everything else, she was having a hard time sorting out her feelings and thoughts about the guy. Was he a hero? A savior? Or was he some self-serving jerk who was simply using her for his own reasons? There were times when it seemed like he was kind and gentle, when he tried to comfort her or pet her head, and yet there were times when it seemed like he didn’t care one bit about her thoughts or feelings.

Part of it, just a small part, she thought she could understand. One of the reasons why she couldn’t sleep right now, even as exhausted as she was, was due to the ever throbbing ache in her chest. Glancing at the side of her vision, she could tell from the health bar, that she was twenty-seven percent injured – and all basically from his incessant pinching, pulling, twisting, and biting on her nipples! They were so tender and sore now, that anything they touched almost brought tears to her eyes.

And yet, as much as she didn’t want to admit it, her rational mind could finally understand the reason why. In this new game, which was life, all people and creatures had one hundred life. Leveling up didn’t give more. Buffs couldn’t give more. Nothing gave more life. That red health bar tended to work like a percentile gauge, with each tic on it being one percent of a person’s life force.

IF there were some hidden numeric values to a person’s actual life – like her having thirty hit points at level one – then there was no way to know it. If she leveled up and gained another thirty hit points, her gauge would still read one hundred percent healthy when she was in full health and zero percent health when she was passed out or dead. The bar might drop slower, but it still only displayed one hundred health as the limit – and this was why Matthew felt it was vitally important to raise resistances as much as possible.

Since there was only a maximum of one hundred points of life, players of the game could only take damage in percent of life! If something didn’t damage you enough to do a single point of damage, you didn’t take any – and that was a huge advantage! Like, in Matthew’s case, he’d already worked his physical resistance up to three – which seems like it’d be such a small number it’d be worthless – but that allowed him to resist three times the damage he normally would take. So a normal person could walk through the forest and run into a briar patch and would suffer a point of damage every few steps, but Matthew would only take a fraction of that damage, and since the total was less than a single percent of his life, he’d never get hurt!

Matthew could prance around naked in the middle of a briar patch, dance through from one side to the other, and never lose a single point of life! And, when you applied that effect to every source of damage, it definitely had a monumental impact on survivability. A normal person gets shot, they could lose fifty health. A gamer gets shot, they seemed to have a natural durability, and would probably lose half that amount. If Matthew were to get shot, he’d only take about a third of that, rounded down, which means he’d only lose a total of about eight percent of his life!

Rebecca could finally understand now why building up resistances were so important in this new world – but that didn’t mean she had to like it! The incessant little throb in her chest was still enough to bring tears to her eyes – at twenty-seven percent damage, she was one-fourth of the way to being unconscious or dead – and she wasn’t certain that Matthew had needed to go that far! Was he really just trying to help her build resistances and survive, or did he enjoy listening to her yelp and cry?

Sadism, or altruism? She honestly didn’t know him enough at the moment to say for certain which it was.

Her thoughts concerning him were all just a single jumbled mass of confusion and uncertainty. Even the time they’d spent in the bed together after the bath – the long time together – was something she was conflicted over.

After several hours of talking and pinching down at the pool, where she learned a lot about the basics of the game she was now living, they’d came back up to the room. A few more minutes of talking while sitting on the bed together, and then she got ravished. He’d treated her like she was nothing more than an object for all his teenage sexual fantasies – and the worst part was she let him!

She’d agreed to give in and share his bed when she’d taken the book – though, at the time, she really didn’t believe that what he was telling her was real. Now, she was too nervous to try and say no to whatever he wanted. He was insistent that the book go to someone who would indulge him in such matters, and she’d agreed to it. What would happen now if she said something like, “Not like that! I don’t like it like that!”? Would he accept it? Ignore it? Get mad and leave, trapping her in this icy prison until she changed her mind?

She didn’t know, and she was too nervous to find out, so she’d simply gave in and let him have his way with her – and he’d had his way with her a lot! Apparently gamers move past the normal limits of NPCs the moment they join the game, but over time they can improve on just about anything. If she had twice the stamina of a normal person now that she’d joined the game, Matthew had trained himself to half ten times more than her! Their ‘nightly activity’ had lasted hours, and the green bar indicating her stamina had fallen and completely gave out by the time he’d finally satisfied himself and went to sleep.

And that’s where she found herself now, Rebecca mused – exhausted, sore, covered in sweet and full of his seed, with her thoughts running around in circles. She was too tired to sort out her thoughts, and too sore to go to sleep, and so she just laid there, snuggled up to his chest and tried to put the pieces of her mind back together.

So many things to think about now. To worry over. She hadn’t found her pocketbook, so she didn’t have her birth control. What was she going to do if she got pregnant? Matthew hadn’t had a condom – not that she imagined one would last through all she’d went through last night – and she definitely had enough of his seed inside her to get with child. What could she do if she was? What about her friends? Her family? Were they okay? What had happened to everyone at the school? At home? What was going to happen to her now? To the world?

Asking ‘what’ tended to fill her mind with too much doubt. Too much anxiety. Instead, Rebecca decided to change gears and go over some of the things that she did know now, rather than the ones she didn’t know. Matthew had been right – the ‘help’ really hadn’t been all that helpful at all, but she had managed to learn a few things specific to her class which could be useful.

For starters, she learned that appearance was something which was vitally important for a dancer. Her spells received bonuses or penalties, depending on how she looked. A woman waking up in the middle of the night, with her hair up in curlers, toilet paper stuck between her toes while the nail polish dried, wearing a moo moo with her face all covered in cleanser wasn’t going to have half the effect on a guy by dancing that a Las Vegas showgirl might have.

She’d never been that vain before, often going days (and sometimes even a few weeks in the winter) between shaving her legs. She’d never had a ‘bikini trim’, nor had she ever bothered to go to the tanning booth like some of the other girls. Make up, mascara, and lipstick wasn’t something she’d bothered to use very often. Rebecca smiled faintly to herself remembering; she’d enjoying being a sweatpants and flannel shirt type girl, who enjoyed huddling up on the couch with a tub of ice cream while watching television.

That was going to have to change now, Rebecca mused. A lot of things were going to have to change for her. She’d need to get her ears pierced soon – she’d managed to also discover that dancers got a bonus from all jewelry that they wore, from the game help, since they had such a limited choice of clothing and armors to choose from. She wasn’t certain exactly how that worked – was it a bonus that worked with all jewelry? If she put on a thousand necklaces and danced, would her magic get stronger? Or did it work on enhancing effects already on jewelry, like the bracers which she’d been wearing earlier that Matthew had given her that protected someone? Would they protect her more like metal armor than leather, with the bonus?

That, like oh so many other things, she didn’t know the answer to. The more she tried to sort things out, the more questions she found that she had, and the more restless and uncertain she became. It was deep into the early morning of the next day, before she finally found the throbbing in her breasts easing up, and fitful exhaustion finally managed to overcome her troubled mind and wash over her, as she slept a deep, dreamless slumber.