Taylor took a breath and began the process of siphoning the excess energy from the female prospect’s body. She’d never used the skill before, it was one of hundreds in the Alpha Test skill menu after all, so she was unsure of how difficult it was supposed to be to use. To make things more complicated, because Taylor had yet to choose her starting skills and Affinity, the Tutorial skill she was using would be locked after a single use. Meaning, she only had one chance to get this right.
'Piece of cake," she thought, and, once she mentally confirmed the targeting prompt, the Energy Drain skill took over the rest.
Her hands began to hum as the glow from the draining energy started to flow from the unconscious woman’s body into her own.
‘Tingly,’ Taylor thought to herself, feeling the transferred energy already being naturally released from her body. With her eyes closed to focus on how it felt to use the skill, she took note of the way her body gathered the woman’s energy towards her hands before basically extending a tiny bit of her own energy out as a sort of bridge that helped pull the extra energy into her. It remined her of the way lightning formed, in a very abstract way.
It was a good start though. Taylor knew that if she could remember this process and eventually replicate it on her own, she wouldn’t need to use the skill menu to use Energy Drain in the future; once she unlocked it. At least, that’s how the developers in the lab described the Mastery Function of the Skill System.
‘Note to self: Ask the developers how the game is able to recognize intent when it comes to using skills outside of the menu.’ she added a quick tag to the notes she was keeping on the test.
Checking the amount of energy left in the prospect’s body, she noticed that the woman’s energy levels were almost back into the green.
‘That’s weird.’
She was by no means an expert, but the system generated Codex, which was provided to all the testers, described the Energy Overload status as being incredibly painful for those either unable, or unwilling, to release the excess. Granted, the process had gone a lot smoother than even she had expected, but, still, the woman hadn’t so much as winced the entire time she’d been siphoning the energy.
‘Maybe it’s a side effect of the skill?’ Taylor didn’t think much of it and simply noted it down in the “Skills and Status” section of her test notes.
Glad that the process hadn’t taken long to finish, Taylor inwardly began to think about how incredibly authentic everything around her felt. This wasn’t the first time she had thought about this, as the very first thing she remembered marveling over when the test first began was just how much of a gap there was between this technology and the immersive experiences she had played until now.
Ignoring the adaptive behavior of the people populating the world and the seamless nature of the randomly generated quests that were constantly being thrown her way, the world itself felt more alive than anything that she ever thought possible.
‘I can feel this woman’s heartbeat, her body heat due to the fever, even the sweat…it’s too real. It’s honestly creepy.’ Taylor began to realize that the level of immersion might be too much for some people to handle healthily, ‘I’ll have to bring this up with Mac later. Honestly, there are too many types of people that this kind of technology would not be good for.’
With the energy of the prospect finally reaching safe levels, Taylor felt relief at being able to move her hands away from the woman. Not wanting to set the woman’s family off again, she deactivated the Energy Drain skill and moved her hands away with as much professionalism as she could muster under the circumstances; or that’s what she tried to do.
Deactivating the skill, Taylor definitely felt her body stop gathering energy and then release the bridge of energy it had made to siphon away the unconscious woman’s excess.
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Unfortunately, that’s as far as things got.
Trying to pull her hands away from the woman’s body, Taylor felt something she could only describe as wrong; the energy bridge her body had released failed to disperse and was instead gripped by a much stronger force that reached out from within the unconscious woman and began to pull painfully at Taylor’s own energy.
No, not just her energy.
Horrified at the sensation, Taylor felt an all-encompassing pressure grab at her consciousness and pull. It felt as if her head had been thrown in a blender or that someone was trying to scoop her brain out with a spoon, if those feelings could even be put into words. She was immediately in excruciating agony. She felt trapped, unable to move or even think past the sudden pain that threatened to consume her.
‘WHAT THE —’
Taylor released a scream that felt like it contained every ounce of her being…
…And then the world went black.
----------------------------------------
Immediately the pain ceased.
Taylor no longer felt the soul-destroying agony that had assaulted her a moment ago, actually, she realized that she didn’t feel much of anything at all. Terror replaced the pain as her mind finally returned to a semblance of rationality. She trembled and refused to open her eyes, instinctively sure that, if she did so, the pain would return and, this time, it wouldn’t go away. Regardless of her wishes, light bloomed in the darkness and, even with her eyes closed, she could suddenly "see".
Though what exactly it was that she was "seeing", her shredded consciousness couldn’t interpret.
Despite the overwhelming fear keeping her from doing much of anything, her mind began working overtime in an attempt to gain back some semblance of control. The instant the light bloomed, the first thing she did was open her eyes.
It wasn’t even a conscious decision.
The fact that she could already see didn’t even register and, due to the lack of feeling, Taylor didn’t even know if she still had eyes or even a body, but the simple idea of doing something, regardless of her actually doing it, granted her mind the illusion of function. While the terror of the irrational pain was still fresh in her thoughts, keeping her paralyzed, she didn’t need to move right now; she just needed to be able to think.
The act of opening her eyes was a balm to her flagging sanity. Taylor’s mind used that moment of clarity to stabilize itself and soon she was able to form a semi-coherent thought.
‘Whatthehellwasthatthatshitwasass…’
Just as the agonizing pain had only lasted a moment, the entire process of Taylor returning to her senses lasted even less. She had no idea what was going on but, along with her growing sanity, she could now somehow understand that everything she was experiencing was disproportionate to reality. It just felt, off, like her thoughts and intentions were lagging behind her perception of them.
The sensation only intensified when she heard a familiar voice speak, low at first but ending in an angry shout.
“Everything is wrong. It isn’t right. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be!”
Taylor looked around for the source but could only “see” a white void all around her. She turned her head to take a look at her arms, and only took in more white void, her body nowhere in sight.
“Is this a cutscene?” she tried to think to herself, hearing her voice echoing out into the void around her instead.
“What?! Why can I hear my own thoughts?” she thought, realizing how absurd the question sounded when she heard it echoing back at her. “Ok. What the actual shit?”
Although she once again found herself in the position of passive observer, the torture she had just experienced flashed through her mind and she decided to calm down lest she trigger a repeat incident. She really didn’t want to go back to that nightmare.
Whatever that pain was, it clearly wasn’t something that was intended to happen. Taylor didn’t think for a second that the developers wanted to actually torture their players, not that that would even be legal in the first place.
Only a few seconds after hearing the strangely familiar voice echo out from the void, a novel idea came to her mind and it almost made her cry out in relief. Almost. If not for her own voice echoing back at her, making her angry instead.
“Log out, idiot.”
Embarrassed by herself, she tried to pull up the alpha menu to log out, knowing that, even without a body, the menu was only an intentional thought away.
“…What?”
A different kind of terror rose from the depths of her psyche, a terror that threw her newly stable mind into chaos and caused her to revert to an almost primal state of mind: the terror of being trapped.
The interface wasn’t responding to her commands. The space before her eyes remained empty despite her repeated summons.
Taylor’s mind nearly broke.
She couldn't feel anything, she couldn't see herself, she couldn't think private thoughts, and, now, she couldn't even escape.
“Nooo. No, no, no, nonononononono…”