Deep in the Dark Forest

Wow. Holy hell, just...wow.
After I panicked and slapped my computer off-actually so freaked that I committed the deadly tech sin of shutting it off via simply killing the power-I sat and stared at the black screen of my dead laptop in dazed confusion.
What the hell had just happened?
And why do I seem to have such wicked skill in apparently pissing the wrong people off?
The online RPG game I had just exited from in such unseemly haste was not your typical game. Let's just say I hoped there weren't any unsupervised fourteen year olds out there playing it.
To give you a little background information here, I'm a divorced non custodial mother in her thirties. (Please don't think I lost custody of my sons after the divorce, but I have two boys, and it just ended up that the only way for every one to get the best of a bad deal was for my sons to go with their father.) So I have them every other weekend.
It's hard sometimes to make those visits good ones. My apartment is small, and it's in the middle of the city. I don't have a car and there's really not a lot to do close enough to make an outing always worth the hassle. In winter it's too cold to hang around waiting for a bus, and in summer unless one of the grandmas has a Saturday free to come and take us all to the beach or a water park, my boys would rather just hang out as close to the A.C.as they can get.
So the first six months after the divorce, those every other weekends were pretty sad, pathetic affairs. We all just pretty much sat around together in the living room. I'd read a book, or pretend to watch who ever was playing on the PS2, and the two boys would switch back and forth between that and playing games on my laptop. We were "together" but the quality of that interacting really wasn't worth shit.
We'd go out to eat a few times-there were at least a good amount of restaurants within easy walking distance of the apartment-hit the grocery store that first afternoon to pick up the treats or necessities I'd forgotten to get, and not really do anything to write home about.
If their dad ever asked them what they did when they got back to their other home, that kid cliche answer of "nothing" was rarely far off the mark.
And then for my oldest son's birthday present the three of us walked up to their favorite gaming store and I bought him the reconditioned Game Cube he'd told me he wanted.
I told him he could get two games as part of the present. Let the "baby" pick one too. He's still young enough that the whole "but it's not YOUR birthday" thing hasn't sunk in yet. I'll give up ten bucks without blinking to head off hysterical sobbing, believe you me!
At Leon's age, one game was of course the typical blow them up, beat them up, YES you do have to stick to a teen rating fighting game. But he really surprised me with what was actually his first choice.
He picked this bucolic, rated E for every one game where the goal was to build up a farm-and apparently run around and pick flowers and forage for food and fish to sell in the town market. You got to buy chickens and sheep, and plant crops and do all the things that would be expected of a real life farmer.
I don't think either boy even played the other two games all of that first day.
And as always, I sat there in the living room with them. But this time I really WAS watching them play. And after I put the "baby" to bed, and Leon asked me if he could get on the computer for a while, I couldn't resist. I had to play that game for myself!
So I made him set up a file for me, and started buying chickens and planting peach trees.
Well I had no idea what the fuck I was doing and everything kept dying or wilting on me. I'd lose items or forget how the hell you milked the stupid cow-and damnit WHY won't that Satan spawned bitch LET me milk her!
I was yelping "Leon help me! I think I lost that sheep again!" Or "Oh crap, where's my farm, this stupid person keeps falling asleep on me I gotta get her back home! Leon!" Whine whine..."Help mom out here I think the chicken is dying!"
Well the poor kid finally game up on trying to play on the laptop. (It's not like he could tell mom to shut the hell up and leave him alone or send me off to bed.) He finally said "Mom, you've pretty much killed everything-and forget about the dog, it's not coming back. You have to feed the poor thing. Let's just make a joint file and we can take turns on days and I'll try and teach you how to play."
The next day the "baby" insisted that he and mommy have their own farm together, and from there...
I won't try and insist that this was serious, important quality time we were suddenly having together. But we WERE doing things together. We huddled next to each other and played, plotted and planned our farms. The little one would ask me how we could do something, or get something, or make friends with a character we needed as a friend, and I'd pull up the "cheat sheet" from the favorites list on the laptop and have him read out loud the section telling us what to do.
It gave us something to talk about during our nightly phone calls. The "Ummm, so what did you do today...how was your day?" questions stopped being the main thing Scott could think to ask mom to keep the conversation going.
I have a very good online friend whom I'll probably never meet, but we chat for hours. We know every thing about the other; secrets and dreams and things we'd never admit to any one we actually had to look in the eye. She knew all about this game, even went out and bought it for her son, and begain playing it almost as obsessively as I did.
And then one day when I got back from work and got online I had an offline IM from her.
"Katt, you have got to check this site out. You will NOT believe it! It's a total triple X version of that game our boys love."
It wasn't totally that game, of course, copy right infringement shit being the way it is, but...
Basically, picture a seriously pornographic version of the SIMS game, and there you go.
It was raw and raunchy, enough so that I never ever put it on my favorite's list, just memorized the Irl.
It was a RPG game that combined elements of a few different games. You started out with this bare bones property that you worked at improving. You "trained" in different ways to get stronger and better able to defend your property and your person. You could "study" to get smarter, and be able to out think players that you couldn't out fight.
You could play as an invisible character, which meant people wouldn't be attacking you left and right, but when you did that all your gains were at half speed. But it was a good way to start.
After my cute little green eyed Rapunzel got raped-and might I add very realistically and graphically-in the forest by this evil version of Robin Hood while she was gathering wild mushrooms I tended to stick to the invisible.
I wanted to be able to kick some ass before I ventured back out into the "real" world of this fake RPG world!
And I got good pretty fast, since I tend to get a little obsessive compulsive about things I'm into. It wasn't too many months before my character could get away from pretty much anyone who tried to molest her.
That's when I started to explore the world of Deep in the Dark Forests.
You couldn't do that playing as an invisible character.
You couldn't go into the two town bars, or attend any of the social gatherings that other players hosted if you were playing invisible mode. You could only go to market to buy items, or to Helga's farm to buy seeds or trees or fertilizer.
And after a while that did get a little boring. I got tired of spending all my playing hours planting tomatos or scything down fodder for my animals. When you trained for strength or speed-when you took a class over your farm "computer" or sat down to read a book, the game froze for a real world hour or three, until the training or education quest was finished.
So finally one night I decided to take my little mini me katt for a sidled look see into one of the bars.
Gods above and below, when my character slunk in, I think both our jaws hit the ground!
I knew this was a triple XXX, raw and raunchy porno no holds barred kind of game-I mean after all I had watched slack jawed the night my innocent little newbie chick got banged and buggered in the forest, but WHOA NELLY!
The bar I timidly "walked" into was basically a strip club-yeah maybe a little out of place for the over all feel of the game, but that's what it was.
You could see the entire lay out of the bar from the door, and in those maybe twenty seconds before I kinda went eeeeppppp and hit the damn kill power switch on my laptop I saw...a barmaid bent over the bar with what I assumed was the tavern owner behind her fucking away with great force and enthusiam, two scantily clad dancers on their knees giving blow jobs to beer guzzling customers, and a very enthusiastic lesbian sex show up on the rustic stage.
I think there was a donkey doing something to someone but the screen went black before I could focus...
I sat there for a few minutes gaping at my dead laptop screen and I think hyperventilating, and then laughed. Well what the hell. I was an adult and well over the age of consent and I had to admit it was a lot more entertaining then just reading porn on Literotica.
I had checked out the game because my friend told me it was a lewdly lusty laviciously depraved bit of adult RPG kink. Eventually I'd get over being shocked at seeing stuff you don't normally see on a "video game."
And of course I did.
Because yeah, it was depraved. Your character could get raped. You could rape someone yourself. But there were no sexual sadist serial killer characters. You couldn't murder someone, or even really hurt them that badly. I mean I watched scenes of sexual Domination where people-men and women-were slapped to their knees for insolence or disobediance. I saw spankings, and belts and whips being used on cunts, butts, cocks and tits. But have you ever played say Resident Evil? Now to me, THAT'S scary.
At the time, I didn't realize that, in keeping with the obvious insanity of the sites creaters, you could run into tanks that attempted to blow up your barns, animals and house. Not your character, just everything that character owned!
I have to say, I really wish I'd known that.
Maybe I wouldn't be chained to my own bed if I had...
I guess I better back track a little. Because I know you're got to be wondering how in the world a thirties something part time mother who doesn't do anything much beyond working or putzing around in the online world when it's not kid weekends could end up chained to her own bed.
I wish I could say it wasn't my fault. But I really can't. Because it was. Even if I honestly wasn't trying to be a bitch and was just struck silly by the hilarity of the entire situation. I didn't mean to piss him off and I wasn't making fun of him. I just picked the wrong night to have a solitary drink or two too much, and the wrong person's nutty calamity to get the giggle fit, witty comments about.
It was maybe two-three am on a Saturday morning that wasn't a boy's weekend and for once there wasn't any over time being offered at the small publishing company I worked for. So I was staying up and being "wild." (Which for me meant having a few vodka cokes while I played my favorite debauchedly demented online RPG game.)
This game doesn't have a huge amount of registered players-I'm not sure if that's surprising or to be expected-and at this particular time there were less then thirty people playing. I didn't have much that I could do at the moment. (All my animals were sleeping and I didn't have any crops to water or harvest.) I didn't have any nerve or energy to speak of, so I had turned on the chat option, and was just casually watching the scrolled lines slowly move by.
And then a line delivered in all caps caught my eye.
"I'M BEING ATTACKED BY A FUCKING TANK!" Some unknown player cyber roared.
Huh what? A tank???
"Are you serious? A tank?!?!?" I rapid typed the disbelieving question.
"SHIT! Two tanks now!" Came the reply.
I sat there blinking stupidly for a few seconds. One of the bucolic Rebecca of SunnyBrook kinda farms was being attacked by a fricking tank??? This guy had to be totally bull shitting!
I quickly back scrolled to find the online nick of the player suppossedly being attacked by a couple of tanks, then scrabbled to type in the search-view user ID's property requirements and WHOA SHIT! He wasn't kidding! He was being attacked by two tanks!
I stared wide eyed as his avitor's figure raced around frantically trying-and failing-to get his animals out of the barn and his dog out of it's dog house. I watched as his house exploded. Then his chicken coop. And one by one pretty much every single building on his property either imploded or exploded.
Then I did a really, really stupid thing.
It wasn't breaking into hysterical laughter safely behind my computer that was the stupid thing. He wouldn't have had any way of knowing I was laughing.
What was stupid was typing without even thinking-I really WAS guilty of drinking too much at this point.
"OMG! That was hilarious! Tanks...unreal!"
Yeah-probably not the most sympathetic or cool thing to say to the guy at that moment.
I really wasn't mocking what had happened. But damnit, it WAS hilarious. I just shoulda kept that thought to myself.
I read what I had just tossed out into the cyber world and winced. Oh man girl, that was rude. I was half way into typing out a sheepish apology when...
"You think that's funny bitch?" Popped up on the screen.
Oh shoot.
One of these days I will learn to think before I speak. Please God? And before someone kills me?
"NO! I mean not funny that you got attacked by tanks...well the whole tank thing was funny but..." AUGH! I went to hit erase and try to actually form a real apology-and hit enter instead.
Oh my gods above and below I whimpered. That was...prolly, really, really, really NOT GOOD!
I think I actually "heard" the feral snarl that had to have accompanied the blisting words that spat themselves out across the screen.
"You are so fucking gonna pay!"
"Hey wait, no, I'm really sorry I..."
He was gone. His avitor had left the ruins of his farm and was headed...oh boy...where?
I had about two seconds to worry about that. And then the double doors to my lil green eyed girl's nicely upgraded Southern style plantation house literally exploded inwards and the dark haired male avitor I had been watching less then a minute ago was charging in.
Oh awk!
My girl was standing stock still in the middle of her entry way, looking-I had to admit-a little moronically cow eyed vacant. I'd kinda abandoned her in mid task when I heard that furiously pissed guy was getting attacked by tanks to rush off and watch the carnage.
Shit shit shit shit shit! I scrambled frantically to type in the simple command run out the back door, but neither one of us had a chance.
He was on her in a second. (His avitor, that is.)
When he grabbed her by the shoulder I hit the defend command-and he just slapped her to the ground.
I've trained my girl up pretty high in this game. It's one of the things I like. Being female in this game doesn't mean you're automatically the weaker. How high your strength and speed has been trained determines who's stronger.
Unfortunatly in this case, his avitor was at such a higher lever that I realized with horror that I HAD really screwed up. I'd pissed off one of the ancients of the game because I couldn't do a bloody fucking thing but basically watch what his avitor did to my lil girl green.
I decided that maybe this was why more people didn't play Deep in the Dark Forests as I watched.
I'm definatly not an advocate for rape. I'm sure most of the people who play Grand Theft Auto kind of games don't advocate murder or running other drivers off the road.
I know rape is a horrible trauma.
But this was just pretend, you know? It wasn't real. The avitors were both realistic looking, but in that typical anime way of so many RPG games. They weren't real.
I'm a writer.
When I'm not working, when I don't have my kids, I'm usually writing. Not even my obsession for playing online gets ahead of that. I play online when I can't write. If I'm dealing with writer's block or if I need to step away from something I've been feverishly working on. I'd live 24/7 in let's pretend land if the real world allowed. I like it better then reality. It's safer. And nothing happens in my made up worlds unless I want it to.
Maybe that's why I was more turned on then anything else while I watched.
Domination excites me. Probally because I'm a pretty strong willed Irish hellion, and there aren't that many people who have a hope in hell of Dominating me. Maybe physically, but even there...we all have to sleep sometime.
Intellectually I tend to be a match for almost anyone.
And I'm very, very good at manipulating people.
But don't think too badly of me for that skill. It was learned out of necessity. Because when daddy got too deep into his sullen, brooding depressions, people got hurt. Usually my mom or my baby brother. But I was daddy's princess and I kept us all safe.
It's not a lesson or a talent that any six year old kid should be a professional at, but life is. Some of us are just born to take care of things.
So I'll be the first to admit that I'm probably a little fucked up. But I survived and I'm pretty much just fine with who I am. I'm a little twerked and twisted, but who isn't?
I didn't know, as I watched my little made up pretend character being taken, that the man controlling the character doing that taking, was already making plans that were spilling into the real world.
I don't think it would have mattered if I had.