Work Text:
I was seated at my desk, playing the new content update for one of my favorite games, when I found a section distinctly different from the game's usual rapid-fire combat fare.
A few creepy lore texts and a maze-like layout heralded the switch to an almost survival-horror-like format, where I was forced to evade a 'monster in the walls' which attacked through paintings and murals and dialogue messages instead of regular fireballs or bullets, seeking to corrupt rather than kill my avatar.
The game seemed to be decaying into a glitchy mess, but I could tell it was probably deliberate stylization rather than an actual bug. Right?
It wasn't exactly what I'd signed up for, but nor was the change unwelcome. I'd enjoyed that survival horror game with the tragic lesbian robot woman a year or two back, and the chance to dust off that general skillset was appreciated; this segment was a fun step up in challenge, too.
I was managing all right, conserving my resources and hacking security cameras so as to avoid seeing through my avatar's own eyes, until I found myself in a new area, a dark castle rendered in a simplistic visual style with white edge-detection lines. There were no convenient surveillance cams here, I was forced back into the vulnerability of the first person view.
Each time the monster tricked me, it laughed, smug and distinctly feminine in tone. Finally my HP was depleted, though the HUD indicator was full of white noise rather than empty, and I didn't get the typical game over screen.
Instead, I was immobilized in place as the monster took physical form at last, apparently just to gloat. She looked like a young human woman, dark brown hair cut short, wearing a tank top, skirt, and tights. She was alluring, I had to admit, but her empty, hungry eyes made me feel a weird disquiet somewhere in my gut.
"Hehehehe... you're mine now, my perfect and hollow thing. You thought you could evade me, but nooooooobody escapes me in the end," she teased.
I tried keys, tried clicking the mouse, and the latter actually caused the gun I was holding to fire despite me being otherwise frozen. It was in vain though; she just dissolved into a phantasm of corrupted data that my shotgun pellets flew right through, before reforming perfectly unharmed.
She did... something, said something, but I can't for the life of me remember what exactly. Then the game crashed to desktop. But I could still hear that distinctive laughter...
"Probably just got a virus from some sketchy site," Leo said as he tabbed through my laptop. After the crash with the weird laughing girl, I had continued noticing slowdowns and odd little bugs in other programs, so I'd gone to a techie friend's shop to ask him to look at it. Rather unhelpfully, he continued, "I know you pirate a lot of anime, dude. Gotta get your waifu time in."
"I- I don't," I sputtered, uncertain what to make of that last comment. "I don't think it's okay to objectify women like... that... even if they're fictional!" Sure I liked watching a lot of shows with cute girls, but I usually thought about them kissing each other, not me.
"I do," a voice from the next room chimed in suddenly, "though I suppose the gender dynamics are a little different when it's me doing it, hehe."
The speaker walked in through the threshold between the little geek shop's front and back rooms, revealing herself to be a woman in a gray tank top and a utility-skirt of many pockets. "Hiya, I'm this dork's new coworker," she explained, gesturing to Leo. "Call me Wendy. Heard a lot about you already."
"You, you have?" I asked.
She swished her short brown hair out of her eyes, answering, "Well I presume you're the gamer friend Leo has told me so much about."
My attention was largely fixated on the fact that she had about two inches of height on me, so I was surprised when she noted, "It's rude to stare, you know," in a clearly teasing tone of voice.
Leo realized I was a bit out of it at this point, or maybe he was just genuinely curious, so he spoke up again to ask, "Thought you only liked girls?" This only added to my confusion (was she flirting with me? that couldn't be right), but before I could interject she was answering.
"Yes, that's correct," Wendy said. She winked at me, as if I was in on some joke or something, but I had no idea what she could've meant. She walked back to the other room, muttering to herself about needing to find an adapter of some sort, and I was just realizing where I knew her face, her haircut, her deep, dark eyes from...
...when I awakened as if from a dream. My memory of whatever had just happened slipped away from my grasp, and all I knew was that I was in bed and my morning alarm was going off.
Thinking about it a bit more, I recalled going to Leo's yesterday and getting my laptop fixed without issue or any particular event of note. My memory felt a bit hazy, but I knew I'd had dinner and worked on some of my college coursework after coming back, and vague ambiguous memories weren't entirely unusual for me so it was little cause for worry.
I went about my morning: getting breakfast ready, chatting a little with my dorm roommate, and watching a casual video while I ate.
Once my routine was done, I had plans to get to. Fortunately I didn't have any classes until the afternoon today, but I did have a partner project for one that my teammate and I had agreed to meet up for today. So I headed down the stairs and over to the campus library, where we had reserved a little conference room for our work session.
Wendy was already there when I arrived, ever the punctual one. She'd been my friend ever since our first semester, but this was the first opportunity we'd had to take a class together since the one we'd initially met in. It was surprisingly good luck that we'd been assigned as project partners too.
We got down to business pretty quickly after exchanging pleasantries, tinkering with solutions and design choices for our project. At one point about half an hour in, though, she did something odd.
She leaned over the table, closer to me than as strictly comfortable, making an intense, almost glaring eye contact. Then she spoke softly, "You can be a girl if you want, you know."
I was processing this when she leaned back and continued working as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. I wasn't sure what to make of it - of course I wanted to be a girl, didn't everybody? But it had to be more complicated than that, it's not like I was trans or anything.
I helped Wendy hang up the pink, blue, and white flag on the wall of our new apartment, one of the sys we'd found to make the bare space at least a bit more our own. She was taller, so I let her handle the high reach while I handed her the thumbtacks. We were an effective team just like always.
"Thanks babe," she said once we were done with the simple task. I smiled, leaning in for a quick kiss.
Oh it was excellent to be two trans ladies in love!
I had my fair share of regrets, dropping out of college after one semester and not pursuing transition sooner being chief among them, but in the end I wouldn't change a thing about my past because it all led to me meeting this wonderful woman.
We leaned into each other. She purred, almost nuzzling me.
"I had a dream last night," I whispered, "and I can't get it out of my head."
Wendy grabbed my hand and gave it a gentle, grounding squeeze. "Tell me?" she asked.
"I was... I think I was a guy, still, and I was sad and lonely. Pouring hours into a video game not because I particularly enjoyed it so much as because I had nothing else I cared about. Only it got creepy and glitchy, and you were there."
"Ohh? Sounds sad, yeah," she said. Soft and caring as ever.
"You were in the game, you were some sort of glitched-out NPC. I didn't recognize you then, so I tried to blast you, but it just went right through like you didn't have collision physics."
"Awww."
"Then you... came out of the screen into physical space, and kissed me, and pushed your tongue into my mouth. And all I felt of you was just pins and needles, like TV static. It was... haunting. And the game crashed suddenly, but I could still hear your laugh." I could tell she could hear my discomfort in my tone of voice.
"Ohh. Hey, it's all right, it was just a dream. I'm here, and I'm real, and I'll hold you close as long as you need."
"But, what if..." I trailed off, unsure what I was concerned about.
"I'm sure it didn't mean anything," she reassured. "Now, would you like to feel my tongue in your mouth, to prove it's more than pins and needles?"