Notes from Emmy:
Hi all, I'm really sorry I'm late. As I said in the comments of a previous chapter, we were hit pretty hard this  week by that merciless bitch called life. Our oldest cat, 18, has been showing signs of having an infection as of late. My partner is totally blind and I myself have limited vision, so a vet call was in order to determine the severity of his condition. Unfortunately, that cost us a pretty hefty piece of coin, not to mention the emotional aftermath of the final verdict from the docs.
It turns out that our little Ozzy has an abscessed tooth and gum infection. They couldn't, or rather, wouldn't do much beyond giving him a heavy antibiotic via injection that would last ten days or so and a mid-strength pain med, also injected that would help for a few days as his age is a risk factor for sedation. In other words, no pulling the tooth as they don't think he would make it through. So they did these injections, sent him home and want to reevaluate in two weeks. If the infection isn't under control by that point, we'll have to let the little guy go over the Rainbow Bridge. The mood around here has been quite somber as you can imagine, and more over, this was a financial blow that we couldn't afford.
I hate asking or suggesting, but if you could possibly consider giving us a little bit of a hand, I'd be beyond relieved and grateful. If not, I understand. Times are rough for everyone these days and I don't expect people to put themselves in a bind. Still though, anything helps. If you can, cool and thank you, if not, cool and thank you anyways.
So this chapter is 4500+ words in length. I could have kept going, but I didn't want to make you wait any longer than you already have.
A special thank you to LunaWolf who was kind enough to volunteer to be my Beta. I shutter to think how bad things could be if I didn't have you checking over my work.
CW!
Transphobic statements and generally shitty parents.
Finally, thank you so much for being patient with me. I'll have chapter 9 out on Wednesday, and as the first few chapters are already written, I'll have Chapter 2 of Taking Chances out later on this evening. As always, thank you for reading and thank you for the comments, as they never fail to make me smile.
Emmy

                Regaining consciousness sucks, pure and simple. First there’s the creeping sense of a half awareness as you start to wake up. In my case this was also accompanied by a considerable amount of pain. Next there’s a disorientation as your brain tries to figure everything out at once; What happened to you, where are you, why does everything hurt? If you’re lucky, your brain will connect the dots, the disorientation leaving you as realization settles in. Other times, your brain will simply conjure up strange thoughts and memories to fixate on. We’ll call this your fucked up bootloader.

                In my case, I was in a half state. I could feel the pain along my limbs and body as though from a distance, though my mind was elsewhere. In particular my brain picked out a memory of an event I hadn’t thought about since I was a kid.

                Images of a school play flitted through my frazzled mind, fuzzy though the circumstances were clear as day. A girl in the class who was to play an important role had been relocated to a different school leaving an open slot for casting. I had volunteered to fill this role, one of very few spontaneous attempts I made in my childhood to be more outgoing.

The play director was delighted, I was strangely eager, and after I learned the lines, I went home to tell my mother and father the news. Neither of them were supportive however, and I quickly found myself barred from performing in the play, or even having anything to do with the performing arts department.

                “I don’t see what the big deal is,” I argued. “All I’m doing is dressing up in a costume and//”

                “For the last time Felix! No!” My mother had screamed. “What will people say, that my son is some sort of cross dressing weirdo? If you want to join an after school activity, then do something like sports, like your brother.”

                I had been devastated. It was made even worse when my father had written a letter and given it to me to take to the director. I never saw what was written in that letter, but I remembered in that strange half state of awareness as she had read it silently, her brows knitting together in disapproval as her eyes swept across the page. Then she suddenly tore the paper to pieces and sighed as she looked at me with pity and… I never understood what that look was, then again I never thought about it after I tried to put the whole incident behind me, pretend it never happened.

                “ If you ever need to talk to someone who understands, you come find me. And if they ever change their minds on this foolishness, I’ll make sure you can perform, even if it’s not this play.” After that, she had patted me on the back and sent me away with a look of remorse as her office door closed behind me. I never went back, and as I remembered all this now, the thought of it made me sad.

                I whimpered as I shifted slightly. Fuck! Everything really did hurt.

                “You’re awake,” a deep voice said softly from above me. Gabin, the tunnels, the Chuds and…

                “What happened?” I asked as everything swam around me. It sounded like my words were somehow garbled. I tried to sit up but it was too much work. Best to just lay here and…

                “I think it was my fault,” Gabin said as I heard him shift uncomfortably. “I told you before my psionic abilities aren’t subtle. We were getting overrun, so I did what I could to get us out. Unfortunately, I caused a cave in. That’s not even the worse part though.”

                I opened my eyes to find that we were in near total darkness. Gabin had what appeared to be some sort of glow rod  on the ground next to him, but everything was still too hazy to make out any discernable details.

                “What’s the worst part?” I mumbled as I fought to regain my sense of self.

                “The ground gave out and now I have no idea where the hell we are.”

                “Yeah, that’s pretty bad.” I tried to sit up but was overcome by a sense of dizziness that made the idea of going vertical unappealing to say the least. Instead, I rolled onto my side and pulled my legs up to my chest and curled my tail around me.

                “How are you feeling?” Gabin asked as he moved a little closer, the light source moving with him.

                “Like crap. Think I broke my body.”
                “I gave you an injection of nanobots. They’re not the best, but it was all I had that would stop the bleeding.”
                “Bleeding?” I asked.

                “You had a pretty bad slash across your left arm and a few ugly bruises that I could see from the fall. I didn’t want to risk internal hemorrhaging, hence the nanobots. You’re probably experiencing the unfortunate side-effects that come with them.”

                “Full body pain, dizziness, nausea, lethargy, that kind of thing?”
                “All of the above. That’s why I don’t usually use them if I can avoid it.”

                “How long does it last?”

                “Usually about two hours if there was a lot of damage, but if things weren’t so bad, less than that. You’ve been out for about forty-five minutes.”

                “Fun. Damn it, my head hurts.” I brought a hand up and covered my eyes in a vain attempt to ward off the headache that didn’t seem to be getting any better. “So what now?”

                “First, you rest,” he replied. “After that, we figure out where we are and go from there. We fell a good ways, which means I don’t have any clue how to get us out. It also doesn’t help that I’ve only got the one light.”

                Despite the head and body aches, I lowered my hand and brought up my inventory screen. Strange, despite the shape I was in, I could see the menus perfectly as though I wasn’t seeing all kinds of fucked up and blurry. My condition was only virtual, regardless of how real it felt. Maybe my interfacing with the games menus bypassed all that? Something to think about later.

                I scrolled through my inventory until I found what I was looking for. A moment later and I had the tried and true RPG staple starter light most games started you off with, though this wasn’t a generic oil lamp or whatever.

                “Oh yeah,” Gabin said through a chuckle. “Forgot you start off with one of those.”

                It was a self-contained flair on a metal rod, in other words, a fancy as shit way to say a high-tech torch. Squinting through the light it emitted , I saw that there was a digital screen along the edge showing the power readout. Naturally it was full, but I had no way of knowing how fast the charge or whatever powered this thing would actually last. I flicked it back into my inventory, figuring it would be best to save it for later.

                “Well, we have two lights now,” I said finally. “Yay for small improvements?”

                “Indeed.:

                I looked up to see what had the big guy so distracted and found him staring at the key he had discovered. Great! It seemed my vision was on the mend. Come to think of it, I was starting to feel a little better. Taking a chance, I slowly pushed myself up into a sitting position, the world not seeming to be as violent with the spinning as it was a few minutes earlier.

“What do you think it goes to?” I asked as I watched him turn the key over in his massive hands. He definitely looked like he had been through the works. His leathers were torn in places, revealing some sort of shiny protective gear underneath, and he had a great gash running down the left side of his face from ear to nose that looked like it had only stopped bleeding recently. I had to admit, he would have scared the hell out of me if I hadn’t already known how kind he was from my experiences with him up until this point.

                “I have no idea. I haven’t come across anything that needed a key since I’ve been here, so your guess is as good as mine.”

                I glanced down at my own form, finding that I was covered in dried blood, but after a few moments of poking and prodding, I found that I was still in one piece. “It looks important, whatever it goes to.”

                “Yeah.” Man, he took this explorer thing pretty seriously. “Think you’re ready to try moving?”

                I pushed myself to  my feet with great care, not quite sure yet how I felt. “Think so, though I still feel a little off.”

                “That’s fine, we’ll take it slow,” he said as he too pulled himself to his very much considerable height. “Just stick close to me. The last thing we need is for one of us to lose the other.”

                I nodded in agreement as I checked my person for my weapons. I didn’t remember sheathing my sword when everything had gone to hell, but sure enough, it was secured across my back. Everything accounted for, I turned my attention to our surroundings.

                It was clear that there was no going back up the way we came. Rubble was everywhere, great chunks of natural stone in large chunks all around us and somehow over our heads. It was an absolute miracle we hadn’t been crushed or simply killed from the fall, though I could still remember Gabin pulling me close and wrapping himself protectively around me as we fell. It really said something to how tough he was to have come out of that as well as he had.

                We were at a dead end, though I wondered if it had always been this way. Probably not though, for one end of the hall we were in was not as smooth and as roughly carved as the walls along the sides. Clearly there was only one way to go.

                “I’m ready when you are,” I said finally as I took a few experimental steps forward. Everything seemed to work as it should. I pulled my torch from my inventory and held it slightly above my head as to not blind myself.

                Gabin studied me for a moment before nodding. “Right then, stay behind me.”

                 It turns out that exploring a maze like series of tunnels you’ve fallen into is pretty anticlimactic. Everything looked the same; Grey walls, grey floor, grey sealing, hell even the air smelled grey. Well actually it smelled stale and like you’d expect old air to smell, which to me smelled grey. Yes, my brain is strange.

                Where ever we were, it was clear that these halls hadn’t been traveled in some time. There was a haze in the air, most likely from the collapsing rubble, but none of the light fixtures we passed seemed to be drawing power or were too damaged to do their jobs. Either way, walking in an enclosed space deep under ground with no sense of direction and limited light wasn’t exactly on my top ten things to do.

                As we walked, I thought about the last… however long it had been since I logged into the game. Somehow, I had become this strange fox/human hybrid who was pretty flashy with a sword and could point and shoot with a reasonable degree of accuracy, I had been knocked out twice, nearly killed a couple of times, met a giant dude who quickly became a friend of sorts, if you excused the little nighty-night tap, gotten lost in some crazy series of subterranean tunnels, and oh yeah, I was now a girl. It was kinda a lot to take in.

                Eventually our endless walking rewarded us. There had been smaller tunnels branching off of the larger one that we had been blindly following. We had talked about exploring them at one point but had decided against the idea as it was safer to stick with the one big one as it was most likely to lead somewhere. If we got turned around in those smaller passages, we could wind up more lost than we already were and that wasn’t something neither of us wanted to consider.

                The reward in question turned out to be a mangled door that the corridor had led us to. In the sparce illumination afforded by our lights, it appeared to be one of those heavy things you saw in old Sci-Fi or war movies, the kind of door designed to stand up to direct shots from artillery shells.

                “Other than the doors leading into the tunnels and the ones that connect to different parts of the city, I’ve never seen any doors down here, certainly not any like this,” Gabin said as he moved his glow rod over the doorframe. “Look,” he pointed. “whatever hit this thing was powerful enough to wrip it right off the track.”

                He was right. The door had a huge dent directly in the center of it, though it was bent at an angle, the metal edges wedged in the concrete ground.

                I moved closer, my eyes studying the gap between the door and the wall where it was ajar. I could probably fit through, but I didn’t really think Gabin would have that luxury. I shoved my arm through the gap with my light gripped firmly in my hand then pressed my face to the edge of the frame to peer through.

                “What the hell? Look at this.”

                Gabin was suddenly behind me, his hulking mass looming over me as he too looked through the crack.

                The space beyond seemed to be an entirely different type of passage than the one we were in now. The walls and ceiling were reinforced with the same sort of metal as the door before us, though there seemed to be some kind of turrets facing our direction. Fortunately, I had enhanced my night vision during my botched character generation, which I was now grateful for. The turrets appeared to be damaged, their barrels warped and almost melted looking. They weren’t firing anything at anyone anytime soon.

                I don’t like the looks of those guns,” Gabin said as he stepped back from me and the door. “Odds are the power’s out, I mean it’s pretty dark down here, but you never know. Could be some sort of backup generator running a secondary grid for defensive systems or something.”

                “The guns are damaged,” I replied as I continued to peer through the gap. “They’re all bent or melted or something. I can’t really tell from this angle, but it looks like there’s another door further in that’s mostly open.”

                “Your vision is definitely better than mine then.”

                I allowed myself a smile. No one ever took me at my word. Either I didn’t really know what I was talking about or I just got ignored outright. Gabin didn’t even question if I could really see the door or make out the details on the turrets. He just accepted it and moved on. It might be a small thing to most people, but my opinion of his character and temperament rose even higher.

                “That’s all fine and good, but how do we get through?” I asked as I stepped back from the door, pulling my arm and light through as I did so.

                Without saying anything, Gabin handed me his light and replaced me at the door, placing two of his massive hands on the wall to brace himself and the other two on the edge of the thick slab of metal. He heaved and to my absolute astonishment there came a horrible grinding sound as the door opened another six inches. Another heave had it opened six more, and so it continued until he turned and wedged himself between the wall and the door and shoved with all four arms until the thing was pushed wide enough for both of us to slip through.

                As he turned to reclaim his light, he smirked at my expression. “I told you, level fifty-four. I’ve allocated a lot of points to strength.”

                “Clearly,” I replied dryly.

                We Stepped into the corridor beyond, our lights held high to give us as much illumination as possible. The air was even more stale in here with some sort of bitter quality that I couldn’t quite place, though that wasn’t what had me  nervous. The turrets that we had spied from beyond the door were indeed wrecked, their barrels flattened and bent at a strange angle. The walls themselves also seemed marred. Deep violent slashes were cut into the surfaces in places, huge burn marks like an energy weapon or something in others. Even more reminders of a misbegotten youth spent watching old Sci-Fi flics from more than a hundred years ago.

                I was also right about the other door at the end of the corridor, well sort of. I had thought it was half opened, but as we approached it I found that it had actually been blown in half with a huge chunk of the wall also missing.

                “What happened here?” I asked, though I didn’t really expect an answer.

                “More important question,” Gabin remarked. “Where’s the bodies?”

                He was right. There should have been something left behind of the obvious battle that had taken place here. Even if it had been a long time ago, there should have been some sort of remains, bodies, bloodstains, something, but there was nothing other than the environmental damage caused by whatever had occurred down here. There had been skeletal remains up in that cavern where all hell had broken loose, why not here?

                I coiled my tail tightly around myself as we stepped through the destroyed door, a hand nervously resting on the butt of one of my revolvers. This place was just plane fucking creepy. The room beyond was even worse than the last. It must have been some sort of check point at some point in time, but now it just looked like a demolition crew had come through after having a few drinks at the local watering hole.

                The walls here had been blown away in places, leaving large gaps that revealed what looked to be administration offices beyond, furniture smashed, slashed apart and burned. There seemed to be projectile weapon damage all over the place, like whoever had made their stand here went down with a fight, but again there were no bodies, no sign of whatever it was that had done all this.

                We walked cautiously over the debris that littered the ground, our lights casting eerie shadows that really didn’t do much to help the growing sense of dread and anxiety that was now chittering away in the back of my mind. There was suddenly a crack under one of my boots, and as I squeaked and stumbled forward, arms flailing uselessly through the air, Gabin caught me by my shoulder and steadied me before I could hit the ground. I blushed to the tips of my ears and sheepishly nodded in thanks as I tried to act like nothing had happened.

Seriously? Zac wanted me to stream? Who would want to watch some clumsy fox girl trip and stumble and squeal at her own shadow? With that as a reminder and needing something to do that took my mind off my little accidental near acquaintance with the unforgiving ground, I brought up a small window that only I could see and checked my virtual camera. Yup, the red light was still on. I closed the window without a second thought and refocused my attention back to my surroundings. There were things on the floor to dodge. I would not be bested by mere debris. Nope, not at all.

“Hey watch—”

                The slab of broken stone where a piece of the ceiling had broken free at an odd angle smacked me right above my hairline and knocked me on my ass before I even had a chance to catch myself. What the hell was with my head and its ability to magnetically attract everything to hit it from all angles? This was getting fucking ridiculous!

                “Are you alright?” Gabin asked, amusement in is voices as he leaned down to offer me a hand up.

                I rubbed at my head, thankfully not bleeding and took the offered hand. “I’m fine, but my pride is taking a hell of a beating right now,” I replied as I glared at the damn broken piece of stone that had just said hello.
                “You’re really not the most graceful fox out there, are you?” Even I could tell he was joking so I just shrugged and pressed my lips together. “And now you’re pouting?”

                He laughed, actually laughed at me. My ears twitched as I tried to hide my face behind my hair. “You’re actually pouting right now.”

                “I’m not pouting,” I shot back. “I’m just… I don’t know, but I’m not pouting.” I meant for my voice to sound sure, in control, but even I could hear the indignation.

                “Whatever, you are so pouting right now,” he retorted as he pushed a broken piece of furniture out of his way.

                Okay, fine, so I was pouting a little tiny bit, but only because the world was mean to my head. Surely I was allowed to pout at such an injustice?

                We finally made it through the checkpoint or whatever it had once been and found ourselves in another corridor. It might have once looked clean and remarkable, but now it was just a collection of broken tiles, battle damage and a distinct lack of bodies. There was one thing though. At one end of the hall was a set of doors that actually looked like they were left open and not destroyed. Together we approached them, our footsteps crunching through the debris echoing off the walls back at us.

                “An elevator?” I asked as we came nearer.

                “Looks like it,” Gabin said as he was the first to reach the opening in the wall. He stuck his head through the doors and glanced up and down before pulling back and turning to face me. “Repulser lift to be exact.”

                “The difference being, what exactly?”

                “No moveable mechanical parts,” he pointed over his shoulder. “If that was an elevator, we could scale the shaft and work our way up using the cables that connected to the car to do so. Repulser lifts use magnetics to raise and lower the car. Without power, the car is sitting somewhere down at the bottom of this shaft. There’s no cables so we can’t use them.”

                “So we need to either find a way to restore power, probably an impossibility given the state of this place, or… Take the stairs?”

                “Exactly,” He pushed off the wall and back down the corridor. “Look through these doorways and see if you see any stairs. I’ll get this side, you get the other. Oh, and New Girl? Don’t trip.”

                I spluttered, wanting to say something about my ability to go five seconds without hurting myself, but my still pulsing and throbbing head wasn’t going to let me make that claim  with a clean conscience. Besides that, there was that feeling again. That happiness, disconnected but still there.

Why was this happening every time he called me a girl? Why was I feeling this way? I wasn’t a girl, not really, not in actual reality. This was VR. I was a girl only in here, but out there I was just Felix Stephens, a dude with a lot of problems, very few friends, and no future beyond what I was doing right now; Playing as a girl in a VR game, all be it a supremely realistic VR game that took emersion to a completely different level.

                I put the thoughts out of my mind and turned to the task of locating those stairs. I found them, though we had a major problem.

                “Don’t suppose at level fifty-four you have some epic flight ability or something?” I called over my shoulder.

                “Why do I get the feeling I’m not going to like what you’re talking about?” He replied.

                “Because the stairs are completely destroyed next landing up.”

                “That’s just wonderful,” he said as he came to my side and surveyed the damage.

                What had remained of the stairwell was an unstable mess of girders and bent to shit frames. Everything from the next landing up was completely unusable and most likely not safe to attempt ascent, and everything heading down was… Well not much better, though it looked a lot more doable than our other option.

                “Thoughts?” I asked as I shook my head at the mess before us, my ears jiggling on my head. That was an interesting feeling. I shook my head again, though I did manage to contain the little giggle that wanted to make itself known. Probably not the best time to try and explain my fascination with my own ears, at least not when we were standing on a rickety as fuck landing considering our next move.

                “Suppose we could go a few levels down, see if we can’t find another way back up. Otherwise I don’t like the idea of trying to make it up those things.”

                “me neither. So down then?”

                “Down it is, though you go first.”

                I understood his logic immediately. He was a lot heavier than me. It would be in our best interest if I went first. Once at the next landing  down, he could follow me, which meant if something happened and the stairs gave way under him, it wouldn’t immediately kill me too, not that I relished the idea of him dying down here and leaving me alone. Actually, I really didn’t want to even think about that right now. I was doing well enough trying to ignore all the feelings of panic and hysteria from doing what we were about to do as is. I really didn’t need to add alone in the dark to my list of growing immediate concerns and fears. Well fuck you too brain, that little line of thought already committed itself to said list. Fucking wonderful. On the bright side, if you could call it that, if the stairs gave way and I fell to my death, I probably would respawn elsewhere. Maybe? Actually, did Zac even tell me what happened when you died? Was I seriously having this internal monolog with myself before climbing down an extract from a horror film?

                I glanced at my path again and shook my head. I was seriously about to do this right now, wasn’t I?

                “Just breathe,” Gabin said. “Breathe in and step on the exhale. Try not to focus on anything else other than your next step and your breathing.”

                Despite myself, I found comfort in his words. I glanced at him and found him smiling encouragingly at me then turned back to the stairs at hand. I nodded, took a deep breath, focused on where I was going to place my foot, then stepped forward.