[Episode 70833] [Episode 70833]
Nabiki slowly regained enough sense to ask herself what happened and where she was. She was in a semi-private room with the dwarf she’d been attempting to heal in another bed beside her. The head-healer and an unfamiliar wizard were at the dwarf’s bedside quietly consulting.
She sat up with an as yet undiagnosed feeling of unfamiliarity, attracting the attention of the quietly conversing pair.
"Ah, you’re awake.", said the wizard. "Tell me what you experienced. It’ll help me with my report."
Nabiki uncertainly paused, piecing back together her scrambled memories and looked to the head-healer for approval. The head-healer’s body language clearly communicated impatience, so she tried to share what she could piece together of the story.
After she'd shared what she could, the wizard said to himself, "That’s it for sure then. It’s a wizard hacker’s cheat snippet." He looked back up at the head-healer and ordered that the student healer and dwarf be kept isolated here for a few hours while he sent in a report. "Don’t let her leave. I’m pretty sure this will catch the attention of a much higher-ranking wizard pretty quickly.", he emphasized.
The head-nurse gave her a meaningful glance as she departed with the wizard.
Nabiki was left to herself, if you didn’t count the unconscious dwarf who looked even more withered and sickly than before. She tried to make some sense of her recent experiences and hadn’t accomplished much when she discovered the need to use the restroom. This room had its own private bathroom wish a flush toilet! As she moved, she was again struck with a feeling of undiagnosed unfamiliarity.
The reason for the feelings of unfamiliarity became apparent as Nabiki moved toward the bathroom and crossed the focus of the full-length glass mirror mounted door. She was presented with first reflection of herself she’d seen since her character options had been selected. It was such a surprise she forgot the need that had prompted the short journey to the bathroom. She now had a very voluptuous body that rivaled the head-nurse. Less obvious at a distance, but hard to miss, was her new, very athletic musculature. While she was still a sexy, elven Nabiki, she was now built a lot like Ranma-chan. Serious muscles that somehow didn’t mar an over-endowed figure.
Nabiki managed to survive the next few hours of boredom. Her observations out the window were interrupted by a pimply-faced human teenager walking through the door. He was wearing wizard’s robes and carrying a laptop computer.
"You’re the one with the cheat snippet, right?", the teenager checked.
When Nabiki affirmed that that’s what the previous wizard had said, the kid sat down and opened up his laptop computer. He was instantly absorbed in whatever it was he saw there. He would sit motionless for minutes and then furiously tap keys. Nabiki looked over his shoulders once. She recognized western characters, but otherwise it was all gibberish.
With no warning, the kid blurted in surprise, "You’re a player character?"
At Nabiki’s assent, he asked a tangential question. "What do you think of the Pavlovian conditioning we built into the game? How’s it work for you?"
"I know what Pavlovian conditioning is, but I’m not sure I understand your question.", Nabiki admitted.
"Oh, well we wanted to encourage characters to improve and live up to their character classes. So we put in some conditioning feedback. You know, fighters feel glory when they kill something, wizards feel powerful when they cast spells, sex-slaves feel more aroused when they use their talents. Their conditioning is reinforced whenever they improve their character value."
"Is that what was going on?", Nabiki frowned in horrified comprehension. "I bumped the wrong key accidentally and found myself a sex-slave with no way to get out of it. Then I selected some good advantages and was unexpectedly slapped with a high libido and submissiveness disadvantage to offset them. Just about everything was quite arousing, even success. It was really distracting. Now I hear that you *purposefully* rigged it so that I would be aroused every time I improved? I’m not amused!"
"Oh. Well, I’ll tell Joe you didn’t like his user interface and send your comments about the conditioning feedback to Fred. Joe’s pretty good about fixing interfaces when you point out the problem to him, but Fred’s pretty opinionated. He’s not likely to change anything unless he gets a lot more negative feedback."
"Well, anyway, back to the problem at hand. Your file is so screwed up, if I hadn’t heard all the surrounding circumstances, I’d boot you out of the game because I was sure you’d been trying to cheat by editing your character file. Look here, you somehow started playing a character without a username and login password. I wouldn’t have believed a live player would choose that class and those disadvantages, but apparently you just stumbled into them. You achieved an awful lot of experience points in three game days, and then you somehow had the cash to train here and ended up trading strength attributes with this here sorry dwarf. On top of that, somehow you shifted most of your libido into the attractiveness advantage."
"Ok, I know you weren’t cheating. A wizard hacker wannabe left an incomplete cheat code snippet lying around. Your healing talents supplied shortcomings in the attempted cheat code, and for a few minutes, you could transfer skills and talents at will. I’m gonna fix the bug that let that happen. It’ll make it into tonight’s rebuild. Don’t get too intimate with anyone until tomorrow." At that, the pimply-faced kid and his laptop vanished into thin air.
Nabiki’s chance to get out of this madness quickly had just unexpectedly vanished.
On wizard’s orders not to get intimate with anyone, there wasn’t much Nabiki could do around the hospital. Besides, the contempt she had experienced before was nothing compared to how she was being treated around the hospital now. It was clear there had been a lot of rumors. Nabiki recognized there wasn’t much she could do about it. She didn’t have a fraction of the clout around the hospital it would take to replace those rumors with something that generated less hostility. Nabiki left the hospital.
…
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(Posted Mon, 29 Sep 2003 01:16)
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