Eroma by Piers Anthony

Author:Piers Anthony
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Open Road Media

Chapter 4:

Sustenance

Pedro found himself in the control room of a spaceship with seven others: three male, four female, all naked. He was relieved to see that one of the females was Fotina. This was another unified setting, rather than separate ones. He hoped it would not be as ugly as the last, and that it would be as wonderful as the conclusion of the last turned out to be. Getting to know Fotina IRL, having repeated sex with her in the flesh—what else could possibly match that?

An alarm went off. WARNING the sign flashed. RANDOM FOODER BREAKDOWN.

“Oh, shit!” Kemo said, checking it. The nameplates really helped; Pedro had not directly interacted with the others in the prior rounds, though, of course, they had all been at the Poop of the Day restaurant. Kemo was a powerful Nubian, surely possessed of all the best avatar traits.

“How bad is it?” Nola asked. She was a lovely Elf with flaring green hair.

“Bad. It seems to have shorted out, and the food raw material was jettisoned before it spoiled.”

“That’s idiocy!” Tris exclaimed. He was a handsome blond Nordic.

“No,” Pedro said. “It’s the arranged setup for the challenge of this round of the game. We are going to have to land on the one ship-hardened site of a nearby hostile alien planet to find enough food to complete our voyage.”

Tris nodded, frowning. “Sometimes I forget that we are subject to the whims of imbeciles.”

“In that case, we’d better strap in,” Xylia said. She was a fair Nordic beauty. Of course, all the surviving avatars were handsome and lovely; they had won those traits in the first round. They all enjoyed sex, too; that was why they had entered the game. Pedro suspected that Fotina’s IRL resemblance to her avatar was a rarity; Nola and Xylia were probably overweight wallflowers. The game made a phenomenal difference by lending extreme sex appeal to all players.

They strapped in and let the autopilot take them down. But first Fotina fetched the ship’s manual, and paged through it as the descent commenced. “This is bad,” she said.

“Out with it, girl,” Kemo said.

“The imbeciles have laid it out. The planet is nicknamed Horror. It was colonized two generations ago, but subsequently abandoned because it was considered too dangerous to be pacified. Some colonists remained, but their present state is unknown.”

“They may or may not help, if they survived,” Tris said. “They’ll speak the universal language, but may have become uncomfortably alien in the interim.”

“True,” Fotina agreed. “Horror, officially named Horizon, seemed at first to be the ideal Earth-type world, with similar gravity, atmosphere, and compatible animal and plant life. Then colonists started disappearing. Some were later found, but there’s no indication in the record what had happened to them. Only that at some point the colony was revoked and most of the people fled the planet. It seems they refused to speak of what they had seen.”

“How convenient,” Tris said.

Fotina’s mouth quirked. “It’s a game. The imbeciles don’t care about things like abuse of coincidence.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.