Chapter 42: Why should we kidnap the gay prostitute?

Johnny was standing on the street corner close to a gay bar in the Commercial District of Greentown. Back in Redtown, when classmates secretly recorded him with his highschool English teacher in the bathroom, his father tried to kill him for being gay.

Johnny was now turning tricks and sleeping in a cheap motel. He was a kind of shut-in. He would only work two nights a week during Friday and Saturday. The rest of the week, he would shut himself inside his motel room and watch TV shows from his phone. His appetite was almost non-existent and he only ate cup ramen or some candy bars once a day. Though he liked drinking a lot of chamomile tea. It made him feel more relaxed.

His life was bad, but it could be worse in his eyes. At least he got to be alone most of the time. He tried dating apps, but he used a fake picture of himself and was always too scared to meet anybody his age in person.

A car pulled up to his corner. It was a rental sports car. Three guys were in it. They looked kind of familiar. One of them was tall and skinny and kind of handsome. The other one was average looking but bulky. The third one was average looking and had an average built body.

“You wanna make some cash?” the bulky one said.

Johnny was nervous. He almost never got any younger customers around his age range. And it was very abnormal to see some 18 year olds driving an expensive sports car.

“Gangbang is 730 dollars,” Johnny said.

The skinny, handsome one pulled out a big wad of cash and took out eight one hundred dollar bills and gave it to him..

“Keep the rest,” Jack said.

Johnny’s eyes widened in surprise.

…

I’m gonna die now! I’m gonna die now! This was such a stupid choice… Johnny thought. He was tied up in an abandoned warehouse in the industrial district.

Jack, Brian, and Lucas had dressed up in all black.

Brian sat down in front of Johnny and made deep eye contact.

“Nod your head if you are listening,” Brian said.

Johnny nodded his head.

“Okay. So, simple job. There is a new VR game out. It’s still in beta. Nobody has heard about it. You are going to help us out inside the game. Look at this,” Brian said, and pointed at a printed out QR code.

“You are going to use this paper to enter the VR game. We will follow along with you. I’ll give you instructions again one last time before you enter your VR room. When you enter the room, there will be a weird VR gaming chair. You will enter that chair at my specified time. Do you understand?”

Johnny nodded.

“If you do not do everything we tell you to do, we will kill you,” Brian said.

When Johnny entered the metal room and the door slammed shut behind him, he felt like he was in a weird nightmare.

“They didn’t steal back the money,” Johnny thought. As dangerous as the situation was, that was his first thought.

He grabbed the cash and counted it and tried to look at it in the light to see if it was fake.

He checked the time on his phone. He tried calling the cops. It didn’t work inside the metal room.

“Fuck,” Johnny said.

He sat in the weird VR chair. It slammed shut and he tried to escape and then he blinked and he was seeing a sunny blue sky.

He felt rough hands immediately grab him and lift him up. He looked around and saw a weird stone plaza and the three men dressed in all black.

“What is this place?” he said.

They didn’t answer him, they just dragged him out of the plaza while other people looked at them.

…

“You slash it like this! Keep it in front of you at all times,” Jack said, and gave Johnny instructions on how to use the combat knife.

“Okay. Good. Now attack that balloon monster. In the end, it will try to jump at you, so be ready for that. Go!”

This was the scariest moment of his life. Everything looked so real but that monster, there was no way that was real. The blue leather ball monster slowly bounced towards Johnny. He took a step back in fear, but Jack shoved him forward towards the balloon monster.

It jumped towards him and he did an awkward slash. Johnny was never the athletic type and was skinny from his bad diet and just watching tv shows all day on his phone. And he slashed with a kind of feminine and weak posture.

When he missed, the balloon monster was about to bite his neck but Jack punched it in the face and it bounced away.

“Again,” Jack said.

“Why did we pick a gay for this?” Lucas said.

“Give Johnny a chance,” Brian said.

“What? How do you know my name!” Johnny said.

“Focus!” Jack screamed into his ear.

The balloon monster was bouncing towards him again. He tried slashing like Jack had taught him and managed to hit the monster. It popped and blew up into leather pieces.

“We from Redtown too. You don’t remember your senior?” Brian said.

“Oh shit,” Johnny said when he realized he knew who Brian was. He was the crazy guy who had to skip town when he got into trouble with the cartel.

“Okay, listen up. Now you are going to grind on your own. You will keep grinding until you get a weird yellow crystal from one of these monsters. When you get it, be very careful with it and put it in this bag with ripped paper. If you crush it, it will explode and kill you. Ah, almost forgot. Give me back the QR code. Okay. Also, if you get a skill point, you are not allowed to use it. If you use it I’ll chop off four of your fingers like I did to that guy,” Brian said, and pointed at Lucas. “Also, you can easily exit the game right now by looking at the corner of your eye and mentally pressing the exit button. If you do that, we will kill you. Now, go and get us some crystals. We’ll see you later,” Brian said.