Mark Mason - Late

Author's notes:

So begins the East Side Story.
Howdy, Poolio the author here. Thanks for bothering to check this out, I hope you like it.

What to expect:
Lots of jokes of a questionable quality
Puns
Objectively weird shit
Unearned bashing of the French
Music, game, and literature reference

The writer's barely disguise completely undisguised fetish The best writing I can give you (I'm an amateur, mind you)

Release schedule: You're getting 5 total chapters for week one. One for both sides on both Monday and Friday, with the bonus of the prologue thrown in. After chapter 3 is released, we'll be going to weekly releases, with East on Mondays and West on Fridays. This might slow if it's unsustainable but I'll be doing my best!

NSFW scenes will be marked out by horizontal separators like the one below, in case you want to skip them.

A special thank you to RafaDark, Briyanda, and all the friends who put up with me gushing about this to them so often.

Floating on a cloud. Drifting in the endless sky, free flying and unbound. The only issue was that incessant beeping

Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.

Mark groaned as his pillowy cloud in the sky was replaced by a too small bed in a humid apartment. His alarm was going off. It was time for yet another day of work. He turned it off without bothering to open his eyes and sat up. At least his back didn't hurt this morning. Rubbing at his eyes, Mark was doing his best to wake up but he was never an early riser, much preferring when the sun had gone below the horizon. When he opened his eyes, he found something familiar seeming, yet still entirely strange. A window, floating around a foot in front of his face.

He blinked a few times at the apparent quest box that trailed his field of view slightly when he turned his head. Thinking he was still asleep, Mark gave himself a smack across the face, only to be met with the sting of slapping himself. The feeling of being stupid was quickly overtaken by curiosity for the impossibility he was looking at. He reached out his hand, making sure to avoid the two buttons at the bottom and found that, while he couldn't touch it, he could push it further away. It returned when his hand pulled back, going back to its normal position.

He read over the quest box, seeing it as a pretty standard morning for him, now with XP as a reward. A quick tap of the accept button made the tan colored window disappear. At the edge of his vision, he could see other HUD type elements. A red bar with a white box next to it, a plus shape in the negative space. Below it was a blue bar in the same fashion, a teardrop shape instead. There were no numbers tied to the bars and his first thought was to try to open a menu of some kind. He tried to swipe his hand downward but that left him with nothing.

His second alarm went off, set a few minutes after the first just in case. He got up and headed for the bathroom. No sense just sitting in bed while he did this. The handle for the shower was set roughly where he wanted it for things to heat up as he stood there, thinking.

'I don't know what's happening. I don't think I'm going crazy but that's what a crazy person would say. Crazy people always think they're perfectly sane.'

While the water heated up, he tried to think about a character sheet opening, feeling a small tug in his head somewhere as one did, in fact, open. It was incredibly simple and not particularly fancy.

Tapping at things to test the waters bore a small surprise, each stat having its own tool tip, offering some explanation of what the number represented.

Strength: Physical might and muscle mass. A higher Strength stat will improve damage of weapons that rely on power, increase your HP regeneration, and add more definition to physique. Your ability to crush a tomato.

Agility: Balance, coordination, and dexterity. A higher Agility stat allows you to run faster, aim ranged weapons more accurately, improve footing, and increases damage of melee weapons that rely on precision. Your ability to hit something by throwing a tomato.

Endurance: Stamina, physical hardiness, and overall health. A higher Endurance stat will increase your HP total, allow you to exert yourself for longer, and make physical ailments less debilitating. How you handle eating a spoiled tomato.

Intellect: Mental acuity, knowledge, and problem solving. A higher Intellect stat will allow you to process information faster, improve your ability to understand complex topics and situations, and increase your MP total. Knowing a tomato is a fruit.

Wisdom: Life experience, judgement, and sense. A higher Wisdom stat will improve your situational awareness, allow you to think through the consequences of choices, and increase your MP regeneration. Knowing not to put a tomato in a fruit salad.

Charisma: Social influence and navigation. A higher Charisma stat will improve your ability to express what you intend to others, navigate social interactions, and makes you look slightly more attractive. Being able to sell someone on a tomato based fruit salad.

Libido: Sexual drive and the ability to recover from orgasm. A higher Libido stat will result in a shorter refectory period, increased cum volume, and increased fertility. Please do not fuck the tomato.

Tapping on HP and MP respectively also gave additional popups of their own.

HP: Health Points. A representation of how much damage your body is capable of taking before Gamer's Body cannot heal the injuries. Total is affected by Endurance, regeneration is affected by HP total and Strength.

MP: Mana Points. A representation of how much Mana you have. Total is affected by Intellect, regeneration is affected by MP total and Regeneration.

His eyes went wide as he read the last tool tip. He was so excited by the idea, the thoughts in his head escaped past his lips. "Mana? I have fucking Mana?!" Mark was absolutely floored at the thought. That implied that magic was real and he could eventually use it. He checked the water and got in after dismissing the tool tips. The character sheet bore inspection. Simple as it was, every part of this needed to be looked into to see what could be important.

An audible sigh left Mark's mouth as his body auto-piloted the showering ritual. He muttered to himself out loud, loofa scrubbing his thin body. "My stats are kinda shit, I bet. Strength, Endurance, and Charisma aren't even above ten and my highest stat is related to my sex drive. The numbers don't feel random, at least."

Mark continued to pour over the fairly basic looking character sheet, another window appeared in front of the sheet.

That was something he hadn't considered before.

'Not only is there someone seemingly interacting with these powers, they're also fallible in some regards.'

The moment he finished that thought, another window appeared.

He wasn't going to try and argue with that. He tapped the Yes option and all the windows disappeared, replaced instead by a loading bar at the edges of his vision. While it moved towards completion bit by bit, he finished the cleaning portion of his shower by shampooing his hair, also taking a few minutes to check off one of the two optional objectives.

The first person to come to mind was a woman with bright red hair and a freckled complexion. Tara Walsh was his boss and she was about as bitchy as she was hot. She always wore black leggings, a tight office skirt, and a button up shirt. In the winter months, she also often wore a light brown cardigan. Mark wanted to grab hold of that shirt and sweater and pull it apart until the buttons went flying and those massive tits spilled free.

He pleasured himself to the thought of finally getting to dominate her, fucking her throat, her tits, her eyes crossing when he tears a hole in her leggings and pushes into her ass. It was one of his more vivid fantasies and it definitely helped him cum quickly.

'I feel like I should be creeped out to know you can see my fantasies. Then again, you've been responding to my thoughts so I'm not sure how I didn't think of that.'

There was no response from Gaia and the new window made clear the update was done. Things were very different. Going from a tan-cream gradient to a dark mode type grey and much more expansive. Not only did he now have numbers for his HP and MP, as well as their regeneration rates, he had skills, stat points, raw numbers for stuff like experience, and different tabs! No wonder Gaia wanted him to update, the amount of information here was far more useful. Mark examined each tab in turn, first going over Attributes.

It had a lot of the same stuff he had expected, now with specifics. He also had an area for quests, featuring his first quest, and two areas for skills, though he had no active skills. Next was the inventory screen.

Not a lot to see here, it was a whole lot of nothing. The fact that he had an inventory was notable but otherwise, there was literally nothing here. Well, might as well check out the Guild's tab.

So not only was he denied the Guild tab, he was being made fun of in the Relationship tab. He turned off the water after making sure he was cleaned off of all the suds and grabbed a towel, working through some things as he dried his hair.

'Going to need to test some things. Inventory and equipment sound useful even if nothing changes. I guess we'll start with this.' His first instinct was that it was like a backpack, like the back slots in some of the VR games he'd gotten to try. He held the towel over his shoulder and dropped it. The towel landed at his feet. After picking it up, he then tried thinking about having the towel enter his inventory and it vanished from his hands.

'Looks like it's all mental commands. If I can use the entire menu system mentally as well, that could also be important to know.'

Mark opened his Equipment tab and saw Soiled Towel in his inventory sheet. Tapping on it granted him two windows.

Soiled Towel
A used towel. It's mostly just wet but it still needs to be washed.

He tried to bring the towel back out of his inventory by thinking about it, causing the towel to reappear in his hands as if gathered from surrounding dust. He let out a satisfied sound. Something worked right the first time, progress. With one main objective and one optional one completed, next up was shaving. Mark had the virtues and benefits of a clean shave instilled into him since he'd first started growing peach fuzz. One of the things his dad left him was a straight razor, passed down for three generations at this point. Using it was one of the things Mark took seriously, both because a slip up could leave a nasty gash and because the blade belonged to his father. His face was lathered with shaving cream and he prepared the razor, practiced movements from years of practice.

Looking in the mirror, Mark had a chance to inspect himself. Same old black hair that would end up mildly disheveled no matter how much he tried to tame it. It wasn't in the hot way, like someone who woke up with great bedhead and could just go out like that. No, all the humidity in the air made his hair stick every which way in spite of his efforts. When he'd tried gels, they somehow made it worse. Speaking of things getting worse, the bags under his eyes were more pronounced now. That's probably what he deserved after six or less hours of sleep a night.

He was getting towards the end of his shave when an alarm on his phone went off, causing him to look over on instinct. This mistake was met with a stinging pain on his cheek as the sharp edge found purchase in flesh. Mark let out a startled sound as he pulled the razor away and pressed his cheek with a finger to try and stop the bleeding. He turned off the alarm and pulled his finger away to see if the cut would stay and it seemed to have stopped bleeding for the moment, thankfully. The shave was finished more carefully than before, not wanting two obvious blunders in one day, and his face was rinsed off.

To Mark's surprise, the cut had completely vanished when the blood was washed away. He gently pulled at it and found his cheek completely undamaged. He remembered something called Gamer's Body mentioned in his HP tooltip and went to check, finding that, indeed, it was healed.

Gamer's Body. Lvl: MAX
Damage your body sustains is healed by your HP pool. When your HP hits zero, damage taken can no longer be healed.

Gamer's System. Lvl: MAX
Converts your life experience, skills, and magical abilities into numerical representations. Also allows for quests and leveling up your stats to occur.

He'd been so excited by the idea of having Mana and magic, he'd completely missed these two abilities. At least he'd checked them, it was nice to know he could take a few hits and be no worse for the wear. With his alarm having gone off, Mark really had to hurry if he was going to make the bus. He grabbed his clothes and shoes and willed them into his inventory, opening the Equipment screen to try and equip them to save time. Not only did they appear on him properly, they even felt like they settled properly. The top button of his shirt was even unbuttoned, as he preferred it to be. A big time save as he went to make himself something small for breakfast, just a simple sandwich he could eat while he walked.

He was out the door only a few minutes after his alarm had gone off, walking with purpose to try and get to the bus stop on time. It was often late, so that shouldn't have been hard. He rounded the last corner to find his bus pulling away, Murphy's Law biting him in the ass once again. His feet started moving as he thought to himself, 'No time to cry about Shit Creek, better start paddling.' Not the first time he's had to run to work, at least it wasn't raining this time.

So he ran. Hard. Mark was impressed with how long he managed to go before needing to stop for a breath, considering the last time he'd had to do this. When he did, he was surprised with another new window.

'OK, so I can get new skills by doing stuff... Feels kinda bullshit that it starts at level 1 but maybe all of them will.' He regained his breath quicker than expected. A lot quicker. Maybe level 1 Running wasn't so bad after all if he could recover faster than 10 minutes.

Onward he pushed, resting when he had pushed himself to his limit. As he ran, he tried to use the skill he'd gotten earlier, Observe. All he had to do was focus on someone for a moment and... 'Wait a minute, that person has a name tag over their head.'

Margaret Carpenter
Level 16 Apprentice
Stifled Rebel

'She's over three times my level. Am I really that pathetic?'

'Yes'

The thought came unbidden to his mind. It had the same feel as a window but in thought form.

'I get the feeling that you're going to be sassing me until you get bored of it.'

The woman had wandered off, out of sight. In need of a new person to use Observe on now, someone else was picked and instead of a window, a sense of knowing came over him.

Nick Ramos
Level 8 Mechanic
Grease Monkey
23 years old
No relation to The Gamer

It was nice to know that he could manage to get information like this but he should probably be careful with it. Invading someone's privacy like that could be dangerous if he found the wrong person. Enough thinking about that though, he needed to keep on running.

He kept on going, pushing himself further to try and make up for lost time. Somehow, that just made him smile. Something about this whole situation set off his endorphins. Maybe it was the idea of a runner's high he'd heard about, maybe it was being challenged, maybe it was the thrill of racing the clock, Mark couldn't place the reason and didn't have the time to consider it. He could only keep running, as hard and fast as he could. Maybe going for a run after work wouldn't be a bad idea.

Mark's punch in was technically on time, thanks to the company's time keeping system rounding to the nearest five minute interval. He was late by around a minute and a half but it could have been much worse. Everyone seemed to already be at their desk so no one would see anyways.

The vaguely insulting feeling of the achievement was mitigated by the stat gains. So long as he kept getting better, he'd deal with a bit of snark and sass.

"Mason, you're late." A faintly accented, feminine voice danced in his ears. It was a such a delightful sound for so terrible a woman. Tara Walsh, woman of fantasies and rider of ass. "If it weren't your birthday today, I'd send you on a coffee run like the interns for being late. Consider it my gift to you."

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