Original Story Here

By FoxFaceStories

A Commission for Chicagiensis

Haru and Yua have achieved their happy secret ending, and are now enjoying their life exploring the exciting and sensual digital secrets of the island of Tropico. But everything changes when two new video gamers, Max and Tom, are zapped into the dating sim, one as a gorgeous kitsune and the other as a handsome competitor for Yua’s affections. The dating game has begun again; what new secret endings will be unlocked?

First Part

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Part Two: New Entrants

It had been one year since the pair of men renting the apartment on Ford Street had mysteriously disappeared and become local legends. Just a few weeks ago, the troubled location finally found a new pair of tenants in two new young men; Tom and Max. They needed a place to stay that was close to their respective workplaces. Tom, a tall and slim man, was constantly shifting hobbies, always getting into deep dives on his interest of the moment, be it biking, birdwatching, bitcoin, or blacksmithing. And that was just the B’s! His only continuous hobby was jogging, and the tall blonde man kept himself in solid shape as a result, though it didn’t help him keep a job in the same place for more than six months with his changeable nature. Still, his endless pursuits made him a very smart man, and he knew a great deal about a wide range of topics.

His best friend Max, on the other hand, was a lot more consistent. He was a shorter man, but worked hard as a bodybuilder. His own muscular nature was a result purely of his relentless hard work, but he wasn’t just a gym nut. The man loved electronics and gaming, and so had a secret nerd side that only Tom knew about. In fact, he actually worked at an electronics store, though he pretended he was above it all when around his social circle. He had an image to maintain, even if his true passion was in far nerdier things than he would like to admit.

The pair had met in high school and had hit it off immediately. Max had shown his new friend the ropes and helped him navigate social situations, even helping him get his very first girlfriend. Tom could be quite socially awkward and rather odd thanks to his excitable nature, and Max suspected his friend had undiagnosed ADHD, most likely. But Max took him under his wing, finding his earnestness and sincerity rather endearing, perhaps because he himself struggled to admit to the world that he was a secret nerd. In fact, it took some years before he admitted to Tom his actual love of gaming, and now he was taking an even greater step.

“It’s called Finding My Right Beach Girlfriend,” Max said. “Apparently it’s a dating sim game of some kind. Like that Japanese harem stuff. You know, not that I actually care about that stuff!”

“Wow, that’s so cool!” Tom said in his totally genuine way. “I’ve never played a dating sim before, but I’ve always wanted to. I’ve been looking for a new thing to get into.”

Max smirked. “I bet you have. Fishing didn’t hold your interest?”

“Fly fishing, actually. And yes, it did! But now I kinda want to try something new. Are you an expert on these things? Dating sims, I mean.”

Max blushed as he faced the computer. His friend was looming behind him, so the shorter man had to hide his features. He had actually played more than a few dating sims and got oddly invested in them, but he couldn’t even let Tom know that level of embarrassment. After all, what if one of his booty-call girls found out? And he was currently doing a good job of wooing Anna Everette at work. She was a good looking gal, and might view him as a freak if she found out about this!

“N-no,” he said. “C’mon man, you know I can be just a little secretly nerdy, but this stuff is not my jam at all. Still . . . it clearly belonged to those two guys who went missing. Aaron Kasey and Mark Chesterton. So we gotta give it a look, right?”

Tom nodded. “Oh yeah. That’s such a sad story. I read about them during my dive into True Crime. Maybe I should get back into that?”

“You should. Girls love true crime. You might get lucky again.”

“Oh, really? I had no idea! Nice! Put on the game!”

Secretly, Max was also excited, but he wanted to still feel like the cooler of the two friends, so he played it off with a shrug and turned the game on. 

The main screen booted up, but Mark was a little surprised by what it displayed. The cover indicated that a protagonist named ‘Jin’ would be featured, along with various classic harem girls: Akemi the athletic one, Sashira the wide-eyed childhood best friend, Akemi the shy moe one, and so forth. But instead, it displayed a tropical beach-inspired setting with just Yua, the very well-endowed blonde rich-girl, wearing a stylish white bikini. Another character who looked more like the plucky comic relief was kissing her cheek, one arm around her waist.

“Huh,” he said.

“Is he the main character?” Tom asked.

“He shouldn’t be. Oh wait, look at the title on the screen. It says Finding My Right Beach Girlfriend: Secret Ending Edition. It’s one of those cool dating sims where there’s tons of hidden secrets and alternative endings and extra optional romances and - er, I mean, I’ve heard about this.”

Thankfully, while Tom was very intelligent, he wasn’t always perceptive. Instead, he found himself fascinated and keen to play.

“Let’s see if it still runs. Hey, I just looked the game up on my phone; apparently it’s super rare and has this whole myth about sucking you into the game about it.”

Max smirked. “I guess that solves the mystery of Aaron and Mark, eh? Fine, I guess we’ll play it.” But the musclebound secret-nerd shivered a little in excitement. He clicked play, and the screen changed to show a series of manga-style drawn images of an island paradise while a slightly accented voice spoke the opening narration.

“I’d found love and connection on Tropico Island. The town of Ocean Tides had become my home, and Sashira, my closest friend, had admitted her love for me. We were together, and we had decided to stay on the island and make a life there. That should have been the ending of the story, right? Well, there was still much to explore and do on Tropico, and two new arrivals were heading our way!”

The images displayed the main protagonist kissing Sashira, and a scene of romantic passion with them on the beach, though nothing too risque was shown. Yua was in the background, pulling Haru into her titanic breasts, and Tom chuckled.

“I wouldn’t mind being him!”

The other girls looked on with jealousy at the two couples, then their expressions changed to acceptance and even happiness, before they faded away back into town. But then, the screen showed a yacht arriving. A rather large and prestigious one. Standing on the ship, one hand holding the rope that kept the sails secure against the winds, was a dashing looking guy. He had hair the colour of fresh snow, and it fell in strands around his eyes, which were pale blue like ice. His clothing was refined, his silky shirt opened at the top to show off more bare chest than most men were brave enough to display. He was not muscular, but he had a lithe strength about him, and his face was confident and daring, his coat flapping in the wind like he was some brooding antihero of a Victorian-era novel. A name appeared beneath him: Hiroshi.

“That’d be an ikemen,” Max said. “The archetype of the cool, brooding young man. Often stylish and charismatic.”

“I thought you didn’t know much about this stuff?” Tom asked.

Max had to hide his blushing features. “Um, Peter at work talks my ear off about it.”

“Ah,” Tom said, though it was impossible to tell whether he believed the lie or not. “Ooh, look, another character! I’m getting into this!”

A new scene played, and this time it showed a shrine at the top of one of the island mountains, a Tori gate surrounded by verdant green and with a grand view of the town of Ocean Tides far below, and the magnificent ocean beyond. The gate glowed a bright blue, forming a portal within its arch, and then a beautiful woman strode through. She was a beautiful Japanese woman with striking features, her face elegant and demure and regal all at once, with expressive eyebrows and a soft, coy pair of lips. She wore a red shrine maiden outfit with a white inner trim, a taste of tantalising cleavage on display where the v-neck formed. Her figure was slim, yet she had trim waist and bare legs shown off by the leg slits in the outfit, and her bust was clearly quite lovely.  But what was even more striking about her was that she wasn’t truly human: a pair of large orange and white fox ears sat atop her head, poking out from her silky black hair. Her irises were bright orange, and four equally orange fox tails with fluffy white tips spread out from behind her - two to each side. The name beneath her as she strode down the path to the town below was Mika.

“Wow, she’s cool,” Tom said, before nudging his friend. “Think we get to date her?”

“Dude, she’s like a furry,” Max said, playing it cool, though in truth he found her entrancing. “A kitsune or whatever!”

“Well, I’d ask her out!” Tom chuckled. “You know, if I had you as my wingman, of course. The fox ears and tails are cute. At least I think so.”

Max smirked to himself. “Well, maybe we’ll be able to romance her character when-”

The musclebound man was suddenly interrupted by the screen going haywire. The colours crackled and shifted, pixels flashing and displaying a photo negative of Mika the kitsune and Hiroshi the ikemen archetype suddenly clutching their bodies in shock. The sound warbled through the computer speakers.

“BZZZT MIKA MIKA YOU ARE MIKA - HIROSHI BZZZT BZZT HIROSHI WHY AM I HIROSHI THIS MAKES NO BZZZT FOXTAIL? I HAVE FOXTAILS PLURAL!? I’M NOT A BZZZT KITSUNE BZZZT-”

“Woah, that’s weird,” Tom said. “Hey, you’re good with electronics. Do you know what’s going-”

He never got to finish the sentence, because suddenly the screen stretched outwards, stretching like a blown bubblegum balloon. Both men screamed as hands of static shot out from the expanding screen, but it was too late to escape: it gripped them by their wrists and began to pull them forwards, into the screen. 

“What the fuck!?” Max cried. “Tom, don’t tell me you’re back into LSD again!?”

“I never took it!” Tom yelled, struggling against the arms as he was pulled further forward. “I just liked reading about the history of it. You know, it’s really fascinating because-”

“NOT NOW! ARGGH!”

They began to enter the screen, pulled up to the forearms into the crackling nightmarescape that had stretched unbelievably wide to accommodate them both. Tom was starting to kick at the screen, only for his legs to get stuck. He was struggling to think of a way to escape, but for all his dozens of different obsessions over the years, nothing had prepared him for this. Soon his face was being pressed against the screen, becoming part of it. He could feel himself being dissolved into pixels, and Max was only a few seconds behind him, trying to punch and pull against this nightmarish scenario but failing to do so. For all his strength, nothing was working.

“The cord!” he suddenly cried. “Unplug it!”

“All my limbs are going in, dude!” Tom managed to stammer. His mouth entered the screen, preventing him from speaking at all. But he’d said enough. Max kicked at the hardware of his PC, stored at his feed beneath the desk. He curled his foot around the cord, desperate to yank it out. 

“I can d-do this! I can - MMPHH!”

But he never had the chance to find out if it would work, because the suction of the warping screen suddenly increased, pulling him in like a wet noodle through a pair of hungry lips. The man didn’t even get to scream until he was dissolved into code.

Code. 

Code.

It was everywhere. All around Tom and Max as they flew through some kind of cyberspace dimension. Ones and zeroes were everywhere. The two men tried to reach for one another as they hurled head over heels through this world of black and white and single digits, but where they began and ended was too difficult to determine, for they were now ones and zeroes too. Max and Tom immediately knew what was happening, and were terrified for good reason. The stories of this game were true; it really did have the power to suck people into the game. Mark and Aaron, the disappeared young men who had previously occupied this house, had likely suffered the same fate. But had they died, or gone elsewhere?

“We’Re NoT gOiNg To DiE tOm!” Max managed to scream.

“wHaT dO YoU mEaN!?”

“IT’s ThE gAmE! ThAt’S wHeRe We ArE gOiNg!!!”

A ripple of colour opened up before them. A great blue ocean that grew larger and larger as they catapulted towards it at great speed. Something was happening to their bodies, but the experience was too overwhelming to focus on anything except the rapidly approaching sea. A dot within it grew as they accelerated towards it; a beautiful tropical island and several other small ones that clustered around it. The region of what Max realised was Tropico rose to greet them, and nothing was there to arrest their fall.

He managed to get out half a scream before the world turned white.

To Be Continued . . .