Page 9 of Control

“Or escorts,” Clover added with a coy smile as if she were saying something naughty.

“Right,” I said, offering a smile right back. “Or escorts.” Our drinks soon arrived and our waitress, appropriately named Alice Hyatt, told us our order of cheese sticks would be out shortly. “That’s the greatest thing about Aurora, at least in my opinion. You can learn things here like how to speak another language or how to sew, cook, or ride a motorcycle, and that knowledge stays with you even after you leave the game world.”

“So,” Clover said as she looked around the club more. “I could learn how to…write poetry if I wanted.”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding my head. “There’s really no limit except that you have to take into account that any activity you learn here, you have to be physically able to do it in real life for it to have any lasting impact in the real world. Like if you learn how to fly a plane, are you also able to perform that duty in the real world? If you’re blind there, then the answer is probably no. You couldn’t make full use of that skill so while you could learn it, it couldn’t really benefit you outside the game…unless you could find someone that was alright with letting a blind person fly an airplane.”

“What have you learned while you’ve been here?” Clover asked as our cheese sticks arrived. Alice, not wanting to interrupt our conversation, quietly set the dish onto the table and slide it over in between Clover and I. She then placed our drinks down in front of us and took her leave.

“Let me think,” I said, grabbing a cheese stick and nibbling on it, the texture of the cheese and crispy outer shell feeling just as it would in the real world. “Well, the last thing I learned was how to roller skate! Someone opened a roller skating rink and a bunch of us went by to have a look. I fell on my ass most of the night, but I eventually got better. Me and a few friends did that for a good week so now I can roller skate!” Clover smiled with me as she also enjoyed a cheese stick, biting into it and letting the melting cheese stretch out in front of her as she pulled the uneaten side away from her mouth. “What else, um. I learned how to knit a blanket. That was interesting.” Clover took a sip of her watermelon-flavored cocktail. “And that I can fit a level 2 butt plug in my ass.”

“What the….” Clover spat her drink out in utter shock and amazement, pink juice spraying all over the table top in front of her. She covered her mouth to try and hold in as much as she could but it was no use. After taking a few seconds to recover and reach for a napkin, Clover said “Did you say you used a butt plug?” Admittedly, I found her reaction amusing and had a good laugh over it.

“I told you,” I said, holding back a much heartier laugh than I gave her. “Things in this place, including sex, are much more prominent than in the real world. When people are here, they do not hold back sexually. It’s a huge aspect and a big reason why there are no children allowed in here. That’s why the game has such a stringent review process for people that want to play. They absolutely do not want kids in here. If kids wanna play a game, let them go get on Fortnite or Overwatch or whatever other game that’s rated for them. This place, Aurora, this playground is for the adults.” Clover continued to clean her face with a napkin as the spat out contents of her drink slowly despawned.

“That was just, like wow!” Clover was obviously a little more taken aback by my comment than I’d intended. “So…is that like your…thing? You like butt plugs?”

“What,” I said, my mind already moving on from the overtly sexual joke. “Oh! No, no. Butt plugs aren’t really my thing. I’ve used them before, but they’re not a huge turn on for me. I just kind of wanted to gauge where you were on the sexuality scale. I’d mentioned earlier that this place has a ton of sex and I figured if something like that joke shocked you then I would strongly advise you not visit any of the rooms that are around strictly for sex.”

“Are they really that bad?” Clover asked, the curiosity in her voice obvious.

“I wouldn’t say they’re bad,” I offered back. “Bad, after all, can be very subjective. What’s bad for you might be great for the next person.”

“So what do you think would be bad for me?” Clover said, almost defensively. “I think I can handle sex just fine!” She wasn’t upset, but was clearly trying to act far more grown up than she really was. In that moment, I contemplated if maybe she’d purposely lied about her age on her profile. The minimum age for playing in Aurora is 18, but even most 18 year olds could quickly become overwhelmed with some of the sexually explicit rooms they’d have access to. While most rooms are available to all players, a handful are exclusive access only which often requires you to either get pre-approved by the owner or for you to have special access credentials as I do from my Escort license.

“Clover,” I said, leaning forward to her as I dropped the remaining bit of my cheese stick on the serving plate and cleaned off my fingers with a napkin. “There are rooms here where you go in and literally every single person there is engaged in some sort of sex act. Every single person! And I’m not talking a room with 10 or 15 people in it. I mean hundreds of people all having sex. I’ve been to those rooms! It can get completely wild in them.” The look on Clover’s face was priceless. It was clear she was very much a novice when it came to sex in real life, much less sexual encounters and how they could be in Aurora. “Clover…your profile says you’re 22. Now I normally don’t pry and ask for personal information, but I have to know. Are you really 22 or are you just putting that in your profile and user data to make yourself seem older? I have to ask because if you’re really only 18 or 19, I really don’t feel great about….”

“Mormon,” Clover blurted out, interrupting me. “I…was raised Mormon and my parents didn’t let us watch much TV or use the internet.” I sat there silently for a moment, giving her time to tell me more. “I’ve…had sex before. With a guy in college. It was just that one time though and it hurt and he didn’t want to see me anymore after that.” Even though I’d had people admit things to me, often times very personal or dark stories of their lives, it still took me by surprise when they’d reveal such things. You’d think at this point, doing what I do and talking to so many people about their personal lives that I’d get used to it but I never do. I know it’s because the things they tell me, their stories, are possibly turning points in their lives. For me and for anyone else hearing them, it may not seem like much but to the person telling it, some of these experiences are life changing in ways we may not fully be able to understand.

“Wow,” I said back to her with a slight grimace on my face. “What an asshole. He just stopped calling you or something?”

“Yeah,” she said, a slight touch of sadness in her voice. “I guess I wasn’t interesting enough for him or…whatever.” I could tell this single experience was a sore spot for her and not at all that uncommon in Aurora or the real world.

“Men can be real jackasses at times,” I said to her. “That happens here too sometimes. You meet someone and you think you form a decent enough connection and then suddenly some stupid stuff ruins it all or they just ghost you completely.”

“That ever happen to you?” Clover asked. “I can’t see someone wanting to do that you. You’re so pretty and you’re basically a celebrity here!”

“Celebrity or not,” I said back to her, “people will end up hurting you.” I pushed the white, ceramic dish of crispy cheese sticks away from me and over to Clover in case she wanted more. “It’s happened a couple of times, earlier on when I first got started here. When the game first came out, it was all so new to everyone and relationships started rather quickly. Plus, at first, there were maybe 200 of us so it felt like everyone knew each other and when that happens, people talk, rumors spread. It can get ugly sometimes.”

“So who did it to you?” Clover said, moving into waters I really didn’t want to wade into. I deflected.

“I’d rather not say,” I told her. “It was some time ago and for all I know they’re not even playing anymore. I find it best sometimes to just leave the past in the past.” Clover nodded her head and didn’t push me on it. “Relationships here are often fickle. Too many people have this idea that just because we’re in a game that feelings and emotion shouldn’t matter. Game or not, every single avatar you see here has a person behind it. People like to forget that when it’s convenient for them. It’s all fun and games until it happens to them. I’ve talked to a huge number of players who thought that way only for it to get turned around on them. Only then did they realize.”

“How did you end up talking to them all?” Clover asked.

“Escorting,” I said as I looked out to the club and the people mingling with each other. “I know it has this reputation for providing one particular kind of service and that is very true to some extent. A lot of my old clients really just wanted to have sex which is fine. But every now and then I’d get someone that was really hurting and simply wanted someone to comfort them. They needed a shoulder. At first it was a little awkward because I’d had this expectation that all they wanted was sex, but over time I started to understand more and more that were in real pain. Someone or something had worked them over pretty good. Or sometimes it wasn’t necessarily about something that happened here. Real life still bleeds into this place all the time and even when you come here to try and get away from it all, those thoughts and feelings, those experiences, they never go away.”

“What did they tell you?” Clover asked as I pulled the half eaten dish of cheese sticks from in front of her and set it at the edge of the table, letting our waitress Alice know we were finished with it. “Was it mostly relationship stuff?”

“A lot of it was,” I said. “Sometimes someone hurt them pretty bad and they wanted to vent. I was fine with that. Other times it was about real life stuff like work or family problems. They’d paid for my time so I wanted to give them what they wanted and in those cases, they wanted an objective response to the problems they had and I gave that to them.” “I laughed a little to myself, thinking of some of the past experiences I’d had with some clients. “In fact I know that me talking to clients started to get around because over time, more and more of them came to me just to talk about their lives. Was kind of strange really. People began to assume I was a therapist in real life because I was, according to them, so good at listening and giving objective feedback.”

“Wait,” Clover said as she put up her hand. “Are you actually a therapist in real life?” I pursed my lips together and looked down for a moment, contemplating my answer. After a few seconds, I looked back up to her, her eyes fixed on me and eager for my response.

“Not a therapist,” I said while shaking my head. “I’m…just me. But I somehow inadvertently became a sort of therapist here. It got to the point where I had to specifically state in my profile that I was not and have never been any sort of therapist or psychologist. I do read a lot about human nature and how people react to certain situations, but I’ve never gone to school for it. I’d thought about it at one point though. There are a few players that teach classes here on various topics so if I really wanted to, I could attend those and learn more.”

“You can take college courses here?” Clover asked while smiling. “Can you actually get a degree?”

“No,” I said while giving her a smile back. “You can’t get a degree here, but you can still learn about all sorts of things. Nothing is official as far as earning stuff like college credit, but the knowledge is solid. The people who run those classes, some of them actually are college professors and teachers so they know their stuff. It’s really only caught on in the past year or so. One teacher started a room and offered to teach Spanish to those that wanted to learn and it blossomed from there. Now you can learn a ton of other languages as well how to do all sorts of things like fixing cars or photography, how to create a website or even how to please your significant other in bed.” Clover’s face started to turn red over my comment. “What can I say, Clover. It really is a thing and it’s pretty important both here and in real life.”

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