Chapter 3 - Acclimation

Over that “night” Marisse’s dreams were filled with passion and perversions she did not even think were even hidden in her darkest of desires. It was such a blur though that by the time she woke up, all she was left with was a pounding heart and a sopping crotch. Sitting up with a start the young woman looked about. 
 
Like last time this had happened, it seemed that she had been moved to another room. And, also like last time, it was worse off than before. The wallpaper was peeling about the corners and significant water damage now stained the ceiling, which was comprised of what looked to be cheap asbestos tiles. Her “desk” was now a folding table with a padded surface, similarly the chair was a cheap fold out as well. 
 
The bed springs beneath her groaned as she swung her legs over the side of the bed and planted her feet onto the short cut, stained carpet. However, as she did so her eyes widened at the sight. Her legs now had short stubble dotting throughout her flesh. While not as thick as her armpits or pubic region, it was far more than she had ever been used to personally. How long was she out? The dark hairs belied what had felt, to her, to only having been one night of “sleep.” Of course it was hard to say how much time had really passed for her given everything that was going on inside of her. Similarly, her toenails had lengthened notably as well, having turned a grungy shade of off -white and pushing pretty easily into the yellow spectrum, her nail polish entirely gone. 
 
Outside the view was even worse, the brick wall now blocking the whole view. From the corner she could make out that she was only a couple floors from the street now, which looked to be littered with garbage and advertisement papers now that the smog was not obscuring it. But now that she was so low, she no longer could see the sky and check the time that way. In either case the lighting was terrible. Were she to step into the bathroom area, which now looked just to be a toilet and a sink with a scratched up mirror, she would have seen how the shadows in the room drew across her face, making her changing features all the more prominent. 
 
“Jiāofù!” Another slamming knock before thudding footsteps away.
 
The message! Had they seen it? No, how could they, she had not even slipped it out the door when she had been gassed…
 
Still, moving towards the front door, which creaked almost as loudly as her mattress as it opened, she found an even larger “care” package this time. Taking it to the bed she dumped the contents to find all the usual, except in larger quantities, as well as a few new things. The first thing she noticed was what looked to be a candy bar. The wrapping was brightly colored and the print all in Chinese of course, but it had that happy “candy” vibe to it she had grown familiar with as a child. The second was a single solitary alcohol wipe, as if to mock her lack of luxuries. It was still wrapped in its paper casing at least. The third was a small shaving kit. Pinned to it was her note, if not a bit smudged. Opening the kit she hopped to get something close to a razor, but felt her heart drop at the contents inside. Inside was what looked to be a pack of cigarettes, another set. However, upon opening the film she saw they were a deck of cards, specifically Chinese baseball cards. All of them were in terrible condition, the cellophane wrapping clearly being a redo job, and all the text had been penned over with kanji. On the side of the box there was a logo. “Razor Entertainment.” Very funny…
Had a thick, well-seasoned emotional stew inside of her that was simply frothing; heated by the fires of the burning rage that’d been building since she opened her dry, slightly-reddened eyes. Between the fact that she was in a shittier room, knocked out before she even had the chance to shower, and given this terribly, bitter taunt from her captors, she was sufficiently pissed at this turn of events - well past the point of articulation. 
 
“Ass!” she shouts down the hall before slamming the door, stomping into her room with her package… Before turning around to inspect the door, hoping she didn’t break anything. Sure, she was always trapped in here, but she didn’t want to be… Well, trapped even further due to her own stupidity. The frame of the door had cracked a little, but after opening and shutting it a little bit, she resolved that it was fine. 
 
Her neighbors weren’t exactly keen on it, she didn’t think - they seemed to shout louder through the thin walls now, and that wasn’t just because of how much more easily sound passed between them. If only due to how hard it was for her to pick out any one person speaking amongst the cacophony, she couldn’t tell what they were saying, if anything about her at all… But it all sounded terribly negative. 
 
With another heavy sigh, she sets down her package on the table, which creaks dangerously as she does. The chair does much the same as she eases herself down into it, holding her face in her hands… Holding her weird-feeling face in her hands. Her hands broke from their limp cup and pressed into her cheeks and chin, feeling around. “Hm?” she muses, cocking her head. Her face felt… Weird to her, but how, she was none the wiser. Her hands part with her after a series of weak slaps to her cheeks; a small attempt at waking herself up. 
 
Even if she’d only been… Active, at least, for three days, she felt like she was falling into some sort of routine. Wake up, get package, rifle through it, eat, get gassed, rinse and repeat in a shittier room. At least she spiced it up with a few pills and a game last time… Which, she supposed she aught to get a headstart on today. 
 
The nagging headache had returned - whatever JadeTech had done to her felt like they’d put a termite in her brain that was eating away at everything that was… Her; that was Marisse, but all she knew was that she had a migraine. With a mouthful of water and two pills, she attempted to solve it… Even if the pills only helped work to JadeTech’s ends. None the wiser, she set it down and booted up her computer, feeling oddly… Driven, today. She had in mind the game she wanted to try out, and was determined to figure out the keyboard today. 
 
Marisse wanted to say that she figured they only gassed her for doing a poor job yesterday, and she wanted all the time she could get to study the keyboard, take a shower, and figure this whole situation out… But she honestly didn’t know why she was so determined today. Scratching her stubbly crotch, she digs through the bag for another box of food and the daily note, looking to see if it, or the one on her wallpaper, were any different today. Idly, she plugs her headset into the ports on her computer, throwing it around her neck. 
Using the start menu, she tracks down the logo she’d clicked on yesterday - looking at the title in kanji. “Aion, huh?” she muses, trying to pick out the symbols that make up the word… Seeing as the title probably wouldn’t be translated because it wasn’t a word or sentence or anything, she figured she’d have a leg up if she learned those symbols, cross-referencing them with the keyboard. “Alright, alright, I… Got it, I think.” she mumbles, going to the search bar and typing in the symbols she saw - a smile comes to her face as she sees the game pop up again. 
 
A part of her felt… Proud she was able to remember that. Maybe if she got good enough she’d be able to translate her stuff online and send it off as actual English - now that they might not expect. Her smile drops. Or… They would, actually. Booting up the game again, she scans over the keyboard, feeling much more… Familiar as she digs hungrily into her food, no longer fumbling with her chopsticks… Well, not using them as clumsily as she’d had for the past few days, at least.
 
The package was more insulting than the last. All of this was like some sort of sadistic joke! So this was how they were going to punish her huh?
 
Now that she had been awake for a small bit, Marisse really began to feel the affects of being knocked out. Her entire body felt stiff and ached, unaware that she had lost a whole inch from her bones compressing. She looked a wreck at this point, the constant feed of chemicals in her system taking its toll on her body simply from all the trauma.Bags had now formed under her eyes, slight wrinkles having appeared about the sides of her eyelids while those bags formed a crease as she smiled or moved her mouth too much. In short, it made her look older. Her dark roots had taken over more of her hair, her style lost to the messiness and tangled knots that had begun developing. It looked like she had not had a haircut in a few weeks at this point. 
 
Working on the computer, she did indeed feel more comfortable using the keyboard, unaware that the language reprogramming had advanced substantially inside of her brain during her last black out. Where before the kanji had just become somewhat more familiar, and patterns had begun to emerge, now Marisse could pick out certain symbols and begin pairing their meaning more intuitively. Of course, as the drugs worked by overwriting information, not creating new information, this meant that Marisse found herself stumbling slightly over her own English text. She could still read it, but a bit of that innate understanding was now forever lost, leaving her much less confident in what she saw in the game’s chat as she tried to balance that with learning the game.
 
Aion was an easy game to figure out, or maybe it was just similar to the last and she had started with a bit of a boost. In either case the keyboard controls seemed to be independent of knowing kanji and more about memorizing location at least. her character was  SFHETS5, a completely randomly generated creation that looked like the diarrhea of a statistical obsessed demon, a hodgepodge of random features. The same program worked it’s magic as before, endlessly spewing out spam, again and again and again endlessly. It did not take her long to ignore it though. 
 
Though she had more trouble ignoring all the rage she was getting in the general and private channels. Unlike the last game, this chat box seemed to be tabbed. Having been playing around with it she realized they were sorted by various topics. As such, she was able to see what people whispered to her or were saying about her in the other tabs. 
 
None of it was good. 
 
It pissed her off more than yesterday. Maybe it was the stress, or her achiness. In either case she did not have the patience for it. As she tried working out the keyboard she hit a couple keys at the same time and suddenly a pop up came up in the game.
 
“SETTING: ENGLISH.”
 
Could it be? She pressed a key tentatively where she would have expected an E. An E appeared! While she would have to work from memory of a keyboard layout, she could type in English! As she lifted her arms up in victory a sudden crack of pain jolted through her head from the sudden movement, spiking her migraine and making the room spin. Marisse felt herself tip over and spill onto the floor as her inner ear seemed to temporarily give out. 
Not that she would have been able to read it yet, but there was indeed a warning on that bottle of pills. “TAKE WITH FOOD.” Or at least that was what the kanji would have said. When she had begun eating, she had also entered the game. She did not even realize she had stopped. Unfortunately the pills had a nasty accelerating effect when unaccompanied with food in the system. The migraine panged throughout her head like buckshot scattering throughout the inside of her skull. What she felt as pain was actually the sudden spontaneous “popping” of her brain cells, the exploding membranes increasing her cerebral pressure enough to cause the arteries running to her brain to dilate, hence migraine. It was the drug working haphazardly. What cells it ran over, the chemical either stripped away entirely, or rewrote over the following minutes, all of it focused on her lingual system. What cells were surviving had been reprogrammed entirely. Now, while her brain was far from converted at this point, what would have been a solid couple of weeks, if not more, of chemical reworking had just violently shot throughout her brain in this particular development, and would likely  keep cascading in progression likely for the next couple of hours. 
 
As she sat back up the pain was subsiding back to “default” levels, she got back in the chair, ready to finally get help. 
 
Marisse clawed her way up from the ground much like a zombie from its grave - her hand shot up and grabbed onto the table, allowing her to drag herself up as the world gave its last few dying rotations, giving her a moderate sense of stability. It took a moment or two of sitting in her chair for her to realize that she wasn’t being gassed again.
Though, even if it wasn’t that that fucked her up… She had no way of knowing the true cause of her migraine, and as such she laid the blame on the most likely culprit - JadeTech. For all she knew, they planted a chip in her head and could knock her out at any moment! … Well, maybe not that, or else they wouldn’t use the gas. But, it was one hell of a coincidence that such a thing happened to her when she switched back to English. Was that just a warning? Were they going to do it again if she looked for help? 
 
Marisse began to sweat, eyes wide as she stared at the screen. Were they going to… Kill her? 
 
A guffaw escapes her lips. “Heh. Hehe… Hahahah…” she weakly laughed, just to rid herself of the tension, all the while holding her head. No, they wouldn’t kill her - she hadn’t done anything anyone else wouldn’t have done, and they probably needed her to speak some English, anyway. They obviously needed her to speak Chinese too and didn’t teach her that, but she didn’t care about that at all. 
 
If this plan of her works, if even one person takes her message seriously, she’ll be home free! The risks were great, but the reward was greater. As her fingers dropped from her aching head and hovered over the keys, she… Drew a blank, at first. It took a bit more time… A bit more effort to think of what she was going to say, gears visibly turning as she thinks of what, by all means, should be a simple message. Though it was simply-worded and brief, she did manage to pull through… And create something comprehensible, at least.To each of the people that’d sent her private messages, even if they were the sickest of death threats or the kindest requests to stop, she sent a uniform message:
 
“Sorry. My name is Marisse Sanders from Texas, USA and I got kidnapped by people named JadeTech and put in China, I am serious, even if you think I joke please call police/FBI/CIA/anyone who can help and tell them about me please.”
 
For as peculiar as her grammar was, she just couldn’t think of any other way of wording her plea… And, she didn’t exactly have time on her side. Like she’s deflating, Marisse exhales and slumps into her chair. Now, she thinks, comes the hardest part. Praying it works, and playing along with JadeTech. If nobody saw her little stunt, then she wouldn’t be the target of any suspicion if she was actually doing her job, right? To everyone that didn’t tell her to stop, and whispered to her with serious inquiries, she bit her lip and replied to them - to her chagrin, positively. 
 
“Yes, offers are good.”
“No bans, just you give and you get.”
“Sharing = caring, we care.”
 
It made her sick to do this, but it was her only choice. Thankfully, she didn’t seem to smell any gas yet… But honestly, and dejectedly, expected it. 
The least she could do was get some food in her belly until then, she figured, and began to quickly force the remainder of the box’s contents into her mouth, pausing only once to rap herself on the forehead. 
 
“Goddamn it, forgot to shower.” 
 
That guffaw sounded wrong to her. Her voice, it was almost deeper, the sound something akin to an animal in many respects. It was not the laugh she was used to, but the situation was so absurd what was she to say she was not just losing it altogether? It felt like her head was a carbonated soda shaken up too much, and that her brain wanted to fizzle right out of her ears. But at least it was not a painful as much as a lingering pressure that almost reminded her of a sinus cold.
 
Responding to the "business" inquiries was frustrating, but it at least bought her time. If she was being monitored even if only periodically, by doing some work she increased the odds of her actions going undetected. As she continued to reply to the messages she heard occasional pings from the speakers. Glancing in the corner towards the clock, in remembrance of last time, she saw that instead of the clock flashing, a counter above it was pinging each time it rose by one. Were those people that bought her pitch? 
 
As she danced between replying and finishing her meal she once again forgot about showering, instead getting engrossed with the game and chatting. However, in spite of remembering the keys pretty well, Marisse continued to stumble with her thoughts, words just not coming as quickly as she would like them to. Unaware that the medication was still accelerated for the time being, and having been working in general, the longer she actually kept at the computer, the worse she was going to get. 
 
Unfortunately for her, accelerated or not, the true insidious nature of this drug program was revealed in how it progresses its pace. By working on the computer, constantly reading and trying to convey herself through writing and recollection, she was stimulating the parts of her brain that were necessary for such tasks. When a section of a brain is stimulated, blood flow to that part of the brain is increased, and as a result, more of that chemical cocktail flows across the surface membranes of the brain cells in those areas. So the more she engaged a part of her brain, the more quickly, and severely it would deteriorate. And that was the catch for Jadetech, once a worker caught on to their job, the job would do the work of changing them on their own. 
 
By the time Marisse had finished her meal she had felt her jaw pop a couple of times, unaware that her chin had broadened slightly as well as her jawbone. Her teeth and eyes ached, but she took that as symptoms of the headache of course, unaware that those were beginning to change as well. 
 
As she sat there at the computer time seemed to fly by, hours going by without Marisse even realizing she had not gotten out of the cheap chair. During all of that, the computer’s heat venting out of the side ports were heating the room and the immediate area, making her sweaty and sticky, her slickened flesh feeling like greased chicken skin after a while. But every time she would think to get up and clean herself up, someone new would ask about her “offers.” After a while she started to forget about asking for help at all.
 
And then, a private message appeared. This one different from the others. 
 
“I am a moderator. This is a formal warning to stop spamming or else this account will be banned.”
 
Another message, “I would have banned you outright as a bot, but we have received reports that you are claiming to be a kidnap victim. Do you require assistance? “
 
Marisse had her head down, away from the screen and buried in her second box of sauce-laden noodles, almost missing the message if not for the notification that came with it. When her eyes, which looked not only tired from how dazedly; boredly they looked at the screen, but from the bags beneath them and the shadows that the monitor cast across her face. However, a spark of life returned to her face and a noodle fell out of her mouth, splashing her chin and lips with sauce as she saw it. 
 
Hastily moving her box of food, she scrambled to reply as fast as she, and what she presumed to be her tired mind could muster. Her fingers moved quickly as she typed the words out, the only delay coming between them - thinking of what word should come next, as if she wasn’t used to the language. 
 
“Heh, the Chinese must be… I must be getting used to it.” she warbles, clearing her throat afterward in an attempt to clear the faint distortion from her voice. She didn’t… Sound like herself. 
 
In her rush, her message to the moderator came out oddly, but got her point well-enough across.
 
“Thank for reply. Name is Marisse Sanders, got kidnapped by people named JadeTech and got made to do this spam or I get punished. Don’t know where I am, somewhere in China please send help fastly.”
 
“Fastly?” she muses as she sends it off, praying he won’t think she’s messing with him. Somehow the word sounded weird, but… She couldn’t think of anything better. 
 
Biting her lip, she watches another few spam messages pop up and hover over her character… 
Would another moderator step in and ban her before she got the chance to do anything? Would JadeTech shut down her account before that? Even if she does get banned, would JadeTech just provide another account to spam with? 
 
Holding her head in her hands, she thinks of the possibilities, taking deep breaths… Oh, god are they gassing her? No, no, no, that’s just anxiety… God, she actually had a chance to get out of here! Filled with energy for the first time in a while, she pries her tired eyes away from the screen and audibly peels her sweaty, nude ass off of the chair, the cheap plastic clinging to her supple flesh every inch of the way until it got too far. 
 
Seemingly with every inch she moves from it, her joints pop, giving life to small pockets of warmth where tension had been moments ago. Stretching only gets rid of the few areas her movement hadn’t before, leaving her only feeling warmer… Not like she wanted that, anyway. Idly she fans herself, trying to wipe some of the droplets of sweat from her face, feeling her stomach wrench as she runs a hand through her greasy hair, which clings to her cheeks and neck. 
 
“Yeeugh.” she murmurs, peeling her hair off of herself. “Today, I swear… A shower.” she mumbles, trying to think of the words again. Even when she’s talking…? 
 
It wasn’t just the sweat that bugged her - in fact, she wouldn’t normally care about how drenched she was. It was the smell. The horrid, pungent saline scent that tinged every breath she took and only moved about the small room, her presence seeming to stain every corner of it with the foul odor. It’d not quite gotten to the point of making her eyes water… But smelling it at all was new for her, so used to long, hot, soapy showers to wash off any bit of sweat or dirt she may’ve amassed when she worked or worked out.
 
With baited breath she awaits the mod’s response, sitting back down and taking her box of food again, eager to finish it, to put to rest stomach which has long-since been knotted with anxiety.
 
Some sauce spilled onto the keyboard from when she had turned her head away from eating to spot the message. All the while she tried to reply to the person Marisse did not even notice the similar globs of sauce and spices that had splattered over the swell of her bust and over her stomach. No, the more she typed the more her head seemed to hurt. It was like Jadetech was outright in her head, bopping her brain with a stick and saying, “no!” as one would to a dog that just piddled on the carpet.
 
With her mental filter eroding as she continued to stimulate her communication centers in her brain, she found herself mumbling out what she was trying to type every so often, and of course thinking out loud whenever she paused to think or note something. However, her voice was indeed warbled, deeper but with a sort of a melodic cadence to it, like the faint beginnings of a Chinese accent, the beginnings of enunciation issues slowly working into the root of her tongue’s muscle memory, or more aptly, removing things from that memory.
 
Similarly her syntax was starting to erode away, as evident by her typing, but also in how she was starting to approach her English. As the familiarity with the language decayed in her mind, that natural feel that a sentence structure just felt “right” was washing away. That lack of confidence made her stumble over the keys a bit more.
 
The heat radiating off the computer had filled the room pretty quickly. It had become clear that the room was not ventilated, the temperature of the space having climbed throughout the time she had been on the computer. But now she had become acutely aware of her smell. While she was a human being, and she had experienced her own body odor before, this was something much more pungent. In reality, the combination of the food she had been eating, which was heavy in thick spices, and her greasiness that was making it a problem. She had been unclean for so long, all that oil, sweat, dead skin, and the like had coated over her flesh and the sweat was just turning it into a brine that evaporated in heavy plumes of reek, adding to the humidity of the room. She could almost taste her stink on her pallet, which, much to her disgust, made her stomach gurgle hungrily. It reminded her that she had not cleaned up pretty much at all at this point, her teeth felt grimy and coated as she ran her tongue over them, the things feeling more slablike. Although she thought that was from not brushing and not because they had indeed grown slightly, actually losing some of their formerly straight, orthodontically adjusted appearance as the real estate in her mouth became a smidge more precious. She really needed to-
 
Ping!
 
She looked at the screen, grinning. Butterflies flittered about her stomach, making her forget about the smell, or thinking about how her chair probably had her stench ingrained in the foam of the cushion at this point. No, if she could get help she could finally get out of here and never see this horrid place again!
“We do not take fraudulent claims lightly. Can you demonstrate your sincerity? Do you have any information that can prove what you are saying?
 
Marisse paused, why would they doubt her? Weren’t they obligated to believe her outright? All they needed to do was call the police! These stupid Western idiots. No wonder people hated the US. She really had a mad forming. A..what? She was mad! Still, it was her only way out of here. She needed to be of patience. 
 
However she seemed to be taking too long, and another message appeared.
 
“Due to the severity of your claims, please click the help icon and submit a formal ticket. Please title it ‘Criminal Report Claim: Seeking Assistance’ so that we may quickly respond to your needs. This way you can write out your situation without worrying about the chat limit. Our staff will respond to you via whisper for immediate response.”
 
“Demonstrate… D-demonstrate my…?” she muses, an eyelid beginning to twitch as she squints at the screen. “Sin-seer-it-ee?” She sounds out the word before drawing back, shouting in rage. “Demonstrate sincerity!? What, fuck, fucking pig dog son of bitch!” she shouts, bringing her fist down from up high and stopping just short of slamming it into the table, stopping largely to keep it from collapsing in on itself. 
 
Her voice was shrill and profanity was flowing from her mouth without regard for making sense of any of it, coming… Unnaturally broken, as if spoken by a child who’d only heard them in the forms that weren’t appropriate for them to use when they wanted to use them.
 
When her anger was taken down to a low simmer, her face red and breast heaving with breath, forcefully clicked on the help icon, copying and pasting the mod’s suggested title for it, largely because she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to remember that much or not… Her abundance of sleep, rage, and the drugs that must still be working their way out of her system hadn’t done well for her articulation, she reasoned. But, after all, she didn’t need to write like an English major just to say she’s been kidnapped, which is something nobody should take lightly. After all, she could just be a child who couldn’t type well for all they knew.
 
Though she tries her best to collect herself, it’s hard - impossible, actually. The nagging headache had only gotten worse with the angrier she’d gotten, causing her to groan and fumble for the bottle of pills. Another two ought to get her to her deadline. Gulping them down with the last of her water, she sets to writing out her ‘support ticket’. 
 
Her frustration continues to froth and bubble as she comes up short for words - though, she tries to be understanding. They need information - she’s sure there’s always going to be some asshole out there in the west who’ll submit a kidnapping claim for fun an-... Wait, how did she think of them? How did she think of her home? 
 
“Western?” she mumbles, pausing for a moment. Sure, it was… Certainly one term for the world outside of Asia, but she never used it before. It… Thinking on it, it seemed to lump such a large portion of the world into one group, and she couldn’t do that. A dry chuckle escapes her. “There are more than one asshole out there.” she says, clucking her tongue and musing over how she phrased that. “And I’m one of them.” she reminds herself. Despite her words, she feels an odd… Disconnect. A distance between both her words and the truth, and herself and her home. It wasn’t just a feeling of her being in a foreign land, but like she was lying to herself to remind herself of her home. Part of her felt sick. 
 
“Can’t wait… Until I’m back in… The US.” she says, forcing a smile through her frustration, forcing her words as well. These guys needed information, and they were getting it. 
When all was said and done, she grimaced as she looked over what she’d written. It felt… Weird. Alien, both like it didn’t look how it was supposed to, and that it didn’t belong at all.
 
“to help people,
            hear: name = marisse sanders; home = USA, texas, fort worth. born = 1993-3-14. one day woke up in room in china, see signs in chinese out window. tried run but take back. wake up in new place still china. told play game to say thing to get money by people name JadeTech. say do bad thing to me if not do thing. so do thing. i not do thing good and wake up new place still china nother time. place get badder every wake up time. so do thing and talk you, you say help me, you say need in form a t ion i give all i know. i know no more. tell mom/sister i alive. pls send help i dont know if JadeTech will take to badder place now dont know what happen time is small.
pls help pls”
 
“Ah, there we go.” she proudly says, capitalizing her name. That cleared up a few of her worries about its look. With that, she sends it off, looking at the clock down on the bottom of the screen. She… Got up early, didn’t she? And, it wasn’t long before the mods came and started talking to her… So it couldn’t be that long until the deadline, right? The mods… Wouldn’t take that long to respond to something this serious, right?
 
The seriousness of the situation was making itself known again as Marisse continued to struggle to articulate herself in the very language she had known her whole life. For crying out loud she had even gotten her family to get her an opt out pass for high school French! Now she was having trouble reading a fucking message! The sense from this made madness in her!
 
Her hands clenched into fists as she tried to calm herself down. The sensation of being unable to communicate was a vulnerable and terrifying experience in many respects. She had no control over the situation, it was almost akin to being a child once more, lost in a world that no longer made sense. Unfortunately, the more she tried to fight the mental block, the worse it would end up for her. After all, she was focusing as hard as she could on articulating herself, pouring her mental energy into the task and sending the drugs coursing through her system to that part of her brain like iron shavings to a magnetized rod, letting them cling, spike, and grow about the source and take over bit by bit.
 
However, out of all the things she could have done about the situation, she wound up making if not the worst choice, at least one of the top three worst. By taking those pills she had only added more fuel to the chemical fire burning in her brain and body. That stiffness in her joints had returned again, unaware that her body’s bone structure was still altering. The medicine did alleviate some of the pain, since she did have food in her this time, but this was more of the medication than she had ever taken in a single day, not even a day, but an afternoon.
 
As she typed out her “formal” response, she felt her stomach churn, those butterflies multiplying as she fumbled over every word and sentence structure, making her feel both stupid and confused. Even spelling was starting to escape her, as some of the words needed to be sounded out then spelled phonetically a couple of times before she could correct herself. But, every time she did, there was a hollowness in it, like she was winging language lessons that she had not pulled out of her hat since she was in high school, a rustiness that did not quite scrape off as much as one tried to push forward and hope that the overall context made more sense than the statement to statement syntax.
 
In some respects, the frustration she was experiencing also fueled this emerging stereotype about Americans and Western thinking, as if bashing on the West would justify not being good at English because it’s not a “worthy” subject. That seed did indeed seem to have wormed its way into her brain, a certain elitism and xenophobia beginning to bud in her mind, both as a defense mechanism and a philosophical approach.
 
Still, she had sent it. Now all she needed to do was wait for them to read it and send help before that gas does anything else to her. She clicked around in the game a couple of times, trying to distract herself while all the while being acutely aware of each passing minute. She felt that at any moment she could end up getting gassed, although nothing of the sort had happened yet. 
 
Part of her began to wonder why that was. They had gassed her for all sorts of reasons. Surely they had to be monitoring her work since last time 5PM hit they had punished her pretty quickly. Were they watching her now? Did they know what she was doing? Or were they only checking at five? Marisse could hear what clearly was the sounds of sex in the room adjacent to the wall the table was pushed against. The walls were definitely thinner in this part of the building. For a moment she felt a pang of irritation, but then it was replaced with something new.
 
The sounds of that pleasure were almost arousing. 
 
She could feel her loins stir at the realization, her tongue darting out to glaze over her lips as her legs pressed together before she noticed what she was doing. No! This was not the time! Time small time not now! Marisse shook her head of the thoughts and tried to ignore the noises. After what seemed like an agonizing amount of time she heard the chirp of the whisper tab updating.
 
“Dear account holder #8279321, you are hereby banned due to violation of fraudulent use of monetary schemes, abuse of the communications network, and for perjury upon moderator examination of the previously mentioned offenses. You may appeal this decision in ninety days.” 
 
A couple minutes after that the game suddenly logged her out. When she tried logging back in, she just got an error. “Account suspended, please contact administrator to reinstate permission.” 
 
The pings in the bottom corner of the screen stopped as well. Above the clock the number 48/50 showed. Did she need to reach 50 in order to meet her quota? The clock read 4:47. 
 
“No.” 
 
Marisse barely noticed the clock at the bottom of the screen - only the sound of silence; the lack of pinging brought her attention to it, and even then it was fleeting. Her prime concern, her ticket out of here and back to the US… It had failed. All she could do was stare at the error message set before the login screen in disbelief - she flat-out didn’t believe it. Those people, regardless if they were smart, stupid, kind, assholes… They wouldn’t take her pleas lightly enough to ignore them.
 
“N-no…”
 
They wouldn’t! Sure, she might not’ve written those assholes a whole fucking essay, but all she’d said was the truth! There wasn’t anything they wouldn’t, or couldn’t believe in it! Unless…
 
“No!” she shouts, slapping her hands against the corners of the table, tears welling in her eyes. 
 
“Was it JadeTech? Did they have contact with the moderators? Were they the ones that banned her so she couldn’t get a response? Did they alter what her message said so the mods would think that it looked like a spam response?
 
“No, no, no!” she cries shoving off from her chair and stomping at the ground, so full of rage and despair she couldn’t help but vent it, doing so like a child having a temper-tantrum, futilely believing that it’d make some sort of change… But all it did was evoke a few plaintive cries from the rooms around her. The one where she could hear people fucking didn’t seem to have any problem, though. 
 
“Dumb, pig fuck foreign asshole! No idea what happens here! No idea, so stupid fuck!” she shrilly shouts stepping away from the computer, shaking and weeping. With that… With that game gone, there wasn’t any hope for her to restart her escape attempts. At least, there wasn’t anything she could do today. With a look of malice on her face, she shut down the game and double-clicked on the large, golden ‘W’ she saw in her start menu. 
 
With as familiar as she’d grown with the keyboard, she could, with some effort, read ‘Warcraft’ as one of the words. The others she presumed were ‘World of’, but the Chinese words for them. 
 
The very least she could do was set up shop again in this new game… Watching her character, some sort of burly… Animal thing with a name that looked like a jumble of letters, begin to slowly rattle off another message with a link to JadeTech. Presuming that those assholes weren’t behind her getting shut down on Aion, they’d want to see her hit those fifty pings… And with only nine minutes left, after her little outburst, she could only pray for them to roll in. She sulked over her keyboard, eyes reddened and cheeks moist with tears, holding her head in her hands sadly. 
 
“Please.” she sighs. “Just… Give me this.”
 
It was like she had been betrayed by her own people. The game was clearly an American version based on the chat, or at least English or something of the sort. And yet, no one took her seriously. Well, that was not quite right. Those that wanted to get in game currency for themselves sure seemed to take her seriously.  Those people were more than responsive apparently. Maybe Western culture was based in selfish needs after all.
 
Part of her wanted her to dissuade herself like before, to shake her head of the thoughts and focus on the positive and the potential avenues of escape, but a growing part of her just wanted to stop with all the mental exertion and no go against what felt to be more and more of a gut instinct about these people. Instead, she felt like it would just be better to use what opportunity she had and just say fuck all to anyone else. No wonder spammers did so well, they just capitalized on what these people wanted. 
 
The World of Warcraft logo was easy to recognize, it was pretty mainstream after all at this point. Not that she knew much about it. The game seemed to run through some sort of hub, “battle.net,” that boasted excellent security according to its subtitle. Well weren’t they the arrogant ones? 
 
Once her character had gotten going the threats flooded in. Some people even outright starting spamming her back. It did not matter though, she knew that came with the territory. However, a few pings came in after a couple of moments, along with some messages asking for details, proof, and interestingly enough, something called “bot checks.” 
 
While this was going on Marisse did notice that there was also a report button on the site, this one a bit more obvious than Aion’s. To an extent, there was always trying again, but it was also getting late. Besides, if they were watching her, pushing the limits even further could provoke her captors needlessly when she might in reality need to be at this for weeks, if not months. That and she also-
 
Ping ping ping.
 
The clock at the bottom of the screen flashed, as well as the fraction above it. Did she really make it? She made it! What did that mean? Was she free to go without any disturbance for the night? The game in front of her did not close. In fact, it looked like the following day’s quota fraction had opened up, the thing slowly filling following periodic pings. It seemed like she could get a head start if she really wanted to, but at the same time she could use a break. Wait, a break from what? 
 
Marisse had to recompose herself. Did she really think she had accomplished much? Well, of course she had, this would make it the first day without any major incident wouldn’t it? That had to be of value right? However her thoughts were interrupted by a sudden pounding on the door.
 
“Jiǎnglì!” The familiar voice of the delivery man shouted from the other side of the cheap door, prompting hoots and cries from the adjacent walls. Opening the door, she saw not a cheap plastic bag, but rather what looked to be a small hat box. Bringing it inside she popped the lid off and saw a note, this time entirely in Kanji, as well as a couple of items. It was the first one that grabbed her attention the most though.
 
A pair of white cotton panties, still sealed in what appeared to be individual packaging. 
 
Marisse had to make a double-take as she looked at the pair of panties in her hand, the crisp packaging crinkling lightly in her hand. It… Almost seemed too good to be true - they were actually rewarding her? Giving her something more than the bare necessities she needed to survive? 
 
Bringing the pair of panties back to her swampy, moist chair, she places the small box on the desk beside her trash bag… She was running out of room, just a little. Her eyes never left the pristine white of the raiment, and when she sat down, she gave a long sigh of relief. Whether she knew it or not - something inside of her clicked. Her entire body was awash in a feeling of relief - by no means abating the rage she still felt for how she’d failed, but… Made her feel like she wasn’t in imiment danger. JadeTech… They weren’t going to gas her, move her into a shittier room, or anything… And they were going to do that because she didn’t mess up. As with anyone, she looked for confirmation and reward for her work, no matter how easy or hard it’d been… And with that, she’d want to work simply for these rewards.
 
“Panties, huh?” she muses, a smile growing on her face. “I’ll put ‘em on… After my shower.”
 
Marisse smiled and set the pack of underwear back in the box, making her character move just a little to show some form of activity, that there was someone on the other end. A ping brought her attention to the small counter - she’d already gotten one of her fifty hits. So, she was already working towards tomorrow’s goal… What was the harm in trying to get it already? 
“I mean… I finish my work now, I go to sleep at a good time, I get tomorrow to myself.” she resolves, a smile coming to her lips. Getting into a schedule… Getting a hang of this new life of hers would be good. If she got to know the routine of everything, she’d be able to exploit it… And, what would a few days of playing to their end do? It’d give her time off of their radar - to take her out of the light of suspicion. 
 
Clapping her hands, she says “Perfect.” before clearing her throat, once more hearing the distortion. Leaving her character to… Sit around and spam, intent on getting to whatever messages come her way when she got back, she moves to the bathroom and looks about for the shower… While part of her knew she needed it, another part of her worried about what sort of state the bath was in… After all, it wasn’t exactly the fanciest place… 
 
“I’ll… Deal with it.” she mumbles, rubbing the back of her greasy head, looking at herself in the mirror for a moment. All of her hair seemed dark, due to how inundated it was with her sweat… The darker spot about her scalp didn’t exactly draw her eye. And after she took her shower, she thinks, she’ll have to dig into that box… And maybe make a snack of that candy bar from her care package.
 
The small cube-like space of her “hotel room” looked kind of pathetic, thinking back on it. Had anyone come in today they would have found an unwashed looking woman of mixed descent sitting in a box of a space, on a cheap fold out chair in front of a laptop on a low end table, with only a twin bed and a basic bathroom to keep her company. There were not even paintings on the walls in this room. But there was a certain amount of comfort in the room now that the quota was filled. While the place was a cheap dump, it was safe, at least in the respect that there seemed to be no gun violence, or crime aside from her...situation, no one really bugged her. She was just put in front of a computer. 
 
The dull throb of her headache seemed to had abated for now too, which almost amplified the relief of the situation. Sitting in front of the game the only downside seemed to be she was stuck playing this spambot character for the time being, unless she figured out how to make a new one. Would they even let her do that though? It was an issue potentially to reapproach in the future.
 
Inside the bathroom the shower was not quite as bad as she had expected. It was not particularly clean, and it did not seem very fancy, but it did look functional. Unfortunately, the bathroom was barren in terms of products. No shampoo, no soap. But, hot running water was better than nothing. The shower head was rather high up, almost rooted at the corner of the ceiling in the bathroom. It had a pair of ceramic cross knobs directly beneath them, one with a red dot and the other with a blue one. While the shower was rooted in a bathtub, there was no tub faucet. 
 
Stepping over to the knobs Marisse found she had to crane her body outwards to try to reach them without stepping into the tub and potentially dousing herself with cold water first, unaware that a good part of this reason was because she had lost a fair chunk of her height since she had arrived. The knob position seemed to mock her predicament.  Force to get into the tub first she managed to reach the stupid things and turn them.
 
At least there was no blast of cold water. Instead she was hit with lukewarm water that did not seem to get any warmer as time went on. For the briefest of moments Marisse was convinced that she had not taken off her clothes, so used to undressing before stepping into showers of past. The realization gave her a soft chuckle. Reaching out her hand she moved to grab at the shower curtain, only to find that it was decorative. The cloth only stretched out to about one fourth of the tub’s entrance, leaving her in full view of her window and computer. Well, she did not expect the brick wall outside to peep on her any time soon and her computer screen was not facing her so no camera issues there. 
 
As she stood there, letting the water run over her, the groaning whine of the pipes in the wall in front of her swallowing up the background noise of the other “residents” nearby, Marisse was left to her own thoughts. Her hands roamed over her body in spite of there being no soap in an effort to scrub off the grime that she had accumulated over however long she had been captive now. Looking back on it, Marisse could not even remember the date she had disappeared, sending a slight pang of concern through her.
 
Continuing to “wash” herself, her fingers danced over her soaked flesh, her complexion much more tan than before, her skin not simply olive in tone, but having turned away from the pink end of the color spectrum and more towards a yellowish hue, though it was hard to tell with the lighting. Her leg hair had grown in thicker, and was really starting to make itself known. Similarly her pubic hair stubble looked thick and dark with the water now running over it, almost hiding the entrance to her own body like some forgotten doorway left to moss over in the jungle. 
 
Her bones popped occasionally, since this was the most she had really stretched her body out since she had awoken, her shoulders having broadened slightly while her legs seemed shorter than they once were proportionate to her overall figure. It was like someone had stripped the grace out of her appearance, turning her body away from being a Jaguar and more into a out of date Jeep.  While she had not been athletic before, her svelte figure had seemed to have lost some of its definition, a layer of puppy fat having formed about her middle and making her stomach soft to the touch in a way she had not experienced since she was little. It felt good to explore herself, like she was engaging in some form of release. She did not even realize she had let out a soft moan, not unlike the kind that she heard periodically from the other rooms, unaware that her altered libido was making itself known now that the stress of the immediate situation had been put aside. 
 
A blush rose to her face. She didn’t want to… She didn’t exactly want to feel horny, not here, not now. It was too tense of a situation, too dark for her to be… Enjoying herself. Yet, despite this, she couldn’t help but raise one hand to a pert, full breast and lower the other down to her crotch, gently rubbing at herself, her blush deepening. At the same time as not wanting to, she realizes that she has to - being hot and bothered when she’s supposed to be… Doing something, whether that was her ‘work’ or something else that could potentially get her gassed and moved or something much worse, could only hinder her. 
 
With the sound of the rushing water and creaking pipes, she felt… Alone. Like how she felt outside - out there, surrounded by voices, she felt isolated. Here, she felt like she had some form of sanctuary, a form of… Peace. A smile grew on her lips briefly as she removed her hands… Only to disappear as the side of her hand brushed up against the stubble upon her crotch. 
 
“Ugh, this…” she recalls, looking down and seeing so many dark spots, her well-manicured fingernails picking at the hairs. “Why the hell’s it growing in so dark…?” Come to think of it, she realized that her entire body seemed to be a shade off. Was it something in the water? Something in the gas they’d hit her with? It was messing with her skin…? She couldn’t come up with any reasonable explanation for it, because… Well, people didn’t just change color like that. Unless they were just dying her hair and shoving her in some sort of tanning booth while she was out. 
 
Lethargically, she mumbles “Whatever.” and shuts off the water. She didn’t want to be away from the computer for too long as to not look like she was just… Idling, was it? And, she was about as clean as she felt she was going to get. Though she shuts off the water, it takes a while for the pipes to quiet down, and in that time she wrings out her hair and reaches for a towel…
 
Only to find none. “Fuck.”
 
Those assholes didn’t even give her anything to dry herself with! Unless the panties… No! She couldn’t just ruin them right off the bat! That left… Looking around, she tried to find something, anything that’d be able to adequately dry her, but all she could see was the thin shower curtain. 
 
“Do I have to…?” she muses, peeking out from it and looking over the edge, in case anything that could dry her had fallen onto the floor. No dice. “I guess I do.” 
 
Using the more dry side, she begins to run it across her body, blushing only as she dries off her crotch and breasts. However, it’s a meager solution at best - most of her progress comes from dripping dry. 
 
When she makes it back into the room proper, she sits back down in her chair… And immediately regrets that decision. Having had time to cool, to congeal… The puddle of sweat she’d left on it doesn’t exactly make for a comfortable seat. “Eeeeugh…” she whines, rising up. 
 
The dim lighting of the room made her fold-out chair glisten, the sight making her stomach turn. Having nothing left she’s willing to use to wipe it off with, she uses her… Feet, making sure that just enough of it was gone for her to have a comfortable seat. With that cleared up, she digs around in the newer box and fishes out the panties, gladly slipping them on. They dampen somewhat, with the scant bit of moisture still clinging to her legs and ass, but she doesn’t mind. 
 
Marrise sniffs, her nose wrinkling. “Mmnnngh…” she gripes again, rolling her eyes. The entire room reeked - of her. Sure, it was only herself she was smelling… Mixed with the food, and the faint, hot, chemical smell of the computer with how much its fans are blowing… But still, it bothered her. She had no reason to smell this way and beyond that, simply wasn’t used to it. 
 
With a resigned sigh, she simply waves her hand in front of her face a little and brings the box into her lap, idly picking through it. How efficient she was - between thumbing through it, she began to address the first flood of messages she’d gotten in the game, settling everyone’s worries… Well, as best she can. At this point, she was simply telling them what they wanted to hear… By copying and pasting their own words.
 
“What do I need to do?”
“follow @ JADETECH.CN”
 
“Is this a real deal?”
“yes real deal”
 
“How do I know I’m going to get my stuff?”
“you get your stuff yes”
 
Sure, it was a bother to do that, but responding to every one of them in the queen’s English would be even more of a bitch. “Fuck them.” she rasps, peeling the wrapper off of the candy bar, not even bothering to see what it is before taking a small bite out of it.
 
The shower had kept her out of the stench of the hotel room, now, having stepped back into the main living area the reek of her body odor and old food made her feel slightly ashamed of herself. Looking at the run down place, the window outside might as well have been the glass wall for patrons to look at the newest zoo exhibit.  Still, it was not like she could do much about it now.
 
The sun was already setting by the time she had gotten back to the computer, making it all the more obvious that she really could use a lamp, or at least something more than the light of her laptop. Because she had left the game running, the fan was still going and the machine was belting out heat constantly with a high pitched, but relatively soft whirr.
 
Inside the box, underneath the underwear, were a pair of cheap glasses, a small USB flash drive, and a can of…something, she could not make out the Kanji. However, as she looked at the can, almost instinctively she felt that the symbols meant air. Canned air? Compressed air?
 
It did not matter, not with people pestering her to get their money. However, again stimulating her brain in an effort to get her English back into gear, it only crumbled all the more. Even her parroted replies felt shaky at best. Marisse found herself looking at words for moments at a time, sounding them out if there were more than a couple of syllables and even when not, she would easily get them mixed up with similar words. The scary thing was that this was happening inside of her mind as well, her mental voice beginning to use close, but not quite right words, either phonetically or in definition. Part of her did recognize that her writing and reading was worse than her mental and verbal skills.
 
However, it seemed that people were more open to spamming here, or maybe those that were wise to it had filtered her out automatically. In either case she felt like she was getting more responses than in the last game.
 
Biting into the candy bar was a strange surprise. It was definitely not chocolate. The thing tasted like nougat and chewing gum with a gritty aftertaste that seemed to coat her tongue in chalk. Looking down at the bar, she found a white lumpy slab with some sort of chopped nut jutting out of it. She had not even tasted the nuts! That aftertaste made her gag. This was candy?
 
Of course, like everything else in this place, the candy did have a secondary purpose than just being a “delicious” treat. The stuff was filled with toxins of all sorts, most notably two. One was an inhibitor to her endocrine system, specifically the parts that helped kick her metabolism into gear and kept it active. By eating this treat, it was quite literally destroying her metabolism with every bite, which not only would make her more easily susceptible to weight gain, but further her lethargy, her sleep time, as well as overall pep.
 
The second chemical was more insidious. Much like the bombardment of drugs flooding her brain, this one also worked at the same organ too. However, rather than damaging or rewriting things, this chemical targeted the hypothalamus and would cause it to swell and grow out of balance. Being that this was the part of the brain that regulated her hormones, moods, hunger, sleep needs, temperature, thirst, addictive compulsions, and sex drive, by stimulating and over developing this region of the brain it, in many respects, would strip away some of the walls humanity had evolved to keep from being dominated by their more primitive needs based interests.