Opening his notebook, Jon was greeted by Maureens profile ad his shoulders slumped as his gaze fell on a section labelled 'Selected outfits' and the entry "School: Uniform(default) ".
No. There was no way, Jon decided as he was back in his room staring at the clothes in question, he was going to school wearing a frigging school uniform! Admittedly, he had seen a few girls around school wear skirts that were shorter than the one belonging to the uniform. But Jon also remembered what had went through his mind seeing these girls. His healthy teenage mind.
So no. There was no way he was dealing with that, right after being dropped into this game. Instead he sat down at his desk and began to study the guide-book once more. A few of the things he had read the evening before made a bit more sense now. Like Phantasm Corp. specializing in ‘ True Augmented Reality’. The book was very vague on the details but Jon and presumably this house were ‘Code you can touch’. Part of a program that was somehow projected into Jons hometown. Or something.
The important takeaway was that Jon wasn’t trapped inside a computer. He was trapped inside his hometown, because the manual was very clear on any Phantasm-Code leaving the boundary of the gameworld would simply cease to be and reset back to the last save-state. The silver lining was that – as a member of the staff- Jon was backed up basically in real time. So no existential crisis, wondering how often he had already gone through this.
It also meant that everything outside wasn’t controlled by some outside force. These were real people walking down the street and Jon could get into a random car accident (and be reset to the starting point). Being functionally immortal was definitively a plus in Jons book. But if anybody had asked him, Jon would still have gone back to his boring mortal life in a second.
Other than that Maureens body was designed to be as life-like as possible. Jon could not actually starve while being her but would still get hungry, he still had to use the bathroom ( which Jon hoped to put off as long as possible ) and got tired and sweaty when engaged in strenuous activity.
When it came to clothing though Jon could only wear the outfits provided by Phantasm Corp. Right now Jon would have to wear one of the three default outfits:
‘Casual’: which was the green tracksuit he was currently wearing, and the default option for hanging around the city (and P.E).
‘School’ – the anime-esque thing hanging by the door.
‘Professional’ – the uniform he had worn during the intro cutscene last night, which doubled as work clothes for Maureens part time job in the office below.
If Jon wanted to expand his wardrobe he had basically two options: The player could purchase additional outfits for a girl with “Phantasm Points” ( or “PP” for short ). But Phantasm Points cost real money. The clothes weren’t nearly as expensive as the real thing, but still pretty pricey for an average student like Leonard. The player could earn some PP via events, but the manual had been pretty clear that scraping enough points for expensive gifts like clothes together that way, would take a few days.
The other way was for Jon to use his administrator-privileges and issue a custom quest. To do that however Jon would have to earn a few Quest Points (“QP”) because the game wanted proof administrators put in some work before using PCorp-ressources to meddle in the proceedings. One way was to help out the player, but the manual was a bit vague on how that translated into QP aside from the ‘helpfulness’ of Jons advice being a major factor. Working in the office downstairs was another and had a decent hourly wage. If Jon put in an extra hour or two he’d be able to offer one of the cheaper outfits as a quest-incentive.
Which meant Jon had a choice to make:
A) He could wander around town in the tracksuit hoping to run into one of Sarahs other victims but Jon had a feeling nearly all of them would be students.
B)He could have the most humiliating day at school he ever had, and try to find Karyn.
C) He could go downstairs, and grind for QPs to unlock a non-humiliating outfit for Maureen and have Leonard unlock it by fulfilling the quest ‘Get out of bed.’.
