Online Fiction

Headshot has just gone live and the whole world's playing the new Artificial Reality blockbuster. Unfortunately, unless you can buy your way onto the Survivor's side, you can only participate as a Zombie. Each week, the forces gather to tear each other down to the bone...until, at week's end, the Apocalypse is reset. Ryan's played the Beta for months, but now that his favorite game has launched, he finds it consuming his life - even as he struggles to decipher whether or not there's actually a way to succeed if you're not willing to Pay to Win.

Noah Carver used to work for Maskell Entertainment, developing the smash hit virtual reality game Sevenfold Sword Online (loosely based on the fantasy novels of Jonathan Moeller). Then Carver got fired. Not for incompetence, or for laziness. But because he discovered the truth.

Well, she's not dead. That's better than Mummur expected. But after Telvar cast her out of the game with all her strings attached, Murmur has more than in-game death to deal with. When some of the abilities of Somnia remain with her, Murmur must figure out where she ends and the game begins.

Two years ago, professional hockey player Mitch Frambough and headhunter Lexie Monroe met and sparks flew. They fell hard for each other, and everyone thought they were endgame. But now they're not together. In fact, they don't even live in the same state. When Mitch was traded from the Warriors to the Los Angeles Knights, his entire life changed with one phone call. When his life is once again upended in a split second, he finds himself back in the Mitten. Surprisingly, everyone welcomes him home with open arms. Everyone except the one person he desperately wants: Lexie.

With all my best friends off the market, it’s time that I, Tori Sussex, join them. So where better to find my future husband than the internet? It’s great. I get to get all the awkward stuff out of the way and already know if I’m going to like the guy before we meet in person. It’s a shame nothing's ever that simple. My relationship with Colton Lane, my best friend’s brother, is the very definition of complicated - dirty little no-strings-attached hookups we’ve somehow managed to keep secret from all our friends for the past six months.

After all the drama surrounding the invasion of the White Crane Hall, Seiki gave his word to Ippei that he’d join the War Games. So, when he hits level 14 and finally gets eligible for his first troops, Seiki gets ready to face the Demonic Clan and begin his climb up the military ranks. But before he can claim his unit from the Shogun, Seiki has one last promise to fulfill. Together with the whole band, he has to clear Nezumi Temple - aka the rat dungeon - in order to secure a rare armguard for Yamura as a thank you for saving their neck back at the siege.

Between raiding Red Caps and dives into the local dungeon, danger seems to lurk around every corner. Adventure. It makes Hall wonder if he should remain as Lord of Skara Brae. The excitement of life in the wild calls to him, but so do his responsibilities. Both duty and adventure collide when members of the Greencloak Rangers, Hall's favorite faction from the original game, arrive in Skara Brae seeking Leigh's help in her role as Druid Custodian.

I've managed to survive my first week in Euphoria Online. But I couldn't have done it without my new friends. Lotharia. Falkon. The Green Liver goblins. But now Lotharia's gone missing. Swallowed by that nightmare keep. Lost to the darkness. Everyone's telling me that going after her is madness. That I don't have a chance in hell. But I'm not the kind of guy to turn my back on my friends. Damn the odds. I'm going to find her.

Adam begins his adventure in the latest VRMMORPG, but it's not long before he realizes there's much more at stake when taking a life in this new game. The pain is very real, and death...is permanent. Now, trapped in a virtual world, Adam must take the mantle of Zander Darkblade and brave the dangers of the Aether Gate.

Life’s tough when you didn’t expect to be living it. But now that Journey has a future, she apparently also has to figure out what that future’s supposed to look like. Some days the pain feels as fresh as that day: the day she attempted suicide. Her parents don’t know how to speak to her. Her best friend cracks all the wrong jokes. Her bipolar II disorder feels like it swallows her completely. But other days - they feel like revelations. Like meeting the dazzling Etta, a city college student who is a world unto herself.

After eight years together, Lil Bailey thought she’d already found ‘the one’ - that is, until he dumped her for a blonde 20-something colleague. So she does what any self-respecting singleton would do: swipes right, puts on her best bra and finds herself on a first date with a handsome mountaineer called Max. What’s the worst that can happen? Well it’s pretty bad actually. First Max ghosts her and then, after weeing on a stick (but mostly her hands), a few weeks later Lil discovers she’s pregnant.

He didn't want to be in the game. Now, he has to save it. Killed on the first day on the job, 25-year-old police officer Nyle Maxwell finds his mind uploaded to Capes Online, the world's biggest and most popular VRMMORPG. Yet, the one-way, mind-to-game upload process means that Nyle can never return to his physical body. Now, he must become a real superhero and protect Capes Online from both hostile players and malevolent AIs and NPCs alike that seek to destroy the game itself.

Fire Chief Noah Callahan can’t understand what’s going on his department. A series of arson fires, broken equipment and unusual accidents plague the firefighters. It’s no surprise when he comes under investigation by Captain Eve Woodward from the Office of Fire Prevention and Control. She arrives in Hidden Cove believing he’s guilty, but soon begins to respect, understand and care about this very good man. A second storyline follows hotshot Zach Malvaso as he befriends, then falls in love with Casey Brennan.

Somnia is evolving, and Murmur is confronted with enemies both old and new. She must lead her guild, Fable, through a dungeon filled with riddles and puzzles to claim the first of 12 keys required to achieve victory. But things are not as they seem: Glitches abound, enemies rally against Fable, and unexpected threats move in the shadows. As the system becomes increasingly complex, Laria and Shayla battle through mismatched coding, and Storm Corp discovers they’ve left some anomalies in the game out of their reports. Anomalies like Wren.

As Murmur reels in the wake of the secret her friends tried to keep, her grip on what is real and what is virtual begins to slip. What's more, she's no longer sure whom she can trust. Stalked across the continent by a rogue with a vendetta, Murmur is forced to dig deep and develop her abilities before she finds a knife in her back. Suspicion surrounds the AIs as well. Their behaviors are too human, their reports too perfect. Shayla and Laria must uncover the truth before the system raises concerns and Murmur is lost forever.

Voices in her head. Sure, that was how Murmur always imagined fully immersive VR. With the getashi’s growing in influence, Fable's race against the clock is thrown into disarray as the dungeons begin to make their own rules. As a last resort, Fable teams up with Spiral and Exodus to speed things up. But with tensions growing between the groups, it’s a matter of when and not if they’ll be betrayed. Murmur’s team begins to fray as her abilities branch out and start to those around her.

After the loss of Bastion, everyone who’s not a zombie has holed up in FFO’s sole remaining safe haven: the lowbie town of Windy Lake. But the undead armies never rest, and it’s only a matter of time before the Once King’s forces come to crush what’s left of life in this world. But Tina, James, and the rest of the players are facing a crisis of their own. After so long in this world, their human bodies are dying on the other side. If they don’t find a way home soon, they may have nothing to go back to.

In the hyper-realistic player versus player MMORPG Fantasy Realms Online, Kromgorn the Barbarian remains trapped alongside his friends by the evil schemes of the Lich-Lord. But despite finding a temporary way to fight back against their enemies in the Secret Order, he's still stuck in the avatar of a simpering Courtesan named Lacey - a female character that was designed exclusively to get down and dirty with the in-game pleasure system. When the Lich-Lord's lackeys use a dirty trick to capture his best friends and guildmates, Kromgorn is forced to learn some dirty tricks of her own.

With his glory days behind him and nothing but life as a loser to look forward to, Zane can’t wait for MythRune. A first-of-its-kind immersive fantasy game that promises to provide just the escape from reality a washed-up athlete like him needs. But when his younger brother learns he only has weeks left to live, Zane is forced to take his gaming to the next level if he’s going to afford to pay for his brother’s operation and ditch their sorry life forever.

As time runs down for the players trapped by the evil Lich-Lord in the hyper-realistic MMORPG Fantasy Realms Online, Kromgorn the Barbarian is still stuck playing as the gorgeous, pleasure-fueled Lacey the Courtesan, a character designed to level fastest when she’s getting busy with every NPC in sight. The action is hot, the stakes are high, and Lacey will need to pull out every skill she can muster if she wants to win the day.