Talon took me on a brief tour of the SW Clubhouse. It felt like a real building, although whoever had designed it had built the rooms willy-nilly, without any real attention towards what a real house would look like. If it had been a real place, it would have been wildly irregularly shaped when viewed from the outside. However, no one ever went out of this "house." Only its interior had been rendered. For now, anyway. Talon told me he was thinking of adding a garden, for those who wanted to get back to nature.
In the clubhouse, there were basically four floors, each with their own areas to explore. The ground level, where I was now, was for people who just wanted a simple and brief virtual experience. If you just wanted to shrink or be shrunk, the living room was the place to meet. The kitchen, study, and other areas were there for tiny people to explore, where they could just revel in being small. By rule, no one got too explicit in the entry zone, just in case a teenager or child showed up (either by mistake or by trying to slip past the adult controls).
I didn't bother to bring up the scene with the buxom bikini girl, which had seemed pretty explicit to me, but what did I know? I was still new here, after all.
The second floor was mostly bedrooms, closets, drawers, and the like set up entirely for private exploration of the SW fantasy. A person could pair up with one or more others and find complete privacy behind those closed doors, which no one else could open as long as they were occupied and "locked." What went on back there was entirely up to the participants, who could take the fantasy as far as they wanted to go. Normally, Talon explained, it was agreed upon in advance how far the experience would progress. After all, anyone who felt uncomfortable could disconnect at any time, and their avatar would simply wink out.
The third floor was a mostly open place designed for storytelling. Usually, it was empty, but occasionally someone would call a meeting there and do the SW equivalent of telling tales by the campfire. Interestingly, they had a huge variety of computer-generated props available to help out, and if they wanted to take the time, they could even program virtual rooms and such to help the audience feel like they were part of the story. On rare occasions, someone would produce an entire VR adventure, playable either alone or with a group, sort of like the holodeck in those Star Trek movies. However, the time involved in creating such a thing was beyond the patience of most SW fanatics.
Finally, the basement was for SW "experimentation." It was originally supposed to be for more realistic shrinking, but over time had taken on a whole different meaning. Talon called the place the "dungeon," and likened it to a torture chamber. The shrinking that went on down there was much more violent and sadistic, though not to the level of the "torture rooms" available elsewhere at the Virtual Shrinking Center. Basically, if you were a woman, you only went down there if you wanted someone to get rough with you, probably torturing and possibly even killing your avatar.
Oddly enough, some people really got off on that sort of thing. Well, I didn't, and I said as much. "That sounds horrible," I mentioned, hitting the keys that emoted a facial expression of disgust on my avatar.
"Hey, it's not for everyone," Talon admitted. "All right, Val, tell me about yourself, and why you're here."
I looked around, somewhat uncertain about that. By now, we were back in the living room, and several others had gathered around to join the conversation. Apparently, as de facto leader of this bunch, Talon tended to draw a crowd, and the fact that a newbie was here had already been spread around the place.
I looked at the various avatars that surrounded us. There were at least 20 of them, of a variety of shapes and sizes, from one 7-foot giant down to ladies just a couple of inches high. The costumes and faces most of them wore were quite intricate and detailed, presenting some well-developed personas that indicated they'd been doing this for a while.
One nice thing about the VR environment was you didn't have to waste time with introductions. I toggled a key, and the names and a brief description of each person appeared over their avatar's head. Unlike myself, where my "description" was blank, the others all had rather detailed information available. Talon, for example, identified himself as a technophile whose house was full of all the latest gadgets, and who looked forward to the day that shrinking devices were really available for use in the home.
What was really astonishing was the variety of different people around me. Literally, no two were even close to alike. One guy looked like he was a white-furred tiger, and there was a tiny woman dressed in a skintight outfit who wore cat ears and a long, fuzzy tail. The huge man I mentioned earlier was dressed in a Scottish costume complete with kilt and massive claymore, and flitting about his head was a dark-skinned fairy who could easily have passed for an African-American Tinkerbell. Someone was wearing a skin that made him look more like a Chinese dragon than a human being, and there was even a representative of the Federation Star Fleet, wearing a costume that would have been quite at home on the Enterprise-G.
Suddenly I felt uncomfortable having not given a better description of myself when I created my avatar. "I don't know," I replied. "I'm not sure how much I should say. I'm still not really used to all this."
"Hey, that's all right," Talon told me. "Tell us only what you want to. No pressure. None of us are who we seem to be, anyway. This is the Internet! You can make stuff up if you like. We'll understand."
I considered that. The guy in the Starfleet uniform, whose tag identified him as TrekkerTDL, was proof that damn near anything goes in here. "Well," I said tentatively, "I'm really just here to gather some information."
"Oh, are you a reporter?" asked a man in Oriental attire, whose name was Lorekeep. Next to him, with her arm around his thigh, was a Japanese woman about three and a half feet tall, wearing a schoolgirl outfit complete with pleated skirt and kerchief. Her avatar's name was "lildolly," but a secondary line gave her real name as Clarissa.
"No," I admitted, although it that would have made a nice cover story, now that I thought about it. "I'm here to learn what it's like to be...well, you know, shrunk."
"Ooh," said the Starfleet officer. "Looks like we've got a live one here!"
The little fairy fluttered up to me. I saw to my surprise that she looked to be no more than about eighteen, and was wearing a tiny cheerleader outfit, plus a huge gold amulet around her neck. Her tag identified her as Crystal. "It's great!" she told me happily. "I can get big or small any time I want, see?" She touched the amulet, and suddenly became a normal-sized woman, without the wings. Another touch and she was a fairy again.
"Wow!" I said, impressed. She had done some serious work on her avatar to be able to make it do that! "But I don't think I'm explaining this right. See, I have to get used to being shrunk. It's part of my job."
"What's that supposed to mean?" asked a woman in black bondage gear, whose name was Kajira. She looked like she'd be more at home in the dungeon section of the clubhouse. "You mean shrunk IRL?"
"IRL?" I asked.
"In real life," said Talon. "You don't visit these virtual rooms much, do you?"
"This is my first time," I admitted. Of course, I'd done virtual training, but I'd never come to a place like this for entertainment purposes.
"They haven't made shrinking machines available to the public yet, have they?" asked the grinning green-scaled serpent, whose name was Cloudwalker.
"No, of course not," said Kajira. "If they had, I'm sure Lorekeep would have found out about it by now."
"True," he admitted. "If something big happened regarding SW, I'd be all over it."
"Hey!" said the fairy excitedly. "You don't work at the casino, do you?"
"Yeah," I admitted. "The first time they shrunk me, I almost freaked out, and yesterday, someone picked me up. I thought I was gonna die."
A couple of them started talking among themselves. "It's gotta be a gag," said someone named Starhawk, who had feathers in place of hair and huge white wings growing out of his back.
"There's no way this is for real. It must be RP," said Clarissa, looking at me doubtfully. "Pretty well done, too."
"Yeah, she's just playing a joke," agreed Lorekeep. "Are you Minimizer behind that skin? This sounds just like the kind of thing he'd pull."
"Nah," said Trekker. "This doesn't feel like his style. Besides, he hasn't been by since the new season of 'Land of the Giants' started. You know how much time he has to spend on all those scripts."
"True," agreed Talon. "Remember when he used to almost live in here? I still don't know how he ever got any work done."
"Hey, what if she's on the level?" said someone named Ironman, whose skin was silvery. "Wouldn't it be cool if she was?"
This line of conversation went on for a bit, and I didn't intervene. I noticed, as they chattered quickly, that most of the talking was going on between the people I've already mentioned. Occasionally some others would pipe up, like tiny Samara, cloaked Gernsback, furry Tinyfox, gaudily dressed Mini-Goddess, red-eyed Mirv2.5, or the costumed Superbabe, but the rest just seemed to hang back, content to watch without participating. I found out later that these others were "lurkers," people who just enjoyed the entertainment the rest of the avatars provided. They rarely, if ever, contributed. While most of these wore what looked like default skins on their avatars, some actually reveled in their lurker status, choosing names like "He Who Lurks," "Silent Bob," "Lurkbeast," and "Aussie Lurker." After a while, I just learned to ignore them.
Finally, Talon looked at me directly and said, "All right, I'll play along. It could be fun. So, Casino Girl, what do you want us to do?"
"Do? I don't know," I told him honestly. "When my friend picked me up yesterday, it really scared me. He was just so big, and I was so small in his hands! I've tried everything to get a grip on this, but I just can't seem to do it. I thought if anyone could know what I was feeling, it'd be people like you."
"She's got a point," Lorekeep agreed. "I think we can accommodate you, my dear. Your best bet is to let us shrink you for a while. How small shall we make you?"
"Well," I replied somewhat nervously, "at the casino, they made me one-third normal size. That's what I want to get comfortable with for now."
"Not a problem," said Talon, reaching into his jacket and withdrawing an exact duplicate of the funny-looking pistol I'd seen earlier. Did everyone have shrinking guns in this place, or was that one of the tools he had programmed into his avatar? I didn't have time to ask, because he went on quickly. "I'll just set this for 33%," he said, and turned a dial or something on the barrel--or pretended to, I wasn't sure. Then he pointed the gun at me.
I thought about protesting. After all, this was happening much faster than I expected. Of course, these people were much more used to shrinking each other than I was, so to them, it wasn't unusual to do this sort of thing.
"Elevator, going DOWN!" Talon laughed. He pulled the trigger, and the green beam reached out and hit my avatar, just below the level of my vision. Immediately, my view began to slide downward as I shrank. Of course, I felt nothing unusual, as I wasn't wearing any VR sensing gear. I wondered if there were any programmed tactile sensations I was missing, or if the girl in the bikini had been faking the orgasm for the benefit of the men who'd been watching. I'd probably never know.
After a few moments, I was two feet tall, looking up at the giant avatars around me, all of whom seemed to be watching with great interest.
Crystal the fairy fluttered down to my eye level, now looking about three times bigger than before. "Not so bad, is it?" she asked, laughing. "You should try it at my size!"