<div align="center"><span class="bbc_u"><strong>The Fireheart Tournament.</strong></span></div><br/>It’s one of those things that most people didn’t know about.  The small percent of the population who did know the name thought it was just a very popular website known for it’s amazingly in depth and single focused series of CGI pornography.  However there were enough people who knew that the rumors about that pornography was true, it wasn’t just an expensive and high end pornography created in computers, it was real, it was all real.<br/><br/>Eight years ago Tesla released the standard for neural link technology, the mark IV neural link dermal connection.  Unlike previous connections that allowed direct human to computer interface, the IV only required multiple points of dermal contact, and did away with messy implants and costly surgery.  Practically overnight the world of virtual reality changed as neural interface VR became available to anyone who could pay the cost.  As with most new technology the charge was led by the pornography industry.  At first the medium was limited to interactive VR porn that let users not only see, but feel, their favorite pornstars from any and every angle.  But it was not much longer before the tech branched out into other sectors.  Massive multiplayer online games dominated the web, with the neural link allowing for a realism dreamed about but never before experienced.  Of course every single one of these endeavours became rife with horny users taking erotic role playing to a whole new level.<br/><br/>That’s when Fireheart Entertainment LTD saw a massive opportunity and stepped in.  An offshoot of a very well known and popular pornography site, they decided they were going to set out to create an online erotic neural net VR environment.  A monthly pay subscription let players interact with a fantasy environment that was fully scripted for various erotic encounters.  Erosworld was a massive hit, garnering over six million users in the first year alone.  But Fireheart Entertainment wasn’t content to rest on their laurels, especially when they realized a rather strange and interesting quirk to their MMO world.  A massive percentage of their player base never experienced more than the first five percent of the game.  The average user would do one of two things; log on, find a group of monsters, and purposely lose to them so they could be raped, or log on and find one of the first type of players and then watch the resulting monster rape.<br/><br/>They realized there was a previously unrecognized market for erotic entertainment that had never been tapped.  A year after the launch of their amazingly successful Erosworld MMO they announced they were working on a new endeavour in virtual reality neural net erotica (VRNNE).  Six months later they launched a series of relatively inexpensive VRNNE ‘movies’ that users could buy direct from their website.  These were at first hailed as a failure as they were simply recordings, and not interactive at all.  But the numbers didn’t lie and they sold amazingly well.  Featuring all of the favorite characters and monsters from their Erosworld game beating and raping adventurers in the world, it was the experience a lot of players of the MMO wanted.<br/><br/>The website continued to release these VRNNE movies weekly over the next six months till they announced they were working on the next batch, and it would take six months to produce.  Their stock took a significant hit and several poor quality knock offs popped up in that time.  But a year later, sure enough, they announced that season two of the ‘Fireheart Tournament” VRNNE movies was starting.  This time, they promised, they had enough content to ensure weekly releases for an entire year, until season three started.<br/><br/>Of course, what only a select few people knew was that Fireheart Entertainment wasn’t creating these VR movies at all.  They created a pocket server of their mmo and then entered selected people into a tournament with several thousands of dollars as the cash prize.  Recording the adventures of the players and then releasing it  let them create massive high quality non interactive pornography easily.  That’s why they came out with season two, and this time they had fifty players instead of a dozen competing for the top score.  Year after year the prize pool got bigger, the player base increased in the tournament, and the fetishes, kinks, and sex got more and more dark, obscene, and intense.  Also, Fireheart realized they could charge perverts an absolutely insane fee to watch the tournament as it was being run.  They couldn’t interact with the players or the environment, but they could log on, in ghost mode and travel around following their favorite player, watching every bit of action for any angle they liked.  Even trying to keep it as secret as possible, they had more people signing up and throwing money at them to be spectators for the three day long tournament then their server could possibly handle.<br/><br/>Every year for the last six years since the advent of the first tournament, Fireheart Entertainment LTD, has held a three day long competition / tournament.  Every year somehow word grows more and more, and the prize pool gets bigger and bigger.  This year, season seven of the Fireheart Tournament, promises to be the biggest year yet.  With the new mark VII dermal neural net interface having been on the market for nine months, the connections between a person’s brain and the servers is faster and more real then at any point in history.  Fireheart has created a new game world, solely for the tournament to give all players a fair chance regardless of how well they know Erosworld.  The bidding war for spectator slots reached as high as $19,452.  Fireheart has said the top scoring player over the three day tournament will take home a prize of six million dollars, with the next twenty four players sharing almost eight million between them with a value decreasing the lower their points.<br/><br/>But most importantly, and where our story begins, is with a young woman, Callie Liddle, and her journey into season seven of the Fireheart tournament.<br/><br/><hr/><div class="floatright"><div align="center"><em>click to enlarge<br/>(https://i.imgur.com/JCgnmec.jpg)<br/>Callie Liddle<br/><br/>(https://i.imgur.com/KCJQkXu.jpg)<br/>the plugsuit<br/><br/>(https://i.imgur.com/EiCJ46W.jpg)<br/>Tialyn Luxora</em></div><br/><br/></div><br/>Callie had of course heard about the Fireheart tournament, but was one of the people who thought it was just pornography and had no idea that it was a real tournament at first.  She was a young and beautiful gamer girl.  She’d come of age during the neural net revolution, as it was being called, and had a lot of skill at the various neural net games.  She’d also started streaming her neural net gaming on the most popular VRNN site, stream.nn.  She’d already built a small following and was starting to make a little money on her streaming when one of her subscribers suggested to her that they wished she was in that season’s Fireheart tournament.  At first she almost banned the user thinking he was just suggesting that she do porn.  But then he explained how the Fireheart tournament was an actual thing, a real competition, with big prizes.  Of course it was too late then to get into the tournament, season 6 at the time.  But the idea kept tugging at her brain.  A real chance to challenge herself.  A real chance to make money, crazy money.  Yes, there was sex, rape, it was essentially porn.  But that was only for people who were defeated, right?  So she started looking into it.  Her first shock came when she found out it cost $500 non refundable for Fireheart to even send her an application packet, with absolutely no guarantee of anything further other than that they would review her application.<br/><br/>She was ready to write it off until one of the subscribers to her stream.nn channel donated the $500 flat for the application fee.  She figured she had nothing to lose, and if she didn’t, she’d probably lose the ‘whale’ of a viewer.  So she sent away for the application packet.  She was surprised at how in depth and detailed the application packet was, as well as how personal.  Questions about her gaming career weren’t surprising.  But then questions got weird, delving into her psychological profile, her hopes, fears, and dreams.  Then they got down right sexual and lewd.  Questions about her tastes in pornography, her sexual history, her grooming habits, how often she had sex and masturbated.<br/><br/>Still, she had a sense that this would be rather lewd, and it was $500 just for this application, so she filled it all out, a process that took the better part of a day.  Thankfully she did the whole thing while streaming to her NN stream, and her viewers had lots of suggestions, some of which were actually helpful.  The only part that she really had a hard time deciding on was picking her character’s class, as there was no explanation what the various classes did.  She knew that some of the classes were right out of course.  Eromancer, Commoner, and Cumslut seemed like terrible choices for someone who wanted to win the game.  Right?  In the end she chose Warrior because it was at the top of the list and she guessed it would be the most basic class, allow her to get the feel for the game, and maybe she could specialize into an advance class, or even repick at a later time.  It was something that seemed to be a common theme according to the few viewers she had that watched the Fireheart tournament VRNNE videos apparently.<br/><br/>Her application sent off, it was almost an agonizing week later when Fireheart contacted her for a follow up interview.  Held in a private virtual space on the net she was questioned for hours, until her brain felt like mush and she swore that the voices that were speaking to her from the dark were some sort of computer AI program.  She was almost ready to quit and disconnect from the neural net when they finally told her that she’d been accepted, and as soon as she provided her standard $5,000 entry fee, she’d be registered for the season seven tournament.<br/><br/>The next few months were a flurry of hard core and marathon streaming sessions on her stream.nn page to raise the money for the entry fee, but she managed to raise it in time.  Then the week before the tournament started she received the specialized plugsuit by bonded courier.  The skin tight suit of elasti-latex was outfitted with hundreds of sensors and neural net dermal contacts.  She also noticed a harness that strapped on over parts of the skin tight suit that seemed to be worn directly over the genitals as well.  She spent several hours reading the directions on how to don the suit, and the various canisters of thick slime that came in the package.  Once again she considered backing out, until the announcement to all entrants that the prize pool had been raised and the top three players would be splitting eleven million dollars with the highest point earner taking home the lion's share at six million.  Hell even placing in the top twenty five guaranteed a payout of her initial entry fee, and doing better then twentieth place meant she was going to be walking out with a pay day.<br/><br/>She also knew that she could make more money with her stream.nn site if she was willing to set up a cam and simply aim it at her while she played.  The donations would role in, this was a no brainer.  She knew she was good enough to beat any VRNN game she’d ever played, she just had to be good enough to beat the other people in the contest.<br/><br/>So the friday morning that the tournament was to start, she committed herself.  A short chat with the loyal viewers of her stream and she did something she never thought she’d be doing, stripping down on camera in front of them.  Her body completely smooth due to the previous night’s instruction of a full rub down from the neck down of the depilatory cream had left her skin glowing and smooth and without a single hair below her head.  She could hear the sound of the donation ticker going off even as she did, realizing she was stripping nude for strangers on the web.  But god damn, the donations never came in this fast when she was playing VRNN video games.  Then as she began slathering the cool clear slime on her naked flesh, the donation ticker came in even faster.  Slipping fingers into every nook and cranny, and as the directions suggested, applying a liberal amount to her completely hairless pussy and tight asshole.  The cool gel made her sensitive bits tingle, but eventually she was secure that she’d liberally coated every square inch of her body from the chin downwards with the silky gel.  Looking at the container, she now understood the textured grip pattern on the outside as she was almost having trouble standing up or sitting in a chair without sliding to the floor.  There was just enough in the container, she decided to follow the suggested advice for remaining gel, and pushed a generous dollop with two fingers into her pussy before scooping out the last of it and repeating the process with her tight anus.<br/><br/>She was beet red with embarrassment at doing this on cam, but noticed that the donation ticker was already over $250, better than almost any day she’d ever had in two years streaming video games.<br/><br/>Next up was the plugsuit itself.  Thankfully the top was open enough that with the super slick gel, she was able to shimmy her body into the custom designed suit specifically shaped to her current dimensions.  At least she got to keep the suit no matter what, she almost said out loud.  But then she dismissed that thought.  As she jiggled and shuffled, sliding into the skin tight material, she wasn’t going to even consider losing, she was going to win!  The suit felt amazingly comfortable once she pulled the straps up over her shoulders, like a second skin.  The slick gel let it bond and sculpt to every single curve on her body.  Reaching a single hand down to her sex, she could even feel the soft folds of her labia through the suit.  Letting out a soft gasp, she immediately stopped.  The gel seemed to be making her more sensitive.  Probably a necessary thing for the dermal neural net sensors, she told herself even as her nipples hardened, showing perfectly through the silver second skin of the suit.  Next came the harness, which slid over her head, covering the exposed skin of her shoulders.  She slid her arms easily down the sleeves and then retrieved the straps and buckled the ‘codpiece’ to her crotch.  Activating the power button she felt the suit come to life.  Gasping as the already skin tight suit somehow constricted even further, almost vacuum sealing itself to every pore of her skin.  A soft feminine voice sounded announcing that it was ‘calibrating’ as she felt the sensation of thousands of fingers rolling over her body everywhere the suit touched.  Then penetration as she felt the codpiece inserting slowly a phallic object between her nether lips.  Her hands slapped at it but there was nothing she could do.  Thankfully it retracted after only a moment, leaving her somehow wanting more.  More that came a moment later when the back end began probing her anus.  She could feel the ring parting as she was penetrated, then quickly it too retracted.  Gasping and, she had to admit a little aroused, she fetched the last bit of the plug suit.<br/><br/>She didn’t know if the earpiece was shaped the way it was because she’d chosen an elfen character, but the points on the headpiece did remind her of classic fantasy elven ears.  Sliding them over her head, she took a seat in her gaming chair, kicked it back into recline mode, and said goodbye to her stream, and hoped that at least some of them might be spectating her in the tournament.  Knowing she had a little time left for the tournament, but not wanting to wait any longer she reached up and made the connection between the suit and her computer, instantly connecting to Fireheart’s private server for the tournament.<br/><br/><hr/><br/>Black void space.  Nothingness.  The eternal inky nothingness of a person entering VRNN space and not yet having a character or persona.   It could feel like an eternity waiting for something to happen.  During that waiting period no one had any frame of reference for time.  No breath, no heartbeat, no input at all.  Thankfully Callie had experienced it so many times she knew the drill by now.  The human mind operated faster than any computer ever built.  While it might seem like an eternity, she knew it was probably only a matter of seconds, a minute at the most as all of her credentials were checked and double checked.  Still it was unsettling, the waiting in limbo.  Even counting didn’t work to pass the time because with no frame of reference the human brain could think thousands of times faster and you’d count to a thousand in less than ten seconds.  So she tried to remain calm, as she always did, and tried to keep her mind as blank as the void around her.<br/><br/>Then form began to appear, sensation began as her body materialized around her.  A body that was much like her own real life body, but stronger, elven, blonde.<strong>  “Greetings Tialyn Luxora,” </strong>a digital voice said as she watched her elven body form around her.  Using the name she’d chosen as her online persona.  She would be Callie no more, she was the elven warrior Tialyn.  Leather formed around her bare feet and materialized upwards forming long leather boots that reached almost all the way to the smooth hairless sex between her thighs.<br/><br/><strong>“Welcome to the Fireheart Tournament, season seven,”</strong>the voice continued as a leather coat began to materialize around her hips and continued working upwards.<strong>“You are aware of the rules.  The first round of the tournament begins soon, and continues for eight hours.” </strong>Callie of course knew that eight hours real time could easily mean days, weeks, or even months in a virtual environment depending on what the server had been set at.  But she was sure that Fireheart wouldn’t push her neural link to operate at a speed that was unsafe or that the players were unable to handle.<br/><br/>The coat had reached her shoulders and barely closed in the front, leaving most of her chest and belly exposed.  It only barely covered her sex, and she noticed that there were no panties with this garment, as it began to form a high necked and fancy collar.  The voice continued, explaining rules that she already knew and had read,<strong> “You may at any point disconnect from the game world to return here to the lobby, but doing so will count as an in game death, and restart you at your start location, or the last inn that you rested at.  Any death you incur in game, via disconnect or game mechanics will result in an automatic respawn, a temporary penalty to your statistics, and an immediate loss of one half of your current point total.”</strong><br/><br/>The coat had finished materializing around her elbows and white gloves that matched her boots were finishing wrapping about her fingers at that point.  A belt with a very strange sword was materializing at her waist at that moment.  A curious blade knowns as a ‘Da’ it was apparently a racial sword of the elves in this game world.  The blade was about the length of a longsword but with a handle equally as long that let it function almost as a spear or short polearm if required, and light enough to be wielded one handed or with both.<br/><br/>She took stock of the completely impractical high heeled ‘boots’ that she was wearing, and her garment which seemed like it would blow open and expose her in a stiff breeze, and knew what she had been signing up for.  Around her a digital construct of glowing light began to form as well.  A roughly humanoid shape, feminine, stood in front of her, and the voice seemed to be issuing from there.<strong>“The ultimate goal of the tournament is to be the one to defeat the lich queen, if it is possible.  But the winner of the tournament will be the one with the highest point total.  Defeating the lich queen will net enough points to practically secure a victory, but not assuredly.  Also if no contestant defeats the lich queen by the third eight hour session, the victor will be the one with the most points.”</strong><br/><br/>A door materialized, one that looked like it belonged in an old castle.  Stone casements with solid oak wood planks and heavy iron bands.  The glowing figure gestured to it and said,<strong>“The tournament begins in 5 minutes, you may enter this door and begin when the door swings open.  Do you have any questions for me before you begin?”</strong><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">Character sheet</div><div class="spoiler_body"><div class="floatright"><div align="center"><em>click to enlarge<br/>(https://i.imgur.com/EiCJ46W.jpg)<br/>Tialyn Luxora</em></div></div><br/><br/><strong>Character:</strong> Tialyn Luxora<br/><br/><strong>Score:</strong> 0<br/><strong>Heat:</strong> 5<br/><strong>Hero/Whore:</strong> 0/0<br/><br/><strong>RL Name:</strong> Callie Liddle<br/><br/><strong>RL Age:</strong> 20<br/><br/><strong>Mental Strength:</strong> 5<br/><strong>Mental Agility:</strong> 5<br/><strong>Mental Discipline:</strong> 2<br/><br/><strong>Advantages:</strong><br/><br/>i) Intuition - Our heroine might not be book-smart, but she has a knack for figuring things out. ("This is the end that shoots bullets, right?") Beginners sometimes get lucky, after all...And sometimes, on the virtual battlefield, a good guess is better than all the knowledge in the world! <br/><br/>ii) Attractive - No two ways about it...Our heroine's *hot*. She's not just a babe virtually, she's hot IRL too...Which makes her very popular indeed, on both fronts. (The fans seem to love it, and who can blame them?)<br/><br/>iii) Minor Celebrity - Streamer - Callie already has built a decent following on her stream.nn page.  She's going to have a fan base that's going to cheer her on and try to help her in game as supporters instead of going in as an unknown.<br/><br/><br/><strong>Flaws:<br/></strong><br/>i) Vain - It's hard to be a streamer without being just a *bit* of an attention whore. And our girl has it *bad*. She just loves the adulation of her fans...And she's oh-so-willing to do what it takes to keep them interesting. (This isn't just showing off - She's more likely to take risks, even when they'd work against her.)<br/><br/>ii) Trouble Magnet - It happens. If there's a one-in-a-million chance that something could go wrong...It *will*, and she'll probably be right at the heart of it. Things just keep getting drawn to her, one way or another. <br/><br/>iii) Livestreaming - The world is watching her, not just in game, but also her real life as she goes through this lewd quest.  Any failures to her heat rating are going to more severe, as people are seeing that failure on two fronts. <br/><br/><br/><strong>Fetishes:<br/></strong><br/>i) The Gross / Ugly<br/>ii) The Undead<br/>iii) Goblinoids<br/><br/></div></div>