*(Content Warning – I do mention real world death, mostly it’s me rambling about the game though, there’s a lot of IC sex-scandals and some slut shaming oh then things went really mad over the mafia)*
Yeah, it’s that game again. The Forever and Ever version… three days for this stuff to get completely mad… please do play my character’s soundtrack if you like.
I was playing Lizzie-Mae Russo, celebrity influencer and reality star. My original concept was based around me deciding I wanted to try and be famous (I’ve seen other people do it a chunk and I wanted to do something different from what I’ve done before) and so I went and talked with Neuroscience who said I’d really suit Kim Kardashian’s type of makeup… so I learnt how to contour, yes I only got the basics down by the time of the game but I acquired a makeup hardskill so I’m feeling pretty proud. In anycase, she was supposed to be Kim Kardashian but in a future where she was a fourth generation reality star in something that was beginning to resemble The Truman Show…and that was the basic concept.
Then she opened her mouth.
And the thing is, Kim Kardashian isn’t who I have in the back of my mind when I’m thinking about the epitome of the celebrity influencer and reality star.
The vocal fry was only just starting… but I guess when it comes to reality celebs no matter how hard I try, I’ll always have Paris.
The details of my character were such that for once I was actually aiming for genuine character development and had the rough idea of an arc… I think Weasel’s methods for playing this game are rubbing off on me. My rough outline was that she would be her fake ‘Reality’ persona on Friday, Saturday undergo trauma (I knew the game would provide that so didn’t bother to outline it) and Sunday have an understanding of who she really was whether or not that would end up in heartbreak.
So as ever when it comes to this game, Friday night is when we get our first dates and we roleplay them out in real-time. And due to drop outs and some player’s character suggestions the first date that Lizzie-Mae had was the first ever Triad to trial out a new way of doing the implant technology.
Her Triad date was Crescentia Koppel, her arch-nemesis and cosmetic brand rival.
Oh I should mention, in addition to running my character I was also using my other Discord log-in in the browser to run The News – so that I could put some scandals out there about Lizzie-Mae and also offered my services to other players.
And just to explain the set up for Lizzie-Mae and Crescentia’s rivalry going in:
As far as the Public was concerned, I stole her boyfriend, of course… actually he was a male escort… I just paid him not to date her and date me instead.
Lizzie-Mae wasn’t happy about this date but she knew it was going to be good for ratings. So she went in to do it for the ratings… yeah about that… Lizzie-Mae had specifically resisted her mother’s machinations to have her release an sort of cybersex video. She was a bit worried her promiscuous reputation would be exposed for fraud when she entered Together Forever so she started paying her escort boyfriend for sex so that she knew what she was doing.
Then she got matched up in a Triad so immediately sent Caspian a message to ask… how exactly do threesomes work? Now, I was expecting The Fae Ref to get back to me with a random hold message as he had his first date with the Canadian Foodie… oh, oh no sweet Mish your naivete is showing, for you are playing this settings Paris Hilton. He replied; “…a demonstration is not out of the question. I suspect I have a willing third here if you want to learn before you try with your own matches…”
And so whilst my rival and her ex were romancing each other in a club and bemoaning the fact that they were matched up with a vapid but hot party girl I made my excuses and headed over to learn how to shag an escort and a hot fireman. I think I’m going to go back to naive virgins for a bit after this one because that got a bit steamy.
Then she left and walked straight into Crescentia and Hermes and left with them for her second threesome of the night! Too steamy. The next day we met on the beach to split up, and for once I used the swimming costume prop I usually have at one side of my screen! Finally!
The Second Date started and that was with the girl that Lizzie-Mae had wanted to take to Prom but that her mother had made her date because the ratings wanted her to take the super hot rugby team captain.
At some point they made up or so Lizzie-Mae thought. And The News broke the scandal of her paying for a threesome with the Firefighter and the escort to cheat on her assigned partners with. And because none of the players actually went far enough to say that this had happened I decided her mother dearest had done that to her.
So she completely trusted beloved Odette. Odette who was in the pay of Crescentia… and Crescentia was mad, especially when Lizzie-Mae didn’t do a great job of explaining just why she’d cheated on her. But in the mean time she made up with her brother, the guy who’d angrily left Keeping Up With The Russo’s because he hated the fakeness that his mother had forced onto his little sister. (I do enjoy a good big brother). They went on double dates snowboarding and Lizzie-Mae met Weasel’s character, ahh hello chaos butterfly of Weasel’s – yes we rather know how to play off that as a couple of party girls.
She changed her hair and started growing and knowing who she was, all thanks to that wonderful Odette…
Turned out Odette was kind of kinky and worked as a Pro-Domme, which mostly vanilla little Lizzie-Mae was fine with. She wanted to make Odette happy so she agreed to try out Odette’s kinkier preferences. They were a little hardcore but they made the woman she loved happy, so that was ok.
Then the Talk Show happened. The Valentines Date competition for the best date… Oh the CAR CRASH! See the couples who volunteered were my brother and his date Sophie Caspar and Caspian and his date, Sophie’s sister Julia. Julia Caspar was second in command of the Gasparro mafia family. Sophie was Giovanni Gasparro’s special princess looking for love. Yes I think many readers have seen Weasel do similar and this was a full on Weasel mafia family special with Daddy and his little princess. Or at least, part of it was (Sophie and Giovanni), the rest was beautiful chaos. See Julia and Caspian had had a date at the opera that turned into a dramatic rescue by Max (sexy firefighter of the paid for threesome on Friday night) as a VR avatar singing Carmen turned out to have bullets that were programmed to actually target their VR rigs…Sophie was immediately whisked into Family Protection and Lizzie-Mae’s brother went into some kind of relapse and wasn’t allowed into the Virtual Talk Show. Luckily I had a back-up couple… one of whom was a Gothy Teen, Nebulam who kind of hated her stockbroker match, Zachary, who then read poetry to prove he was brave…
Then there was an audience vote. Julia and Caspian won… even if Caspian was blatently in love with sexy firefighter Max. And Lizzie-Mae the talk show host went on maybe a touch too long about how awesome he was…
And then. In a mid-Together Forever gathering, just after Nebula had read her tarot cards to predict a disaster coming, Lizzie-Mae suffered the thing she had always prevented her Mother from doing to her. The Sun published a recording of her cybersex, the kinky hardcore sex she’d had with Odette because she loved her. And that was my beautiful crash into going and getting high and drunk with Sophie, Lizzie-Mae who’d avoided drugs and didn’t really drink much alcohol because it made her sleepy. Again, Weasel and I playing drug-taking rich-bitch princesses, yeah that’s some nice familiar archetype roleplay going on.
One thing that was quite interesting was the video ended on essentially an advert for Lady Dominique at Pandora’s Box… not that Lizzie-Mae knew who that was, and she trusted Odette. She also had some very supportive friends in her support group and Athena, Ruby and Sophie helped her put together a rejig of the video so that they could claim it was just a really good deep fake.
And then the real world intervened.
See I didn’t know before Sunday whether I wanted a happy ending or not when it came to romance, I was just aiming for her to know herself. But on Sunday DS Luke messaged me before I accidentally came across the news online, which would have blindsided me. And that was to tell me that a friend of mine was dead. I actually cried my first lot of make-up off. Then I looked up who was going to be my match OOC, and breathed a sigh of relief because he would know what was happening. And I and The Fae Ref agreed to be gentle with each other on the final day.
The Game runner offered that anyone who needed to could drop out, I think there were four, maybe five of us in the LARP who were to varying degrees affected. I messaged my weightloss channel (which had two other people from the LARP in it), another person messaged the OOC chat on the game server, we all did the sensible. But when it came down to it, I imagined I was talking to Dudge, there’s no way he’d have condoned missing the last part of a LARP because he’d died. So I blew a kiss to the ether and did my make-up and got right back into it.
And on Sunday morning Caspian let Lizzie-Mae know that Lady Dominique was the Pro-Domme name of Odette and Lizzie-Mae messaged Odette to say “We need to talk.”
Odette admitted what she’d done. And with Full Vocal Fry, Lizzie-Mae set her shoulders and channelled her mother; “This is how we’ll play it…” and agreed that if they were Forever Matched she’d be happy on camera but she never wanted to see Odette again when she didn’t have to. Odette claimed publically that she’d faked the video as a private joke and proof of concept to advertise her business but that her rig had been hacked before she’d had the chance to show Lizzie-Mae.
Yeah, IC 4chan did not believe a word of that vlog Lizzie-Mae. And rightly so.
Third match? Yeah that was Caspian, the escort she’d previously hired to be her boyfriend. Who’d been dating a mafia donna as well as he could mostly out of fear for his last relationship, but who was owed a favour by her.
So when he asked about if Lizzie-Mae had known Odette was recording and she said no his need for consent was outraged and he immediately called in that favour to have the mafia family target Odette! Not that Lizzie-Mae knew any of this.
Lizzie-Mae couldn’t understand why, or why Odette asked if she had had anything to do with the fire.
And then her mother, in a show of magnaminity let her settle out of court to separate Lizzie-Mae’s makeup and skincare lines from the rest of the Keeping Up With The Russo’s merchandising.
Then there was the other talk show, led by Lizzie-Mae’s twitter friend, Galaxy Novak, celebrity author. This one was about The Worst Dates and Max the firefighter dragged his date, Julia the mafiosa, up to the front and he explained it was his worst date because – she was the head of a Mafia family and he exposed her on live TV! (Which was great from the other perspective of my game as I was typing like a mad thing trying to get down all his accusations accurately!)
Just before they had to split up Caspian admitted to setting the mafia on Odette. Odette who had previously offered Lizzie-Mae a way of destroying her mother, which Lizzie-Mae had refused because that would have turned her into her mother. And here’s the love of her life telling her that he had his revenge via the mafia. She shook her head, looked down and then she squared her shoulders, and channelled her mother and with Full Vocal Fry said; “This is how we’ll play it…”
She hung up as her voice began to break and she called Sophie Caspar who had to get rid of her pills and went out and danced and got really, really high.
But Caspian had had to tell her two other things. One was that The News had reported Max as dead in a gunfight at the Gasparro family. The other, was that he loved her. And then they had to split.
Of course she and Caspian got Forever Matched. And so hungover and trying to come down from pills they had their final conversation in the game. Lizzie-Mae hung out in an art gallery and talked to her brother, her best friend, her brother’s match and Caspian who was clearly still a little bit in love with Max.
And then… her best friend revealed she’d been matched with a man who’s name had not been in the Together Forever program and in walked ‘Dave’ who Caspian immediately confessed his love to.
There then followed a bit of a conversation;
“I love how much you love him, but are you ok with us?”
“Do NOT get cold feet on me now just because I got a little emotional while still drunk in an art gallery after a man died and then came back to life”
“I’m not going to get cold feet on you now”
She and Caspian agreed to stay together but she said she wasn’t going to marry him straight away because weddings were a bit of a performance and she wanted to keep things as real with him as she could.
And we left it on:
“I’m going to dance until the taxi arrives”
“I can’t wait to dance with you”