Like Photobomb, this was only an age regression story, not a gender swap story.
I actually reused the detective character from the Tales of the Scarlet Knight books, Captain Lottie Donovan, only this time I gave her a daughter.
Lottie is investigating a killer called the Gamemaster who kills people with sadistic games, like a literal game of Candy Crush. (As in crushing someone with big pieces of candy.) Then Lottie gets a message from the killer that he has her daughter Casey.
Lottie goes to a warehouse but is knocked out and wakes up in a motel room that she soon finds out is a virtual world. The Gamemaster has imported her consciousness (and Casey's) into a VR world and unless she plays his game, they'll die.
The Gamemaster arranges a series of sadistic challenges and each time they fail a challenge Lottie gets 2 years younger and Casey 1 year younger. Lottie is 36 and Casey is 18 so the math means they'd both end up at 0 at the same time.
The fun I had with this story is that I used a lot of my other stories as the settings for the challenges. Like one was based on Chance of a Lifetime/Second Chance. Another Lottie is basically Midnight Spectre and then Velocity Gal and then later Apex Girl's intrepid reporter friend Kate King from Girl Power. And another they're in the creepy sort of 50s version of A Handmaid's Tale world from Perfect Worlds: The Stone of Change.
There was other stuff too, like one challenge where they're Mexican immigrants trying to get across the border. (This was even before Trump and the MAGA hat brigade.) But of course they always lose each challenge. Sometimes because the Gamemaster would invoke some loophole like one where they were supposed to do something by midnight and they did it at 12:00:01.
Unlike Photobomb, which ended Happily Ever After, this had a couple of twists leading to an unhappy ending. The first twist is that Casey was never in the game; she was never even kidnapped! The Casey Lottie was with was just a virtual creation.
When Lottie loses the game the final time she's left as an infant. But in the real world she's still full grown, though acting like a newborn. After seeing her mom in the hospital Casey goes home only to be knocked out by the Gamemaster and put into her own virtual prison. Bwhahahaha...
So what happened to Casey? We deal with that in the sequels. Though those did have gender swaps because I thought that might help them sell better--it really didn't. The upshot is that Casey sort of becomes one with the Matrix and in her own way becomes like the Gamemaster by playing sadistic games first with her mother's old partner and then with a computer programmer.
As a fun fact, since after each level they got younger I numbered the chapters backwards from 18 to 1. That was also a good way to keep track of how old they were supposed to be at the time.
I decided to make a new cover for this one too:
2 comments:
I like both of the covers. And they tie in well with each other so you can see that they are part of the same series.
Pretty cool idea. I can think of an evil version of Angry Birds. That cover with the woman trying to escape the screen is chilling
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