This is a sketch I asked HypnoFire86 to make for a concept I've had rolling around in my head for a while; A future in which many people attend their jobs and schools via fully-immersive VR environments. In this work-from-home world it is not unusual for kids to attend school from their bedrooms in their jammies while their parents work in the home office (also in their jammies). Your digital avatar talks and interacts with others within VR spaces in real-time no matter how far or near you are in real-space.
In this world your company's office, your school, the town hall, your local library, your favourite hangouts and clubs exist on servers. Those servers not only provide the terrain, they provide the rules for the digital reality itself, determining what is and isn't possible and the metaphors available to you to interact with the environment.
In this picture __CoolKittyDan17__ is attending a class in his VR school taught by an AI teacher who is part of the school software. The rules of the school server make it so that all students are dressed in smart uniforms, and—as in all SFW spaces—the server makes it impossible for clothing to be removed or for the students to be touched in an inappropriate manner while normal physical contact such as games of tag and roughhousing is still allowed.
Unfortunately for Dan and his classmates, an extremist hacker group has just uploaded a virus to the school district's server farm. They've disabled the log-out functionality of the server, sped-up the simulation time, subverted the AI teachers to deliver hypnotic lessons to the students and are busy morphing the terrain around and inside the school into a fever-dream of traps, tests and encounters usually only seen in dark fantasy movies, all in an effort to condition Dan and his fellows into adopting their worldview.
This sketch was commissioned from the amazingly talented HypnoFire86.
I'm glad you like it. I've been thinking about the setting and the adventures the kids in it might get upto for a while. Fire also does the best zonked expressions. :)
I'm glad you like it. I've been thinking about the setting and the adventures the kids in it might
