Beast Planet

Beast Planet Book One Aaron Oster For my father, who buys and reads all of my books just because I wrote them. Contents Please Read 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Epilogue Afterword Please Read In 2019, at the end of my first year as an author, I wrote a book called Animal Kingdom: Riot. This came at a time when I had already started four new series in eight months, without writing a second book for three of them. A fifth new series was just a bit too much, both for me and my readers, and as a result, the book wasn’t given a sequel. However, after more than four years as an author, I have decided to give this series another shot. The book has had a complete overhaul. New storylines, character names, in-game races, and plots have been added. If you read the original and enjoyed it, I guarantee you’ll like this as well. If you didn’t, well, I can’t make any promises, but the story is definitely far better than it was way back then, if I do say so myself. I hope you enjoy Beast Planet as much as I do, and if you do, please consider leaving a positive rating or review. It makes all the difference. 1 Dan floated in an infinite pool of darkness, the void seeming to stretch out endlessly, robbing him of all sensation. If he hadn’t recognized the familiar darkness, he might have panicked. Despite that, he had no idea how he’d gotten here. He strained, trying to drudge up the memories of the last few hours. It was almost as if someone had stuffed his brain full of cotton, leaving him unable to focus for more than a few seconds. Ever so slowly, the darkness began to fade, and Dan found himself floating high above a familiar-looking green and blue planet. A moment later, some text began appearing before his eyes, scrolling across his vision in spidery lettering. Initializing… Welcome to Beast Planet, a world dominated primarily by animals and beastlings – half-beast, half-human hybrids. Beast Planet is a dangerous and brutal world. Survival of the fittest isn’t just a saying here. It’s the difference between life and death. Choose your starting race… The welcome message vanished, leaving a wall of text showing all the starting races. Dan still had no idea how he’d ended up here, but he did know where the logout button was. Though he didn’t have a body, as he hadn’t chosen an avatar yet, he could still control the interface with his mind. Exiting the Race Selection menu, he scrolled down to where the logout button should have been but wasn’t. Okay, he thought, trying to calm his racing mind. No need to panic. All he had to do was contact customer service, and they could take care of this. Quickly scrolling up, he tried looking for the customer service option. A pang of dread washed over him when he saw that it was missing as well. Now he really began to panic. There was no logout button and no customer service. He tried looking for the in-game messenger, hoping against all hope that it might still be there. It wasn’t. Dan’s mind began frantically working, trying to clear the cobwebs and piece together his last few hours. The last thing he remembered was logging out of the wildly popular Beast Planet Unlimited, the world’s most prominent VR MMORPG. Even though he would have liked to have kept playing, he’d had school the next day and his parents would have killed him if he overslept again. He’d gone to take a shower, and then… Dan’s mind recoiled as a series of emotions flashed through it. He couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but one stood out to him above all others. It made his mind flinch at the mere thought. Fear. And not normal fear, either. At that moment, Dan felt terror the likes of which he’d never felt before. Fear that he hadn’t even known was possible. Then, just like that, it was gone, as were the fleeting memories of the past few hours. This wasn’t normal, but for some reason, he wasn’t panicking, which was strange, considering that he was a generally anxious person and that this certainly qualified as a good time to have a full-blown panic attack. Shoving those thoughts aside for the time being, Dan focused back on the problem at hand. It seemed that he had somehow been transported back into the game, and he couldn’t see any way out. He’d read books in which this had happened. Earth was full of popular fantasy novels about how people logged into video games, only to be trapped with no way out. After all, with the VR craze sweeping the globe, it was hard not to enjoy books of that nature. But those were only books, not reality. Sure, there had been some fringe groups who’d tried to pass a sweeping ban over all VR gaming, but they’d failed just as miserably as the countless lawsuits lobbied against VeriTech, the company responsible for both BPU and the VR technology used to play it. Mentally shifting back to the character selection screen, Dan was confused. If he had indeed been transported back into BPU, where was his level 82 beastling cheetah character, Ronin? Why was he being asked to choose a new one? Scrolling through his user interface – or UI, as gamers called it – he tried to locate his lost avatar. After coming up short, he had to face the reality that he’d need to enter Beast Planet with a new character. It would suck to have to start over again from level 1, but at least he knew