Virtual Heaven and Hell

Oh if only they could make VR like this!

Sorry for the long delay in new caps.  I just haven't been feeling it lately.  I did start a cap about a week ago, but didn't finish it in the first try.  When I went back to it, I edited down the story and threw it into a design, but it just didn't feel right.  I might post it later, but I'm going to take another swing at it and see if I can make it better.

Today I looked at, and when I decided it wasn't ready for prime time, I went looking for another image.  I really didn't think I would find one to cap, but I came across an image that just blew my socks off (pun not intended... but enjoyed):

I really had no idea of what I was going to do with the image, but I decided to just throw it in Photoshop and play around a bit.  I cropped it down to the real action (focusing it more on the girl), then pulled the color out.  But it didn't really click.  I re-colored in her hair and lips, but it still didn't move me.  Just playing around I tried something a little different.  Instead of making it black and white and then recoloring the image, I made a copy of the image in black and white, and then deleted out the part I wanted in color.  That left a whole that the original color image show through.

And now it clicked! I really don't know where, but I got the feeling that she was in a virtual world.  The color part is her, while all the black and white is the virtual world.  Including the man she is worshiping.  I figured a man tried out a virtual simulator and got stuck in the girl he wanted to fuck, and now had to live out the story.

My initial idea was to present it like "The Hard Part" with the words just overlaying the image.  Little snippets started forming like 'Eww I can taste him"  "I can't move!" and "I wanted to fuck this girl... not BE her".  But one snippet was "Thank God Jeremy isn't here... I would hate to have him see me like this"  And that got the old wheels turning.   What if Jeremy WAS there.  And the computer let 'Calvin' see him as black and white.   Hey... What if I also wrote up Jeremy's part!

A couple problems I would have to overcome.  First I would need to do the same 'erasing' to get Jeremy in color and Calvin in black and white.  Second I would have to directly explain that the black and white is the virtual world, so that the readers could see the 'error' in the program.  With that much story telling, I couldn't just put the text over the picture.  I would need a little more structure than that would allow.

I went back to my new style and figured I could still put the story in its own blocks.  The only other element I needed then was a 'background' image.  Sure, I could use the same image and just blur it out like I did in "Anything to Help", but that is exactly what I did with the previous mentioned cap.  So I wanted to go at least a little different.  Being a VR setting I figured some computer generated image would work.  Thankfully I quickly found this:

It wasn't hard to zoom in in (eliminating the pure black portions), color it to match the image, and then line it up in the background.