DoucheMage

by Damien Hanson

  A clock started up, Delivered to be Devoured, which he snorted at. Except that the clock only had four segments. Meaning, with his Risky situation here, he only had two shots at this, before mama dropped him into a nest full of a bunch of three-headed murder birdies. He readied a warding sphere spell, which on a Fortitude only rolled a 4, followed by a 2 when he fed it a Plot Point. He swore as the clock filled up and the nest drew near. The pterodactyl pulled into a steep dive and rushed him down toward a very uncomfortable looking craggy edifice with sharp beaks pointing out everywhere. Finally he had a final chance to roll, but this time the game auto-defaulted to Animals, then rolled him a 9 and a 2. A third failure.

  They released him, and he went screaming down about five feet into the waiting beaks of the awful needle-faced monsters below. Except… he released the other spell at that exact moment, rolled up a pair of 9’s on a Wreck, and blasted every little baby bird in the nest in one fell swoop.

  The original thing shrieked in horror and fury at him, and he flipped it off.

  “Irresponsible parents!” He pulled out his reanimator, and brought the murder kids back to life. “You should’ve made sure your food was disabled before you tried feeding it to your kids! Look, now I turned your babies into zombies! How you like that, huh?”

  Fortitude was the next on his list to level up. It was just too bad he would be forced to head to a different genre to get the Access Level up to 3, just so he would have the chance to buy third level dots.

  He came back to reality to discover three wickedly sharp beaks stabbing down at him. He took a level 2 Harm right away, and pushed himself to step it down to level 1, because he hated that he only had about 7 hit points in this game. He then unleashed a spell that turned the flapping monstrosity to stone. The thing called out in terror before the creeping stone shell encased it. Instead of having to deal any damage, he just watched it plummet to its doom. Down at the base of butte, his new statue shattered into a thousand pieces.

  He was already down to about 30 Spell Points. If he kept this up, he’d be out of SP before he got within sight of the final boss. He swept his gaze around at the piteous bird creatures, and cracked his neck. He was built for this. Everything that was happening now was only because he was rubbing against the glass ceiling Prestige set. They didn’t like that he was so close to the Mythical Gear already. After all, once he swiped the highest level artifacts, what would stop him from tearing through the place?

  They were scared of him.

  He engaged a Feather Fall spell, rolled his Lore with a 9, 8, and 7, then leapt off the cliff and began his slow, peaceful descent towards the final clues.

  Over the course of the next eight hours, Morelon the Learned murdered tribes of hyena folk, burned the decapitated stumps on a hydra, took Harm, and camped out in a pocket dimension to give himself time to heal up and restore spell points. He found his way into the tower of Psythulian the Knower. Clearly no one had ever attempted this quest before, and not just because Psythulian didn't have a ridiculous name. It was also because the miserable hamlet of hyena folk surrounding it didn’t have a tavern with an awful name. Instead they had a swath of dead bodies leading to the tower’s door, and more XP.

  He was breathing heavily by the time he entered the pocket dimension again, with no way to heal the Level 3 Harm he’d sustained except by sitting in this dingy little magical cabin and eating what delicious rations he had available. Prestige wouldn’t starve him to death.

  When he emerged, it was to trudge up several more flights of stairs with his haptic bodysuit reminding him of the level 2 Harm and the loss of one die on all rolls. He hadn’t had time to appreciate the stark beauty of the tower. He did, however, get a look at several of the coders’ portraits.

  This quest has been brought to you by Swords & Sorcerers lead coder Viridian X, it read, and showed the portrait of an elder dragon with gleaming green scales. As he ascended, the dragon changed into a thin black man with waves of short-cropped hair and a mischievous smile. The plaque below, instead of Viridian X, now read Reed Schmidt. Several more portraits did likewise: a muscle-bound shark with too many eyes shifted into a pink-haired Asian girl, a half-man half-spider changed into a dumpy, pale nerd with thick glasses and obviously airbrushed acne. There were more, but Morelon was busy going through his spellbook for the boss fight.

  The huge oak door creaked open a minute later, and Psythulian appeared in a padded armchair, in a robe, with a sizable pipe protruding from its fishy lips. The monster was somewhat a combination of a snake and a fish, with webbed hands both wet and thickly scaled, and at least one huge glassy eye that swiveled to take him in.

  Its mouth tentacles shivered and it spoke. “You’ve finally arrived,” the croaking voice said.

  “I have come to vanquish–”

  “Let me shtop you right there,” it said. “You’ll find no fight here.”

  Brian stopped dead in his tracks. “What?”

  It took a puff of its big pipe, and its tentacles quivered as the smoke escaped its mouth. “Oh yesh, I’m merely a shtepping shtone on the way to mush, mush bigger queshtsh.”

  That couldn’t be right. “You’re trying to fool me.” He readied his mind blast spell.

  “Absholutely not. Akshully, I heard you were closhe to the Shupple Orb of Boobshight.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll give you all the knowledge you sheek, and more, if you promish to procure the boobiesh for me. Old Shythulian would love a few roundsh with that Shupple Orb.”

  “Hang on just a damn second. You’re supposed to be guarding the Supple Orb. What’s that about?” Damn. He hadn’t taken advantage of any of the park’s more… sensual offerings yet, on the off chance he might still end up meeting and wooing Nicole. The Supple Orb was supposed to take some of the edge off.

  “Well you shee,” Psythulian burbled, “There’ve been shome mix-shupsh in the coding departmentsh…” He sighed. “I mean the Shanctimonioush Hall where the Godsh dwell and sheal all fatesh. Closhe ash I can gather, shometimesh thingsh jusht… go a bit shidewaysh.”

  That was entirely too meta. He both loved and hated the idea of a self-aware game. “You’re stalling in order to keep me here.”

  Brian whirled to see what fresh ambush lurked just beyond his periphery, but found nothing. No tentacled horror or succubus wanting to drain him of all his levels while subjecting him to the bliss of lovemaking forever. How many guests had gone straight for those quests, he wondered.

  Nothing.

  “Sho… will I relinquishhh my control over thish Transhmogrifier I have for the Shupple Orb? Or will we have at thee, and pursue this moronic exshershize to its final stupid end?

  Finally, he said, “As you wish, nightmarish one. Tell me how to obtain the Supple Orb of Boobshight. Ahem, Boobsight.”

  ***

  Nicole put her book down and waved Tandy and Chris over. The cafeteria, at least, the East Hub cafeteria, was a large hive of buzzing activity, which unfortunately split into group cliques. You had writers over in one section of tables, guest services over here where the light was best and the one column had a huge floor to ceiling mirror, the coders in the corners slurping up the food as fast as possible to get back in the test labs, then other various and sundry people who made Prestige tick… HR, Hub IT, genre troubleshooters, financing, catering staff, drivers, janitorial staff, and the list went on.

  Nicole had been on her own until her fellow VIPs sauntered up. They had their trays piled high with salad and puffed rice snacks, along with a tiny helping of expertly grilled scallops in lemon-garlic butter.

  “Grrrrrrrrl,” Tandy said.

  “Ladies of the realm,” she replied.

  “We’re back in Swords & Sorcerers?” Tandy asked.

  “I like the purity of it,” she said. “Everything there is just, completely, itself. The grass is the greenest, the gold pieces are the goldyest, the armor is the shiniest, the air is the airiest. I’m reading this… here, Lord of the Ring
s. You guys read this? It’s awesome.”

  “I think you get a couple of employee points if you read it and do a quiz on it,” Chris said.

  “I’m all about the points,” Tandy said. “You think I can put it away in a weekend?”

  Nicole snorted. “More like a couple of months. This is the second volume, and there’s two more just as thick. There’s talking trees, and little halflings, only in this book they’re called hobbits. They eat like twelve meals a day. Then there’s black riders seeking out this invisibility ring. Anyway it’s… it’s way deeper than anything we have written up in the storylines here. The only way anybody would get close is if they just went on quest after quest, or called one of us up to tailor make an epic quest, like a custom job. I wouldn’t even know what that’d look like.”

  “So you’re waiting for that Brian guy to call you up and demand a Lord of the Rings edition VIP thing, huh?”

  Chris sighed. “I wish I had a Brian. I just had a Susan and a Chad. They were constantly fighting with each other about what to do next. She just wanted some poolside relaxation time I think, and he wanted motor boat chases and to cut the red wire while some bimbo in a bikini waits to blow up.”

  “There’s the problem,” Tandy said.

  “Yeah, another horndog. Except she didn’t want to let him out of her sight. Trust issues.”

  “That’s too bad,” Nicole said. “I’m never getting married. Too much bullshit.”

  “Speaking of your future husband, how’s your beardy Brian doing anyway?” Tandy asked.

  Nicole blushed. “I’m not supposed to… I mean I haven’t been watching his every move.”

  They stared at her.

  “Fine!” She produced her handheld and tapped at the feed, until she found a good angle. Brian was currently engaged with the LUBE. “Looks like he’s in a boss battle… but no battle. He’s, uh, checking through LUBE and looking at some rules.”

  “Coding error?”

  “I don’t know. This is… weird.” Brian had just cast a spell, and produced LUBE as a physical object, a tome. He held it up so Squiddy McSquidface could get a better look. “Can he do that? I don’t think it’s allowed.”

  “What, LUBE up an NPC?” Tandy shrugged. “I don’t know the rules on it. I doubt it.”

  “Do you think we should report this to troubleshooting?” Chris asked.

  Brian was engaged in a conversation with a creature they’d never seen before, a Cthulhu thing smoking a pipe and sitting in a smoking chair, with a bathrobe on and everything. The idea of a boss in a smoking jacket was wrong and so absurd it overrode the unsettling feeling of wrongness that popped up regarding the game itself.

  “You ever seen a thing like that? What is that?” Tandy asked. She was in high demand, and didn’t have a lot of time to spend studying up on the various genres or their conventions. Nicole had a pretty fair point base in Galaxies Unknown, Age of the Powered, Saddles and Six Shooters, Stone, Bronze and Iron, and had a bit of a point glut in Windswept Hearts, for no reason she cared to admit to anyone. She’d gone into fantasy reading overdrive since having Brian choose her (and not made any other choices for guidance, as was his right as VIP). She still needed five points in all the various genres before she’d get a mandatory pay raise, so Brian was a bit of a boon to her cause, honestly.

  “I think it’s guarding one of the Masterpiece items,” Chris said. “Maybe one of the Mythics.”

  “Anyway you think he’s going to make it?” Tandy asked.

  “I’m confused why there’s no battle going on.” And no dice being rolled. And the very idea that the LUBE could be manifest in the gameworld, or that the NPCs might either know about the rules, or understand what they were being shown. It sent a deep ripple of disquiet through her.

  However, the IT people, the story writers, the coders and the troubleshooters all knew their business. It was her job to keep the guests happy, not make the frickin game experience. She had enough on her plate reading through Lord of the Rings, and then something called Discworld. It sounded stupid. Intriguing, but stupid, like some Flat Earth nonsense.

  “Let’s finish up quick,” Nicole said. “I’ve got to show you this song the wizard sings to the elf maiden in Book III. It’s…” Orgasmic, she didn’t say.

  Chapter 9- Sh*t, Brian’s Dead

  Brian tapped the hand-drawn map just beside the laughing, curve-tusked woodcut caricature of a sea serpent. On that map was a donut-shaped island past the Lakely Lake with no features, and handwritten notes about how the map owner was pretty sure the island itself existed, but not completely. Dense fogs always swarmed in any time they set a course for it, but mysteriously vanished if they brought the boat about.

  Several other guests stood with Brian around the table at the tavern. Someone had named this The Tavern Inn, so as such a miniature picture of the tavern itself was painted on a signboard over the door, with another even tinier painting of the tavern in that mini-tavern’s signboard. He had a pair of couples: an elven bard (useless except to draw fire), a dwarven cleric (because nobody on the entire earth liked to stretch their imaginations past the obvious tropes), a halfling rogue (again, duh), and another wizard, this one a gnome. Brian especially didn’t like the idea of another wizard being along, but they weren’t VIPs, so it didn’t matter.

  What did matter was they were new here. On the one hand, they didn’t know the story of the Three Muskyteers, and on the other hand, they were still level 1.

  “As close as I can tell,” Brian said, jabbing his finger into the map, “the Mythical artifact is out on this island here, Greensville.”

  “Sounds like it was named by a six year old,” the halfling suggested.

  “Probably somebody’s kid, one of the coders,” the bard added.

  “Let’s… can we stay on task?”

  They fell silent.

  “The fog protection is definitely an enchantment. I attempted to scry it with a spell several times, and nearly got killed every single time…” Here he realized his mistake: the couples traded worried glances back and forth with one another. “But I found some critical information. There are some golems guarding Darian’s repository, and they should be easy enough, but once we get in there, we’ll have to stay tight and really rely on each other, because I have only a few fragments of maps from the last quest I was on. Our cleric should be able to handle a lot of punishment with that armor, while our bard friend–”

  “We have names, you know.”

  He stopped. “I’m aware.”

  “Look, this all sounds like a little much,” the halfling rogue said. He had his hand in the gnome’s robes, and while it was clear to Brian they just wanted to have some freaky time as weird fantasy species with the world around them being really big, he’d hoped they would at least do a single quest before shagging their whole stay away.

  “Sorry,” the bard said, “We were hoping–”

  Even as the cleric locked eyes with her and said, “This really isn’t our–”

  “No, fine! Great! It’s perfectly okay. You four go… do… each other, I guess.”

  They all gave him dirty looks and filed out, with the halfling basically disappearing beneath the gnome’s robes.

  Brian swore under his breath and stared down at the home of his ultimate quest, Greensville. “My nemesis: some town from Tennessee or somewhere.”

  With all the Credits and a handy teleport spell, he was able to charter passage across Lakity Lake towards Greensville. The captain had a snake bird on his shoulder that kept shouting ‘Abandon ship!’ and ‘Keel haul that scupper!’ and such, but Brian got him nice and drunk, proposed giving him as many as three Credits worth of gold and Platinum, and the sot agreed, even if his bird said ‘Throw him overboard! Feed the sirens!’

  He considered going back to the party, killing them, and reanimating their corpses to help him fight off whatever was inside, but decided against it. PC corpses might just vanish out of sight like last time.

 
No, he couldn’t risk it. He needed to get the items, one after the other, pretty damn quickly. If the powers that be had any inkling of what he was trying to accomplish they’d cut one of the quests or change the powers or do something Muskyish. And he didn’t at all want to deal with that. He’d used the LUBE liberally and tore through its innards– he knew that any park guest already in the possession of an artifact or item could expect its properties to be grandfathered-in in the event of a rule-change– even if said item were judged to be Overpowered.

  He laughed. He had big plans for this place. Great, big, swollen plans, engorged by testosterone and ambition, ready to spurt forward. The laughter, the teasing, all the stupid nonsense names for things, the bullying, it was over forever. Starting just as soon as Darien’s Transmogrifier ended up in his hands.

  The fog rolled in with alarming speed, like sentient mist out of a horror movie done bad. The captain of this particular vessel, the only one drunk enough to accept passage to the fabled, terrifying Greensville, balked. The thing on his shoulder, sort of parrot colored, definitely feathered, but mostly snake, squawked and cried out, “Abandon ship!”

  “She’s just like they say,” the weathered captain muttered. “We’ll never be able to navigate through this.”

  Brian reached into his spell book for All Sight, and cast it on the captain. He selected Study, and rolled out a 6 and a 4, which was enough. Although a clock sprang to life reading Beware the Depths, the captain immediately cooed with delight and yanked hard to port.

  Or perhaps starboard. Brian wasn’t in this to become a friggin sailor.

  “Reef the mainsail, lad!” the captain barked.

  “Avast ye swabbies!” the snakebird squealed.

  Then again, he’d become a friggin sailor if he had to.

  The ship juddered with a scraping impact, and nearly through him off his feet. Instead he was forced to choose between Survival and Pilot, both of which he’d neglected to level up. So he was a minmaxer, big deal. Why’d the game have to go and punish him for it? He selected Survival, mostly to remind himself to buy it next level up, only to roll a 9 and an 10. Yes!