He wizarded his packroll up from its depression in the tall grass and into its dimension of holding, then he scanned the horizon to get his bearings. He wasn’t far from the Lake of Lakiness– it gleamed in the high sun of the cloudless day.
Lake of Lakiness he thought with a cringe. It was a name that made his brain feel stupid. He sighed– there was so much good that was going to come from what he had to do here. Maybe, when it was all done, Nicole would understand.
He picked up his step and made his way to the shoreline, then walked into it about waist deep, ignoring its chill even as the water froze his balls. Morelon traced a circle through the water with his fingertips, they sluiced lightly, breaking the skiing and making ripples. Ripples that he charged using a few spell points from his completely replenished store.
It’s the last night of that extra week I paid for those assholes. Won’t they be surprised to get a visit from good old Morelon?
He chuckled and stepped back. The circles of energy blazed golden as they sped up the whirling motion, created two whirlpools that blurred ethereal and unreal.
“Neat,” Morelon spoke as he watched. He’d never cast it before and it looked quite amazing.
The circles funneled and then wove together into a single, blurry picture. It flickered a bit and then opened to a panning shot of Franjy Ponny. It swooped down, flickering into an infra-red, showing the heating signature of a few human players inside buildings then switching back to normal vision. Morelon imagined he could hear the whine of a drone’s propellers– maybe that was how the nanites made this particular magic happen.
He willed the spell to go to a window and peek on through. There they were! That asshole Taz aka Robby Robber was bitching about something to Curtis, who was scratching his balls underneath the orange of his monk outfit. Paige was there in the corner, just staring out of a different window. She wasn’t at all as chipper as he remembered her. It made him smile. Hey hey, the gang’s all here!
He willed the spell forward and heard the clink of glass. All of their heads turned to face it. Shit!
“What the hell is that thing now?” Robby asked angrily. He’d winced at the clink and he had his weapons out, looking halfway PTSD.
“I– I think we need to get out of here!” Paige said, her face pale. “It’s him. Everything in this place is.”
Brian/Morelon started laughing, speaking through his spell. “You all didn’t need to stay! I killed you, you got reset, you could have gone home!”
“Fuck that– then you win,” Curtis/Cornholen glowered. “What the hell are you doing here and how are you a giant eye floating outside our window, asshole?”
Ah, so that’s what the spell was doing.
“Great questions! I’ve got a job I need done. And you three are just the fools to do it! Congratulations!”
“No!” Paige whimpered. “No no no. This isn’t fun anymore. That shit monster that you made took hours to kill us! It pushed itself into our mouths and over our bodies, keeping us pinned down while it did so. And then it just let us choke out slowly. Stress point by stress point.”
Morelon smiled. It had been commanded to give them a slow suffocating death, torturously squeezing itself into every nook and cranny, making sure to make it hours of hell before they repopped in Access 0. He was happy to know his summoned minion had followed his commands to the letter.
“Yeah, and there’s nothing you can do to change our minds, man. That shit was just monstrous. I’ve scrubbed and scrubbed,” Robby complained, “and still the smell keeps coming. So much scrubbing.”
Morelon was beaming now. He’d imbued the shit golem with a stench curse that Robby was having a hard time shaking.
“Yeah,” Curtis said. “You go find somebody else. Nothing you can offer us will get us working with you.”
Morelon gathered some energy and then popped into the room with them.
“Surprise,” he grinned, and readied a spell crackling and smoking arcs of lightning. Nothing happened. In fact, he began swirling with greenish energy.
“Oh shit, motherfucker!” Robby exulted. “Just wait til you get tossed on your ass! This place will… fuck you up… why isn’t it working?”
Because he was casting an anti-magic spell, that was why. It nullified all their high level items, and apparently kept him from being thrown out. However, it wasn’t strong enough to just disenchant all the protection wards in town.
Time to flex.
Morelon had the Transmogrifier, and was busy clicking and clacking through the encyclopedic store of different magical effects he had in it. One of them was stupid powerful, it must’ve been an early beta version item that helped them destroy the rules in the game system they thought weren’t right, so they could be easily replaced.
He muttered the rule he wanted dismantled, even as the protective spell around Access Level 0 kept trying to pick him up and catapult him out. Instead, a few moments later, it dissipated. A cry went up from outside.
“Oh shit,” Cornholen said.
He blasted them with lightning. The unprepared players shook and trembled as they were hit with three spinning 10s, each one bumped over using his Transmogrifier. They took level 2 Harm, only to stand and attempt to run, and get acid blasts in each of their backs. More level 3 Harm, which they couldn’t heal down from. They writhed in pain, but it was over quickly.
Then in quick succession he sprayed them with dark purple necrotic magic. The oily magic resonance oozed out toward their bodies and latched onto them. Each of them twitched and shuddered, then acid burns and all, they stirred and got to their feet. Now he had three avatars to be undead servants to his cause.
“Welcome to the party,” he told them. The nanite-generated avatar glitched a bit as their hosts were pulled away to Level Access 0. Morelon wondered what they were screaming out there in unaugmented reality. Something profane and earth-shattering, surely.
He walked around the gaping zombies, noting how they still clung to their weapons and balanced adeptly on the balls of their feet.
“You know,” Morelon said, finishing his inspection, “this item right here is my Transmogrifier. And I found a few loopholes and made something very special. It can take the powers out of any other item and add them to my own. You three are a test of that. This particular McGuffin was called a DoppleGhoster and if it worked right you three are now NPC Zombie slaves with all of your powers and none of the bullshit. I know you’re just dumb zombies but you have to appreciate just how awesome that is. Especially since the original item was one use only… and mine is infinite.”
Morelon stopped and hurried to the window. He peered through, noting the many player characters interacting with one another in the square and beyond.
“Follow me my friends– let’s make an army!”
***
Nicole writhed and schlorped in her tongue beast form for hours before the spell finally broke. And then she spent another hour dodging satanic hallucinations as Merelon’s “Hell Hath No Fury spell” finally ran out of spell points. Whether it was great winged dildoes with hideous fanged mouths, or enormous teddy bears with eyeballs for mouths and made of sticky marshmallowy goop, she hated it equally. For a while she’d fallen into a pit of quicksand ringed by dancing nude imps all cheering for her to fail and drown in the muck. After she’d chased them and their waggling little wieners off, a great monster with the heads of a bunch of annoying, rapey office workers followed her around and told her how hot she looked, how she’d be prettier if she smiled more, and could she wear the tennis dress tomorrow because the CFO and CEO were auditing the department. She eventually hacked a bunch of their heads off, but now without taking some level 1 Harm and burning off a whole bunch of Stress points. She then had to make her way through a swamp where drowned versions of all her fellow VIP Services people, including Janelle, floated up near the surface and stared at her as she went. In place of foreheads each of them had a hairy scrotum floating off, with testicles roughly the size of tennis
balls.
Now she was simply back to where she had started, a nanite wilderness built up in the middle of the New Mexican desert. She sighed shakily and bit her lip. The whole experience had been so unique and terrifying. A bit like Brian himself. She doubted he’d come up with those specific things, but rather just allowed the game system to play with the things she personally disliked. It was one of the bad parts about having so much of her info in the system.
Worst of all, she couldn’t exactly blame him for the way things had gone.
No pad means no easy way out. I’m just an adventurer now, she realized, looking down at the VIP Services crest on her breastplate. An adventurer with no special powers, no unlimited control over the system, and no way to exit the game.
She made her way to the edge of the caldera, and headed down the mountain. A quick Survival roll of 4 and 5 ended up with her skidding halfway down and scoring a Level 1 Harm, after spending Stress to step it down from level 2. The fall had hurt, but at least she still had the ability to control the haptic pain settings.
She bit back the swearing. VIP Services were not about the profanity.
“Wait…” She wasn’t really a part of VIP Services any longer, and didn’t have to abide by all the rules for when she was around the VIP guests.
She sucked in a great deep breath. “Fuck! Urgghhh! Shit shit shit shit shit. Great-big-fucking-asses-stuffed-with-vienna-fucking-sausages!”
This didn’t help her get off this treacherous ledge, but it did make her feel a little better. By now she was bemoaning that she didn’t have a cushy assignment, like an entitled, handsy cheating husband who she could fend off with relative ease, for only a few days. No, she had to get the complicated one.
She set out, one foot at a time, taking her time, breathing slow and steady while she thought about what to do. About what she could do. Then she slapped her forehead.
Duh. Just go back to Franjy Ponny. I’ll have plenty of time to think things through on the way.
With her mind set and decision made, she strode hard down the mountainous path. Striding back to Access Level 1 and freedom, with cheeky cursing that came pouring out with every step.
“Fuckity fuck, shitting ass gadgets on fire. Big pendulous ass, wobbling and swinging in the breeze. Douche canoes, paddling down rivers of massive turds.”
***
Kaboom! The side of the tavern exploded in one concussive wave, the players hidden within screaming as their comrades outside used the opportunity to sweep in and attack. Fighting had been heavy and the ground was muddy with simulated blood, but the bodies of the fallen were up and alive again. Some of the player zombies had twins as vengeful players had come back from Level Access 0 to try and get their revenge.
Morelon sat upon a stump, overlooking the chaos. It was quite magical. He’d come out into the town square and felled probably twenty before anyone knew what was happening. Then he’d raised them– NPC zombie minions with PC powers– and everything just grew from there. It was an army that grew its own army. It was the start of his kingdom. And everything he’d done was in the rules, he’d be grandfathered in when they changed the system.
It should have been enough. His face drooped and glowered. He knew it should be. But it wasn’t. With what he had here he could be a king or emperor. He could be the wild mage emperor of Swords & Sorcerers– but with the pad, the right glitches at the right time with the right game skills– he could be a god. He heard a battle cry behind him and with a twitch of his fingers, two 7’s and a 9, a wall of flame ended the threat without him even having to turn to look.
“You should have expected that,” Morelon said, his inflection thoughtful and jesting. “Ah well, my friend, your intrusion reminds me that I have duties to attend to and little time in which to do so. Thank you and welcome to my army.”
He turned and looked down at the scorched barbarian berserker lying on the ground, a halfling rogue next to him. That surprised him. That damn little ankle biter was quiet. He was happy to welcome them both aboard.
Murky purple magic swept out from Morelon, over both of the corpses at his feet and then wider over the entire battlefield. It was time to use up his spell points, grab up his army, and move on.
He walked down from the hilltop with slow and purposeful strides, gazing over the destruction. There were still adventurers fighting or hiding here and there. One man fired an arrow at his head that he dodged with a few nudged 8s, and a 1st level mage fired some sort of spectral squawking chicken that flared out in a counterspell from one of his zombie mages, but otherwise it was a finished battle and a full on victory for Team Learned. Learn-ed? He’d have to work on the name later but everything was exactly as it had to be.
“Onward, my monster men!” Morelon bellowed. They marched over, making a large circle of level soldiers with him as their nucleus, then they moved in step, off to Level Access 4 and the land of the Everbolt.
Actually, shit. He’d been practically everywhere in this one horse game world. He laughed at the absurdity of it. “Now… where was it again?”
Chapter 17- Official Reviewers Guild Investigation and Execution Service: ORGIES
It took Nicole the better part of a day to realize her mistake and just die.
She’d been through a large forest, a warren of angry hyena people who really wanted to stick spears into all her orifices. She then stumbled down through a trap in a grassy knoll and had to fight her way out. She rolled dozens of times and killed kobold after kobold, until, at last, she reached the exit and nearly made the critical mistake of leveling up.
Instead she suddenly realized what had happened. A moment later, she had her massive sword hilt-first in the ground and pointed at her chest. A hard shove and a pinch later, she woke in the midst of the boring white room.
“Greetings, guest!” a young lady with a clipboard said, then stared at her with her head cocked for a second. “Wait, do I know–”
“I’m VIP Services and I need your PENIS.”
“Uhhh,” the woman said.
“Skiff, I need your Prestige Electric whatever Iridescent Skiff, damnit, the dildo-looking thing you used to get in here. Nicole Locke, VIP Services, access ANAL and you’ll spot me in no time.”
“Uhhhhhhhh,” the woman said.
“New here?”
“Second day.”
“Great. Administrative Network Access Lookup service I think, or Access Network Admin Lookup… anyway, ANAL. Find me there, now. I’m in a hurry.”
Ten minutes later the woman’s PENIS was zipping along full tilt, which was a bit of a tight fit. She’d introduced herself as Wendolyn, and told Nicole that they had a huge batch of new hires in preparation for the new rollout, which was coming any day now, and possibly even tomorrow.
“I wish I could congratulate you, but we have a serious problem,” Nicole told her, and elaborated only for as long as it took to get down to the admin levels. She gazed out the window as she shocked this Wendolyn over and over again, both with her knowledge of Brian Morecock’s exploits and the various acronyms in the Prestige system, which was apparently constructed by a twelve year old with an affinity for poop and dick jokes.
She disembarked and immediately took a Priority Intra-office Shuttle Service, or PISS. She’d never had to take a PISS before and frankly the situation scared her. She found it to be a yellow and black striped magnetically levitating single train car. A bewildered and semi-regretful Wendolyn drifted after her, asking slightly horrified questions. Luckily the stream the PISS followed was both quick and heavily saturated with admin tools. She used these to send a priority message out to the coding team, story writing team, and admin staff of Swords & Sorcerers.
God, she’d wasted so much time hacking and slashing her way through the gameworld. She hoped Brian hadn’t gotten totally out of control.
The admin was quick to respond, as were Tandy and Chrissy, who jumped on the conference via PISS. They wrinkled their noses at the story of Brian’s ascent, and final a
mbush that had left her incapable of protecting her tablet.
“I understand that this will cost me my job, sir,” she told the admin on the call, a dark-skinned, mustachioed man named Sanjay. “But this is an emergency.”
“I’ll have all the feeds following Mr. Morecock transferred over to a troubleshooting team. Get here and we’ll see about getting this situation fixed up. Meeting in ORGIES as soon as possible.”
ORGIES. Dear lord. She kept her face carefully composed. “Yes, sir.”
She pulled up the current game feed surrounding Morelon the Learned, and gasped at the carnage that used to be Franjy Ponny.
***
Just the entrance to Access Level 4 was something entirely different, and too difficult to find. He was frankly amazed it took him several hours of research just to puzzle together, given how the rest of the game had freely shared its info with him. Access Level 4 clearly wasn’t meant to be found by players. Not casual players anyhow.
He peered around the Kapi Tal central library and records archive. This thing was so huge, so massive, it had extra-dimensional spaces built into it to allow access to books that would otherwise overflow its regular third dimensional space. Certain alcoves would teleport you to a reading room somewhere else in the great empire, a smaller library dedicated to some obscure line of magical research, or ancient history from thousands of years ago. Sure most of the books were written in ‘indecipherable pictograms’ which he took to mean the game writers hadn’t bothered to fill the books with actual knowledge. Others were simply text copies of real world books, some with phenomenal illustrations and thick vellum pages, often making them about two feet thick. There was the porn, with illustrations in holographic magic. The porn sections were seemingly limitless, subdivided down into various types.
And then there were in-game books. It took magic to find them, more magic to rifle through their pages quicker, and even more magic points to take the notes and cross-reference the other books. The longer he went through the literal literary labyrinth of texts on the Everbolt, the more impressed he was. The first layer of text only referenced ancient scholars, and the ancient scholars were reputed to have met and interviewed those whose mistresses’ uncles’ cousins’ second-best-friends’ grandparents had lived through the actual events in question. From there, the next level was buried in maps and charts in similar fashion: current maps, then older maps from before various cataclysms, where the geography of the world had been irreparably altered, and the newer settlements built atop the rubble of long-dead civilizations. It was all as tiring as it was fascinating.
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