DoucheMage

by Damien Hanson

  He found Nicole smirking. Behind her was the smoking body of her boss, its draconic body curled up on its back in pain.

  “What you did, before, trapping me in that nightmare hell fantasy land, that sucked. You got me good, but that sort of shit, that’s a little psychotic, Brian,” Nicole admonished him, her face turned serious. “You Muskyed me there. I don’t want to be Muskyed anymore,” she said, traipsing up to him and offering her hand. “Not by you, or Prestige Gaming, or a landlord out in the real world, or some leprechauns who want my tight ass booty.”

  Morelon/Brian frowned in confusion at that last bit, but his heart was soaring. He listened intently, watching her say her piece with admiration. She’s the alpha, he thought with a sigh.

  “I want to be me, here, living in the game. I don’t know what exactly that means for the future, but if I take your deal, will you agree to pay for me to retire here, even if we break up and all of that later on?”

  Beyond, out the window, a sexy angel with dark skin and raven’s wings stared. Her mouth hung open, but then a few moments later it snapped shut, the look of incredulity faded into one of careful admiration mixed with some resignation, and Tandy flew off.

  Morelon took Nicole’s hand and she heaved him to his feet. He looked deeply into her eyes, trying to find any glimpse of lie or intrigue, but all he saw was Nicole, badass gamer girl incarnate and someone who deserved better.

  “I am in need of a paladin,” he admitted coyly. “But can such character classes work for evil bosses?”

  “I’m not sure about the boss part, but I bet we can partner with them.”

  “Welcome to the party, Nicole of VIP services.”

  ***

  They scurried down a corridor deeper into the Everbolt’s Stronghold. Behind them they heard the elemental monstrosity roar in anger and begin to smash up its chamber.

  “WHERE ARE YOU HIDING, PISS MAGE? YOU CANNOT HIDE FROM ME!”

  “So are you sure you know where your pad teleported off to?” Morelon asked as they raced around a corner. The interior was black stone, with a torch burning magma red every ten paces and there was a side passage every five.

  “Well, no, I can’t say I know for sure. Stupidly I bookmarked the location on my pad but not to the cloud because it was my idea and fucking Reed would have taken it and called it his own. So I can’t know exactly where it is without my pad. But I have a pretty good idea.”

  Morelon nodded. “How good would you say good is?”

  Nicole stopped running for a moment. “A nine maybe?”

  “A nine out of ten? That’s tremendous!”

  “No, like a nine out of twenty.”

  Morelon’s jaw dropped. “Who the hell uses an out of twenty rating system?” he asked.

  “A girl who is crazy enough to decide to fry her boss and come live with a psycho in a video game,” she retorted. “The problem is that I had the idea to make this escape plan thingy when I was drunk. Like really drunk. And so I remember a few different places I put it, then changed my mind, and moved it. It’s a bit of a blur.”

  “I CAN HEAR YOU,” the Everbolt called from the entrance to the corridors. “I WILL FIND YOU.”

  “Oh stuff it up your hole,” Morelon called back. Something about being there with Nicole and doing the game their way instead of the way the admins wanted them to play made him feel bold and powerful. He conjured a rock elemental and sent it back the way they had come from.

  “Alright let’s keep at it,” Nicole said, starting to jog forward at a trot. They took a side passage, and then another. The echoes of combat, and then stony earth crunching, came from somewhere behind them. “Maybe we need to speed things up,” she added, sharing a wide-eyed glance with Morelon.

  He concentrated on his HUD, selecting a single spell point haste action, then shook his head and canceled it. Without any more pending level-ups he’d have to use his magic sparingly.

  “Nicole, I have a power in my Transmogrifier that will make us go really really fast and it won’t use any spell points.”

  “You do?” she huffed, “Then use it!”

  “I took the power from an item that had been kicked out of the game. It is called Boots of the Gingerbreadman and they are super wacky. If I do this we’ll both change into gingerbread men,” he coughed, “er, people, and then we won’t be able to do anything but run and talk. We’ll have no attacks and just one level of harm.”

  “Alright. So what’s the flip side?”

  “Everytime we say fast as fast can be you’ll never catch me, we double our speed. Also we can’t stop the artifact until after running a full 2 miles for whatever reason.”

  “ROAR!” the Everbolt called from the corridors behind them, wrecking a wall with his fist.

  “Alright let’s do it!”

  ***

  The strangest thing about the Boots of Gingerbread Speed, or rather its power, was that when it transformed them it made sure to make them anatomically correct as well.

  Two pointy cupcakes adorned Nicole’s chest and Morelon stared at them with strange eyes.

  “Stop that,” she scolded, throwing a flat cookie arm over to cover them. She looked down at his crotch and he followed her gaze. A candy cane stuck out, straight end pointing toward her. They both giggled.

  “You know,” she said, swaying her bready hips as she sauntered forward, “this might make for an interesting night sometime in the future.” They both laughed, then said the magic words.

  Faster speed was truly something to behold. At several points, they came across the Everbolt in this godforsaken maze, reversed course, and for several seconds were running on the walls and ceiling. Their speed was such that after saying the rhyme for the third time, Brian couldn’t speak. They ran on walls around corners, they ran over and under golems meant to guard whatever was in the Everbolt’s sanctum, they ran through and over and past traps designed by some evil mastermind: scything blades, trap doors, flamethrowers from above, acid baths, and at least one room chock full of old RPG books, stacked on shelves and haphazardly all over the floor. One skeleton amidst the books spoke of some danger in the room, maybe starvation from reading too many sourcebooks, or brain explosion from the same, but they were past it before Brian’s mind even processed what he was seeing.

  They took wrong turns, sped into and back out of dead ends, went up and down staircases and ramps of all shapes and sizes. He was beginning to wonder whether they’d end up in an Escher room of upside down and sideways stairs, with no meaning to any of it, when Nicole suddenly wasn’t beside him. He skidded through several more lengths of hallway to a halt, then carefully hyper-sprinted back to where she’d stopped.

  “What the fuck–“ she started.

  “–is that?” He finished.

  Before them, the dressed stone passages and candelabras with ever-burning magical torches gave way to analog snow: a hissing, popping fuzz of black and white, with bits of red and blue and yellow sometimes appearing. At first the hallway walls appeared to be made of it, that this snowy phenomenon went back into space, but soon it filled the hallway with one flat screen of crackling nonsense.

  “Is that… snow?” He asked.

  “It’s glitching,” she responded. “The system can only handle so much before it snaps.” She explained briefly about the capacity of the servers to handle all this, while they backed away from the spreading glitchy snow.

  “I threw a guy ten miles away,” he said.

  “That’d do it,” she said. “If you’d done it with an NPC, no problem. They can disappear into the system’s memory. For PC’s though… system has to make the PC’s experience real, has to extend a block environment to where he was supposed to end up, and since you’re both PC’s, it has to be done with real space. He has to make the ten mile trip back if he wants to get at you.”

  She skidded to a stop again, and cursed. In her gingerbread voice, it was pretty incredible. They backtracked a few paces and peered into a room.

  “
There she is,” Nicole breathed, and hurried after the tome of VIP Services. She turned to him. “This has to stay with me, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You can’t just say okay.”

  “What? I said okay because it’s okay. Really. It’s okay.”

  She stared with suspicious purple gumdrop eyes into his own. “Oh sure, you say that now, and then you completely obliterate anyone who gets in your way.”

  “Fair point.”

  The hissing was getting louder, which meant the unknowable glitching of snowy stuff was creeping closer, but Nicole was the alpha and he wasn’t about to stop her.

  “I had your back, remember? I supported you every single time. I rescued your minmaxing ass. So when you say okay, what you mean is you won’t pull this shit with me ever again. I’ll break you in seventeen places just like I did with Reed.”

  “Okay.”

  “Ah!” She screamed. “Stop doing that.”

  “What else am I supposed to say?” The glitch was entirely too close for comfort. “Can I promise never to mess with you once we’re out of here?”

  “Right now.”

  “Okay!”

  “Say that again. Say okay one more goddamned time!” She screamed. “I fuckin’ dare you.”

  “Sorry! I promise, ok– I mean, I promise, all right?”

  She squinted at him again. “For now. But you’ll be paying back a debt to me with some serious interest.”

  The walls of the hall had begun to flatten out into a 2D monstrosity, and Nicole suddenly disappeared into a burst of gingerspeed. He gingersped after her.

  With the sort of logic only movies and the truly idiotic fiction could muster, they were up and out of the citadel in less than half the time it took them to get to the tablet. They burst back into the Everbolt’s main chamber overlooking the plain below, with its scene of carnage and one thick glass bottle.

  “I think we need to take that.”

  “YOU MUST SAY YOUR PRAYERS,” the Everbolt promised from behind them. Brian morphed back into himself, snatched up the glass bottle with a quick spell (table bumped for success), and leapt right out the window of the citadel, onto the scene of absolute insanity below, hoping Nicole was right on his heels.

  He heard calls of ‘There he is!’ And you will face justice this day, mage of douchery!’ All about him were the remainders of the armies levied against him: non-humans, centaurthings, bearthings, and a handful of PCs who’d survived the various assaults. They immediately charged toward him.

  Unfortunately he also spied a great deal of snowy static crackling at the fringes of the battlefield. Several were high up and appeared like portals in the sky, but directly overhead the static was enormous and had peeled away to reveal the blue New Mexico sky, now fading towards that dangerous orange-indigo of twilight. The worst was that it moved with his HUD, which told him it wasn’t actually dissolving just there, but that his game helmet was on the fritz, communicating with the game system itself.

  He packed the glass bottle away before being able to examine its magical properties, and spread a wall of force around himself and Nicole. With a Survival roll of 9 and 9, nudged just once for success, several creatures and attacks bounced off it.

  “Suggestions?”

  She surveyed the scene quickly. “Everything’s going to shit in an awful hurry.”

  “Astute, but unhelpful.”

  Chapter 20- The Return of the Glitch

  “The coders and IT will know what to do. There’s one!” She pointed toward a tiny little halfling barbarian, one of the only individuals not actively attacking their force field. Lord knew why an IT would choose to be a barbarian, then spend the whole time staring at a book. He would know how to fix this catastrophe. Nicole didn’t care how, she just wanted to get away from this mess and start again. This was all her fault, and now her only way to salvage any bit of what she wanted, it would be through Brian and his power fantasy.

  Brain whipped up a quick whirlwind that scattered everyone attempting to murder them, then sprouted a dozen versions of himself that all went running in different directions. Maybe they could use that spell some other time in bed.

  “Not the time,” she admonished herself quietly, and made her break.

  A short sprint past a giraffe centaur and then a bearamander brought her to a line of elven soldiers she charged through with nary a scrape to the armor. The halfling barbarian’s head suddenly snapped up, and just in time to find her hands closing on his tiny shoulders.

  “It’s falling apart,” she hissed at him.

  “Yeah!” he said in his tiny, gruff voice.

  “How do we get it back together? What’s the fix?”

  “Look, we’ve got too much going on!” he chirped. “It’s more than the system can handle. We’ve got a PC like ten miles from here, and the game had to create a block path all the way to him, and an environment big enough to house him. You have any idea how much–”

  “No!” she shouted. “Tell me how to fix it!”

  “There’s a… a self-replicate order. We can switch it on, and the game will survive until this ends.”

  She shook him by the shoulders, then grimaced and remembered her giant strength gauntlets. “Good, that’s good! How do I do that?”

  “There’s an admin terminal back in Franjy Ponny… unless that jackass destroyed it.”

  “Which jackass would that be?” Brian said from behind him, throwing up a wall of all the dead bodies, while above him the hole in the game’s visual representation widened, and the Everbolt roared.

  “Uh… I mean…”

  “What do I have to do to start the replicate order?” The order appeared on her holy tome, and with it came clear, simple instructions on how to accomplish it. Really the tablets here had all the answers. She should’ve just asked the tablet how to fix the issue.

  She shoved the halfling barbarian away. “Teleport us back to Franjy Ponny!”

  The Everbolt blasted its way through the corpse wall and reared up. It was a massive thing, over twenty feet tall, and now composed of purple red crystals. It was snakelike at first, until great crystal appendages popped free from the sides, with slivers of jagged red crystal for fingers. First two, then four, then eight of them appeared all down its side, four for walking and four for attacking.

  Its head was easily six feet high, and its maw brightened into a singularity of roiling electricity and heat. Twin orbs of white crystalline fire hovered inches above the main head and focused on them.

  “YOU HAVE STOLEN FROM ME,” it very pointlessly said. “THE PUNISHMENT IS DEATH.”

  Brian snorted behind her.

  “WHAT? WHAT’S SO FUNNY?”

  “Death. Pssshhh. Wake up in a white room where I can eat and drink whatever I want? And this beautiful woman arrives right after me? Yes please!”

  The Everbolt considered this while various armies chased down Brian doppelgangers and attempted to murder them. “YOUR NEW PUNISHMENT… IS TO BE GROUND TO JELLY OVER THE COURSE OF A YEAR AND A DAY IN THE CAVES OF TORMENT.”

  “See that’s better,” Brian said. That wasn’t better, but Nicole didn’t mention that. The Everbolt was supposed to be a big dumb efficient killer, and not much more.

  “Would you accept a polite refusal with thanks and a returned glass bottle?” she asked.

  The thing paused.

  “NO I WOULD NOT.”

  “Just checking.” Sometimes all it took was the polite use of manners.

  ***

  Brian went after a teleport spell, only to find his exit blocked somehow. He could’ve cast Detect Magic or Pinpoint Magical Source, but had neither the time nor the will. One of these idiots thought they could keep him from getting away with a spell that might be called Anchor, or Close Portals, and boy were they wrong.

  Before the Everbolt could figure out it had the opportunity to kill them, he wove a massive illusion spell, and turned the whole battlefield into a series of vertigo-inspiring stone columns,
with all the participants still here standing on ten feet of rock with a hundred foot fall below. Unfortunately a spell this size consumed twenty Spell Points, but fortunately he used the Transmogrifier to change that down to two. Instantly the landscape shifted, until it appeared they were in the middle of the Grand Canyon, except with a series of gigantic rock dildoes, each with a person standing at the top. He added in the graphic of the rocks and boulders falling away down into the canyon below to add a touch of realism. They had to believe that if anyone could radically reshape the environment, it was the douchemage. It was a hell of an illusion, but it wouldn’t take long before one of them fell and they all figured out it wasn’t real.

  Nicole stumbled into him, knocked back by the terrified and off-balance halfling whose acrophobia was giving him a really bad time. “Sqweee!” he hollered, grabbing a hold of her legs. Morelon paused then shrugged. I guess it wouldn’t hurt things any to bring a company tagalong with us. He fired off the teleport spell, and the three of them vanished from the battlefield, whatever spell that had blocked them before having dissipated in the chaos.

  They reappeared in the ruined environs of Franjy Ponny just steps away from the shattered bricks of the town well. There was a lot less debris than Morelon remembered leaving– probably some of it had been repurposed for the battle to defeat him. He smirked.

  At his side Nicole bent over and picked the halfling technician from off her leg with one hand and set him up under his own two feet. “So what now, little man?” she asked sweetly. The halfling scowled.

  “Look we had to keep the console out of sight from the park guests, so we had to put it down the well and at the end of a dungeon.”

  Morelon and Nicole gave him an incredulous look.

  “Yeah, yeah, it doesn’t make sense in these circumstances here,” the halfling pleaded, “but it made sense then alright. Just magic away all of the mess so we can jump on down and get to the console.”

  “Hey Morelon, got any magic that can just take us there?” Nicole asked. “I know that teleport won’t do it since you’ve never been there before, but maybe you got some retired OP magic item power that’ll just kick us through this mess and let us save the day?”