DoucheMage

by Damien Hanson

  The Everbolt, the great many-legged serpent it was now, was curled into a ring and resting its enormous head on its enormous tail. It finally settled on a still-floating part of the tavern, high up where it would be able to see the goings-on in its domain. It now sported huge, dinner plate ears beside wicked, curled horns that stretched back away fro its neck.

  “You better know what you’re doing,” she breathed. The door wasn’t an actual thing; it was more of a suggestion at the edge of town, so the crystal obstruction over the gate was more of a ten foot square, foot thick wall of solid lightning in deep indigo and crimson and colors in between, like magenta or violet, criss-crossing itself up and down.

  He came after a good three minutes of lying low and studying the crystal doorway. She didn’t see him, but rather noted the Everbolt’s head pop up, before it got to its feet.

  “DOUCHEMAGE, YOU RETURN.”

  “That’s right, asshole!”

  “HAVE YOU CONCOCTED ANOTHER PATHETIC ATTEMPT TO BEST ME?”

  “I got your number right here, buddy.”

  He raised the Transmogrifier and the pile of furniture rose up against him. However, a second later, instead of coming up to dogpile the douchemage, they veered off and went after the Everbolt instead. A flood of tables, chairs, sofas, cabinets and footstools all went from friend to foe, but as she’d feared, it wasn’t anywhere close to enough. The Everbolt tore them to shreds, skewered them on each other, and exploded some to splinters, and that was before unleashing a gout of lightning flame that incinerated several more to ash.

  “YOU THOUGHT YOU COULD TURN THE TABLES ON THE EVERBOLT,” it chuckled.

  Brian's hands hadn’t stopped moving on the Transmogrifier.“Just wanted to test a theory,” he yelled. The Everbolt rose up like a snake, and lunged down.

  Morelon the Learned needed the Table Bump power a whole lot, and right now.

  That was her cue. She brought out her sword and gave it a mighty swing, only to have it crash against the great crystal doorway. Several clocks appeared: one green, with eight segments, reading The Barrier Falls, and a red one with eight segments called The Everbolt Takes Notice. Three segments appeared on each. Amazingly enough, the Everbolt’s containment clock was no longer thirty-two segments, but was down to thirty. She hadn’t expected Brian to be wrong, but when he was right, he was right.

  She reared back and swung again.

  ***

  “Come on, Nicole,” he muttered, “Come on come on!”

  He’d engaged the Transmogrifier to give him the rapid running boots, and was keeping pace away from the Everbolt, and trying not to watch the clocks as Nicole broke through the crystal wall. It went to roast him with fire, but he veered to the left, engaged the invisibility cloak, and skidded to a stop so he could disappear from view. His hands were getting sore from twisting, pulling, and bopping this Transmogrifier to get the different functions to work.

  “You better work. Work, work, work work work work!” he chanted.

  The barrier over the door fell away, which immediately started up a new clock: The Holy Tome of VIP Services Regains Its Power.

  “Yes!” he shouted.

  The Everbolt had taken notice of Nicole.

  “No!” he shouted, took off running, and reconfigured the Transmogrifier to replicate the Meteoric Mantle and turn him into a living meteor. God, he hoped this untested and unused artifact didn’t char him into a fiery briquet.

  He felt the heat begin to surround his body as the game took hold of him and really threw him forward at breakneck speed. That was the other possibility; that the untested magical artifact would instead crush him into a puddle of sticky paste. Well, for this to work, Nicole had to be hale and hearty, and not a fainting couch.

  So instead of worrying about his own ass, he rocketed on an intercept course to where Nicole was. He then angled slightly behind her, and with red orange flames surrounding him, barreled into the Everbolt at what felt like escape velocity.

  You have suffered a level 3 Harm. Would you like to resist?

  “You bet your ass I’d like to resist,” he muttered through the pain, and stepped the Harm down to level 2 with a Fortitude roll of 2 and 6. Four Stress points burned.

  He’d done another solid ten segments of damage to the Everbolt, but that was down to six a few seconds later, then two. And then zero. Ugh… at least he’d bought Nicole more time.

  “Come on, Everbitch!” he shouted.

  “THE CHASE BORES ME, DOUCHEMAGE,” the thing said with deadly calm. “ALWAYS YOU RUN. PERHAPS I WILL CHRISTEN YOU DOUCHEMOUSE.”

  He took the moment to table bump the Everbolt’s clock down another four segments. Eat that, he thought.

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

  He didn’t respond, but instead pressed the button on the Transmogrifier several more times, and sucked the Everbolt’s life away pie slice by pie slice. Four more segments disappeared. Now it was down to a mere twenty-two hit points. Which was all well and good assuming he had some way of actually inflicting damage.

  From half a block off, a great red and purple crystal head popped up above the hills of rubble and sneered. It immediately launched itself toward him.

  “Where’s my best girl?” he shouted

  No answer. Instead he tapped at the Transmogrifier and broke into a sprint away from the Everbolt, leeching its hit points away one by one. Twenty-two fell to eighteen, then fourteen, and finally twelve before it caught up to him and threw him off his feet. He crashed into the broken timbers of a building, rebounded to the ground, then was swatted a good twelve feet into the nearest stone-ringed fountain.

  You have suffered a Level 3 Harm. Would you like to resist?

  “Uh… huh…” he groaned.

  Apparently his tortured moan was enough for the game to register, because it initiated another resistance roll. The Fortitude roll of 8 cost him another two Stress Points, and filled up his other level 2 Harm box. There was no way to step it down again, even if he had a bunch of extra Stress… which he didn’t.

  A paw easily the size of his entire torso clapped down on him, surrounding him with claws easily the length of bastard swords. An arrow shaped head the size of a sedan came into view, leaking fire-lightning to either side of its maw.

  He just kept jabbing the button on the Transmogrifier. Juuuuuuuust in case.

  “YOU PROVED TO BE A GRAND CHASE, DOUCHEMOUSE.”

  It reared up, then froze. Later, when Nicole tried to describe it to him, it was as if the thing came apart into crackling streaks of lightning from where Nicole’s sword had jabbed it in the middle. It unraveled from the middle forward and back, scorching the ground in random places. Several of them zapped his body, but Nicole was already in the process of healing him up, and he made several more Fortitude rolls to stay alive. One last sizzle of reddish electricity zipped down into his robes.

  In the aftermath, he’d find the Everbolt curled up and zapping the sides of the great glass bottle he’d stolen from its lair. Its furious little face would yell at him, and he’d poke at it, just for fun.

  It was over.

  ***

  It was actually just the beginning.

  Nicole had her first ever opportunity to meet a man named Ravindra Pradthala, the CEO of Prestige Gaming face to face. She shook hands with him in a sort of surreal moment, given that Ravindra was done up in a blade whirler outfit that was tight across basically all of him, inordinately focused the eye down on his bulging leather-covered groin, yet was full of gold ornaments and embroidery of all different shapes and colors. He had that perfectly curly, ring-shaped hair that was simultaneously soft and oily at the same time.

  The VIP Services and Swords & Sorcerers people fanned out, together with a few of the ORGIES personnel to get the furniture detangled from the guests’ haptic suits. The coders then began the process of building up a new Access Level Zero.

  “I’m sure you’ll want Franjy Ponny left as it is,” Pradthala said.

  Brian shrug
ged. “It’s your game environment, not mine.”

  “Mr. the Learned, I’d like to cut the pleasantries, if we could, and skip right to the negotiation table. We can get an actual table, one that isn’t attempting to murder you, though I find a brisk walk generally excites the humors and provides the brain the impetus it needs to really work. Shall we?”

  Nicole waited for the other shoe to drop, but it didn’t turn out this was an act after all. They took off with several of Mr. Pradthala’s CEO Services people following after: Tandy, surprisingly enough, a chubby cheeked Indian fellow she recognized as Sanjay, and another young lady of indeterminate heritage. Perhaps Sanjay was being punished by not being allowed to put on a game skin. Yeah, she decided, that was probably it.

  Nicole sidled up next to Tandy while the verbal sparring match got underway.

  “So… congrats?” she breathed.

  “Thanks,” Tandy replied. “I jetted the fuck out of there when things started looking weird and got out before that Everbolt shut down the gate.”

  “Huh.”

  “Apparently that’s enough for a promotion.”

  “Either that or he finally got a look at the result of all the core workouts you do.”

  Tandy grinned, but didn’t reply.

  “That’s not going to work,” Brain was saying. “I’m not turning over anything. Your game developed sentience and couldn’t handle a mass raid experience, and boy would that be terrible press if it ever got out. One might even see the federal government come knocking and start asking questions about a functioning artificial intelligence.”

  “I know this is your lifelong dream, Mr. the Learned. If we’re shut down, you’re out all those billions of dollars.”

  Brian gestured down at himself, and most importantly the Transmogrifier. “I’m willing to put all this to good use. Building up this place into a respectable game environment. Not some half-assed shitshow that’s nothing but masturbatory dungeon crawls where you can’t even keep all the loot. And no rectum diving.”

  Ravindra regarded him for a time, while they surveyed the extent of the destruction in Franjy Ponny.

  “I would love to be known as the reclusive wizard up in his mysterious tower, sending out armies to shape the geopolitics. If you want, I think I can whip up a ring or fifteen. You know, with one to rule the others.”

  “Nothing so derivative,” the CEO countered.

  “Sure. You can send somebody in to be my advisor or whatever. But the first thing I’ll need is a VIP account with Nicole’s name on it. That coder for Swords & Sorcerers was a complete disappointment.”

  The CEO stopped dead in his tracks, then turned toward her and Tandy. “VIP Services has a very high regard for our Ms. Hanslen, and it would be a great loss to let her go.”

  “And I’ll need something called codemancy. I saw it referenced in the histories of the building of this place. I know it’s a magical art crossed with a way to reshape the game.”

  “Shall I also give you my fifty-one percent of the Prestige stocks? Is there anything else you’d like in the meantime? Perhaps a throne carved from the ivory and bones of all the creatures and enemies you’ve slain? A teleporting castle that’s never in the same place two days in a row?”

  “There’s something else…” Nicole said, but Brian looked her dead in the face, with wide eyes, and gave her the tiniest of head shakes. He didn’t want the replication order to stop. The very concept of not shutting it down, and having the nanites continue to gobble up New Mexico was one that terrified her… but Brian was easily as smart or smarter than she was. Maybe he’d already seen a way to use them, or that they weren’t that dangerous after all.

  “Oh yes?” the CEO turned his full attention on her. The intimidation factor really sprang to the fore, with his perfect face and shadowy beard, his too-many earrings and tattoos, the goddamn leather bulge somehow front and center. Surely the skin was super overcompensating.

  “Uhhh… Janelle. She’s a bitch, and she pressured me to change Brian’s mind using sex.”

  Ravindra Pradthala uttered a breathy curse in some language Nicole didn’t know, and rolled his eyes. Then, while he launched into the company’s policy on sexual discrimination and sex labor laws in the state of New Mexico and the United States of America. She darted another glance to Brian, who was stroking that goddamn beard.

  Whatever his motives for wanting to keep the gray goo situation alive, she was… letting him get away with it.

  She wanted a mustache ride. Maybe one more for the road, before she took her leave of this entire FUBAR situation.

  Chapter 24- Salesmen & Sorcerers

  Brian refused to budge in the slightest when it came to the Transmogrifier. He’d spent several months here and wasn’t about to leave. Ravindra was clearly baffled by his adamant refusal to leave Swords & Sorcerers, and tried a huge number of enticements to get him to branch out. Coders came in and pleaded the case regarding the roll out, which was scheduled for the next day. They were rebuffed. He had IT people come in and present the case regarding system stability with someone owning such a powerful magical artifact, to which Brian replied that they should’ve thought of that before they built the damn thing. The story writers were brought in, but all of them were so stinking drunk that Mr. Pradthala threatened to fire all of them on the spot. They stumbled off to where the coding team was busy building the new Access Level Zero.

  Nicole watched it all with a growing sense of unease. She wasn’t sure what to do about the replicating order, nor what to do about Brian. They weren’t even clear in her mind as to which one was worse. Brian might have the power to break the game, but the nanites had the power to break the world. Surprisingly, neither had happened, and in fact, the nanites had helped un-break the game just when it seemed like their plan to break Brian had failed.

  All these swirled around in her mind as she watched the goings on. Ravindra Pradthala eventually disappeared to the construction site, and after an hour of negotiations, the rest of the admin followed after, all except one.

  Reed Schmidt clenched one fist, and seemed ready to break his tablet in the other. Instead he slowly reached up, touched his hair behind his ear, and took several steadying breaths.

  “What’re you doing here?” she asked.

  “Mr. Pradthala asked me to elevate your status to VIP, and complete your VIP Services termination policy.”

  “You’re… HR now?”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Just show me your right forearm, please.”

  “This guy bothering you?” Brian asked.

  Reed seemed briefly terrified, but got himself under control. “I’m just here to process your bi… your girl.”

  “Oh, she’s not mine. She’s not anybody’s, and definitely not yours. If only you guys had figured that out earlier, you could’ve stopped me. Whatever you’re doing, do it.”

  Reed scanned her forearm, where they’d given her a shot when she got the job with Prestige, then tapped at the tablet a number of times. It got awkward, with them just standing there, waiting. And then it went from awkward to annoying, with the still just standing there, doing nothing while Reed tappy-tapped. At least if this were a movie or a shitty TV show, the tablet would beep and boop as he did stuff. Instead he had the goddamn thing on silent mode.

  And she finally snorted in disgust. “Is this going to take–”

  “Done!” Reed announced, and ran his hand over the side of his head.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Check out your character sheet.”

  “I had to nerf some of your skills so you could add some challenge, but you’re a VIP now. High Gear choices, extra Credit and Stash. Great job suck… uh, I mean, good for you. You never have to work again. Hope that works out.”

  “Shut up and go away,” she said, and wonder of wonders, he did.

  She turned to Brian with a broad, fat, enormous, wondrous lady boner and jumped into his arms. She crushed him tight against her, then pulle
d back and grinned that huge grin into his wizened, beardy face. “We did it!”

  He nodded.

  “I mean, you survived. I didn’t think–”

  “Me neither.”

  “And damn, we really crushed the hell out of that Everbolt.”

  “I think this deserves a celebration,” he said. “You ready? They’re building a whole new Access Level Zero because of us.”

  Her VIP Services training quickly picked up on something being wrong. He’d lost the enthusiasm and excitement from before. Still, he brought up a spell, opened a teleportation portal, and they stepped through somehow into the new Access Level Zero.

  They’d already done an amazing job putting this new town together. The mud and timber construction looked phenomenal, down to the glowing runes in the walls where protection spells were laid in. Above them floated a matrix of protection crystals, each one in a ring of spelled metal, encircling the town like a dome.

  “Hey,” she said, before they stepped toward the huge tavern, with its thatched grass and moss-covered roof, and the tinny sound of music emanating from within. She took him by the sleeve and turned him. “You okay?”

  “Sure.” A lie.

  “I’m not just jumping out of here, you know. If you want, we can hang out.” And maybe have a going away party, in some grand fantasy genre style, like floating around in glowing primordial ooze, or transformed into gigantic creatures.

  “Sure, that sounds good.”

  “Bri– Morelon.”

  “Hmm?”

  “What is it? What’s going on?”

  He finally focused on her face, and said, “Promise you won’t be upset.”

  “Uh… what?”

  “Just promise. What I have to say is going to be a little shocking, so if you promise to keep your emotions in check a bit, then I’ll tell you.”

  “Sure. I promise.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Me too! Promise.”