The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss

by Max Wirestone

  “Come back,” I yelled. “What were you doing at my door?”

  I then ran after her, barefoot, still holding the Marquis de Sade. Perhaps processing me as a crazy person, she hastened her way to the elevator, got in, and pointedly did not hold the door for me. The doors closed and Miss Innsmouth was gone.

  First-class detective work, Dahlia.

  Only so much time could be allotted for vanishing strangers. I brooded a bit and tried to find some less trashy reading material for our common room. But that was it.

  Five hours later and I was, again, a little pink fairy named RedRasish. I’d been in Zoth for only a few days, but I could see how it could easily become addicting. RedRasish’s life was simultaneously more exciting and more predictable than mine, and this was proving to be a comforting combination.

  I was due at the Sunsalt Marshes in an hour. I had picked out this zone because the site WikiZoth had noted that it was known for “beautiful sunsets and sunrises” and because all these dawns and dusks inexplicably occurred there more frequently than in the rest of the world. Clemency had offered to teleport me there yesterday, but I felt like this was a little like Skyping in to someone’s wake. “Can you hold the camera up to his face, Herb? I can’t see him! Oh, wait, yes, he looks very lifelike!”

  It was half-assing it, is what I am saying. This had been mine to run, and run it I would. The least I could was to actually walk to the funeral myself.

  And there was plenty to do. I’d been reading a very lovely book on funeral planning titled Funerals—Step by Step Planning: A Death has Occurred, What Now? by M. L. Veres, which has a lot of practical advice, although nothing specifically on planning the online fantasy funeral of someone you barely knew. Frankly, I think if M. L. Veres had to be forced into a position on the matter, his advice would be to escape. But no matter. I focused on the practical things I could control. The locale. The time. The ambiance.

  Plus, I had real-world money to spend, and real-world money buys you a lot in Zoth. I had hired two trolls and one two-headed ogre, who were sprinkling black and pink flowers on the ground. I know that sounds tacky in the real world, but in Zoth it was a nice touch. Also classy: They were wearing tuxedos, although this made me feel underdressed and retroactively made me worried that I had underdressed for Jonah’s analog funeral too. Clemency was also dressed in black, which further made my orange gauze outfit seem a little tasteless. I also had a wizard on hand—not in a tuxedo but more of a nice dinner jacket—to help with visibility and for teleporting guests. Some woodworkers had made pews and laid them out. I was supposed to plug their services at the end of the funeral, which also struck me as a little tacky, but I suspect different rules apply in Zoth. When it was all said and done, it was really pretty picturesque. Maybe it looked more like a destination wedding than funeral, but at least there were no flame pits.

  After twenty minutes of putting things together, I got a message from someone who was rather unimaginatively named “Detshuler,” which read:

  “Can you port me there?”

  God, Shuler was such a closet geek. “Port me there”? Please. This was clearly not his first time at the rodeo.

  “Sure,” I messaged him. “The port will come from a wizard named Grisgris.”

  A bit later, and “Detshuler”—a dark-skinned human who looked an awful lot like the real-world version, assuming Detective Shuler had the upper-body strength of an Olympian and liked wearing very tight shirts—was milling around the place too. I was afraid that he would want to make small talk, but apparently not. He was just here for the event, I guess.

  The Horizons were amassing now—Clemency, tall and wispy, in her black dress. Tambras—who I knew to be a black female violist—appeared as a roguish white male troubadour, sexy and thin, with a lute in one hand and a perpetual grin on his face. He was playing a dirge, which ought to be appropriate for a funeral, but let’s face it, is dirgelike and unappealing even in this most appropriate of circumstances. Orchardary was here, an enormous tree-person, twice the size and mass of anyone else, carrying a Templar Knight’s shield. She (it?) looked very dignified, except for the shield, which seemed like something a tree ought not to be carrying. Kurt’s wise kung-fu master was sitting on the ground meditating. Oatcake’s golem was sitting off to the side, looking as if it had been depowered.

  Not everyone was there. We were still missing a few Horizons. But it was still a little early. Although, at this point it was getting a little crowded—all manner of people and things were amassing here. Maybe seventy-five? This would mean that Jonah’s funeral in Zoth was better attended than his one in real life, which was either a good or bad thing, depending on how you considered it.

  At five minutes of, there was getting to be quite a crowd, maybe a hundred folks. Wayne, a dwarf tinkerer with a Southern accent showed up, looking harried as he rode in on a clockwork horse. Chtusk came skittering in, literally, from a hole in the ground. And Oraova, the drunken fire mage, apparently wanted a good crowd before he made his entrance—in a flaming chariot that came from the sky, which arrived with fireworks. I was mightily impressed by the chariot, but if anyone else was, they didn’t register it. Black flowers and pink flowers now littered the ground, and my wizard-for-hire conjured up a podium.

  Also at that time, I got a message from someone named “Mandarina”:

  “This is Emily. Can you bring me to the funeral?”

  Yegads. Speaking of funeral invitations I didn’t expect to be cashed in. I told “Mandarina” that Clemency would teleport her here, and that it would be just a moment. When she arrived, I could see that Emily had spent some time and money in the cosmetics shop before logging in. There was a little geek in her yet. Although she was merely a level-one elf, Emily had taken the trouble to create a dignified character of mature years. She was tall and thin and had an impeccably made-up face. Her hair was tied back in a bun, and she was wearing an elaborate white gown with complicated patterns embroidered lightly in orange. Pastels for Emily, as ever.

  “Welcome to Zoth,” I told Mandarina when she arrived.

  “Wow,” she typed to me. “There are a lot of people here.”

  And there were. I was glad I had noticed everyone from the Horizons already, because the crowd was getting large enough that it was hard to immediately see anyone. It was time to start, and so I signaled my wizard-for-hire to levitate me so that everyone could get a nice view of me.

  The beautiful sunset was fading on cue—sheer luck, incidentally, and the sky was growing solemn and dark. Players lit candles, and I floated high into the sky to speak.

  “Greetings, everyone—humans, trolls, ogres, golems, scarbati, dwarves, treants, undead, elves, mummies, harpies, and other—we have all come here today to honor the passing of Kristo Krispoint, the human thief we knew in real life as Jonah Long. Kristo, as he was known to most of us, was a great friend and a wonderful human being.”

  It wasn’t a terrible introduction, but I had the distinct feeling that people weren’t listening to me. Maybe Chetwood was wrong. Platitudes weren’t the right way to go after all. I had planned a few more paragraphs of this, but I got nervous and skipped ahead to the literary quotes.

  “If our great poet Shakespeare had played Zoth, I think we can all agree that he would have rolled a bard.” Pause, wait for laugh. No laughs. The crowd seemed to be scattering, actually. Would a quote from Henry VIII stanch the bleeding? “Said Shakespeare of death: ‘He gave his honours to the world again, his blessed part to heaven, and slept in peace.’”

  But no, people seemed to be speeding away now.

  “The one thing we will all miss about Jonah is his clean, clean teeth?”

  And then things went to hell. It was comforting, however, because it was at just that point that I realized that it wasn’t me. The sky was getting dark. Beyond nightfall dark. It was starting to look a bit creepy. I also was wondering if I wasn’t hearing some sort of whispering noises—like, the darkness was whispering to me. It’s ju
st horror-movie stock stuff, but when you’re wearing headphones, things like that can wig you out.

  Also, there were pirates.

  Circular glowing runes began to appear on the ground all around us, and it appeared that pirates were magically teleporting in. They were all yelling things at the same time, as pirates do.

  “KRISTO WAS A SCALAWAG AND THIEF AND ZOTH IS BETTER WITHOUT HIM!” and “ANYONE WHO’S HERE TO HONOR THAT DO-NOTHING HAS BEEF WITH ME” and “MURDER! PILLAGE! RAPE!”

  was the sort of thing they were typing.

  There was a moment or two of stunned silence while everyone processed what was happening, and then hell, as the proverb goes, broke loose.

  I was pleased to see that Detshuler was instantly incinerated. A great wall of flame swept up from the ground, and this meant that I did not have to worry about his scowling visage. My primary concern was for Mandarina, who was also in that wall of flame but seemed unconcerned by it. She was ethereal, I had now noticed, and the flames just sort of passed through her. A resourceful woman, that Emily.

  And then I was dead. I wish I could tell you what happened—I was probably knifed in the back—but who knows? Being dead in Zoth is not such a bad thing—you can still watch what’s happening, which is all I wanted to do in the first place.

  My ghost sat motionless, watching the fight but unable to do anything to contribute to it. Frankly, I couldn’t contribute to it much regardless.

  “Why are we losing?” I yelled out. This was not a rhetorical question—it was directed, loudly, to Clemency, who was huddled on the sofa with what she had ironically referred to as a gaming laptop. Threadwork, meanwhile, had been stationed in Charice’s room.

  It goes without saying that I did not, by the way, mention Detective Shuler’s warning to Charice. If I had warned her that Shuler was speculating that one of them might have been involved in Jonah’s murder, she would have viewed the warning as an open challenge, and not only would they be staying with us, Charice would also have them armed.

  “We’re losing,” Clemency said plainly, “because they are dressed for battle, and we are dressed for a funeral.”

  And yet, we were only mostly losing. Not everyone had come dressed in flimsy black silk. Tambras wore the same battle gear that she always did, and she was now nimbly taking out pirates with a crossbow. Chtusk, who was basically a large beetle and wore no clothes that I could make out, was picking up some of the smaller pirates with her mandibles and hurling them around, like a terrifying insectoid dog playing with a stick. Or a small animal’s corpse. Likewise, Orchardary and Oatcake—the treant and golem—seemed perfectly prepared for battle. Orchardary was throwing up some kind of force field while she swung that silly-looking shield of hers around, and Oatcake was walking around drawing runes on the ground in pink chalk. Granted, that didn’t look like an especially helpful thing to do when one is attacked by pirates, but what did I know? Presumably, it was somehow useful.

  And so it was, after an initial wave of beheadings and incinerations, that the two factions started to seem more or less equal in power. I don’t want to imply that there was an actual break in the fighting, because there certainly wasn’t, but there was a kind of slowdown, in which people apparently took to typing at one another.

  “For Kristo!”

  “For Jonah!”

  “Avenge Jonah’s passing!”

  typed the survivors of the now half-dead funeral party. While the pirates typed:

  “Vengeance shall be ours!” followed by

  “BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!”

  To which one of the pirates asked, /shouting,

  “What does that mean?”

  And was answered by another, drenched in blood,

  “IT’S A MEME!”

  If you will recall earlier, I had commented that the sky had grown unusually, you might say disturbingly, dark. For those in the fray, this was easy to overlook, as there were bands of angry pirates or mourners actively trying to kill them, depending upon their goals and persuasions. But for the freshly dead—our ghastly white spirits sitting comfortably on the ground, watching the action through a pleasant ethereal haze—it looked awfully obvious. As entertaining as it was to watch a tree pick up and throw a pirate, and as curious as I was about the pink chalk the team’s leader was putting everywhere, I couldn’t help but look away from the fight to survey the sky.

  Things were happening up there. Unpleasant things. And even though I was dead, I could still hear through my headphones these terrible skittering and hatching sounds. It was all very disturbing, really. I felt as though I should yell and warn Clemency, who was still, improbably, alive—even if she were wearing a black dress to a knife fight. But I was worried I would look stupid, like a little kid complaining about a noise in a horror movie. If I brought the terrible noise to someone’s attention it would invariably just be a cat, which would jump out and scare me anyway.

  It was not a cat. The sky burst open—no longer black, but silver and gray. The sky was covered in webs. Infinitely many webs. And the webs were not empty—they were filled with infinitely many spiders, whose eyes gleamed at me, little red dots glowing in the sky like angry stars.

  A terrible wispy voice rang through my headphones. It was female but sounded old and scarred and not at all human.

  “Worldlings of Zoth. It is I, Zxlyphxix”—I had to look this spelling up later—“whom you thought you had defeated ten thousand years before. I come to you now, my resolve restrengthened. Your world shall be sundered and cast into the eternal web. Bring your strongest to me, and prepare to feel the wrath of my spider-guard!”

  This speech is, in fact, quite truncated. Zxlyphxix went on for a great many minutes that I will spare you, detailing her history, her banishment from Zoth, and, like a good Bond villain, strong clues as to how one should eventually go about defeating her. I see no reason to include those here, but if you are interested, I’m sure you could google them. Suffice it to say that she was a lady who took things very personally.

  This completely stopped all the fighting, by the way. I’m guessing the game somehow ordered everyone to sit still for Zxl’s monologue. It would destroy the sense of drama if folks wandered off or simply went about their business—picking herbs or sewing pants—during it. However, when she was finished, there was a universal euphoria. I was altogether displaced by it. I had expected alarm, or distress. Instead everyone was all-capsing:

  “IT’S A SERVER WIDE EVENT!1!!”

  “THE EXPANSION MUST ALMOST BE HERE!”

  Even Threadwork was burbling with happiness from Charice’s room.

  Tiny spiders riding what seemed to be angry-looking, demonic sea horses descended from the sky and began slaughtering everyone. Few words were typed on the matter, but it was a matter universally understood that this little fracas vis à vis the matter of Jonah’s death was now on the back burner, and that the pirates and mourners should put the matter of the funeral behind them and focus on the death-spiders riding the demonic sea horses. The whole thing really was quite a spectacle. The number of combatants continued to swell, despite a generally alarming number of casualties, because it seemed that most of the world of Zoth were coming to the zone to check things out. I saw about twenty guilds, a woman riding a giant squid, and what seemed to be a queen’s royal guard, although I wasn’t aware of Zoth actually having a queen. At any rate, everyone was eventually killed by spiders.

  It was agreed by all that it was an excellent funeral. The only regret that anyone expressed, pirates included, was that Jonah had not been alive to see it.

  Emily, having eventually been killed herself, and being unable to figure out how to return to life (Just walk to a spirit fountain, come on, Emily!), decided to simply turn off her computer and call me directly. I had expected some sort of chewing out, but Emily sounded almost pleased, saying the same thing that people were saying in-game.

  “I’d only met Jonah a few times, but I think that might have been the perfect send-of
f for him. It was completely ridiculous, and he would have adored it.”

  I did eventually correct Emily’s assumption that I had arranged for the Spider-God to crash the event. (I don’t know what power she must have assumed I had over Zoth, but that’s non-geeks for you.) “Ah, well,” she said, just as easily, “it was a happy serendipity.”

  I’m not sure that spider demons eating everyone at a funeral would be something I would casually characterize as a “happy serendipity,” but you know, the client is always right. Even Detective Shuler messaged me:

  “Highlight of my week. Thank you for inviting me to this bloodbath.”

  Which I took to be partly—but not entirely—ironic.

  The one person who did not message me, however, was Chtusk, the green-and-black beetle who seemed to always have mic problems. First she had dipped her microphone into a fluted champagne glass, which was so dopey that it sounded completely true, and then she had a new mic that also wasn’t working. The second instance of her mic not working was a little less plausible. Regardless, I knew her mic was working now, because she had been yelling out commands in the funeral battle. Mostly “run!” and “spiders!” but her name lit up, even so. I was getting increasingly suspicious about her mic never seeming to work when I was around, so I jumped at the chance to speak to her “in person.”

  “Glad to see your mic problems are resolved! Are you available to chat for a moment?” I asked her.

  But there was no response. I knew she had gotten it because she was online. A little green dot next to her name made it abundantly clear. I sent her a second message, which was a little more forceful.

  “I really need to speak with you.”

  And I watched the green dot turn red. The little bug had fled the Internet entirely.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Walking late at night—and here, past nine PM qualifies as late at night—is never an exceptional idea for a girl of my station and age in Saint Louis, and so my anger more or less evaporated after a few blocks. One needs to keep an eye on other pedestrians, and for that, one needs to keep one’s temper in check. Also, I wasn’t entirely unsure that Shuler wasn’t going to pop out and interrogate me on the street.