by A. J. Markam
I was about to v-e-r-y slowly back away when an old woman’s voice croaked out from inside the shack, “Who is it and what do you want?”
“My name is Ian. I want to be a warlock.”
“Ah! A warlock, eh? Come inside, then!”
Like the man said – there were no coincidences in the game.
The two demons let me pass, although they menacingly followed my every move.
I opened the door, which was almost falling off its rusted hinges, and entered a dark, creepy room. An old female dwarf with white hair and dressed all in rags was sitting by a fire in a rocking chair.
I could see the ID tag above her name: Vesparia. Level 50 Dwarven Warlock.
Technically a warlock is just a male witch, but Warlock was the game’s designation for a particular class of fighter, so that’s what she was listed as instead of ‘witch.’
She stared at me with eyes filmed over with glaucoma. “Come closer, boy.”
I gulped and edged closer to the fire. I knew I was in no real danger, but when the game seemed this real, it was hard to convince your brain that you were perfectly safe.
She grinned up at me with a mouthful of rotting teeth. “So you wish to be a warlock, eh? I warn you – you are trespassing in a realm you know nothing of. Toying with powers you do not understand.”
Typical OtherWorld Non-Player Character banter.
But this NPC was seriously creepy.
“A warlock’s powers come from dark magic, boy. If you decide to follow this road, you will be summoning demons to serve you, and only you.
“There are temporary bindings, where the demon only appears for several minutes, as long as your spell persists. Then there are permanent bindings, where the demon is bound to you and will never leave your side until you dismiss it.
“Permanent bindings come from dark magic embodied in the physical form of collars, which are powerful indeed. The collars can only be forged from the deaths of your enemies. The more souls you reap, the more powerful demons you can bind. You need to harvest 40 souls by your own hand to fashion the first collar.”
Okay, this was a little darker than I’d expected.
“However,” the old dwarf female leered, “if you truly wish to be a warlock, your first collar will be a gift from me. Do you wish to proceed?”
A computer window appeared in front of me.
Sell Your Soul For Rock ‘n Roll
The game’s customary bad puns and goofy quest titles could sort of undercut the ambiance they were going for.
Vesparia the witch has offered you initiation as a Warlock, and a gift of your first demonic restraint collar. Do you wish to accept and start down the path of darkness?
For 50 bucks an hour plus overtime? Hell yeah. Sign me up.
I mentally hit the ‘Accept’ button and the window disappeared.
The witch grinned. “Gooooood.” She reached into the mound of rags covering her frumpy body and pulled out two items.
One was a thin book bound in dried-out, scuffed-up leather. I could smell the vanilla-y scent of its weathered pages.
The other object was a collar that looked like it was for a tiny dog – black leather with metal studs.
“Open the book,” she said ominously, “and begin your destiny.”
I opened the book to the middle, wondering what horrors I would find within –
But there was nothing inside except blank pages.
Confused, I thumbed backwards until I reached the first page – the only one with any writing on it. “Uh, there’s only one page.”
“Of course, you fool!” she barked. “You have to earn the right to see more pages! Read the first page and call forth your first servant!”
I placed the collar on the floor and started to read the incantation. I didn’t know the language, but the game took care of details like that. You didn’t have to learn complicated spell casting, either – you just thought about an action and the game took over. In this case, words in a guttural language I didn’t recognize tripped off my tongue as easily as though I had grown up speaking it from birth.
Suddenly the room began to grow even darker, and the fire began to fade away as though receding in the distance. The witch completely disappeared, swallowed by the shadows.
Lines of purple energy sparked across the wooden floorboards in front of me, and symbols began to appear as though drawn by some unseen hand. My voice sounded hollow and far away to my own ears, and I heard a dark and ominous rushing sound like a waterfall crashing down on me.
The symbols glowed brighter and burst into dark fire. I don’t know how to explain it, except that there were tongues of flame, but they were black instead of yellow.
There was a bright burst of purple light – the roaring rose to a crescendo –
And then suddenly I was back in the room with the witch and the fireplace. Only now there was something standing in front of me.
After all those pyrotechnics, I felt distinctly underwhelmed.
It was an imp. Basically the ‘Starter Pack’ demon. It stood about two feet tall and was very thin, almost emaciated, with willowy arms and legs that ended in slender fingers and toes. Its skin was the grey color of things that lived under rocks. It had long, limp ears and a smushed-in face without a nose, just two slits above its beak-like mouth. Its eyes had no irises or pupils, but glowed a weak yellow. It stood there, hunched over, completely naked, with nothing between its legs to indicate whether it was a boy or a girl.
It looked like Yoda’s anorexic gray cousin. Or maybe Dobby the House Elf from Harry Potter if he was buck naked and gray.
And lo and behold, it was wearing the little black dog collar around its scrawny neck.
“Hey boss!” the thing said.
It sounded like Kermit the frog with a five-pack-per-day smoking habit for the last 20 years.
I stared at it in dismay, then turned to the witch. “This is it?”
She scowled. “Of course this is it! You summoned it, didn’t you?”
“I just thought it might be a little more… impressive.”
The imp jerked back its head and frowned like I had insulted it.
“No offense,” I said to it quickly, though it seemed faintly ridiculous to be apologizing to an NPC. Especially one that was now my demonic servant.
The witch, though, was seething with rage. “You entitled little ingrate – this is your very first summoning! What, did you think you would get a Dark Walker on your first attempt? A Fell Beast? Fool! This is your servant – go into the world and learn to be a warlock, and then maybe you will be able to summon something more ‘impressive’!”
More NPC babble. It was pointless to argue.
I dropped the spell book in my bag, where it disappeared into the darkness and showed up as a selectable item in my bag inventory window.
“Well… thanks,” I said to the witch.
“Get out of here,” she spat. “And never darken my door again.”
I sighed and turned to my new servant. “Alright… let’s go do warlock stuff.”
Then I turned and left the house, and the imp followed along behind me.
4
As we walked through the fields on the way to our next adventure – whatever that might be – I figured I might as well pass the time by getting to know my new demon.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Stig!” the thing croaked in its raspy, high-pitched voice.
“Nice to meet you. My name is Ian.”
“Yes, boss!” the creature answered.
He didn’t seem very bright.
“So, Stig, what can you do?”
“I can use fireballs, boss!”
That sounded impressive. Better than my Darkbolt.
“Okay, let’s see what you’ve got.”
“What do you want me to attack, boss?”
I looked around the meadow. I didn’t really want to kill anything defenseless, but I reasoned that it was a videogame. I would be
killing digital people soon enough. What was some wildlife compared to that?
Over by the nearest tree, a skunk was minding its own business.
I figured the world could probably use a few less skunks.
“Kill that skunk over there,” I ordered.
“You got it, boss!”
Stig brought his hands together, and a small ball of fire appeared in his palms.
When I say small, I mean tiny.
About the size of a marble.
Then he shot it across the meadow with a farting sound.
Thbtpppppt.
The fireball hit the skunk – but rather than killing it, the fireball only enraged it.
The skunk suddenly glowed with a faint red outline, the game’s universal signal that it had turned from a neutral observer into an enemy. Then it screeched and charged directly at Stig.
“Uh oh, boss…”
“Keep attacking it!” I yelled.
Stig fired another flatulent fireball and hit the skunk again. The first attack had shaved off a quarter of its hit points, and the second attack took off the same – which was absolutely pathetic. The skunk had only started out at 16 hit points, which meant Stig’s fireballs were only packing a punch of four Damage each.
The skunk was twenty feet away from us when Stig decided to bolt.
“See you, boss!” he yelped, and ran in the opposite direction.
However crappy he was at throwing fireballs, Stig was a pretty fast runner, I’d give him that. More of a retreater than an attacker, I guess you could say.
“HEY – what are you doing?! Come back here!”
“Okay boss!” he yelled, and started running in a circle around me.
I scowled. “I said come back!”
“I am – I’m just taking the scenic route!” he explained as he passed behind a tree and circled back around.
“Come directly ba– screw this, never mind,” I yelled, then turned to face the skunk. “I’ll take care of it myself.”
Unfortunately, in the time I had spent messing with Stig, the skunk had decided to switch its target.
To me.
I looked back just in time to see its tail lifted high and its furry little ass pointed right at me.
Psssssst.
A cloud of horrific-smelling mist enveloped me from head to foot.
“Dammit!”
I began choking and gagging on the smell, which was somewhere between horrific B.O. and the stench of a porta potty at a music festival in August.
I mentally selected Darkbolt on my action bar, and immediately my hands cupped together wrist to wrist. That was apparently the motion to cast the spell.
A black ball of energy formed in the air between my outstretched fingers, and two seconds later it launched at the skunk.
The little bastard got a bolt of black energy right up his ass.
For a brief second he was illuminated with ultraviolet light from the inside out. You could see his bones, sort of like when the Emperor zapped Luke with Force Lightning in Return of the Jedi.
Then the skunk keeled over, dead.
I waited for some loot to appear – but nothing happened.
What?!
I selected the skunk to see if I had missed something, but there was nothing on it that could be resold to a merchant. For good reason, I guess: nobody wanted a foul-smelling cloak made of black fur with white stripes.
As pissed-off as I was, I had to admit it was my own fault. I didn’t have a quest to kill skunks. It wasn’t something dangerous like a wolf or a giant spider, so why would I get any loot?
I had been basically been turned into a walking fart-cloud for absolutely no freaking reason, other than to test out my incompetent imp.
This whole Warlock thing was starting wonderfully.
I decided, Screw this. I’d basically only been in the game for five minutes. I could just start over.
I brought up the main menu and looked for the Log Out option. I would just return to the game interface and select a new character –
But ‘Log Out’ was written in grey letters. Not selectable.
Okay, no problem – I would just exit the game completely, talk to John, and have him restart me.
Except the ‘Exit Game’ option was greyed out, too.
Okay, that’s odd…
I tried to tell myself not to panic. This was the QC process – you figured out bugs and reported them to your supervisor. No problem. I would just send a chat message to the support team.
I brought up my chat message box.
Greyed out.
I checked my mail window. Apparently I had the ability to receive mail, but my ‘Compose Letter’ option was completely greyed out, too.
What the HELL?!
Now I was starting to get worried.
As far as I knew, I didn’t have any way to exit the game – and I didn’t have any way to contact the people who could help me exit the game.
What do I do?
I panicked for a second – then told myself that they had to be monitoring me. They had to know this was happening.
I should just forget about this for right now and go ahead and play the game. Surely they’ll fix it in an hour or two.
Besides, 50 bucks an hour to play a videogame ain’t bad. Even if I do smell like a walking combination asshole/armpit.
Would that be an ‘ass pit’?
Stig finally reached me. I realized that he’d basically been running in a spiral – not completely disregarding my command, but doing whatever he could to circumvent it and keep himself out of the way of the skunk.
“What the hell was that?!” I yelled.
“I think you got sprayed, boss,” he said quite seriously.
“I KNOW I got sprayed – why didn’t you stay and fight?!”
“You didn’t tell me to, boss.”
That enraged me. “What do you mean I didn’t tell you to?! I said ‘come back’ – ”
“Yes, that’s exactly what you said – come back. And I did, boss!”
I frowned. “But I meant – ”
“But you only said to come back, boss. And I did!”
Now he was confusing me. I mentally retraced my steps through my commands – including what I’d said when he didn’t kill the skunk on the first try.
“I also said to keep attacking it!”
“And I would have – but you killed it first, boss!”
I realized something: I hadn’t said ‘Stay and fight’ at any single point in the last two minutes. I also hadn’t said, ‘Keep continuously attacking it.’
That literal-minded little bastard.
He was like a lawyer contesting every single line of a contract. Anything with any leeway in it, he was going to interpret whichever way benefited him.
I glared at the imp, and I could have sworn he was reading my mind.
He grinned at me like Sucker. Just now figured it out, huh?
The little asshole was smarter than I’d given him credit for.
After all, I was the one who smelled like a PortaJohn, not him.
“From now on,” I said angrily, “when I am under attack – or I am about to be under attack – you stay with me and you fight whatever it is that is attacking me, or is about to attack me. Do you understand?”
“Yes, boss!”
The little jerk would probably find a way to screw me over with the directions I had just given him, but I would gradually refine the rules until he had no more loopholes.
I sighed. “All right… let’s see if we can do something about getting this horrible smell off me.”
“You got it, boss.”
And while I was at it, see if there was some way I could contact my new employers.
5
I pulled up my Map window to get my bearings, and headed for what looked like the nearest inhabited area. We were apparently near a backwater village named Fernburg in a land called Ostmere.
After about 20 minutes of walking, Stig and I came t
o a small farm where a man was out in the field working his crops.
I walked up to the fence and waved at him. “Hello! I was wondering if – ”
“By Chalastia’s crown, what is that?!” the man cried out as he pointed at Stig.
I had no idea who Chalastia was or what her crown had to do with anything, but I could tell the farmer was distressed.
I looked down at my pet demon, who had his hands on the bottom rung of the split-railed wooden fence and was peering over it like a toddler might. He looked up at me with eyes wide with surprise.
I turned back to the farmer and answered as politely as possible, “It’s an imp.”
“Run away from it!” the farmer howled at me in terror. “Hurry!”
I frowned. “It’s my imp.”
“So you’re a warlock!” he yelled accusingly.
“Yeah, so?”
The farmer bent down, rooted in the dirt, and pulled out an object that he sent hurtling through the air.
It thumped against my shoulder and fell on the ground.
A potato.
Motherhumper was throwing potatoes at me.
He kept at it, too, yanking them out of the ground and tossing them through the air, one every couple of seconds. “Get away from here, you foul wizard!”
“What the hell, man?” I snapped as I dodged the next spud.
“Get away! By the grace of Chalastia, I rebuke you in the goddess’ name!”
Asshole!
I thought about hitting him with some Dark energy, but I wasn’t exactly sure that was the best move at this point. After all, attacking the skunk hadn’t exactly worked out in my favor.
“You want me to fireball him, boss?” Stig asked.
I was pretty damn sure the guy had more hit points than the skunk, plus he had a hoe in his hands. In other words, a weapon.
“No, I don’t want to annoy him and have him attack us. Let’s just go.”
So I walked away – just as another potato hit my back.
I was sorely tempted to turn around and fry the bastard, but I refrained and kept on walking.
“Why didn’t we kill him, boss?” Stig asked as he loped along beside me.
“Well, first of all, because you suck.”
“It’s not my fault, boss! The more powerful you get, the more powerful I get!”
