by Charles Dean
He hadn’t taken more than ten steps before he heard Kitchens behind him. “Minx, put that down. What are you eating?” Kitchens scolded his daughter.
“But red means cherry. It’s tasty!” Minx whimpered. “Even Fuzzy Wuzzy thinks so!”
Darwin turned around to see Minx holding a ball of red snow. She was still licking it and taking bites even after her dad chastised her.
“Come on, try it!” she said, holding out a handful of the enemy’s slushy, red remains.
“I’d rather not. It might be poisonous, and I don’t think any of us have an antidote type of potion,” the ever-vigilant Kitchens replied sternly, not at all swayed by his daughter.
“Darwin, you try then!” Minx produced another giant ball of the red snow that she had obviously saved for later and tossed it to Darwin.
Darwin looked at the red ball in his hands with suspicion. Half of him wanted to just agree with Kitchens and toss it back to her, but everyone was eyeing him like he was the first one in the group to test a rickety bridge. Minx wasn’t showing any signs of being affected yet, and while that did little to assure him that the snow cone wasn’t poisonous, it did make him feel intensely pressured to try it. They’re going to think I’m a chicken if I don’t, aren’t they? He sighed, stuck out his tongue and gave the red ball a lick. Holy crud! It’s cherry flavored!
“This is wonderful. You guys have to try it,” he said, breaking the giant ball he had been given by Minx into smaller bits and passing it around to everyone except Fuzzy Wuzzy. The bear was already working away at his own blue snowball, which Minx appeared to be in the process of taking away and trying to use as a hat for him.
“I didn’t realize dungeons in this game came with snacks,” Mclean said, biting into the red snowball. “But you are right, this is tasty.”
"Why wouldn't they come with edible delights?” Darwin laughed. “I’ve been using dungeons as a food source for the NPCs since the very first one.”
“Well, I mean, there is still one question regarding these snow cones. . .” Daniel greedily took another bite of his. “Do they have enough sugar to be served in an American restaurant? Will they make our guildmates grow wider more quickly than they grow stronger?”
“You’re worried about weight gain in a video game? If you don’t want to put on pixels, why didn’t you just alter your character’s appearance in the creation menu?” Mclean shook her head. “Aren’t girls supposed to be the ones worried about packing on the pounds?”
“Well, new day, new standards. Can’t be chubby cheeks and pull all of the mad ladies like me.” Daniel flexed once or twice in the most over-exaggerated manner he could.
“You have a girlfriend?” Darwin asked curiously.
“Um . . . No, but at least I have the body to get one!” Daniel flexed one more time.
“Yeah . . . that’s not how it works.” Mclean bopped Daniel on the back of his head. “Dufus.”
Now is as good a time as any. Darwin sighed, not wanting to actually broach this subject with the gang yet. “Actually, there is something I need to talk to you guys about.” Darwin took another bite of his own cherry-flavored treat. The dungeon hadn’t even really started yet, and the whole group, other than Kitchens, was quietly eating away at their dessert as if they were celebrating a hard-earned victory over the boss.
“Wait, you’re not gonna tell us you’re actually a fat forty-year-old with hygiene problems, are you? I mean, I did have my suspicions, especially with how much you like milk and cookies, but I wasn’t gonna say anything, boss.” Daniel’s joke caused both Minx and Mclean to cringe at the mental image.
“What? No. Heck no.” Darwin did his best to defend himself against the idea, but he knew the image would still be stuck in everyone’s minds for a good while once it had been put out there. “I was going to tell you . . . I kind of have a skill problem.”
“You mean how you don’t have any? Yeah, we all saw you practicing with Alex. You’re getting a lot better at it. Don’t worry, it’s okay to be really bad for a while after the beginning of a game. Most people only know how to swing a sword from watching some space opera or medieval fantasy where they just thrash around in a way that looks pretty for the camera.” Daniel continued to guess wrongly, most likely on purpose just to mess with Darwin.
Darwin sighed. “No, I mean one of my skills is causing me a lot of trouble,” he said, trying to finish this time before Daniel could volunteer something more embarrassing or insulting.
“A class skill?” Kitchens’ eyes opened wider. “Tell me more about it. I have been meaning to select one, but haven’t been able to decide.”
“You don’t have a class skill yet?” Mclean’s eyes practically popped out of her head as she asked him. “How in heaven’s name do you do so much damage without one?”
“I just use the same sword art I have been studying for the last twenty years. It seems to do fine on its own, so I haven’t felt the need to pick out a skill.” Kitchens just shrugged again as if everything he said were perfectly normal. He hadn’t been awesome because of his class but because of his twenty years of classes.
Fuzzy Wuzzy let out a roar of approval and pawed at Kitchens’ leg in the ursine equivalent of a pat on the back. He really can understand us. Darwin was still amazed at the bear’s ability to understand and interact with them.
“Anyway, the thing is, I need y’all’s help. My skill . . . It will cause me to lose my sanity. It’s hard to describe, but everything goes red, and it’s hard to control what I’m doing. When that happens --”
“You need us to restrain you again? Just like we did on the battlefield?” Mclean interrupted him before she began licking the remainder of her red snow cone off of her hands.
“Or kill me.” Darwin frowned defeatedly. He hadn’t died yet, but he knew that it was inevitable now. Until his condition was treated, simply restraining him might not work at some point. “Just stop me from hurting any of the NPCs or continuing the bloodbath. I’m worried that the longer it goes on, the harder it will be to come back to grips with reality.”
“It could be the other way.” Kitchens put on the oddest contemplative look, which made Darwin think he was trying to wink but with the entire right half of his face. “Sometimes, when you encounter a river of blood, you will find it’s easier to wade through it than turn around.”
That statement from anyone else would have been taken somewhat half-heartedly. It might even have been just brushed off as vague sententiousness spilled out from some random book written three centuries ago by someone who wanted to sound smart. But with Kitchens, knowing his past and seeing how calm he was about everything, it made Darwin shudder. Someone from a military background, who could have very well seen live combat, had just told him that he could continue wading through a river of blood until reaching the other side. It was slightly terrifying and extremely unnerving.
“Well, either way, I’m going to need help if the effects get out of control. Think you guys can handle it?”
“Easily. After all, you still haven’t finished those lessons with Alex.” Daniel grinned. He was in really high spirits today.
“Thanks, I guess.” Darwin wasn’t sure exactly how to take that. “So . . . on to the next set of mobs?”
“Sure. I need more of this red snow cone,” Daniel said with his mouth full from taking another bite.
“I’m going to try a different color next time,” Mclean said and smiled happily.
“Not the yellow one, right?” Darwin teased.
“No. You need to turn those into minions, remember?” Mclean took the air right out of his joke with a serious answer.
”Alright, let’s get going then,” Darwin said, leading the group on to the next fight.
They finally reached another group of enemies that was exactly the same as the first. This time, as suggested, Darwin was on yellow snow cone duty, and he had the help of Fuzzy Wuzzy, a member who hadn’t taken part in the last fight after he had been impaled with
icicles.
Nothing felt different at all about the fight until one of the yellow snow cones was converted into one of Darwin’s red-eyed followers. The snow cone didn’t really have eyes to begin with, since it was literally just a floating of shaved ice that used spells to try and dodge and defend, and there was no way to noticeably differentiate it from the enemies. If Darwin’s team hadn’t been attacking the same creature, they may have accidently killed it without even realizing it was a resurrected cone. The second it came back to life as one of Darwin’s zombies, however, the entire battle changed. Whereas once Kitchens, Minx and Daniel had struggled to get through the giant yellow shields that prevented them from killing the blue snow cones, that same defensive spell was now shielding the trio from danger. Although the shields would only appear when they were struck, Darwin could still vaguely see the rough outlines of the hexagons and a small green bar in the middle. Is that the health meter for the shield? he wondered.
“Woah, neat,” Minx said as she stood still a minute and let the icicles coming at her bounce off the hexagons. “Kinda defeats the purpose of doing anything almost,” she said with a frown. “I can’t stop them from hitting the shield since its block radius is further than my arms. I’m like a bubble princess now!”
“But you can do damage, right?” Darwin asked as his own sword effortlessly passed through his newly formed shield and stabbed the remaining yellow snow cone. His sword had a much longer reach than her daggers, so the possibility of a barrier pushing the enemies out of his range wasn’t much of a concern.
“Yeah, it lets me stabby stab good times,” Minx said, “but the enemies shield stops the daggers, so now it feels like an easy-mode waiting game.”
“Not a fan of cheat codes?” Mclean asked as she helped Darwin push through the remaining yellow snow cone.
“Nuh uh. My dad says cheat codes are for people that are lower than politicians.” Minx, no longer restricted in her attacks, tore right through her opponent as if it were a piñata at a birthday party.
“You know, I have to admit: Minx’s complaint aside, this feels way more like an MMO than before since we actually have class roles now,” Daniel said. “It’s like we’re actually playing a game now and not just some random hackathon.”
Mclean laughed, picked up the black ball and tossed it to Darwin after the fight was over and then she just shrugged. “I’m still wondering who came up with the artwork and creatures for this place. I think someone must really enjoy drinking while at work and has a boss that’s just like ‘Meh, if that’s all you got, then that’s all you got.’”
Darwin’s group picked up two more yellow, healthful desserts to help them out, just for safe measure, and proceeded on their merry way, going about business as usual until they came to the typical tell-tale signs of a boss room. They had managed to bag what felt like a hundred black snow balls along the way, but they still had no idea what they were for.
The room that housed the bosses, three different ones, was designed differently than the rest of the dungeon. Rather than snow, the floors and walls were covered with thick, white ice. There was an entire matrix of giant, black, empty holes covering both the ground and the walls. Each hole was around two feet in diameter and was separated from the other circles by at least five feet.
There, standing gloriously in the center of the cavernous room, were the candy confection bosses. Keeping in line with the dungeon’s theme, the loot-droppers were a sort of snowman--if a snowman could ever be described as a unicorn. They each had a string of five snowballs for legs, two fat snowballs for the body, another string of tiny snowballs for tails and a few additional snowballs to support horse-like heads. They each had candy bits for the eyes, strings of purple and pink candy for manes and long carrots sticking out of their foreheads--just so that no one ever mistook them for normal horses. The three Snownicorns were each identical in almost every way except their color: one was red, one was blue and one was yellow.
The Snownicorns, which were using their front hooves to make snow cones of their color, turned to look at the group as soon as they came into view.
“Sunny, I told you not to leave the door open. Look at the bugs that got in,” the red one practically spat as he complained at the yellow one.
“And I told you that I closed it, Burny,” the yellow one protested, not even looking up from the snow cone he was working on. “How come you always blame me? Why don’t you ever point a hoof at Blizzy?”
“Cause Blizzy doesn’t do anything but work. Work, work, work. He makes way more than we do and never bothers going outside,” Burny, the red Snownicorn said, finally taking a break from his little project and looking up. “See, he hasn’t even noticed them! Blizzy! Blizzy, wake up! We have company! We need to teach them a lesson.”
The blue Snownicorn picked his head up, looked at the entrance and then immediately went back to his work. “I don’t wanna. You do it.”
“Blizzy, either help us out, or I’ll kill one of your little precious children myself after the fight,” Burny shouted.
Darwin looked over at his friends. He wasn’t entirely sure what to do here. “Should we . . . maybe take advantage of this?”
“Hold on! I’ve never seen this cut scene before!” Mclean hopped in front of them and extended a hand to block Darwin so he couldn’t charge.
Kitchens nodded. “This is new to me as well.”
“Alright. Fine. We’ll let them prepare for us and then fight them instead of catching them with their pants down,” Darwin grumbled. He didn’t like the idea of the enemy being more difficult than it should be.
Blizzy finally put down his snow cone craftwork and joined Burny and Sunny. The three Snownicorns laughed as they began shooting balls of ice at Darwin. Like other the orbs they had been creating, these colorful slush-sicles were extremely reminiscent of Kass’ favorite spell. Before the projectiles hit Darwin, however, they shattered across a newly-formed yellow shield as the four yellow snow-cones behind Darwin successfully protected him.
“Why are my children working for him?” Sunny looked puzzled. “They stole my bots! Burny! BURNY! THEY STOLE MY BOTS! How come they didn’t take yours? Why mine?!” The yellow Snownicorn stamped its little snow feet, and a giant burst of yellow snow sprayed up in a shower all over the place, but still didn’t break through the appropriated snow cones’ defensive spells. “This isn’t fair!” Sunny shouted again.
“Yellow first, guys! Kitchens, Minx, keep the other two off us. Let’s just run the same drill we did with the coneys!” Darwin shouted, the rest of the group rushing in to attack the yellow boss. Unfortunately, as soon as Darwin’s sword swung at Sunny, a giant, black, hexagonal shield deflected his blade. “I can’t hurt it. What about y’all?”
“Nada yada, boss boss!” Minx replied as her blades also bounced off a dark pane of the spell.
“No luck here either.” Kitchens frowned. “It seems we are at an impasse with them.”
Black shield, black snowballs, Darwin thought, looking around for more clues as to how they were supposed to handle the three Snownicorns. “Do you guys see anything?” With his yellow shield flashing, his teammates darting around next to him and two terrible excuses for a fight going on nearby, it was hard to make out what was going on.
“Are we really going to stop and have a chat in the middle of a fight? That just doesn’t seem right,” Darwin grumbled. It wasn’t that people didn’t talk during boss fights, but he knew from prior experience as a raid leader that conversation generally meant the group was slacking off and not doing what they should. Although this wasn’t the case here, the memories still irritated him.
“I think we could bake cookies and have tea, and it wouldn’t make much of a difference right now,” Daniel joked at the mutual helplessness of both sides in the battle.
Darwin kept hacking away, but the black shield didn’t dim at all. Unlike the others they had encountered, it didn’t slowly start to fade before resetting either. It just sat there unm
oving, unyielding and unwavering in the face of every bit of violence he could muster. The bosses’ balls of ice weren’t damaging his group, but his zweihander wasn’t melting a single enemy snowflake either. He was about to give up hope when he finally noticed that one of the circles on the ceiling wasn’t black like the others: It was yellow. Quickly looking around, he managed to spot both a blue and a red one as well. As soon as he noticed them, however, they faded.
“Guys, did you see it?” he asked the others.
“The circles? Yeah. Pass me a snowball,” Daniel said, catching one as soon as Darwin tossed it. “Let’s give this a try.” Daniel wound up his arm like a baseball pitcher and threw the black snowball at the yellow circle that had reappeared, hitting it dead center just as it moved to a new location. As soon as the ball landed, the black shield around Sunny dropped and his bright, lemon-colored face shone with horror.
“Help!” he screamed as Darwin’s zweihander lopped off part of his flank. “He--!” he tried to scream again, but it was too late. He had been chopped up and melted by a flurry of attacks.
“Red next!” Darwin called, pulling out another black snowball and throwing it at a red circle. It missed. Really? I can nail a guy charging at me dead in the eyes with a spoon, but I can’t throw a snowball properly? He cursed himself, knowing the others were probably laughing at him on the inside for his failure.
“Let me get it. I used to play baseball,” Daniel volunteered. Darwin obliged him. He didn’t want to fail twice in a row and make a complete fool out of himself in front of his friends. “There!” Daniel called out as the black snowball made contact.
“This . . . This isn’t fair--” Burny tried to protest, but like Sunny, his life ended far too quickly under an onslaught of blades and furry claws.
Blizzy, seeing what was going on, just frowned. “I should have kept working. I could have finished another before I died,” he grumbled and sighed helplessly as Daniel pitched a ball right into the blue circle on the wall, dropping the last snow pony’s shield. Unlike the other two, Blizzy didn’t make a sound as he collapsed into a pile of slush.
