Georgio coughed and choked. “How– how did you know that they were going to do that?”
“Because if I was going to nerf me, that’s the first thing I would do.”
“Yeah,” Georgio smirked. “Well, what’s the second thing?”
“I’m going to grab another Mythic Artifact.”
Georgio snorted in disbelief and grabbed a crisp slice of bacon from his breakfast plate. “Already against the rules,” the orc crunched, rolling his eyes back in delight. He reached out to grab another slice of bacon and promptly had his hand slapped.
“Yeah I’ve been thinking about that. With all of this blahblahblahing about stressing out the system during the update I was thinking that I can try to force through my own rules. Play with the code a bit. Pretty sure there’s another McGuffin I found that lets me play with code and use magic points to change numbers and rolls. Just temporary stuff but really useful stuff. Magic– poof I rolled a ten. Yay! But what if I could use it to change the items? Glitch the code, eh? Break the rules or bend them to what I want.”
Georgio looked at him with gleaming eyes, caught up in the idea. “That might work. Hells, I bet it would work. The Codex of Code X was meant to be a dice roll changer but at its root it is really a gamified block editor that burns spell points for fuel. With enough spell points you could keep pinging numbers while the system is updating and receptive to change. You could brute force numbers and qualities into the items, spells, maybe even yourself! I don’t even know how it will work. Brian you are brilliant! And then it’ll all be grandfathered in under contract! Genius.”
“Yeah it is. I’m going to remove my Mythical McGuffin limit, uber enhance my magic stuff, and then figure out if I can’t make myself invincible while I’m at it. Don’t tell anyone, Georgio. Just let them know I refused to go but that I said I was comfortable just taking it a bit easy for now. A few quests here and there but mostly good old R and R. And let’s see how far I can go before they figure out that I lied.”
“Yeah I’ll do that. Need any item lists or quest data Mr. Morecock?”
Brain nodded. “Yeah, find me another Mythical McGuffin ASAP.”
***
Nicole had never before feared for, or disliked working for Prestige Gaming. Granted, the park had only been open just over two years, and she had only been here about eight months, but almost every minute of those eight months had been kind to her. She’d loved the training sessions, the clear explanations (often apologetic) that VIP Services were much like the acting industry: you had a limited window of ‘hotness’ to be considered for such important guidance roles like these. While the company regretted that it could only have her on staff for so long, it was clear and upfront that the pay she’d be receiving for those years here would be five or ten times what she could get doing hospitality or tourism, or even modeling elsewhere in the country, or even the world.
No beating around the bush, no awkward misinterpretations, just upfront acknowledgement of the industry and what it meant to work here.
All that ended the moment she walked into the Team Lead’s office.
The woman standing there appeared to be chiseled out of a solid block of granite, from her square jaw to her thick everything else, Janelle Stumpf had never been anything but kind to her. All that was over.
“Shut the door,” Janelle commanded.
Nicole did so.
Janelle gestured sharply to one of the seats before her huge, Janelle-like desk: a massive slab of some dull, gray material crammed with various bric-a-brac from trips abroad: a miniature Arc de Triomphe, a miniature Great Wall, a humpback whale in the midst of leaping free of water, the moment carefully rendered in some unidentifiable material. And others. Nicole had always wanted to touch them, to see if they were plastic, as they looked, or ceramic, as they must’ve been.
“I’m going to need you to explain to me exactly what the fuck transpired that has your asset still in Sword and Sorcery?”
Nicole blinked in surprise. “I… what?”
“I understand you had a lengthy conversation with the asset, you seduced him, and yet he’s still there. Explain.”
“I don’t… I don’t make people’s minds for them,” she replied.
“Do you have any idea what is going to happen now, thanks to this clusterfuck?”
The shock was wearing off. Nicole had been five foot two pretty much since she turned fourteen, and had had plenty of time to spend looking up at people who looked down at her, literally and figuratively. They seemed to equate small with cute, and cute with harmless, or if not harmless, at least someone you could easily push around. Well fuck that.
“Oh I’m sorry, am I the VIP here, or is he an asset? Who has a name by the way. He came into this game knowing exactly what he wanted, and that was to play the game. Now he’s doing that, and you want to crawl up my ass for facilitating his game experience? Which-“
“You watch yourself, missy–“
“–which, thank you for interrupting, is what I am employed to do, thank you. And since we blasted past the topic of intercourse with park guests, I have been given to believe by certain leaders of certain teams–“
“Not another word!”
“–that the practice was not only smiled upon, but encouraged.”
“Enough!” Janelle bellowed. “I’m taking you off this assignment.” Yeah, she knew this interaction was being recorded, and mostly because she was recording it on her handheld. Janelle probably had her own recording in action, and she wanted exactly zero of it to be admissible.
“And what are you going to do when a single-minded, intractable, stubborn, headstrong VIP client demands to see me?”
Janelle stared molten lava into her soul. “Look at this,” she said. She tapped at the screen portion of her desk several times, and the wall display flared to life. Brian was in the midst of beginning a new quest, this time walking by himself through a craggy plain covered in tufts of tenacious grass. “He has activated a Legendary ability that will allow him to see all the secrets possible to see, and exhausting the list of high level adventures our coders have worked up. You and I both know that eventually he’s going to come upon some empty place, a glitch cove or room, and there’s no telling what he’s going to find. Something that can break the game as it currently is? Quite possibly. Something that can break the game as it will shortly be? Almost certainly.”
Janelle fell silent, and a cloud of miserable tension hung heavy in the air. Nicole dared Janelle to go a step farther and blame her for this. She was sure Janelle was hoping the exact same thing, so she could dock Nicole’s pay or force clauses in the contract to make her pay reparations for all the room and board she’d gotten over the last eight months.
After plenty of thinking and rumination, she said quietly and forcefully, “I’d like to request two of my personal days.”
“Are you… get out of my sight,” Janelle hissed.
***
Darkness swallowed him, save for the intermittent flickering of some far-off torch bouncing off the gleaming obsidian marble walls. Maze of Madness, heh. This one felt like some novice storywriter pulled it straight out of his butthole about a half hour ago. It was supposed to be Cthulhu weirdness meets MC Escher, but populated for some reason by bearowls. That made no sense, given that bearowls lived in forests, not tangential outer planes. Dumbasses.
And they had to know he’d picked the secret level sight power as his Legendary ability, so he’d be able to see all the hidden everything. The tiny holes in the walls for the sleep darts, the notches in the walls for the blades, the trap door edges, all that stuff glowed faintly reddish orange.
Second of all, he had nothing to fear, since he had an army of the dead working on his behalf. First he sent along one of his still-functioning dead bearowls, which of course triggered the three different traps down the corridor. This one absorbed all the sleep darts without a speck of trouble, then was quickly hacked apart by the wall blades. Still, they were out
and couldn’t retract, because he’d done so many quests they were going with the rookie shit, apparently.
He ventured on, then forced another dead bearowl to amble over to the door and peck at the hatch to open it. A flood of poison gas filled the area ahead, glowing faintly of greenish yellowish death, before it dissipated. The zombie didn’t seem any the worse for wear, which was great. Getting more than one use out of each one suited the Douchemage just fine.
And more bearowls came, from apparently roosting deep in this subterranean oubliette of a mad lich lord from eons long past or something. And apparently the evil was escaping into the nearby town, which desperately needed him to head in there and send the entire place back where it came from, or at least stop it from possessing the townsfolk. If they hadn’t gone with bearowls, and had instead used cosmic entities or spectres or demon knights, perhaps he would have understood, but… bearowls! The dumbest of all creatures. Head of a bear, body of an owl, five feet tall? Why? Just… why?
They opened their bear faces, flapped their shaggy wings, and roared out sonic attacks that their dead brethren absorbed. He sent a lance of magic through their heads and killed them instantaneously. Then he teleported forward with the Transmogrifier’s power copying ability (thanks Robby Robber) and avoided triggering the pit trap that would send him somewhere else in the loopy architecture of this place.
He then added several more bearowl zombies to his cadre of servants and soldiered on.
Truth be told, he rather enjoyed the concept of this one. It was far better than the bowels of some titanic creature, swimming with parasites, that was for damn sure.
He ventured further, twisting and turning until he came to a room plain in its build and decoration, but gleaming with orange light. It looked as though the entire wall was a secret of some kind.
“Oh, I’m interested,” he mumbled to himself, and sent several of the bearowls into it.
Nothing.
This one turned into a real puzzle. None of the bearowls triggered a series of deathtraps, nor did a bunch of spells meant to figure out the problem. He’d long since turned the settings on his HUD down to enhance the reality of the game, so he didn’t have the clattering of dice all up in his face. Instead he had magical telekinetic hands probe the thing, summoned monsters trounce around the room, and a wall of force crash into it. After all that, it appeared to be nothing more than a plain wall of unbreakable obsidian.
He reached forward and placed his hand against the wall, expecting somehow that he might pass through it, even where the creatures and zombies and magic had failed. After all, he was less a part of the game and actually real. So it was ultimately even more bizarre when nothing at all happened. No ghost came and tried to possess him, no spikes came shooting out of the ceiling, nor did the ceiling collapse down on him from above with the spikes impaling him.
Just… a wall.
Well, there was definitely something behind that wall. All he needed was his trusty Transmogrifier, and, with a couple of clicks, teleported through the wall, and while he was feeling a bit of trepidation going in without his zombies, and also not knowing what he’d jump into, he gasped when he finally did get in.
The room was absolutely chock full of treasure. And not just gold coins. In fact, there was practically none of that. Instead he threw together a quick magic detection spell, cast it (after a couple of rolls) and was amazed to find they were all Legendary or Masterpiece level magical items, the sort of level 2 and 3 stuff that could outfit a hundred gaming parties.
“Oh my God!” He called out, and smacked his head. He’d bookmarked this back earlier in the LUBE, maybe the first or second day. How could he have forgotten?
And then it struck him. He produced the Transmogrifier, and began to do a little dance while humming and singing a tune. No tune in particular, just the disjointed, jaunty hymn of the destruction of Prestige Games and its ultimate gazillion dollar theme park.
Chapter 15- Lustful Little Leprechaun’s Lads
“Woohoo!” Rebecca yelled, her muscled and tight midriff open to the cool night air. Lights whizzed by as their fire-red hover convertible took a corner at a dizzying ninety miles per hour. The other girls giggled and laughed, and Nicole tried to add her own sounds to the mix, but it just wasn’t fitting in well.
The streets of Albuquerque were lined with that timeless white adobe that shined white in day and went a solid dark tan in the shade of night. It was a place that was cheap to hang out in, full of loose hussies and broken homes. The kind of place that lived for the drunken and spoiled antics of Prestige Gaming employees. A night on the town carried with it the feeling of pampered lordship– not only was the money tight but so was the prestige, as it were. But even with all of that floating between her and the girls on this moonless desert night, she just could not get into it.
“What’s wrong with you?” Rebecca asked, taking vodka straight from a bottle, then swishing it through her mouth and spitting it in a stream from off the side. “We’re free! Better than that, we’re on patrol and ready to roll! You have any idea what kinda guy you’re gonna pick up tonight?”
Rebecca bounced her new blonde perm a bit with the flat of her hand, and retouched her lipstick, staring at the former VIP paladin with an expression that read half-drunk but one-hundred and ten percent party.
Nicole sighed. “I– I guess I don’t know. Maybe I need to see them first? How the hell am I even supposed to see our options when we’re going warp speed around every damn corner that Tiffany can find?”
“Warp Ten, Star Voyer!” the tanned woman called from up front. It was a wonder that she wasn’t freezing considering her garish style of dress. She cackled and then cracked open a beer, taking a long and satisfying gulp.
“Hey Tiff, it’ll be hard for us to party if we get killed first. Where the hell are we going, anyways?” Rebecca asked.
“How should I know?” the woman threw back over her shoulder. I was following you!”
The two of them laughed. Nicole pulled out her handheld and she twinkled her fingers over it, zipping past the slow clicking three dimensional clock with a sigh and autologging onto “FarcicalTome”, the latest in Online FriendStalking Hyperware.
Her profile popped up and with it came a 3D rotating carousel of images. Nicole in her paladin avatar, beheading a orange-skinned drumph as it’s tiny clawed hands dug at at her pretty face. She saw the next one and giggled. Wave upon wave of scaly-limbed kobolds were stabbing Morelon the Learned over and over again in his aching nutsack. He had almost passed out– he’d been so low-level then. And an ogre swung by, herself ducking under and slashing at his bulging gut– a mixed snarl scream upon her lips.
*AUTOPILOT ENGAGED* the convertible blared *DESTINATION ARRIVED* it added moments later, decelerating at a good yet comfortable pace to shimmy sideways into one of a few carbon gray slots of an automated parking garage.
“Yeah!” Tandy yelled. “We’re all gonna get wasted, we’re all gonna get wasted!”
Rebecca jumped out over the door and grabbed Nicole’s hand, making her drop her phone. “Oh, shit, sorry,” Rebecca laughed. Nicole shrugged and picked it back up. There wasn’t much in the world that could dent or crack a (insert phone’s name).
The girls all gabbed and hooted as they walked up the block, the bouncing furor of a dance club ebbing and flowing in pressure and style, swirling about them in siren’s song. And as they turned the corner, the bright rainbowed lights of The Lucky Leprechaun washed over them. Two little people dressed like nightmare baby dolls did little jigs and dances at the doorway. They weren’t even holograms. Nicole sighed, and wished she had a sword with which to battle them. Not that she wanted to actually murder– just the game was so much fun. And, for the first time ever, all of this wasn’t.
Ten bucks for cover and a free drink coupon later, the club enveloped them with its sweaty, pulsating darkness and flashes of laser. The interior and exterior made no sense. At least in Swords & Sorcerers you saw both.
>
This was the type of place that really tried hard to get a cameo in a cop forensics show: lots of skin, blaring music, hands in the air, and everyone both in their twenties and ecstatic to be there. They had cages beside the DJ where half nude women or men were dancing, they had elevated catwalks, and VIP rooms, and even guys with gleaming silver or charcoal suits were drawing in the women like a mosquito buzzer.
Rebecca and Tiff immediately peeled off for the bar, leaving her with Tandy.
“Where’s Chris?” she shouted.
“In game!” Tandy screamed back.
Damnit.
This whole insane thing was supposed to get her away from Prestige. “Need to dance. Come on!”
She dragged Tandy with her to the dance floor, and they were immediately surrounded by Lustful Little Leprechaun’s Lads. See, some of these guys came here, probably popped some ecstasy or even weirder shit, and changed into Leprechaun garb. If you were wearing green, or a four leaf clover, it was like putting on a Little Black Dress™. She wasn’t–
Shit. She was wearing a green top. Guys with hideous spray-painted orange beards and thick, shiny buckled shoes had them surrounded. Suddenly crotches and long green coattails were being rubbed all over her.
“Here to get lucky, huh ladies?” one of them sputtered. Drunken spray. Fantastic.
“I forgot!” she yelled in Tandy’s ear. “About the green!”
“I thought you were here to sex out your stress!” Tandy shouted.
She wailed. The grinding continued.
“What do you want to do?” Tandy return yelled.
She hated being five two. She’d much rather be wearing full plate and a big ass shield to bowl these bastards over, plus a nice full-body length sword to cleave them in twain. Instead she was in a tight skirt, with hands already on her, and a strapless tube top showing off the freckles that went all the way down her shoulders. Vulnerability sucked so hard.
She swore several times, and slapped away hands that were after her lucky charms. They cursed at her in loud, horrible Irish accents.
DoucheMage Page 15