“Make way!” Tandy shouted, grabbed her wrist–
she met Brian’s eyes, seeing panic flash through them
–and dragged her out of the circle. They made a beeline for the bathrooms. A hideous skirted clog dancer was the symbol for the ladies’ room, and a bushy-bearded leprechaun for the lads’, and they were through in a blur.
She couldn’t breathe. Tandy quickly wrapped her up in a hug and got a couple of snickers from ladies already at the bank of sinks and the huge, forty foot mirror. It felt good to be squeezed for a moment, and she was sad when Tandy took her by the shoulders, bent way down, and looked her in the eyes.
“You okay?”
“This was a bad idea.”
“We can switch tops.”
Nicole’s spirits sank even further. She couldn’t put her friend through the inevitable horror of being mobbed by dozens of horny leprechauns. The shame, embarrassment, and regret swirled, took her down a ways, then swirled again and took her down even further.
“Is it your VIP?”
“No!” she shouted. “No, it has nothing to do with him.” Her shoulders slumped. “Yes. No. I, maybe. No, it’s Janelle… she cussed me out. She said since I slept with my guest I should have ‘convinced’ him into switching up genres. That’s not how I… I don’t manipulate partners. Not after watching the creeping fucking misery that was my parents’ divorce.”
“You don’t have to explain yourself. Especially not to me, sweetie.”
“We had our orders. I failed.”
Tandy blew a raspberry and quicker than you please, stripped off Nicole’s badly-planned tube top. “Please, girl. You fall off a horse, you get back up on there. If you want a second ride, that is.” In seconds, her own black shirt and transparent, gauzy outer shirt were on Nicole, and the much-taller Tandy was trying to convince the green shirt to cover more than just her boobs.
“Now,” Tandy said. “This is gonna be hilarious. You got some mascara?”
She saw Tandy’s plan immediately and gave her a weak smile. “Sure.”
Fifteen minutes later her green tube top was practically black in the front, it loudly said F-OFF in the back, and they were back at the bar.
And she still couldn’t wait to leave.
***
Sure, Brian wanted to take his sweet, sweet time in squeezing every ounce of minmax he could from the available cache. He had this creeping suspicion that Nicole would show up and challenge him to combat, and when he died he’d be locked out of Swords & Sorcerers forever. He could study rulebooks for the best possible combos and progression toward the ultimate godlike power level.
He really was getting it all, but time was not on his side.
He grabbed up the Wand of the Table Bump, and entered its ability into the Transmogrifier first. Although it had a stupid name, its power was manifold: it could bump a die one face to one side or the other, turning a disastrous roll into a supreme success. It also had the power (once a day, pfft) to play with the number of charges another magic item had, or once per magic artifact to permanently influence the number of charges the magic item had. So you could double up your charges on a fireball staff if you were a feeble-minded fool, or you could add to the number of abilities your Transmogrifier could store… including the Wand of the Table Bump.
He used the Wand immediately on the Transmogrifier, then the Transmogrifier on the Wand to boost its max permanent increases to two, then the Wand back on the Transmogrifier. Ping pong ball effect: back and forth she went, boosting his super magical item until it could store the capabilities of every magic item in this coder dumping ground. Sure taking all these powers and then organizing them in the Transmogrifier would be complicated, but he would find a magic item or he’d invent a spell to keep track of everything.
He did this for several hours, all the while looking over his shoulders for VIP Services or coders to come and break up the party.
Which didn’t happen. He grew hungry, but didn’t want to risk the wrath of anyone finding out where he was, even if it was via catering delivery drone. Eventually his stomach was protesting loudly, and he’d just about finished taking all these overpowered magic items into his Uber-McGuffin.
He stared down at the Transmogrifier and wondered just how powerful it would make him, or just how powerful it would become.
He now had the power (via some poorly conceived Mythic item) to strip away a single restriction… except with the Transmogrifier he would have the ability to strip them all away.
Every, single, hurdle in his path.
He eventually rose, and listened to the complaints and popping sounds coming from all over his body. He would need to leave, eat, rest, and plan. So far the only thing he’d done was increase his capacity to hold magical item powers. Now he was faced with the ultimate choice: power over a game, or food.
He went with food.
Outside the dungeon, his teleport spell could take him all the way back to Kapi Tal, and he paused at the gates to reconsider. Could they move it? The way the story was written, the dungeon wasn’t one of those phase-shifting teleporting ones.
His stomach growled loudly, causing him to clutch it and head toward the nearest tavern. On the way, a twinkle of light caused him to peer up and at the spindly spire of Kapi Tal’s highest tower. It was a semi-impossible construction of stone and magic-infused crystals holding everything aloft, along with wards and more mundane defenses ringing it. Given dragons and angry spirits, you couldn’t just build your keeps the same way you would in plain old medieval times. This thing was a masterpiece of layered defense works, but he knew without a doubt he would take it. He would become the king, or the emperor, and he would have subjects.
He’d just sat down to his first meal in maybe twelve hours when she appeared.
“Morelon?”
He started, tucked the Transmogrifier into his robes and peered up at her.
Yes, she was once again clad in her bluish steel armor, the freckles standing proudly against her pale skin. Only the half smile was different than her usual cheerful grin.
He stood, grimaced at the hunger pangs, and motioned for her to sit. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I would get your chair, but I’m actually starving.”
She placed the book on the table and had a seat. “You okay?”
“Okay? Yes, I’m better than okay! I’m fabulous.” The realization struck him about halfway through this: she was here to undermine his efforts. Her intentions could be benign, like the sincere belief that she was helping him break out of his comfort zone and she wanted to hang out with him on a pirate-infested beach somewhere. However, they could just as easily be motivated by the desire to snatch away all the gains he’d made in the last few days. Had she viewed the recording of the shit demon? He suddenly wished he could have altered the recordings, or layer over an illusion of the three of them just hanging out and slapping each other’s dicks while behind the veil the shit demon did its worst.
“Fabulous? That’s great news!”
“I mean I’m much better now that you’re here.” At least that was sincere… ish. He really wanted to explore the secret room further, before the VIP Services people and the coders and story writers could delete it or move it to some other location it would take ages to stumble upon.
“So hey!” She apparently still had that old bubble inside her after all. “You need some help? I’m still supposed to try to convince you to head over to another gameworld for a bit because the roll out is happening in a couple days, but you know what? You do you.”
“Oh yeah?”
She nodded. “The higher ups think the system won’t be able to handle having you here for the update.”
He dug into his food, which had never tasted better. It was all done in elven style, which meant it all had the glimmer of perfection over it, even though it was recognizable food. He hoped the chefs for Prestige enjoyed the command to ‘make your favorite menu item’ because this was delightful.
As he ate
, and Nicole’s own food came (a salad made of magical leaves with beads of dressing floating overtop it), after a time his eyes fell on the holy tome of VIP Services.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
***
The precaution he attempted to take was to unleash a mindspeak spell. The real world physics of it mattered a lot, but he had no way of knowing if his words were protected from the prying eyes and ears of the almighty admin, but it was all he could do under the circumstances.
He’d teleported her to a quiet mountain overlook far to the north of the city. It was secluded, and while he knew they hadn’t actually traveled and real distance, it felt good to be surrounded by some enchanting wildflowers, mountain crags, and far off feathery wisps of clouds, with the occasional drake or wyvern deep in the distance.
“We should be able to speak privately like this,” he said.
Silence followed, and he wondered about the possibility it didn’t work well between real-world players. Then, her dulcet tones came through.
“Are you worried about them overhearing?”
“And watching, yes.”
She opened up the book again, and tapped something. “We should be okay now.”
“Thank you.”
“What’s on your mind?”
“The truth,” he said.
“Oh yeah? You think I haven’t been truthful with you? Or you haven’t been entirely honest with me.” Here her tone began to drip with innuendo.
“Not at all,” he said. “But I know there’s a lot you can say that’s technically not a lie.” Because he’d done it himself, on more than one occasion.
She took a deep breath and appeared to steady herself mentally. “I’m supposed to ‘convince’ you to branch out, um, between the sheets, let’s say.”
“With sex,” he deadpanned.
“Yeah. They’re really worried. You’re stretching what they’ve got for one genre. Meanwhile they’ve got hundreds and hundreds of stories for all these different genres coming up, and all you’d have to do is wait.”
But that would mean giving up his Transmogrifier, which he could not allow.
He cued up several spells while looking out over the landscape far below. Here, at the mountain’s caldera, the canopy of the forest appeared like no more than bubbly carpeting, and the swamps like the carpeting was stained with grape juice.
“The admin is out to get me,” he said.
“I know.”
“But you’re… you’re my ally. The only person I can trust in all this.”
“Bri–”
“Morelon. I’ll never be Brian again.”
“Listen, it doesn’t have to be you versus them. A week is all it would take, at most.”
“No.”
“Just like that? Just no?”
“You said you would stand by me. You made the choice not to use sex to change my mind. So if I say no, you’ll still stand with me?”
She came toward him. “Look, I don’t… I’m not technical. I don’t know all what they’re saying and how much of it’s the truth. I don’t know if you can really shut the game down or not. But it can’t hurt, right? If you take a few days off?”
“Nicole, no.”
She bit her lip. “Look–”
He tripped the string of spells, casting and burning plot points and casting again and again. A series of mirrors sprang up out of the mountain around her at the same time a ray zapped her straight in the chest.
“I thought you were better than them. If you’re not with me!” He shouted over the rumble and screech of the mountain shaking and the mirrors grinding against them. “You’re against me.”
“What are you doing?” Nicole screamed. Her voice began to warble and change as her overlay was taken over by some grotesque abomination, teeth, single strands of hair, and just so many tongues. “Flrrrp,” she struggled, her new avatar completely incapable of more than the most basic of rudimentary noises.
She dropped her tablet in shock, and Morelon’s eye fell hungrily to it.
“Give me that,” he snarled, swinging his arm in a downward arc.
Nicole kicked it out of his reach then dove her pink tongue-laden self upon it. She wasn’t sure what was going on here but she knew she could not let Brian/Morelon have the tablet.
Rolling and flouncing over top of it, she just managed to lick and smoosh the right series of codes to get a news quest set and ready to roll, with the tablet as the McGuffin.
SET NEW QUEST Y/N? Yes, she licked, just before Morelon kicked her off the place where the tablet had been just a moment before.
Chapter 16- Hey, Hey, the Gang’s All Here!
“What did you do?” Morelon asked with a pleading snarl. His face looked desperate and Nicole wondered if, underneath all of the nanites, the real Brian had tears on his face. This seemed like one of those emotional breakdown moments the VIPs had been trained to expect, then told would never happen.
Nicole concentrated on making understandable words and let the system roll, spending so much stress on failures that her avatar gained a quirk. “Qweth! Tabet qweth. You win qweth you gedda tabet!”
Morelon began to pace before her. “You had a tablet quest primed up all this time, just in case of some bad guest? That is clever. Let me guess. An epic quest? The most epic of quests?” He sat down on his heels before her and called up a spell that let her speak normally, but only to himself, the caster.
“Why are you doing this?” she began immediately. “It’s just a game! Just a stupid game that you can’t take with you when you leave, just a thing to keep you happy for a little while before you go back to life. You can go have fun somewhere else, come back here after the updates, it’s no big deal!”
“Did I ever tell you about how I came into this? Did I ever tell you about that big sweaty ogre of a boss named Brett Musky? That was a fucking game. That life was a game that I was losing everyday, a game where I somehow lost levels and didn’t go anywhere. It was a game where everyone else was the adventurer and I was just some dumb random encounter to be defeated over and over again. Nicole, I wanted you to understand! I thought maybe you did… your bosses and management and whoever, they are goddamn Brett Musky’s. They’ve come into my dream world– my new life where I am the adventurer who makes the levels and calls the shots– and they’ve decided to Musky all over it. And you, you got yourself a chance to tell them to go to hell, and instead you’ve decided to lick their boots and tell me it tastes like pudding.”
Morelon paused his rant and raised his arms up to the sky. Magical energy was sparking about him, his spell points flying free and ready. Nicole had never seen anyone do this before. She regarded him fearfully.
“Tell me, Nicole, where do I go to start the quest for the tablet?”
“I sent it to the Everbolt,” she sighed.
Morelon stomped his foot and bellowed in rage. Then he turned around and dropped his arms down in unison. Every spell point he had left blast blue-white rays through her body, latching onto the mirrors he had risen throughout the mountainside. “You stay here,” she heard him say as the terrain around her morphed into a literal hellscape full of flames, blood, and red-tailed, white-diapered, demons. She screamed.
***
God that was stupid, Morelon thought as he stomped on through nanite-generated forest and hills. He’d gone back and drained all of the McGuffins of their abilities, so he wasn’t stupid stupid, but still he was at 0 spell points and would have to rest to get any real use out of his powers. Yet time was of the essence– he wasn’t sure how VIPs actually checked in and got checked up on, but he’d have to get that tablet before anyone noticed that Nicole was missing.
His face reddened as her name snaked across his mind. It felt like a slap in the face. She betrayed him. She sided with those jerks up high who just didn’t want to let him have his time in the sun. She fucked him and then, she fucked him. Well, tried to at any rate.
A gaggle of orcs snarled up out of some b
rush. Morelon instinctively tried to burn their eyes out with a flamed-sight spell, but shook to his senses when the magic didn’t do anything but spark and burn his fingertips.
Shit, no spell points!
“Is no magic hoo-man, git ‘im boys!” the orc growled to his comrades. Morelon ducked as the big tusked galoot leapt at him. A 5 and a 3! He desperately burned some stress to roll again. A 10 and an 8– much better. His duck was followed by two dodges as he swerved through the gleesome threesome. Then, with a 7, 10 and 10 he stabbed his wizard’s staff up through the ass flaps of the orc’s loincloth and a good six inches up into its suddenly very tender rectum.
“Gah–” it choked, doubling over in pain. The other orcs turned, looked at the sight, looked at each other, and then fled.
“How about you?” Morelon asked the orc speared on his staff. “Would you also like to run?”
It nodded its head, tears streaking down its face.
“Inform your friends that, even bereft of magic, Morelon is not a force that you wish to reckon with.” He pulled his staff from out of the monster man’s rectum, wrinkling his nose in disgust at the messy steaming pile of liquid shit that followed it. The orc ran off with a bellow.
Morelon paused to contemplate his situation. Nicole had implied long before that the Everbolt was a being at the end of the game. That you’d have to traverse the entirety of the great sea of Greatsea, through the thousands of broken islands and other lands, before you could even face it let alone try to defeat it. And she had been pretty specific about it not being defeatable, which was a bit of a problem. Getting the tablet was going to take time that he didn’t have, with battle skills that no one had, in a place that, presumably, no one had ever found.
Maybe it was time to take a quick rest and go conscript some help.
***
Morelon got up from camp a scant 4 hours later. There had been no more random encounters, which might have had to do with the orcs. He’d figure out some spell or something to scan through history and figure it out definitively later. He had goals, he had plans, and he was almost out of time.
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