DoucheMage

by Damien Hanson

  These lines of research led him all over the Kapi Tal central archive, into those alcoves, out into other alcoves, to a hidden switch beneath one of the bookshelves, into a disused and forgotten repository of forbidden texts where he’d been forced to kill an elemental literally composed of all the scrolls, which would grow in size when he smashed it and it bounced off shelves in the library.

  And in the end, far more impressed than he imagined he would ever be, he’d done it.

  Eventually he discovered the answer: something called a Hell Vault beneath the vast temple of the major clerical orders, a subterranean cave situation ruled over by fanatical clerics of every god. Even the god of pleasure, fornication and kink had a stake in protecting the entrance to the hell vault.

  They’d set up their den of traps and tricks near the vault itself, in a room carved with more phallic symbols than you could comfortably put in one place. They were hanging from the ceiling, sprouting out of the walls, and rising up from the floor in places. A huge… what was that? A clam? A huge clam stood in the center of the room balanced on its side and pulsing with godly power. Two attendants were busy polishing it with wet cloths, and sacrificing cucumbers, carrots, sausages, and huge baguettes to it.

  Wait a second!

  The followers were typical clerics, kind of, in that they wore heavy armor and wielded heavy weapons, but the realistic breasts on the plates and open codpieces to allow their junk to just hang out… not so typical. A flowery thing sat at the center of each helmeted forehead, in polished steel, like the upturned clam that dominated the room. Some of them, though, were in gleaming leather bodysuits, including full face masks with too many zippers.

  Geez, he did not want to be here a second longer than he needed to.

  One of the clerics stomped (lightly, avoiding the floor phalluses) up toward him. “XXXeus, protector of pleasure, fornication and kink, demands you return whence you came, vile spawn of boredom and lovelessness.”

  “Stand aside,” he said, “Or I’ll get off on wrecking you and this whole place.”

  Beneath the clam helmet, bright red painted lips grinned at him.

  He joined battle with a sweeping rush of flame, and rolled a 9 and a 1 on Command. He only managed to deal damage to the gimps, who screamed and dashed out of the room.

  “So hot,” the cleric said. “XXXeus wishes to make you their pet.”

  Waves of energy coursed out from the cleric, and seconds later light, insistent touches began to stroke him all over. A scent, subtle but very real, wafted into the air.

  This was not how he imagined his quest for this Everbolt going. In fact, only seconds later he found himself fully aroused.

  “XXXeus knows you, heart and soul,” the cleric cooed. “Give in and your desires will be made manifest.”

  He commanded his zombies to tear them apart, and watched in rapt fascination as they lurched forward, and tripped over the uneven floor… decorations. The cleric made a disgusting series of motions, and holy light began to pour out of… thank heavens the light became blinding an instant later, because this was a bridge too far.

  Unfortunately, it must’ve been a turn undead spell, because several zombies just dissolved into holy light. None of the other holy orders had thought to employ that spell, only the one dedicated to getting hot and heavy with the floor. Or the walls.

  Fine. He had Spell Points to burn.

  He sent the leader to sleep with a Prowl roll of 3 and 7, except that the game put a clock up on his HUD: The Hell Gate is Sealed Shut by the Holy Order. One of the eight clock segments filled in red, and he lost his mind. He cast several more spells in quick order: a necromantic spell that leeched life from the next cleric, for a roll of 2 and 4, and he responded by bumping the table to change the 4 to a 10. The Transmogrifier began to heat up a bit in his hands as he changed dice rolls right and left. With three clock segments to go, he floated past all the sex imagery to the gate room. Thankfully, the arousal spell was wearing off; he no longer felt insistent fingers stroking him in all the wrong places, but the smell still lingered.

  Within the gate room, several more robed clerics (except for the obvious devotee of XXXeus, who wore practically nothing) held their hands tightly clenched, raised up toward a huge swirling portal. By the sigils on the floor and the glowing blue dome of energy crackling around it, they hadn’t quite got the portal closed.

  He had a squad of zombies distract them… several of the former clerics from earlier in the maze of subterranean tunnels down here. He smiled while the barrier around the portal crackled and dissipated, before he stepped through.

  ***

  Nicole hadn’t expected the gathering of admin to be so huge, nor the attendees to be the higher ups. She burned with embarrassment and fear: surely she would lose her job over this.

  The room itself was a cross between an amphitheatre and a large oval office called ORGIES: the Official Reviewers Guild Investigation and Execution Service, and while she liked a good funny acronym, she couldn’t help but wonder whether the people in this room were really free with their expression of love, or if this room was regularly just used to deal with potential system issues. For this reason, she tried to keep her hands off all the surfaces here, and gave the chair a long, hard look before sitting down near the upper rim, where hopefully those assembled would pay as little attention to her as possible.

  The people within already had several feeds up, and were taking long looks at Brian’s actions from the beginning of his stay up until this very moment. The place buzzed with a low hum of concerned conversation, and thankfully none of them were nude or currently engaging in any inappropriate conduct.

  “It’s just a name,” she muttered. “Just a name.”

  In minutes they had everyone assembled and were throwing various camera shots up onto the huge flat screen panel high on the opposite wall. The largest was one in which Brian sat in a cluttered room, one filled with staves, empty and dark braziers, suits of armor both standing and fallen, orbs on pedestals ranging from creepy to flamboyant, wands, scroll cases, books on bookstands, helmets, and everything in between. He had a wand in one hand, and the Transmogrifier in the other.

  “This is a serious problem,” the head of ORGIES said. He was a portly man apparently straining against the idea of going to get a suit tailored to fit his prodigious gut, and the same moustache as before. This was Sanjay, one of the Pradthala family who ruled Prestige Gaming. The rumors about him were not good, to say the least. “We’re going to have to know exactly what all is in that room… for now though, I have to brief my uncle on the situation.”

  He quickly disappeared and left all of them glancing at one another. The murmuring started up, and pretty soon Tandy and Chrissy showed up, and much hugging ensued.

  “Girlfriend! I’m so sorry!” Tandy gushed.

  “This hyper fucking blows,” Chrissy said.

  “Yeah… I don’t even know… I don’t know what’s going on, or how to stop him.”

  A skinny dark-skinned coder broke away from a discussion at one of the coder cliques, surveyed those assembled, and strode on over to Nicole and company.

  “You. You did this.”

  “What?”

  His nametag read Reed Schmidt, Lead Coder (Sw&So), and he had this thing about touching the sides of his head. To be fair, he had a dragon expertly buzzed in there, which started behind one ear and went all the way around, so the tip of its tail just glanced the other.

  “You’re responsible for that… that fucktard.” He jabbed a finger back at the screen.

  Another coder was coming up behind Reed, an Asian girl with half her head shaved, and violently turquoise hair falling over one eye.

  “This asshole ruined everything. He’s literally breaking the system, and not literally like fucking figuratively, literally like he’s actually literally about to cause the collapse of the entire game. And on top of that, my department is going to get reamed out and then probably shit-canned all because you couldn�
�t fuck your client properly.”

  Tandy was on her feet and beginning a loud protest when Reed’s head snapped to one side. It stayed there for a moment while Nicole nursed her aching palm and everyone got real quiet after the explosive crack of her slapping him across the face. Even the cliques of IT and story writers in other parts of the huge room shut up and turned their attention on the developing bruhaha.

  “You want him to stop trying to become a god, I suggest you go in there and fuck his mind straight!” Nicole yelled. She stared daggers around the room, and was darkly gratified to find no one able to meet her gaze. “Any of you want to go in there and use your body to convince a client not to play by the rules you’ve set up, but go do something he doesn’t want to do? Because it sure as hell isn’t in my job description! And the next person who suggests I’m just a pair of genitals that changes male minds is going to lose their genitals.”

  “Hell yeah,” Tandy muttered.

  “Fuckin’ tell ‘em,” Chrissy muttered.

  “I tell you what!” Nicole shouted. “It wasn’t my fault you idiots made the VIP tablet into a game item! Now he’s after it. If you want me to go in there with an army and fight him before this rollout hits, I’m your girl. If you want me to cast spells at him until he’s exhausted, I’m in. But I will be god damned if I’m going to be told that I should’ve sprayed sex stank all over him and lured him over to cyberpunk or sci-fi.”

  “Actually,” the Asian girl with the funky hair said, “that might be our only choice. Someone get a hold of Meredith Johnston.”

  ***

  The place Morelon the Learned entered was a land not unlike a movie he’d seen as a child. In that film, a number of doors had been in trees, and each door promised some odd, mythical land around a theme. In the movie, they’d been holidays: Christmas land, Thanksgiving land, Easter land, and so on. At his feet a massive inscription read Great Sacred Planar Omnidirectional Threshold.

  “G-SPOT,” he muttered. “Got to be fucking kidding me.”

  Here the doorways stood free around him in a circle, unsupported by walls, and no passages stretching on behind them. They had names like Limbo, Asgardia, Pandemonia and Carceron, written in ancient runic, which looked amazing, and translated by a simple magic spell, where they appeared more like dog poop but were at least understandable. Everbolt was in the plane of Hades. When he turned toward the door, it literally burst into flame and began leaking inky, shadowy smoke, around a relief of a three-headed hellhound dripping foam from its jaws. Beneath its paws, several tiny figures were either trying to wriggle free, or were screaming in agony.

  He spent a minute tinkering with the Transmogrifier, and giving himself several abilities that would probably come in handy: invisibility when he stopped moving, protection against extreme heat and cold, and the same breathing spell he’d put on the Three Muskyteers when they’d assaulted the butthole of a colossus.

  He paused with a hand outstretched toward the door’s knob, then reconsidered. There were planes of peace and plenty, where nothing was horrible, everyone treated everyone else with kindness and respect, or went hunting and drinking afterwards… there were planes full of elf maidens, and planes full of green swishing grasses, talking trees, and free love. But it would only be a matter of time before Nicole returned, or someone with no connection to him and who didn’t give a shit about his grand aspirations. They would make war on him, subjugate him, and give him the Musky treatment. No doubt they had already hidden away the secret vault of magic items.

  No, he was the alpha here. He had figured out all the systems, learned all the tips and tricks, found all the loopholes. With the book, they wouldn’t be able to impose their pathetic limits on him. Behind him, a battalion of zombies stood silently, awaiting his every command.

  He grasped the door knob, felt the heat and heard the despair in the moans, and pulled it open. A blast of ash and heat roiled out to meet him, but after that, nothing. No flying hydra shooting fire at him, no bulbous monster tentacle blob to humiliate him sexually until he died, no… nothing.

  He stepped through, and a hundred other feet followed after.

  Chapter 18- Nolan Wrote This Sh*tty Chapter

  Meredith Johnston was a very busy, and very angry coder. She hadn’t listened to very much of their story before cutting them off. Meredith had done troubleshooting for basically every other department when things got rough, apparently, because from what Nicole could tell she was a kind of god in the Prestige admin levels. Rumor was that Age of the Powered was one of the most complex genres, after Swords & Sorcerers.

  “How am I supposed to get my bosses coded and reskinned, and come fix your piddly little problem at the same time? I’ve got something on the back burner, and I’ve got to have Gary done before I can take my personal time. How many of your people suddenly contracted syphilis?”

  Reed Schmidt and the other coders from Swords & Sorcerers stared around at each other blankly. Finally the Asian girl, Kyoko said, “What?”

  “Sounds like none,” Meredith said. “That tells me you’re working with a full coding team, which is why you’ll absolutely be able to handle this yourselves. I’ll send you one of mine with the mashup patch and super power packages… you can outfit your people with powers if you want. Just make sure you stock up their character sheets with Ability Points. And stay away from syphilis. It is not something to mess with… so I’m told.”

  Meredith’s feed went dark.

  Nicole watched all this with a gnawing sense of wrongness. What they should’ve done was build a Swords & Sorcerers that could handle someone like Brian. They had to know some minmaxer would come along and find all the system exploits, then exploit them. Why build a Transmogrifier unless they expected someone to spend months in the same gameworld actually playing the damn thing, instead of schmoozing around and trying to stick their dicks in any new creature they came across?

  The quick answer was because the whole system worked like a pyramid: lots of low level quests with simple beasties, fewer level two quests full of traps, tomes, and trouble, and then even fewer level three quests. All because people got bored, drunk, and horny, not necessarily in that order. They switched over to Saddles & Six Shooters for some Wild West action, to cheat people at cards and do quick draws and use a spittoon. Or they headed off to Stone, Bronze and Iron, where you could battle a Minotaur, sail across to Lesbos, or meet up with Dionysus and get blitzed literally out of your mind. Then Cyberpunk Alleys, then Galaxies Unknown, then Thrill Ride… nobody stayed and stayed and stayed, especially right out of the gate.

  “Okay people, we have a plan!” Kyoko announced. Nicole also got the feeling, as the plan began to roll out and she ignored the barbed glances from Reed Schmidt, that Swords & Sorcerers would have a new lead coder after the dust settled. “I need all the VIP Services that aren’t currently handling clients. We’re putting our story writers in the game because they need to soak up some of the blame but can’t be part of the coding solution, so you assholes get suited up and grab character sheets. Meredith’s person is taking a PISS and should be here any minute. Anybody who wants super powers gets them when Meredith’s person arrives. All of you right now are going to relay the plan back to your team. Nicole you’re lead on VIP Services, Cole you’re going to go wake the rest of the story writers, get them caffeinated, and get everybody up to speed.”

  Then she launched into the details of what might just be Prestige’s last stand.

  A half hour later Nicole was back in the gameworld, tending to the players just joining, or respawning after Brian had killed them.

  “Hi there!” she said to the newcomers. “I wonder if you’d be interested in the opportunity to level up real fast, and take on a quest the likes of which you can’t even imagine. I’ve been authorized to upgrade your stay to VIP status for the next two days. All you have to do is join the Five Armies.”

  Which was a stupid name, because they had the Story army, the VIP Services army, the Guest army, and t
he NPC army. But it was in one of the LOTR books, so it stuck. In actuality it was about fifty armies, since they were including gnolls, kobolds, goblins, orcs, elves, dwarves, giants, cyclopses, land octopi, trolls, the list went on. After that it was people with the bottom halves of different animals, like spider centaurs, snake centaurs, plain old centaurs, and even weirder ones like goat centaurs, massive elephant centaurs, hilarious giraffe centaurs, and teeny fox and rabbit centaurs. Then you had the literal opposites: bugbears and bearbugs, owlbears and bearowls, bearamanders and salabears. Why they were all bears Nicole hadn’t quite figured out. Swords & Sorcerers was a silly place.

  Most of these people took her up on the offer, which was great. Unfortunately they’d get bent out of shape when you told them tonight they’d be dining in hell, literally. They were equipped, leveled up, and marched directly beneath the streets of Kapi Tal where a bunch of surviving clerics were ushering people through the gate toward the G-SPOT. She had to keep her HUD settings engaged at all times to tell NPCs from guests wearing orc or elf skins, although their magical arms and armaments were pretty good indicators.

  The other VIP Services people were finishing up their rounds of handing out tickets to people in other genres if they’d come over and help out for this massive combat initiative dreamed up (so the VIP Services people claimed) by the admin as a fun super battle.