One of them rolled around on the ground, engulfed in the fires, and died. If ‘died’ was the correct word, anyway. Morelon slapped at a spell that had appeared at his HUD, which rolled a Lore of 1, 2, and 8. Enough.
The Death Sight spell immediately flickered to life, and overlaid a ghostly pallor on the city. The town of Franjy Ponny appeared in ghostform like it had before he’d lain waste to it, and ghostly figures hovered nearby, watching intently. The one he needed was the confused player in the Prestige Gaming bodysuit that read RPG down each arm. That person began to be pulled toward the town’s Access Level Zero doorway, back to the Hub. Only, the Everbolt turned toward this hovering person, erected a barrier somehow scaly and like lightning at the same time. The ghostly player bounced into it, and stopped.
The Everbolt reached down into the rubble, and produced a large smoking chair that was mostly intact, a lovely crushed velvet thing mostly in olive green, with a huge, cushy, clam-shaped back to snuggle into, with exquisitely carved wooden lion claws for feet.
And with a sort of magic he didn’t quite understand, the Everbolt pushed the struggling ghostly shape into the chair. A face immediately appeared, with the seat cushion rising up to reveal a toothy maw and button eyes scrunching down into a furious brow. The little lion claws for legs wriggled where the Everbolt held it aloft.
“NOW, MY MINION,” the Everbolt declared, “TEAR THE DOUCHEMAGE APART.”
It set down the angry chair, which immediately went scurrying in his direction. He was in the middle of asking her if she’d seen anything like that when the thing scrabbled over a smashed barrel and roared at them. To be fair, she’d also been in the process of asking him the same thing.
In a split second he had his decision.
“Come on,” he yelled to Nicole, bounding up from the ground and pulling her along with him. “We need allies if we’re gonna put this thing down, and those players up there look like they’ll follow just about anybody with a plan.”
Surprise came over Nicole first, and then it settled. As the Everbolt sucked in air for another gout of flame, she swung back her shield. “Shirak,” she yelled. A massive beam of intense sunlight blasted forth from her shield and into the Everbolts eyes. It bellowed and stumbled backwards.
“What the hell was that?!” Morelon asked as they ran.
“Jim’s Beam,” she replied. “It’s a magical artifact that I was gonna use on you in the battle. It stuns creatures when you make your rolls right. And it royally pisses them off when you don’t.”
“How long will it last?”
A roar behind them answered the question, a cloud of flaming engulfing all of the surrounding ruins.
“YOU CAN RUN, DOUCHEMAGE. BUT YOU CAN NEVER ESCAPE. I OWN YOU. I OWN ALL OF YOU!”
“Can we cut out the side? I threw a guy ten miles.”
“The game will just follow you because you aren’t logged out. And you can’t log out without getting past the Everbolt.” She tapped at the holy book. “In fact… this thing isn’t responding.”
“Right, right.” Morelon and Nicole crested a hill and paused to catch their breath. To the one side he saw the Everbolt stomping about angrily and tearing holes into the ground, bellowing in rage. To the other they saw the player characters coming back together to discuss what they had just witnessed. Morelon and Nicole shared a gaze and then nodded. It was time to make another army.
***
Nicole had the distinct impression she was going to become a teapot. If the Everbolt caught her and turned her into anything, it would be a bloody teapot. Morelon would become the clock; he was suited for nothing else.
Focus, Nicole! This is serious.
They guerilla hustled their way through the ruins of what had once been the only absolutely safe place in Swords & Sorcerers. Brian pulled the other PCs aside into the cellars that had once belonged to NPCs, like brewers, blacksmiths, item crafters, carpenters… and just folks who happen to live in villages whose function was apparently to have just a few smashable pots and nothing else. Smashable pots full of huge precious gems.
One was a short, black half elf and half dwarf, which was just the most interesting combo imaginable, with the pointed ears and the beard woven through with elfie bangles and baubles, while the other one was a bluish-skinned dragonkin, complete with the twisty ashen horns and intense orange eyes.
“You’re the guy!” the dragonkin yelled, except Morelon had activated some kind of silence bubble artifact, because nothing they did– crunching through broken pottery, clomping down stairs, or shouting about Morelon– came out louder than a whisper. They went for their weapons, but she got in between them and crushed a rock with her giant strength bracers.
“Yeah, listen, situation’s changed,” she said. She filled these two in on what was happening with the Everbolt and the portal out of Access Level Zero, and most especially the chair. “If you want to stay yourself and get out of this, you’ll help us, get it?”
“What is it with this place?” the half dwarf asked.
“That… would take us all day,” she answered. “See if you can round up a few others, okay?” She laid it on thick, and added a Sway roll. The dice had always been kind to her, and didn’t let her down now: 6 and a 10. However the game might be bugging out, it didn’t here: it must’ve laced her words with some extra seductive sound, shown some armor cleavage or a little extra smoky eye maybe. She didn’t know, and didn’t care. The two of them were into her, and that was all that mattered. They readily agreed, set a place to meet back up, and left the cellar.
“I’ve been thinking,” Brian said.
“Mmm?”
“This is clearly a glitch, right?”
“Triggered by the mass of PCs all in the same gamespace at the same time, and your rule-destroying powers, right?”
“Harsh.”
“True or not?”
“Either way, harsh.”
They came upon another trio of PCs. It was–
“Oh, fuck,” he muttered.
Cornholen, Robby Robber, and Casino turned to behold them. For several moments, no one moved or spoke. They merely stared, maybe waiting for Brian to dick them over again. When that didn’t happen, Robby Robber immediately disappeared, and reappeared behind them a moment later with a knife already in his hand. Unfortunately Brian was faster, and had also teleported, up to the top of a mostly-intact house.
“We need your help.”
“No way! Not falling for that shit again!”
A distant roar had them all craning their necks to see whether the Everbolt was visible.
“I promise not to kill you again.”
“For the fourth fucking time?” Cornholen demanded.
She turned to Brian. “Fourth?”
He had the good grace to look embarrassed, at least. “It’s… not important.”
“Motherfucker killed my baby dragon and stuffed a shit demon down our throats!” Casino declared.
Another roar came from directly overhead, and the five of them ducked into the house Brian had been standing on. They had a tense sort of standoff, with Brian holding his Transmogrifier and the rest of them cringing.
“You can’t just kill him,” she said. “It’s not gonna work. But you also can’t get out of here.” Again she explained the current glitchy situation, and most importantly, the smoking chair.
“This place has been open for two years,” Cornholen interjected. “It hasn’t fallen apart once. I don’t believe you.”
“Look outside,” Nicole said.
The three of them, still with one eye on Brian, headed over to the grimy window and peered out. They flinched back when a huge seven-legged dinner table marched by, not unlike a centipede, followed by a massive wardrobe. The wardrobe froze, turned away from them in the house, and skittered over toward a distant figure. It then pounced on that person, wrapped them up in the wardrobe’s clothes. Their distant cries were pretty awful to Nicole’s ears. The wardrobe scuttled off, back toward the
entrance to Franjy Ponny.
“That is fucked up,” Casino muttered.
“So we need a plan,” Robby the Robber said, then reached over and swatted Brian straight in the nuts. “What you got, Douchemage?”
After doubling over in pain, groaning for a bit, then glaring at Robby, Brian laid out the plan. It wasn’t a great plan, but it was what they had. Brian was apparently fond of plans with tons of moving pieces and syncing up times precisely, so Nicole had to shave it down to a few different actions all hinging on Brian’s incredibly powerful ass.
“So it’s essentially a raid boss,” Casino said, and nodded toward her fiancé. Honestly, before Brian she never would have understood the allure of a guy like Cornholen… or Brian. Not that they were so similar. But they weren’t so radically different.
She nodded. “But first we’ll need more people, and we’ll need them before they’re turned into furniture.”
“There’s a sentence I’m quite certain no one ever thought would be said aloud,” Robby said.
The next two hours found them skulking around the town, hiding from free range furniture all trying to make off with people. At one point the original smoking chair leapt off a building and almost got Cornholen, but Casino and Nicole both teamed up to hack it to pieces. Cornholen had suffered some Harm, but she healed it up without much trouble. Before long, they had a group almost twenty strong, all briefed on the plan, most plainly terrified of the coat racks and butcher blocks and huge sofas prowling the town.
They drew together near the remnants of the tavern, which lay half destroyed on the brewer’s shop where it had fallen once Brian stole the magic out from under it. The other group took the wide route around to the other rally point, half a confectioner’s someone had named Candy Ass. Probably Cornholen’s people, she mused. The half that was left was just the ASS and a signboard of two great big red spherical lollipops overlapping one another, forming a butt.
“You realize we’re gonna die again, right?” Casino whispered.
“Shut up,” Nicole said. The people around her were plainly terrified. Morale was important, so she turned to the assembled left flank. She breathed, so just the helmet could hear her. “Could really use a nice inspiring speech right now.”
She cast a spell to make herself more charismatic, then rolled up a buffed Command, for 1, 1, and 3. Luckily the spell allowed her to-roll her 1’s on Command, Consort or Sway. Jeepers. The 1’s re-rolled to 6 and 9. Two of her favorite numbers.
The HUD generated a couple of snappy opening gambits for her inspiring speech, and she went with one. She stood up proudly, to her entire almost-five-foot frame, then thought better of it and got up on the eclair-shaped table.
“Listen up everybody! This is our time. When we stand up and fight, you’re going to be part of the most epic battle this game system has ever seen. You’re going to make history, people. You’re fighting for your freedom, literally this time. We can’t let this thing keep us here… it might just try to starve us to death. Now, the one you all knew as Douchemage is the most powerful PC I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting–”
Casino coughed, “Boning,” entirely too clearly for her tastes.
“–and he was decent in the sack.” Chuckles followed. “That’s not why I’m here with him. He’s… different. And that’s in a good way and a bad way. I jumped into a giant’s anus with him and lived to tell the tale, and now we’re going to go ram this other thing straight up its regenerating ass. Now who’s with me?”
Chapter 22- The Everbolt is Defeated and Everyone is Happy
In Morelon’s mind, the worst part about the offensive was the stretch of silence before the thing got going. For several hours, while they were busy recruiting people (more like keeping everyone away from becoming transformed into an evil deck chair), the Everbolt had been stomping around, trying to find them, blasting places with random jets of flame, and changing its shape. It started as a ball of lightning, turned into a snake or worm thing, grew appendages, transformed those into wings, and then two of its back legs fell off near the exit, where a sheet of crystallized lightning barred the exit. As far as he could tell, those sloughed off legs were dead, but he wasn’t about to chance it.
Now the Everbolt simply paced back and forth before the blocked way. It knew somehow that the only exit here was this one, and they would eventually have to get out. While unlimited all-you-can-eat buffets and lavish hotel rooms in Kapi Tal sounded pretty good for a while, it wasn’t a tenable situation for good. The food would run out. The shower facilities would break down. Something would happen. They were in the middle of a desert in real life, encased in a huge ever-shifting bundle of game blocks, and somehow water and food got to them.
Just as bad, contact with admin had ceased. The holy book in Nicole’s hands was functionally now just a pile of vellum pages held together with leather binding.
To add to all that, the furniture had all gathered in the clearing beside the exit, where the city walls used to tower, where now there were huge chunks blasted out of them courtesy of Il Duche-mage. And the pile of wardrobes, hat racks, dressers, tea sets, sofas, fainting couches and other large fluffy (and somehow dangerous) accoutrements were now lying dormant. Either tired out, since they had real people in there somewhere, or more likely poised to strike.
He’d tried to wrap his head around what exactly was going on with those furniture PCs. They were like extras out of that horrid movie… but each one had a living, thinking person in there, encased in some game blocks. Were the blocks moving them, like the tail wagging the dog? Or, more likely, were their HUDs being highly manipulated to show something the Everbolt wanted them to see, and attack, and retrieve? If the former, he couldn’t imagine the pain they’d be in. If the latter, the Everbolt and the billions of lines of code were seriously complex and the thought of that monster having the power to instill that in people’s HUDs was pretty fucked up.
If there was one positive to all this, it was that everyone crouched in here with him in the tavern/brewery mashup was utterly in awe of him. Kidding, it was that the egg-laying spiders hadn’t gone full nightmare infestation mode. They’d more or less disappeared, actually, and taken the hissing analog glitch snow with them. And while he didn’t think it was a massive plus, he would take it. While he had intended to break the game, he hadn’t thought he’d break the game.
“Status?” he asked.
“Leeroy Jenkins!”
“Green!” one of them whispered.
“Five by five!” another said.
“My life for Aiur!”
“Your mom!” That one had to be Robby or Cornholen.
One by one the others indicated they were ready.
“First wave on my mark,” he hissed.
The seven of them who had been selected for the first wave tensed up, including Cornholen, who hadn’t been very happy to be assigned to the vanguard of the attack. Morelon twisted and clicked on the Transmogrifier until it was almost there, then shouted for them to go, and pressed the last button.
“First wave!” he screamed.
Immediately illusion doubles of all seven of them burst to life as the actual versions of them did likewise. He’d selected the fastest, most maneuverable and most difficult to hit for the first wave, to attract aggro. Cornholen’s shoes let him run up and over a wall, up the roof, then down the wall on the other side. One of them was playing a fairy and just zipped away with the twinkle of tiny bells and glittering dust trailing after. The others ran or leaped or rolled after, splitting in all directions to draw fire.
The furniture, predictably, rose from its slumber and took off after the first wave, both real and imaginary. The faster ones anyhow. The scurrying dining tables and armchairs went in pursuit, while the wardrobes and coat racks and couches stayed behind. They were definitely on alert now.
The Everbolt perked up, yet didn’t leave its position at the gate. It did, however, roast one of their first wave noobs alive, for venturing too clo
se to the impossibly gigantic monster.
“Now!” he screamed, and stepped out of the concealment of the tavern. The second wave now appeared around him, while he fired off a number of prepared spells. He went with Embiggen, which was a real spell somehow, and turned several of the bigger meat shields into enormous friggin meat shields. Following that, he coated several of the second wavers with flame shields, so any furniture that got a hold of them would destroy themselves. Finally, he made all of them hyper competent for the next few minutes. They’d gain an extra die on all rolls.
Over on the other pincer, Nicole was doing the same buff effect: replenishing all Stress Points for those in view, and healing up the initial wounds. While barbarians and fighters took on the furniture or dared to go toe to toe with the Everbolt, both he and Nicole stood just a tad back, out of the worst of it.
“WHERE IS THE DOUCHE?” the Everbolt demanded. “HE WILL MAKE AN EXCELLENT DIVAN.”
For a few minutes, Morelon exhausted his spell points, then twisted the Transmogrifier to give them back, and the fight went well. The clock announcing The Everbolt is Contained reappeared, but now there were so many clock segments it seemed just impossible. And while the furniture army was whittled down to nothing pretty quickly, and several of the segments filled up with damage dealt to the monstrous lightning crystal dragon thing, they disappeared just as fast. Three, five, and then eight damage segments appeared, then four of them disappeared. Lesser magic users in the second wave pelted the thing with lightning and fireballs, while roaring barbarians chopped at its legs and tail, but ten segments became six, became eleven, became seven, then it crushed several of the second wavers. It got as high as half its health before roasting alive Casino the Warriorish Princess and a trio of other melee fighters. The segments, about fifteen or sixteen in all, fell to twelve, then eight, then four, and finally back down to zero.
And the Everbolt… was laughing at them.
“YOU HONESTLY THOUGHT YOU HAD A CHANCE.”
It casually swiped the fairy out of the air, where she slammed into a bit of rubble and exploded into a puff of fairy dust.
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