He’d been using the opportunity to rain acid on the dragon, to envelop its legs in sucking sand, to lift and chuck huge portions of Franjy Ponny at this indestructible asshole. And all the while, he was moving towards Nicole’s position. That tablet wouldn’t be inoperable forever, he reasoned. Plus she made his heart sing whenever she smiled.
Yet one by one the second wave fell away, and were then turned into a cruel parody of that movie from a hundred years ago, only to attack and disable Morelon’s people. The Everbolt kept turning the destroyed furniture back into new evil attack furniture, and there seemed to be no end to it either. The hideous designs started coming out, with yellow and purple stripes, or orange and green polka dots on yellow. The sorts of furniture coders delighted in putting into houses no PC was ever meant to lay eyes on, in other words. And at the end, some of the furniture clearly belonged in someone’s sex dungeon.
And they were losing. Hard.
Morelon stepped up. He had other plans, though they involved only he and Nicole. Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for his plans, he and Nicole were most of what was left. She seemed grateful to see him, but worried that this was going off the rails.
“I’m here,” he called. “You want me? Come get me!”
“What are you doing?”
“Plan B… possibly jumping to plan G.”
“G? As in, you have a seventh plan?”
The Everbolt swiped an ambitious footstool out of its path and charged at the two of them. Its wings fell away, and new legs sprouted from its rapidly lengthening sides. Soon it was running toward them on eight, then ten legs.
Morelon cast a spell on Nicole, which sucked her into a pocket dimension, and he followed immediately after. He watched via a crystal ball while the thing crashed headlong into a bunch of splintered timber and went ass over teakettle. Ten segments of damage right there, one hit. He hopped back out of the dimension and laughed.
“Come on, you have to be able to catch me!” he called.
It snarled, got back to its many feet, and charged at him again. This time, he wrenched a few dozen massive stone spikes from out of the earth. The Everbolt again went headfirst into a dozen impaling spikes, and though it had already healed up four segments, it took another ten in the second attack.
The next was a house on its head. He cast a huge telekinetic spell and threw an entire building on the thing for another ten segments of damage. His HUD warned him that the Spell Point situation was getting low, but he didn’t care. He was doing it. It went from sixteen segments, to twelve, and up to twenty-two by the crushing force of tons of rock.
He was screaming in triumph and launching a full series of acid spikes to catch it as soon as it emerged from the rubble.
It didn’t.
Twenty-two became eighteen segments. Eighteen dropped to fourteen.
He shrieked in defiant rage, and noted Nicole next to him, also frowning. They shared the barest of glances, and the moment they did so, it pounced.
It was all mouth, coming at him. Nicole had the wherewithal to draw up an instinctive paladin shield composed of blinding holy light, and the entire might of a ten ton creature barreled into them. He thought they might be swallowed, but it wasn’t to be. The thing propelled them up and out, into the air. Into a mighty crash.
***
Nicole couldn’t be sure what exactly had happened until she let the shield go. The impossibly huge, bright blue sky should’ve been an indication, but wasn’t. The cacti should’ve told her exactly what was going on and where they were, but didn’t. It was seeing Brian somehow covered in reddish dirt that finally did it.
They were in New Mexico. Which, of course they were. But they weren’t in Swords & Sorcerers any more, Toto. Yet it wasn’t exactly New Mexico. For one thing, they were still encapsulated in the hazy shade of their avatars. And for another, all of their powers were still there and present in the side scroll of their HUDs.
Plus, Nicole’s brain reminded her as the shock of the event’s passing began to wear off, they had flown high enough and hard enough that they should have exploded into bloody goo and cast red dripping smears over the scrub sand of the desert. She shuddered. They should be dead. Like duck in a blender dead. But somehow here they were, out of the game system, with their powers still intact. Her shield must have blocked their fall.
“What’s happening?” asked Brian, grabbing a hold of his Morelon beard and stroking it. “Why didn’t the blocks follow us out here?”
“I think it’s broken. I think it is really broken.” She paused, staring at a mound of dirt that was slowly shrinking and melting its way into nothing. “And I think the nanites are here. They are sucking up dirt and making more of themselves. This is really really bad.”
Morelon frowned and spun up a 0 point cantrip, a dancing imp with a stripper pole who spun and oohed at them. For a brief second they could see a hazy shade of movement from the diminishing mound, the spell sucking up newly wrought nanites coming into the game world.
“How long before they stop self-replicating?” he asked, gazing at the dancing imp deeply. It shook two deep purple tits and leered suggestively.
Nicole laughed, but it was a scared laugh that contained a sob at the end.
“It shouldn’t be happening in the first place! At least not like this.”
“And so that’s why the world banned nanites for military purposes,” Morelon nodded. “This is a gray goo scenario, isn’t it?”
Nicole nodded, her eyes wide and glassy. The entire world overrun with nanites, invading people and tearing them apart from within, turning them all into nanites. The thought of it caused a huge shudder to run through her.
“So why aren’t they eating us?” he asked. He dismissed the dancing imp with a wave.
“I– I don’t know enough to know,” her hysteria level rose as she went on, “Maybe they can’t actually consume us because of their base programming or whatever. But the rest of the world– I think they’re going to sweep over everything and make it into Prestige Gaming. Everyone everywhere will be stuck in the game. And they’ll be in it without having haptic suits, without having goggles… they’ll be helpless and blind!”
Brian put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her into him. She hugged him back hard, trembling. Brian glared out over her shoulder into the expanse of the desert. Everywhere he could see tiny lump and piles disappeared, leveling the place out into an eerie and unnatural flatness. Like the surface of a mirror, but without the reflection, he mused.
“Maybe it’s just around us, like a personal bubble. Maybe we’re the catalyst. Why don’t we fly up and take a look? It can’t be that bad. I mean a gray goo scenario would mean the end of the world. All done. Game over, man, game over! No company in the world would be so Musky as to use potentially world-ending technology to make a game.”
Brian released his hug and, her hand in his, they flew up into the air, spending just a few of his meager remaining Spell Points to do so. And then Nicole began to cry. All across the New Mexican desert piles of sand and dirt were disappearing, and game structures were rising to take their place.
Chapter 23- Tilting with the Everbolt
Brian tried to make sense of what he was seeing, and parse it with a mind that always found the workarounds, always identified the loopholes. He’d failed against the Everbolt because it wasn’t meant to be fought straight on. Somehow it had some other side door vulnerability. Coders always left in some magic puzzle you could find if you were looking closely enough. There was a way; he just had to see it.
The problems became manifest when he considered that for all his hard work, he’d failed in his mission to become an alpha. Nicole had brow beaten him back into the beta role.
He had only had a few other relationships. The first had been in high school and first year of university, where he had nearly convinced her to marry him by figuring out what it would take to get her to say yes. She’d stared at him, been on the verge of agreeing, before she s
aid she’d have to think about it. And in the end, all her friends had convinced her he wasn’t worth it, he was only giving her what she wanted.
Which, in the grand scheme, was pretty confusing. You gave people things they wanted, and did the things they liked, in order to get them to like you, and give you things in return. This was plainly how the whole of existence was supposed to function.
The others had been complete disasters: all dating app matches which led to unsuccessful dates, or in one case a short but screaming-filled relationship with a completely insane woman who broke down every time she saw a tomato. He hadn’t pushed.
His resolution had been to leave the female half of the world to its own devices, and not bother with it. Instead he’d gone heavily into online RPGs, where the rules were set out and there was a clear path to progression that would cause you to come out the strongest.
With Nicole, he’d largely left her to her to her own devices, given her an initial gift, and then not pressed. From there he’d found her lively, engaging, and eventually she’d seen that his offer was vastly superior to that asshole coder dragon. Again a win, inching her closer into what he would identify as a relationship, and not just a one night sexual tryout. He’d congratulated himself on progressing up the skill tree toward the ultimate prize: a real girlfriend.
Now she was in the midst of a complete meltdown, and wouldn’t look at him.
She’d set down on what had been a desert, but was now a series of small white blocks, about an inch cubed, covered with a thin layer of white sand that had been reddish brown before, still in her paladin armor.
He had no Spell Points, no levels to regenerate him, and no ideas on how to conquer the Everbolt. The only way to get Nicole back in the position where she might like him was to turn off the replication order that solved the huge game problem. On the other hand, he didn’t really want to turn off the replication order. He imagined the Swords & Sorcerers world as limitless, just populated by folksy NPCs and the odd dungeon or rampaging orc tribe here or there. A great big sandbox to play in forever. And if it swallowed up a New Mexican town, he’d have some eating options if the game fell apart.
That wouldn’t work and he knew it. He cursed himself for daring to believe it. The Prestige servers couldn’t handle all the combined gaming of more than a hundred people in one game space.
“Snap out of it,” Nicole said from behind him.
“Huh?”
“You’re deep in there somewhere, and I need you back.” She approached from behind, where he was currently watching the sienna swallowed up by the bleached white. “We have to save those people. I don’t know what the Everbolt did to them, and I… feel responsible. I put you on its trail.”
He couldn’t blame her. It wouldn’t help.
“I don’t know if I can.”
“You have to. I need you to figure out the workaround now, and get back in there, and get it done.”
“I can’t–”
“Shut up.” He blinked as if she’d slapped him. He turned to find her adorable face not soft and cute, like her profile image in the VIP Services database, but hard and determined, full of teeth. “You’ve done literally everything else you set out to do.” Except become the alpha. “Now get your head in the game. We get back in there, you figure out how to kill that thing, and–”
“Contain the Everbolt,” he said.
“What?”
“The clock on the HUD didn’t say it would die… the clocks are tricky, and specific. This one said Contain the Everbolt. It wasn’t an accident.”
The solution clicked into place.
“I got it,” he said. “I figured it out.”
“Oh yeah? Let’s go do it.”
“Ah… no.”
“What? What the fuck?”
“First, tell me what happens when I defeat that thing.”
“I think we tear down the wall in between Access Level Zero and the Hub, reinstate my tablet, and undo everything that’s happened in here. Kill the spread order, cue up the rollover to the new version with the genre mashups, and get all these other players out of here and into an infirmary. Admin issues a lot of coupons for free stuff, I think… hotel stays, better food, free Gear if they head back into a different genre, that kind of thing.”
“And me?”
“Hell I don’t know, Brian! They probably try to fire me, and you promised you’d pay my way out, to a VIP retirement like. And you… admin will, I don’t know, come in here and try to negotiate. They have to set up Access Level Zero again, reset a lot of the dungeons, and get you to give up all the contraband items if they can.”
“Yeah like I said, I don’t think that’s going to work.”
“I’m not saying you have to give up everything, but–”
“I want narrative control.”
“Jesus, Brian, narrative control? What does that even mean?”
He shrugged. “I want the tools to make up the stories and challenges I want. I’m already close. I stumbled onto something in that cache of magic items that’s called the Codemancer’s Primer. I’m almost entirely sure it’s an old version of the tablet you’ve got.”
“You’re just trying to become an employee here.”
He chewed at his lip. “Maybe. Listen, when you get your VIP status, there’s nothing that’ll keep you here. You can go anywhere you like. There’ll be a hundred and forty-four choices. You won’t need to see me ever again. And in return–”
“In return I won’t twist your balls off,” she hissed.
He spread his arms out in conciliation. “And a lack of punishment, as nice as that sounds, isn’t enough. Look, I’ll be doing a lot of the story writing for them. I might even branch out and get into their genre crossover thing they’ve got planned. But I need you to negotiate.”
“Or else we starve to death here?”
“Or get turned into a step ladder when we head back in, under that thing’s control. Who knows what happens after that?”
She considered him for a time. “You know what? You’re a hell of a person, Brian Morecock.”
“It’s going to be Morelon the Learned forever,” he said. “Soon enough. So, you agree?”
“You’ve just put me in the worst position imaginable.” She heaved up a huge sigh. “Fine. Fine! Fuck.” He really came closest to loving her when she swore like that.
He told her the secret, and watched her slam her hands on her thighs in fury. Then, they settled down to plan… plan J, plan R, maybe plan triple X for all he knew. It would make a lot of sense for this place, with its G-SPOTs and ASSHOLES.
And then the planning was done.
***
Nicole couldn’t figure out if she’d gotten the warm fuzzies from all Brian was asking her to do, or butterflies at the idea of being imprisoned in a piece of furniture… possibly forever. There was every chance the Everbolt would overtake them before the plan got off the ground, in which case she’d end up a teapot singing shitty musical numbers for the beast.
When she turned her back on the Prestige Gaming monolith, most of the skyline was taken up by limitless pure blue skies, great reddish rocks in the distance, and scrubland interspersed with cactus. Behind her, however, was a massive monolith of chalky white, rising up into the sky eighty or a hundred feet. These were game blocks about three feet square, and were moving ever so slightly. One sheet of them came down from above, plonked down on the New Mexican sand (that was currently being absorbed) and the whole thing slid onto this new deck that had been created.
Up higher, the blocks themselves shrank from huge three foot cubes down to about an inch. At one point they bulged outwards, then a massive amount of them swarmed out over the bulge, making the thing look like it was about to teeter out of control. Except more monolith blocks came down from above, neatly wedged themselves in there, and supported the swarm pressing outwards, like a child’s toy.
“Come on,” she said, and hopped up onto an unsteady ledge near this new bulge. Brian foll
owed along, except the whole thing was moving a bit. She found it accommodated her, maybe still able to detect her on the outside of the game.
Up where the blocks got smaller, she pressed her fingers into a gap between the almost perfect, slightly beveled cubes. At first, they didn’t want to part and give, but after pressing harder, they obliged and sank back, then let her hand through. Then her arm, shoulder, and finally her head. Brian came close behind.
She was lucky enough to appear in the outskirts of the Franjy Ponny. The nearest dresser ejected several drawers in surprise, then took off running on its stumpy little legs.
“Element of surprise blown,” she muttered.
“It’s fine,” he said, and twisted the Transmogrifier, pressed several of its many little buttons, switched a couple of its many little levers, and handed it to her. “Press this button.”
She gazed up into his face, and could plainly see the existential worry that cross his features at merely letting go of the Transmogrifier. She pressed the button and tossed it back, and chuckled at him frantically fumbling to catch it.
She immediately disappeared from view: her hands were just vague outlines in front of her.
“How long again?”
“Until you make an attack.”
She nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see her. “All right. I’ll wait for your signal.”
Now invisible, she made the slow trek back around the devastation Brian and the Everbolt had wrought on this place. She went over the whole magic shops district, shaking her head at how fresh and exciting everything had seemed, back when it was Brian’s unlimited bank account and not his ambition she had on her mind. She headed around back to where the tanner did their wretched, stinky work, and she was forced to skirt the latrine pit, which was just a channel cut near the edge of town chock full of all the worst of everything. Thank heavens she didn’t have to get into it.
From there, she pulled a wide loop through the fields at the edge of town, behind the main town entrance, which was now just a mass of reddish bluish crystal. She surveyed the scene, as promised, and got a good look at the resting heap of furniture a good fifty feet off, into the town.
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