by A. J. Markam
“So where is this Sinter Klaws?” Alaria asked.
“I don’t know… I’m supposed to find a portal first.”
“You mean that portal?” she asked as she pointed behind me.
I turned around in surprise.
Sure enough, there it was: a silent, glowing, oval blur of shifting colors, about eight feet tall and hovering ten inches off the ground.
“Yeah, that’s gotta be it.”
“What do you mean, ‘that’s got to be it’?” Alaria asked. “You mean you don’t know for sure?”
“Well, they said there would be a portal, and there it is.”
“Who said?”
“The guys who told me where Sinter Klaws would be.”
“What guys?”
“Guys I know!”
“And where will he be, exactly?”
“Through the fuckin’ portal!”
Alaria looked warily at Stig, who seemed to share her unease.
“What’s the problem?” I asked in exasperation. “Why are you so paranoid?”
Alaria frowned. “Don’t you know better than to go trusting strange portals?”
“Yeah, boss,” Stig agreed. “Strange portals’ll fuck you up.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
Alaria recited what sounded like a nursery rhyme in a singsong voice.
“Never, ever trust a strange portal.
“That mistake might prove to be mortal.”
That was not a saying I’d ever heard before.
“Is that so?” I asked, amused.
“Everybody knows not to trust a strange portal,” Alaria said somberly.
“Yeah, boss. Everybody.”
“Well, we’re just going to have to take a chance.”
“This is a bad idea…” Alaria muttered.
“ALL of our ideas are bad ideas. What’s new?”
“All of your ideas are bad ideas, boss,” Stig said.
“Shut up and let’s go,” I snapped, then stepped through the glowing shape.
4
I stepped out of the portal and into a different world entirely.
It was a Bavarian mountain village at night, with snowdrifts everywhere I looked. Narrow cobblestone streets wound their way through A-frame buildings glinting with icicles. Other than the moon and the stars in the clear winter sky, the only lights to be seen were candles flickering in the glass-paned windows.
The only slightly odd thing was the snow-covered graveyard right next to the town square, but it had been placed there for convenience. Not the villagers’, but mine. If I got killed during our adventure, that was where I would resurrect. Standard videogame practice.
It was still a pretty corner of the town, with ice-covered angels and towering crypts dusted with snow.
The entire scene was beautiful and peaceful – a true winter wonderland.
And it was cold as fuck.
My breath turned into smoke as soon as it left my mouth, and a bitter chill nipped at my exposed face. At least the rest of me was covered in a vest, pants, and cloak.
The same couldn’t be said for my poor demons. One was completely naked, and the other wasn’t wearing much more than a Victoria’s Secret model. (The ‘much more’ part being thigh-high leather boots.)
“Goddess,” Alaria hissed as she came through the portal, “couldn’t you have picked a warmer place to kill somebody?”
As soon as Stig stepped through, he immediately stopped in his tracks. It didn’t help that he was up to his armpits in snow.
He apparently decided he wanted none of it.
“Unh-unh,” he said, and turned around to go back through the portal –
But it winked out of existence.
“WHAT?!” he cried out.
“Sorry, bud, we’re stuck here until we get Sinter Klaws,” I told him.
He started muttering incoherently under his breath in what I could only assume was imp profanity.
Alaria clasped her bare arms tightly around her chest. “Well, can we do it fast?!” she asked, her teeth starting to chatter.
Although when she hugged herself like that, it made her already incredibly large breasts look ginormous. Plus, her nipples were standing out like diamond-hard nubs under her bikini top.
I was starting to like the cold.
“I can see exactly where you’re looking,” she snapped, “and I can promise you, you’re not touching them until I get someplace warm.”
“Alright, alright, let’s find a pub, go inside and get wa– ”
WHAM!
Sharp pain exploded in the back of my head and I saw stars.
By the time I realized what had happened, I was face-down in the snow.
A helpful little computer-generated phrase appeared in my now-dark field of vision:
-36 DAMAGE.
Whatever the hell had just attacked me had knocked off 2% of my total Health.
“What the FUCK?!” I snarled as I pushed myself up out of my involuntary snow angel.
I reached up to the back of my head and felt a clump of icy wetness.
Somebody had hit me with a fucking snowball.
“Son of a bitch,” I seethed as I stood up, “you just bought yourself a… a…”
I paused as I looked into the terrified faces of my succubus and imp.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Alaria pointed in mute horror.
As soon as I turned around, I saw.
A pack of five snowmen were 30 feet away and heading right for us.
They were about six feet tall. Each had a segmented body, with a giant snowball on the bottom, a medium one in the middle, and a bowling-ball-sized head. Chunks of coal made up their eyes and frowning mouths. They all had carrots for noses, and tiny twigs for eyebrows gave them all a permanent scowl.
They had to be magic. First of all, because they were moving. Their bulbous lower bodies slid over the icy cobblestones like slugs in fast-forward. Second of all, because their stick arms were jointed at the elbows and waving around in the air.
Stig and Alaria were losing their shit.
I didn’t know why the hell a snowman would be so terrifying to demons, but… whatever.
Me, I was just reminded of old cartoons where snowmen would attack Calvin and Hobbes every winter.
“They’re just snowmen!” I said. “I don’t see why you’re AAAAH!”
A sharp pain speared through my torso, and I looked down to see a foot-long icicle protruding from my chest.
What the FUCK?!
Another 10% of my hit points, gone.
I grabbed the spike and yanked it out. Thankfully there was no gore in the video game – otherwise I would have been a bloody mess.
I looked up. The snowmen were preparing for battle, using their twig fingers to snap icicles off buildings and scoop up mounds of snow from the ground.
Suddenly a computer window appeared:
Ho Ho Uh Oh
Kill five snowmen – or die.
1000 XP
5 carrots
Ooooooh. Carrots.
I didn’t need vegetables, I needed gold. I had bounty hunters on my ass after going into debt to a goblin mob boss for –
…long story. Maybe later.
Shoddy rewards aside, I was still going to do the damn quest. Not just because it was my job, but because I was fucking pissed off that the snowmen had injured me twice. At this point I would have paid to attack them.
“KILL THEM!” I roared.
I started casting Darkbolts, one of my Warlock spells. As each crackling ball of black energy hit the monsters, snow blasted off their bodies like blood in an action-adventure film.
Stig and Alaria jumped in beside me and flung fireballs through the air. The snowmen’s icy bodies sizzled and hissed as every flaming missile connected.
The bastards got off another round of icicles and snowballs – and tagged me again for another -5% hit – but quickly died under our combined onslaught.
&n
bsp; Heads rolled off and plopped onto the ground.
Holes the size of softballs blasted through their chests.
And two of them dissolved into a puddle on the ground before freezing again, leaving behind only lumps of coal and carrots.
With each snowman’s death, ‘75XP’ flashed in the air – and when they were all gone, ‘1000XP’ appeared.
We’d completed the Ho Ho Uh Oh quest.
I tromped through the snow and retrieved my loot from the snowmen’s corpses. If the game made a point of designating the carrots as a reward, they might be useful later on. For what, I had no clue.
“Why were you guys so afraid of snowmen?” I asked as I shoved the carrots in my bag.
“Haven’t you ever heard the saying?” Alaria asked, wide-eyed.
“What saying?”
Again she sang out a nursery rhyme:
“Snowmen travel in a pack,
“If you see five, ten more attack.”
“Whaaaat?” I scoffed. “You’re making that up.”
“Oh no,” she said quite solemnly.
Stig shook his head like it was a matter of life and death.
“Everyone knows it,” Alaria continued.
Stig switched to nodding ‘yes,’ just as deadly serious.
“Give me a break, guys, I – uh… oh crap…”
Far behind Alaria and Stig, up one of the twisting cobblestone alleyways, more snowmen appeared.
Way more snowmen. And not just ten.
If five had been a pack, then this was a wildebeest herd. A hundred at least.
And they were all headed for us.
Alaria and Stig saw my expression and turned around.
“GODDESS!” Alaria called out in a panic.
“Oh crap,” Stig muttered as his legs quaked beneath him.
Five hadn’t been a problem – but there was no way in hell we were going to be able to kill 100 of the bastards.
“Let’s go,” I said, pointing in the opposite direction.
Stig bolted ahead of us like a greyhound, and Alaria and I quickly ran after him.
The imp turned the winding corner of the village lane – and immediately came racing back.
“Bad idea, boss!” he yelped.
I peeked around the corner to see what was the matter, and saw another herd of snowmen headed right for us.
Jesus, were all the kids of this village CURSED or something?!
Otherwise I had no idea how you would wind up with 200 of the damn things.
I could see a Village of the Damned-type situation, with a bunch of little blond-haired Aryan buggers creating their icy, Nazi footmen –
Suddenly a voice whispered, “In here!”
I turned to see a cracked-open door in one of the A-frame buildings, but there was only darkness within.
Not exactly the most welcoming sight.
But seeing as I was looking at certain death bearing down on me from two directions at once, I was immediately reminded of a non-OtherWorld saying:
Beggars can’t be choosers.
I ran through the open door, followed closely by Alaria and Stig.
I just hoped we weren’t about to fall victim to another saying:
Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
5
As soon as we were inside, the door slammed shut, followed by the sound of multiple deadbolts clicking into place.
There were a couple of candles in the room, but that was it. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I saw an old man in a nightshirt turning a dozen locks all the way down to the bottom of the door. He turned around to us and put a single finger to his lips. Shhhh.
Out in the street we heard the sound of ice scraping over ice – but the sounds died away, and then there was only silence.
The old man grinned. He was a funny-looking little guy, maybe five feet tall and stooped over, with tufts of white hair sticking out from underneath a knit night cap. His face was pale white and wrinkled as a walnut. His voluminous white nightshirt extended all the way down to his bony shins, and he wore a couple of curled-toe slippers on his feet.
“Ho-kaaaay, dey are gone now,” he said in an Eastern European accent.
“Thanks for saving us,” I said.
“You very welcome. Is bad time to be out in street.” Then the old guy got a look at Alaria. “Wowza, did not know was saving pretty lady!”
Alaria just smiled like she was getting unwanted attention but had to put up with it.
Then the old guy looked at Stig.
“Oooh, and ugly baby!” he exclaimed.
“Chill, bitch!” Stig snapped, then looked over at me. “Somebody tell that bitch to chill!”
He’d learned Samuel L. Jackson’s Pulp Fiction line from one of my fellow players in the game, and unfortunately used it at some of the most inopportune moments.
“Stig!” I scolded him.
But the old man cackled in delight.
“Is true, very chilly, yes, bitch!” he laughed, then hobbled over to a wooden table next to embers in a fireplace. “Would like a drink, yes? Wine, yes?”
“Hell yes,” Stig said as he scurried over to the table and pulled himself up into a chair.
Alaria and I sat down as the old man uncorked a half-empty bottle and shakily poured out red wine into four wooden cups.
Stig greedily reached for his –
“Stig,” I snapped. “Wait for everybody else.”
He glared at me, but waited for everyone to get their cups first.
“Prost,” the old man said cheerfully, then drank.
The rest of us did the same. The wine was a little sour for my taste, so I just took a sip.
Stig didn’t have any problem with it. He downed every drop of his, then slammed the empty cup on the table.
“Oooh, ugly baby thirsty!” the old man laughed. He got a full bottle out of a small cabinet by the table, uncorked it, and pushed it over to my imp. “Here, bottle for ugly baby!”
With nary a Chill bitch to be heard, Stig grabbed the bottle and tipped it all the way back.
Glug, glug, glug.
The old man laughed again. He hobbled over to the fireplace and gingerly laid a couple of logs on the embers. “Fire soon, not so chilly, bitch!”
“What were those things?” I asked.
The old man looked around at me like I was daft. “Snowmen!”
“Yes, I know that, but – ”
“Snowmen travel in a pack,” he recited. “If you see five, ten more attack.”
Alaria turned towards me indignantly. “See?!”
Okay, I guess it really was a thing.
“Do they just… appear?” I asked the old man. “Or are there snowball babies, and they grow into snowmen?”
Alaria looked at me with thinly veiled contempt. “Really?”
Stig stopped drinking just long enough to croak, “That’s stupid, boss.”
The old man tittered. “Yes, stupid, bitch, very stupid.”
“Well, I don’t know!” I snapped. “They don’t have evil snowmen where I come from!”
Now Alaria looked at me in confusion. “You mean… you have good snowmen?”
“I don’t know if they’re good or not, but when we make them, they don’t – ”
“You MAKE snowmen?!” she interrupted me. “Why would anyone MAKE snowmen?!”
“Kids do, for fun.”
Now she was truly horrified. “What kind of evil children do you have where you come from?!”
“The snowmen don’t come alive!” I protested.
“They stay dead?”
“I guess that’s one way of putting it, yeah.”
The old man sat down gingerly in one of the wooden chairs across from me. His face looked serious now. “Here, snowmen very evil. Made by Sinter Klaws.”
I perked up.
Aha!
“Hey,” Alaria said, “it’s that guy you want to kill!”
The old man turned to me in surprise. “You want to kill Sin
ter Klaws?”
Stig took the bottle out of his mouth long enough to croak, “He’s a dick.”
The old man cackled. “Yes, bitch, he is dick, yes!”
“You know Sinter Klaws?” I asked.
“I have seen him, yes,” the old man said soberly. “Ugly dick.”
“Yeeeeaaah, maybe let’s cut out the dick talk,” I said. “Where is he?”
The old man leaned forward and whispered, “You want to kill him and save Little Baby Zeebus?”
“…who?”
“Little Baby Zeebus,” Alaria said, like it was obvious.
“Yeah, boss,” Stig chimed in. “Little Baby Zeebus.”
I stared at them, not comprehending.
I mean, it was a Christmas quest, so I was betting that it was a play on ‘little baby Jesus,’ but that still didn’t enlighten me any as to what I was dealing with here.
“You’ve never heard of Little Baby Zeebus?!” Alaria asked, dumbfounded.
“NO.”
“Everybody’s heard of Little Baby Zeebus, boss,” Stig said.
“Not me.”
“Where are you from, bitch?” the old man asked, astounded.
“Hey – let’s ease up on the ‘bitch’ talk, too,” I snapped. “Why don’t you just tell me about this Little Baby Zeebus and what he has to do with Sinter Klaws.”
“Little Baby Zeebus is most wonderful of all babies!” the old man said ecstatically. “He fly around, all golden and glowing, and go down chimneys in all the villages of our land!”
“Uh huh… he goes down the chimneys,” I said drily.
This sounded familiar.
“Yes, on Zeebusmas! Which is tonight!”
“ZEEBUSmas. Really.”
Okay, now I knew the game developers were punning off of ‘Baby Jesus.’
I’m sure the Christian Right was going to loooove it when this new quest came out.
“Yes!” the old man exclaimed. “And he leaves cheese!”
Okay…
…I hadn’t seen that one coming.
“Cheese,” I repeated.
“Yes! Slices of Zeebusmas cheese!”
I frowned. “Wait… let me get this straight… a flying golden baby comes down chimneys and leaves people slices of cheese.”
“Yes,” Alaria said.
“Yup,” Stig agreed.