by Justin Coke
[95] The legendary staff of Kirosh the Omega, besides having ludicrous stats, also gave the player the ability to reflect all of an opponent’s damaging attacks back on itself; an incredibly potent ability that made both raid bosses and PVP almost trivial.
[96] On 4Chan, anyway.
[97] Sic.
[98] Boys Love U, Kid Twist’s band. At the moment Mad Hatter wrote this, Kid Twist was doing a live interview with CPopWorld in Beijing. You can see him shiver, as if a cat had walked over his grave, at the exact moment Mad Hatter typed the words “BLU.” This compelling evidence for parapsychological phenomenon would go undiscovered by modern science.
[99] Tick Tock loved BLU. Loved, loved, loved BLU. She loved BLU so much that she had bought a copy of their eponymous debut album on vinyl. She didn’t even have a record player. She just wanted to own a copy. Her room had a little door in the closet, so small that a child would have to get down on their knees to get in there. On the other side was an attic. Her shrine to BLU was there. She’d thought her parents had forgotten about the attic space; her mother certainly couldn’t have gotten in there without a sledgehammer. But her father hadn’t forgotten, and he’d snuck in there while she was at school and taken it all outside and burned it. They were in one of their spiritual revival moods, which seemed to be less about spiritual introspection as it was trying to spy on Tick Tock as hard as they could. After torching her limited edition vinyl for being a Satanic idol, he’d called the Kingdom Hall and ratted her out. While the heist was going on, she was getting interrogated by fat, stupid “elders” whose holy self-satisfaction vied with their ignorant know-it-all attitude for the title of “Thing That Made Tick Tock Most Want to Reenact That Scene from Full Metal Jacket.”
Hayes took her email as a joke, but the truth was, it was more of a plea for help, even if she would have denied that to the grave. She would have given a lot to be allowed to go to the prom just then. When she started to lose it, she’d stare at the calendar and calculate the days. She’d stuffed all her rage and hurt and hate into an aluminum dive tank, and the tank was bulging where ever it felt weakness, the anger constantly seeking release from the enormous pressure caused by simply having too much for one person to hold. It wasn’t anger about the record—or not just that, anyway. It was anger that she’d had to hide the record in the first place. It was anger that she was subservient to fat cunts who had given themselves brain cancer and would stop at nothing to make sure she got it too.
She stared, empty eyed, at the calendar she kept on the wall while she typed this email (she was an excellent touch typist). It was the official JW.org calendar and featured some cartoon of the apocalypse, in that classic Jehovah’s Witness art style of Hieronymous Bosch meets Norman Rockwell, Mary Worth on a light dose of amphetamines, and some vile drug invented by Mengele that made you enjoy the thought of billions dying by the blade of a jealous god; she had seen it so often her mind blanked it out and she might as well have been staring at a empty wall. Her twit father thought it was a sign of her faith; it was actually the advent calendar to the day she opened the release valve and let what happened happen. She had plotted and planned and schemed for years on making that release do good work for her, set her up for a life worth living instead of the putrid, dead-eyed failure that Jehovah’s Witnesses would tell you was happiness. But the battle was close and she was a hair away from uncontrollable decompression. She was having a hard time caring about who might get hurt by the shrapnel. In fact, she kind of liked the idea of who might get hurt by the shrapnel.
Tick Tock was, at her core, a peaceful and non-confrontational person, which was good for the vapid fleshpiles that sat below her, watching TV and congratulating themselves over what good parents they were. If they had known how close she was to going full Borden, they would have called the police.
[100] Hayes noticed the lack of capitalization. This cemented his opinion that Kid Twist was living out some weird James Bond fantasy through the Thrill Kill Cult.
[101] Hayes had somehow, miraculously, missed most of the OJ Simpson trial, but he guessed the meaning from contextual clues.
[102] Like many people with innate politicking skills, Hayes had the ability to intuitively make it sound like he was promising much more than he really was.
[103] Since the burning of the record, her parents had instituted Bible study on every single night they weren’t already committed to going to church. Tick Tock had put in for early graduation this morning; she’d have her diploma and be on a Greyhound bus in 16 days.
[104] He had legitimately felt bad for Teabagz; in his mind, Teabagz was sociopathic monster. He had turned out to a nerdy kid whose voice hadn’t quite dropped yet, sobbing about how scared he was. Knowing, as Quartermain did, that Teabagz had four adults plotting his downfall, it had put Teabagz in a different light. Waking up to find out Teabagz had taped the whole thing and made Quartermain famous as the Guy Bannister of the Strumpet Stickup, as the Daily Dot had named it in a fit of yellow journalism, put Teabagz in a less sympathetic light. Still, he couldn’t find that hate that Hayes seemed to keep inside him like a treasure.
[105] Quartermain described Kid Twist as “a fruitbat” who sounded “like he had thirty kinds of cologne.” Being a military historian with a penchant for ancient siegecraft, Quartermain had stayed in the past in other ways as well, including his insult vocabulary. Kid Twist actually had more than a hundred colognes, but what was he supposed to do? They sent them to him for free, and they all smelled wonderful.
Mad Hatter was described as “the kind of guy who jacked off three times a day and then went to some redpill site and bitched about women,” Tick Tock was “the kind of chick who bragged about giving long blow jobs but had no idea what a penis actually looked like” and Hayes was “probably a serial killer.” He didn’t name any names, and it was fairly obvious that he was humoring the kid, but each of them saw enough truth in the descriptions to be a little hurt.
[106] Tick Tock would have lost her shit if she’d heard Mad Hatter call the last couple of weeks her “Jesus Trip.”
[107] Currently on the final leg of the tour; Kid Twist is, as this conversation is happening, about to step onto stage in front of 120,000 crazed fans who have gathered at Yuva Bharati Kirirangan Stadium in Kolkata, India. Daler Mehndi and the Bombay Vikings are the opening acts.
[108] He said as he filled out an application for a phone sex job. If the Credit Line Wanker was going to do this to him, he might as well make an extra twelve grand a year doing it.
[109] DOT—damage over time spell. Basically like bleeding to death, it is an attack that takes a long time to work and leaves the victim plenty of time to take confession. Supercritical—feeling that damage rotations were getting too simplified by the fact that direct damage spells had the chance of a critical hit (doing twice as much damage) while a DOT didn’t (guaranteeing solid but unspectacular damage), they added a flat 5% chance for any DOT to go supercritical; i.e. do 400% damage.
The debate over whether a 20% chance to crit, or a 5% chance to supercrit changed anything was argued via arcane spreadsheets on every continent. Including Antarctica. Mundis was huge at the Halley Research Station. The Antarctic position was that the supercrit was a paradox; while it lowered individual DPS by taking away from time casting their good spells, it raised the raid groups DPS because someone was always rolling hot dice. It also added some spice to PVP, as in the current scenario where Mad Hatter died in an inn. The Squid Pistol member saw an ephemeral HK: Grand Marshal appear on his empty, defeated foe-less screen. Cursing, he began to write a lengthy (and ultimately skimmed, then ignored) troubleshooting ticket about how shit the lag was in Mundis.
[110] Http://swd3ootw6kvcIw.onion/cmuOHciyNUCSruzVvsqshNEPtbQU5yujrIZPZFTlSzTG1A
[111] https://www.jw.org/en/publications/music-songs/sing-out-joyfully/?media=sjjm
[112] He had spent the last two days in an endless series of concerts that had blended together into one blurry dream, the bo
ring kind where you spend the whole time washing dishes and you wake up mad that you wasted precious dreamtime on working. Then it was a nightmare of the same tedious reporters asking the same tedious questions. His PR woman, who was amazing, had basically scripted both the questions and the answers, so the main thing was looking like he a) meant what he was saying and b) was not on Adderall to combat bone deep exhaustion (he was on all the Adderall). He had finally finished the tour and had one more night in India before heading back to the United States for a month off. He was so wired on amphetamine salts that he was too tired to sleep. So he thought he’d kill time in Mundis until he either fell asleep or it was time to head to the airport.
[113] It was hard to type with the old school number pad.
[114] Hayes never talked about that with anyone; half the time he wouldn’t admit that he’d known the victims to himself. It was just easier that way.
[115] Or Waffle House equivalent.
[116] His waitress was reasonably friendly, but she was 30 years older than him. Trying to explain Mundis to anyone over the age of 30 was like trying to explain carbon dating to a Creationist; not only did they not understand, they had a lot invested in never understanding it. Also, Waffle House waitresses always intimidated him a little.
[117] Every Waffle House waitress Hayes had ever seen, whether they were young or old, had struck Hayes as being the hard-bitten matriarch of some family that could just walk on to the set of Jerry Springer if they felt like it and have half a season of material. Waffle House waitresses always made Hayes feel like a spoiled child, whining about things that didn’t even count as problems in the eyes of these waitresses, who had stared into the abyss and then pulled a midnight to 6:00 p.m. shift on Christmas Day to fight the monsters that lived in that abyss to a bareknuckle, sixteen-round split decision victory. That, combined with the ludicrously low prices, meant that Hayes tipped 40% at Waffle House at a minimum. Tonight, bored and flush with cash, his waitress got a whopping 100% tip—a total of $12. Hayes figured he needed to pay extra for renting the table for so long.
[118] He’d had a girlfriend once in college who had dragged him to the Cheesecake Factory once a week. In his considered opinion, cheesecake was kind of crap anyway, and the rest of the menu was overpriced Applebee’s fare that always left him slightly sick to his stomach. That girl had nearly bankrupted him over the Cheesecake Factory, and he hadn’t even rounded second base. She’d broken up with him when he put his foot down about going the second time in a week. The memories of the Cheesecake Factory were subconsciously making Hayes sour and paranoid that he was being taken advantage of somehow. The Hooters knockoff was at least half honest about trading cash for titties. He didn’t realize he was keeping one hand on his wallet as he watched for the green hat.
[119] MMO players tend to have a certain look due to the sedentary lifestyle. Their limited mobility made them walk like people who sit in front of computers for 40 hours a week, for instance, and they tend to have a high albedo within their melanic continuum.
[120] This was the first time she’d seen a real limo and not just some old stretched Lincoln they kept around for prom.
[121] She was lucky no one was coming; she was so focused on the man in the green hat that she wouldn’t have noticed an Abrams tank rolling down the street.
[122] The exact nature of the extreme carnal propositions Tick Tock was trying to make don’t need to be recorded. For the rest of her life, Tick Tock would sometimes worry that Kid Twist had actually understood her and only pretended he hadn’t to avoid embarrassing her so badly she would be forced to commit seppuku.
[123] If Kid Twist had wanted to order shit sliders, she would have backed his play.
[124] Being rich and famous and having large houses was the kind of thing Mad Hatter’s father would think was cool, so he had been trying really hard to act like he wasn’t impressed by Kid Twist. He was failing miserably, and he knew it, which was starting to piss him off.
[125] Kid Twist was actually keenly aware of their reactions, and it was making him very sad. He’d known revealing his identity would probably lead to the end of the friendship. Only his concern for their safety made him expose himself. But he couldn’t think of anything else to do but try to pretend that everything was fine and normal. But he could already see the resentment boiling up in Mad Hatter—jealous but refusing to admit it—and the hopeless, breathless, desperate desire to please from Emily made him want to cry. But he was a showman, and he was determined to make sure they were safe, whatever happened, so he kept up appearances.
[126] Like, seriously, they looked like the kind of thing Baron Harkonnen would bring to a LAN party.
[127] He had a lot of other celebrity anecdotes that, he realized, watching Tick Tock struggle to remain conscious after learning Johnny Depp had been in the room once, would be a mistake to talk about.
[128] Kid Twist did go to the police the next day. He figured being rich, white, handsome, and famous, not to mention not directly involved in the break in, would protect him from any crazy prosecutors. He’d just keep the rest of them out of it. The FBI officer he talked to was not really able to wrap his head around the concept of Mundis, much less someone using Mundis to create an untraceable dead drop to further mask the source of files available via anonymous Darknet file sharing. It didn’t help that Kid Twist couldn’t even really be sure what Teabagz was doing (except when laying traps for nosy gamers). Kid Twist facepalmed when the officer asked if Mundis “was a Nintendo thing.” For a long minute Kid Twist thought about telling the agent that he’d heard Teabagz talk about how awesome the Koran was just to get something done, but he couldn’t quite make himself take advantage of religious prejudice. And so the police remained uninvolved. Though he did place a call to his security company, National Protection Corporation.
[129] Highlights include Black Sabbath (Staring Boris Karloff), Zombi 2, Cemetery Man, Cannibal Holocaust, Star Wars Episodes 4–7 and Rogue One (“Hey, wait a goddamned second,” Mad Hatter gasped), Nobody Ordered Love, Jail Birds of Paradise, Wasu Kingu Kongu, and a ton of others. Kid Twist may or may not have been, and in fact totally was, the source of the hi-def restorations of the original Star Wars that had been released into the internet wilds by a coven of Star Wars nerds called i2 e2 ven though George Lucas claimed he had trashed all the original film to splice in a Jabba the Hut that now looked like it had been rendered on a Commodore 64 and had looked like dog shit even back in the 90s. I’m sorry, I just get so pissed about not being able to watch the original Star Wars. However, any celebrity with two firing brain cells would rather stick his dick in a wood chipper than get on Disney’s shit list, so his involvement in that project was beyond Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information. Even the i2 g2 uys didn’t know who he was; he just had some scary-looking guys from National Protection Corporation drop off the reels with the understanding that if the film didn’t come back in perfect condition, they were getting their teeth kicked in.
[130] It was Colorado, so you know that was the dank equivalent of a ’45 Mouton Rothschild or Snoop Dog’s personal sativa strain or something equally awesome.
[131] Kid Twist was in no rush to run off to Orlando and do ... something. Something that was probably illegal. He kept picturing himself trying to do a stake-out while paparazzi surrounded the car, cameras flashing. TMZ Headline: BLU star JASON ANGEL seen STALKING PRETEEN NERD. Were the rumors right? Is he GAY? Or a PEDOPHILE? Is JASON ANGEL trying to wrap his lips around TEABAGZ? You’ll be shocked at what the victim had to say. SEE MORE >>. It made him very tired. And getting Pee Wee Herman’d was no way to go out anyway. He hoped that spending some time with them without third parties constantly reminding them that he was famous and they weren’t would allow them to still be friends in the future. He harbored reservations about basically drugging them into friendship, but the only strategy he could really think of was to hope that familiarity bred contempt. You watch a man stoned out of his mind try to play Axis and Al
lies, you can’t really take him too seriously after that.
[132] They had met on the set of BLU’s music video for “Girl I Want to Text You (How Much I Love You).” The makeup artist, Chris, had been secretly hoping to bang Kid Twist ever since. This was so common that Kid Twist only noticed when someone didn’t want to bang him, so he thought they were just friends.
[133] A character from a show called Death Note. I don’t know either.
[134] This one was from Enterprise (from the episode Broken Bow), so this is the one he used for cons because he didn’t give a shit if it got stolen, at least relative to Gowron’s bat’leth from Redemption, which he kept in the vault with the really good stuff.
[135] It was not.
[136] Morgan Freeman had highly recommended the Maxima to Kid Twist. “It’s got a good engine, crash safety is fantastic, reliable, and when you want to just go for a drive and be yourself, nobody thinks a celebrity is driving a Maxima,” the Voice of God said to him over canapés he had commandeered from a waiter. “Seriously, I loved mine. Just get the windows tinted so people can’t see your face.”
[137] The conversation with Mad Hatter hadn’t been so easy; he’d found her in the bathroom, skirt around her ankles, sobbing on the toilet, and barged his way in. He squatted next to her as she gaped at the intrusion and looked her right in the eyes. “You need to accept the fact that you’re never going to sleep with him. I know it’s hard for girls to accept it, but you’re so deep in the friend zone you’d have a better chance of escaping Alcatraz than sleeping with him. You’re getting creepy with the fainting and the blushing and it needs to stop. He needs you to be a friend to him. He has all the fan girls he wants.”
A lot more was said, makeup was ruined, hugs hugged, but in a weird way it was a relief to have it put so baldly.
Sure, he was super hot, but did she really want to sleep with him (well, yes, she did, but that was perfectly natural) or was she just sort of trying to execute her boy band fan programming and her friend programming and her woman programming all at the same time, and she was short circuiting like some Star Trek computer faced with an irreconcilable paradox?