“Uh-huh.”
“If the ship isn’t big enough, I’ll just hack into the code and add some extra crew quarters. It’s one of those things I can do, you know, give us plush accommodations, if you want.”
“Sure, sure.”
He spotted her again! There she was, halfway down the slope and coming up on the tell-tale wire BRA tower. Several necrolites were on patrol, but clearly hadn’t spotted her yet. She was so–
Meredith put a hand on each side of his face and moved his attention away from their objective.
“Derek, hey,” she said softly. “I need you present, buddy.”
“But–”
“Look, I invited you out here for a reason.” Yeah, to kick bad guy butt and fly around the galaxy and use rad superpowers. He got it. Why she insisted on bringing up this stuff in the middle of a crucial mission was just beyond him. In his periphery, the game was calling for skill rolls, and though he had points in Resourcefulness and Survival (and although he had none in Strategy, the game would have allowed him the attempt), for the time being the settings were turned off, and he shoved the non-essential roll away. This action alone would come back to bite him, literally, in the hours and days to come.
He grabbed her hands. “I appreciate this so much. Seriously, this has been the most amazing time so far, and it’s all thanks to you.”
Her eyes lit up. “Good, because I am one stolen ship away from getting you in the crew quarters and sucking the–”
“–but right now we need to focus on the mission.”
He went to turn back, but she caught his face again. “Derek, please. I’m trying to tell you that I like you. I’ve alw–”
“Awesome! I like you too. You’re an amazing person, Meredith. I mean Kayle. You’re still Kayle in here. And with our awesome powers combined, we’re going to help awesome Sigourney knock down this BRA, steal a ship, and get some rockin’ quest loot.”
He turned back to find Sigourney engaged in a firefight with the necrolite guards. Dice rolls were popping up above her head, but she was too far off for him to make out any numbers. Except, it wasn’t going perfectly, because a clock opened up in his HUD saying Additional Security Arrives with ten segments, with one filled in.
“Crap, that’s our cue,” he said, and burst into action. Yooplegoop was suddenly yanked forward on the electronic tether and sprinted after Derek to catch up or just be dragged along over the rocky slope.
***
That. Was. It.
Meredith chewed on her upper lip for several seconds, trying to process the constant, chronic sensation of being on a rollercoaster. Every time she approached the top, the park swung a bat and smashed her in the face with failure, only to get her hopes back up by handing her some small victory or another, to make her think that the next hill might just plateau out and land her in bed with the man of her deluded, idiot dreams. Over and again it went: smash with the bat, get those hopes back up, smash in the face again. Rush of exhilaration, wham went the expectations and hopes, and another good wham for good measure.
She was a complete tool to think this would work.
“Why did I think he would be into me? Why?” She was just a piece of garbage Derek kept coming back to for advice on how to avoid being a piece of garbage.
Tears slipped down her cheeks, and a full on headache burst to life from the top of her neck to her temples. She tried not to scream, but in the end threw her head back and gave a full-throated howl at the sky. The blurry, wavering form of Derek didn’t turn to see what the matter was in time. By the time he did, she was gone.
Chapter 13 - Escort Missions are the Worst
Derek sprinted down the hill, Glooblegleep or whatever sprinting along as they watched Sigourney kick one guard the face, eviscerate another in a backhand arc across his chest, and blast a third in the crotch.
“Yeowtch,” Gleepergloop said, the first words he had uttered that Derek was aware of. The alien’s eyes watered and narrowed.
“Yeah, that’s Sigourney,” Derek laughed as they ran. “Don’t piss her off.”
Then Derek heard a pock - and a pale red laser beam shot down from a hill, almost taking off his foot.
“Son of a–”
“Horse uncle,” Gloobtube supplied.
“Thanks,” Derek said. Another bolt fired down, this time slicing into Globgor’s electric tether. The alien boy stopped, frowned, and ran in the other direction.
“Gah!” Derek yelled, starting to follow. Then he spied a boulder– one with a tremendous angle on the BRA! If he could wedge himself in there then he could potentially become a one man support fortress.
Help Sigourney first. Save her ass, get the ship, then we find the kid and scram. Derek, you are a genius.
He sprinted, heard a pock, swerved right, watched a red bolt blast where he had been, and then pulled himself in. It was roomy for a boulder.
“Grakle cackle akle!” the unseen sniper bellowed.
“Yeah you can go to hell,” Derek laughed back. This was amazing! He waited, noticing that the regular sniper shot wasn’t coming and that something had changed. Peeking out the entry crack to his boulder fort, he tried to find the hidden figure that had been tracking him.
Parapapapapapapapa - a light blue machine gun swarmed a pattern of blue electric bolts over his position. Brrrapapapapapa. He was well entrenched between a boulder and the hill behind him, and he hadn’t been hit. Yet. The stray blasts crackled and smoked, smelling too much like the slow burn of a Marlboro Red.
How the heck am I supposed to fight someone that I can’t see?
Derek opened up his HUD and rolled through his character options. MYSTERY NOIR - STUDY welcomed his eyes, and got him to thinking.
I’m not trained in it, but maybe if I try to study the angle those blasts are coming from, I can figure out where that damn necrosniper is?
He stuck a fingernail in his mouth and chewed, a bad habit that came up in tense times while gaming. Two die rolls, take the lowest. Well, why the hell not? It isn’t like I have anything better to do.
Two 10s flashed into view, and then his vision flashed brilliantly. The game paused for a moment as he switched to a rushing bird’s eye swoop, flying the entire path from his eye to where the last bolt blasted, then riding up the projectile’s arc to the prone necrolite peering over the lip of the far hill. Then, back in his body and using his eyes, he popped out through the dusty gap of hill and boulder, and fired two blasts down range. A scrabby bush exploded into flame, and a bright red splash marked the hillside a shot later.
Boom, Derek thought. He left his boulder spot and ran around the hill, looking for Sigourney, with an eye out for Meredith. What had happened with her anyways? She was so great and yet so moody and unpredictable.
Coming around the hill, Derek saw a bright flash and then found himself on his ass, covering his ears as the BRA exploded, smoke and flame buffeting out in all directions. The burning pillar where the BRA had been looked like a giant torch and its powerful orange light over the land. Sigourney stood up where he and Meredith had been before, her shadow an elongated giant behind her, laughing at the sight.
“Hey, Sigourney, down here!” he yelled over the ringing in his ears. He spat, his mouth full of acrid dust. She looked down at him, and she waved.
“Where’s your girlfriend?” Sigourney asked, hopping and sliding down the sandy slopes. Her chainmail popped up and down, given Derek an eyeful of underboob. Her bronze skin looked golden in the firelight.
“Umm-” he stammered, his voice temporarily in his dick. “Meredith is, um, she’s not my girlfriend. I mean, she’s my friend and she’s a girl but she’s like a sister to me. Like, we’ve never kissed or anything. I -”
“Shh,” Sigourney silenced him, hopping down to his side and swinging a finger to his lips in the same acrobatic move. “It doesn’t matter. If she’s not here then we’ve got to get a ship. Check your BOOBS now that the BRA is gone.”
Derek grabbed his BOOBS a
nd tapped through, zooming in on their position, then engaging the search function on its side. SPACESHIP he typed, waiting to see if the device would accept so simple a command.
Ding! Right where they had expected, in the space the BRA had been covering sat a sleek looking design labeled Ehcsrop YM-69. Derek’s face lit up and his mouth rolled into an O as he showed Sigourney the device and its findings.
“Porsche spelled backwards?” Sigourney asked with a cocked eyebrow. “That Meredith not girlfriend of yours is going to have to fire somebody when she gets back to work.”
Derek looked back down at it and sounded the word out from back to front, slapping his head when he realized she was right and that he had totally missed it. He tapped on it, and found that the YM stood for Your Mom. Jeez.
“So, what do we do now?” Derek asked, crouching down and facing the entrance to the hill. It was well concealed with scrappy brush and crystalline cacti, but once you saw it you couldn’t unsee it. Derek turned to Sigourney and caught a whiff of sweaty musk, then felt himself shiver. Yeah it’s time to finish this mission.
Sigourney’s gaze hovered over the bodies of the fallen.
“Well that mission clock filled up, so I might have killed everyone inside. I wouldn’t mind us just walking in and taking a breather for a change. What do you think, Dare?” she smiled, a dimpled invitation on her face. “Wanna take a walk with me?”
She reached out her hand and he took it. Then they walked away from the flames, Sigourney curling a pinky finger around Derek’s own, as they marched through the hill and to the treasure within.
***
Sigourney knew this kid wasn’t going to help her much, but he was all she had. So far this place didn’t seem to be any different from her usual surroundings, except for this big bumbling hairy fool. He was proof positive she wasn’t in the Dungeonworld any longer.
Which begged several thousand questions she had no answers for, nor any way to ask. How had she gotten out? How safe was this place? Her HUD still had the haptic pain responses dialed up all the way to max, but Kered had taken blaster bolts to the chest and shrugged it off like it was nothing. And if this was the heaven to her former hellscape, the ultimate question was this: was there a way out?
In the meantime she brought up her blaster and blew a hole in a groaning, downed necrolite. She’d seen a few of these things in her first year running Dungeon Delves, live weeknights at seven and eleven!
If only they’d kept her doing the Delves. She’d been pretty good at those, provided some jagoff didn’t log in and cut your feet out from under you by spending money and erasing your skill points. Har har, look at her lose the ability to spot enemies!
She’d learned to game the system at that point, given that blind spots would have a subtle blurring effect on them. It was worse when they deleted your Prowl skill and the game just forced you to make a whole bunch of noise. Not much you could do against that.
No, it was the Soap Opera Gauntlet that really got under her skin. Literally, they tried putting these nano machine things into her body and she’d thrashed and injured some of the handlers. No way were they going to put the game inside her. She shuddered every time she thought about the needle and the way they’d tested out the Augmented Reality on her, without the helmet. They’d turned her vision off, then made her see merpeople floating in the ocean, then vampire ice cream cones coming to suck all the warmth out of her. Sadistic monsters, every one of them.
She couldn’t afford to dwell on the past. Kered Mingham was a tightrope she had to walk in order to get whatever benefit she could out of him, to get off this rock. If she had to boink him, she would make that sacrifice, but she didn’t think it would come to that. She knew Kayle was jealous of whatever adorable, sloppy fixation Kered had on her, and Kayle was the lynchpin.
Kayle was an employee here. That meant a bundle of different things, but chiefly it meant that Kayle had all the keys to all the doors here. She could shut off the pain settings to Sigourney’s haptic suit. She could turn the danger level down. She could summon those floating cars and speed Sigourney back to safety and the exits. She could also inflict the opposite, which, judging by her sudden disappearances and the odd coding misfires, had already happened. It smacked of petty vengeance.
So while she needed to get into Kered’s good graces, she couldn’t complete the seduction because she needed Kayle as her friend.
It wasn’t quite the pickle Soap Gauntlet had been, but it was no easy.
“So, how long have you known Kayle?”
“Mare?” he hissed out a long breath, then whistled. “Man, she moved to my crap little town in sixth grade, didn’t know anybody, got teased a lot. I had this girlfriend at the time who was just constantly brutal to her. Jessica? Jennifer? Jennifer I think. Mendez, I’m pretty sure, maybe Ramirez. Anyway she broke up with me because I wouldn’t let her talk about Meredith like that. Her parents and mine went to the same church.”
Sigourney filed all this away for safekeeping and use later.
“Friends by circumstance,” she said.
“Oh yeah, she knows every facepalm moment, every disappointment, and every setback I’ve ever gone through. It’s… kind of embarrassing how much dirt she has on me. I mean, just to give you an example, I once worked at a supermarket as a bagger, you know? And somebody posted this video of me singing and playing air guitar with my mop and mop bucket. A hundred thousand hits in the first week. It was so embarrassing it kinda made me famous.” He rubbed the back of his neck in a classic sheepish shy guy maneuver.
“You’ve clearly come a long way since then,” she said.
“Yeah? I mean, thanks… I mean, it’s not… I haven’t really, you know, like–”
“Aside from not thinking you’re worth anything, you’ve certainly matured in other ways. Physically, for one, you’re easily a seven. Maybe an eight. I saw you during one of the glitches. That big, smelly, hairy face peeled off and I got a look at those baby blues.” She put a little extra smoke into her voice and watched with delight as he gulped and tried to process this amazing revelation.
“You… you think so?” the wieekoo in him grumbled and roared out.
“Of course. You should ditch the skin and go as yourself. Here, grab up your settings menu and go into Advanced Settings. See it at the bottom?”
He nodded.
“You can grant settings permissions over to others. Parents get permission for their kids. I’ll re-skin you real quick.” She hoped she wasn’t pushing too far. That shaggy face gave her a skeptical look. “Unless you don’t want to. I completely understand the urge to hide what you really are.”
“What do you mean?” But he was into it. He reached up and tapped at some invisible settings, until the little blip appeared in her HUD. He’d done the smart thing and only given over control of his outward appearance. Well, that was okay. She’d take what she could get. Maybe she could wheedle a bit more out of him later.
“I mean whatever happened to you, these facepalm moments, you’ve built up a shell around yourself. There’s two people here: the open and honest you versus the painfully shy trying not to get hurt version of you.”
She did take what she had on the menu, a floating holographic display all in blue showing various options, and re-skinned him. For an initial test this was going swimmingly. Back in Dungeonworld they had practically no control over anything, and she expected the same restrictions up here… but no. She could get out of this sexist metal coochie cover whenever she wanted to.
She was at once annoyed and pleased at how this particular chainmail bikini turned Kered into an obedient hound. For the moment, it would remain.
Free of the wieekoo carpet he was wearing, her suspicions were confirmed. This uber shy nerd kid was cut. He was ‘four years of prison gym into a life sentence’ jacked. Whatever Kayle saw in him was probably warranted. She dressed him all in black, like a hitman, but gave the clothes that sci-fi edge where diagonal lines of different material were
barely visible, and the material itself was all hexagonal. If sci-fi was a person, it would be in love with hexagons. She considered shades, but rather enjoyed the literal baby blues he had. Damn.
She shoved that thought aside. Any monkey business she ended up getting into would be for a purpose. There might be a horizontal mambo to be had, but it would be in service to freedom. No hanky panky without the end of clanky clanky.
“There we go!” she said, and stepped back to admire her handiwork. She’d taken his natural ash blonde and made it long and slick.
“Something’s… missing,” he said.
She sighed, then swore. “It’s that kid, isn’t it?”
NPCs were the absolute worst.
***
A pair of eight segment clocks appeared in his HUD. Find the mark, in green, along with Reinforcements arrive in red. The situation still read as Controlled, so he considered it a win.
This wasn’t bad. There were far worse things that could go wrong. Meredith could show up and turn him into a toad with that tablet of hers. Sigourney could leave him all alone out here to face an RPG setting with only his paltry noob skills, or stop paying him super embarrassing and probably untrue compliments.
Derek had always tried to date upwards. His mother and father had insisted that he always shoot the moon, hit the top, pick your cliche really. So when he proved to be capable of tripping over his own elbow somehow while playing basketball, or when he broke his legs and destroyed any possibility of his father’s plans to have a pro ball player as a son, he’d turned to female company as a way to climb the ladder.
And really, he’d tried to always have a girlfriend. Just dumped? Go to a bar and buy a girl a drink. Ask out the cute librarian. Swipe right whenever he saw a pair of yoga pants.
“I’ll search this way,” she said, pointing toward the massive boulders formerly under the protection of the BRA. “You head that way.” She indicated the hangar and the various ships.
Glitchworld Page 12