Death by Cliché

by Defendi, Bob

  Take a large metal barrel and half a pound of fireworks. Climb inside with the fireworks and seal the thing closed behind you. Then start a match, and, in the echoing depths of the barrel, light the fuse. Do not stick your fingers in your ears. If, just before the fireworks detonate, the barrel gets hit by an eighteen wheeler, you’ll have the right idea of the noise.

  Damico did something he couldn’t quite describe with his middle bit to try to dodge the explosion. One moment he stood there, the next he… well, he still stood there, but his clothes were clean and sharp while everyone else in the party picked themselves up and patted out little fires all over their clothing. Damico didn’t understand how he was unharmed.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” the dwarf said.

  Damico carefully studied his limbs, checking for damage. He couldn’t find any.

  “That was some dodge,” Lotianna said.

  Oh. A game mechanic. Abstract. You dodge the fire, but your miniature stays in the same place on the map.

  “I think I’ve taken three levels of thief,” Damico said. “Let me examine the doors from now on.”

  “Either that or you’re a martial artist,” Gorthander said.

  “I wish I’d seen my character sheet before the little prick shot me in the head.”

  “Come again?” Gorthander asked. “I didn’t quite make that out.”

  “Never mind.” Damico patted his sword. “I’m a little well-armed for a fighting monk.”

  Gorthander grunted and gestured toward the open door.

  Damico slinked ahead and peeked through the doorway. On the other side, five creatures stood frozen in the room. They had green skin and wore scale armor and furs. Great tusks emerged from their bottom jaws, and they clutched scimitars.

  “I’ve always wondered why monsters in these dungeons never seem to move from room to room, helping one another,” Damico said.

  “I didn’t catch that,” Lotianna said.

  Why didn’t they hear him? He hadn’t spoken softly or slurred.

  “Sneak in there,” Gorthander said.

  He nodded and placed one foot carefully after the other, hugging the wall, doing everything sneaky people did in movies. He even tiptoed.

  As he broke the plane of the doorway, the creatures—they had to be orcs—started moving. They didn’t do anything useful, though. They just sort of moved their arms and torsos aimlessly while standing in place. The Country Orc Jamboree.

  Damico glanced back at the doorway, and he couldn’t see the others, but the orcs didn’t even seem to notice the door hung open. He didn’t know how many times he’d seen monsters behave like this in games. It wasn’t any less stupid in real life.

  He slipped behind one of them and drew his sword. His body moved effortlessly, familiar with the skills even if he wasn’t. He didn’t think as he glided into place, as he put his longsword point-first into the back of the closest orc, as he grabbed it by the throat, as he thrust.

  This wasn’t right. This wasn’t real. He wasn’t a cold-blooded killer but a person, a real person, and he wasn’t supposed to feel the slick-hot flow of blood over his hands, down the front of his clothing. He expected to see the point of the sword come out the other side covered in green or black blood, but it came out glistening a perfect, beautiful red. Against the green of the creature’s skin, it looked absurdly festive. Christmas with Mussolini.

  As quickly as it started, it was over. The orc kicked once, twice, then went limp on his sword and became a two-hundred pound deadweight. He let it fall, guiding the monster to the ground.

  This wasn’t real. It wasn’t real.

  Omar and Gorthander burst through the door, their weapons high, bellows echoing from their lips. Frick and Frack. Mutt and Jeff. Tweedle-Die and Tweedle-Doom.

  Arithian strode in behind them, strumming a mandolin. Bolts of white light flew past his head, blowing the chest out of a second orc. Damico barely had the time to think before he charged, just aware of his own actions, and lopped the head off another one.

  The orcs lay in broken heaps on the floor. Damico didn’t know if it was his stomach or if the room really swayed like that, but one of the orc heads rolled back and forth to his queasiness, so he decided to give himself the benefit of the doubt.

  The two warrior types cleaned their weapons, and Damico did likewise. Then he stared around the room and spotted the door on the other side. He left the dwarf to loot the bodies and walked over to it. Kneeling, he did what every good thief was supposed to do. He pressed his ear against it and listened.

  Great heaving gusts of wind roared in the next room. It was a terrible snorting sound as if from the unholy union of a bull, a wind tunnel, and the brass section of the London Philharmonic.

  Damico straightened and stepped away from the door. Gorthander had a handful of gold that could have funded the takeover of Saudi Arabia. He frowned as if it were a pittance.

  “Hardly worth dividing,” he grunted. The others nodded their heads.

  “The corridors in this dungeon haven’t branched, have they?” Damico asked.

  “No,” Lotianna said. “Why?”

  “Well, a dungeon is so popular as an adventure structure because it’s essentially a flowchart. You go from here to here to here, and although there are branches, they order everything neatly. You can’t flank a dungeon crawl.”

  “So?” Omar’s voice practically yawned with boredom.

  “So, this flowchart has only one branch.”

  Gorthander scratched his beard. “What does that mean?”

  “It means Carl has no imagination.”

  “I didn’t catch that,” Gorthander said.

  Damico nodded. He’d expected that. He was starting to figure out the rules of this madness, and one of the core conceits was it behaved exactly as if he were in Carl’s game. As if the boy had gone back to the table after stuffing Damico in his trunk. Damico now lived in the game, but the others thought he was a Non-Player Character, a character run by Carl to flesh out the party. A thief-type because the party seemed to lack stealth.

  It made a strange, beating-your-head-against-the-wall sort of sense. If he said something to the characters, Carl had to repeat it to the players. He wasn’t going to repeat stuff that made him sound foolish. He wasn’t going to repeat anything…

  “Gorthander,” Damico said. “I want you to listen to me very carefully.”

  “All right,” the dwarf said.

  “Carl shot me in the head. I’m in his trunk. Call the police!”

  Gorthander stared at him, confused. “I didn’t catch that.”

  Damico sighed. “Never mind. Let’s go meet Sir Snortsalot.”

  He faced the door.

  Chapter Six

  “All right, fine. I lied.”

  —Bob Defendi

  amico checked the door for traps and then threw it open. If he had to live in a madhouse, he might as well do it with a certain style. He’d heard of polishing the brass on the Titanic. This was more like headlining at ground-zero Hiroshima.

  On the other side of the door stretched a wide room lit by little dishes of fire hanging by chains from the ceiling (braziers, but don’t tell Carl). The room lay bare, and Damico only then realized he hadn’t seen a single stick of furniture in this damn dungeon.

  But that was of lesser concern. In the center of the room stood a minotaur, but not just any minotaur. It had a great bull’s head and a muscled torso like, God help him, like a bulky super hero. The thing stood twelve-feet tall, was lightly furred like a fat Italian, and wielded an ax with a blade the size of a dinner table.

  It wore only a harness of a green leather that was probably tanned orc hide. Metal rings excised holes from the leather bands giving them a vaguely kinky look. Fredericks of Crete.

  Damico sidled sideways (because sidling forward is just plain silly). Meanwhile, the dwarf went the other direction and Omar charged straight up the middle.

 
“At least take a red cape!” Damico shouted, but matador humor was a little beyond the great lummox. Omar raised that ax of his and hacked with everything he had, but the minotaur just blocked. Omar staggered backward. If the thing had hit the ax any harder, Omar’s moles would have flown off.

  Gorthander charged in from the side; Damico cursed and did the same, angling for a Back Stab, hoping the thing would lose him in all the confusion

  The minotaur smashed Omar and the man took air, flying backward and landing with a thunderous crash, like a bag of pans rolling down a flight of stairs—or a dramatic reading of a Chinese phone book.

  Lotianna let loose with another volley of white-hot darts, and Arithian dove in to grab Omar. Meanwhile, Gorthander charged, his ax transcribing a silver arc in the air.

  The minotaur parried the attack and slapped him with the blade. Gorthander staggered there, shaken like a James Bond martini.

  And Damico froze.

  In a game, he would have charged without thinking, but here he stared at the naked hairy ass of a creature that would tear him to jerky. The pain would be tremendous. The death would take hours. It didn’t matter he was already dying in the real world. He was beyond fearing that. That might have been real, but this felt real. This was here. This was now.

  Gorthander tried to dart in again, and the minotaur smashed him, knocking the dwarf to one knee. Then the minotaur raised that great ax even as more darts of light splattered against its tough hide. Gorthander faced his doom.

  Damico moved. He didn’t have any more time to think. He raised that sword in a two-handed grip, point down. Damico leaped, seeking height, searching for the sweet spot in that giant hairy back, looking for the center of the cashmere sweater the thing called a hide.

  Minotaurs aren’t supposed to be fast like the bulls they resemble. It wasn’t supposed to dash sideways. Damico wasn’t supposed to sail past ineffectually.

  He stumbled as the blade stabbed down into the dwarf’s chest, splitting mail and rending leather, shattering bone. The dwarf looked up into Damico’s eyes, his own wide, uncomprehending.

  The minotaur reared behind him, twirling that ax.

  Chapter Seven

  “This is not the quote you’re looking for.”

  —Bob Defendi

  ut we don’t really care about a fight, do we? They are so droll.

  Instead, we will wheel the camera of our mind up and away from the dungeon, the minotaur, and the butchered dwarf. Up, up, and up we’ll spiral, a leaf on a metaphorical wind. A plastic bag on the updraft of the soul.

  Once we reach daylight, we swing around, and there, do you see it? It’s a village placed right next to these ravaging hordes of evil. A village that should have moved long ago even though all the creatures inside have no obvious way to go peasant poaching. A village on the edge of disaster.

  Peasant! Is that one down there, under the gaze of our long eyes? Behold him, at the end of a plow, working his perfectly square lot of farmland. We will watch him, and he’ll never know. A peasant under glass, as it were.

  He has no name, so we will name him. Bil, for the weapon. Bil reaches the end of a long, painful furrow in the earth. He reaches the end, and he pauses wearily. It’s time to turn the plow. It’s easier to pass an arms budget through a democratic congress than to turn a medieval plow.

  But he starts.

  Grunting and heaving, cursing the ox that pulls the thing and spitting, he starts the slow, exhausting process. He is low, lower than low. So low that right now you should be terrified that this, after all, is the real hero of our story.

  Never fear.

  It’s not that Carl isn’t unimaginative enough to explore the peasant hero become savior. It really isn’t. It’s just that this particular peasant hero was abandoned. Once, in a game long ago, he was the hero. Or at least he would have been if the player hadn’t found sitting in the same room as Carl about as pleasant as an all-day Air Supply concert. There is nothing sadder than a former Player Character after the player has permanently left the game.

  And so here he is, abandoned after less than one game session. Evidently, the player’s aunt had been whisked away to the hospital. Which then exploded. You can understand why he couldn’t stay.

  He is halfway through this most tortuous of all peasant tasks when he stops and surveys the field. Then he surveys the one next to it. There are six square fields, all in a row. He studies the plow and then the fields again.

  Would it not, indeed, be better to have long rows? He could give up all but one sixth of his field to the tillers of the other patches, in return for one sixth of each of theirs. As long as those sixths all lead from one to another in a straight line… yes. That would work.

  And yet… wait.

  At the end of the day, he’d still have to go home to the wife he’d never loved, the children he couldn’t remember fathering. The horrible, stifling life.

  He squinted over at the dungeon, uncomfortably close to his field. What had he been thinking coming out here every day? He couldn’t imagine what had brought him to this. He couldn’t remember the details. It was as if he’d just been born.

  He didn’t know he stood directly between Damico and the villain’s magical Artifact (not the one he’s searching for… the one I haven’t told you about yet).

  Bil looked around and decided he wasn’t going to negotiate the deal for the new fields. He wasn’t going to plow one more row. He wasn’t even going to go home tonight. Bil didn’t care about any of that. He’d never cared, but it was as if until now he wasn’t aware of his own feelings, his own wishes, his own needs.

  Bil let the ox loose, one buckle at a time. Then he walked away from the village, not so much as glancing back.

  Now. I suppose we should get back to that battle?

  Chapter Eight

  “Still, don’t expect a quote every chapter.”

  —Bob Defendi

  amico stared up at the minotaur, because if he stared forward, he saw those great hairy testicles, like two coconuts. A man needed an ironclad self-esteem should he ever look a gift bull in the crotch.

  Damico dodged to one side as the minotaur brought its ax down, smashing into the flagstones and showering the area with sparks. Damico tap-danced backward, almost feeling good with the energy, the vitality of this new body.

  But that feeling evaporated as the minotaur dove in again, smashing his ax into the floor and sending up another glowing shower. Either that ax was electrified, or this weapon came straight out of a Highlander movie.

  Damico moved in, trying to stab with his sword, only to have it batted aside effortlessly. He leaped away from another sweeping attack and darted in again, faster than he’d ever been in the real world, striking like a mongoose, thrusting like a snake, seeking like a tax auditor.

  Again the minotaur knocked his sword away, again it looked like the thing wasn’t even trying. Damico was going to die. He couldn’t believe it, but he was going to die. Again.

  He stumbled backward, his hand shaking, his sword point wandering, transcribing lie-detector patterns in the air. He wasn’t supposed to be here, fighting this great stinking brute. Even in the game, he was a damn thief. It wasn’t his job to stand toe-to-toe with the boss monster.

  The minotaur spun its ax gently in the air, as if it were a prop, not a real weapon of hardwood and steel. Damico’s eyes darted to the dwarf, lying broken on the paving stones. His blood still spurted into the air through the rent in his armor. Damico had done that. He’d killed one of the closest things he had to a friend in this strange, unlikely place.

  And he barely even knew the dwarf.

  “Tag!” shouted Arithian because character, in the hands of even the best role-player, is still a matter of convenience.

  Damico didn’t dare take his eyes off that ax, so he just cringed at the bellow behind him. Someone charged at his rear.

  Omar burst past him, weapon whirling, battle cry streaming from h
is lips. He sounded like a cross between a broken car horn and the 32nd Infantry division. He struck.

  The minotaur knocked him aside.

  This was a game. Damico had to keep that in mind. It might feel real. He might even be able to die, but still a game. No matter how deadly.

  And that was part of the problem. If he was outside the game seeing the dice rolls, he’d know what was happening, but in it… he’d never realized before the terror of not knowing. He’d never pictured how frightened his character would be, even in a winning fight.

  The problem was damage.

  The d30 system—“d” for die, “30” for the number of sides on the die—used abstract hit points. They could represent luck, the amount of energy the creature could use while dodging, even sword tricks that only worked once on a given opponent. Damico and Omar could be missing with their attacks, or they could be hitting, whittling away at the minotaur’s finite number of hit points.

  Omar dashed in again, and Damico circled the creature so he and Omar would be directly opposite each other, giving them flank bonuses. He needed to remember the game. He was an expert at the game.

  He moved in, attacking from behind, hoping his Back Stab would hit. Omar came in from the front, swinging. The minotaur dove away from both of them to the right. Had they both hit, dropping those abstract hit points, or were they ineffective? There was no way to tell.

  “What’s your armor class?” Damico shouted at the minotaur.

  “Thirty-eight!” the minotaur shouted back, its voice rumbling like a locomotive in an echo chamber.

  Thirty-eight. But was that its real number, or was it using its Bluff skill?

  They both ran in past its guard again, striking at almost the same time. They must have rolled the same number on initiative. The minotaur dodged.