Death by Cliché

by Defendi, Bob

  Forty troops.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” he said.

  He led them back and around and through another valley, quiet like a cat. Subtle like a Dennis Miller joke. Unrelenting like Arianna Huffington.

  “Mr. Damico,” a voice said.

  Fifty guards surrounded them, appearing on the ridges as if from nowhere. They pointed down at the party with crossbows and alert expressions, great mountains of beef with weapons of pointy death. Behind them stood a man in tights, a doublet, and a mask.

  “Dammit,” Damico said.

  There would be no escape. It didn’t matter what he did. It didn’t matter how clever he was. Carl would cheat if necessary because in Carl’s head, there was one thing more important than skills and plans and characters’ free will.

  The adventure said they were supposed to go to the castle.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “No, really. Where’s my thesaurus?”

  —Bob Defendi

  f you wanted us to go into the fortress,” Gorthander asked, “why did you talk us into leaving?”

  He sounded angry, almost petulant, and Damico couldn’t blame him. They thought he was a Non-Player Character, and so everything he said seemed to come from Carl. To have Carl railroad them into being captured right afterward, it had to seem like the cheesiest village in assholedom.

  They sat in a ten by ten cell with benches along one wall. Lotianna sat in one corner, her feet curled up under her, her forehead against the wall, folded in on herself like a turtle who just found out she flunked her SATs. Arithian sat next to her humming because they’d taken his mandolin away. Gorthander sat next, his feet dangling in the air like a kid in a high chair. Omar stood in one corner… mainly because I’m tired of writing “sat”… growling and glaring at them all angrily. Jurkand stood in another, his expression pensive, like the IRS auditor when you’ve told him visiting grandma was a business expense.

  Damico understood all their frustration. He wished he could say something that would make them feel better, but he was too scared. Most of them were in a game. He would experience everything in here as if it were real.

  “It is real,” Jurkand said, as if reading his thoughts.

  Damico scoffed at the middle-aged man.

  “Go buy some Just for Men,” he said.

  Jurkand frowned, puzzled. He was the only one here who couldn’t get that joke.

  The thing he didn’t understand was why Carl had even passed his arguments on to the rest of the group in the first place. If he wanted them to go into the fortress, didn’t he just have to not tell them anything Damico said?

  But then again, maybe Damico wasn’t the only one who had to play by the rules. Maybe Carl had to pass certain things along. Everything Damico said in character for instance. He passed along the out-of-character pop culture references too, but he probably chose to pass those on because they made him seem wittier. Actually, maybe Carl didn’t know what was going on any better than Damico did.

  Hmm. That was an interesting thought.

  “It’s your fault we got into this mess, dwarf,” Jurkand said. “You were so loud every soldier in three miles must have heard you.”

  Damico wanted to correct Jurkand, but he didn’t see how. How did one explain to a person that their entire life was at risk not due to anyone’s actions but because the “adventure” stated they had to be captured in act two? Jurkand was alive. He had free will. He couldn’t possibly understand the portions of this that were still a game.

  Damico cursed, and his frustration mounted. They were going to torture him. They always tortured you at this point in the story.

  “Dwarf, are you listening to me?” Jurkand asked.

  “Stop acting like your name,” Damico said.

  “Come on, Dwarf. You got us into this mess, so now I’m going to be beaten to death, she’s going to be raped, and it’s all your fault.”

  “Lad,” Gorthander said, his voice growling with threat. “Shut up.”

  Jurkand’s voice sounded wild, a bit out of control. Just a tinge of hysteria like the forty-year-old Star Wars geek when he comes home and finds out his sister has let his nephew take all his little man-dolls out of their original packaging.

  But that didn’t scan. Jurkand wasn’t acting right. Had he just changed personalities like Lotianna? Damico studied him but didn’t get any clues.

  “You did this to us, you prick!” Jurkand shouted. That was really out of character.

  “Shut up, lad,” Gorthander said.

  “What, are you too stupid to keep up?” Jurkand asked, his voice desperate.

  Was he claustrophobic? This was just a little bizarre.

  Gorthander slid off the bench and walked over to Jurkand. He stared up at the man from chest height, his beard quivering. Quietly, he said, “Shut up, or I’ll shut you up.”

  “Make me,” Jurkand said. His voice almost sounded hopeful.

  Gorthander shrugged at the rest of the party, as if to say, “What are you gonna do?” Then he punched Jurkand in the throat.

  The man reached up, his face turning white, then red. He grasped his voice box and collapsed, choking. He was still flailing when Damico rolled his eyes at Gorthander.

  “Did you have to kill him again?”

  “Technically, I’m just finishing the job from the first time,” Gorthander said, climbing back onto the bench.

  Damico was really too worried to feel for Jurkand. That was just too strange for him to have any proper feelings about it. Was Carl taking over Jurkand? That didn’t make any sense either. It was almost as if Jurkand was egging the dwarf on. Did he know something the rest of them didn’t?

  “We have to get out of here before the torture starts,” Damico said, ignoring the wet sounds coming from near the ground.

  “You think we can?” Gorthander asked.

  “I think the adventure says so.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Objects in this chapter are closer than they appear.”

  —Bob Defendi

  isten carefully, and you might hear it.

  Step. Step. Step.

  It’s the sound of hard-soled boots on flagstones. The measured beat of doom. Step. Step. Step. It’s the sound the serial killer makes right after leaving the cutlery shop. It’s the sound of your pacemaker as the battery runs low. It’s the sound of her father’s feet on the stairs.

  It was headed this way, and Damico wasn’t ready.

  Damico looked up from Jurkand’s dead body and glanced at the rest of the party. Their faces were tight, Lotianna drawn more closely into a ball. He watched the door and, at that moment, lost all his former confidence.

  This was it. He was going to be tortured and killed right now. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. None of this was. Who would have ever thought you’d be shot in the head and things would go downhill from there? Oh God. Please. He’d do anything. Anything.

  Step. Step. Stop.

  Damico watched the little window on the cell door, but it didn’t open. Instead, a bar slipped, and he reached for the weapons he no longer had. The door opened.

  There, framed in the doorway, stood the man in tights. The tights were purple, and his codpiece bulged like he was an actor in a Ron Jeremy film. His doublet was blue and yellow silk. His mask white porcelain. His hair fell in immaculately oiled curls.

  “Ah,” he said. “There you are.”

  “Hraldolf,” Damico said.

  “Damico,” Hraldolf said back.

  And suddenly Damico knew. He didn’t know because of evidence or deduction. He didn’t even know through some deep, subconscious link to his character. He knew because he knew this story. He’d seen it far too many times. Now he was living it, but that didn’t change anything. It was still the story, and this was what happened next.

  “You two know each other?” Gorthander asked.

  “He’s my brother,” Damico said.

&
nbsp; It was so obvious. Every character in a game had to have a backstory. Damico’s father in real life had died when he was young. But the character Damico, in the game, would have had his own history and his own fictional family. His father could well have been the former Overlord, his brother now on the throne. That would make him the plucky adventurer out to right the wrongs of his family. It was so cliché it hurt to think about, and that meant it was almost certainly true.

  Now that Hraldolf was here, the fear was gone. The man could do to him whatever he wanted. Damico would face it.

  “Your mother named one of you Damico and one of you Hraldolf?” Gorthander asked. “Did she have a sense of humor?”

  Damico shook his head and stared into the man’s eyes. They were beautiful eyes, perfect eyes. But they were also Damico’s eyes. Definitely his character’s brother.

  “This is when you taunt us, is it?” Damico asked.

  “An evil overlord needs to have fun too,” Hraldolf said.

  “You can come up with a better line than that,” Damico said.

  “How about, ‘these little diversions tickle my fancy?’” Hraldolf asked.

  “There you go. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Damico asked.

  Arithian looked up now. “You’re his brother, prithee?”

  “Would you like to tell the story, brother?” Hraldolf asked.

  Damico hadn’t written this story. It was all an invention of Carl. “I’m sorry. This is GM’s fiat. I don’t know it.”

  “Then allow me,” Hraldolf said. “When we were boys, our father set for us a destiny. My brother was to be the evil overlord. I was to be his enforcer. But my brother forsook his duty and left our home. It was left to me to kill our father and take over.”

  Damico was an only child in the real world. He didn’t really know how to react to finding out the character he played in the game had a brother, so he just said, “You killed our father?” He couldn’t find the gumption to feel bad about it. Damico’s real father had died the day after his eighth birthday. Heart attack after an appendectomy. Evidently he was fatherless in the in-game story as well.

  “Indeed.”

  “Well, what are you going to do?” Damico asked rhetorically.

  Hraldolf didn’t seem to get rhetoric because he said, “Kill you… everyone.”

  “You aren’t going to torture us first?” Damico asked. “Father would be so disappointed.” A little improv there.

  “Well, a son can’t follow entirely in his father’s hobnailed boot prints.”

  “So, you just came here to gloat?” Damico asked.

  “Pretty much,” Hraldolf said.

  “You aren’t very good at it.”

  Harldolf cleaned a bit of dust from his doublet. “I’m in a transitional phase.”

  “Well, I hope that works out for you,” Damico said. He walked up to his brother and put a hand on one shoulder. “Brother?”

  “Yes, brother?”

  “Never let someone get this close to you.”

  In a single move, Damico twisted Hraldolf around and caught him by his neck. He pulled the mask clear as the guards rushed through the door.

  They exploded, one after another, like giant balloons filled with red paint. Splash… splash, splash. The scene made the end of The Fury look like a Pokémon movie. When the guards stopped coming, and blood dripped from every available surface, Damico bent his brother’s struggling head forward in the move he was never allowed to do in high school wrestling. When Hraldolf went completely limp, Damico put the mask carefully back on and wrung the dead guard juice out of his clothing.

  “How did you know to do that?” Omar asked, staring at the gore with envious respect.

  “He’s my brother,” Damico said.

  Obviously, Damico had no idea how any of this worked, since he’d just found out his character had a brother five minutes ago. Still, he somehow knew that one. He knew it the same way he knew how to Back Stab. Maybe he’d seen it in games before and recognized the trope. Maybe he’d made a Lore (Family) skill check. Either way, it was done.

  The sound of guards rattled toward them. “Let’s get out of here,” Damico said and they ran through the door.

  They barely had time to gather weapons from the guards outside before sprinting down the hall.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “The sword was the first point-and-click technology.”

  —Bob Defendi

  ait!” Gorthander screamed as they stumbled down the hall.

  Damico checked both ways, past the gore dripping from the ceilings and down bleak, irregular hallways. An occasional torch cast the only light, creating shadows more than illuminating. Except for the links of loose chain mail from the dead guard, still rolling along and spinning up tiny sprays of blood, the coast was clear. He glanced at Gorthander. “What?”

  “What are we doing?”

  Damico looked back and forth between the faces of the party members, confused. They appeared more confused. He was confused by their being confused. They were confused by his confusion about their being confused. He was… you know, never mind.

  “We’re running through a doorway.”

  Gorthander examined the doorway as if to check this hypothesis.

  “Why?” he said.

  “We’re escaping from the dungeon of the evil overlord,” Damico said. “Guards are coming!”

  But for the moment, they weren’t. Time must have stopped at the table. He thought about going back and killing Hraldolf now that he had a weapon, but that would restart game time, wouldn’t it? He watched the nearest turn in the dungeon hall. They could be close.

  “Huh?” Gorthander asked.

  Still no guards. This conversation was definitely taking place out of game time.

  “Oh!” Gorthander said. “I remember! That was a long time ago.”

  “That was thirty seconds ago!” Damico said.

  “No, it was four weeks,” Gorthander said.

  “I still don’t remember it,” Omar said.

  “I think you fell asleep at the very end.”

  “I did not.”

  “Then you snore when you eat Cheetos.”

  “I occasionally rest my eyes at a game. I never snore!”

  “Oh good grief, you always snore.”

  “Shut up!” Damico said.

  They all fell silent.

  “Why has it been four weeks?” Damico continued.

  “Dude, it was your fault. You were the one with car problems,” Gorthander said.

  Damico opened his mouth, then reconsidered and closed it again. They thought they were talking to Carl. He kept forgetting that. Carl’s car hadn’t worked? They’d missed four weeks? Dear God, he really was dead. This had to be Hell.

  But what if it wasn’t? What if he hadn’t actually died yet and this was still the game. What if Carl’s mother was Kathy Bates from Misery? Could they have kept him alive for five or more weeks? Or maybe he was a John Doe languishing in the hospital in a permanent coma. If he’d been in a coma for more than a month, what were the chances of ever waking up?

  No, he had to push on. One thing at a time.

  “We have to get out of here.”

  “You,” Gorthander said, pointing at Damico. “Choir.” He indicated the rest of them.

  And Damico heard the guards start approaching again.

  Damico cursed and shot off down the hall, still dripping blood like Carrie at the prom. He reached the bottom of the stairway which led up and out, and climbed the steps as quietly as a ghost… or at least a ghost with boots full of blood that made all the nearby mice shudder and say, “Eeeeeewwwwwww.”

  At the top he found a guard, and dispatched the man with a squishy Back Stab. Then out and down a hall and running, running, have to get out now. He skidded to a halt at the edge of a huge marble room.

  The place had vaulted ceilings with intricate frescos. The walls were mirrors, and
the floor had a mirror finish. Balconies lined the top, and guards stood on the other side. He didn’t see how he could get across without sticking out like a burst blood bag on a snow bank.

  “What do we do?” he whispered.

  “Now you leave it to me,” Omar said, stepping into the room. He pitched his voice to carry. “Hey, assholes. Yeah, I mean you. We’re escaping your fortress! What are you going to do about it?”

  Gorthander darted up past Damico, careful not to touch the big, blood-soaked man. Then the two tanks stood in the opening, their weapons drawn. Damico fell back to the rear, ready to guard their flank.

  “You think that was a good idea?” he shouted.

  “I think if I’m gonna have to fight every guard within shouting distance, I don’t want them picking the spot,” Omar said.

  For once, Damico could see his point.

  The guards descended in droves, great hulking droves, like cattle. It was open range in the ballroom, and Omar was the lunch special. That’s not a mixed metaphor if you allow for cannibalism.

  The guards thundered as they descended, each guard eight feet tall and wearing enough armor to explode an MRI machine. They carried great hacking blades that they wielded with the finesse of a fishmonger… it wasn’t pretty, and things were awful stinky, but if you gave them a clear shot they only needed one swipe to remove a head.

  Omar did what he did best. He tanked. The job of the tank was to take obscene amounts of damage so he didn’t die before the cleric could roll out his healing spells. It was the role-playing equivalent of when you got your first athletic cup in high school and ran around the locker room screaming, “Kick me in the jimmies!”

  Omar was beautiful, an indestructible work of art. He’d picked up one of the popped guards’ weapons, and now he cut and thrust in that doorway, his armor taking hit after hit as he worked through the guard of one enemy, then another. Parry, parry, hack, parry. Parry, parry, hack, parry. Brian had designed his character to do one thing, and they’d been trying to deny him this the entire game. Now it was his turn to shine. When someone needed to read a book, it was Lotianna’s turn to be a Viking. When someone needed to play an instrument or thee and thou a woman into bed, it was Arithian’s turn to be a Viking. When someone actually needed to be a Viking, it was Omar’s turn.