by A. J. Markam
“Yep, Ian banged me into a Sleeping Beauty-style coma,” Alaria said nonchalantly.
I looked at her in surprise. She just winked, smiled, and blew me a kiss.
“Wonderful, wonderful!” Zali cried out, then elbowed me in the ribs. “Sooo… today ees the day you keel me, no?”
“Hopefully,” I muttered.
“I must warn you, my freend… I have not had my sheet this morneeeng!” he said in a sing-song voice.
“…great.”
“So, shall we conteenue our epeec battle from yesterday?”
“Sure, let’s – ”
“Can we look around the sculpture garden again first?” Alaria interrupted.
“Of course!” Zali exclaimed. “There ees always time for art!”
“NO THERE ISN’T,” I snapped, and gave Alaria the stink-eye.
She just grinned and stuck her tongue out at me.
“But I inseest! Let us go through the garden first!”
“The gay part,” Alaria interjected.
“Of course, of course, wherever you weesh!”
“NO!” I shouted. “PREPARE TO DIE!”
And then I hit him with Soul Suck.
Now, I’ll admit, it wasn’t very sporting to just attack him like that – but if the alternative was to go look at a bunch of gay porn, then I was perfectly willing to be a dick.
…wait…
…that didn’t come out right…
Zali, on the other hand, was amused rather than outraged by my poor sportsmanship.
“Oh ho – treecky, treecky!” he laughed, waggled a finger at me, and then started to cast his spells.
I was dead inside 45 seconds.
I resurrected immediately at my gravesite, which was back inside the sculpture garden –
Right next to a bunch of incubi with their dongs out.
“GOD DAMMIT!” I roared, and raced back towards the villa.
Zali met me halfway.
“Here we go!” he cried exuberantly, and killed me again.
And again.
And again.
Finally, out of sheer desperation, I reached into one of my bags for the only wild card I had: the crystal dungeon core that had once housed Alaria’s soul.
I slammed it down into the sandy ocean floor, and pink crystal spread underneath us like ice in a sped-up documentary clip. Walls of pink crystal rose up into the air and formed a cathedral-style, sloped ceiling above our heads.
“Oh, this place,” Alaria grunted as she looked around us. She hadn’t exactly enjoyed being a dungeon core.
Stig just lay down in a sparkly corner for a nap.
“What ees theees?!” Zali said, goggling at it all in wonder.
“This is where you die,” I snarled, just like a 1980’s B-movie action hero.
I pulled up my menu and summoned the first round of monsters – a giant slime mold and two skeletons in rusted armor.
“WAIT!” Zali screamed, his arms outstretched.
What possessed me to comply, I don’t know, but I hit pause on the menu bar and the three monsters just stood there, waiting.
“What?” I called out.
“I like eet,” the little hatchetfish said. “How much?”
I frowned. “How much what?”
“How much do you want for eet?”
I stared for him as his meaning finally sunk in. “It’s not for sale!”
“It could be,” Alaria said.
“NO, it’s not,” I said, shooting her a look.
“Eet ees a dungeon core, no?” Zali continued. “I could do GREAT ART weeth such a power. How much?”
“I told you, it’s not for sale!”
The hatchetfish twiddled his mustache. “I weel give you… one meellion gold.”
I gulped. Hard.
One million gold?!
Holy sheet – uh, shit!
That would be more than enough to pay off Varkus, the goblin mob boss who’d sent bounty hunter after bounty hunter to track me down!
Hell, it would be over 50 times what I needed!
You could purchase OtherWorld gold on the internet, even though my boss had forbidden me to do so to get out of Varkus’s debt. The more you purchased, the bigger a discount the black market gold farmer exchanges would give you.
5000 gold was going for roughly $1000 these days. I had no idea how much a million gold went for – there was no way it was worth $200,000 – but I figured it had to have been worth at least half that!
THE GAME HAD JUST OFFERED ME $100,000 TO SELL A –
“Tee-hee, I was only joking, I do not have one meellion,” Zali tittered. “How about… 500 gold? Actually, I am not sure I have that, either… makeeng art is expeeenseeeve… how about 20 gold?”
I stared at him.
ASSHOLE.
I felt like a kid who’d just been told that Santa Claus didn’t exist, and then the person who told me had just laughed in my face.
“NO,” I snarled.
“Oh. Well, if you change your mind, let me know.”
And then he killed me.
Oh, I threw some slime molds and skeletons at him first, but he defeated them effortlessly.
I resurrected outside my dungeon, ignored the incubi dongs, and rushed back inside.
“Tweeenty-one gold,” Zali offered as soon as he saw me.
“NO!”
“…fine,” he sighed, and killed me again.
I got him up to 55 gold – in increments of one gold each time I died – before I finally threw in the towel.
“I can’t kill him!” I told Alaria in frustrated despair. “We might as well leave, ‘cause it’s not gonna happen.”
“Wait – no – don’t geeve up!” Zali cried out. “You are geetting so much better!”
Alaria pecked me on the lips and smiled. “It’s okay. We can leave anytime you want… but are you sure you want to?” she asked, raising her eyebrows. “I mean, we both slept pretty well last night, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes! Leesten to your succubus!” Zali implored me. “I have the most comfortable beds in the keengdom!”
I weighed the possibility of spending another night with both Alaria and Lilandra. Truthfully, though, I was so fucking pissed at my spectacular failures fighting Zali that I just wanted to get the fuck out of there.
I deactivated the dungeon core menu, and the crystal cathedral crumbled to sand around us.
“Noooo!” Zali wailed theatrically as he held up his hands and tried to catch some of the dust.
I smiled ruefully at Alaria. “We’ll come back, I promise… but right now, I just want to leave.”
“Wherever weel you go?” Zali butted in. “Whatever weel you do?”
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do: I’m going to go find a dungeon, I’m going to grind it, I’m going to level up, and I’m going to come here and POUND your ass into the ground.”
Zali’s eyebrows shot up, and his mustache quivered. “You weel pound it hard?”
“…what?”
“My ass. You said you would pound my ass eento the ground. You weel pound it HARD, no?”
I stared at him. “I… I’m just going to keel y– KILL you.”
The hatchetfish gasped. “You weel pound my ass SO HARD you will KEEL me?”
“And you didn’t want to visit the gay part of the sculpture garden,” Alaria snickered.
“NO!” I yelled. “No pounding of the ass! I just misspoke!”
Zali shook his head sagely. “I do not think you mees-spoke.”
“YES I DID!”
Stig took that very inopportune moment to leap up from his drunken stupor and repeat something he’d picked up while we were doing a Christmas-related quest a while back.
“Hump bug, hump bug, hump bug!” he cried as he jumped around, thrusting his crotch into the air and spanking an imaginary ass.
“STOP THAT!” I yelled at him.
“Alright,” Zali relented. “Eef I cannot change your mind, there ee
I stared at Zali, then leaned over and whispered in Alaria’s ear. “Do you know what he’s talking about?”
“The Great Abyss, or pounding asses?” she whispered back. “Because I happen to know a lot about both, actua– ”
“THE DUNGEON,” I hissed. “Is it a gay dungeon? Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but – ”
“Do you want it to be a gay dungeon?” she asked slyly.
“NO!”
“Awww…” she pouted.
“Is it or isn’t it? Gay, I mean.”
“It’s not gay.”
I turned back to Zali. “Fine – we’ll go to the Great Abyss.”
“And then you weel come back and pound my ass, no?” Zali asked as he wiggled his eyebrows. Or where his eyebrows would have been if fish had eyebrows.
“NO!”
“…maybe, yes?”
“NO!” I yelled over my shoulder as I led Alaria and Stig out of the sculpture garden.
“…alright… well, come back anee-time you weesh!”
The last I saw of Zali was him standing alone and forlorn, surrounded by his forest of three-dimensional porn.
And dongs.
Way too many dongs.
18
We couldn’t swim up over the city walls, so we had to leave by the main gate – which brought me back into contact with some of my most favorite people in the world.
That was sarcasm.
The protestors were back in front of the city, waving their signs and chanting stupid slogans.
“OtherWorld
“Is not great
“Sex is just to pro-create!”
Genius. Truly.
I led Stig and Alaria along the inside wall from the side so the protestors couldn’t see me. When we were close enough, I waved at the Naga commander. “Psst!”
He looked over and recognized me. Seeing as I had killed a bunch of his least favorite people in the world, he did me the courtesy of slithering on over. “What?”
“Is there a back way out of the city?” I asked.
“No.”
“And you’ve got some sort of shield over the city, right?”
“Of course. Otherwise people could just swim over the wall.”
“You wouldn’t consider turning that shield off for a few seconds so we could swim out of here, would you?”
“No.”
I sighed. “Then I guess we’re going out the front door.”
The captain cocked the spiny fin over his left eye. I think it was supposed to be a Naga eyebrow.
“Are you sure you want to do that? They’ve been waiting for you.”
Great.
“Are you going to turn off the shield?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll deal with it. Just open the gate.”
The captain yelled, “Open the gate!” and a Naga soldier unbarred the door.
As soon as I stepped past the wall into view, there was a collective gasp – and then the crowd started yelling, “MUR-DER-ER! MUR-DER-ER!”
“Oh, get over yourselves,” I yelled back. “It’s a video game. You came back to life, didn’t you?” Then I was struck by inspiration. “See – you’re just like your hero now, and you didn’t even have to wait three days!”
They did NOT like that.
“BLAS-PHE-MY! BLAS-PHE-MY!” they chanted.
But everything got exponentially worse as soon as Alaria stepped into view.
There was a gasp from the crowd.
“What is she wearing?” one granny-lady-in-training gasped.
The answer: not much.
“What a slut!” some other protestor yelled.
“Thank you!” Alaria said brightly, which confused the hell out of them.
I noticed that quite a few of the protestors were staring at her, wide-eyed and slack-jawed.
I couldn’t tell their genders in most cases – I mean, how do you differentiate a boy Lobster person from a girl? – but I was betting they were guys. Saving up images later for their own personal spank banks once they got tired of yanking it to Song of Solomon.
But who knows – maybe a few of them were women for whom the conversion therapy hadn’t quite stuck.
Then Alaria saw the posters they were carrying – including one with a drawing of a bloody hand getting a nail pounded through it into a piece of wood. Beneath the gory picture were the stenciled words, Jesus cries every time you fornicate in OtherWorld.
I don’t know why Jesus should be the only getting nailed, though.
Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all weekend.
Alaria gasped, pushed her way out the open gates, and pointed at the poster. “You know JESUS?!”
The crowd grew quieter, unsure of whether she was trolling them or not.
She wasn’t.
Unfortunately.
“Tell me all about him!” she said excitedly.
Oh no.
I hustled through the gates and tried to pull her way. “Not a good idea, babe…”
She wasn’t having any of it. No, she wanted to sit in on Sunday School as taught by the Westboro Baptist Church.
“Jesus is the Son of God!” someone yelled.
“Ian says that, too,” she yelled back, “but which one?”
The protestors seemed stunned.
“…what?” one of them asked.
“Which god? There’s a whole bunch of them – and goddesses, too.” She counted them off on her hand. “There’s Jaiya the goddess of sex, Chalastia the goddess of purity – oh, and Priapon, my favorite!” she said with a naughty smirk. “He’s the god of phalluses, you know.”
Huh.
Did not know that.
“His name is Yahweh!” someone in the crowd yelled.
Others shouted,
“Jehovah!”
“El Shaddai!”
“Adonai!”
Alaria shrugged. “Haven’t heard of any of them.”
“You slutty heathen!” somebody yelled at her.
“Yes,” she agreed happily.
“There is only one true God!” somebody else yelled.
She sighed in frustration. “They all say that, but I’ve personally seen half a dozen.”
“What kind of video game is this?!” someone screamed. “What are they teaching our children?!”
Alaria squinted like she was confused. “What is a ‘vid-ee-oh game’? And why does Jesus hate sex?”
“Jesus doesn’t hate sex!” one of the protestors yelled.
“But he doesn’t want you to have it,” Alaria said, mystified.
“Yes he does – but only inside the sacred bond of marriage!”
Alaria made a face. “Well that just RUINS it.”
“I’ll say,” a Lobster guy on the front line muttered, only to be smacked by his Lobster wife.
“Sex is a holy sacrament!” one of the protestors yelled.
“True,” Alaria agreed solemnly. “When you do it with temple prostitutes.”
Oh boy.
There was a gasp from the crowd.
“You make sex dirty!” someone yelled at her angrily.
“Yes – dirty, and nasty, and very, very bad!” Alaria giggled – then bit her lip and made a Oooooh, fuck me NOW face. “But only when it’s really, REALLY good.”
A third of the protestors’ jaws went slack again.
There went another deposit into the spank bank.
“Hump bug, hump bug, hump bug!” Stig yelled out, and began to thrust his hips and spank an invisible butt again.
Before anyone could react to Stig’s entrance into the discussion, Alaria pointed innocently at the ‘Jesus cries’ poster. “Is that Jesus getting a nail pounded into his hand?”
“Yes!” someone shouted.
“Even I don’t do that,” Alaria purred. “Mmmm… Jesus is a VERY kinky boy.”
That didn’t go over very well.
“BLASPHEMY!” one of the protestors screamed.
It was a Lobster Lady – and suddenly she launched herself at us.
I hit her with Terrify, which sent her screaming in the opposite direction.
Well, THAT was a nice, non-violent way to handle things, I thought.
Except that her protestor friends weren’t really in the mood for non-violence.
More like some Armageddon-type shit.
They surged forward with a group roar of rage.
“Shit,” I muttered, and started laying on the Soul Suck.
I immediately noticed, however, that they didn’t die as fast as last time. It was taking as much as a full six-second blast of Soul Suck to kill off just one protestor.
Out of curiosity, I checked their Levels and saw that they ranged from Level 3 to 5.
Holy shit, the Jesus freaks are levelling up!
They must have taken my advice last time and started becoming more powerful for an occasion like this one.
The entire crowd mobbed us, claws snapping, knives flashing, signs whapping.
“Hey, what happened to ‘Turn the other cheek’?” I yelled at them.
Guess it went the same route as ‘Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself.’
Alaria summoned her pitchfork and poked a lot of them to death, and Stig vomited on a couple of them, which was almost as effective as Terrify.
With my demons’ help, I could have killed them all – but I had a lot more pressing items on my To-Do List than gank a bunch of Bible-thumping prudes.
Luckily, we had a fast-swim trinket. The protestors did not.
They quickly faded into the distance as we swam away at Michael Phelps levels of speed.
“Why do those people hate sex so much?” Alaria asked me. “Are they that bad at it?”
“Some of them are,” I admitted. “But the main thing is, they believe you should only have sex if you’re married.”
“They were serious about that?” Alaria asked, astounded.
“Yeah.”
“Oh… well, at least you can do oral outside of marriage.”
“You’re not supposed to.”
She stared at me like I was insane. “NO ORAL?”
“No.”
“Well, handjobs are okay then, right? Diddling each other?”
“No, not really…”
“NO?!” She looked aghast. “What about frottage?”
“What is that?!”
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