by Oliver Mayes
Cassandra placed his food in front of him as he spoke, at once completely ignoring the implication of what he’d said and barely batting an eye.
“I’m sorry, it’s a bit cold. I heard you get in late yesterday and I made it a bit later, but since you didn’t wake up when I knocked I thought you could use the rest more than the sustenance.”
“Thanks, mom, I’m starving.”
She paused with her hands on the tray to nosily inspect his screen. Then she gave him a look.
“How did Lillian take it? I guess you were still with her after it happened, since you got back so late. I’m glad you were with her when she was having a tough time.”
Damien tensed his cheek muscles a little more, holding everything in place.
“Yeah, it was good to see her again. I’ve got to get back to it. Thank you so much for bringing me breakfast, I’m surprised you don’t want me to have it in the kitchen!”
“I know how busy you must be, and how hard you’re working. Keep at it. I’ll bring you lunch as well, in a while. Fancy a curry?”
“I’ll eat whatever you make me. Love you.”
“Love you too.”
She turned and had her hand on the doorknob before spontaneously turning and delivering what had actually been on her mind.
“I’m going back to the daycare tomorrow. I’m fit for work, the heart’s running perfectly, I’ve never been a stay-at-home person and I miss my kids. They miss me too, I hope. But I need to get started on my prep. I’ve got a favor to ask, if you have time?”
Damien groaned before he could stop himself, then swiveled in his chair, back toward his computer, so that his misgivings might be less obvious. He wasn’t happy Cassandra was returning to work so soon after her operation, but he knew better than to argue. If she’d made up her mind, debating it with her was a one-way street to an unnecessarily long talking to, followed by her doing what she’d said she would anyway. Besides which, she was obviously doing much better. There wasn’t much for him to complain about.
“What do you need?”
“I’d like for you to pick up groceries from the market street. Veggies mainly, some fruit as well, so we can get some actual nutrition for once. Before lunch would be ideal, so I can serve them up. Can you get them after you finish breakfast?”
“Sure, I’ll manage.”
“Thanks, honey. I’ll leave the list on the table.”
Damien grunted and Cassandra kissed him on the head before seeing herself out. The moment she’d closed the door behind her, Damien slumped down in his chair. There wasn’t much he could do here beyond moping, but that didn’t mean he felt like going outside. He sat up and started eating the food, slowly at first, but increasingly quickly as the joy of eating vanquished his distaste at having been eaten. Hunger was a powerful force, even more powerful than disgust. He went to have a look at his own channel while he ate, so he could do a quick review before heading out.
There was a private incoming message, from someone he actually knew as a friend in game. He desperately hoped it wasn’t Kevin. He was already under enough pressure without Kevin riding him for going against his advice. He squinted one eye shut as he opened the message window, then breathed out gratefully. It was from Lillian.
Lillian: Send me your footage from yesterday, please. I’m hustling and I need it.
Damien squinted at her politely framed, unreasonable demand. What did she need it for? He hadn’t edited it yet, he didn’t feel too good about sending it raw. Not even to Lillian. But he had other stuff to do today. Like eating and wallowing in self-loathing. He mashed out a reply into the box.
Daemien: What do you need it for? I might need it for my own stream, so don’t give it to anyone else.”
He’d barely gone back to looking through his channel comments when the chat box pinged.
Lillian: Not sharing it. Just need to see with my own eyes. Ammunition. We need help and I need to know what our enemies look like. If you want me to fix this, you’ll give it to me. QUICKLY.”
Jeez. Ever the negotiator, our Lillian. It couldn’t be helped. There was almost half an hour of footage there, he didn’t have time to review it before he went to pick up groceries. Pursing his lips, he picked up the video file and dumped the whole thing in the chat box, along with a flat statement of his own interests.
“Don’t put this anywhere near the Saga Online official channel. I’m doing this for a living now, and this whole thing you got me into yesterday is jeopardizing it. Hope you understand where I’m coming from.”
He clicked ‘Send’ and several gigabytes immediately moved out of his own personal control into the purview of a second person. What he’d said seemed a little mean, but he needed her to understand that this footage was very private.
Her reply was quick and by all rights should’ve had a ‘TM’ symbol next to it.
“Piss off Damien, I won’t send it to anyone. You must be pretty stressed out to insinuate that. Thanks for passing it to me despite your overwhelming paranoia. You’ll be eating your words before this evening, if I get this right.”
Well, that was pretty final. She sounded almost as stressed out as he was. Guess it was justified, but at least she unequivocally knew where he stood on distribution rights. Now he could move into his comments section and have his late breakfast while he read people’s hateful comments in peace.
There was a lot of the usual rubbish, with a higher proportion of people complaining about the lack of content than usual. He considered sending a message and decided against it. Things were bad enough already without inflicting his almost nonexistent charisma on an unsuspecting public. He’d been scrolling through his page for about fifty comments when something interesting, and altogether a little disturbing, showed up. A comment from a vaguely recognizable name, sent that morning, complete with a link invitation.
Scorepeeus63: Praise Be, Dark Lord! We would be honored if you could take some time to fill out our survey.
Hmm. That made an interesting change from the usual negative feedback. This guy was a Scorpius clone! Man, that sure brought back memories. Technically, they were the ones who’d killed Aetherius, when they’d guided a nine-year-old boy into combat as a joke, only for him...wait a minute...
Damien gave the messenger’s name another look and his mouth fell open. Scorepeeus. 63. The nine-year-old. It was this guy! This was the guy who’d killed Aetherius! He hadn’t heard anything from this lot since he’d returned to the game after his mom settled. He’d always thought they’d hit their peak as a group and disbanded, not least because the character they’d named themselves after, ‘Scorpius’ from his beta-testing days, had faded out after his big occultist reveal. He’d been a little surprised and more than a little put out at their disappearance. They’d proven themselves a very committed sect of mega-fans, bordering on extreme, right up until they’d vanished.
Why on earth were they inviting him to do a survey? That was a bit incongruous with calling him ‘Dark Lord’: ‘Good afternoon, Dark Lord. On a scale of 1–10, how would you rate your pain?’ He wouldn’t have even seen this message if he hadn’t been killed yesterday. Not much of a silver lining, but it was something. Better than backlash from people he’d killed, at any rate. He clicked on the link, not entirely sure what to expect, and was presented with bold white words on a black background, with absolutely no further information:
‘Type the name of your sponsor: _____, and wait until your membership is processed.’
Well, Scorepeeus63 was the one who’d sent him the link, right? He input his name and the screen went blank, save for a loading icon in the middle. Didn’t surveys need to be easily accessible, so people wouldn’t bugger off and do something else? Requiring not only verification but ‘membership’ on top seemed a little counterintuitive. If it weren’t for the weird form of address and the person who’d sent the link, he’d have closed the window. It seemed a little too strange to write it off completely, though. He decided to leave the page op
en while he went to do the groceries that had been requested of him. With any luck, by the time he was back it would be ready and he could see what this was all about. He single-mindedly chomped down the last bites of his breakfast and got dressed. It was time to take a trip down memory lane.
He turned out of the compound, giving the security camera outside the gate a glance, a wave and a grin, before heading into the alleyway. It was an improvement, not having to worry about his face being seen as he left his own home. The summer was nearing its end and the temperature had become ‘sweltering’ rather than ‘actively hostile’, but the greatest improvement to his comfort by far was not wearing a headset. It hadn’t bought him as much time as he’d hoped for, but at least it had been enough to sort himself out.
The worst mistake he’d made by far was waiting for the Central Union agents to show up at the internet cafe before he’d started frantically withdrawing credits from his mom’s card. He’d played the ‘what might’ve been’ game a fair few times in his head since that day, a deeply unhelpful hobby that lent itself to him naturally as a chronic overthinker, and generally found himself grateful. Had the idiots assigned to him blocked his mother’s card before they invaded his unsafe haven, he’d have been left with no credits at all. He’d have known they were coming, too, but without credits he’d have been dead in the water.
Even at his most self-deprecating, he found it hard to fault himself for the lapse of judgment. Maybe what he’d learned about the permissions of CU Child Services would be useful, next time he was traumatized from giving his mom a life-saving shot directly into her heart before she was kept in a medically induced coma as he attempted to win a streaming competition from scratch to save her life while simultaneously evading the aforementioned authorities. Ya never know.
Well, he was pretty sure it wouldn’t happen again. Fingers crossed. The important thing was not to demean himself for a simple mistake made under extreme duress. Not his forte. He was just glad this information wasn’t available to the general public; they were a pretty judgmental bunch, and he was plenty judgmental of himself already.
He came out of the alleyway and emerged into the bustling market street. The stalls were all different, as they were every day, but somehow it all seemed the same. With a couple of notable exceptions. He hoped the fish vendor had stayed home on this particular outing. The veggies could be anywhere, but he expected to find at least a few of the ones with less nutritional value staring at screens in the internet cafe. So when he looked into it on his way past, he had a bit of a shock.
There were red signs in the window, marked with ‘closing down’ in bold white text with red borders. He’d seen a lot of these signs in shop windows before, from shops that seemed to be in a permanent state of foreclosure with cut-price items that were not all that cheap. There were a couple of shops on that street that had been holding ‘closing down’ sales for years. People being what they were, they were generally full of would-be opportunists. Damien had a shorthand for them: gullibles.
Damien peered through the gaps in the internet cafe window as he passed it by on the opposite side of the street. It did not appear to be employing this as a tactic. It appeared to be very much closing down. The entire place was empty, as it had been when Damien had last visited it himself. ‘Closing down’ signs didn’t work as well for people who sold fast internet and judgment-free spaces as it did for retail, apparently. The door was wide open in a feeble attempt to invite people in. Damien peered through that as well, all the way to the back wall, and what he saw made his heart sink. The VR pods at the back had been wrapped around with red tape, as if each one were the centerpiece of a crime scene.
Damien quickly turned his head away and down to the floor as he walked past, as if taking his eyes off it would prevent it from existing. Even he’d clocked the pod distribution as being unsafe when he had last entered. At the time he’d viewed it as a positive. It meant that CU didn’t have eyes on that place. He hadn’t conceived that Tweedledum and Tweedledee would trawl through the footage manually, or that he’d inadvertently draw them to find the violation of an internet cafe which he’d considered to be off-grid.
He’d not given it much thought since he had left it – there’d been a lot on his mind – but his impact on the small business had clearly not been beneficial. While he’d somehow managed to come out of the ordeal relatively unscathed, he’d led CU on a red-tape path of destruction in his wake. That old man obsessed with his phone game was one of the few people who’d been kind to him, and this is what he’d got in return. If Damien hadn’t found a place so quickly, there was little doubt all his efforts would’ve been for naught.
The same went for the other place...what was it...Freja’s Freakshow Palace? No, that name was a bit off. The sentiment was right, though. She’d let him in as well, although she’d been a lot more reluctant to do it, given his age and the venue’s orientation. Damien hadn’t been to see the aftermath of that visit, but he had chucked nutrient juice all over the walls in a rage fit and fled. Not his finest hour.
He’d all but forgotten about them in the wake of his victory, but he doubted they’d forgotten about him. Not in a good way. The rush of traffic prompted him to look up. He’d gotten all the way to the end of the road while staring at his feet. He huffed and checked his pockets before turning on his heel, pretending for the benefit of exactly zero onlookers that he’d realized he’d left something at home. It wouldn’t do for the strangers around him to think he’d suffered some sort of mental lapse. He confirmed to himself that he’d suffered exactly that when he found the grocery stall right next to the internet cafe. He kept his eyes down as he picked out the choices his mom had made, half expecting a kind old man to run out and start heckling him in the street, before heading back home at double pace.
The groceries dumped in the fridge and his past behind him, Damien slumped into his chair and focused on the screen. To find utter pandemonium. His ‘membership’ had been approved. The ‘survey’ was most definitely not a survey. A large pentagram occupied the vast majority of the background as he scrolled through a block of very supportive, deeply disturbing communications:
Scorepeeus63: Behold, the prophet is come! My lamentations have summoned him from the abyss. Praise Be.
Scorpenis: Praise Be! My mother is also happy!
Daemiaemiaemien: What if Daemien, was, one of us? (dododoDOdo) Just a pagan, like, one of us? (dododoDOdo) Just a danger in the dusk, tryna harvest some sooooouls?
Scorpious666: He is risen. The slumbering one has awakened. I was there at the dawn of his creation: I stared into the void and the void said ‘No, that’s ok, you go ahead.’ The first words of our abyssal master! I failed to recognize their worth, and lo, I shall crawl across the earth on my belly for all time. Praise Be.
BabySharkolomew: Oooooh, it’s what you’ll do to meeeeeeeyooooooh, and all humanityeeeee. Ooooooh, you raise demon armiiiieeeeeeeesoooooooh, to kill everyone slowly, and then I’ll say Praise Be.
Vargus: Be me. Eat a bag of dicks for breakfast. Go home for lunch and eat another bag of dicks. Finish work and start preparing my bag of dicks for dinner while I warm up ‘The Saga Continues’. No Aetherius. Me sad. Chew dicks pensively. Some guy called Scorpius fighting instead. Level 28. Total noobcake. ROFL, wut a tryhard. Noobcake kicks demi-god in my three meals a day and cusses him out in livestream, with broken arms and legs. Dicks spilling from my gobsmacked open mouth (soooooo many dicks). I inhale too hard and my dinner gets lodged in my throat. Stars in my vision, blacking out. Try to call my mom for help, but multiple phalli are blocking my respiratory organs. Tumble out of my chair sideways and hit the ground, hands around my throat to dislodge all the penises I’ve been chowing down on. There’s no hope, there are too many. Everything goes dark.
Wake up, my vision is blurry and my throat is blissfully unburdened by inadvertent deep throating. I’m being transported somewhere. Am I on my way to heaven? How will I explain my eating habits to Saint Peter
? Big blurry white words are floating into perspective in the center of my vision. I try to focus on them, my brain still struggling to replenish oxygen. The words clear, and it is obvious that my diet has not gone unnoticed. I am in hell. ‘The Elder Scrolls V’. Oh no, oh god no, anything but that! ‘SKYRIM’. Please, St. Peter, I can change, please don’t forsake me, PLEA- “Hey you, you’re finally awake”. Thanks Todd.
10/10, would eat dicks and watch Daemien kick a demi-god in the schlong again.
Praise Be.
Daermiern: Finally we will be together, Dark Lawd! Finally we will be together! I feel your embrace, Dark Lawd! I love you so much! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Praise Be.
Scawpeous69: I was blind, but now I see! I am Daemien, and Daemien is me! Praise Be.
ScawPious: Bid my bloodlust ru - CAN’T WAKE UP - cancel possesio - SAAAAVE MAAAAAAAIII - Save me from the Noi-gel I’ve become. Praise Be!
Daemiaemiaemien: Oh, and Praise Be.
What in the name of all that was tasteful was this? Damien’s eyes roved around the rest of the page, searching desperately for some sort of anchor to reality that he could cling to in this sea of depravity. There was not much to be found. The page had a member list, going at more than sixty strong, with not very many online. That made sense, given that these reprobates came across as creatures of the night.
He scrolled back up and found a banner at the top of the page, designating this far-flung corner of society as ‘The Nine-Year-Old Army’. What a bunch of nine-year-olds were doing flinging profanity around for his benefit in a dark corner of the internet, Damien was sure he had no idea. His instincts said ‘flee’, but his ego said ‘let’s see what happens if I type a message into the comments box’.
Damien typed a message into the comments box.
Daemien: Good afternoon. (1:1)
Just when he thought it couldn’t get any weirder, it did.
ScawPious: It speaks! Shun the nonbelievers! Shuuuuuuuuuuuun! Praise Be.