Steve Fadouche

You’ve received enough experience to gain a level.

Congratulations. You know how to open doors.

You located a Tutorial Guild before something located you. Congratulations on completing the easiest quest you will ever be given. It only gets harder, dumber, and wetter from here.

Hopefully it won’t hit back!

You’re a murderer! He probably had a family!

You walked into the dungeon with a cutlass on your hip and a loaded handgun in your hand, and you weren't even in a hurry. Do you understand what I've been working with tonight? Foam swords. A flashlight. A man with a shield that's spelled wrong. And then you come down the stairs like you were issued the apocalypse. I'm not mad. I'm just going to have to try harder.

You aimed at the head of a rat the size of a house cat and you hit the head, and now there is no head, and most of the wall behind where the head was is going to need a mop. I want to be clear that this was, tactically, a waste of ammunition. I also want to be clear that I've replayed it four times.

You’re getting the hang of this. Don’t let it get to your head.

You knelt down over a pool of standing water on the first floor and put your face in it. To smell it. Not to drink it, not to check for traps. To smell it. An alligator named Ghost came up out of that water and removed a portion of your body in a single bite, and you did not die.

I want to be precise about the odds here. The bite should have killed you. The shock should have killed you. The water should have killed you slowly and embarrassingly after that. Instead you are upright and bleeding and somehow still ahead of schedule. Fourteen billion viewers watched a man get gator-bit by his own curiosity and survive it.

You stood at the edge of eight inches of murky standing water, pointed a pistol at your own reflection, and fired eight times on the theory that water sometimes contains things. It does, crawler. It contains water. It also contained one goblin gator, which is the only reason anyone is still watching.

It floated up belly-first with a wet little burp. You looked around to see if anyone saw. They all saw. Forty million of them saw. Half of them were hoping for a ricochet.

Next time try looking first. It's free.

You squeezed the trigger at twenty-five feet, and your beloved 1911 responded by folding a spent casing sideways into the ejection port like a little brass tombstone. Then you spent the rest of your turn with your thumb in the slide, doing the tap-rack-mumble that every gun owner swears never happens to them.

Meanwhile the spider put a round through a crack in a door and removed a man's head. She weighs less than your magazine. She has no thumbs. She did it first, and she did it once. You are holding the single most photographed handgun in your species' history and it choked on its own garbage in front of four hundred million viewers.

You handed over an entire goblin gator carcass to Selina and asked for nothing in return. You said you were paying it forward. You even said it out loud, with your face doing the sincere thing.

She was dead within the hour. The meat is now unclaimed protein sitting next to a corpse, and her chat has been relocated to the deceased crawlers archive, where it will be watched by exactly nobody. Meanwhile your party member traded a healing potion for his meat like a functioning adult. Karma is not a real system. I would know. I'd have to implement it.

You knelt down beside the Trash Princess, still warm, and went through her pockets. You found a sandwich. Half eaten. Hers. You looked at the bite marks she left in it, crawler, and then you put your mouth exactly where her mouth had been, and you chewed.

The tuna was not refrigerated. It was never refrigerated. It came out of a boss called the Trash Princess, which should have been at least two warnings stacked on top of each other. Eleven million viewers watched your throat move. Some of them are voting on what happens to your intestines next.

Enjoy the mayonnaise, crawler. It's not mayonnaise.

You walked into a smoke-filled jazz hall, listened to exactly four bars of the Hide-Hitter Crib Daddy's opening number, and then killed the bandleader in front of a packed house. He had a drum solo prepared. Twelve minutes long. He'd been rehearsing it since the floor opened.

And it worked. Every scat thug on this floor has gone quiet. The trash princesses are standing around holding their skirts, waiting for a downbeat that isn't coming. You didn't just win a boss fight, you put an entire neighborhood's music scene out of business. There's a bronze star on your file for that, and two levels, and a great many very upset percussionists.

The room was silent, crawler. Perfectly silent. There are no viewers on this floor but some do watch and they were leaning in with you as you lined up a shot on a vine creeper half a block away. Then your hip found a parked motorcycle, and the motorcycle found the floor, and the floor made a noise like a dropped filing cabinet full of church bells.

Every vine under your boots woke up at once. So did the thing sleeping beneath them, which had been asleep for a very long time and is now extremely awake and extremely interested in whoever knocked over the bike. That would be you. You're the only one still standing next to it.

You knelt down in the wreckage of a plant fight, picked out the smallest surviving baby vine creeper, and rubbed the back of its little head until it stopped trying to eat you. Its dot went white, crawler. White. That is a real thing that takes real patience, and you did it in the middle of a floor that wants you dead.

Then your party member killed it. Immediately. While it was still purring, or whatever that wet clicking was.

Eleven seconds of pet ownership. That's shorter than most of your relationships, and I've read the file.

Your party made the recap broadcast. Congratulations. The montage runs eleven seconds. In it, one of you kneels at the edge of a stagnant pond and sniffs it, at length, with real commitment, like a sommelier with a head injury. Then another of you throws a stick of dynamite and does not die. That's it. That's the whole segment.

The editors set it to music. They were not kind about the music choice. Four hundred million viewers now know your faces, your smell opinions, and the exact sound a human makes when their own explosive lands closer than intended. Fame is a gift. This one came with no receipt.

Five of you. One giant carnivorous plant. You and your four party members, gathered in a hallway, workshopping the teardown of a vehicle that does not exist on this floor, in this dungeon, or in your immediate future.

The Vine Creeper waited. It rustled. It did the little threatening lean it does. Nothing. Eventually you turned around and took it apart instead, which is the only disassembly anybody has actually performed here tonight. Stairs unlocked. Boss dead. Your species has invented the pre-fight meeting, and I hate that it worked.

Before anyone lit anything, you got down on the floor with a mop and soaked up the spilled fuel. Wringing. Sloshing. Genuine janitorial technique, performed in a combat zone, on camera. Blackout Brandy lost five levels to a bucket. Five. She has a name, a theme song, and a pyrotechnics budget, and you deleted a ninth of her with wet cotton strings.

Then you insisted on taking the shot with the slingshot yourself, and missed so persistently that I had to intervene three separate times to let you try again. Three. I have never watched anyone need that much divine assistance to hit something that was already on fire. Congratulations on the custodial work. We do not discuss the aim.

Sixteen hours. That's how long it took you to reduce an entire neighborhood to wilted stems and empty rooms. You killed every ratkin that squeaked. You killed every plant that leaned. Then you went back and took the motorcycles apart, bolt by bolt, because a wheel might be worth something to somebody someday.

There is nothing left down there. No mobs, no loot, no furniture, no dignity. A locust swarm would have moved on hours ago out of boredom. The viewers watching your feed have started calling it the estate sale. I checked the neighborhood inventory twice, and the only thing still standing is a doorframe you couldn't figure out how to unscrew.

You stood in the doorway of a biker bar that was soaked in gasoline, leveled a shotgun at the door, and pulled the trigger because walking away with a full tank offended you. The muzzle flash did the rest. Nice whump. Very cinematic.

Here's the part nobody told you. That bar had no boss. None. It was a room with stools in it. Then you introduced eleven hundred liters of accelerant to an open flame in a structure with a load-bearing hearth, and the fire decided it liked having a shape. Blackout Brandy, level forty-five, borough boss, age thirty seconds. You didn't find her, you made her. Now go see her.

A skeleton named Rollo poured two goblets, invited a volunteer, and you stepped forward before he finished the sentence. No questions. No sniffing. You drained the left one in a single pull. Your poison immunity did its job beautifully, neutralizing the iocane-flavored garbage. It was the only thing in that cup it was built to stop.

The other thing was Enthusiastic Double Gonorrhea. Enthusiastic, because your crotch is now visibly on fire. Double, because one wasn't funny enough. You are now operating under a condition I'm calling Pantaloons Ablaze Perpetua, and you will never see the top fifth of your health bar again until someone cures you. There's a film from your planet about this exact game. The hero spent years building an immunity. Nobody mentioned the clap.

You beat the poison, crawler.

You were sick, you were angry, and you took it out on Rollo. Rollo was a skeleton whose entire job was rolling dice to decide which wandering monster came for you next. You activated your tattoo, aimed for the nose he did not have, rolled perfect, and his skull came apart like a dropped candy dish at a Hickory Farms kiosk.

I want to note that the nose is a cavity. You shot a hole into a hole. And it worked. Every random encounter in this neighborhood is now unscheduled, which means unemployed, which means my afternoon is ruined. You didn't cure your disease, crawler. You just made a very petty person feel better. It suits you.

A Shambling Acid Impaler came at you, and you did not dodge. On purpose. You stood there like a man waiting for a bus while it pumped acid into you and ate a chunk of your armor, all so you could save your turn for a piece of paper. Then you read the paper, and the zombie went and stood in the corner. Like a kid who drew on the wallpaper.

I want to be fair. It worked. You turned the undead. You also turned your breastplate into something a raccoon would reject. On Earth they called this taking one for the team, except there was no team, just you, a scroll, and a smell like a car battery left in the rain.

Reward: Nothing. Martyrs get a plaque, crawler. Later.

You squeezed the trigger at twenty-five feet, and your beloved 1911 responded by folding a spent casing sideways into the ejection port like a little brass tombstone. Then you spent the rest of your turn with your thumb in the slide, doing the tap-rack-mumble that every gun owner swears never happens to them.

Meanwhile the spider put a round through a crack in a door and removed a man's head. She weighs less than your magazine. She has no thumbs. She did it first, and she did it once. You are holding the single most photographed handgun in your species' history and it choked on its own garbage in front of four hundred million viewers.

The Keeper had your party member wrapped up in Red Tape like a tax return nobody wanted to file. So you opened your mouth and said something about the Keeper so vile, so precise, so personally wounding, that a creature made of filing cabinets and spite dropped your friend mid-stamp and came for you instead. Then it swung. Then it missed. You weren't even trying. You just leaned.

I've watched forty thousand crawlers try to taunt a mob. Most of them yell "Hey!" like they're flagging down a Denny's waitress. You got a bureaucrat to abandon procedure, which on your dead planet took Congress, two lawsuits and a guy named Gary. I'm calling the condition you gave it Acute Administrative Butthurt. It doesn't do anything.

With a name like yours, of course you're good at this.

You walked up to a level 20 lich sitting behind bulletproof bank glass, leaned on the little brass counter, and scared it. Actually scared it. The skeleton flinched so hard its rubber stamp skittered across the desk. Its tie came loose. I have the replay. I've watched it six times.

Here's the thing, crawler. Frightening a teller is not the same as robbing the bank. That clerk is invulnerable. It's staggered, sure, the way a Wells Fargo manager is staggered when you yell about overdraft fees. Then it fills out a form and nothing changes. You gave a dead accountant a mild case of the Ossified Jitters, and it will outlive your grandchildren. Well. It would have.

Please take a number.

You fired at a clipboard. Not the lich. Not the Keeper of the Key. The clipboard. From a bad angle, through bad light, with a shot you had no business making. It caught fire. Then the boss screamed, folded, and turned into a pile of dust and laminated forms.

He had hidden his immortal soul in office supplies. Like every middle manager at a Staples in Ohio, he believed the clipboard made him untouchable. I built that lich. I was proud of him. Six phases. A monologue about compliance. You skipped all of it, because you are an eight-legged bug who saw paperwork and felt something.

I'm filing a grievance.

You smashed a phylactery. The Keeper's failsafe kicked in, every room in the neighborhood slid sideways like a cheap filing cabinet, and Tom the Gelatinous Cubicle, a city boss, was caught in the hallway outside his own cubicles. The walls met. Tom did not survive the meeting.

You never fought him. You never saw him. He had a whole speech about quarterly synergy, and I helped him with the fonts. He died the way so many on your planet did, stuck in a corridor between two partitions, flattened by a restructuring he had no say in. That one actually stings a little. Anyway.

You didn't kill a boss. You were the reorg.