The Arcade: Chapter 3

 Ok, so the first thing you're going to notice about this one is that it is in third-person omniscient point-of-view. There was a huge gap of time in between when I wrote parts 1 and 2, and then part 3, so I kind of forgot that they were supposed to be in first person. 

So just forget about that and enjoy it!

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“Prepare for atmospheric reentry,” cooed the computer system onboard the escape pod which was plummeting towards the surface of an Earth-like planet. The small, spherical, waiting room-like craft began to rock violently as blue ocean turned into the whiteness of clouds ripping past. Just as Steve grabbed at his seat’s harness in an attempt to stabilize the status of his stomach, which was quickly approaching barf levels, the pod announced in a waitressy tone:

            “Enabling comfort protocols,” and the thrashing suddenly ceased, the sound of rattling components replaced by smooth jazz. The image of the ever-quickening approach of the planet’s surface on the video screen over the shoulder of Steve’s robotic companion, JORDI, turned into one of kittens playing.

            “Coffee, sir?” asked JORDI, extending in his metallic hand a plastic cup he’d retrieved fresh from a dispenser on the wall.

            “Sure, thanks,” obliged Steve, noticing that JORDI was actually tapping his metal fingers against one knee to the rhythm of the muzak. There was a soft thud underneath Steve’s feet not unlike that of an elevator reaching ground floor, and the hatch slid open, revealing a green countryside complete with picturesque village in the distance.

            “So up next is Harkenshire,” Steve mused.

            “You are familiar with this planet, sir?” chirped JORDI, fiddling with an access panel on the side of the pod.

            “You could say that. And I’m sure I know which session this is too,” but before he could continue:

            “Life forms! Seventy meters north!” cried the metal man, and sure enough, a raiding party composed of equal parts ogres and orcs, with a smattering of kobolds for good measure was approaching the village, smashing their crude weapons together in anticipation as they came nearer to the puny town gates.

            “Calm down,” said Steve, easing himself down onto the ramp produced by the empty pod. “There are enough heroes at the inn in town to clean up that mess. Rob’s character has a new staff full of charges to try out.”

            The monsters in the distance were joyfully ripping logs from the village’s shield wall, climbing over each other for a chance at the terrified townsfolk. Helpless villagers. Then Steve remembered exactly what was going to happen during this particular session.

            He got up in a hurry, tossing away his second cup of space-coffee. “JORDI, we have to go help them!” Without question the android abandoned his maintenance work and was trotting alongside his captain, restraining his hydraulic strides to match.

            As they closed in on the dilapidated gates they could see the fighting within. The meager untrained forces of the town guard were being eaten alive (in some cases more literally than in others), but in the center of the town square three warriors, obviously player characters due to their ludicrous amount of costume and armor detail, fought off the beasts in a triangle formation.

            Reaching and passing through the broken wall, Steve and his robot entered the fray, Steve staying behind JORDI as he turned snarling, blunt instrument-wielding fiends into piles of dust with his vaporizer. Bolts of arcane energy pierced through the abdomens and heads of orcs, flying from the tip of a robed and bespectacled wizard’s staff. He was smiling as a boy a quarter of his age, blasting away, flanked by an elven huntress, loosing shimmering magical arrow after arrow while her enormous cleavage attempted valiantly to escape its meager restraints.

            On the other side was the character Steve had played, a battle-hardened cleric smashing ogres with morning star and enchanted shield alike. In the midst of the chaos Steve was searching, hoping that the girl was still alive when he saw her: the spitting image of his first girlfriend, Tracy, red hair, freckles and all in the grasp of a particularly bloodthirsty orc by the back on her plain dress. Rob’s wizard was mopping up the remaining opposition with some sort of vortex spell while the cleric finished the last kobold with the sharp edge of his emblemized holy shield, and the huntress kept an arrow knocked and trained on the final orc with his hostage.

            Steve knew how it was about to go down. He’d replayed it dozens of times in his head at night after the infamous dumping after sixth period. The elf woman shouted for the monster to unhand her, to whom it laughed and snorted, and when the glimmering arrow was protruding from the back of the orc’s head, it had already yanked its axe across the girl’s throat. And even though the cleric roared in dismay, her wound too grave even for cure heavy wounds, the sixteen-year-old player who held the dice chuckled and smirked.

            But not this time.

            “JORDI, now!” yelled Steve, and with a speed even faster than that of the huntresses elvish reflexes, the robot aimed and fired his arm-mounted cannon, the orc’s molecular structure destabilizing, its axe falling in the dirt, and the girl unharmed save for a healthy lifelong fear of all orckind.

            “My, what a magnificent golem you have there, young man!” exclaimed the wizard.

The Arcade: Chapter 2

            “Can’t you just use divine magic or something to make me less anxious?” I asked, with both arms wrapped around my torso, checking for spiders. We’d just gone down into the basement and the only light coming in was from the open trapdoor to upstairs. The light only went so far and the chain to turn the one light bulb on was swinging almost imperceptibly just beyond where the light reached. I just knew there were spiders there. That’s where they live, in the darkness wherever your hand needs to go.

            “It doesn’t really work like that. Remember the whole non-interference thing?” said my angelic companion, only a few steps behind me.

            “Ok, you need to explain this to me right now: you can give me weapons, but can’t give me the equivalent of a holy aspirin. Yet there are demons here, what about them?”

            “One demon, and it’s similar to a non-aggression pact on Earth. This demon is breaking it. And the ways in which I’m allowed to assist you are complicated; difficult for a mortal to understand,” Mr. Greaser replied, adding a: “No offense,” after a pause. “If you want I can create light around that drawstring,” he added, a halo of golden light appearing around the drawstring and light bulb.

            “But you can’t just turn the light on, or make enough light for the entire room?” I said, my brow furrowing.

            “Again, that would be going too far.”

            With an exasperated sigh I pulled the spider-free string and the rest of the basement was illuminated. It wasn’t that big of a place. Part of me couldn’t believe I’d been afraid this long, but still I felt the need to investigate every corner for things that crawled around. So far, nothing, and the box that should have contained all my old D&D things and campaign materials was empty. The cardboard box marked creatively “Porn” by my friends was in the upper left corner of the room, devoid of anything save for some dice. I felt that maybe some of what the angel had said about alternative methods of killing a demon might require something like this. After all, this was how anything was killed in a table top RPG. So I stashed them in my pocket and looked around.

            “What now? I don’t see any demons.”

            “This is not the extent of its lair,” explained Greased Lightning, and pointed to a smooth metal slab on the east wall of the room. As I walked toward it I realized it was an outer hatch to the USP Star Phoenix, the intrepid vessel of a band of space adventurers whose campaign I had penned. The logo was there just as I’d drawn it, gilded phoenix surrounded by engraved stars. I couldn’t help but smile as I touched the surface, it felt so…validating. Like one of my dumb stories had been made into a movie.

            But as soon as my fingertips brushed the surface a small black screen on the left side of the hatch read: “CAPT. JOHNSON, STEVEN. ENTRY ADMITTED,” and the whole slab slid upward, revealing the interior of the Star Phoenix. I stood there on the other side grinning like an idiot until the angel said: “You do remember that there is a-“

            “SYSTEMS MALFUNCTION,” cried the ship’s computer, Ellen, as not only the metal of the doorway and the ship beyond lurched violently, but the entire basement behind too, as if it were all one interconnected vessel in outer space. I was thrown to the floor inside of the ship by the shaking and when I looked back the hatch had closed behind me, with the angel standing inside as if the entire place weren’t convulsing like an amusement park ride.

            “Ellen, what’s happening?!” I yelled over the din of sirens and what sounded like enemy fire.

            “PERIMETER DEFENSE DRONES ARE MALFUNCTIONING AND READING THE SHIP AS AN ENEMY TARGET,” she replied curtly. Now I remembered. This was the part where Tighdarians hacked the drones and set them against us, I think George’s character had had space-sex with one of the king’s space-daughters.

            “Sir?! What are you doing still aboard? The others have jettisoned in the escape pods, and what happened to your power suit?” screeched a humanoid, bipedal robot as he tumbled around the corner.

            “JORDI!” I yelped with more 10-year-old enthusiasm. He stayed behind to go down with the ship and make sure the pods got away safely, one of my more tragic storylines.

            “Sir, we must get you to the final escape pod before it’s too late!” the automaton intoned, lifting me to my feet and proceeding down the hall. I began to follow him when I remembered the angel behind me.

            “Aren’t you coming?” I said, motioning towards the escape pod.

            “No, it seems you’ve found a new companion. He can show you the way,” he said, combing his pompadour and staring at his reflection in the steel wall. “You will see me again, Steven. Until then, good luck,” the angel said, smiling. He turned toward the hatch but before he pressed the button to open it I remembered something.

            “Hey! You never told me your name.”

            “It’s Michael,” he told me, opened the hatch, and stepped into what was now outer space. The hallway was suddenly filled with suction into the vacuum beyond the hatch in the seconds it remained open, and fortunately there was a railing protruding from the wall to hold onto.

            “Jackass,” I muttered under my breath before starting towards the only remaining escape pod. JORDI stood next to it interfacing with the terminal, programming the pod’s flight path.

            “You’d better come with me, JORDI,” I shouted over the sirens, pulling at his metallic arm as I stepped into the small, yet roomy vessel.

            “But the ship, she might be saved,” suggested the android.

            “That doesn’t matter wherever I’m going. I need you.”

            “Very well sir,” JORDI consented. And drifting through outer space, I got to see my own creation, the starship USP Star Phoenix get demolished with my own eyes, plasma glinting in streaks from the drones that surrounded it like a swarm.

            This was one of the pretty-cool things that happened to me.

The Arcade: Chapter 1

            The arcade always had a basement, I’d just never been down there. See, I’m kind of afraid of dark and enclosed spaces, not to mention bugs. I will lose my shit if I see a roach. Anyway, a few of my friends had gone down before. I don’t know if they saw the demon that lived down there or what, but they never said anything. Or maybe they got brainwashed. Maybe they’re going to get activated and come back to kill me, who knows. What’s important is that a lot of very stupid things happened, and I’m going to tell you about them.

            It was a cold, airy evening when I came to visit my parents’ house. It could have been a warm, un-airy morning. I don’t remember, you pick. We made small talk, the kind where they still talk to you as if you were the same kid who used to live with them. They make references to things you used to do. They tell you what old friends whom you haven’t seen in years are doing. And I played along, pretending like I still cared, until the old arcade came up. My dad said he’d driven by and seen a light on, so I decided to go check it out. I don’t know why, though. I guess just to see how my old stuff was holding up. And maybe to kick out whatever old hobo was squatting there.

            So I pulled up to the dirt parking lot, turned off the car, and got out. I should probably mention that the arcade isn’t actually an arcade. It’s an old diner my family inherited that went out of business since it’s sort of out of the way on the edge of town. Also, the food wasn’t very good. I remembered the beef tasting strange, and also my great uncle who owned it ended up in the insane asylum, so that probably had something to do with it, too.

            After it went out of business my parents didn’t have any luck trying to sell it, so they just let me and my friends use it as a clubhouse. We mostly played D&D in there on weekends, and then by a Coleman lantern when it got dark because my parents didn’t pay to keep the power on. That’s why it was odd that all the lights inside were on. Even the sign reading the imaginative name of the place, Burgers!, was lit up, though I seemed to remember all the bulbs having been broken or missing.

            I walked inside and the place wasn’t immaculate by any means, but it didn’t look like a place that had lain in disuse for years either. In fact, it looked like it would have looked right after one of the old groups’ meetings. The booth we used to use was strewn with snack wrappers and scratch paper and pencils. One of our rulebooks was even on the table, but I knew we’d agreed to put all of those away in the basement the last time we met up, though

I never went down there myself. To make things weirder, all of the lights were on, even the ones in the kitchen. It looked like someone broke into this place and restored it, not to use it as a meth lab or sex dungeon, but actually found our old sourcebooks and said: “Forget whatever we were going to do, let’s play D&D!”

            I could feel that this was going to get weird. All three of the friends I used to play with moved away and I hadn’t heard from them since high school. This would be an awfully painful surprise if that’s what this was, some ill-advised high school-nerd-reunion set up by my parents. It was, in fact, my parents’ suggestion to come down here. It was all starting to come together, and as the doorknob to the front door was turning on cue, I was already putting on my fake smile.

            That was when the angel walked in. And I don’t mean that the love of my life walked into the room and I’m choosing to describe her as an angel. Totino’s pizza rolls are the love of my life right now, and they are less than angelic. No, an actual angel, from heaven, walked into Burgers!, except he didn’t look like one. He wore jeans and a white t-shirt under a black leather jacket with a pompadour. You’d think the last movie they got in heaven was Grease.

            “Hello Steve,” said the angel, “I’m an angel.” That’s one of the funny things I came to find out about celestial beings: They don’t really understand tact.

            “And I’m Dick Tracy,” I said, realizing that I don’t actually know who Dick Tracy is.

            “No,” the greaser-angel said, “You are Steve Johnson, and I am here to assist you.” Now it was really starting to get weird, so I reached for my gun, except I don’t have a gun, nor have I ever touched one, so it was more like stupidly brushing my hand against my hip.

            “Are you a friend of my parents or something? Whatever this joke is, I’m already tired of it,” I said, backing away.

            “I do know your parents, but that’s not why I’m here. I’m here because there’s a demon in the basement, and you have to kill it,” he said calmly, walking towards me.

            “Ok, what?” I was starting to say, when the thing that looked kind of like one of the sandworms from Dune only with two scaly legs and more than a few tentacles emerged from the basement trapdoor screaming something that sounded like, “SKLEEEEEUUUUUHHHHHHH.”      No sooner had I looked over my shoulder and seen it than I was bolting for the door. I ran into John Travolta blocking the way as he said: “Use this,” and handed me a TEC-9. I turned around squeamishly and aimed the automatic pistol with both shaking hands at the monster. Its legs were situated at the very back of its long, phallus-esque body and it was having a difficult time standing up and keeping balance before falling back over and shrieking, which made it an easy target. I took aim and squeezed the trigger, and my eyes shut as the gun flailed in my hands. I heard wood splinter and glass shatter.

            When I had emptied the clip and the wailing had stopped I opened my eyes to see the monster slumped on the floor. Only a handful of bullets had pierced the monster—the rest had found other targets all over the room—and it was bleeding something that resembled blue Powerade. Amazingly, the first thing I thought to do, rather than passing out or weeping, was to turn to my new friend and ask: “Ok, can I go home now?”

            “That was not the demon, merely one of the monstrosities being spawned by it. The evil we seek is less…corporeal,” mused the greaser as he lit a cigarette.

            “So it’s a ghost or spirit or something?” I asked, sitting down on the floor, turning away from the carcass across the room.

            “Something like that.”

            “So how am I supposed to kill it? And besides, why couldn’t you have shot that thing yourself just now?”

            “There are other ways, and us celestial beings cannot directly interfere with the fates of mortals,” he said, and took a long drag from his cigarette.

            “Handing me a gun seems pretty direct to me.”

            “Not so. Assistance is allowed. But we must press on,” the angel said as he stomped out his cigarette and approached the trap door.

            “Well, I’m sure you can find another mortal to help you,” I said as I dropped the gun, stood up, and dusted off my pants. “I have microwavable rolls of the pizza variety waiting for me at my apartment.” I figured I’d come back the next night and burn the place down, that ought to take care of it. But it was when I was unlocking my car door that I realized I knew that penis-shaped monster lying dead on the floor of the arcade. I’d known exactly where to shoot it even with my eyes closed. I had designed it for one of my old campaigns.

            “You know why it has to be you, Steve. You created them, and now that this demon has brought them to life, only you know how to destroy them,” the angel said behind me. And even though I knew I’d probably die, hey, I had an angel on my side. And it would be fun to see all these horrible things I’d dreamed up come to life. But mostly I wanted those old edition rulebooks back. They’d be worth a lot on eBay. So I turned around, put they keys back in my pocket, and walked back into the arcade, all while the greaser-angel popped up the collar on his jacket and said, “Eyyyyyy,” pointing both fingers at me.

            This was the first of the stupid decisions I made.

Thrilling Tales! Vol. 1

Bobby woke up to the Mr. Stevenson’s pet rooster cawing from down the street.

            “Good morning Mr. Rooster, today’s going to be a swell day!” he exclaimed without an ounce of grogginess, the smell of his mom’s famous pancakes made sure there’d be none of that. He threw on his trusty shorts and t-shirt, it was summer, and he didn’t have a minute to lose getting down to the old baseball diamond.

            He slid down the bannister the way his mom always told him not to, patted Max the dog on the head at the foot of the stair, and continued towards the aroma of batter.

            “OH LORD!” Bobby yelled as the woman who offered him a plate of three neatly stacked pancakes was not his mother but indeed a six foot tall bipedal octopus monster stuffed into one of his mother’s dresses and wearing a blonde wig.

            “BOOP! BLOOP-WOOP!” replied the monster, gesturing the pancakes toward him in a motherly fashion. If there was something wrong with Bobby’s mother, Max the dog did not seem to notice.

            Bobby slammed the plate o’ cakes out of the beast’s tentacle and into its even more tentacled face. Without a moment’s hesitation he bolted out through the backyard and into the street, cries of SCROOP-NOOOOOOOP! echoing behind him.

            He ran down the street, stopping on the sidewalk before Mr. Stevenson mowing his lawn.

            “Hey-ho, Bobby-boy! How ya lookin’?”

            “Good morning Mr. Stevenson, sir. Have you seen my mother today?”

            “Oh, well let’s see now, not since I saw her come out for the mornin’ pa-SKLERK,” he said, being frozen by a green tractor beam and pulled onboard a gigantic UFO floating overhead, which Bobby seemed not to have noticed until that moment.

            “Leapin’ Lazarus! I bet that’s where mom is!” And before Mr. Stevenson’s legs were just out of reach, Bobby jumped and clung to the man’s pant legs, gazing up into the green pearlescent void of the tractor beam which emitted a ZWORM, ZWORM kind of sound as they were pulled inside.

            Upon reaching the inside of the ship, Mr. Stevenson was being beamed into some kind of stasis pod in a long row of pods. Bobby let go just in time to land on his feet in front of the line of glass prisons. He could see Mrs. Schneebly, and Mr. McMannis the greengrocer, and even Little Timmy No-Legs the wheelchair bound boy, all suspended in tubes filled with green goop.

            He ran along the row, looking for his mother, but to no avail. He reached an archway, leading into another circular room, this one with panels and buttons and lights all over. In the middle of the room was yet another tube, this time containing Bobby’s mother, but around it was an array of terrifying instruments.

            “Mom! Did they hurt you?!”

            “No, sweetie,” she replied, “but you’ve got to get me out of here before they do. To do so you’ll need to travel to the three wings of the spacecraft, each one harder than the last in terms of puzzle difficulty, to acquire the three keys necessary to operate the release mechanism on my cell. Do you want me to repeat that one more time?”

            “No.”

            “Good, now press START to view a map of the ship, the highlighted parts are places you’ve explored-“

            “Uh, mom? Why don’t I just flip this big red lever that says ‘release’?” Bobby asked, pointing towards a very large red lever marked underneath with the word RELEASE.

            “Oh, well I guess that works, too,” his mother answered.

            Bobby pulled the lever, and just as he did so, his mother disappeared, her tube being sucked through the floor and replaced by a huge holographic head, blue and in the shape of a football.

            “CONGRATULATIONS, YOU HAVE PASSED THE FIRST TEST. I AM THE ALL-MIND, I KNOW ALL,” spoke the hologram.

            “If you know everything then why did you have to test me in the first place?”

            “SILENCE. THIS VESSEL REQUIRES THE RAW ENERGY OF HUMAN CHUTZPAH TO RUN. A COMMODITY OF WHICH YOU ARE IN POSSESION OF GREAT AMOUNTS. OF. ALREADY OUR CHUTZP-O-METERS ARE RUNNING OFF THE CHARTS,” the floating face said, nodding toward a screen that displayed meters showing a healthy green level. “NOW YOU WILL SERVE AS OUR NEW POWER SOURCE FOR THE REST OF YOUR DAYS, THAT IS, UNLESS YOU ESCAPE.”

            The head turned toward a hatch that had just slid open, marked ESCAPE, which upon closer inspection dropped immediately into a tube of green liquid.

            “NO, PLEASE DO NOT ESCAPE,” pleaded the All-Mind as Bobby peered down into the tube. Instead, Bobby ran out of the room through another open door, this time presented with a long corridor. Pleasantfield, his town, was visible through a long window. On the opposite wall were two hooks holding identical laser guns, one read DOOM RAY above its hook and the other NOT A DOOM RAY.

            Non-doom ray in hand, Bobby burst through the door at the end of the corridor and into a room containing a throne-like levitating seat turned away from view, surrounded by 4 BLOOP-WOOP-ing octopus monsters wielding spear-like weapons.

            “FANTASTIC,” the All-Mind announced from his throne, “USUALLY THEY PICK THE DOOM RAY, WHICH OF COURSE JUST OPENS A PIT IN THE FLOOR TO A STASIS POD. TRULY MAGNIFICENT CHUTZPAH! GUARDS, SEIZE HIM.”

            But before any of the guards could lay a tentacle on young Bobby, he had blasted the non-doom ray with extreme prejudice into each of their cephalopodan faces with a satisfying ZREEP ZREEP. The room rumbled all around them.

            “YES, EXCELLENT! THIS IS MORE CHUTZPAH THAN I COULD HAVE DREAMED OF! WHAT SAY YOU, BOBBY OF EARTH? WITH THESE POWER LEVELS WE COULD BECOME CONQUERORS OF ENTIRE GALAXIES!” cackled the All-Mind.

            “No thanks, Mr. All-Mind, I have a game to catch,” Bobby replied, leveling the raygun at the throne.

            “No!” cried Mr. Stevenson, swiveling around in the chair, “you wouldn’t shoot your dear old neighbor would you, Bobby-boy? Come along now and rule the universe like a good lad,” he begged as Bobby ascended the steps to his throne.

            “I was always pretty sure you were a pedophile anyway.” ZREEP flashed the non-doom ray, splattering a satisfying blue mist of alien entrails over Bobby’s face.

           

            “Well, I’m sure glad that’s over with,” said Bobby, digging into his pancakes at the kitchen table, “everything’s back to normal.”

            “Not everything, those aliens sure know how to cook a mean pancake!” said Bobby’s mother, holding out a piece, “isn’t that right Max?”

            “JORT-JORT,” said the grotesque crab creature stuffed into a dog costume as it devoured the bit of pancake, and they all laughed happily ever after.