Читать книгу Soda Pop Soldier - Nick Cole - Страница 12
ОглавлениеAt nine thirty I’m mostly sober, though I’ve filled a nice big tumbler of scotch and pulled out half a pack of smokes I’ve been meaning to throw away.
The stuff you’re liable to see on the Black is often just too much for a sober mind.
I lock my disk in, run my cracking daemon on it, then my computer screen turns black.
Maybe my computer couldn’t handle it.
Abandon All Hope … appears on-screen.
I hate this stuff.
I’m trying not to run the lights in the apartment to keep our electric bill down, and I know there’s no one in the room with me, but already I have a case of the willies. The pervasive sense of dread that accompanies the Black is already making its way into my mind. My old speakers begin to thud out the beat of ancient tribal drums as hammers strike anvils, nailing out high ringing notes. I look at the clock.
9:33 P.M. New York time.
Across the world, weirdos with a taste for the twisted that can no longer be satiated by the SimDungeons they’ve constructed in secret are logging on to an illegal open source i.p.
Looking for thrills.
The words open source are enough to get federal data surfers interested in what you’re doing, while at the same time dropping the AG’s office an e-mail to start filing blanket charges. Open source just isn’t done anymore. I know the reason why, all the reasons why. They teach them in history class. But it’s the only way to make money tonight, right now. Money I need yesterday. Who cares if open source was once responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of lives and a worldwide global collapse, pandemic, and famine. I need rent money.
Please be Light.
On-screen, blood red fades to gray, becoming concrete, stone, then finally grit.
I’m wondering what kind of game we’re playing tonight as I catch myself again repeating inside, Please be Light. Please be Light. Please be Light.
Will it be third world dueling crime syndicates in an open-world version of Kinshasa in the never-ending quagmire that is Greater Africa? Drugs. Hit missions. Gang warfare in the streets. Genocide.
Or …
Some over-the-top science fiction classic that’s been rewritten for the Black and its particular take on lust, torture, and ultraviolence? There was a Star Wars tribute Black game that got busted and made the news last year because some Hollywood actor hadn’t told the feds about his undeclared income from the game. He’d made an extra hundred thousand dollars playing a rapist C3PO who was fairly good at poker.
I stop.
Please be Light.
“Boys and girls, gents and ladies,” begins a soft, malevolent voice through my vintage Grundig Sharp speakers. Vintage meaning old, but they still do the trick. “Saints and sickos, tramps and troublemakers, predators and prey … it’s dyin’ time … again.”
Please be Light.
“Worldwide we are registering over fifty-five million subscribers for tonight’s event,” continues the announcer in his overstylized carny-of-the-damned tones. “And we ask ourselves, my fellow little perverts …”
Pause.
“Who will hack, slash, rape, and loot their way out of our little horror show tonight and for all the nights we play our game until everyone be dead or damned? Who’s ruthless enough to backstab, steal, and cheat their way out of hell? Tonight, my lovelies, we begin … again, in”—the voice is musical, singsong, melodic, its cheery note a counterpoint to the death carnival I’m sure I’m about to find myself in—“the lost World of Wastehavens.”
The music crescendos and then, after a short interlude of silence, returns to the wanderings of a mournful flute.
I have no idea what the World of Waste-whatever is.
“Behold the tower of the Razor Maiden, the Marrow Spike,” continues the announcer.
My screen clouds over. Blue shadows resolve into swirling dust, and from somewhere nearby over ambient in-game sound, I hear a crack of dry thunder followed by the patter of rain falling mutely into ancient, thick dust. Water drops cascade and echo and I’m struck by the certainty that if Sancerré is truly gone, out of my life, I’ll listen to the rain and think of her and it will be little consolation to a very lonely me.
On-screen a fat gibbous moon, swollen, corpulent, and odd, makes its way across the night as its light falls on a lonely desert. In the distance, a rising tower, more perversion or malignant growth than structure, stands out in the moonlit night. Its crazy architecture rises, feasible only in computer-rendered graphics, pushing away from a crumbling city that is slowly being consumed by the dunes of an endless desert. I let go of a fading hope I’d harbored for a simple AK and the clear-cut purpose of merely machine-gunning my way through this game until I’d earned enough money for rent.
Modern warfare is my specialty. Fantasy, not so much.
The spire is jagged and thorny, a black silhouette against the desert night, rising from the jumble of odd-angled ruins in an arid waste devoid of anything living, all made colder by the moon’s pale light. Only the most morbid tourist would choose such a place for an online vacation.
A piano in minor chord ponderously strikes cryptic notes as the camera pulls focus. I’m scanning for landmarks, features, anything I can use later to navigate my way to some cash and prizes. I don’t see any obvious enemies. Yet.
“Even now, pretty and not so pretty little things,” continues the announcer abruptly, “you’re awakening from your crypts, graves, tombs, and sewers …” On-screen the view switches to a collapsing graveyard in some courtyard near the the tower, forgotten and abandoned millennia untold. Gravestones with Gorey-like inscriptions denote fallen warriors. The sound of grinding stone caressing stone erupts across the ambient soundscape. A necrotic hand pushes from the earth. The piano continues to strike those minor chords, alternating now with other diminished chords that seem full of suffering and hollow all at once, turning the soundtrack into a march, into a call to nothing good.
I hate the undead.
They make me jittery. In most games, they just come at you in waves. Guns are basically useless. In fact, most things are useless against the undead. In the end it comes down to baseball bats and lead pipes. Which doesn’t matter—the more of them you send back to death, the more of them appear. I always wonder, after games I’ve played that involve the undead, after killing a thousand, two thousand, what that does to my mind. It can’t be good. One time I played a game where I had to kill fifty-seven-thousand-plus undead just to unlock an achievement. I can distinguish between reality and games, but … some people can’t. What does killing fifty-seven thousand humanlike once humans do to players?
The undead are a hard way to spend a thousand bucks.
A hard way to make rent.
“Prisoners and fiends, victims and in-betweens … ,” continues the game’s unseen announcer. The rattling of chains, a tortured scream, a woman sobs. Everything happens fast and just moments before the game reveals my avatar, the unknown character I’ll play as I attempt to beat this game, I see the tower above and hear the whimpering of a child.
“Razor Maiden, devourer of the innocent, eater of life, queen of hell, commands that you die tonight, or live trying.”
In these online tournaments, and might I add, illegal open source online tournaments, the goal is to figure out the game and then beat it before all the other players find and beat you. You’ve got to start somewhere, and often that’s a game in and of itself that must be beat before you can actually start beating the main game. Just like life. I’m guessing the game I’ll be playing to start with is “escape.” But from where and how, I don’t know just yet. Along the way is where I’ll really make money. Contests, treasure troves, even in-game bargains can lead to big cash and interesting prizes. Or so I’ve been told.
The intro is over and now my story, the story of my avatar, begins.
“Please be Light,” I whisper once more in my empty and very dark apartment.
Gloomy clouds thicken on-screen, then a golden shaft of light, something my eyes are starving for, stabs down through the clouds.
In Olde English script, the word Light appears as I hear a distant trumpet play a fading call to arms.
“Noble Son”—it’s a different voice than the game announcer, kindly, a sage or a king perhaps—“I am Callard the Wise of Rondor, and I’m here to help you. You must rescue a child of hope from the clutches of the diabolical Razor Maiden. Your training as a Samurai of the mysterious East has given you the Focused Slash ability and the Iron Hurricane attack. Armed only with your katana Deathefeather, you have journeyed many leagues into the southern deserts to reach a fabled lost city buried beneath shifting sands so that you can climb the jutting ruin of the Marrow Spike and confront evil itself.”
Pause.
Wait for it, I tell myself.
“Alas, you have been captured by the nightmarish horde of the black witch Razor Maiden …”
There it is. Captured.
I hate games where you start off in the hole.
The question now is, How many of my fellow contestants are also captured? Whoever’s not captured has a big advantage. Even worse, am I captured by one of my fellow players? Someone playing Darkness?
“The Black horde has taken your hand in payment for daring to approach their forgotten realm,” continues Callard the Wise of Whatever. “But fear not, Samurai, there is hope! Somewhere within this ancient desert lies the Pool of Sorrows. If you can find it, maybe its restorative waters will return your lost hand, and then, once you’ve found your legendary blade Deathefeather, perhaps you might dispense the justice Razor Maiden so richly deserves.”
I feel cheated.
Damn Iain.
A thousand bucks down the drain on a one-handed Samurai that’s probably being tortured and raped from the get-go.
The picture on-screen dissolves as the voice of Callard reminds me to “find the child.” What child, I’m not sure, but apparently a child must be found.
The screen changes from panorama to point of view. I’m inside the avatar’s skin. The HUD comes online and I’m checking the layout. Vitals are down 50 percent. But who’s exactly a million bucks after having their hand lopped off? My right clicks are enabled, so I scroll through a menu of available feats I can slave to the mouse and bind to the keyboard. I like the old-fashioned mouse, none of these reticle-cued, SoftEye enhancements everyone’s trying to sell me these days.
With part of my mind on the screen that shows my surroundings, and the other scrolling through a submenu checking what skills I can employ, most of which are offline, I see the grotesque feet of a large monster shuffling toward me. My POV is only responding to the vaguest of movements, like I’m drugged or chained up or something. Over ambient, beyond the scrape of the jailer-monster’s feet, I hear an agonized scream followed by repeated cries for mercy. Then the obligatory tormented scream punctuation as hot iron sears flesh. Again, the screaming.
The Dungeon of Endless Despair flashes across my screen.
The jailer nears my body and hauls me upright. I stare from the darkness of my snow-swamped apartment in midtown Manhattan, into the face of an Ogre on-screen. Protruding canines and bleeding gums compete for computer-rendered audacity with an oozing gash that was once an eye.
“Wot’s yur name, maggot?” growls the Ogre through my DellTashi display, something I purchased on credit after being confirmed for professional status with ColaCorp.
A QuickMenu opens up asking me to type in my name.
“Loser” springs to mind along with “Thousand-Dollars-Down-the-Drain Guy.”
I can’t use PerfectQuestion. If ColaCorp knew I was gaming in the Black, I’d lose my pro status immediately.
What comes next comes from nowhere. It doesn’t mean anything to me, and I can’t remember ever hearing it before.
“Wu,” I type in.
“Wu!” shrieks the Ogre and roars with laughter and flying spittle right in my face. My POV spins crazily about as the Ogre, easily well over seven feet tall, hurls my Samurai at a far wall. Ragdoll physics take over as the laws of the universe in this online world send me flying through the air. After a bone-rattling impact into a wall, I land on a thin pile of straw in the orange light of a nearby guttering wall torch. The damage deducts 2 percent from my Vitality and now I’m down to 48 percent.
I’m still searching all the Samurai’s submenus. He has some awesome skills and devastating attacks. But all of them are offline, probably due to the missing hand and damage. I find one called Serene Focus. It’s live, so I enable and drag it onto the right mouse button. I read the quick hint description of the skill as once again the Ogre lumbers toward me all grunts and wheezy laughs.
“I’ll baste yur bones with yur own blood ’n’ crack yur skull between me teeth, I will.”
A very ogre thing to say.
Meanwhile back at the skill description, I read that Serene Focus allows the user to slow down in-game time while still moving at an intensely fast speed.
Yay, now I can watch the Ogre beat me to death in slow-mo.
I scan the jail cell. Torchlight and shadows, more alcove than cell, it opens into an undefined gloom beyond the flickering light. I do not see my Samurai sword, Deathefeather, anywhere nearby. The guttering torch along the wall of my cell reveals nothing that would be useful right about now. The Ogre is almost on me again, grunting and laughing. I pan up and see the great sabers of his fangs rending his own scarred and bloody welt of a lip.
I have to admit, whoever wrote this software, even though they’re stealing my thousand bucks, did a great job. It sucks to be me right now.
The Ogre’s tumorous Adam’s apple bobs up and down. The game’s soundtrack cranks up to do or die with the bleating tribal horn of triumph every dark beast that ever walked the worlds of fantasy is known by.
Imagination.
I know what to do.
I right-click Serene Focus, and the blaring war drums and horns slow down as though drowned in a thick syrup of sugary sonic deadness. The edges of my screen distort to soft focus. From somewhere nearby, I can hear the delicate strings of the Japanese koto plucking out singular, poignant notes.
I don’t know why, but I understand now.
It’s as if the programmer wrote a quick cut-scene illustrating the point of Serene Focus and dropped it onto my mental deck for a frame or two.
“The hands of the Samurai are like the legs of a crane in a shallow pond. Early morning, fog and mist, they do not disturb the water, or hesitate. They lift and descend and the water remains unmarked.”
Yeah, I understand how the crane walks through a shallow pond and doesn’t disturb the mirrored surface of the water.
Creepy, huh?
I target the Ogre’s bobbing throat and attack with my left mouse button. The Samurai’s only hand reaches out from my POV. In this instant, I hope the developer spent good money on things other than great graphics and good physics. A well-built game will render an opponent’s entire body, allocating damage based on anatomy and physiology. When computer games were first invented, all you could do was attack another player. It couldn’t differentiate if you hit him in the legs, head, or chest. Hell, even a hit in the nuts or gouging out an eye were undefinable. Computers couldn’t crunch that level of data. But games evolved. Eventually you could make head shots. That was at the beginning of the new millennium. Now, technology can target specific muscle groups. I hope whoever built this circus of pain paid enough for that level of design. Otherwise, I’m dead digital meat. And homeless.
On-screen the Samurai’s hand reaches out. The represented on-screen digital world fixates on the great bobbing tumor that is the Ogre’s throat, as the hand of the Samurai grasps …
… then crushes it a second later.
In a game like this, where players and watchers are looking for the sickest of not-so-cheap thrills, the likelihood was high that the designer went all-in for the best in blood and gore. My Serene Focus gamble pays off as the Ogre stumbles backward, gasping and reaching for its shattered throat. It stumbles, falls, then dies in the shadows beyond the cone of torchlight.
Now, I’m in the game.
If you count having one hand, 48 percent of your health left, and most of your options offlined, as “in the game,” then yes, I am in the game.
I check my Samurai’s inventory. I find only the robelike gi of the Samurai and a pair of wooden sandals. Both equipped. No lacquered armor or sword for that matter.
I move forward and hear chock … chock … chock, the wooden sound of his sandaled steps, echoing in the dark. Underneath that is the breeze-whipped guttering sound of a torch. And underneath it all, wandering rhythmic drums and the full chords of a baby grand piano play, striking out harsh tone clusters that cry doom, gloom, and the loneliness one finds beneath the earth in lost and forgotten places.
Music is important in games. A tempo change can mean an impending attack. A certain chord can indicate the state of affairs, good or bad. Even though I like to keep my own tracks going, I still keep ambient in-game sound and soundtracks in the groove just so I can check in on that level. Some gamers don’t, and more often than not they pay for it.
I proceed forward, using my keyboard to move the Samurai into the darkness beyond the torchlight. The game factors time and vision in and adjusts my POV to the dim lighting. I see a great buttressed hall stretching away and above me as batlike architecture embraces high shadowy reaches, unconquered by the dim, barely tossed illumination thrown from small guttering torches along the wall. I stick to the shadows as much as I can.
I’d taken the Ogre by surprise. Now my Serene Focus is offline and waiting to recharge, which could take some time. Not if, but when I meet new enemies, they’ll probably not be as vulnerable as the stupid Ogre who was probably just a “bot,” controlled by the game’s artificial intelligence. When I meet other contestants, other players, they’ll be quicker to hack me to pieces and loot my body before any questions can be asked. In fact, I seriously doubt there’ll be any kind of Q and A.
Right now, I need a weapon.
In the alcoves to my right and left, I see hulking creatures performing obscene acts on their unwilling and occasionally willing victims. I’m sure these are just appetizers for the weirdos who can no longer apply for a simple pornography permit, the mentally ill who’ve failed the psych test and proved themselves to be a danger to society. Open source Black games are their last resort to get any kind of fix—even if it means ten to fifteen years’ hard Education if they get caught.
With just one hand I’m next to useless. I proceed forward despite the pleas for help, cries of agony, the delight of the deviant.
A menu option opens, letting me know I can tuck the Samurai’s damaged left hand under his opposite arm to control the bleeding, but I’ll be at a combat disadvantage. Still, it’ll control the damage loss. I’ve already lost another 2 percent health.
I do. I curse Iain again. And I wonder where Sancerré is right now.
Then I stop. I’ve got to focus and make this thing pay, regardless. So I force myself to play the game and let go of all the other junk in my life.
If I’ve started in the dungeon, I reason, then the child I’ll need to rescue is most likely at the top of the tower. That’s the obvious path and the only goal I can think of right now. Somewhere, I’ll probably find a staircase leading up from the dungeon and into or near the tower.
I need to go up.
Instead, all I find are rendered rough-hewn stone steps leading down into a faintly green iridescent well of darkness. Dripping water from fanged stalactites above provides a tympanic counterpoint to the lonely wooden chock … chock … chock … chock of my Samurai’s cautious steps down through the mostly silent descent. The steps finally lead me to a natural cave. I move the Samurai close to the wall and, cleverly, the avatar turns sideways and hugs the rocky surface. Once again I’m amazed at the authorship of the game.
In the cavern, a long-legged dark figure, with slender thighs but misshapen by a large potbelly, prowls about. Fat arms and tiny hands caress a ropy bullwhip. Above this, a curiously odd-shaped head, covered by a leather mask, cranes itself side to side from the short stump of a neck. In my gut, I know it’s another player.
I call him Creepy.
Probably Darkness.
Beyond Creepy, a natural bridge heaves itself over a gaping chasm. The other side is little more than a lone, distant torch and flickering shadows. I wait, back to the stone wall, hidden in the dark of the passage. Once again I scroll through the Samurai’s submenu looking for some ability that might be of use. I find nothing. Serene Focus, which I could employ to push Creepy off the ledge after a quick rush, refuses to come back online as it slowly recharges.
My brain begins to tickle, and I wonder for a moment if I’m being watched. I check the stone staircase behind and above me. Nothing. I watch the stone ledge where Creepy seems to be patrolling, looking for something, even waiting for someone. A new submenu, which I’d been prowling, opens up the history of my Samurai. After I get past all the code of honor and devotion to the art of combat stuff, I catch a line that intrigues me.
The Samurai, a master of balance and grace, employs these traits to deliver decisive death blows and evade enemies.
I unpin the Samurai from the wall and walk forward. Creepy instantly stops pacing. The whip hangs limply from one studded-gloved hand.
I send him a message in text.
“HOLD, friend, let’s talk.”
I open up a chat channel and send him an invite. My quickly evolving plan, in short, is to do a little role-playing. If Creepy likes to play with his food, and if I can maneuver him into a position near enough the edge of the chasm, I might be able to push him over said edge, or even get myself onto the bridge and away from him. I might be able to evade him if I catch him off guard or lure him into a sense of complacency or even, perhaps, do something more lethal. The bullwhip is a weapon I could probably use with one hand. The Samurai were masters of every weapon, and if I am going to make my thousand bucks pay off, then I need to think like a Samurai and get a weapon.
Will Creepy go for it, and if he does, what does he want? Role playing involves me looking into his room, his world, wherever in the world that is, and him, even more frightening, looking into my world, my apartment.
I take a quick sip of scotch, consider lighting a cigarette, and wonder again where Sancerré is right now.
Shortly my worst fears are confirmed. A visual channel opens in the top left-hand side of my screen. Creepy in real life looks exactly like Creepy in the cave. He’s cosplaying himself in the game. From behind the black mask I see two beady eyes alight with feverish intensity.
“Guten abend, mein freund.”
Crud, a German.
“I don’t … sprechen … English?”
For a moment Creepy’s face seems to twist with frustration. Then, “Ja, my English is nicht sehr gut. But I make it for you.” Red lips painted with lipstick smile awkwardly back at me. For a brief moment he seems nice, harmless, like a kid I knew in school who just wanted to make friends but didn’t know how. I feel sorry for him and instantly I degrade Creepy’s threat level. Maybe he’s just playing for kicks, looking for a good time and, more important, a friend. I can use that against him. Maybe I can even get him to leave me alone, or help me.
“You vant to make vis der role playing or maybe you vant to vatch me do stuff?”
This is too easy …
… and I know it’s too easy.
And nothing is ever too easy.
“Yeah,” I say, “I like to watch.” I feel a million tons of sludge oozing through my veins.
“Ja, really?” says Creepy flatly. Watch out, I hear my mind scream.
“Okay, I’m gonna lock my door so no one comes in, vait a second.” He gets up from his keyboard as I wonder two things.
One, who is “no one”?
And two, wouldn’t you lock your door before dressing up like a weirdo sadomasochist pervert to play an illegal Black game?
He gets up from his computer, turns his back, and goes to the far end of the room, receding into the fish-eye lens of the visual chat.
It’s now or never. I run for the bridge. The head start I get on him now that he’s away from his keyboard might give me just the edge I need to at least get onto the stone bridge. Maybe the bridge narrows enough that I can make him fall if he chases me or at least slow him down.
But from the moment I slew my POV toward the bridge to begin my dash, I know it’s doomed. Ten steps out and, crack, the whip’s sonic slash echoes over ambient. A POV-spinning second later and I’m facedown on the digitally rendered grit and gravel of the ledge. I slew my POV around and see Creepy pulling hard to haul me in. On-screen, the visual link’s still active, and I see Creepy smiling, drooling, chuckling softly to himself as the glimmer of a crimson SoftEye burns malevolently inside the cheap shiny leather of the mask. He’s got some kind of motion-recognition software running. He’s pulling hard at an invisible whip, dictating the movements of his on-screen character.
He’d kept an eye on me the entire time.
No deception. No gain.
I send my cursor scrambling through the Samurai’s submenus looking for anything to use. Serene Focus still refuses to activate, but it’s crawling toward a full charge. Under a menu called Posture I find all kinds of things. Sitting, Standing, Relaxed, Entertaining, and even something called Breakdancing. But it’s the combat postures listed there that intrigue me the most. Creepy’s almost passing out from glee on visual, so I cut the link. Focusing on the Posture menu, I find a variety of weapon and martial arts stances for different combat situations. Some are online, but all the powerful attacks seem to require both hands. Some even require the Samurai’s lost sword, Deathefeather, specifically. I quickly scroll through the martial arts, searching for anything to use in the next ten seconds. I find Hopkido, even something called Hwa Rang Do, but it’s Judo that attracts me the most.
Creepy drags me upright. His avatar’s grinning, sweating face thrusts itself into my monitor like a fiend. I can only imagine what’s going on in Berlin, or wherever Creepy resides. This is probably like the Super Bowl for him. Creepy wraps his bullwhip around my neck and my screen suddenly hazes over in a red mist as a thudding heartbeat begins to pump slower and slower through my speakers.
He’s strangling me.
My health meter drops quickly to 40 percent. I switch combat postures to Judo, even though Creepy’s got me by the neck. Now his avatar begins to fumble at my clothes.
Man, the developer didn’t slack on any of the options.
At 35 percent I execute a Judo attack. If I just thump him hand-to-hand style, I don’t know how much good it’ll do. I suspect not much. But sometimes good games build in finishing moves and cut-scene attacks.
I’m rewarded with both as once again the game dazzles me. The Samurai slams his head forward into Creepy’s leather-clad face in front of my POV. Then the screen switches to a circling overhead view as the Samurai, now holding Creepy by the skin of his chest, falls backward in slow motion. The attack off-balances Creepy and he’s flying through the air toward the lip of the chasm. He’s still holding the bullwhip, and it trails away after him as he disappears over the edge.
My Vitality bar is now at 28 percent. The red mist has cleared. I move to the edge of the chasm peering into the darkness below and the lash of the whip comes flying out of the darkness and hits me again, deducting another 2 percent from my health. The labored breathing of the Samurai erupts on ambient. I’m down to precious little health, and being that this game is sadistic, chances are I’ll pass out before zero. That way all the deviants get the thrill of knowing that, though their simulated victims are unconscious, they’re still alive and watching from the other side of the screen at whatever comes next.
But I’m not done.
I’m still in the game, and my thousand bucks isn’t gone, yet.
Below, I see Creepy. He hasn’t fallen down into the blackness of the pit. He’s on a rocky outcrop just below the ledge, winding up for another attack, his whip dancing out behind him in the pale green light from above. I target him, press Spacebar, and jump while moving forward, executing a flying kick. Once I’m airborne I realize the potential for catastrophic error. If I miss, or if Creepy moves, it’s off into the dark pit beyond and below. With 26 percent Vitality left, I probably won’t survive any kind of fall.
Slipping in the bathtub would probably kill this Samurai right about now.
Also, I’m jumping down almost twenty feet; even if I hit Creepy, I’ll probably kill myself from residual damage. But who cares. I hate Creepy, I hate the world’s greatest fashion photographer, and I hate WonderSoft. I focus my rage squarely onto Creepy’s leather vest and plan on driving my foot right through his chest cavity.
Serene Focus comes online.
At the last second I quickly right-click it and a cut-scene of raindrops falling into a quiet garden superimposes itself over my fall into Creepy. I’m moving slowly. Syrupy. I hear the strings of an ancient era recall sorrows past.
All that Serene Focus jazz.
Time slows even further, and I plant my foot lightly into Creepy’s chest, backing him just to the edge of the outcrop as his whip falls from his hand. I bounce off him, taking less than 1 percent of damage, and backflip onto the rocky outcrop in slow motion. For a single moment, maybe fifteen frames in the camera of life, I face Creepy on the outcrop, across the world.
Then I attack.
One click.
A quick roundhouse hot key spins my POV in a great circle as the Samurai grunts in satisfaction at the well-honed spinning kick connecting with Creepy’s jaw. Crunch. It shatters as Creepy launches outward, backward, and then downward into the empty black void beyond us. I watch him go and he doesn’t seem to stop until he disappears into the darkness way down there.
Wherever “there” is.
No one could have survived a fall like that in real life. I remind myself this isn’t real life. It’s a game. I pick up the fallen whip from the black dust of the outcrop.
Now, I have a weapon.
I turn to face the rock wall. I’ll climb back up onto the ledge above, I’m thinking.
My screen begins to shake and the rock wall in front of my perspective begins to race past my eyes.
I’m falling!
I pan down and see the entire outcrop is sliding into the abyss after Creepy. Great!
The floor begins to tilt, threatening to dump me right into the avalanche, but I balance on the sliding rock with light taps on my direction keys. I spare a glance upward and already the green glow from above is a distant blob, and soon after that it’s just a small pinpoint of sickly light. Then it’s gone. The rock wall rushes by me in gray and sudden red hues as if passing indeterminate fires. The stone face of some fanged demon leers up at me as I fall toward it. I pass it and consider trying to get onto its jutting head, but it’s gone too quickly and the rumbling rock carries me farther down into the dark.
At that moment the screen goes black and the game dies.
