The Slums.
A stallion was galloping through the narrow streets, his hooves leaping over potholes and swifting him past beggars rattling their cups.
Henry's stallion coat was slick with sweat from another productive day of duelling.
In his over-sized arena, he'd slapped the noobs of Suchi with his free Wankalgalese hand, skewered them twice with his Medrishan spears, slain and dissected them under the stars, pawed them not so gently, pestered them with unvenomed blowdarts, and sang them flowery tunes about their own defeats. (He'd refrained from debuting No'Are Vigilance as an individual martial art since that insidious faction would harass him with assassins if they discovered him stealing their secrets.) Altogether, a few more passages had been written for his latest legendary saga.
And the progress was showing. The fan club that the Beast Tamer from London had created to investigate him had more than doubled its membership numbers, growing to an awe-inspiring 13. No more than 3 of those supporters were Henry himself - he may or may not have been exploiting The Ring of a Thousand Soul's fake identity function to inflate his following and build hype.
Now, his stallion nose was pointed towards Byzantium, where he would waste his evening hours with his school friends, team-training with the golden roleplayer, then camping out on the savannah for The Empire's 'Plains Day' community event.
If luck were on his side, today should be as uneventful as yesterday.
-Zhangmei33: …Dr Greenway's plan may be the proposal of a noob who's ignorant of the hippy roleplaying class's abominable traits. Nevertheless, she insisted I try. Cripple-gege, please spare me a grain of your priceless time. Help me to complete my homework.
Rose was in the vicinity, too, stalking. Apparently, during today's therapy session, she'd complained about the Earthfriend class she'd initially adopted for her disguise, feeling that its supportive, hippy roleplaying nature was antithetical to her core being. Her shrink, intrigued by Rose's disproportionate resistance, had offered a radical recommendation: give it a proper go, risk gentleness, be an Earthfriend. Thus, Rose had been begging for guidance from Henry, who could be considered an expert on the Class given that he'd mastered multiple Earthfriend styles. At some level, he was obliged because her irrational aversion had been picked up by imitating his own.
The request was triggering his alarm bells.
-Henry Flower: First, the persona assistance, now, this...Rose, these treatment methods seem a bit unorthodox. Wouldn't a therapist advocate for a stalking client to maintain distance from their victim rather than engage them in the healing process? That sounds dangerous, like malpractice.
Twenty metres to his rear, Rose almost clipped her mare hooves while jumping a pile of rotting wood in the middle of the road.
She gambled for the recovery.
-Zhangmei33: Actually, Cripple-gege, I have a secondary motive, but…it's embarrassing to mention.
-Henry Flower: It's already an embarrassing request.
-Zhangmei33: Dr Greenaway…she told me that it's wrong to view every behaviour through the misshapen lens of trauma…that an essential stage of recovery is learning to recognise both the abnormal AND the normal…consequently, this might not be 'stalking'…it might be…a more...a more unforgivable sin…
-Henry Flower: Than stalking?
-Zhangmei33: It isn't confirmed yet…it's a possibility…a small one…but there is a blurry line between stalking and…and…
Rose choked up, faking a rising emotion stoppering her throat.
-Henry Flower: If it's too painful...
-Zhangmei33: No, Cripple-gege, you deserve to know the truth. Dr Greenaway says I might not be…a stalker but…but…a stereotypical...a stereotypical obsessive teenage fangirl.
Henry stopped.
-Henry Flower: A stereotypical obsessive teenage fangirl? Have you ignored all my speeches? Someone so hopeless that they waste an unbalanced amount of their limited hours rooting for another's climb rather than striving for their own - this is one of the most terminal breeds of pleb.
Rose exhaled in relief.
Zhangmei33: Again, nothing is definite…Dr Greenaway's been having me relay our interactions and my reactions to them…guiding me in piercing the obfuscating fog between trauma-bonding and stereotypical…teenage…
-Henry Flower: Enough…I understand. For this homework, then, I will spare you twenty minutes, distributed at my convenience, no more, possibly less.
-Zhangmei33: Cripple-gege is as generous as he is talented.
-Henry Flower: Disgusting.
Rose, seeing him continue on none the wiser, chased after him at a cheerful gallop.
This was better than predicted! Using genuine breakthroughs from her actual therapy over the past years, she'd allayed Cripple-gege's suspicions and simultaneously tricked him into viewing her in a less tainted light, creating the opening for more. From the jaws of defeat, she'd stolen back victory! Tonight, during her one-on-one lessons, she would use skinship to javelin it beyond the clouds!
Up ahead, Henry, who'd answered with a braindead interpretation befitting his Fleshbag self, scrutinised the strange admission properly, applying to it a century of digital wisdom.
Astounding. For Rose to have not only gained insight into the mechanics of her stalking behaviours but to be able to discuss them so openly, to weigh their veracity and judge them against alternatives - this was astounding progress, unbelievable even. However, if the treatment should take a week to complete as Rose had informed him, then this speed should not be unexpected.
To be frank, Henry was an imbecile. It'd been many years since he'd entertained the stereotypical obsessive teenage fangirl hypothesis. After meeting her deranged brother, he'd always attributed to Rose's actions similar, sinister underpinnings.
Why was she robotic? Childhood abuse. Why start stalking him after he'd killed her repeatedly? The mind that's trapped with pain for too long escapes by changing the one thing it does control, itself; it reconfigures and warps itself until it confuses pain for pleasure, animosity for affection. Why an assassin? Because, after enough perversion, the visceral anguish of someone dying in your arms can be transformed into ecstasy.
It was under these assumptions that he'd tolerated her.
But, without the background colouring everything black, one could conjure much more benign rationales.
Why was she robotic? A sheltered kid, maybe with autism. Why start stalking him after he'd killed her repeatedly? Impressed by his groundbreaking duelling style, she'd become an obsessed fan. Why an assassin? Because, for the average teenage girl, the missions are a fun challenge.
To identify which explanation was correct, that was the trouble.
This ambiguity had been a recurring gripe for Henry with Saana, due to the game's twin nature of being realistic but, still, a videogame. A murderer could just as likely be seeking the thrill of killing as the thrill of XP points - or they could want both, or they accepted one for the other, or they began for one but later transitioned. In this poorly-designed universe, clear answers were hard to ascertain. You might spend years with someone before discerning their real motives; you might need even more time for your own.
For the poor sister of Geno's, it would give him immense relief for her aberrancies to stem from stereotypical, mundane causes. However, no matter the angle he tested her analysis from now, his gut warned him of its falsity.
Back during The Cripple era, due to his global fame, he'd had dozens of die-hard fans, who'd stalked him to learn his ways and befriend him. When he juxtaposed her behaviour against those idiots, he was struck by glaring discrepancies.
Especially in persistence. Most obsessive fans had stopped hounding him after he'd lectured them about tarnishing his name and making fools of themselves. The rest desisted after he'd killed them and stolen their gear. But Rose? It was almost half a real-life decade since whatever this was had begun.
So, IF a stereotypical obsessive teenage fangirl, THEN, to explain the remainder, there must be something extra...what could that be?
Right, he finally understood.
Mental illness.
Not fangirling, not stalking, but both - the worst of both worlds.
How depressing...
The two of them dropped their transformations as they arrived at Byzantium.
Inside, Walker was lecturing to his PVE-ers with footage of a fire-breathing, cherry-red mammoth. A Returnee Woodworker was guiding the Civilian players, substituting for Citizen Higgs, who'd left with his construction team to prepare for the savannah community event. A dozen PVPers were in the mini-arena, wearing loincloths and hacking at each other with baby-lion-fang daggers.
Amongst every faction, there were new faces, pairs of Villagers could be spotted giggling and flirting – fledgeling couples born from yesterday's speed-dating.
Overall, the atmosphere had a carefree quality. It sizzled with the easy-going, strung-out electricity of an afternoon with friends between two nights of heavy partying.
For a newcomer, few were the stains of the squalor outside - the beardless NPC guards, who could tell that they'd been hired to replace predecessors killed two days ago? The Slum was quick to forget its trauma.
Henry received an irritating greeting at the gates.
"Big Bro! What's up, dude?"
The one addressing him wasn't Dan but the Cook who'd once served him Garlic OJ Rancid Seagull Soup.
"Don't call me that," Henry snapped back.
The handsome meathead's atrocious nickname was spreading through the Byzantines, gaining popularity by the day. Henry hated it. To be referred to in this fashion by these Village scum filled him with a stomach-gnawing discomfort.
The Cook shrugged. "So cupid's arrow struck you last night, as well?"
"Nope," Henry replied in mild confusion.
Aside from the persona Rose had been beta-testing, he hadn't found anyone who'd interested him. That didn't concern him, though. He was guaranteed a 7-score girlfriend from his global gold-digger recruitment tournament.
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"Oh, my mistake. This is Barbara." The cook introduced a girl accompanying him, who wore a herb-stained apron and was a spy.
'Barbara' leaned forward and sniffed. "Alembics? If my nose isn't broken, Big Bro here must be a—"
Henry, muting the spy, froze in shock, as if all the thunder in the heavens had converged at once to strike him in the chest.
"My god...," he gasped, his heart rate accelerating with each beat.
Forget that useless gold-digger recruitment tournament, the perfect girl was already here!
What a fool he'd been! He should have scheduled his conquest of seduction much sooner! If he screwed this up, he might lose his soulmate. No, if she were his fan, she would accept him for himself.
Just to be sure, he exchanged his outfit for a swanky, tailored tuxedo, produced a comb to straighten out his unruly hair, and spritzed himself with an alluring cologne. For a courting gift, he dug into his inventory for a Legendary bracelet of crystals that each housed the hot glow of a planet's core.
-Zhangmei33: Cripple-gege, what are you—
Henry, ditching Rose, marched boldly forward to meet his destined love.
In a corner of the Village, a figure had been sitting alone on a wooden crate, staying aloof of the noisy festivities.
Concealing her appearance, she was draped in baggy fabric from head to tope, her hair wrapped in a shawl, her face behind a wooden mask, and her eyes hidden by sunglasses. The only identifiable feature was a set of delicate fingers wrapped around a novel whose cover depicted a shadowy figure shaking the talon of a winged monster while they both posed before a mound of treasure-stuffed sacks.
That book's title: The Invincible Cripple Saga: Greed of The Hypermanticores, Annihilated by Gold.
Henry squatted beside this immaculate-taste-having, ultrapatrician Aphrodite and jingled the Legendary bracelet to announce himself. "You know, if you ever want a signature from the author, I can arrange for it to be given in per..."
He trailed off. His nostrils puckered in revolted recognition of a stink emanating from the young woman… the unmistakeable rot of a plebeian…the alpha pleb…
"No need." The book gave a sharp clap as it was snapped shut by Silver Wolf's pissed-off hands. "I'm well acquainted with him."
The wolf had sniffed out its prey.
After wasting several days of her holiday on the sea sailing from one place to another, after being dodged again and again by his deceit, she'd finally tracked her slippery target down. He was within choking range.
"First," Silver demanded, "apologise."
Henry, sighing, stowed his seduction attire back in his inventory. "'How anticlimactic', I grumbled," he grumbled. "What I'd mistaken in this cultural swamp for a fellow erudite sufferer had in fact been my old archnemesis, the teller of tripe, the relater of rubbish, the spinner of shit - Silver Wolf. It seemed that the alpha pleb had returned to spoil the story.
"An outstanding question was how had her two and a half neurons managed to guide her to my whereabouts. Although I had alluded to this troublesome zone in that earlier chapter, I'd never shared which of the thousands of roleplayer-plagued 'Villages' I was languishing in. Then, had she heard my name carried on the swelling winds of my latest—"
Silver removed a hand shielding her vision while he'd changed. "First-person, hilarious. Apologise."
"But there was no hint of humour in her voice. By one of those inexplicable mechanisms of human interconnection, I managed to apprehend the look of contempt behind her opaque lenses, and, behind the contempt, a bitter jealous—"
"Do you think this is a joking matter? Apologise."
"'I do,' I replied snarkily."
She tried to choke him.
"Having habitually left a safe distance between us after my Illuminati-style self-defence training, I leaned back an inch, causing the alpha-pleb's attempted chokehold to miss pathetically."
"Stop that!" Silver screamed in frustration. "Listen here!" She summoned the manuscript of his ultimate pleb-bait and shook it with the righteous fury of a woman presenting an incriminating photograph to her loser, cheating spouse. "This trash can't be published! You've made me into a vapid moron!"
"'lol,' I loled."
"You!" Going for a second grab, Silver paused when a random girl intervened, wedging herself between them. "Uh…hello?"
"Don't you dare try touch him you dumb bitch why insist on showing your rat cunt face you blonde fucking bitch pleb fucking literally no one cares that you're here I hate you so fucking much," greeted Rose, who begrudged Silver for exploiting her shared hobby with Cripple-gege to earn privileged access to him while being oblivious to his absolute god status and then having the audacity to appear when it was Rose's turn to seduce Cripple-gege, "if I wasn't under-levelled I would rip off those fucking glasses and lodge a dagger into your fucking snooty eyeballs up to the hilt seriously bitch fuck off and die get cancer in real-life!"
Silver was stunned like a deer caught in the headlights of a car driven by an axe murderer.
"Bad, Rose!" Henry reprimanded her for the outburst. "While the ideal persona must indeed disdain poop-peddling swine, you shouldn't stoop to their level with such low-rent insults. Instead, demonstrate their inferiority as I have, by upstaging them in their own craft. And aren't you failing your homework? Pretend to be nice."
"But Cr…gege, your effort is wasted on this bitch! Does the dragon concern itself with the wriggling worm? It's an injustice to spend a single breath on this cunt of a bitch!. Even if you ignore her, she will be crushed to a paste beneath your titanic footsteps."
Henry frowned sternly. "Yo, if you're going to talk out loud near the Byzantines, drop the honorifics."
For players from Australia and New Zealand, the sense in which Rose used 'gege' or 哥哥 translated to 'big bro'. This was specifically why he'd been annoyed by Dan coining the almost identical nickname - it'd given him an unsettling premonition of being saddled with multiple Roses.
"Big bro, please, I beg you, command this ungrateful cow to return to her pasture!"
Silver was still bewildered.
Henry clarified. "This is the younger sister of my colleague-turned-enemy. She's also my stalker/biggest-fan, so she tends to blindly imitate me, including my grudge against you. Actually, you've already met her. She often sneaks into the bookstore disguised as various customers."
"That didn't clarify anything. Apologise."
"Y-y-you knew?"
He rolled his eyes. "How dumb would I have to be to miss you buying my epic saga again and again? The numbers don't add up, Rose. 2% of my fanbase are women, yet they somehow constitute 87% of my readership. Absurd. It should be plain to anybody that I lack in the traits that appeal to the female demographic."
"Big bro, who told you that lie?!"
"It's the truth," he shook his head in deep lament. "As a class, women are almost uniformly plebs."
"Excuse me?" Silver was appalled by the misogynistic assessment, appalled even more by this reunion being botched after her long voyage to get here. Refocusing the situation, she tapped the offending manuscript. "Henry, this—"
"Oi, Big Bro! You guys want a glass of grog?"
At a keg beside them, a drunken Australian Byzantine was filling his mug, the beer overflowing and spilling on the ground.
"We don't!" Henry screamed back. "Stop calling me that!"
The drunk pointed at Rose. "She just said it."
"No, she didn't! She's Chinese! She's mixing English and Mandarin!"
The drunk returned the dead, unthinking gaze of a kangaroo with a concussion. "So that's a negative on the drink, Big Bro?"
"Bloody Rose!" Henry raged. "Bloody Dan! Bloody Australians! Bloody Village…"
"Henry!" Silver, refusing to have her moment stolen, glared and—
A dagger poked into her side, its point unable to prick her Tier-4 ribcage.
"Go on bitch," Rose whispered, "strut down to the docks and book a trip back to whatever swamp spawned your stuck-up cunt bi—"
"HENRY!" Silver exploded, muting the weird girl. "This is the worst execution of a love triangle I've ever seen! You can't insult me with this contrived parody!"
"Huh? Parody?"
Silver thrust the pleb-bait manuscript at him, flipping past several bookmarks highlighting problematic sections. Starting her breakdown of his crimes with the most egregious offender, she opened up a chapter in which the baldness-inducingly-clueless MC complained about her poor romantic prospects while failing to detect the blatant interest of the twelve-millennia-old alien-vampire and the muscular stallion-riding barbarian NPC.
"To be made to act out this filth," she shook the manuscript hard enough to make it rain bookmarks, "is INTRUSIVE and HUMILIATING!"
It was Henry's turn to be clueless.
"Parody? Act out?" He taste-tested a peculiar tone in the air, before realising the misunderstanding between them. "Ah, so first-person exposes its flaws again...no, the MC isn't a copy of you. She's a character, not a person."
"The style is IDENTICAL! You're obviously mocking me! Explain yourself! EXPLAIN! EXPLAIN AND APOLOGISE!"
"Explain..." The bonfire of passion suddenly ignited in Henry's gaze as he seized upon a rare opportunity to talk texts. "Yes, well, according to my—Rose, no, that's anatomically impossible—market research on light fiction, your prose style happens to be near the optimum balance between artistry and accessibility for plebs. Since I'm familiar with your writing from editing your normie quests," she did his; he did hers – quid pro quo, "and I wanted to minimise time wastage, I chose the flattering and efficient path of imitation. Her voice is not a parody, nor is any other aspect of my ultimate pleb-bait - it's a pastiche of pleberature, a sincere homage to accessibility." He smirked smugly, segueing to an evil victory speech. "What graces your grip, my foiled foe, was the poison by which you now perish. For months and years, I plotted..."
If his story were merely a cheap joke, would the system have marked it a miracle?
For the period of his first Overdream session that he'd worked on light fiction, and in his spare time during the real-life years prior while hanging out with Silver, he'd offered his entire heart to the genre, earnestly placing himself in the mindset of the semi-illiterate noob.
And the pleb page had taught him much.
For one, it had revealed to him the fatal error that'd caused his earlier pieces to flop. With his mania for the climb, to always be advancing in literature or anything else, he'd lost sight of the common folk. His stories became so complex as to be intelligible to only an elite group of bulging-brained, hyper-literate, 144-IQ-minimum geniuses. Turns out, it was possible to be too patrician. The teenage Henry—whose favourite literary school was 2040s post-maximalism with its philosophy of 'if more is more, then even more is even more'—could never have guessed.
The climb had also granted him an appreciation for the advantages that pleb fiction held over its superior cousin. Unbeholden to authenticity, one could amplify life's quietest truths. With less expectation for logical contiguity, one could construct more twisted, labyrinthine plots. And...and that was about it.
Finally, when he'd pushed his light fiction research to the end, deconstructing both sides, pleb and patrician, he dared to build a bridge crossing the chasm separating the two. He wrote a story that could be enjoyed by neanderthals and humans alike, a transcendent, multi-multi-layered masterpiece with genuine universal appeal.
That was his ultimate pleb-bait, a miracle.
"…it's in this sense alone that you should feel humiliated," he concluded three minutes later. "That novel in your hands, that's a snapshot from the top of your puny pleb hill. Apologise? I'm sorry. I'm sorry that, in my impatience, I snuck past while you were sleeping in the night and planted my flag on the summit first. Hahahahaha! Good game; it was not challenging in the slightest."
Silver had stopped listening to the rant half-way to begin re-reading the manuscript. "That's right", she was muttering, "no sarcasm on the page. If I ignore the pretentious internalised nagging, then…whoa…"
Henry, witnessing his archenemy's demise, struck a triumphant pose. Rose, out of the loop but supportive of anything that humiliated Silver, added an enthusiastic applause.
Yes, folks. With his overpowered Cap, Henry was fated to become the best at literally everything non-athletic. To think, if this simple writing starter quest could bowl over the alpha pleb, imagine the literary cataclysm after his millennia-long study of every genre in world history. Why, in the very latest Overdream session, he'd pumped out SIX miracles, the first being—
"OI! Where's our goddess?!"
"Fess up, bozo!"
His gloating was interrupted by a mob of two dozen irate, spear-wielding fanboys.
Another day had passed without Loki logging on. Many of the fans, fickle in their affections, had ditched. The remainder had held their tongues out of fear for Henry's association with The Company, but, now, that fear had been dwarfed by a second for their absent transvestite goddess.
"You forced her to quit, didn't you!"
"Big Bro, did you get her e-mail address?"
"Don't hide behind your titles; they won't protect you here!"
Henry smiled at the mob with a secret amusement.
Amongst Saana's elite espionage circles, news was already circulating of Loki being kicked from Asatru for compromising his disguise and mission while arrogantly toying with The Tyrant. By Henry's estimation, the outcast spy should reappear soon - maybe for the team-training, definitely for the Plains Day. Camping and hunting out on the remote savannah would provide an intimate, opportune setting for Loki to display his depression at being ejected.
Of course, he hadn't been kicked. While the spy had been logged off, Henry was being monitored by a second Asatru agent coordinating with Loki - the 'casual' with the bulbous-eyed, magenta-haired anime avatar encountered yesterday at The Chapel of The Sky.
"Artemis?" Henry raised an eyebrow with a secretive glee, as though he'd been convinced of Loki's downfall. "Who?"
Duck-and-rolling to dodge the opener, he equipped his gear and, Rose joining in on the action, they hacked the mob apart, sprinkling the soil red. The guards stayed out of it.
For assaulting him within Byzantium, these annoying neighbours, whose soul-lights flew over the Village's walls, were banished forever.
Afterwards, while washing himself off, he noticed Silver peeking at him over the pages of the pleb-bait. Despite her disguise, he sensed her bewilderment, a feeling he could easily sympathise with.
"Suchi," he shrugged, "it's a discombobulating place. Blink too slowly, and you can't track the changes."
"Yeah…Suchi..."
"Big Bro!"
Henry spun around and glared at the meathead sprinting handsomely towards him, armed with sword and shield.
"Big Bro! Where are the bad guys?!"
From Byzantium's residential area, his schoolfriends were emerging, too, having rushed out after hearing about the fight in the Village chatgroup. Cathy shot him with a recriminating look. Abigail, arm in arm with Anderson, flipped him two middle fingers for the snack-addiction she'd cured herself of, ending the gesture reluctantly when Rose, her guild leader, reprimanded her via PM. Brian was dressed in snorkelling gear.
For some reason, Silver didn't accept Henry's recommendation to leave now that the pleb-bait stuff was effectively resolved. He preferred that his noob friends didn't accidentally leak her identity, attract a horde of fans, and inadvertently ruin the timelines of his schemes. But, since she seemed to be sticking around a while longer, he introduced her as a minimum-wage bodyguard who'd wrapped herself up due to heliophobia.