“Now why’d you have to go and bring up oranges, Jane? You know how much I miss orange juice!”

Jane gives me a completely unapologetic grin as she helps me yank these clinging tentacles free of my punctured person. Thankfully the jaws have relaxed in death, so its just the teeth holding them in. Still stings like a bastard as they come out though.

I point at the dead mess of monster at my feet. “If the Grimstone dev team can make that thing smell like poached eggs, surely they can simulate a glass of iced orange juice.”

I imagine it now to distract myself from the pain of these last few tentacle removals. That rich sweetness swamping my tongue, followed by that satisfying, saliva-sparking sourness, and then the cool, quenching delight of it pouring down my throat, washing away my thirst.

Danforth’s beer selection ain’t nothing to be sneezed at. Something for almost everyone there. But I suppose it’s just my own sorry human nature that makes fixate on that which I simply cannot have.

“Doubt the devs will give a flying fuck about us until this here town hits its next level. Right now we’re just so much biomass for the fucking fertilizer plants. If this town misses it’s Level 3 target before the next Cull, whole shiteating instance will get flushed, just like fucking that.”

She clicks her fingers for emphasis, then yanks the last tentacle out of my thigh with a little more vigor than she needed to.

“Shit, Jane! Careful.”

“Sorry, Dog. Thinking about the Cull gets me riled.”

She spits into the dirt and glowers up at the clocktower that looms over the alley.

“Every motherfucking minute that clicks on by is another minute closer to death.”

I shrug. “That there’s life in a nutshell, Jane.”

“Except our parents had a good eighty fucking years to look forward to.”

“Eighty years of living in a shoebox and walking to work wearing a gas mask?”

“Better than measuring your sorry life in days like we’ve got to.”

She fixes me with that hard, dark stare of hers, like two shining buttons of dark chocolate in a bed of smooth caramel. Damn I miss my 70% cacao salted caramel chocolate bars too.

“Seems like we’re the unluckiest generation in the whole of hick-fucking history. Plugged into this digital hellhole because our dumb as fuck ancestors had dicks and cunts for brains. Birth control, people! Slow the fuck down with that breeding so there’s still enough world to go around for the god-damned kids!”

She works the lever on her Winchester, lines up the clocktower and shoots it in the face. The bullet ricochets off the big hand, not even leaving a scratch. Ain’t no way to damage it. Guess the devs figured we’d be tempted to shoot the messenger from time to time.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“That’s us. Generation fucking Zero. Zero freedom. Zero hope.”

She does have a point. We’re the first generation to get ‘plugged in’. We got twenty one years in RL, living like queens and kings, suns shining out of our collective asses. School was a doddle, learning about shit like empathy and resilience rather than grammar and arithmetic like our grandparents had to learn. Yeah, we learned the basics. Enough to read our notifications and crunch a few stats. But most of the time we were just being taught to ‘know ourselves’.

By the third day in Grimstone, I’d worked it out. They didn’t actually care about us ‘knowing ourselves’. It was all about them knowing us so they could work out which game to plug us into. Which virtual nightmare would ‘bring out the best in us’. Twenty-one years of psycho-fucking-metrics.

Still, I’m a ‘silver linings’ kinda hombre so I figure they’ve plugged me into the game I have the best chance of winning. Grimstone City makes it to Level 10 and we’ll all walk out of here, straight into gainful employment and a life where I need never go without orange juice and salted caramel again.

World Gov, in their ‘infinite wisdom’, decided it was better for a few to live well than many to suffer in poverty. When there’s more people than planet, I guess that’s the kinda tough choice you gotta make. Yeah, it sucks ass, but after the energy crises and food wars of the mid-century, something had to be done. Something big. Something desperate.

With virtual reality tech being streaks ahead of the space race, it was a no-brainer to put a generation or two ‘on hold’ until them xeno-planet colonies get up and running.

So here were are. Generation Zero. Fighting in fiction for the right to live in reality. Yep. That there’s some fucked up shit alright.

I nod my agreement and cast an amused eye over them dead demons. They’re fading away now. Won’t be nothing left but some loot in a second or two. The devs might be a pack of sadists, but at least they’re tidy sadists.

I pick up the closest demon’s hand cannon, the one he’d pointed at my face but a few minutes earlier. It’s Colt Navy with some fine silver filigree slithering down its long barrel, and a silver kraken inlaid into its mahogany handle.

The “Hello Sailor” Colt Navy

Six shots.

+20% damage.

+20% range.

Arcane ability = Freeze!

Cooldown = 5 minutes

The Hello Sailor can fire an ice blast that will encase and immobilize an enemy for up to six seconds.

“Give them a lubbers a moment to reflect on the the cold, hard reality of their dire straits.” 

- Captain Grace Deadeye Cortez

I offer it to Jane, as is only right since she was the one to drop its owner. She shakes her head.

“Keep it, Dog. You killed five of them cocksuckers, not to mention that tentacled fucking thing. And besides.” She gives me a wry wink. “The better your gear, the less times I’ll have to save your sorry ass.”

I can’t argue with that logic so I drop one of my mundane Colts and slide the Hello Sailor into my right-hand holster. My old colt ain’t got no resale value, being a Common item. Still feels like littering to me though, discarding gear like that, but it always disappears overnight. Tidy sadists.

Ain’t much else of interest from the two dead demon boys. Twenty silver dollars which I split evenly with Jane. But the tentacled thing turns up something promising, if a little on the grotesque side. Some sort of purple organ that I pick up with my bowie knife and flick into my inventory where it can’t slime or stink up the place.

Sanguine Sucker Spleen

Key ingredient in the Sublime Snake Remedy.

“Fancy a visit to the apothecary, Jane? Reckon Doc Holliway could fix us up a nice batch of improved snake oil with this there organ.”

“Sounds peachy, Dog. Lead the fucking way.”