The copy machine snarled and showed its fierce teeth, stained yellow and red. The bulky device was split horizontally in the middle where a gaping maw dripped with the blood of its victim. It had a single bloodshot eye where the touch screen should be and four crab-like pointed feet. It waddled and leapt toward them with surprising agility. Maxi reacted by slamming the door. It crashed into the obstruction with a loud thud.
They both ran.
“You didn’t tell me this was a boss level!” Farhad yelled.
“You didn’t ask,” Maxi chided. Truth be told, she hadn't been aware that it was a boss level either. The listing had been a different color than the others, but she assumed that it was because it was an ongoing quest.
The creature burst from the room, and it pursued with surprising speed for its bulky size. They made it to the elevator, and Maxi hit the button. Farhad dragged her away, saying, “There’s no time.”
They ran, and sure enough, the killer copy machine made it to the elevator before it was opening. While the creature was fast for its bulk and size. It wasn’t fast enough, and they were able to gain some distance.
When it was evident that the thing was losing ground on them, the creature stopped, opened its paper drawer, and pumped out four sheets of paper. They folded into bats with sharp teeth, and the creatures fluttered towards them.
They saw a conference room where scared people were huddled. She turned towards it, and Farhad followed her. She got to the door, and it was locked. She pounded on the sturdy wood, and a bat fluttered towards her. It was too quick and bit her on the shoulder. Blood stained her yellow shirt. She chopped at the paper bat creature, and it spiraled backward.
It recovered and turned back to engage her just as another came after her, each landing a blow and tearing into her flesh. Farhad was occupied with the other two and the boss creature was quickly gaining the ground it had lost during their run.
She glanced toward the scared people in the office room while she parried and dodged attacks from the bats. She thought of the warning, “NPCs can be assholes, but you won’t survive without them.”
While fighting off the bats, she pleaded with the people inside, “Please, open the door. We are here to help.”
Just as she finished her sentence, she cut in half the bat that she wounded before, and it fluttered to the ground as useless paper. The other one landed a bite in her side and blood oozed from the fourth wound.
A mousy woman in an A-line dress came to the door and unlocked it. It was just in time, as the killer copier trundled its way toward them. They retreated into the conference room, and the three remaining bats fluttered in with them. Farhad had wounded his and had a few more scrapes than Maxi. She slammed the door shut as Farhad stumbled through.
The bats had scattered to terrorize the people in the room. Maxi stabbed one that was going for the girl who let them inside, and it fluttered to the ground. Farhad hacked repeatedly at one gnawing on a man in a suit until it became a shred of useless regular paper.
Together they dispatched the last one, but not before it murdered Gladys from the cubicle photo. By the time the battle was over, most of the people were in shock or weeping.
She braced herself for the beast machine to burst through the door. To Maxi’s surprise, the copier didn’t attempt to bash its way inside or shatter the glass windows to the conference room. Instead, it paced like a caged tiger, looking for a weakness in the barrier.
She pulled out her phone to see that she had only 3 life points left. Those things packed quite a wallop for paper. Her shirt was battered. She didn’t know how much legendary items cost to repair, but she imagined it would be pretty cost prohibitive, considering her financial situation.
From the number of bites on Farhad, she could see that he had a significantly larger life total then hers. She would have been dead twice over, judging by the wounds he had on his body. He pulled a package of gummy bears from his utility belt, downed two for himself and tossed her one.
She looked at the item for a moment, but then saw his wounds close. She ate the gelatin bear, and a message appeared on her phone that said, Healed 7 Life Points. The damage on her shoulder healed entirely, leaving teeth holes in her shirt. The one on her side looked slightly better. His wounds almost entirely disappeared.
“Any office snacks have a chance for magic properties. It’s best to loot snack drawers when you can. You’ll find a temporary effect at best, and save yourself vending machine credits at worst,” Farhad answered the question she didn’t ask.
She glanced at the people in the room. They were scared and murmuring to each other. Someone had put a tablecloth over Gladys. From the look of the meeting room, it looked like the printer had disrupted the 30-year party for Gladys. There was a potluck in the corner and more decorations celebrating her 30 years with the company.
“I guess there won’t be thirty-one,” Maxi said.
“Have some respect for the dead,” Farhad scolded.
“What? They’re NPCs,” Maxi said.
Before the conversation could continue any further, the killer machine bounced up to the large window of the room, roared loud enough to shake the windows, then bounded away.
“I think these are the people we are supposed to save,” Farhad commented.
“There wasn’t any mention of saving people,” Maxi responded. “The email said that we were needed for a meeting being disrupted by printer issues. I think we found our printer issues.” She gestured to the direction the creature had gone.
If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
“It’s too high of a level for the two of us. We were nearly wasted by its minions. Maybe if we had the whole Office Pool.”
“It said I could only bring one ally.”
“Then we were never meant to kill it yet.”
“So why even put it in the first battle? I’ve been in a dungeon crawl before. You defeat the low-level minions to get the XP to beat the boss. How’s a character supposed to advance if they are wasted by the boss in the first battle?”
“This is not your typical dungeon crawl. There’s more than one way to complete a quest. Trust me, if we get these people to safety, we’ll get some serious rewards,” Farhad said.
Maxi lowered her voice conspiratorially, “Or we can use them as cannon fodder, and rush the thing. Maybe giving us enough time to kill it.”
“Want to bet your life on that?”
Truth be told, she wanted this whole thing to end. It was one thing playing video games from the safety of her own room. But the bites from the bat creatures really did hurt, and there was the whole dead thing. The more she thought of it, the more it pissed her off. Companies couldn’t just kill off their employees, no matter what it said in the contract. This place needed to go down. It needed to be exposed.
Even if there was some corrupt government official keeping it in business, she wanted everyone to know. They couldn’t keep operating if no employees walked through the door. If people wanted to sign up for this shit, fine, she wouldn’t stop them. But she wasn’t going to let anyone else walk into the place unwittingly.
For the first time since graduating college, she felt like she wanted to do something with her life, even if it was just taking this company down. She supposed offing a bunch of NPCs would make her just as bad as them, even though she was convinced that she was in some Matrix-like simulation, and the death of everyone in the room wouldn’t matter because they were just a collection of ones and zeros.
NPCs in games were always stuck in the same nightmare. They would be imprisoned, have their villages burnt, suffer all manner of horrors for the sake of the player swooping in to save them. If an NPC were a conscious being, these would be in a hell loop, forced to have a meeting disrupted by a murderous printer over and over again.
The only way to really save them was to end the simulation and take down the company. She had to get out.
“Alright, Lus3r, how do we do this? What’s up with that name anyway?”
“It was a club,” Farhad said. “Back in Albuquerque, we were the 505 Lus3rs. We met at the mall to talk computers. Road tripped to Defcon each year. Then we tried to turn our hacking skills to cash. You know the rest of the story.”
“That was your Office Pool… the one that…” She realized a little too late that she was ripping open fresh wounds.
“Yeah, we thought we were lucky – letting us go through the tutorial as a team, put in the same Office Pool…”
“I’m sorry,” was all Maxi could say.
A silence hung over them for a moment, and then Farhad seemed to bury it back and said, “There’s a fire escape. I saw one while we were running. It’s in the opposite direction from where we ran.”
“Great, so there’s a hell printer between us and the way out. Maybe we should revisit my cannon fodder idea.”
“The solution has to be in this room. The whole floor has been cleared but here,” Farhad said, gesticulating wildly. “You know that thing could break through the door or the window with no trouble, but it stops here.”
“I dunno, maybe there is a cord? I mean, it’s a copy machine. It has to be plugged in, right?”
“I didn’t see a cord.”
He was right, the thing was free, as if it came from the savannah where killer copy machines prey on… whatever it is they prey on. If it wasn’t a cord, then why had it stopped? The creature had obviously rampaged through the floor, clearing, or killing everyone except those in the room. So why leave a room full of people?
Maxi glanced around. The people looked glum, ready to give in. Their office potluck disrupted…
“It’s in the food,” Maxi said. “Whatever is keeping it back is in the food.”
Farhad glanced at the spread of hot dishes and casseroles, soda, chips and salsa, and all the usual potluck offerings, and spoke. “How could the thing smell it from out there, if it could even smell?”
“That’s the only thing that is different about in here over out there,” Maxi said. “Office chairs, plenty of them out there, tables, same thing. That TV hanging on the wall, conferencing equipment, all if it is out there. Except the food. Sure, maybe someone has a box of Mike and Ikes stashed in their desk, but here is the only place with fresh food.”
“But how does it work? It’s just food!”
“Your gummy bears healed me. Doesn’t everything in this place have a potential to be a magic item, or whatever it is that makes the things work? I picked up a magic stapler and was just grabbing the first thing I could to avoid getting bit by a zombie. So couldn’t the food here have some sort of monster warding or similar effect?”
“Daisuke did come across a Toaster Waffle of Giant Strength the other day,” Farhad said.
“There you go, so how do we know that those aren’t Barbecue Mini Wieners of Monster Warding?” she said, pointing to a Crockpot that seemed to end up at every potluck. Considering the trash was full of paper plates, the potluck was probably winding down when the monster attack happened. Maxi turned to the NPCs and asked, “What’s a dish that everyone here has eaten?”
They all looked at each other in confusion.
“Come on,” Maxi said. “There’s always something. What is something that everyone ate?”
“Gladys always makes the best Muddy Buddies,” a slender man with red glasses said. People nodded in agreement, and said things like “I agree,” “I always like Gladys’s Buddies,” and “I had a couple handfuls of that, too.” Maxi narrowed her eyes on a bowl of Chex covered in a pillowy powdered sugar that made them look like little clouds of peanut butter and cereal.
She reached inside and plucked the morsel and popped it into her mouth. After she chewed and swallowed, her phone also immediately showed New Status Effect: +3 Grutomaton Deterrence, with a timer ticking down from an hour. She ate another and the timer just reset at the hour mark. Okay, no stacking effects, she thought. When she clicked on the “more information” screen, she saw that Grutomatons were beasts that were a mixture of machine and creature, which explained the beastly printer. It also said that Deterrence effects prevented the creature type from getting within a twenty-foot radius after a failed contested Creativity check.
Unlike skill checks that were at minus ten for those without the skill, contested stat checks were just one stat versus another, and Maxi guessed that a drooling copy machine didn’t have much in the way of creativity. She passed the bowl around with instructions for everyone to eat one.
Once they were all warded, she put three into a napkin and stuffed it into her pocket. While she didn’t anticipate more than an hour for them to get to the fire escape, they were useful. She thanked the posthumous Gladys and told everyone to get ready to move out.
Maxi took the remaining Muddy Buddies and wrapped them in a towel, then affixed them to her utility belt where she could use the strap to cinch the towel closed. +3 Muddy Buddies of Grutomaton Deterrence (3) added to your inventory. +3 Makeshift Muddy Buddy Bomb of Grutomaton Deterrence added to your inventory. The Makeshift category was a blanket designation of all improvised weaponry. The munitions effects were listed as unknown, but she was pretty sure what it would do if she had to smash it into the creature’s face.
Once they were ready, she instructed the group to be silent and signaled everyone to move out. Both she and Farhad drew their swords and led the way out of the conference room. They heard the grunt of a beast in the distance.