What in the holy…” Lars drew his fingers down across the rosy cheeks of the face that stared back at him from the glassy surface of the horse trough. He pinched them like a grandmother might do, hoping beyond anything that it would cause him to wake up. It didn’t. “Oh, the rosy cheeks! The snow white Amish beard! The pointy hat! Shit, please don’t tell me I’m a—”
“Technically,” Finn said with a bit of an uppity tone. “It’s a Phrygian cap.”
“Gnome, Finn! I’m a fucking gnome! Who gives a shit what the damn hat is called!” Lars flashed a blunt canine, then reached up and ripped the red pointy cap off his head. “Yep. I’m bald, too. And not even the cool Jason Statham kind. I’ve got a straight up Danny DeVito horseshoe! Between the rosy cheeks and the button nose and the white hair—well, what’s left of it. I look like that way-too happy middle school gym teacher everyone knows is on the doorstep of a heart attack!”
Finn reached down and ripped out a handful of grass, then shoved it into his mouth. He chewed as he said, “I couldn’t have put it any better.”
“I’m a goddamn garden gnome, kid! A garden gnome! The game turned me into a garden gnome! I am tiny, just like you said!”
“I sure did. And you sure are.” Finn shoved another handful of grass into his mouth. This one had a few dandelions sprinkled in.
“Are you eating? Nevermind.” Lars spun around and motioned to his pelvis. “And why am I only wearing underwear?! You spawned in wearing the same jeans and t-shirt you were wearing back in the real world, and I get nothing but skivvies that feel like they’re made from Biscuit hair!”
“Two things.” Finn swallowed, held up two fingers, then dropped it down to one. “First, I believe those are made of wool, so you’re not exactly that far off.”
“Wool?” Lars wiggled his hips, like he had a hot coal in his pants. “They’re itchy as all hell, kid!”
“Again, wool. It’s expected. It's kind of wool's thing, even.” He raised the second finger. “And correct me if I’m wrong here—you are the wrestling expert—but I believe you call those trunks in the business. You shouldn’t feel that out of place in them.”
“We do. And I don’t.” Lars sighed, ran a hand across his chest to wipe away the freshly pooled blood, then rubbed at the ink deep within his skin. “At least it let me keep my tattoo. I love my Ogre tattoo. Why do you think it made me a gnome, kid?”
“Well,” Finn munched on another wad of nature's best greens as he thought. “I think it mixed our characters up, Lars.”
“How?”
He swallowed. “Not sure. But it obviously spawned me in as an orc, which is the race you chose.”
“You mean ogre! I wanted to be an ogre.”
“Listen, old man. For both our sakes, I can’t keep lying to you about this ogre business anymore. It’s an orc, okay? An orc. Not an ogre. An orc. Like I told you back in your apartment, an ogre isn’t a playable character in Dungeon. That means that I, Finn Murphy, am an orc.”
“You’re messing with me again, kid.” Lars' eyes narrowed. “You’re making this all up, aren’t you? Trying to cover because you wanted the cool class for yourself, aren’t you?”
“No,” Finn swallowed. “I wish I was but I’m not.”
“You sly dog!” Lars let out a deep laugh. “You are messing with me! Ha, you know what I’m going to do kid? I’m gonna do what I should have done right after I loaded into this godforsaken piece of shit game. I’m gonna take this headset off, go to my room, chug a fifth of Jack and eat a whole damn case of Nutty Bars before I—”
Finn raised a black eyebrow. “Don’t you mean... Nutty Buddies?”
There was a moment of total silence before Lars exploded. “Don’t you dare call them that! Them’s fighting words, kid!” He pounded his hand into his fist. “They’re Nutty Bars and they will always be Nutty Bars. I don’t care what you or some corporate rebranding shill has to say about it!”
“Wow!” Finn huffed. “A little too passionate about the name change, are we?”
“They didn’t even have the common decency to announce it, Finn! They just did it and thought it would be okay. Like when McDonald’s tries to get rid of Hot Mustard every few years. They don’t announce that either, but lemme tell you. We bring it back. Me and the McDonald's Hot Mustard Group on Facebook, we gather the troops, we go to war, and we bring it back every damn time!”
“I hear you, I do. There’s usually good data behind these types of decisions, but I hear you. McDonalds is probably taking a financial hit by keeping Hot Mustard around to make a vocal minority of people like you happy, but I hear you.” Finn snorted. “I think we may have gotten off track again here.”
“Oh. Right.” Lars flashed a weak smile, then licked his lips. “Sorry. I get worked up about food stuff. I was about to rip this headset off, wasn’t I?”
The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“You were.”
“And you were about to stop me, weren’t you?”
“Nope.” Finn shook his head. “I was going to remind you that leaving the game without logging off properly will get you a forty-eight hour ban from Dungeon—for using up valuable server space with an idle toon, but I don’t think you care about that, do you?”
“Fuck no.”
“Okay then, go for it.”
Lars raised his hands up near his head and pointed his palms upward. “I’m going for it.”
“Get on with it, Ogre. No need to delay on account of me.” He paused, then tapped the pointy lobes on the side of head. “Pro tip? Hit up under the ears. The headset is widest there. Headphones, you know?”
“Right, thanks.” Lars sighed. “Going for it in three, two, one.”
Lars rammed both palms upward as if he was raising the roof at a high school dance in 1998. Instead of contacting the headphone part of the headset, all he did was clap himself over the ears like he was fighting himself in the Octagon. He felt a stinging pain, then collapsed towards the ground with a thud. The pain was indescribable. But if he had to put it into words, he would have said it felt like someone had kicked him in the nuts, only his nuts were in his ears and his hands were an ex-girlfriend’s feet. He clutched the side of his head and let out a groan. A groan not unlike the one that follows an actual kick in the groin. “Oh, that stings! That stings like hot sauce in the eyes!”
Finn frowned. "Exactly how often do you get hot sauce in the eyes?"
"Enough, okay?!" Lars groaned. "Did you know that was going to happen?"
“Know? Like know know? No. I didn't know that would happen. But I had a pretty good idea it might. So yeah, I guess you could say I knew what you were in for. Thanks for taking one for the team and trying it out though. I have very sensitive ears.”
***
Several minutes later, with a ringing in his ears that reminded him of a rotary telephone, Lars said, “So.... orcs?”
“Oh! Right!” Finn cleared his throat. “Yeah, I would never play an orc. I always play a half-elf. In fact, I could give you a dozen reasons why I’d never play an orc. Lars, take what I'm doing, for instance.” He reached down, grabbed the biggest wad of grass yet, and shoved it into his mouth. Green drool leaked from around his tusks as he chewed. “I can't stop eating grass. I don’t enjoy eating it, but I can’t stop. I can’t even tell that I’m doing it, to be honest. To me, I’m just sitting here. Orcs are always doing things like this. Scratching their butts, drooling, picking their nose. These are idle animations coded into the race so the character isn’t just sitting still when they’re not doing anything, like when we’re having one of our long, drawn out dialogues. It keeps the game from looking lifeless to other players. And the ones they put in orcs annoy the living daylights out of me. They’re so crude, and vulgar."
“Okay, that makes sense.” Lars paused. “Though couldn’t you just avoid looking at them while you were in the game by playing an orc? Or turn it off in the settings or something?”
"I didn't even mention the stat penalties, but I don't play orcs." The kid rolled his eyes. “And I would... if I could access the settings.”
“Right.” Lars laughed nervously. “Out of curiosity, what are my idle animations?”
“Yours are worse. You smile a lot. Like, an uncomfortable amount. And you have this blank stare. It's like you're a lawn ornament or something. It’s almost creepy.” He tried to grimace, but that was more or less his base facial expression. "Scratch that. It is creepy."
“Thanks, kid. You’re making me feel a lot better about—hey!” Lars’ eyes narrowed. “Tell me this, if you always play a half-elf, how the hell did I become a gnome?”
“That’s the funny thing, isn’t it? After we had our conversation about classes and I read that thing in the description of this campaign, I had an, uh, I had an idea.”
Lars placed his hands on his hips in a picture perfect impression of a porcelain lawn ornament. “What kind of idea, kid?”
“Well,” Finn scratched at his chin. “I only did it because that thing inspired me, okay?”
“What thing, kid?”
“Um. No holds barred. They missed a golden opportunity for a pun there. So I turned it into a pun.”
“How did you turn no holds barred into a pun?”
“I made it no holds bard, obviously." Finn shrugged. "Good, right?”
“I don’t get it. Not one damn bit.”
“Ermahgerd!” The orc rolled his eyes back into his head like a teenage girl. “Like, a bard? You know? No holds bard?”
“No, I don’t.” Lars bent to sit on the edge of the trough. “But I’m guessing I better sit down and get comfortable so can you explain it to me.”
“Nah, we should be probably get moving as we talk. We need to find you a healer, remember?”
“Right, and get us some help.”
“Right.”
Lars peeked over the edge of the trough. “Any chance you can… help me down, kid?”
“Sure, you want to ride Biscuit?”
“She’s coming with us?!”
Finn snorted. “Uh, yeah. We can’t just leave a helpless capybara all by herself, can we?”
“Whatever, like I give a shit. And no I ain’t riding her.”
One short orcavator ride later, and walking side by side in the tall grass, Finn said, “Bard is a class you play, Lars. Like fighter, barbarian, wizard, sorcerer? Listen, I will not get into the nitty gritty, but they pretty much… they battle the evils of Dungeon through song.”
Lars stopped in his tracks, cocked his head back to look the mile up towards his assistant, and said, “That is dumbest shit I have ever heard. And you actually think that’s funny? No holds bard?”
Finn's mouth cracked into a tusky grin. “Yeah! I think it’s hilarious! Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s good. But I thought it could be a little better. So I came up with something better and then I had my idea, and changed my race because I thought it would be funny and”—he pointed towards Lars—“now you’re a gnome. End of story.”
Lars stuck his thumbs in his belt. “Hold on a minute. You’re telling me the joke gets worse?”
“That’s all you got from that, huh? Not that I admitted I picked the worst race in the game? Or admitted that my choosing so resulted in you becoming said race? After all the complaining you just did, all you care about how now is how bad my joke got?”
“Uh, yeah. Don't get you knickers twisted before you know if you need new drawers, remember? So... what was it?”
Finn sighed. “Gnome holds bard. The joke was gnome holds bard.”