Part 3: Final Boss / Chapter 25
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When we arrived in Robbie’s room, he and Margaret were watching Lionheart on Margaret’s phone.
It’s the inspiring story of a French Foreign Legionnaire traveling to Los Angeles to help his murdered brother’s wife pay the bills by roundhouse-kicking his way through an underground street-fighting showcase staged for the entertainment of the city’s bloodthirsty bourgeoisie— starring “the Muscles from Brussels,” AKA Jean-Claude Van Damme. Margaret also preferred Van Damme to Chuck Norris, much to my father’s chagrin. (But again, more on this later.)
“So . . . ” Margaret said, likely noting that Darla and I were wearing the same clothes we’d been wearing the night before. “Not a date, huh?”
“It’s not like that,” I insisted.
“Well, it’s . . . kind of like that,” Darla countered.
And in the end, I supposed it was. But we were in weird territory. We hadn’t done any of the regular dating stuff people do. We hadn’t had dinner, gone to a movie, or watched a sunset at the beach. We’d just kind of skipped to soul mate status, even though we still barely knew each other.
It was a little odd. But it was buoying Margaret’s spirits. So, I decided not to spoil her mood by splitting hairs. Likewise, I decided not to share any of the terrifying details of what Darla and I had been doing since we’d seen her last—even though there were things that didn’t fall under the RIP gag order.
But even with her buoyed spirits intact, she was still awfully tired, given her sleep deprivation. So, after addressing us as “You two love birds” on at least three occasions, she bid us goodnight and headed home. She wasn’t so ambitious as to aim for a full night’s sleep, but she promised to get at least a few hours of rest before boomeranging back. According to my Quest Summary, we had some time, and there was no better place for Darla and me to figure out what to do next—not that we had any control over what was coming.
Robbie was barely able to contain his excitement as his mother made her exit. The second the door shut, he grabbed my arm, rolled up my sleeve and started studying my new ink.
“Level 8?” he cried. “How’d that happen?”
“Toilet vortex. Time travel. Third grade bully almost killed me.”
“Awesome!” he exclaimed.
His enthusiasm was out of line with the gravity of recent events and the stakes of the game overall. But after everything he’d been through, I was relieved that there was still some youthful exuberance in the kid, no matter how misplaced. Alas, after a moment, his enthusiasm ebbed as he cringed and put a hand to his chest.
“What’s going on?” I said anxiously.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just kind of . . . it’s fine. I just get a little pain every once in a while.”
“Every once in a while?” I exclaimed. “How long has that been going on? Have you told the doctors?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s . . . normal.”
Looking back, I should have known he was keeping something from me. And probably his mother. Maybe even the doctors. But he redirected the conversation, grabbing my other arm and rolling up my sleeve to examine it.
“What the heck?” he said. “Your stats have hardly budged! And look at your Life-O-Meter. Only a ten-point bump?”
I sighed and nodded dejectedly.
“What are you gonna do with those?” he asked, pointing to the Freebies in my inventory.
“Don’t know. I was waiting to get your take.”
“Don’t overthink it,” he said. “Pretty sure you can reallocate them later. Put ‘em in Skin Thickness for now. It’s still way behind.”
I followed his advice and dragged the points to their new home.
Neither Robbie nor Darla bothered to comment on the two nonsensical new entries to my stat block, which included “Breath: bad” and “Face: stupid.” Not the system’s most inspired work.
Under Quest Summary there was a new crossed-out listing: “Pigtailed Pain Train.” Poetic.
“You’ve gotta grind some more,” Robbie said.
“There’s nothing worth anything left to grind,” I lamented.
“So you’re just waiting around for the next monster to sneak up on you at any moment?”
“Well, actually we know when the next monster will show up.”
“What?”
“Darla figured out what these numbers mean,” I said, gesturing to the next set of numbers in my Quest Summary.
“No way!”
“Yes way.”
Tracing my finger across the relevant digits, I explained, “That’s the day, the month, and the time.”
“Cool,” Robbie said. “So next objective isn’t due until . . . ” he paused as he worked it out. “5:14 a.m. tomorrow morning.”
“Yup,” I answered.
“With a little luck, whatever shows up could be high XP grinding fodder.”
“There you go!” Darla agreed optimistically.
“Or it could be another boss that you can’t possibly beat,” Robbie continued. “With this game, you really just don’t know.”
“It is a boss,” I said, suddenly certain and unsettled.
“How do you know?” Robbie asked.
“I . . . ”
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Gazing down at my forearm, I understood.
“Street Smarts,” I said, excitedly putting it together.
I hadn’t been paying attention to the stat, but now I saw that it had increased to fifteen, presumably after my most recent Cutie Pants killing spree. It was a disproportionate 50% increase. Despite Nancy’s mom’s accusation that I was getting predictable, the system seemed to have once again rewarded my outside-the-box thinking and the stat was apparently now high enough to give me some foresight into what was coming my way.
I’d been convinced that both Street Smarts and Book Smarts were nothing more than vanity stats. Now I knew different—though how my Book Smarts stat would play into things was still up in the air.
“Well, what’s it gonna be then?” Robbie asked.
“Not sure,” I answered. “Just know it’ll be the last boss.”
Based on the game’s cadence so far, there should have been at least one wave of minions before the final boss. I didn’t know why that had changed or how I could possibly handle said boss with my presumably inadequate stats. But I wasn’t surprised at the inequity.
“So all we know is that something extra-terrible is coming to do terrible things to you,” Darla said. “This game is all terrible-ness all the time.”
“It’s not all terrible-ness,” I said. “It’s the reason we met.”
She blushed a little at that and I gave her a little smile.
“But it’s mostly terrible-ness,” Robbie said, stepping on the moment and reeling us back to the misery of my predicament.
“And worse than that, it’s lame.”
“Huh?” Darla prompted him.
He grimaced in disgust and elaborated, “Everything they’ve thrown at you. Lame. I mean they could at least sic something cool on you. Maybe a bugbear? Or a horde of Goblins? Or a Gibbering Mouther!”
“What’s that?”
“It’s this blob of mouths and eyes that oozes onto unsuspecting prey and devours everything but their mouths, which it adds to its other mouths, which are all moaning in different voices.”
“Oh, so the single most horrifying thing ever?”
“Mmhm,” Robbie agreed.
“I would have taken a dozen Gibbering Mouthers over Becky Borgna,” I said.
“I guess that’s why you got her,” Robbie retorted.
Darla’s phone rang. She looked down at the display, then frowned. I leaned over to see that the display read “Courtyard Marriot.”
“You think they’re calling to ask how the room got eaten by the toilet?”
I shook my head.
“Game would have cleaned all that up.”
“It can do that?”
“Pretty sure it can do anything.”
She shrugged, then answered the phone on speaker.
“Hello?”
“Hey. This is the front desk.”
I recognized the disaffected young woman’s voice from my brief call with room service as I was being sucked onto the spacetime superhighway onramp. Apparently, she was a double threat, spreading her talents between hotel duties.
“Are you, like, checked out? Cleaning staff says the room’s vacant and there’s a big convention coming into town and we need the room or whatever.”
“Um . . . yes, sure,” Darla answered. Then her eyes went wide and she reversed course. “I mean no! No, we’re not checked out.”
She looked at me and mouthed the word “printout”. Apparently, it hadn’t made the trip through the vortex. We were going to need to pick it up some time soon. It wasn’t the kind of thing you leave lying around.
“K. Whatever,” the young woman replied. “BTW, some sketchy dude was in here looking for you. Seemed sketchy.”
That shook us out of the preoccupation with the printout. We knew we were both thinking the same thing. Merrick?
“What did he look like?” Darla asked.
“Sketchy.”
“Right, but sketchy how?”
“I don’t know. He had an accent.”
We traded confused frowns.
“What kind of accent?” Darla asked.
“I don’t know. Hold please,” the young woman said.
Then she hung up. Possibly by accident, possibly on purpose.
“What’s going on?” Robbie asked.
“So it’s not Merrick, but it has to be somebody who works for him, right?” I proposed.
Darla nodded and said, “And what if he’s still hanging around? We have to go back for the printout.”
“Who’s Merrick?” Robbie asked.
“The maniac who burned down Darla’s attic.”
“How the heck could he track us down at the hotel anyway?” Darla exclaimed.
“I don’t know. He’s a tech billionaire. Credit card records, security feeds, traffic cameras. Big brother stuff.”
“Crap! That means he could be on his way he—”
“Sorry to crash the party,” a voice said from the door.
I recognized the voice, but it was a non sequitur. It didn’t belong here. And it certainly had no business making the polite sounds it had just made. But the voice was coming from exactly the source I’d thought. Frank Delaney was standing in the doorway of my nephew’s hospital room, holding . . . flowers?
“Just swinging by to say get well soon, kid,” he said to Robbie. “Everybody down at the office is pulling for ya.”
He handed me the flowers. I glanced at the card attached. It read, “Dear Delores, sorry to hear about the rheumatoid flare up.”
Somewhere on the ward, poor arthritic Delores was now flower-less.
“I just need to borrow your uncle for a quick pow wow,” Frank said, and dragged me out into the hallway.
“Frank, it’s 7 O’Clock on Friday night.”
“Are you sure? Because according to my watch, it’s media contract signature o’clock. You make nice with Marty Malomar yet?”
I rolled my eyes but tried hard to conceal it. I didn’t have the time or patience for this but it was possible that at some point, things would return to some semblance of normal and I’d need my job.
“I’m going to see him first thing Monday morning,” I lied.
“Really?” Frank asked, incredulously.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know how you’re going to do that because he’s dead.”
“What?” I feigned surprise.
My explicit and implicit deceits weren’t difficult. Despite what Nancy’s mom had said about his death being permanent, part of me had hoped Marty had been restored from backup or whatever. It had been easier to think he was still stalking around the car lot, baiting and switching unsuspecting citizens into extended warranties and built-in rear-seat infotainment. But despite its world-altering power, the game wanted me to know it was playing for keeps and Marty’s death was a means to send that message.
Of course, I was pretty sure his official cause of death wasn’t “turning into a video game boss and getting dissolved by free leather seats.”
“What . . . what happened?” I asked.
“Receptionist said he got hit by a car or some shit. I don’t know. Wasn’t listening. Don’t care. But the service is tomorrow morning.”
Despite his bluster, I thought it was nice that Frank cared enough to attend the funeral. But he didn’t.
“His old man will be all emotional and what not, so good time for you to catch him with his guard down and get him to sign that contract.”
“What?”
“You gotta pick your moment though. Don’t want to seem disrespectful.”
“Enough!” I exclaimed.
I wasn’t sure where it had come from, but somewhere along the line, I’d decided it was time to stand up to Frank. The façade of deference I’d maintained for years was beginning to crumble.
“What do you mean enou—” he started to reply indignantly.
“I mean I’m not hassling a grieving father for a contract signature at his son’s funeral, you heartless sociopath.”
“Who the hell do you th—” he started again.
But whatever he had to say became irrelevant as I heard Robbie call out.
“Uncle Henry!”
His voice was strained with panic. I ran back around the corner toward his room and found him hobbling toward me. I could hear his abandoned EKG flat-lining in his room.
“What are you doing?” I cried as I rushed toward him. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Darla.”
“What about her?”
“He . . . he took her.”
“Who?”
“A big Russian.”