Part 1: Character Creation / Chapter 6
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I bolted through the lobby, launching myself through the stairwell door, and down the stairs.
Reaching the ground floor, I burst out the front exit of the building and raced across the terrace to the parking lot. Then I jumped into my car and peeled out as I fled the scene like a get-away driver trying to shake the cops.
As I pulled out onto the main thoroughfare bordering the industrial park, I glanced in the rearview mirror, hoping I was being paranoid. But to my horror, I wasn’t. Marty Malomar was sprinting through the street behind my car, arms and legs pumping with unnatural, robotic efficiency like a T-1000. I wasn’t positive, but I thought I heard him scream something about Scotchgard protection. The fact that he was gaining on me would have been alarming enough, without Nancy’s mom suddenly appearing in the passenger seat beside me. The jump scare caused me to jerk the wheel and I veered into oncoming traffic, eliciting several enraged honks as I jerked the wheel back, narrowly averting a collision.
“Stop popping up like that!” I yelled at Nancy’s mom.
“What the hell are you playing at?” she demanded. “Are you . . . running away?”
“Of course I’m running away!”
“There’s no running away. Did you ever see Zangief scamper off-screen and leap into his Corolla just because Blanca was giving him a beating?”
It was a video game reference that I would’ve missed if it weren’t for my misspent youth plugged into a gaming console.
“Are you . . . talking about Street Fighter?”
“Obviously!”
“Well, this isn’t Street fighter, lady! And I’m not Zangief!”
“You can say that again. You’re not even Chun-Li. Or . . . Guile.”
She shuddered in disgust, as if saying the name triggered her gag reflex.
“What’s wrong with Guile?” I asked, so thrown by her revulsion that my curiosity trumped the circumstances.
“Seriously?” she gasped. “His victory celebration is combing his hair. What kind of a git does that? Vain dweeb probably refuses to fight on humid days for fear of a frizz out.”
Defending the honor of a video game sprite seemed less important as I looked in the rearview mirror and saw Marty had halved the distance between us.
I could see the Cross of Closing still clutched in his hand and imagined him clubbing his way through anyone in his path as he charged out of the office to come after me. I hoped Lela was alright.
I hammered my foot down on the accelerator and swerved to overtake a station wagon ahead of me. But Marty stayed with me. The guy at the wheel of the station wagon stared gap-jawed at Marty as he sailed past. I noticed people on the sidewalk were pointing and yelling at the spectacle, adding to the growing evidence that this wasn’t all just my insane hallucination.
I yanked the wheel right, then left, turning onto a frontage road with less traffic and sped up again.
“It’s no use, you know,” Nancy’s mom said. “He’s going to catch up.”
“Why?” I yelled. “How? How is Marty freaking Malomar running . . .” I glanced down at the speedometer. “. . . 46 miles an hour?”
“Because he’s not Marty Malomar. He’s . . .” she pulled the megaphone from out of nowhere again and dropped her voice several octaves before finishing, “CAR GUY!”
“Will you quit with the megaphone, already?” I cried.
“And he’s not just fast,” she went on, without the megaphone. “A Car Guy boss like that, probably has an O’Brien boost.”
“What’s an O’Brien bo—” I started, but she cut me off, delivering the salient details enthusiastically.
“We’re probably talking a forty, maybe fifty on his Life-O-Meter. Muscles easily clocking in at a seventy.”
“Fifty?” I cried. “Seventy?”
I stole a furtive glance down at the fifteen and eight on my forearm.
“At least!” she answered. “Why, what kind of stats are you rocking?”
She craned her head for a peek at my stats. I shifted my arm out of her line of sight and shrugged.
“About the same,” I said.
She didn’t seem particularly convinced.
“He is going to wreck you.”
“Why does he even have stats?” I demanded. “Why do I have stats? Why does anybody have stats?”
“That’s a stupid question,” Nancy’s mom said. “How else do you know how much damage you’ve done? Or taken? Honestly, for a nerd, you’re not much of a nerd.”
There was a tinny thud from behind me and I looked in the rearview mirror to see Marty hot on my tail, taking a swing at the trunk of my car with the Cross of Closing every few strides.
“And what about you? Why do you know all this?”
“I forget.”
“How can you—”
Marty swung the Cross of Closing again and it punched a hole, burying one of its arms in the trunk’s decklid and holding fast. He yanked himself forward, like an ice climber using a pick axe to hoist himself up.
There was an explosion of safety glass as his free hand crashed through the back window at super human velocity. Tiny and rounded though they were, bits of the glass tore into the back of my head and I sensed my Life-O-Meter dropping by five points.
Meanwhile, Marty grabbed hold of the head rest of the back seat on the passenger side and dragged himself halfway through the window.
I craned my head around to see him glaring at me as he bellowed, “What’s it gonna take to put me in this car today?”
Obviously, the time had come to slam on the breaks and send him flying through the car and out the front window. Just like they do in the movies.
I planted my foot squarely on the brake pedal and smashed it into the floor. The car skidded and fishtailed and the front end dropped into a drainage ditch in front of a lonely apartment complex.
Sadly, Marty didn’t fly through the car and out the front window because this wasn’t the movies. He flew forward just enough to pile into the back seat. Now the psychopath was in the car with us and I was headed for a tire iron-ing.
At this proximity, my weird new sixth sense suddenly kicked in, telling me he was two-fiftieths dead. It seemed his trip through the back window had made only a small dent in his very hefty Life-O-Meter. I couldn’t sense any of his other stats, but being that Nancy’s mom’s high-end estimate of his Life-O-Meter had been spot-on, it was fair to assume that her guess on his Muscles stat was equally accurate. And if Muscles meant what I thought it meant, I needed to get gone.
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I threw open the door and leaped out, noticing a number of looky-loos in the apartment complex pulling their curtains aside to investigate the commotion. I knew what they were about to witness was going to be ugly. The second Marty got out of the car it’d be like a tiger chasing down a three-legged turtle. But as I prepared to take flight, I noticed he wasn’t getting out of the car.
He was still in the back seat.
You’d think I would have taken off anyway. But because I’m a moron, I once again did what they do in the movies. After all, that had worked out great a few moments before. I crept back and peeked through the window to see what was up with the murderous maniac. Instead of seeing him lunge out to kill me as my stupidity merited, I saw him having some kind of seizure. Then suddenly, I sensed his Life-O-Meter dropping off precipitously. He was grunting and frothing at the mouth and convulsing so violently I thought he might start coming apart. And then . . . he did.
Both his arms and legs detached from his torso and each of the five sections started sizzling and steaming. As his Life-O-Meter continued to plummet, I felt the ten points I’d lost off my own Life-O-Meter being restored.
“You okay?” I heard a surfer-voiced guy ask as he got out of his Jeep in the apartment complex parking lot.
He took a few steps toward the car and then stopped short, gasping.
“Whoa! What the—? That dude is melting!”
We both stared wide-eyed at the sizzling pieces of Marty as they rapidly evaporated like butter in a hot pan. In moments, there was barely any trace that he’d ever been there.
But as I looked back at the guy beside me to compare notes on the unspeakable grotesquery we’d both just witnessed, his face was blank.
Then he came to life again, and he asked, “You okay?”
“Uh . . . ” I responded. “No. No, I’m not okay. You just saw that, right?”
I gestured to the back seat of the car.
“Yeah. You wrecked in the ditch, dude. Need me to call a tow truck?”
“You didn’t see the guy in the back seat?” I asked. It was an absurd question. Of course he’d seen Marty. But his face said otherwise.
“The guy in five pieces?” I added. “Melting?”
Suddenly, I felt a burning sensation in my forearm and doubled over, groaning. I didn’t need to examine my arm to know the Life-O-Meter that had been topped off moments ago was back on the skids. But I looked anyway, confirming what I was sensing: the gauge had fallen from fifteen to thirteen. What was going on?
Looking back up, I saw the guy beside me had started backing away, as if trying to make a stealthy escape from a run-in with a loon. Behind him, I noted people retreating from their windows and curtains falling closed again. Suddenly, no one wanted any part of the scene outside.
I sensed my Life-O-Meter changing to fourteen, then topping back out at fifteen. It seemed I’d recovered from whatever mysterious malady I’d contracted.
Nancy’s mom climbed out of the car and shook her head at me.
“Tried to involve an NPC, huh?”
“What?”
The term was a non sequitur. What did non-player characters have to do with anything?
“You’ll get dinged every time you do that—and be dead pretty quick if you keep at it. Plus, there’s no point. If they see anything really weird, it’ll just be rewritten in their minds as something that makes sense.”
“Are you talking about mindwiping people?” I cried.
“More or less.”
My brain got jammed and I made a face like I’d just eaten a lemon, whole. But I pushed through it.
“Well . . . what about Paulina?”
“What about her?”
“Why could she see all the dead dolls?”
“Oh, well, I’d guess because it was hilarious,” Nancy’s mom explained. “And swapping in the pig intestines brought it into line with reality well enough.”
“What do you mean pig intestines?”
“Well, they couldn’t stay doll guts once she rocked up,” she scoffed. “That would make the whole thing seem crazy.”
“Yeah, we can’t have that!” I screamed. “So, my housekeeper thinks I’m the kind of guy that stuffs dolls with pig guts because whoever’s in charge here thinks it’s . . . funny?”
“Just guessing, but, I mean, that’s why I’d do it.”
My brain broke a little more, but then I looked over at the car and refocused on the moment.
“What . . . what the hell happened to Marty just now?”
She looked through the back window at the moist spot that had been my biggest client.
“Hm,” she puzzled. “Did you pay for the leather?”
“What?”
“When you bought the car—did you pay for leather seats, or did you get the dealer to throw them in?”
“Uh . . . they threw ‘em in,” I answered. “Why? What does that have to do with any—”
“Really?” she said, stretching out the middle of the word to suggest that she was impressed. “You didn’t pay a dime?”
“No,” I answered, annoyance percolating. “My aunt came with me to buy the car. She was a good negotiator and—”
“Ah . . . ” she cut me off, signaling that she was no longer impressed.
“What does that matter?” I demanded.
“Well-negotiated amenities: a Car Guy’s biggest weakness. Contact with the seat probably dealt a hundred damage, easy.”
“The seat?”
“Your luck is astounding,” she marveled. “To come out of that without a scratch.”
“I lost five points of my Life-O-Meter!”
“Psh. Five points. You ought to be dead. Like super, super dead.”
I rolled my eyes and asked the next big question.
“What about Marty?”
“What about him?”
“Is he gone? Like dead?”
“Oh, no. I’m sure he’ll be fine.”
“Really?”
“Sure. All his limbs popped off and he dissolved into a puddle. But why should he let that slow him down?”
I sighed, finally registering the condescending sarcasm. I was just about ready to start slapping some answers out of her.
“That’s it!” I yelled. “I need to know what’s going on! I need to know what is happening to me!”
“What’s happening to you is you just lucked your way through your first boss battle.”
“Huh?”
“It’s RIP, you nitwit.”
RIP? The image from my dream that morning flashed through my mind. But that didn’t exactly fill in all the blanks.
“What the hell does that mean?” I demanded. “What is RIP?”
“Well, if you don’t know, I can’t tell you.”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t need you to tell me!”
“And I wouldn’t bother. It’d be a waste of my time.”
“Why won’t you give me a straight answe—” I started, but she cut me off again.
“Oh! Here we go!” she said, her body going ramrod straight and starting to vibrate.
A single slip of paper worked its way out of her mouth and she tore it away as her body went slack again.
“Here you are,” she said, tossing the slip into the air.
“What the hell?” I exclaimed as the wind took it. I bolted after it, zig zagging down the street a ways, swiping at it like a bear fishing for salmon. Then as it swooped to the ground and started skipping along, I finally managed to pin it under my foot.
Picking it up, I saw that it read, “1,000 XP”.
“Can’t say that you earned it,” Nancy’s mom jabbed.
“What? Why?” I said defensively. “Apparently, I just killed a ‘fully leveled Car Guy!’”
“Your back seat killed a Car Guy, thanks to your aunty.”
I rolled my eyes again and shook my head. She was a nasty piece of work. But she was also right. I had very little to do with the fact that I was still breathing.
“Ow,” I cried.
I felt the familiar tingling in both forearms again as the ink rearranged itself to reveal that I was now well past level two. All my stats were appreciably higher—most notably my Muscles stat. It was at twelve—still a far cry from Marty’s seventy, but I supposed it was something. My Quest Summary indicated another chapter of my adventure had been ticked off, as the second serial number on the list (50900822) was joined by a new crossed-out quest objective that read “One at This Price.”
“Also, this,” Nancy’s mom said. “Premo drop. It really is your lucky day.”
She threw a wad of black fabric at me and it landed on my head, covering my face. I yanked it away and . . . she was gone.
“Dammit!” I cursed.
I un-wadded the fabric to find what seemed to be a pair of black, threadbare underwear.
“Cool,” I said to myself. “Some dude’s drawers.”
As Nancy’s mom had intimated, bosses sometimes “dropped” fancy loot. I didn’t see how this qualified. I felt a tingling in my left forearm and saw a new item appear in my inventory: Belgian Boxer Shorts.
What the actual crap? They weren’t even boxers. They were more like . . . spandex.