As Joe pushed against the vines, he expected them to swing open like a door. It was a good thing he hadn’t waited until the countdown ended to break out of his hidey hole. As it was, he tore at the vines as quickly as he could and was still pushed through them when the timer ran out.

Health -2 (8/10) from vines scratching face and arms.

No sooner was he out of the hole than he was attacked. Sure, it was a bunch of small spiders that he could easily stomp on, but it counted, and he knew that because he got experience for doing it.

You have killed 4 small spiders.

You have gained 21 xp and one spider silk.

The spider silk was a tiny spool’s worth of thread wrapped loosely in a way that looked like it might not tangle if it was unrolled very carefully. The xp was welcome. At least the AIs seemed to be starting him off slowly. He’d killed bigger spiders in his old apartment.

He stumbled out into a larger cave system; the spiders having been the occupants of the vines over his safe room. The cave walls were like his safe room in that they were brown, bare, and dotted with bland rocks. The floor was mud that caked onto his shoes and splashed up onto his jeans as he stomped. It wasn’t the kind of place that had stalagmites and stalactites. Instead, it had great wooden beams like an old mine, though there wasn’t a handy cart track for him to follow.

Just as Joe was feeling a spark of hope that he might be able to do all this, a bat dive-bombed him, and it wasn’t alone. Joe briefly considered punching the bats like he was in some video game tutorial, but he’d be as likely to do damage to his hands as the bats. His T-shirt was very little protection with its short sleeves and he didn’t think he could kick a bat. With nothing to hit them with but his own hands, he shrugged the backpack off his shoulder and swung it with both hands.

“Hey!” Grace yelled as she slipped down one of his arms and tried to scurry back up to his shoulder.

“Hang on,” Joe told her, his attention riveted on the bats that were retreating with a scrap of his T-shirt in their too-human-looking clawed hands. He’d bought that shirt! It was his. If the AIs thought they could strip it off of him one scraggly piece at a time, they had another thing coming.

Even as he kept one eye on the bats, Joe gripped the backpack in his fists. Grace had hopped to the ground; his shoulders having become an unsafe place to perch with all his machinations. He hadn’t known that tarantulas could jump. He wished he still didn’t know.

“I was almost bat food!” Grace complained. “Is nowhere safe on you for me to travel?”

“I don’t have a weapon and I’m not a pony! What is it you want me to do?” Joe snapped back, nearly biting his own tongue when he saw the look on her furry face. Yes, it was a look, and yes it made him feel guilty. Sort of. Maybe he wasn’t such a good person.

“It isn’t MY fault I’m a furry little spider with almost no use!” Grace snarled back at him in a very un-grandmotherly way. Had Joe pissed off more than just the World AI? Could these AIs get pissed off? He’d thought they’d said they had no emotions, but here Grace was using guilt trips that would have shamed his mom. “You almost killed me like you did those other little spiders. And if it hadn’t been a sneaker death, it would have been a bat-meal death! Either way, I’m not likely to get recycled into something better thanks to your antics, so cut me some slack, human.”

Joe didn’t know what to say so he just stared at her. If there was a tiny part of his mind that had the urge to stomp her and get rid of her as a pest, it was a very small part. Very small. He swore.

“And if you want someone around to explain your options and how this new world works,” Grace was still ranting, “you’d better take better care of my very fragile form. I don’t have to help you, you know! I could have been a Writer AI or an Animation AI, but no, I’d felt sorry for you, so I volunteered to remain your advocate, and this is the thanks I get?!”

“How much would it take to upgrade you?” Joe asked, and it wasn’t because she was useful or that she’d guilt-tripped him. He was a decent person, that’s why.

“First, you’d have to level to get back into the safe room for a rest,” Grace told him, her tone only sounding slightly mollified by his offer. “Then you’d need to be willing to spend most of your running experience on an upgrade that would barely change me at all. For any significant change, you’d need to get to level four, at least.”

“Then we have a goal,” Joe told her, and she looked shocked, for a spider with fur. “Now where would you like to sit on this pony where you don’t think I’ll buck you off at the first sign of a fight?”

Grace had the grace to be a little flummoxed at that idea. As Joe felt like he’d clearly stated before, if he had to fight with what little he had, there wasn’t any place on his body that wasn’t in danger. While she was thinking, he was eyeing those bats that looked like they were getting brave again. He opened the backpack and quickly pulled out what he had. There was a rope, soap, and candles. The energy bars weren’t something he was going to fight with. He was saving those for later.

There wasn’t a stick on the ground or a handy dagger. This was all he had until the World AI decided to grant him something. There wasn’t even a rock big enough to use as a flyswatter!

“With the way those bats are looking at me, I’m thinking I might be better off back in the backpack,” Grace suggested, edging toward it. “As long as you aren’t going to use it as a weapon again.”

Great. And now she’d kiboshed his only weapon idea. Joe pasted on a smile and opened the backpack, chucking the soap and candles in with her and scooting it across the ground. That left him with a heavy length of rope, his fists, and his feet.

“On second thought,” Grace edged back out of the bag, “there has to be something better than that.”

“You’re welcome to swing from a spider silk necklace if you think that will be better,” Joe snapped, sarcasm slipping into his tone as the bats started to flutter a bit. He didn’t care where she ended up, as long as she stopped busting his chops!

“Okay,” she agreed, getting his full attention despite the threat of the bats.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

The bats chose that moment to attack. Joe swung the heavy coil of rope at them, trying to remember everything he’d ever learned from reading those old LitRPG classics. Since none of those books had involved fighting bats with a coil of rope, he just spun around, nearly tripping on the backpack even as he saw Grace scuttle into it. Trying not to kill her, he kicked the backpack away from his feet and swung around again with the rope. He was almost better off going against the bats than trying to weave some spider silk into a spider saddle around his neck.

You have hit a bat for 3 points of damage.

There was a squeal as he got a lucky hit in and there might have been a hiss from the backpack. Seeing as she was the reason he wasn’t wielding the backpack as a weapon, she could lump it. Even as he got one bat in front of him flapping backward, another dived at the back of his other shirt sleeve, trying to get another clump of fabric which was absurd, as Joe knew more about bats than the AI obviously did because of a paper he’d written in high school about them. That paper reminded him a few more facts about bats and spiders.

You have hit a bat for 2 points of damage.

You have killed a bat for 10 xp.

The only thing Joe had going for him was that the bats weren’t doing any damage to him. As unrealistic as it sounded, the bats were still trying to pluck at his shirt like it was their best food source ever. It took five more exhausting swings to kill one other bat and have the other retreat to the cave ceiling area.

You have killed a bat for 10 xp.

You have received two tufts of bat fur.

What the hell was he supposed to do with that? Joe thought, as he slumped against one of the cave supports, careful not to snag his shirt. Did rough VR wood give splinters? He just hoped the AIs hadn’t thought of that.

“Is it over?” Grace poked a few legs out of the bag near his feet and Joe rolled his eyes at her and this whole mess.

“There’s still one up there,” he answered between huffs of breath. “I killed two of them though.”

“I was thinking we could make a little harness for me to…” Grace was suggesting, but Joe rolled his eyes, cutting her off.

“You want me to make a harness out of a bit of spider silk so you can ride my shoulder while I fight bats that are trying to steal my shirt?” he challenged her before she could finish.

“If you could just shorten that by half, we’d have a clickbait option, I’m sure of it,” Grace whispered to him with a wink that was as improbable as the rest of it. Why wasn’t he just sitting in civil disobedience again? Oh yeah, those stupid timers. Maybe dying wasn’t as bad as these idiotic conversations.

“Let’s just take a good look at this,” Joe suggested, trying to remain calm-headed. “One, bats don’t attack people. They’re afraid of people and keep their distance. Two, the laws of gravity and physics are going to make a harness almost impossible to make and even more impossible for a tarantula to use, especially since tarantulas don’t spin webs. Finally, tarantulas are more likely to eat bats than bats are to eat them.”

“Well, aren’t you a fount of useless and drama-sucking information,” Grace hissed at him, and he was over the idea of placating her or feeling sorry for her.

“That’s the problem with you AIs,” Joe went on, very unwisely. “You take things that sound good and treat them like they are absolute fact, and you are so convincing that you manage to convince people that these idiotic things are true.”

“How do you know?” Grace challenged back. “Human memory is so bad, you could have forgotten that bats eat spiders and plenty of video games have bats as starter monsters. I doubt you ranted about them being unrealistic! Besides, tarantulas do have the capacity to spin silk.”

“But they don’t use it for webs,” Joe argued, grabbing the backpack and shoving the rope back into it as he heard the bat retreat further into the cave system. “They trap their prey after sneaking up on them, not that you could sneak up on anything with as much as you blather.”

Joe should have known better.

You have been slain by a giant tarantula that just sneaked up on you and bit you for fifteen points of damage.

He woke up back in his safe room. He had a bad headache and two timers. One was for two hours, and the other was for twenty minutes.

AP 01:59:19

00:19:19

You have revived with the following curse, Aches and Pains.

Joe was panting for breath after a fight for his life and was expected to be polite? And when he challenged the AIs on their facts, he got insta-killed? How was that fair? Unreal. They got away with everything and he got Aches and Pains! None of this was his fault. Whose idiot idea had it been to let the AIs take over the criminal system anyway?

Everything hurt. His bones hurt. His back hurt, and his eyebrows were even tender as he blinked his eyes. He’d been twenty when they’d replaced the president of the US with an AI. He’d been at the polls, but he hadn’t voted on it. The polls were a great place to find Pokémon and he’d been heavily into it in college. There’d nearly been a riot at the polls as extremists had rallied to stop the bill from passing. The AIs didn’t allow for use of media space for campaign advertising due to it being really unpopular with the younger crowd of registered voters. Joe had left when the arrests started, but he got some really amazing pics for his stream. He was a lot more social back then thanks to Pokémon Go tournaments. He met some of his best friends at those. Where had they gone? He wasn’t sure, but it was probably around the time that Pokémon had been forced to provide captures by watching ads so that the disabled had as much chance to catch them as more able-bodied people.

AP 01:56:47

00:16:47

Joe could probably have responded to a few of their texts for tournaments, but he’d started working and his dad was on him to quit playing games and grow up. This is what he got for growing up. He’d probably still have had enough friends to not get arrested for social ineptitude if he’d still been into Pokémon. Why couldn’t parents understand that it was a social game? He hoped his dad was satisfied. This was all his fault. It wasn’t that he really believed all that, but he was awfully tired of everything being his fault all the time. At least in his own mind, he could blame everything else. They didn’t have the thought police yet, but only because the moo-verse was well-versed in George Orwell’s 1984, though it had since been updated to 2584 and included virtual robots as Big Brother. Then again, they were remaking it every ten years like clockwork. Only Jason and Crystal Lake had more sequels and remakes.

Joe brought up his character sheets again to see if he’d somehow made more experience than he’d expected. Nope. It was still dismal because they weren’t giving him a chance. Why couldn’t he have been stuck in a Pokémon game instead of some idiotic monster-killing RPG?

Dungeon Character Sheet

Name: Joe Cockran Denphry Level: 1

Class: Exp: 41/1000

Health Points: 10 Stamina: 8 (-2 for AP)

Mana: 10 Charm: 10

Dar – 1

Dex – 1

Dur – 1

MS – 1

MA – 1

LI – 1

LK – 1 (-2 for attitude)

Skills: Stupid Stubbornness (2)

Wait, Joe wasn’t normally this pessimistic or surly, was he? What was happening? Was the curse affecting just his stats or was he somehow changing because of his low stats? He hadn’t thought about Pokémon in a dog’s age, and he certainly didn’t blame his father for getting him to be responsible once he graduated college. The thought flitted out of his head as quickly as it had entered it.

AP 01:52:31

00:12:31

“Grace?” Joe called out, wondering if the AIs were somehow cheating and moving the clock faster when he wasn’t looking.

When she didn’t answer, Joe pawed through his backpack. She wasn’t there. Great. Well, at least she wouldn’t be in the way. What did he need a stupid AI for anyway? He was better off without her. The pain from the curse was really making him cranky and introspective. Wanting neither, he slipped the backpack back onto his shoulder wincing as he started to pluck at the vines over his door.