Prologue-
-or
The End is the Beginning
A graveyard had more comings and goings than the contents of the slightly dingy walls of the local QuickEMart. It was silent save for the muffled chirps of the crickets everyone politely pretended weren’t in the back of the employee closet. There was a girl at the counter, a pretty little thing with her absentminded bubblegum popping and her frazzled hair, tapping away at the glass of the countertop.
Nobody but the Holy Ghost ever came to the QuickEMart at three in the morning on a Wednesday. The girl had been there since the sun had gone down on Tuesday and would be there until the sun rose and the morning crowd shuffled in for their coffee. Last call at the local bars had been an hour ago, and she had cheerfully waved out her last drunk patron moments before the clock struck three.
The lull was the perfect time to get some cleaning done. But there was still a slim chance that some straggler would come in desperate need of the last dregs of coffee in the machine, so she resigned herself to killing time for another hour. It was the perfect time to revel in her strange little hobby. With a tiny private smile, she slid her much battered phone from her pocket and carefully unravelled her trusty old headphones from around the scratched glass. A few careful swipes and taps of her fingers had the screen lit up with the gaudy pink and black menu of the latest internet sensation.
Well, for a given value of the word ‘sensation’. The game My Wicked Lover was famous for a different reason than a game of the same kind that featured a bunch of pigeons. No, this game was infamous because it was just so very bad. It had been made by a tiny little indie game studio that was really just a bunch of college kids messing around, and was a textbook example of attempting to milk a cash cow. Awful music, worse graphics, trite plotlines, cliche characters; if you named an awful feature of a girl’s dating game that drove players insane, it was a sure bet that My Wicked Lover had it.
There were almost zero walkthroughs available for it online. Normally one could reliably find the wisdom of those who had gone before with a simple search, but the only walkthrough that had ever been made for this game had only one thing to say for route success:
Pick the option that is a bad cliche. Cheesiest lines, mind-numbing answers, the rule of thumb was to always select the one answer that seemed like it came out of a little girl’s diary about her dream boyfriend.
It wasn’t even possible to mess up the selection of which of the characters you wanted to end up with. Whoever had written the script had apparently not cared enough to hide the fact that they literally had more money than sense, because you had to buy each route separately and then play them all individually. Each route was downloaded to your phone as a separate app, and you could either play them in one massive run by buying story energy or wait the requisite hour for each little choice to recharge.
Moira Grey hadn’t even bought the games. A very clever soul had found a loophole in their code that contained a web version of the opening menu for each installment, then stripped each page systematically before re-uploading the collected mess as an app with a string of numbers as its title. The lengths people go to were truly mind boggling at times.
Then again, Moira couldn’t really judge anyone on their peculiar hobbies when she had downloaded the entire pirated mess and had played through each route as methodically as she could. Well, as methodical as one could be when one had to keep stopping and trying not to scream from the second-hand embarrassment the main protagonist put the player through.
Who just walks into the stronghold of the Demon King and all four of his generals and literally screams that they’re there to subjugate the monsters in the name of humanity? Who even does that?
Moira was almost through the true ending route of the Demon King himself and she wanted to strangle this girl. Or at the least sit her down through a good chat with a therapist to discuss how low her self esteem was. You did not get a boyfriend or significant other by abandoning everything that made you unique in order to feed into their ego. Frankly, this was even a terrible sign for a regular human queen. Moira didn’t really want to think about how badly the protagonist would do as the Demon Queen.
The fact that anyone expected people to pay the worth of a real game done by dedicated professionals for a product that was so deeply flawed was almost insane.
No, she was going to think about it. The protagonist was going to lead that poor country into a ruin if her husband ever gave her even a scrap of power. If this was reality, Moira was pretty sure she would find the protagonist in the dictionary as an example of a ridiculous failure of a queen, right next to Marie Antoinette and Bloody Mary. She made a sound somewhere between the dignified braying of a donkey and a rusted window frame as she tried not to laugh at the sheer ridiculous implausibility of this game. Her phone was gingerly set down under the glass countertop as she cradled her face in her hands, fingers pressed against the sides of her head as if to stave off agony by sheer force of will.
No. No. The protagonist did not seriously just tell the Demon King that she would die for his happiness. But she did. And oh the dialogue was cheesy enough that Moira was pretty sure she had thrown up a little.
She shuddered, shook all over like a wet dog as she tried to jar the bad thoughts loose. The clock on the wall ticked away, clicking so frantically back and forth that she took a moment to see if the hour hand would break off before it could successfully change the hour.
Foiled once again, there was nothing to do but shuffle her way to the back of the store. The light above her head flickered, cast strange shadow shapes through the layers of peeling paint on the walls. She shuffled just a little bit faster through the hallway, desperate fingers unlocking the closet as she tried to find the light switch for the one remaining trusty bulb in the store. It was strange how the one good bulb managed to remain safely ensconced within the confines of the janitorial closet when not even the one little porch light could claim the same. Moira never understood it, but apparently it was just unlucky for the closet light to be anything but perfect.
The bulb popped with a tinkle of glass and a sizzle of ozone, rained tiny little shards of burning glitter down on the floor. Moira rolled her eyes. “That’s just perfect,” she intoned. One hand batted at her hair while the other scrabbled in the dim light to grab the mop and bucket. She’d clean the glass up later when the sun came up. Glass crunched under her shoes as she rolled the bucket out and scooped up the last jug of floor cleaner.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
She closed the door with an absent minded nudge of her foot, rolled the bucket down the hallway, and began the semi-nightly routine of mopping the stained linoleum floors of the QuickEMart. Carefully, almost mind numbingly so, she swiped the mop to and fro. Under shelves and behind racks, Moira mopped until she could almost see a pale reflection of her face on the polyvinyl flooring.
Her phone chimed merrily from across the store and her head whipped up from her Sisyphean labor. In her hurry, Moira's feet tangled with the length of her trusty mop. It gave one mighty crack and the world tilted on its axis for just one perilous moment.
One moment of poor luck would erase all the good in the world, as Moira soon discovered.
Strange how her head ached after that resounding clunk. She must have hit it on the edge of the hot dog machine. Her fingers clutched at the sore spot on her head and came away wet, the sticky red soft and warm to the touch.
When did they get hot dogs that came with strawberry jam for a sauce?
She’d think about it after a nice long nap.
Moira woke because she was cold. This was in itself a giant mystery as she definitely remembered her last customer closing the front door before he left. The air conditioner wasn’t broken either, not like last July where they all came to work in parkas and scarves and dusted snow from the tops of the piles of Wonder Bread.
She sat up with a scowl, nose wrinkled and her face like thunder. The cold only increased her ire, and she shivered as she rubbed her hands on her bare arms in a vain attempt to warm them. Her knees pressed together so hard she could feel the bones in her thighs clatter together with the force of her shudders.
Wait a second. She had pants on before she took her nap. Sure, they were just a pair of mildly resectable work pants that were part of her uniform, but they had still been on her. With her luck, Moira was probably stuck in one of those awful backless hospital gowns made of nothing but paper, hopes, and fond memories of dignity.
Did hospitals hire gothic fanatics for their interior designers? No, there was pink on the edges of the pillowcases. The four poster bed was black, the canopy pink, wallpaper the same shade of black with pink trim. It couldn’t really be considered gothic if there was pink, could it? Was this some sort of holistic medicine sort of hospital that her convenience store attendant insurance wasn’t going to pay for?
Wait just a minute here. Had someone knocked her unconscious and stripped her naked? Oh God she had been abducted by a serial killing rapist. She didn’t want to die a virgin, nor did she want to die in this bad punk goth nightmare of a room. Nope. Moira Grey was not going to die a statistic her mother was going to read about in the Sunday paper.
In her irritation, something smacked against her arm and she jumped. To her dying day, Moira would deny that the sound she made was anything less than a dignified yelp. With a girlish scream, she jumped backwards on the bed and knocked all the pillows off in her frantic rush to grab something solid to smack the thing with. All her efforts yielded was a pillow covered with enough pink embroidery to make the little bolster strangely difficult to hold on to. “C’mon. Here snakey snakey.” Something moved out of the corner of her eye, and she swung the pillow as hard as she could.
Her world exploded in pain.
Something thunked against the thick carpet (again with the pink and black, it was like there was a little girl trying to be tough who lived here or something) and she hissed at the dual feeling of stubbed toes and hit… something. “Ow ow ooooow,” she hissed as her fingers went to rub at her abused toes and encountered something that shouldn’t have been there.
Hang on. When she woke up this morning, she did not have goat hooves for feet. She would be the first to admit that the gold filigree was a nice touch, but did nothing to distract from the fact that she had goat hooves for feet and actual fur on her calves. It may have been soft nut brown fur, but as it wasn’t just stuck on with latex and spirit gum it was thus the wrong kind of leg accessory. The hooves weren’t coming off either, and no amount of cursing or tugging was going to change that.
She tried banging her head against the side of the bed instead of screaming, but after getting a particularly lacy pillow stuck on the point of a curly horn it lost the appeal.
There was no snake in the room with her. That was just her tail. Her long, triangle-headed tail. Because that was completely normal.
And no, she did not turn out to have the infamous paper hospital gown. As it turned out, there was an actual wardrobe that had less in terms of covering than that: lingerie. If you could even call the leather straps adorned with tiny scraps of ribbon and lace ‘lingerie’. That would explain why everything was so cold: she had no clothes on.
Moira would scream, but she was a bit too busy with trying to find a pair of scissors to cut holes in the bedsheet in order to accommodate the pair of bat wings she had suddenly sprouted during her nap. There on the small of her back were wings too small to be functionally useful but too large to be hidden, and thus far were proving to be more of a giant nuisance than anything else.
“Aha!” A vanity, covered in a myriad of little odds and ends. There had to be something she could use to make an emergency toga out of somewhere in its drawers.
The sound that echoed through the halls would have made a banshee proud. And Moira screamed and screamed, fingers clawing into her face as the scissors lay forgotten on the polished wood. For there in the mirror, looking back with just as much disbelieving horror on her face as Moira felt, was the astonishingly well rendered face of Tatra Nul Simnel. The same Tatra Nul Simnel who was forever the rival in My Wicked Lover.
The same low level succubus who was destined to die at the end of every route, because the writers couldn’t be bothered to give her a real end.
How unlucky could one person possibly get?