I’ve been trotting barefoot down the road, holding up my pants, for miles. It’s dark, a bit chilly, and running under the orange lights every block or so reminds me of playing manhunt. This pretty much is manhunt. Or man-run-away. But I’m not a kid, and I don’t think Beetle-Lady is either.
Nor are we playing.
I’ve been heading north. I know this area really well, but only by road. As soon as I wander, stray into neighborhoods here, I can easily become lost.
Neighborhoods and/or farms. Where I grew up is a pretty decent mixture of both.
Trying to think… now that I’m here… where to go….
I have to stop. I’m level 37, and that’s great – I feel great, not even the slightest bit winded. But I’m still me, and I still need to think.
To the left might be good. It’s further away from Beetle-Girl. That is, unless she looped back this way.
Shit – she must be tracking me. I bet it’s the dark mode thing. Maybe I should….
Oh, yeah.
The Menu.
The universal inventory.
Clothes. Armors. Stuff.
“Equip… best.”
Wasn’t that a thing in video games?
It was, and it is. I’m wearing… brown. A lot of brown with a lot of pockets. Feels like thick, padded material, everywhere. Leather. Leather armor and a matching cap.
But there’s better stuff, all throughout the inventory. I can see it. It’s right there. One set is even called God-Breaker Armor of Cosmic Infinity.
But they’re all grayed out.
“What’s even the point in having them if I can’t use them?”
Whatever. This shit feels bullet proof. Plenty of cargo, too.
Should browse a bit more.
“Equip best weapon.”
It’s an anchor. A giant, heavy anchor, and rusty. I can lift it, but it’s a lot, and I’m slowed.
“Get rid of the anchor. No, don’t drop. Just unequip. And equip best sword.”
Bastard Sword of Light.
“Fair enough. I’ll be the bastard-man. Dennis. Dennis the bastard-”
A whistling followed immediately by rustling distracts me.
The rustling moves all about, all around me. First here, then there – from the east to the west, and then north and then south.
A flash ignites before my eyes, and I tumble in a world of searing pain. Weightlessness, tumbling and scrambling, unbreathing and unable to gasp….
99
38
328
Too blinded to see. More explosions, dust and debris showering….
I get up to fight, at first kicking and punching aimlessly, and then swiping left and right with the next best sword.
More flashes. More pain. More tumbling.
99
99!
87
89
It ends with an elbow to my back (66), a knee in my chest (59), and finally a sling from my ankle to the hard ground (888).
All the while, I saw no one.
“HP low.”
“But I’m… level 37….”
So much for all-powerful. Infinite. The other things I thought I felt.
Footsteps.
I can finally… nope – no standy-standy.
There’s a foot on my arm. It shoves me over. I feel a traveling wet moving from my lower back toward my shoulders and spreading out. I’m in a puddle. It’s cold. The moon is bright. The silvery clouds. And all the stars.
“This is it, Katie. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” a voice deep and riddled with static replies.
“No. Katie. Not you, whoever you are. My wife. My real wife. Not the one who shot me. Katie doesn’t have a gun. Little creep”
A chuckle. A whizzing sound and a flash of bright light.
A heavy thud. Another beetle-person arrives. This one, I spy through cracked eyelids, is a man.
They’re removing their masks. They’re… awfully familiar.
“You should’ve stayed dark,” Beetle-Man says. He’s wearing a cloth mask revealing only his eyes, but I can tell who he is by those shapely bushy brows. He’s Ryan (38).
And the other one’s Katie. My Katie. Or so she appears to be. She’s smiling down at me in her typical Katie way – a hip out, her helmet in-arm and propped on it, looking all hot and stuff.
I can taste blood in my mouth. Every part of me that’s ever burned does so now. I feel achy and heavy. And a bit sick.
“What am I, crying?” I ask, choking up.
They’re both just smiling down at me. Katie’s holding the gun she used to shoot me with. It’s a black rifle-looking thing with a blue glow deep within what I guess is the barrel. Looks like something from a cosmic comic. She’s the lady from space, and I’m her earth target.
“You aren’t… my Katie.”
She chuckles. “No. I’m not yours,” she agrees. To the other Ryan. “Should I, or do you want to?”
He shrugs. Of course he does. He’s me. Why would he care?
“Health Critical.”
“Yeah,” I say, and the other two are just talking to one another, ignoring me.
“Say yes to unlock Intuitive Menu Mode.”
“As much as I’d like to, I think it’s only fair that you do it. He’s obsessed with you. It’s gross.”
“Yeah, but it’s you he’s paraded around as. I’d be pissed.”
“Say yes to unlock Intuitive Menu Mode.”
“He’s seen you naked and dwells on it. As much as that pisses me off, surely you-”
Katie rolls her eyes in impatience and aims the gun at my face. There’s just this shine of blue light in my eyes, a soft blue – kinda nice.
“…Yes,” I say.
The Menu opens. As they’re standing there breaking my heart, the Menu itself adjusts this and that – items, armor, weapons, amulets, abilities.
“He’s glowing,” Ryan (38) says. “Why is he doing that?”
She aims her gun. “Stop doing that,” she warns.
I’m smiling. I feel great. In fact, I feel beyond great.
“Let me up,” I tell them, “and I’ll just go.”
“Why’s he pink?” Ryan (38) asks, ignoring me.
“Fritz?” she asks back. “No, it’s… shit! He’s summoning!” Katie yells.
“No, he’s going BVATAR!” Ryan (38) yells.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
I am. I am going from Ava (avatar A) to Bvatar (avatar B). I’m changing my avatar. I’m becoming… Clement Armassi, High Priest of the Vicar, and rightful heir to the throne of both Valas and Galsia.
In an instant and a flash, I’m standing over them, six and a half feet tall, in a light of my own, my silver hair a blazing white, my green eyes aglow like jade on fire. I close my eyes. When I open them and flip my hair with my left hand, my right hand suddenly grips a materializing sword. The Pearldrake Sword.
They’re cowering in the glow of both my sword and the light I radiate from within.
“Mercy!” they shout.
“Spare us, lord!”
I laugh. And my curiosity opens the Menu.
How great is my power level. All 9s and rising.
99999999999999999999999….
My stats are all the same.
“He’s fritzing!” she shouts.
“Go Bva!” he shouts back.
They do. They transfer their consciousness from their Ava to their Bva. Their new appearance reflects the change.
“Run!” they both shout.
And they are running. They’re immensely fast. Like superheroes. They hop like fleas over the endless stretch of tree silhouette, a shapely black cast of forest against the dark blue sky.
I can’t see them with my eyes, but I can see them in my mind.
I can see their levels. I can also see their intention with me; they’re here to deceive me. They are neither a Ryan nor a Katie. They’re mercenaries. They’re on a job.
Still, they must die.
I’m in the sky as if I am the sky and can therefore appear whereabout within it as I choose when I choose without delay.
I crash down on Ryan (38), who is actually a green humanoid with bumps and scales, even on his black, beetle-y eyes. The force of our encounter sends him plummeting below into an immediate storm of smoldering dirt and rock.
4,156. He won’t be getting up for a while.
I look to the east and there is the female. They’re… Borgans. She’s the stronger of the two. Level 78.
There she is directly in front of me, and as my eyes widen, and my hand appears on her throat, and I squeeze just hard enough to meet the edge to the nearest tenth of what her throat cartilage can withstand before crumbling (989.7 HP), and she looks at me breathlessly with eyes bulging, I find it within myself to spare her, if only for a moment so she can see, and those watching through the lens over her left eye, what happens to those who hunt me.
With a thought I draw, from the soggy, muddy depths of his own pool of piss and blood, her Borgan partner.
They hang unwillingly before me, suspended in air, above my old neighborhood. Those below stare up at us – mice, rats, squirrels, cats, a few barking dogs, and Larry, from his porch.
A light from within me reaches out as a blaze and drenches them with a soft, dull pain. The throbbing will continue in a rise until the very essence of time and space within and immediately around their bodies shatters. The universe crumbles within those cubic feet, and I stare into the actual nothingness at its core.
I can see the cosmos of another universe there. “Universal Collapse” flashes across my vision over 999,999,999.
I’m back on planet earth, my feet on the ground. There is nothing but blue blood spatter here, and what look like chunks of thick green flesh. And bones and guts.
I double over and collapse. I’m Ryan again, and Ryan’s puking.
No, just… gagging.
I need a fucking cigarette.
As Larry rushes over I says, between gagging, “I didn’t do that.”
And it’s true. I didn’t. That was the intuitive menu.
“Intuitive Menu off!” I cry – but nothing changes.
“Shit!”
#
“Shit!”
I ran to my car and drove off to the spot. There, I took off the armor, unequipped the sword, and just sat there leaning face in palms outside of my car in my puky work pants. I’ve been there under the power lines, pacing in the cold, smoking cigarette after cigarette and trying to figure out what the fuck is going on.
“Fuck this shit!” I yell – and spit, and cuss some more, and kick at nothing.
My cigarette breaks in the process. “It wasn’t her,” I assure myself. And it’s true, it wasn’t. But it was a person. Or it was people. Green aliens or not. “Why must such fuck-heads taunt me when I’m down? And why did it work?” Gulp. “They’re dead. Dead aliens now. Dead.”
Aliens are people too, man.
Consider me unglued.
I look up at the sky over a trembling hand and its stumped cigarette. It isn’t my hand or my cigarette butt because I’m feeling both detached from the world and depersonalized – okay? Okay. My arm is like a foreign twig in these moments, when I spy it rising to meet my every urge and whim.
The dawn is coming, the sun rising yellow to ignite the pink sky, and I’ve been here all night smoking cigarette after cigarette after cigarette.
Alone. Ryan and alone.
“Katie killed me, so I killed her back. That’s what it looked like. That’s what it felt like.”
Yeah, but that’s not what happened.
“Yeah, but it actually is.”
Fine – whatever.
I’m talking to myself. “I’m talking to myself.”
It’s called reasoning. Bargaining. Or something.
It’s true. I’ve been mourning. Mourning all morning. Mourning all night.
“Menu,” I say shakily with a sudden resolve.
“Avatars.”
I’m gonna figure this out.
Clement Armassi (27)
Clement Armassi (18)
James Ryan Cobb (38)
James Ryan Cobb (23)
Jesse Lucas Johnson (18)
“Which one is the real me. Show me which, and give me proof.”
Nothing.
“Intuitive Mode, On.”
“Intuitive Menu Mode.”
“Thank you. Which of these is the real me? The one I am inside, at my core.”
“Clement Armassi (27), was the antagonist in the fantasy novel, The Lost Prince-”
“No, not that. I already know the trivia shit about that. I wrote that book. I want to know-”
“Clement Armassi (18) first appeared in the fantasy progression novel, The Madman’s Sword-”
“I know that too. I want to know the truth-”
“James Ryan Cobb (38) first appeared in the literary novel, Scary House.”
“What? What does that mean?”
“James Ryan Cobb (23) first appeared in the NA literary novel, Pisces Zero.”
“Jesse Lucas Johnson (18) first appeared in the YA literary novel, Lifeguard.”
“What does that mean?”
It doesn’t say anything. Or, it says it all on repeat again but I’m not listening. I’m… staring at something. Avatar stats.
Clement Armassi (Status: Fritz)
Level 99,999,999,999 Gorralian
HP: 99,999,999,999
Intelligence: 99,999,999,999
Strength: 99,999,999,999
Dexterity: 99,999,999,999
Vitality: 99,999,999,999
Stamina: 99,999,999,999
Luck: 77,777,777,777
I just used that avatar. That’s the one I used to utterly annihilate those assholes. It was like dreaming. No, it was like being someone else. I was me. Or, really, I was him. And as him, I was in control. So, he was in control. And he’s a brutal monster.
Look at those stats….
What does fritz mean?
“Why does it say Fritz? What does Fritz mean?”
Clement Armassi (Status: Fritz)
Level 99,999,999,999 Gorralian
HP: 99,999,999,999
Intelligence: 99,999,999,999
Strength: 99,999,999,999
Dexterity: 99,999,999,999
Vitality: 99,999,999,999
Stamina: 99,999,999,999
Luck: 77,777,777,777
“But what does Fritz mean?”
Clement Armassi (Status: Fritz)
Level 99,999,999,999 Gorralian
HP: 99,999,999,999
Intelligence: 99,999,999,999
Strength: 99,999,999,999
Dexterity: 99,999,999,999
Vitality: 99,999,999,999
Stamina: 99,999,999,999
Luck: 77,777,777,777
“What the fuck!” I reach into my pocket for another cigarette but find only an empty pack. That feeling is literally terrifying. Fitting for right now. “Show me the other Clement.”
Clement Armassi
Level 88 Gorralian
HP: 7,777
Intelligence: 120
Strength: 250
Dexterity: 250
Vitality: 250
Luck: 77
Stamina: 250
“Can I… be that? Right now? Can I be that Clement? The second one? The one not in Fritz?”
Avatars:
Clement Armassi (27)
Clement Armassi (18)
James Ryan Cobb (23)
There’s no flash. No dramatic change in terms of radiance, winds or other energies. I’m simply taller, stronger, faster, more intelligent, and all at once.
Everything… starts to make sense.
I am me. I am. They are not – the avatars. They’re… avatars.
But what does that mean… for me? And why does it mean that?
I don’t know. It just is.
“Well then, who am I?”
Right now, I am Clement Armassi II. I am. Just as just then I was James Ryan Cobb. As much as I’ve ever been anyone. As much as I’ll ever be.
“Okay, but then who’s Jesse Lucas Johnson?”
“You were,” I say to myself.
I was?
“Does that mean that I am?”
It does.
I am him.
You are. We are. I am.
“Okay, okay,” I say – and it’s weird; it’s difficult to think like that while being Clement Armassi – unhinged, unsure, curious about things that don’t, in the context of being him, matter. I have to force the curiosity. I have to wear it like a too-tight shirt. It doesn’t fit. But I can squeeze it on. And the inner me that is Clement might humor me by lending me his awesome power of genius. “This is abstract, but who was the “me” that bumped me out of Ryan Cobb and sent me into Jesse Lucas Johnson? – for that is what happened, isn’t it?
“We don’t know,” I say, a genuine response to the question from the very core that is Clement Armassi.
“We don’t?”
“We don’t.”
“Okay, but is it possible that that’s what happened?”
“We don’t know, but we mean to find out.”
This response lights a fire in me. In both of us – in myself, my core being, and within the avatar.
He’s as livid as I am about everything, perhaps more so than I, due to his natural capacity for depth.
We’re going to problem solve. We’re going to figure this out. Me and him. Or me as him.
“The world is ruined,” I say to myself. Or, rather, we say as ourself.
It’s true. She is not here. She isn’t here, so why should I be?
“I have no reason to be here.”
I guess that’s true too.
“And as we have no means to get out but one, it is that one route we will take.”
And that route is….
He shoots up into the sky. Or I do. It’s difficult to tell who’s who now that I’ve somehow managed to split us.
We’re there. We’re above the planet. It’s freezing cold. But it doesn’t hurt.
“We’ll end it all,” I say.
End it… all. “Wait.”
“We’ll eradicate this entire planet!” I shout.
But I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t do that. Eradicate the planet. Everyone on it.
It’s true. I shouldn’t. But then why do I feel such a strong urge to do so?
The urge is like thirst upon waking after a night of heavy drinking; or the desire to make love with one’s lover at the end of a perfect day; or when you hear your favorite song and you’d like to turn it up; or when you put the keys in the car of your dreams and want to take a drive.
It’s the blooming of a flower in the morning light, dew on the petals, fur on the trembling leaves as the desire to stretch and fan out expands.
The desire to grow as a sapling oak.
The gazelle at the edge of the river in a crocodile’s eyes.
It is inevitable, that I react in just this way, to all the facts that have so clumsily announced themselves to me in string after string of world-shattering change. I have the power to demolish planetary existence. And my every attempt at subduing the urge to do so is and can only be, at most, a delay.
A shrinking delay, a smaller delay with each passing second.
A short delay. A shortened short delay. One so short, no countdown is necessary.
As if holding my breath and opening wide to take in a gasp of clean air, I loom over the planet, a man suspended in the vastness of space.
I shut my eyes and imagine the planet erupting until engulfed in a flame that originated within. The flames become too much in an instant, and in that same instance the planet gives in and expands.
And it does erupt. It does burst. Noiselessly. Slowly. Swelling, crumbling, falling apart.
It’s on fire all over in an instant. The heat radiates beneath me. I’m a sweating, wide-eyed figure of utter excitement, a victim to the surge of adrenaline dispersed within my blood at the sight of the result of my give to the sensational release even I, as Clement, could never have imagined.
The excitement only swells as the heat engulfs my body. As I succumb as Clement, I succumb as Ryan too, as the Intuitive Menu, in its stupidity, places me exactly where I’d been before I transformed.
#
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GAME OVER
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New Game
Ashaneen0000
Available Avatars:
Jesse Lucas Johnson (18)
Clement Armassi (18)
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Clement Armassi (18)
