The copy machine snarled and showed its fierce teeth, stained yellow and red. The bulky device was split horizontally in the middle, where a gaping maw dripped with the blood of its victim. It had a single bloodshot eye where the touch screen should be and four crab-like pointed feet. It waddled and leapt toward them with surprising agility. Maxi reacted by slamming the door. The device crashed into the obstruction with a loud thud.
They both ran.
“You didn’t tell me this was a boss level!” Farhad yelled.
“You didn’t ask,” Maxi chided.
Truth be told, she hadn’t been aware this was a boss level either. The listing had been a different color than the others, but she assumed it was because it was an ongoing quest.
The creature burst from the room and pursued them with surprising speed for its bulky size. They made it to the elevator, and Maxi hit the button.
Farhad dragged her away. “There’s no time.”
They ran, and sure enough, the killer copy machine made it to the elevator before it started opening. While the creature was fast for its bulk and size, it wasn’t fast enough, and they were able to gain some distance.
After the creature began losing ground on them, it stopped, opened its paper drawer, and pumped out four sheets of paper. They folded into bats with sharp teeth and fluttered toward them.
A conference room, where scared people were huddled, was across the hall.
She turned toward it, and Farhad followed her, but when they got to the door, it was locked. She pounded on the sturdy wood when a bat fluttered toward her. It was too quick and bit her on the shoulder. Blood stained her yellow shirt. She chopped at the paper bat creature, and it spiraled backward.
It recovered and turned back to engage her just as another came after her, each landing a blow and tearing into her flesh. Farhad was occupied with the other two, and the boss creature was quickly gaining the ground it had lost during their run.
She glanced toward the scared people in the office room while she parried and dodged attacks from the bats. Benson’s warning echoed in her mind: “NPCs can be assholes, but you won’t survive without them.”
While fighting off the bats, she pleaded with the people inside, “Please, open the door. We are here to help.”
Just as she had finished her sentence, she cut in half the bat she had wounded before, and it fluttered to the ground as useless paper. The other one landed a bite in her side, causing blood to ooze from the wound.
A mousy woman in an A-line dress came to the door and unlocked it. It was just in time, as the killer copier trundled its way toward them. They retreated into the conference room, and the three remaining bats fluttered in with them. Farhad had wounded the bat coming after him and had a few more scrapes than she did. She slammed the door shut as he stumbled through.
The bats had scattered to terrorize the people in the room. Maxi stabbed one that was going for the lady who had let them inside, and it fluttered to the ground. Farhad hacked repeatedly at one gnawing on a man in a suit until it became a shred of useless regular paper.
Together, they dispatched the last one, but not before it murdered Gladys from the cubicle photo. By the time the battle was over, most of the people were in shock or weeping.
Maxi braced herself for the beast machine to burst through the door. To her surprise, the copier didn’t attempt to bash its way inside or shatter the glass windows to the conference room. Instead, it paced like a caged tiger, looking for a weakness in the barrier.
She pulled out her phone. She had only 3 life points left. Those things packed quite a wallop for paper. Her shirt was battered. She didn’t know how much legendary items cost to repair, but she imagined it would be pretty cost prohibitive, considering her financial situation.
From the number of bites on Farhad, she concluded he had a significantly larger life total than she did. She would have been dead twice over, judging by the wounds he had on his body. He pulled a package of gummy bears from his utility belt, downed two for himself and tossed her one.
She looked at the item for a moment, shocked by his action, but then his wounds started to close. Without thinking, she tossed the gelatin bear into her mouth and ate it.
A message appeared on her phone that said: “Healed 7 Life Points.”
The damage on her shoulder healed entirely, leaving teeth holes in her shirt. The one on her side looked slightly better. Farhad’s wounds almost entirely disappeared.
“Any office snacks have a chance for magic properties. It’s best to loot snack drawers when you can. You’ll find a temporary effect at best, and save yourself vending machine credits at worst,” Farhad answered the question she hadn’t asked.
She glanced at the people in the room. They were scared and murmuring to each other. Someone had put a tablecloth over Gladys. From the look of the meeting room, it looked like the printer had disrupted the thirty-year party for Gladys. There was a potluck in the corner and more decorations celebrating her thirty years with the company.
Before Maxi had time to gather her thoughts, the killer machine bounced up to the large window of the room, roared loud enough to shake the glass, then bounded away.
“I think these are the people we are supposed to save,” Farhad commented.
“We’ll get these people killed if we take them with us,” Maxi responded in conspiratorial tones. “The email said we were needed for a meeting being disrupted by printer issues. I think we found our printer issues.” She gestured in the direction the creature had gone.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
“It’s too high of a Level for the two of us. We were nearly wasted by its minions. Maybe if we had the whole Office Pool.”
“It said I could only bring one ally.”
“Then we were never meant to kill it yet.”
“So why even put it in the first battle? I’ve been in a dungeon crawl before. You defeat the low-level minions to get the XP to beat the boss. How’s a character supposed to advance if they are wasted by the boss in the first battle?”
“This is not your typical dungeon crawl. There’s more than one way to complete a quest. Trust me, if we get these people to safety, we’ll get some serious rewards,” Farhad said.
She groaned and wanted this whole ordeal to end. It’s not that she didn’t want to save them. She just thought they’d be safer locked in the conference room. Not to mention that she was worried that she could barely keep herself safe, much less a panicking crowd.
Maxi attempted to make herself feel better by trying to convince herself that it was a simulation, and all the people here were a collection of pixels. NPCs were victimized by video games all the time. Car Thief Hooker Basher 5 had practically made a sport of being the bad guy.
NPCs in games were always stuck in the same nightmare. They would be imprisoned, have their villages burned, suffer all manner of horrors for the sake of the player swooping in to save them. If an NPC were a conscious being, these would be in a hell loop, forced to have a meeting disrupted by a murderous printer over and over again, but if there was even the slightest chance that this was real, and the NPCs were people, she couldn’t leave them.
It was one thing to play video games from the safety of her own room, but the bites from the bat creatures really did hurt, and there was the whole permadead thing. The more she thought about it, the more it pissed her off. Companies couldn’t just kill off their employees, no matter what it said in the contract. This place needed to go down. It needed to be exposed.
Even if there was some corrupt government official keeping it in business, she wanted the world to know. They couldn’t keep operating if no employees walked through the door. If people wanted to sign up for this shit, fine, she wouldn’t stop them, but she wasn’t going to let anyone else walk into the place unwittingly.
For the first time since graduating college, she felt like she wanted to do something with her life, even if it was just taking this company down.
“All right, Lus3r, how do we do this? What’s up with that name anyway?”
“It was a club,” Farhad said. “Back in Albuquerque, we were the 505 Lus3rs. We met at the mall to talk computers. Road tripped to Defcon each year. Then we tried to turn our hacking skills to cash. You know the rest of the story.”
“That was your Office Pool… the one that…” She realized a little too late she was ripping open fresh wounds.
“Yeah, we thought we were lucky—the company let us go through the tutorial as a team, put us in the same Office Pool…”
“I’m sorry,” was all she could say.
A silence hung over them for a moment, and then Farhad seemed to bury it back. “There’s a fire escape. I saw one while we were running. It’s in the opposite direction from where we ran.”
“Great, so there’s a hell printer between us and the way out.”
“The solution has to be in this room. The whole floor has been cleared but here,” Farhad said, gesticulating wildly. “You know that thing could break through the door or the window with no trouble, but it stops here.”
“I dunno, maybe there is a cord? I mean, it’s a copy machine. It has to be plugged in, right?”
“I didn’t see a cord.”
He was right, the thing was free, as if it came from the savannah where killer copy machines preyed on… whatever it was they preyed on. If it wasn’t connected by a cord, then why had it stopped? The creature had obviously rampaged through the floor, clearing or killing everyone except those in the room. So why leave a room full of living people?
Maxi glanced around. The people looked glum, ready to give in. Their office potluck disrupted…
“It’s in the food,” Maxi said. “Whatever is keeping it back is in the food.”
Farhad glanced at the spread of hot dishes and casseroles, soda, chips and salsa, and all the usual potluck offerings. “How could the thing smell it from out there? I mean, if printers can smell. Can printers smell?”
“That’s the only thing that is different here over out there,” Maxi said. “Office chairs, plenty of them out there, tables, same thing. That TV hanging on the wall, conferencing equipment, all if it is out there. Except for the food. Sure, maybe someone has a box of Mike and Ike’s stashed in their desk, but here is the only place with fresh food.”
“But how does it work? It’s just food!”
“Your gummy bears healed me. Doesn’t everything in this place have a potential to be a magic item, or whatever it is that makes the things work? I picked up a magic stapler and was just grabbing the first thing I could to avoid getting bit by a zombie. So couldn’t the food here have some sort of monster warding or similar effect?”
“Daisuke did come across a Toaster Waffle of Giant Strength the other day,” Farhad said.
“There you go, so how do we know those aren’t Barbecue Mini Wieners of Monster Warding?” she said, pointing to a Crock-Pot that seemed to end up at every potluck. Considering the trash was full of paper plates, the potluck was probably winding down when the monster attack happened. Maxi turned to the NPCs and asked, “What’s a dish everyone here has eaten?”
They all looked at each other in confusion.
“Come on,” Maxi said. “There’s always something. What is something everyone ate?”
“Gladys always makes the best Muddy Buddies,” a slender man with red glasses said. People nodded in agreement, and said things like “I agree,” or “I always like Gladys’s Buddies,” and “I had a couple handfuls of that, too.”
Maxi narrowed her eyes on a bowl of cereal covered in a pillowy powdered sugar that made them look like little clouds of peanut butter and cereal. She reached inside, plucked the morsel, and popped it into her mouth. After she chewed and swallowed, her phone immediately showed New Status Effect: +3 Grutomaton Deterrence, with a timer ticking down from an hour. She ate another and the timer just reset at the hour mark. Okay, no stacking effects, she thought. When she clicked on the “more information” screen, she read Grutomatons were beasts that were a mixture of machine and organic matter, which explained the beastly printer. It also said that Deterrence effects prevented the creature type from getting within a twenty-foot radius after a failed contested Creativity check.
Unlike skill checks that were at -10 for those without the skill, contested stat checks were just one stat versus another, and Maxi guessed a drooling copy machine didn’t have much in the way of creativity. She passed the bowl around with instructions for everyone to eat a Muddy Buddy.
Once they were all warded, she put three into a napkin and stuffed them into her pocket. While she was pretty certain they wouldn’t need more than an hour to reach the fire escape, these things could come in handy. She then took all the remaining Muddy Buddies, wrapped them in a towel, and affixed them to her utility belt, where she could use the strap to cinch the towel closed. Silently thanking the posthumous Gladys, she told everyone to get ready to move out.
+3 Muddy Buddies of Grutomaton Deterrence (3) added to your inventory.
+3 Makeshift Muddy Buddy Bomb of Grutomaton Deterrence added to your inventory.
The Makeshift category was a blanket designation of all improvised weaponry. The munitions effects were listed as unknown, but she was pretty sure what it would do if she had to smash it into the creature’s face.
Once they were ready, she instructed the group to be silent and signaled everyone to move out. Both she and Farhad drew their swords and led the way out of the conference room. The beast hunting them grunted in the distance.
Misfits of Carnt series.
