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The group moved through the ravaged office. The fluorescents hummed and flickered, giving only dim light. Farhad and Maxi were in front, with the others close behind. There was a loud crunch as one of the NPCs stepped on an upended plastic mail tray. Maxi glared at the man, and he sheepishly stepped back in line.
They made their way toward the fire escape. They were about halfway to their goal when there was a roar, and the killer copy machine leapt in front of the group. It snarled and drooled, but was unable to come closer to them because of their magical protection.
It hissed and paced, blocking the path toward the staircase. Maxi marched forward, hoping to drive it off with her ward, but that only seemed to upset it more and it let out a deep growl.
“Whoa!” Farhad said. “Deterrence only works so much. Each time you advance toward them, they get a roll to resist, with bonuses the more aggressive you are. After they resist, the effect is only good for penalties on its attack and damage rolls.”
The beast roared and lunged forward, stopping just short of the deterrence AoE. One of the NPCs stumbled backward and ran. As soon as he was twenty feet away from the group, another copier leapt out from behind a cubicle wall, latched onto the guy’s leg, and dragged him screaming back into the cubicles.
“Dammit!” Maxi yelled. “I told you all to eat a Muddy Buddy!”
“Ted is allergic to peanuts,” a woman said unhelpfully.
“Then don’t leave the group,” she yelled as the copier blocking their path shot out more of the paper bats.
The people screamed as another group of bats flooded out from behind a cubicle wall where the guy had been dragged. Soon, it was chaos as the people ran toward the exit, screaming.
“No!” Farhad yelled. “Forcing an encounter will only—”
It was too late. The killer machine blocking their path snarled and strained as the people approached it. Its eye bulged and veins popped out on its body. Eventually, the status effect holding it back crumbled, and it pounced on the mousy woman who had let them inside the conference room.
She screamed as it bit into her side. The bats scattered in every direction, each going for a target. She slashed at the bat in front of her and, surprisingly, cut right through it to another one and wounded the second one. Who said Luck was a useless stat?
She raced toward the woman being mauled by the copier just as Farhad sliced the bat she had wounded in half. Two more of the NPCs were felled by the bats as the rest were going full speed toward the fire escape. Maxi ran up to the copier and thwacked it with her sword, but her weapon bounced harmlessly off its housing.
The copier spat the woman out, and Farhad scooped her up. It jumped on Maxi and pinned her to the floor. Farhad was about to drop the NPC when Maxi shouted, “Go!”
She unclipped her +3 Makeshift Muddy Buddy Bomb of Grutomaton Deterrence from her belt. Farhad, catching sight of what she was about to do, hauled his charge to the exit while fending off more bats.
The creature bit down toward her face, but she put her arm up just in time to offer her limb for lunch instead. She cried out in pain as the teeth tore through her flesh. It opened its mouth for the next attack, and she spat, “Here’s some mud for you, buddy.”
She’d have to work on her one-liners if she was going to do this job. She shoved the improvised bomb into the thing’s mouth, and its eye dilated. It coughed, misting the area in a haze of powdered sugar and cereal. The creature howled, thrashed, twitched, and fell to the floor, dead. The bats crumbled as the creature that birthed them died, breaking off whatever mystical force that willed them into being.
The other printer roared from right behind her. Maxi jumped to her feet and ran down the hall where Farhad was waiting, helping the injured woman into the fire escape. She was about to charge into the fire escape with the rest of the fleeing NPCs when Farhad stopped her.
“What are you doing?” she yelled. “That thing is right behind me!”
Farhad pointed to the hallway. The other creature was covered in the Muddy Buddy mist from the bomb. It thrashed and cried out in pain as it crumpled to the ground.
“We completed the quest!” Farhad said with excitement. “Let’s loot the place before Janitorial shows up and charges us for obstructing their clean up.”
“They can do that?” Maxi said. “Wait, they aren’t going to charge us for trashing the place. It was trashed before we got here.”
“Trust me when I say there is one person you don’t want to mess with at any company, and that’s your custodial staff. They can make your life a living hell. But no, they only charge us for unnecessary damage to company property,” Farhad said and started toward the mangled copier.
Maxi turned her gaze to the fire escape.
“Come on!” Farhad warned, waiting for her to catch up.
Maxi said, “You go. Keep all the loot.”
“You can’t leave! You owe the company money!” he called after her.
“They can bill me,” Maxi said, and trotted down the stairs.
It wasn’t like she had a collar strapped to her neck that would make her head explode if she left the building. She figured the only thing keeping her inside was the magic elevator. Besides, the terms and conditions, which Terry had explained to her while she was in the shower, said that quitting involved the forfeiture of her life. As far as she was concerned, she was free to walk out any time she liked if she paid for the time off at the market rates, which would only matter if she went back.
For all she knew, she’d just never walk back inside. She could be an “employee” her entire life, and they could send her to all the collection agencies they wanted. She just wouldn’t pay them back. They wouldn’t take her to court; their little screwed up scheme only worked because they probably avoided the justice system entirely.
Of course, on the other hand, if she was in the Matrix, the door to the outside would just lead her back to the Office Pool, and she would have missed the chance to loot the boss. Time to test the theory. She pushed open the door on the ground level.
To her surprise, outside was a regular alleyway between two large skyscrapers. From the shadows of the buildings from the street beyond, she could tell it was most likely late in the afternoon. Her phone beeped, and the push notification read: “Unauthorized leave. 1.5x Market rates apply.” She didn’t bother looking at her quest results.
If that was the worst they could do to her, then she was home free. She ran out of the alley and was immediately discombobulated. She was pretty sure she was in the financial district of the city when she had entered the building, but she emerged at a place where all the theaters were buzzing with the latest musicals. The app she had used to find her way had walked her around in circles before she got to the company building. Not that it mattered anymore, but she must have been mistaken about its location.
One good thing had come out of this entire ordeal: she’d use her yellow shirt to convince her mom she had found a job, clear the dungeon for her game back home, and take a long shower. She looked down to see if she could hide all the bite marks if she put on her jacket, but the shirt had mended itself. She still had the wounds from the bats and the beast in her arm and side, judging from the pain she was experiencing, but there was no blood or holes in the shirt.
Luckily, all her damage was now concealed.
The only thing making her stand out was the sword. She dumped it in the alleyway, and a notification came up saying she dropped the item. She elected to keep the rest. Maybe she could have kept the sword and tried to sell it, but considering her only way home involved hopping on the subway, she didn’t want the blade to draw any more attention than not paying for her ride already would.
She made her way home well after dark. Her mom had left her phone on the table—she would often forget to charge it overnight and complain the next day about having no power. There was a text on the screen from a person named Lo that said: “It wasn’t me, but there is something—”
The rest was cut off, and the phone was locked. Figuring the text was a work thing, Maxi put the phone on the charger on the kitchen counter. She wandered to the back and checked on her mom. The woman was sound asleep in her bed with the white noise machine that barely muffled the snoring.
Maxi glanced at the time. She only had a few hours to complete the dungeon or get kicked out of her Guild. She snuck into her mom’s room, found a shoebox in the closet where Tara hid everything she didn’t want her to find, including a pistol her father had used to teach her to shoot, and grabbed her power cables.
***
MAXI’S SHIELD BURST with holy energy and burned the demon god. She leapt in the air and aimed for its heart. The massive beast almost managed to unleash its apocalypse attack, but her blow landed true, pushing its life bar to just below zero. It crackled and toppled in a spectacular death scene that was some computer programmer flexing his muscles.
A message came up on screen: “Traldalor is safe, for now...”
Maxi didn’t bother to read the rest. She closed the Misfits of Carnt video game and crawled into bed, still wearing her yellow shirt. She hadn’t even bothered to take the half-eaten pasta she had found in the fridge back to the kitchen.
It was late, and she was exhausted. A message from Teristaque03 appeared on her screen: “Good, the World Tree raid tomorrow. C U then.”
She didn’t respond. She was about to plug in her phone and fall asleep when she decided to check the quest results from the company app. It was badass that she had beaten a boss several times her Level.
She scrolled through the hourly charges racking up on her account for her “time off.” The rate changed almost every hour. She shrugged. It didn’t matter to her anymore, as she wasn’t going back. She would rather keep all the violence in her life to video games.
When she got to the quest results, it read:
QUEST “PRINTER OF NEVER JAMMING PART I” COMPLETE.
+6 Levels
+1 Ambition
+2 Dedication
+3 Creativity
+4 Emotional Intelligence
+5 Luck
+12 Stats
+24 SP
Learned new skill: Melee Weapons +1
Learned new skill: Rally the Troops +0
Learned new skill: MacGyver +2
Awards: 1500 Credits.
Acquired uncommon items: +3 Muddy Buddies of Grutomaton Deterrence (3).
Her Luck strategy seemed to work. Despite her resolve never to go back, she dumped all her new stat points in Luck, leveled up her melee weapons skill to +10, which was the max for a low-level skill, and dumped the rest in Investigate and MacGyver after chuckling to herself. “PRINTER OF NEVER JAMMING PART II” was now on her list with a message that said: “Conditions have not yet been met for this quest.” But there wasn’t anything to indicate what those conditions were.
She switched over to her social media apps as she was drifting off to sleep to see if anything happened in the world when a news article made her jump upright in bed. There was a fire at a downtown building in the theater district. Listed among the dead was Gladys Hopkins-Wietz, whose picture matched the woman who had made the Muddy Buddies that were still in her pocket. The guy with the peanut allergy who had run was also listed.
She clicked on a video from the local news station. A reporter stood next to the mousy woman who had let them into the conference room and who was about to be put in an ambulance. The name “Clara Tranwell, fire survivor” appeared under her.
“A whole lot more of us would have died if not for this woman and this guy,” Clara said to the camera. “They came in and saved us. Thank you, whoever you are. Thank you.”
The EMTs put her into the ambulance, and the reporter turned back to the camera. “There you have it, folks. Two heroes swooped in and helped the survivors evacuate to safety.”
She clicked on the next video, and the next. None of them talked about killer printers or paper bats. Each survivor who was interviewed told the same story: they were trapped in the conference room during Gladys’s 30-year workaversary when the fire had started, and these two people in yellow shirts had busted them out. While all their visible injuries seemed to be similar to the ones they had gotten from the creatures, they seemed to stick to the same fire story.
Either she was in the Matrix or she was part of something weirder than she could imagine.