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The door thumped and shuddered as the creature outside pounded at the wood, which was bowing under the pressure. Maxi leaned with her back against the door, holding it shut. Bobby was a skeleton with white stringy hair wearing the remnants of a suit covered in dust, slumped in front of a computer that was ancient even by Earth standards. The only reason she knew the man was Bobby was a nameplate on his desk—Bobby McKenzie. She couldn’t help but think he was grinning at her with the hollow eyes.
To her, skeletons always seemed like they were grinning or laughing. She had no idea why the macabre image was jovial to her, but she could just imagine Bobby playing one last prank. “Let’s get the newb to buy sticky notes, but let’s call them Sticky Notes of Wonderment, and then they’ll come to our dying world and get murdered by...”
“What is that thing?” Maxi said aloud.
“The creature type is ooze. It’s a gurglesnorp.”
The thing had a whimsical name for something that was no laughing matter. It was a blob of transparent pink ooze with gunk and bones inside. It had sprouted three tendrils that balled up into miniature wrecking balls, with which it was currently slamming the door. Luckily, the thing was more of a bulbous, fleshy mass than a true ooze, because the door wasn’t exactly airtight. It could fit through tight spaces, but not the crack between the door and the floor.
“Is that what killed these people?” Maxi asked.
“It’s highly unlikely the creature could cause an apocalyptic event. However, it could be the reason we have only encountered bones. Dimension 33341A-115553B uses this creature in their funeral rituals, as rotten flesh is considered to taint the soul, and the digestive juices also reinforce the bones from decay.”
“Lovely. There’s something scarier than this creature out there.”
“There is not enough information to tell why this world is dead. There was never any distress signal sent, and the IT systems still seem to be intact, or else this would be off grid. But it’s likely the gurglesnorp just wandered through an elevator shaft, and with no one from the Company to monitor and send employees on quests to take care of it—”
“Hold up. 142 years passed, and no one was even curious why the place went silent?
“Different locations in the company generally don’t communicate with each other. It’s not uncommon to find each location is wildly different, with strange technologies and customs. The Company is a lot like your franchises, where they may be under the same corporation, but there each branch has different management and ways of doing things at each place.”
“My uncle said we moved to Earth because it was a lot like our homeworld. There has to be someone who knows about the different locations.”
“The Archivist branch carries all Company records. They will pay you a nice bounty for your log of this quest. There are too many dimensions out there to get updates on them all.”
The thumping petered out and there was the sound of sloshing and cracking going down the hallway. The creature that had tried to make a snack out of her was moving on, and since there was no one left alive on this world to care about a hungry-for-human-flesh creature on the loose, she’d rather not have the confrontation. Especially because it was immune to both Psychic and cutting attacks.
Of course, it was... a multiverse of creatures, and the one she encountered was one she couldn’t harm while on a solo quest. Which didn’t add up, because she had a high luck score and abnormally good luck. However, everyone had to have bad luck occasionally.
From what she knew of the system, there was a roll that was always considered a success and one that was always a failure, regardless of the bonuses applied to the situation. However, none of the Company documentation said what dice roll her numbers were modifying, other than that every outcome was a contested roll one way or another. Her hit rolls could be six sided all the way to a thousand sided, she didn’t know.
Her attack roll would add her modifier, compare it to the enemy’s AR rating plus their roll. The higher number won. However, what was being rolled and how that translated to physically swinging the sword was a mystery, but she still felt the system working. Every time she spent her ability points in her melee weapons or Ambition stat, the sword felt that much lighter in her hand, and with all the training, her brain provided guidance about how best to swing it for maximum effect.
It was hard to put her finger on it, but she did feel like she was getting better in increments. Whether her Ambition stat and melee weapon skills were just going up because she had been swinging the sword and training so much, or there was magic happening in the physical world, she couldn’t tell. For all she knew, it could be crazy alternate-dimension nano machines or trans-dimensional warlocks adding muscle mass when she pumped the Ambition stat.
She hadn’t noticed the small changes at first, but now that she was in the higher ranks and attended more training classes than she ever had in her life, she recognized the difference from when she had first started. In addition to the Psychic classes with Swami Robinson, her trainers had taught anything from martial arts and sword-fighting abilities to solving more mundane puzzles to help her Creativity skills.
How the game mechanics were applied to real life, she couldn’t guess. Whether there were some actual dice rolls allowing her to hit and miss, or some smart person had figured out the probabilities of everything and written down the rules, much like Newton had done for gravity, she would never know. For better or worse, she would spend her days training, questing, and maxing her abilities.
Maxi no longer believed she was in a simulation, at least no more than physicists believed such. Whether the rules of the game altered real life or were just a description of what was happening, they worked. There was comfort for her in the idea that life was a game that could be mastered. If life was really a game, she was much better at it now than during what she had previously thought was real life. In her life before, she hadn’t felt like there was any progression, but here she noticed it.
Terry informed her that sufficient time had passed, and the creature had no doubt continued in its mindless pursuit of flesh to devour. She eased up from holding the door shut and went to Bobby’s desk. There weren’t any obvious signs of how he had died. It looked as if the guy was just alive, checking his email or something one moment, and dead the next.
In fact, most of the skeletons looked like they had just slumped in their chairs and died on the spot. There weren’t any signs of the typical disarray that invading grutomatons created. The only evidence of disarray was likely caused by the gurglesnorp bumbling toward its prey. The papers she had seen on the floor when she had first entered were probably knocked off the desk by the creature when it climbed up to engulf the dead human. Clothes were torn, but that was only so the creature could get at the fleshy bits.
Indigestible objects caught up in the digestive system of the creature were deposited in random locations, tarnished and worn. However, corpses that were easily accessible to the creature, like Bobby here, who had slumped back in his chair rather than on the keyboard, didn’t cause much chaos.
Terry postulated the creature had been around for a long while and had divided into others, depending on how long ago it had arrived through the elevator shaft. However, due to the time that had elapsed since the creature’s arrival, Terry imagined there wasn’t much left in terms of digestible humans. The creature must have adapted after a while and now survived on rodents, bugs, birds, and other creatures that may have moved into the building since humans departed from the world.
While Maxi could have just snapped a photo of the dead Bobby and claimed the 50 credits for the quest, there was a part of her that was curious to find out what had happened to these people. How had they just died without a struggle? Even something like gas, radiation, or a virus would have left some clues, but most victims were positioned wherever they had happened to be when they had died, with no visible signs of distress.
Bobby’s bones looked intact. There was nothing out of place on his desk. She went to the window next and opened the shades. The sun was bright, directly in her face. It was morning by the look of it, or maybe near sunset, as she wasn’t sure which way was west, or if the sun operated in the same manner in other dimensions. Either way, it was catching her eyes, and she had to squint to look out the window.
There was a city outside, but it was quiet. There were no cars on the streets, planes in the sky, lights, or anything to indicate what had happened here. This world wasn’t overgrown like TERANCe’s, but nature was slowly reclaiming what the humans had built. Trees were encroaching on buildings, and moss had grown on the corner of a bodega across the street. Some of the windows were shattered.
Whatever had gotten Bobby seemed to have gotten everyone else as well. She checked for power and found there was none. The elevators only worked because they were more a transportation device that had their own internal power source handy for traveling between worlds. She decided to crack open the computer and get the hard drive.
When she was about to smash the thing open, Terry encouraged a more subtle approach and suggested that she look for screwdrivers. On the desk, she found something better—Bobby had a journal/day planner. She thumbed through it and decided it would be worthwhile to browse it later to see if she could glean anything about the Sticky Notes of Wonderment.
She doubted she would find out much more about the people in this world, and figured that now that she knew it existed, she could always come back. Terry was pretty sure she would never have to step one foot here again, since the archivists would suffice with just enough data to keep their map of the known multiverse up-to-date.
She attached the book to her new, larger-capacity utility belt she had bought earlier in the week, which used a strap to secure larger items. A message “Bobby’s Journal has been added to your inventory” appeared in her glasses. She opened the office door and was about to make her way to the elevator when a glowing object sitting on a shelf caught her attention. Considering there had presumably been no power for over a hundred years, she moved to inspect it, half thinking it was something reflecting the light of the sun until she took a closer look at it. It was a phone attached to a solar-powered charger.
The screen pulsed with a charge percentage. It was low, but enough to turn it on. She was about to hit the power button when a schlopping noise came from the corner of the room. It sounded like something was smacking its lips. She nabbed the phone and stuffed it into her pocket. Another message acknowledged the new item.
A smaller gurglesnorp was sliming its way out from behind a planter with a half-digested rat carcass in its heap. Sensing her, the creature grew three wrecking-ball tendrils that looked as if they could do a fair amount of damage. While the main mass was perhaps the size of a dog, the limbs extended about seven feet.
She ran for the door, but her leg caught on Bobby’s desk. She tumbled to the floor, and the thing thwacked her. It knocked the wind out of her. The damage was sufficient to take a fair chunk of her life points, even with the healing she had done before she had left, which hadn’t taken her health to full. Technically, the points she’d had should have been enough for a simple fetch quest.
The creature attempted to smash her again, but she rolled out of the way. The third tentacle wrapped around her leg and began pulling her, burning her exposed skin, and sapping away the remainder of her life. She attempted to chop the thing with her sword, but it sank into the goo and the sword stuck in the goop. Not knowing what else to do, Maxi unleashed a torrent of Mind Shards and Psychic Darts despite the creature’s immunity.
As her body was pulled into the thing, her leg burned as the slime crawled up the gap between her socks and khakis. Soon, it was up to her waist. It oozed its way up over her and found any way it could to get to her skin, encasing her entire body. She wanted to scream, but felt the acidic sludge pooling near her mouth, creeping into her ears and nose.
Despite the agony, she kept her mouth shut. Just before the slime seeped past her glasses, a blast came from out in the hallway and there was a flash of light. The noise sounded as if she were underwater, and her view of whatever was happening beyond the doorway was blurred. However, she could tell the orange and red wave was a flame.
Something in the hall shrieked with what would have been a loud, high-pitched squeal, but it was muted by the ooze seeping into her ears. Her life points were in the single digits when a figure emerged into the office from the fire outside. The silhouette was bulbous and yellow, but the size of a human. There was something green around the face area. In its hand, it held something long and thin, with what Maxi thought was an open flame at the end of a metal stick.
It was hard to tell exactly what she was looking at until the realization hit that the object was a flamethrower. Her life points dropped to one as an orange wave emerged from the tip and a spray of orange heat burst in her direction.