Jerry, God of Morn'a Doon Page 4

  Craig raised his hand.

  “YES? YOU? THE PUDGY ONE WHOSE HANDS ARE STAINED WITH TANNER’S DYE?”

  “May I ask you, oh mighty lord, why you choose now to manifest yourself to us, after remaining so long hidden from our sight?”

  The baby glared at Craig. Its piercing gaze then went to Craig’s companions. Austin had never felt such knowing, all-powerful eyes. For the first time in his life he was frightened by an infant. More of a toddler, actually. The baby had seemingly grown in stature just in the past two minutes. “Does it look bigger to you guys?”

  “Actually, yeah,” Jake said.

  “EXCELLENT QUESTION,” the toddler boomed. “LET’S JUST SAY THAT THERE’S A NEW GOD IN TOWN.”

  “Hail Jerry,” a few voices murmured.

  Wayne’s hand shot up. “One more thing. What’s with the cursing? Why can’t we say, you know, the F word.”

  The tyke boomed out his answer: “THIS IS AN ALL AGES GAME.”

  “But I’m kind of confused,” Wayne continued. “Words with multiple meanings, not all of them dirty, like ass and bitch, are they okay?”

  The baby was quiet for a moment. “DO NOT TEMPT YOUR LORD GOD.” His tiny arm had pulled back as though to hurl another lightning bolt. Austin felt his sphincter clench. He moved a few inches away from Wayne. He would have moved away further but a throng of players and NPCs pressed against him. His fingers entertwined with Angie’s seemingly of their own accord. Perhaps, if they died, he would be booted off the game and back home. Although according to Angie he already was home.

  The baby god Jerry lowered his arm. “IT DEPENDS ON CONTEXT. NOW TRY ME NO MORE, HUMAN ROGUE.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said to Wayne. “Try him no more, dumbass.” Austin glowered at the two of them and waited for the lightning bolt. Nothing.

  “YOUR LORD GOD LEAVES YOU NOW, PEOPLES OF MORN’A DOON. YOU WILL RECEIVE FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS ANON.”

  The god baby disappeared in a flourish of trumpets.

  “Okay,” Jake said. “I have an idea.”

  ……….

  “Let me get this straight,” Craig said with a scowl. “You want to go to war with my friends in the crafter’s guild?” Craig glanced over at the friends in question, who sat at an adjacent table in the Flatulent Unicorn. They waved and grinned at him. The guy looked a bit like Benjamin Franklin, with little rectangular glasses and graying hair pulled back in a pony tail. His wife looked like she should be baking muffins or something. Craig gave them a small wave in return. “Why again do you want to go to war with them?”

  “Okay,” Jake said, “I think this is what’s going on. The game designers have come up with an interesting twist in the big narrative line that is Morn’a Doon. They’ve created a despotic new god to tyrannize all of us until we figure out how to stop him.”

  “And how will going to war with Fred and Jenny stop him?”

  Jake scowled. “Not them in particular, they’re just handy. If our guild declares war on another guild, I should be able to summon the war god that I worship…with this. He pointed to the ruby red orb around his neck, the one they had looted earlier off the troll corpse. “You know about the summon god feature. It only works with certain quests and guild wars.”

  “I still don’t see why you want to pick on Fred and Jenny,” Craig said. He glanced over. Fred and Jenny raised their mugs of ale to him. “They’re really nice people.”

  “I’m sure they are, but we need to go to war with a guild that won’t actually be a problem. I mean, we’re not much of a real guild ourselves, with only five members –”

  “Four,” Austin said, “with Ken…gone.”

  “Four, sure,” Jake agreed. “Unless Angie wants to join.” She looked up at him with bleary eyes. She had been drinking steadily since they returned to the inn. She blinked at him once and lowered her head again.

  “Basically the guild war will be a ruse to summon the war god. Then we use him to fight Jerry.”

  “What makes you think your god can stop Jerry?” Austin asked him.

  “Dude, it’s our only chance. And it’s logical. How do you stop a god? With another god, of course. It must be some elaborate, world-shaping quest designed to garner massive publicity for the game.”

  “Publicity?”

  “Sure.” Jake ran his hand along a swath of space, emulating a huge newspaper headline. At least 72-point type. “Thousands Trapped in Video Game as War Rages Between Gods.”

  “I really doubt if the makers of Morn’a Doon want that kind of publicity.”

  “Dude,” Jake said, “all publicity is good.”

  Craig slammed his flagon down on the tables wooden plank. They all stared at him. He looked angry. “Just because Fred and Jenny are primarily crafters doesn’t mean they’ll be pushovers in a guild war.”

  “Yeah,” Wayne grunted. “Whatever.”

  “Really, I don’t appreciate your presumptions…or your stereotypes,” Craig continued. “Just because somebody joins this game to primarily work in handcrafts doesn’t mean they can’t be top-notch fighters.”

  “What are their classes?”

  “Well.” Craig cleared his throat. “Fred’s a bard.”

  Wayne chuckled, then turned to Jake. “So we go to war with the crafter weinies to summon your war god, Kray-Kun, then convince him to go to war with this new god, Jerry. Then if we beat Jerry, what?”

  “Well, I…” Jake spread his hands. “I assume things will go back to normal. It’s like a puzzle. We’ll have solved it, so we’ll probably get a massive amount of experience, some cool loot, and be able to log out again.” He looked at Austin. “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s…ridiculous.” He counted off the points on his fingers. “One, no corporation is going to intentionally trap thousands of people inside one of its games. I mean, Morn’a Doon is owned by, who is it, Sony? McDonald’s? That’s a mega-lawsuit waiting to happen. Two, Jerry seems like a legitimately sentient being, ‘god’ or whatever. The other gods, like Kray-Kun, or the Rogue God –” He looked at Wayne. “What’s your Rogue God’s name?”

  “Volstaff.”

  “Anyway, they’re just typical NPCs, communicating in a rudimentary way, like talking to a voice tree on the phone to the bank. ‘Press One for English,’ that kind of thing.”

  “You really haven’t noticed how radically more intelligent the NPCs have become lately?” Jake asked him.

  Austin had noticed it, but hadn’t wanted to say anything because in a way it frightened him. It shouldn’t, he knew. His field of study in grad school was going to be ontology, the study of the nature of being. He had already made up his mind about being and sentience, though. That was probably a mistake, young as he was, but he was heavily invested in the idea of sentience as such reserved to organic life. These NPCs were a bunch of pixels with a simple logic program animating them. Except for Jerry. So Jerry had to be…what? Some guy who managed to hijack the game and make himself a god. And there was no way the human designed “War God” could stop him.

  Unless Jake was right, and all of this really was just part of the game.

  “Pascal’s Wager,” Austin mumbled.

  “What’s that?” Jake said.

  Austin glanced at Craig. “You’ve probably heard of it.” Craig, after him, was the best read one of them. Even better read than him in certain areas. Wayne and Jake were street smart, certainly, but he could tell that neither one of them gave a pinch of piss for academic subjects.

  Craig shrugged. “Yeah. It’s why Pascal chose to believe in God, in heaven and hell, etcetera. That’s pretty much it?”

  “Yes,” Austin said. “Pascal made the conscious choice to believe in God because he had nothing to lose if he was wrong. If you believe and you’re wrong, you just turn to nothing after death, the same as the non-believer. But if you believe and you’re right, you go to heaven. If the atheist chooses to not believe and he’s wrong, he gets sent to hell.”

  Wayne made a face. “
What a crock of sh –. Hooey. Crock of hooey. Things are what they are, regardless of mind games.”

  “But it’s a useful mental construct in this situation,” Austin said. “I might as well believe we have a chance with Jake’s plan, because…well, it’s the only chance we have. Count me in.”

  “I’ll go along,” Wayne said, “just to kick old Fred’s ass over there.”

  Craig made a face. “I guess. As long as we don’t actually kill Fred or Jenny. It’s this new baby god we’re going after, right?”

  “What about her?” Wayne gestured to Angie, who was face-planted on the table. “The foxy blonde there?”

  “You mean my girlfriend? Angie? Is that who you’re referring to?”

  “Yeah, sure. Is she in, or what?”

  Austin nudged her. Angie jerked abruptly awake, focused her eyes on him, then glowered. “Babe?”

  “Wh…”

  “I’m going to invite you to join our guild, okay? Just click the okay button when you see it.” He brought up his invite screen and asked her to join their guild, the Hellraisers. Angie found her flagon of ale and took a deep swallow. “If I ever…I mean ever…get back home, we are splitsville, amigo…”

  “Ouch,” Wayne said. Jake and Craig looked elsewhere in the tavern, trying to ignore them.

  “Just…I’m sorry, babe. Just join the guild, would you? Please? It’s important.”

  Austin heard a dinging sound, then read the message confirming that she joined. “Thanks, babe.”

  “Don’t you babe me….” she slurred.

  “What now?” Craig asked.

  “Now we go to war.”

  ……….

  “Okay,” Jake said, “as soon as we declare war I’m going to summon Kray-Kun.”

  Austin looked around at the crowded inn. “Is this really the best place to do it?”

  Jake shrugged. “I don’t see why not. The game’s AI prevents a summoned entity from occupying another NPC’s space. He’ll probably manifest…up on the table, maybe.” Jake cleared a few of their flagons to the side.

  Wayne finished off his own mug and set it over next to the other empties. “As soon as we declare war, I’m going Rambo on Fred’s ass…” He clenched for a moment, as though expecting to be struck by lightning. “Okay, ‘ass’ isn’t on the list of banned words. Anyway, I’m going all Defcon One on Fred over there.”

  “Really,” Craig said, “what has Fred ever done to you?” He looked over at the plump, middle-aged crafters. They were arm-in-arm singing a song about dragons and damsels. “Other than the fact that they’re crafters? And enjoy filk singing?”

  “You are so totally answering your own question,” Wayne said.

  “It feels weird declaring war on another guild while we’re still in town,” Austin said. “We should be out in the forest when we do it. Freetown is supposed to be a safe space.”

  “There are no safe spaces,” Wayne grunted.

  Jake stood, holding the orb over his head. “Screw it. Town is where we last saw that annoying toddler god. Town is where we go to war. Besides, everybody will probably join in when we hit him. Most of the other players here must be unhappy about the recent turn of events.”

  Austin glanced around the crowded inn trying to find some indication of that. The player characters he could identify seemed a bit more pensive than usual – a pair of dwarves he had chatted with in the past were in close conversation at a nearby table, concern etched on their horny, creased brows. Fred and Jenny seemed as jolly as usual – he wondered if they had even tried to log out yet, or were clueless about what was going on. “Hang on,” he said, “I want to talk to those guys before we, you know, go to war with them.”

  Wayne scowled at him, fingering a throwing dagger. Jake was standing with the orb held over his head, muttering an invocation. Better talk quick, Austin thought.

  He hustled over to the older couple. “Hey guys, quick word with you?”

  “Hail and well met, stalwart ranger!” Fred said, practically shouting in the noisy inn.

  “Merry meet, old friend!” Jenny added.

  “Have you guys tried to log out recently?”

  “No, good sirrah!” Fred laughed boisterously. Fred thought of himself as a Falstaffian figure, or Rabelaisian, full of great spirit and appetite. Austin thought of him as a chubby guy who hung out in the inn with his wife trying to sell handmade ponchos. “And why should we, prithee, with all the excitement today!”

  “Fred, look, this is serious. Something’s going on. None of us can log out. And Ken is dead. Like, really dead.”

  Fred raised his flagon. His wife did likewise. “We drink to the memory of that brave gnome, good friend.”

  “For cripe’s sake, Fred, could you guys stop roleplaying for just one second –”

  “THE WAR GOD KRAY-KUN HAS BEEN SUMMONED!!!”

  “Goodness,” Jenny said, “such an exciting day in Morn’A Doon.”

  The god, being a god, certainly cut an impressive figure. Stripped to the waist and covered with blue tattoos, he resembled a barbarian of the icy north, albeit a 9- or 10-foot tall barbarian. The black topknot on his head almost brushed the beam of the high-ceilinged inn as he stood on the sturdy plank table. “WE AID IN THIS JUST WAR AGAINST THE VILE GUILD KNOWN AS FRED AND JENNY’S CRAFT CRONIES!”

  “Really?” Austin said. “You roleplay every freaking minute here, but you can come up with a better guild name than that?”

  Fred shrugged. “It was our first day here. It’s really hard to change a guild name once you pick it. Why are you guys going to war with us, anyway – what the…” The expression on his face changed from its usual jolly self-satisfaction to, in turn, surprise, concern, and fear. “What the heck – what’s the war god doing?”

  Kray-Kun had reared back like a pitcher winding up on the mound. His glittering war axe caught the light of the fire in the corner, and the eyes in his huge, bearded head sparkled with the excitement of battle. He stared directly at Fred as he threw the axe with unerring certainty into the old crafter’s forehead. The noise of the impact made a sickening thunk as the axe split Fred’s skull in two, an explosion of bone and brains splattering Jenny and Austin both. The plump women squealed, shrieking, “When we return you are all dead! All of you!” She waved a finger at Austin, who backed away, hands raised, as much as he could in the crowded inn. “We have friends, you know!”

  “Jenny, I tried to talk the guys out of this, really –”

  “HAIIII!!!” Wayne gave a kung fu cry and jumped on Jenny, attacking her with his daggers. It looked like he was using his Spirit of Banshee skill, the blades flailing like high-speed windmills into her soft body. Austin backed away further, wiping blood and viscera from his arms. He began receiving notifications on viewscreen:

  “THE GUILD GEMSTONE GALS HAS DECLARED WAR ON YOU.”

  “THE GUILD WAYFARING WEAVERS HAS DECLARED WAR ON YOU.”

  “THE GUILD ELVEN EMBROIDERY HAS DECLARED WAR ON YOU.”

  He glared at Jake and the huge War God who danced a victory jig on the plank table. “I really don’t think this was a good idea.”

  Jake shrugged. “The die is cast, dude. Kray-Kun!” he called. It had fallen silent in the inn at the presence of the war god, and the abnormally bloody deaths of the pleasant Freetown crafting couple known by many of the locals. “We require your assistance in our fight with the usurper god Jerry!”

  The war god stopped his guild. “There is no god by this name…and if one pretends to be such as he is…pretending…” Kray-Kun seemed to become entangled in the convoluted syntax of his sentence. “Irregardless, I mean to say I will slaughter this fake pretender of a pretending god!”

  The barbarian charged from the table, trampling a halfling serving wench in the process. When he reached the door he discovered he was too tall, and too wide, to fit through it, and methodically began to chop at it with his war axe, which had reappeared miraculously in his hand after it had been used to cleave Fred’s skull.
>
  “To all proud player characters!” Jake shouted. He had taken the war god’s place on the table. “We set off to do battle with this so-called god Jerry – and we ask, Who is with us?”

  There was stony silence around the inn except for the sound of the war god’s axe smashing at the beam over the doorway. The owner of the inn, an older NPC Halfling, cleared his throat and said, “Your war god there should know that’s a load-bearing beam.”

  “Why did you go and attack Jenny and Fred like that?” came a voice from the crowd. It belonged to a slender half-elf holding a wand.

  “Please, people,” Jake implored, “this new god must be stopped! Join us! Fight with us!”

  “Fight a god?” somebody shouted.

  “And why not? We have a god of our own!” Jake gestured to the huge, semi-nude barbarian who hacked at the infrastructure of the inn. “And…regardless…now is the best time to attack Jerry, before he consolidates his power. Surely you all want to be able to log out again, return to your homes and your loved ones –”

  Voices rose in the confines of the Flatulent Unicorn. “Huh. I thought it was just a glitch…” “I actually kind of like it here…” “We can’t really expect to defeat that new god anyway.”

  “Will it be difficult? Of course! Should we try anyway? Of course! Times ten!”

  “Times ten?” somebody shouted. “Is that the best you can do for rousing rhetoric?”

  “Not quite the Crispin’s Day speech.”

  “True that.”

  “Follow me!” Jake shouted. The war god had knocked a hole in the wall and Jake leapt off the table and ran toward it. “Once more into the breach!”

  “I didn’t know we had been in the breach for a first time.”

  “Unless you count the way they murdered Fred and Jenny as being an initial foray into the breach.”

  The war god was through the hole he had made in the side of the inn, and was followed immediately by Wayne and Jake. Austin looked over at Craig, who stood crestfallen over the slain bodies of Fred and Jenny. Angie lay face down on the table beside him. Austin crossed the room to her and said, “Give me a hand here?” Craig got under one of her arms, and Austin the other. They moved as quickly as was possible through the inn as its beams creaked and the underside of the roof sagged.