Austin Grossman - You

Another skeletal body is here, lying facedown at an angle where a point joins the circle. The bones lie across a charred patch on the stone. Pren-Dahr kneels down and picks out a pair of modern spectacles and a short length of wire. There is no weapon. Deep in the angle of the jaw you see what is either a small round pebble or a cyanide capsule.

Level 5: The Guardian Figure

The shape of this level forms a crude representation of a human body (Adric?), similar to the Long Man of Wilmington or other hillside chalk figures. It is very evidently male. It makes you wish someone would stop fucking around; truly, this dungeon holds great evil.

Level 6: The Lady

This level has been built in the stylized image of a female face, architectural verisimilitude having been abandoned several levels ago.

The first body you find here lies on its side, with a long dagger resting between its third and fourth ribs; it displays tallness and slightly elongated fingers, toes, and cranium. Fifteen feet farther down the corridor, a skeletal hand still holds the hilt of a long black sword, the NightShard (artifact longsword; +5 to hit and damage; 4% chance of Soul Drain; wielder’s Altruism, Loyalty, and Mercy scores immediately fall to zero). The hand evidently once belonged to the human female whose skeletal remains lie on the very top step of the stairway down to the next, penultimate stage.

Ley-R4 may pick up the NightShard if it is found. She now has the option of remaining in Endoria, walking away from her job as empress of the galaxy, and returning to terrorizing the unjust from horseback. If she does, she will relinquish her ceremonial blade and the title to Brendan Blackstar, the true king of Endoria.

Level 7: A Giant Penis

Here, the walls form what we just might as well say is an image of an erect phallus. The three disconnected rooms to the west of the main complex were originally thought to be sealed burial halls. It is time for archaeological scholars to admit they represent airborne ejaculate.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Lisa. “Really?”

“What, you never saw that?” said Darren.

“Yes, but I deleted it.”

“I wondered if that was you. Yeah, I put it back.”

“Did you ever think that maybe that was why we got a B plus? Which is why I wasn’t class valedictorian?”

“Did you ever think of getting over it?”

There is one body, that of a large human male dressed in scraps of denim and a canary-yellow shirt emblazoned with the words SOUL ASYLUM. Nearby you find the remains of a fiberglass skateboard, its rear wheels sheared off. Brendan lingers, baffled at his doppelgänger’s choice of weapon.

Level 8: The Antechamber

From the base of the stairway a single corridor zigs and zags, then terminates in a large room, one hundred feet square, empty except for a low square altar built of stone. The only other item in the room is a skeleton wearing the gray cotton fatigues of a senior intelligence officer of the Soviet Union. It rests, propped against one wall, in a sitting position, hand extended toward the altar.

You always thought this was the bottom level, but the altar has been pushed to one side to reveal a set of stairs leading down. You check the tracking device: Mournblade is exactly five meters below you.

Level 9: Adric’s Tomb

The final level is a network of natural stone caves plainly much older than the rest of the complex. You see here the skeleton of an enormous beast, half hound and half dragon, a long row of vertebrae encircling the room.

At the rear of the room is an archway built of porphyry, which any competent mage or an associate producer who could stand to broaden his horizons a little will recollect is the primary component of any portal spell. It is sad that they know this, but they are correct—any player present will see through it to another place entirely, a random location in space and time.

Here you see Adric himself, seated on a black throne and dressed in shreds of chain mail. His skin is pearl white and his mouth sneers, even in his sleep. He is slender and beautiful and tragic, just as he is on his book covers. He is, without any doubt, what Simon looks like in his deepest, most private fantasies. At the sound of a living being on his threshold, he begins to awaken. His eyes, when opened, are green and soulful. The Artifact-class greatsword Mournblade is visible on his person.

This is the end of the Endorian Anomaly module. Any further material included is of abstract interest only. It is here that the players will die, regardless of whether they rule the galaxy and can’t believe they are being knocked off by a pissant artifact on a backwater planet in an unfashionable genre.

“So is this it?” I asked.

“Okay, okay, I get it,” Lisa said. “Simon said he’d put it in a place no one would ever find, but I didn’t understand the scheme exactly. The room runs simulated all the time, and sometimes Adric gets activated and wanders out into the world. Or an amper picks it up, maybe. So the sword is out there, and then very occasionally the wielder runs into somebody and kills them. Or the wielder dies and another creature picks it up and the rampage starts.”

“Why’s it happening more often, though?” I said.

“Simon wanted it to, I guess. He had some theory about the year 2000, how there should be some big computer failure. Probably it just checks the system clock, spawns wandering ampers more often.”

There was a scuffling sound in the corridor outside Adric’s chamber. I whipped the camera around to see what could only be a Dreadwarg, the terror of the First Age. A Dreadwarg looked like a standard wolf, but, like that of Mournblade, its palette was wiped to black.

I was at the controls. Select all Heroes, target the warg as an enemy, attack! Pren-Dahr’s blaster didn’t seem to damage it. Ley-R4 cut at it with the NightShard, but for some reason it rushed past her to attack Brendan Blackstar. It took 75 percent of his hit points in one bite, but Brendan’s riposte with the Martian blade cut it in half. A gimmicky black wolf had almost managed to kill the rulers of the galaxy. A howling noise came from the passageway outside. Perhaps they could smell the royalty in Brendan Blackstar’s blood.

I paged through the Heroes’ inventory for the first time. Nothing much, only their few weapons and useless imperial money, until I reached the weaponless Loraq, who turned out to be craftier than the rest. He possessed a number of odd items, some of which he spawned with, some of which he had looted from corpses as we passed. A Soviet-era codebook, the Tentacle of the Over-Mind (purpose unknown), and an antimatter grenade, far more powerful than anything these Iron Age fucks had ever considered.

Purely from the point of view of gameplay, it was my option. I had him start the timer on the grenade, proceed into the corridor, and shut the door behind him. The blast was well in excess of its targets’ toughness. After a thousand millennia of shame, Loraq had found a way to give his life for his true king.

We turned to see Adric shambling toward the portal, as he had been doing for millennia. As we watched, Adric passed into the world of American finance to kill and despoil. When he passed through, a metal door closed behind him and locked. I had the Heroes try to break it with the blaster, the NightShard, and the Martian vibro-sword, all without result. On the far side, Adric would kill until the sword consumed him, and then a luckless character would pick the sword up and wield it after him, until at last the sword ran out of wielders and teleported back. In a city as dense as the AstroTrade level, the carnage would be indefinite, a building wave of panic and fiduciary bloodletting.

“Adamantium,” said Matt, looking over my shoulder. “Nothing cuts it.”