The Perfect Run: Bad Runs - Meanwhile, the Sidekicks (What if the Plushie had become a Game Master?)
Art by @kahlen369
What if the Plushie had become a Game Master?
A secret place lay concealed amidst the infinite worlds.
It served as a nexus, a sanctuary, a den of indulgence and iniquity all rolled into one explosive package. The club was known to only a chosen few and accessible to even fewer chosen. Whatever transpired among its members remained between its members.
This enigmatic place was called the Pet Extradimensional Tax-exempt Association; for all its members were indeed avaricious little gremlins. Whether covered in scales or fur, it mattered not. The club catered exclusively to a single clientele: the animalistic companions of legendary heroes. Here, they congregated to play secret games, hidden from their partners’ watchful gazes.
Not all could attend the gaming table this year. Of ten members, a mere four convened for this momentous event: a Game Master and an elite trio of veteran players. The latter eagerly awaited the former, each prepared to roleplay a character of their own design.
Among them was the tiniest member, a phoenix no larger than a hummingbird known as Auri. Tonight, she would embody Auri Flamebringer: a formidable fire wizard princess hailing from a far-off land, beloved by all.
The orange spirit-cat grooming herself in a corner was Orange, Grand Admiral of Mice Chasing of the Sylphrean military. She would assume the role of Orange Von Broccoli, a soul-powered ratcatcher thief and military prodigy, the Napoleon of mice hunting, beloved by all.
Completing the trio was a slumbering dragon: She-Who-Feasts-On-Many-And-Collect-Much-Gold – or Arthur, as she was known in the crude human tongue. She would portray Arthur Bankafella: a cleric, billionaire entrepreneur, and apostle of dragon monopolism. And of course, beloved by all.
After waiting five minutes for the Game Master to arrive, their patience would be rewarded with anguish and despair.
“He’s here!” Auri screeched, loud enough to rouse Arthur from her slumber and divert Orange’s attention from her enticing posterior.
A fourth creature strolled into the room: a beast with fur as white as snow and ears as long and sharp as daggers. Smaller than Orange yet larger than Auri, it was so diminutive that a dog could cradle it in its jaws. Its blue eyes radiated innocence, and the charming ribbon encircling its neck gave it a harmless appearance.
“I am your friend!” the creature announced, taking a seat. Its voice resembled a pre-recorded message rather than a natural animal’s tone. “Let’s play together!”
Arthur, still groggy from her nap, scrutinized the…thing. Although it outwardly resembled an innocuous rabbit, the synthetic fur and voice betrayed its true nature as some form of animated toy. The fact that it could access the gaming table at all deeply unsettled the dragon.
And what of the scent of blood that trailed it like a malevolent shadow?
Orange seemed to have noticed as well. The spirit-cat’s demeanor sharpened, her gaze adopting a newfound edge.
“That guy, he’s the real deal,” the cat whispered into Arthur’s ear. Of all the players gathered tonight, Orange was the most hardcore kind of gamer; the type who viewed sessions not as a source of enjoyment but as a battle to the death. “He has more dead Player Characters under his belt than Call of Cthulhu.”
The revelation quickened Arthur’s pulse. Although their roleplaying sessions spanned many years, they had opted to switch GMs after growing weary of Auri’s reign. The phoenix was infamous for crafting overpowered non-player characters bearing her name, hogging all the glory and eventually boring her players to death. Arthur eagerly anticipated a new challenge worthy of her limitless dragon intellect.
“Hello, I’m Auri!” the phoenix greeted her successor, the magic of the place flawlessly translating her brrrpts into more intelligible words. Thankfully, the others had convinced Auri that they wanted to play with her as a fellow player rather than a GM, so she had accepted the transition gracefully. “What’s your name?”
“I’m your friend!” the plushie replied.
“I know that,” Auri giggled. In her world, everyone was either Auri’s friend or deceased. “I asked for your name!”
“Nobody knows,” Orange said ominously. “Most refer to him as Plushie, or the Disneyland Butcher.”
Arthur had no idea what a Disneyland was, but it sounded deeply profitable. She resolved to add it to her hoard someday.
With everyone present, they were ready to begin. Each player grabbed a pen to jot down notes on their character sheets. Auri proudly displayed hers to the Game Master, seeking his seal of approval; Arthur and Orange simply pushed their sheets onto the table.
The diminutive Game Master glanced at the character descriptions with innocent blue eyes… and then gazed at the players with two orbs of the purest crimson.
“Let’s play together.” The Plushie’s voice deepened as it spoke. “Let’s go to Disneyland.”
Shadows converged around the gaming table. The air crackled with an intangible pressure. Arthur’s head snapped to the side as she sensed something unseen crawling on her back.
“Uh, is that normal?” Orange inquired, her eyes catching the silhouette of tentacled horrors forming in a shadowy corner.
A surge of violet light engulfed the players.
The next extent, they were gone.
Arthur awoke with her face lying on a bed of grass, her head groggy and her legs feeling weird.
Her limbs were no longer dragonly proportioned, oh no! Her new legs were the length of a human’s, though thankfully covered in golden scales rather than fragile soft skin. As she stood up, she realized the rest of her body had changed as well. Her arms were now human-length, her magnificent wings sprouted from her shoulders, and rich priestly robes adorned her torso. A pouch full of gold hung from her neck. The melodious sound of coins hitting each other reassured her in this terrible ordeal.
Had she been merged with a repulsive, squishy humanoid while she slept? Disgusting!
Surveying her surroundings, Arthur discovered she wasn’t the only one in her predicament. Orange and Auri were also present, albeit transformed. Auri had become a fierce bird-woman hybrid, with hands sprouting from her wings and an outfit reminiscent of Gandalf. Orange had morphed into a lithe, slender fusion of cat and human sporting a coat of soft fine fur, a sleek tail, and stylish leather armor. A dozen daggers of various sizes hung from her belt alongside a stitched purse.
“Ugh?” Auri checked herself. “I’m bigger now!”
A blue screen materialized in front of Arthur, startling her.
Your race has been changed to Dragonkin. Auri’s race has been changed to Phoenixkin. Orange’s race has been changed to Catgirl.
You feel the perverse lust of a thousand watchers weighing on your shoulders.
“Hey, I don’t perform for free,” Arthur grumbled in a hoarse voice. She wasn’t too bothered by the race change—she had considered playing the game as a human initially—but she had spent too long optimizing her character to have it all taken away. “Is there a menu?”
A blue screen appeared and displayed her stats. Thankfully, her flawless super-priest build remained unaffected by the transformation.
Orange squinted at her teammate. “Since when can you talk?”
“Since when can you?” Arthur attempted to mentally communicate with the feline, only to find her telepathy had failed. Damn it, she always forgot to include that feature in her character sheets! “Dragonkin… is this a homebrew race?”
A new System Screen materialized before her, outlining the campaign’s objective.
You have been summoned from foreign lands to find your lost friend, Captain Reader, who has vanished in the depths of the [Tomb of Pain and Despair]. Success will bring riches beyond count; failure will be met with a gruesome death.
Arthur stopped reading after ‘riches beyond count.’ She had been won over by then.
“The Tomb of Pain and Despair?” Auri gasped. “Are they both dead? Since when?”
The trio scanned their surroundings. They had found themselves in the heart of a rocky valley where every flower and blade of grass resembled bone powder. A rusty railroad stretching before them led directly to the base of a sinister, fang-shaped hill of chiseled stone. A massive pair of six-meter-tall wooden doors, carved into the rock, marked the dungeon’s entrance.
“The path appears clear to me,” Orange said, sniffing the air with the intensity of a dog smelling another’s rear end. “I detect something vile—”
“Fireball!” Auri yelled.
A burst of flames shot from her hands and struck the doors with immense force. The resulting explosion caught Arthur off guard, flinging her onto her back. Orange, more cautious, simply covered her eyes with a paw to shield herself from the dust.
To Arthur’s astonishment, a scream of agony echoed from the dungeon’s entrance. Sharp teeth emerged from the door frame as it burned, and a chalky tongue sprang from beneath the threshold. The flames reduced the creature to ash within seconds, unveiling a dark tunnel that led into the dungeon’s depths.
Congratulations! You have successfully slain: [Doorway Mimic]!
“Good job, Auri!” Arthur praised as she got back on her feet. “How did you know it was a mimic?”
“I didn’t!” Auri replied with pride. “Whenever I see a door or a chest, I start blasting!”
“What?” Arthur snickered in disbelief. “But what if you destroy a real chest? You’ll burn the loot!”
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“If the loot isn’t fireproof, then it wasn’t good loot in the first place!” Auri retorted with unwavering confidence.
Auri’s undeniable logic silenced Arthur, who couldn’t help but appreciate the young phoenix’s perspective. Still, her eagerness to use fire to solve any problem concerned her teammates.
“Can you show me your character sheet?” Arthur asked Auri, suddenly suspicious. “What’s your spell list?
“Sure!” Auri waved a talon, and a floating screen appeared before her teammates’ eyes.
Name: Princess Auri Magnificent Flamebringer.
Age: don’t ask!
Class: Wizard (Pyromancer) 5
Passive Abilities: [Improved Element: Fire], [Favorite Spell: Fireball], [Spell Penetrator: Fireball], [Bonus Damage: Fire], [Spell Specialization: Fire].
Spell Known: [Fireball].
Arthur waited for other spells to appear… but none did.
“Amazing build, isn’t it?” Auri boasted. “I thought all night about it!”
Orange squinted at the character sheet with a puzzled look. “Where are the other spells?”
“What other spells?” Auri asked innocently.
“I only see Fireball in the spell list,” Orange pointed out. “Where’s the rest?”
Auri stared at him like a caveman discovering flint for the first time. “Do we need any other spell?”
Arthur fought the urge to facepalm and promptly lost. “You took the most versatile class in the game…” Her voice brimmed with annoyance. “And you’ve turned it into a one-trick pony?!”
Auri gave her friend a dark look. “I’m not a pony,” she said defiantly. “I’m a gym-skipping goddess.”
If they ever encountered an enemy immune to fire, Arthur swore to feed Auri to it. Feet first.
“Fine, let’s adopt a formation. Since the dungeon is probably full of traps, Auri should go first.”
“I’m the team’s rogue,” Orange pointed out. “Shouldn’t I go first?”
“You’re a rogue, but Auri is a phoenix,” Arthur pointed out. “It makes her the perfect trap tester.”
“Yes, because I’m the strong–” Auri stopped herself mid-sentence, her eyes squinting at her teammate. “Hey, what do you mean by trap-tester?”
“Bah, if you die from a trap, it’ll be wasted and you’ll be raised from the ashes, right?” Arthur asked with a frown. “Isn’t that how phoenixes work?”
Auri choked in outrage. “I’m not a training dummy!”
“I’m asking you to take one…” Arthur marked a short pause before correcting her sentence. “One-hundred for the team.”
“I refuse!” Auri protested. “Take a hundred yourself!”
“Auri, don’t be a child, this will be a valuable training experience–”
A sharp voice interrupted their argument.
“Have you ever heard…” Orange’s eyes burned with dreadful intensity. “Of the First Law of Meowzy?”
Her ominous tone sent shivers down her teammates’ spines.
“Meowzy was a great dungeon conqueror whose success could be attributed to his greatest discovery.” Orange’s character backstory was like magic, nonsensical and conjured out of thin air. “If you throw enough goats at a problem, this problem will eventually goat away.”
Of all the association’s members, Orange was the one who always went deeper into her character. It helped that she was always playing the same kind of overpowered, insufferably proud rogue. The mask didn’t differ much from the face underneath.
“I, Orange Von Broccoli, do not fail.” Orange grabbed the pouch attached to her belt. “When it comes to mice hunting, cat fighting, or dungeon crawling, I always succeed on my first try; for I am the Admiral Nelson of cat supremacy. I nap eighteen hours a day because my genius demands such tribute to function properly. Others react, but I anticipate.”
If Arthur let her continue, she would boast until sundown. “What are you getting at?”
“Players can start a new campaign with a set of magical items and five hundred gold coins, the latter of which can be exchanged for stuff of the same value upon character creation.” Orange opened her bag. “The cost of a goat is one gold piece.”
A tiny white goat no larger than a mouse hopped out of the bag.
“The cost of a temporary shrinking spell, once adjusted for economy of scale,” Orange continued her tirade, “is twice that amount.”
Arthur and Auri watched on as the animal swiftly grew back to normal size. The gentle goat let out a naïve, squeaky cry.
“Go forth, my fearless scout, my cheese-making warrior.” Orange gently spanked the goat with one hand and pointed at the ominous dungeon’s entrance with the other. “Clear the path to victory for the Orange Armada. Come back victorious or not at all!”
The goat, spurred on by her mistress’s passionate words—and the hungry, starving looks Auri sent her—walked into the dark depths of the Tomb of Pain and Despair with stoic dignity; and a little bit of fear.
“What if it doesn’t come back?” Arthur asked.
“Then it will have set off a trap the second goat won’t have to deal with. It will also make for emergency provisions on the way inside.” After a one-minute delay, Orange swiftly summoned another goat sacrifice from her bag. “It’s a perfectly legal play!”
“How many goats do you have in that bag?” Auri inquired, her mouth salivating. “Can I roast one?”
“As many as needed to secure victory,” Orange responded before practically shoving the second goat into the dungeon. “And maybe later.”
The cycle continued relentlessly. One by one, goats marched fearlessly towards their doom in pursuit of a greater purpose. White-furred, black-furred, large, or small, the horned went on and on and on.
“It works with humans too,” Orange casually mentioned when they reached the thirtieth sacrifice. “But goats are cheaper.”
Arthur nodded in agreement. After all, what was a cat if not a dragon with fur?
Initially amused, Auri eventually lost all patience. “Boring!” she whined. “When do we go in and start blasting?”
“Now seems as good a time as any,” Orange answered calmly. “We’ll need to gather leftover loot to purchase more goats.”
The thought of neglected treasures languishing alone in the darkness, without a caring dragon to claim them, spurred Arthur into action. She strode confidently into the dungeon with her teammates following closely behind. A ghostly message materialized before them as they crossed the threshold:
You have entered: [Halls of Endless Suffering].
It wasn’t long before the trio discovered the remains of the first valiant goat scout. The creature had plummeted through a trapdoor in the dusty hallway, only to end her fall into a vat of acid. A pair of sharks peered out of the liquid and at the adventurers above.
“There are acid sharks?” Auri asked curiously as she carried her allies over the pit.
“There are sharks for everything,” Orange replied wisely. “Sand sharks, zombie sharks, flying sharks…”
Arthur laughed. “Sharknados?”
The party paid homage to many goats as they journeyed deeper into the dungeon. Each had been claimed by a cavalcade of outlandish traps: from alligators held by ropes dropping from the ceiling to slingshots hidden in the walls battered their victims with eggs until they died, Arthur couldn’t have imagined so many methods of goat demise.
The further the trio ventured, the thicker the cobwebs blanketing the ceiling and the more potent the scent of roasted goat grew. The cause became evident as the group approached a stone archway at the end of the corridor.
As it turned out, Orange’s horned scouts had finally met their match: a grotesque ogre scratching its full belly in the shadow of the stone archway.
The squalid monster stood so tall that its pointed ears nearly grazed the ceiling. Its face resembled that of a boar with goat fur still stuck between its razor-sharp teeth. The thing was so obese that Arthur wondered how it could even move, though its bony arms and powerful hands appeared capable of crushing bones. The monster was too engrossed in its meal to notice the party, but bypassing it was impossible.
You face [Goat-Eater, Disemboweler of the Innocent].
“A starving humanoid?” Arthur sighed in compassion. Such was the usual fate of isolated barbarians who never had a dragon to guide them. “Roleplay opportunity!”
The monster’s head snapped towards Arthur. Its blood-red eyes gleamed in the darkness, and a watering tongue slipped from between its teeth.
Stealth check failed! You have alerted [Goat-Eater, Disemboweler of the Innocent] to your presence!
As Orange honed her claws and Auri readied a fire spell, Arthur approached with the unwavering confidence of a seasoned salesperson. “Greetings, peasant!” she introduced herself. “I am She-Who-Feasts-On-Many-And-Collects-Much-Gold, but since you’re from a less advanced race, you may call me Arthur in your backwater tongue! I’m a banker, but don’t ask how rich I am!”
Arthur paused briefly before leaning in.
“It’s more than you,” she whispered, her voice dripping with condescension.
Intimidation check… Intimidation check successful! The wealth disparity has unsettled [Goat-Eater, Disemboweler of the Innocent]!
The poor creature was too awestruck by her grandeur to respond, so Arthur pressed on with a simple question. “What is your salary, my good fellow?”
The monster brandished the goat’s entrails at Arthur as though suggesting she hang herself with them.
Orange, disinterested in the salvation of this savage’s soul, interjected. “Arthur, I don’t think this thing understands—”
“You’re still at the bartering stage of development?” Arthur sneered at the Disemboweler. “Have you not heard of the one true god, the Almighty Bullion?”
Charisma check… Successful! You’ve confused [Goat-Eater, Disemboweler of the Innocent]!
The savage monster gazed at Arthur, its eyes brimming with ignorance. The burden of bringing the light of free-market liberalism to barbarians had never been heavier to bear.
“Well, that’s because you have a poor person mindset!” Arthur displayed the pouch around her neck. “The Almighty Bullion helps those who help themselves! Only through the miracle of the free market can you achieve financial freedom!”
To prove her point, Arthur cast a spell.
“Market’s Invisible Hand!” She waved a claw at the cobwebs. Ethereal, telekinetic fingers of pure magic whisked them away. “See how your productivity can increase?”
Charisma check… Successful! [Goat-Eater, Disemboweler of the Innocent] is cautiously interested in your teachings!
“Capture… prey…” The monster’s lips curled into a toothy grin. “Quicker?”
“Exactly! This is the nature of self-improvement! Invest in me, and I shall invest in you!” Arthur’s passion for wealth spurred her to deliver an impassioned speech. “Don’t you feel the pull of the great chain of industry? The burning fire of financial free—”
“Fireball!”
Auri’s outburst startled Arthur, who nearly jumped as high as the ceiling. A sphere of fire launched from behind the dragon narrowly missing her and struck the monster ahead. The resulting explosion sent dust billowing throughout the hallway.
“Auri, you imbecile!” Arthur snapped at her teammate. “What have you done?”
“You said fire!” the phoenix retorted as if it were the dragon’s fault. “I thought you needed help!”
Arthur had no time to argue, for a screech of pain and rage reverberated throughout the Halls of Endless Suffering. Her would-have-been recruit emerged from the smoke, injured but alive. The fire had transformed its ears into candles, casting eerie light on the scene, and the burn wounds on its pale skin revealed thick, black blood flowing beneath. The Disemboweler’s nails extended into claws sharp enough to cut through steel.
[Goat-Eater, Disemboweler of the Innocent] has gone [Berserk]!
It’s disembowelin’ time!
And so Arthur learned the true meaning of suffering.
Atop its throne of blood and shadow, the Plushie giggled cruelly.
The malevolent master of the game sat alone at a table, its red eyes studying a sinister dungeon map. Its friends were merely miniatures scurrying from one chamber to another, fleeing the Disemboweler as it eagerly attempted to demonstrate the reasoning behind its name.
The Plushie had no doubt that its players would eventually triumph over this encounter. Their victory would come at a steep, bloody price, but they would prevail in the end. The Plushie was patient; it knew that the most effective way to torment adventurers was to string them along. The deadliest snares were those the victims unwittingly tightened around their own necks. True torment demanded a secret ingredient, a seasoning to salt the wounds.
Hope.
Hope was the most devious trap of all.
“Let’s play together!” the Plushie chirped, a multitude of wicked ideas swirling in its mind. “Forever and ever!”
The fun had only just begun.
The Campaign continues in the link below.
