“Ah, stop!” I could feel his suction cups adhering to my skin, popping free, and then his tentacles smacked me again. “What are you doing?”

  “Just hold still, mate.”

  For a moment, I panicked. I was definitely weak enough that he might kill me, but I realized the static haze around the edges of my vision was clearing up instead of getting worse. I checked my HP, and my health climbed by a couple of points with every slap.

  “How? Just… how?” I’d descended to yet another new low: wearing ugly boxers while being slapped by an octopus with healing abilities.

  “If you had listened to my exposition, you’d know the Karjok can employ healing properties for a few different species, humans among them.” He slapped me again, and my HP ticked up a few more points. “Good thing you stuck with your current race, or you might’ve been out of luck. I’ve already saved a few of you poor sods. It’s not even my mission here on this planet; I’m just helpful.”

  I gazed vacantly into the in-game version of Seaboard City, while being repeatedly slapped and suctioned by an NPC octopus, genuinely contemplating how I’d fallen so far, so fast.

  Yet within a minute, he’d restored me to full health. I rubbed the back of my head and my face where the caveman’s club had walloped me and found no more glitter or pain, and my vision had completely returned to normal.

  Silas rubbed his front tentacles together. “There we have it. Pull up the map, and I’ll show you where I need to go.”

  I tapped my WHIM and opened the map feature. It took a few seconds to load, and then a map of the AllVerse Seaboard City splayed out before me. It turns out it was very different from the real Seaboard City, which I hadn’t realized until then. Although much of the city layout was similar, the major diversions from reality included the surrounding lands which formed a mashup of many different biomes.

  “That can’t be right…” I muttered. I stared wide-eyed at the distance marker. “How is this place that big? And this isn’t even all of it.”

  “As I was saying, I need to go there.” Silas pointed at a spot several miles away, but still within the Seaboard City limits. “The area of the city that’s all nasty and broken? Yeah, right there.”

  “Fine.” As soon as I agreed, an objective pinged on my WHIM:

  | Objective: Escort Silas to the crash zone |

  Here goes nothing.

  I took hold of the rails and ran across the pavement, hauling an alien cephalopod across the city in a rickshaw. And I just had to make peace with that.

  “Since we got the time, I should tell you the story about how the Karjok landed here,” Silas said.

  “No. Absolutely not,” I said between breaths. “Skip.”

  “That’s not an option now, mate. We got nothing but time and the open road, and I shall be your Non-Octopus Teacher.” Silas cleared his… I don’t want to say throat. He cleared whatever part of the octopus allowed him to talk. I’m not an elfing marine biologist. “As I was saying, the Karjok were invited to the human embassy, but we ran into a spot of bother.”

  The body pod malfunctioned, killed me, and I’m in Hell. That’s the only explanation for this. My traitorous brother Nate rigged it to kill me, and now he’s gonna take over Ascendant Games and run it into the ground, just like his social life.

  Enduring babble was nothing new to me. I’d suffered for years listening to people, or at least pretending to, to get where I was—where I desperately wanted to get back to.

  Ahead of us, several muscle cars blew a stoplight, and the police chased them. I wasn’t sure if they were from GTA, GT9, or some other GT-game that involved fast cars and reckless driving, but I was glad they hadn’t come our direction. After seeing MeatPopsicle get turned into a—well, literally a meat popsicle in the street, I planned to be extra careful while piloting my new-old rickshaw.

  As we went along, I recognized some parts of this version of Seaboard City, but everything was mashed up. The really good noodle place on 29th wasn’t there, instead replaced by a shoe store. The oldest Catholic Church on the west coast was gone, its land now occupied by a dog park filled with Players stuck in pet-themed games.

  Worst of all, my favorite supplement store on 18th was nowhere to be found. In its place sat my least-favorite supplement store instead.

  Would the horrors of this world ever cease?

  Silas continued to ramble while I considered ways to escape this awful place. There had to be people not in the game working on getting me out.

  There’s a frightening thought… what’s happening on the outside if over a billion people are in here? It’s only been a few hours, or has it been more? The implications were enough to drive me crazy. One thing at a time, Shaw.

  After miles and miles of running, throughout which I amazingly didn’t get tired at all, we neared an area of the city that looked like a literal warzone, even worse than the mayhem surrounding the Loot and Class box drops at the beginning of Launch Day.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “So as it turns out, I didn’t realize when the Karjok were invited to the local embassy, that meant just to be represented,” Silas explained. “The Prime Minister didn’t intend for the entire Karjok population to show. I told that bloke that’s a disastrous lack of specificity, and I’m not culpable—”

  “Shut up for a sec,” I snapped, glancing around. No NPCs populated this area of the city, and it was decimated. The sky above bore an eerie haze of smoke, and a distant yell or gunshot rang out every now and then. “Alright, be ready to heal me. Someone’s in combat here. And where, exactly, do you need to go?”

  “See those billows of black smoke that look like they’re coming from the gateway to Hades itself? Yeah, right there. Should be super easy. Hardly even an inconvenience.”

  It’s hard to sneak with a rickshaw, especially an old broken one that squeaked, creaked, and squealed whenever I moved it, and I doubtless looked really dumb trying, but I was Level 1 with nothing but marine-themed boxers to my name. I was the very definition of “you get what you pay for.”

  I wove through the tattered buildings and bombed-out streets, searching for the best route to Silas’s destination.

  “Go, go!” a man shouted.

  A group of soldiers rushed out of a crumbling building, armed with automatic rifles and dressed in urban combat gear, save for one who wore an old-school WWII-era gas mask. Inexplicably, they all wore pale-pink ribbons tied and fastened to the backs of their helmets, each with two long pink tails trailing behind them whenever they moved.

  What the Fjorst is that about?

  Bullets sprayed across the area, sparking off stones, metal, and concrete around us, and I dove under my rickshaw. Silas squelched through a hole in the seat and splatted down next to me.

  “Ah, sod-cram it… this is a Hall of Duty zone,” I grumbled. “Why are we here, Silas?”

  “Well, actually, I think it’s a Painbow Seven: Siege zone,” he corrected. “You can tell by those pink bows on their helmets.”

  “That is… so dumb.”

  “Anyway, this is where the Nautilus crashed and where my people were marooned. Didn’t you listen while I told the story?”

  I caught glimpses of several other colors of bows—teal, purple, marigold, and more—presumably marking them as from opposing teams. The onslaught of Painbow Seven Players clashed and fought and began chucking grenades. The explosions rattled my teeth, and I wondered if the rickshaw could sustain the concussive force of a grenade detonation even relatively nearby, let alone a direct hit.

  I didn’t intend to find out. I just needed to drop off this mouthy space-octopus and haul asp out of here.

  Silas and I crawled out from our hiding spot, and he took his spot in the cab while I grabbed the rickshaw’s handles. Without a second thought, we darted through the war-torn streets, listening to all manner of censored slurs, rifle fire, and trash-talk.

  A bullet clipped the rickshaw, and sparks erupted from the point of impact.

  “Whoa, that was close!” Silas yelled, “Ya mind rerouting, mate?”

  “I can’t reroute through a battlefield! This is where you wanted to go!”

  “What kinda driver are you?”

  I couldn’t bicker with an NPC and focus on staying alive, so I ran with all my might, hopping over debris, navigating through detritus, and keeping my head low, with only slightly better posture than Nate on his best days.

  The rickshaw hopped up with me, more or less proportionally, whenever I jumped, so that was one positive.

  “Frag out!” someone yelled to my left, and a grenade landed ahead of me.

  “Frag me!” I yelped, and I dug my heels into the pavement to stop. I yanked the rickshaw to the side as hard as I could, but it was already too late.

  The explosion flung me, the rickshaw, and Silas across the battlefield. Pain wracked my body, and each time I ricocheted off the pavement, I felt it. Numbers spattered out with every new impact.

  We landed next to a bombed-out bank with a military truck tipped on its side and on fire. I lay prone and pushed up onto my hands and knees.

  “Your avoidance skills need work…” Silas groaned. “Oh, Captain Nemo’s ghost… you should probably take care of that pretty fast.”

  Before I could ask what he meant or decide if I should even care, I felt the icy touch of cold. An eerie kind of cold. The same kind I’d felt that day, ten years ago, when I’d been rushed from high school to the hospital.

  I looked down.

  A piece of shrapnel had torn through my abdomen, perilously close to where my real-life scar had been. Sparkles poured out, my health continuously dropped, and my vision began to fade.

  This felt different from being clubbed and having only a few HP left.

  This felt like dying, and I knew exactly what that felt like.

  “Silas, heal me now!”

  He crawled on his tentacles toward me. “A ‘please’ wouldn’t kill you, would it?”

  “No, but this wound might,” I wheezed. “Please?”

  He hopped onto my shoulder and began slapping me over the head.

  “Uhh, not sure I can fix this one, mate,” he mumbled.

  Silas was healing me, but not faster than my health was draining. I staggered to my feet while Silas repeatedly whacked my head. My shaking hand hit my WHIM to check my status.

  | WARNING: HP Critically Low |

  | Status: Glittering Out |

  I’d need legit medical intervention to fix this. “Okay, there’s gotta be a medkit here. Silas, just keep me from dying.”

  “At this rate, you’ll owe me for the ride,” he quipped.

  With Silas clinging to my bare shoulders and still whacking me every other second, I staggered over to the on-fire military truck and peeked inside the busted windshield. A crate of munitions, an armored vest, and a high-powered AMR with a curious circular symbol on the stock lay within. I needed none of it more than a medkit, but I reached my arm through and touched it anyway.

  Whatever I touched, it flashed and deposited itself into my inventory.

  “Mate, priorities. I can’t heal you forever. If you stub your foot-fingers right now, that could be the bitter end. More importantly, you won’t be able to give me a ride.”

  Priorities. The one thing Dad had taught me that was worthwhile. The unusual parallels between this situation and the one from ten years ago in the real world wasn’t lost on me.

  I left the truck behind and stumbled into the damaged building, hoping to find something. The pain continued to try to overwhelm me, but I resisted and pressed forward. I hadn’t come this far just to get taken out by a random grenade. “Foot-fingers? You mean my… toes?”

  He continued to slap at my face and head, perpetually keeping me only seconds from perishing. “Well, excuse the ink outta me. I’m not a Xeno-Terran biologist. Call your weird tiny appendages whatever you like.”

  “Stop right there, dude,” a boy called.

  I clutched my glittering abdomen and whirled around to see a man in camouflage gear, complete with matching face paint. He held an automatic rifle in his hands, and I saw the twin tails of a green bow drifting on the breeze behind him. Another Painbow Seven Player.

  When he spoke again, I realized he’d been the source of the command. Despite his older appearance, he spoke with the voice of a ten-year-old boy. “You grabbed the stuff in the truck. I want it.”

  “I’ll trade you for a health pack,” I said through Silas’s slaps.

  The Painbow Seven Player snickered, raised his rifle, and took aim at me. “Or I’ll just shoot ya and take it. How’s that, Octo-Chad?”

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  Dungeon Crawler Carl Audio Immersion Tunnel for Soundbooth Theater, and he's the lead writer for the Dungeon Crawler Carl Role Playing Game.