Arnold had been waiting for TWO HOURS in this godawful MMO which he hated so much. This stupid fantasy world. All the aliens in the universe banded together to make a communication device or whatever, and it was just some fantasy novel written by some hack like Nobody103 or whatever. All the NPCs wanted to talk to him about magical systems for fifteen years and he cared about NONE of it.

RPGs were for nerds who wasted away their lives with stupid pleasures that ruined their hunter gatherer mindset. He recently had read this really good book by the Bronze Age Pervert, some ancient author from the 2010s who really had a lot of great stuff to say. And what he realized was that men--masculine men--were not made for these gross ideas like “science” or “pleasure” or “play.” Every time he looked at a video game, he was sinning in the eyes of his bronze age ancestors, and every time he spoke openly about his feelings he was basically becoming a homosexual, which, nothing wrong with that, but ew gross. After these revelations, he finally came upon the realization that this entire Tower of Somnnus was a stupid joke all along, and he was wasting his life playing it instead of just doing extra weight lifts at the gym in his sleep and getting ripped while the rest of his body rested.

So he had been standing here for TWO HOURS before Kat finally showed up and actually did anything with him.

Kat showed up to him with a smile, and also her trusty pseudopod. Yes, that’s right, Kat had three hands now for some reason. That sounded really sexy but it also looked kind of weird.

“Sorry, I couldn’t get to sleep on time,” Kat said. “I was trying to put my little sister to bed, but she kept talking about Chrome C--”

“You should have just taken some Easy Sleep! That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

“That stuff is a little expensive, Arnold...”

“Then just ask me for money. My family is loaded so I’ll just buy you whatever you want. Money buys happiness, after all.”

He grabbed her by the wrist and began pulling her along with him as they advanced through the drab, boring fantasy world landscape.

“We’re going to go monster hunting,” he told her, “and we’re going to stop these stupid monsters from cheating all the time like they always do.”

“I’m not sure they’re actually cheating, you know. They’re just monst--”

“They’re cheaters,” he corrected. “And the only way to defeat a cheater, you know, is to cheat yourself. So we’re going to sneak up on them just like they sneak up on us.”

“So it’s okay to do it but only when we do it?”

“Now you have the hang of it.” Arnold gave a sexy wink. “As long as the scrappy protagonists write at the end of the day, right is what we say it is. We get to edit out all the bad stuff, because all that matters is the victories and the conquests. I like to think of it as ‘artistic and moral license.’”

He felt Kat shiver and try to yank her wrist away from him, but he refused to let go, and she ended up bursting out laughing instead.

“Arnold, you’re such a... Hoo, boy, you’re a character.”

“I’ll be way more of a character after... There he is.”

They had finally run into Dorrik.

Time to kill that fucking lizard.