Part I: All That Glitters Is Not Shrimp

A surprisingly not-for-kids LitRPG featuring ghostly possession, emerging stats, and a donut-shaped island

Chapter 1 - Manny's Pet Ogre

I wanted to give you the heads up: it’s best if you were born between maybe 1975 and 83 or so. You don’t have any control over that, but that stands. It’s not a requirement, but a lot will make sense if you were. If you grew up with a NES or Genesis you’re going to be really immersed, but if you didn’t, here’s what you need to do: go grab a couple of emulators and play A Legend of Zelda and Super Mario 3. Or buy the remastered app versions or whatever kids do these days. Follow that up with Link to the Past and Super Mario World. Really get in there, too; get into the secret areas, get at least eighteen hearts and find the Star Land where shit gets really intense. Follow it up with at least one Castlevania title, and at least one Metroid title. Final Fantasy and Small Town Strangeness are the last two, and the most vital, for all the stats and RPG parts. This was my whole life for a while, and that’s… not kidding.

My name is not Donnie Rofleeder, and my best friend’s name isn’t Ritchie Dabriel, but those will do. Maya Fabiani, who will come in a little later, isn’t really named Maya, and this only matters because the National Security Administration and the Central Intelligence Agency said I could only publish this with the names changed. Because truth be told, nobody would believe any of this if they read it in a book. They’d immediately go to ‘well, that’s clearly fiction’ and I won’t throw out any blame. If this book makes back the money it cost to publish, it’ll be worth it. You can’t live the kind of life I lived and come away unscathed. A little bit of green padding would be nice.

It’d be nice if the government paid out, you know, for saving the world and all, but they aren’t in the habit of giving ordinary plebs like yours truly. No, those are reserved for the Frank Filibuster and President Pisshead, the pricks.

I’m only slightly salty over this.

Okay… we start, if I recall correctly, in 1978.

***

I was born. All right, yeah, no, that’s too far back. Nobody needs to imagine a pink, squealing little baby covered in yuck in Greensville, California. Blot that out, don’t think about it. And quit thinking about my mom like that, you monster. She was a sweaty, bloody, screaming mess who just happened to have no pants on.

Off by a decade. Whoops.

Let’s fast forward to the start of the whole business, in 1988. September second, I think, the Sunday before school got going again. Maybe that’s too far forward, but we’ll make do. Real writers do flashbacks, so I can maybe get to one or two.

***

Greensville in 1988 is a weird place, but when you’re kids everything’s weird. A couple of streets down? Weird. That old lady who lives in the house with the creepy twisty tree on the way to school? Weird. People from the other side of town who bus in? Weird. People who get rides from their parents? Weird. Foggy days?

You get the picture.

So the idea that Greensville is a perfect circle of land a few miles out in the Pacific Ocean was a weirdness on equal footing with everything else. The shrimp shack next to the old town market, the old castle that appears to be maybe a million years old if it was a hundred, and everything else about it is amazing and wonderful and weird in equal measure.

Ritchie and I mapped out a lot of Greensville in the years we’d been best friends. Ever since we’d learned to ride bikes we’d headed out to the forest between City Hall and the castle, we’d gone through the cemetery at sunset, and we’d ridden by the massive Greensville Furniture company at the island’s southernmost point. And everything in between.

We don't look above and behind our heads, is what I’m saying. We were focused forward, not on the numbers beginning to appear floating behind us, but on the little creek that ran through the forest, or the way the grasses at Greensville State Park glimmer in the wind on a weekend in June.

Anyway there are numbers, but we don't notice them until everyone was vomiting up gold and in far too deep to climb out.

We only notice them because of that Sunday, before fourth grade starts, when Manny stumbles (screaming) upon us playing in our backyards.

Hang on. I keep getting this discombobulated.

Ritchie and I live next door to each other, so we're naturally best friends. Our parents probably encouraged this. I’m pretty sure they engineered the whole thing. By the time we're ten though, they're probably regretting it, because we’ve forced them to build a covered hallway between our two houses. It cuts off our driveway in a super awkward way, but we can go from my side door to Ritchie’s house without braving the elements. I have my own room, but also bunkbeds, because Ritchie sleeps over at my house on a regular basis. He has a toothbrush in my bathroom. That’s how we roll.

I’m pretty sure Ritchie’s parents don't like the idea, but I’m nearly a hundred percent sure my father bankrolled the whole thing. The Rofleeder house is a comfortable one; the Dabriel house less so. I have a shiny new bike. Ritchie has a used one with the chrome half gone to rust, sun damage where the stickers used to be, and bald handle grips.

So Manny’s a year behind us in school, I think. Skinny kid, dark complected, probably some latin blood in there if his family isn’t straight out of somewhere south of USA. Doesn’t matter as much as the terror on his face. He’s coming down this weird sort of alley behind our houses, Ritchie and mine. So there’s a sort of garbage collection alley behind our houses, which seems stupid unless you’re on your way to work and there’s a garbage truck clogging up traffic. During the day that space is super useful, to build shitty bike ramps, to play street hockey with a tennis ball, to play a bit of pick up flag football, water guns, that sort of thing. My neighborhood has these, but they’re not everywhere in Greensville.

Back to the action: Ritchie and I are playing with one of the first ever remote controlled cars, with our backpacks hung up on the fence.

That’s another thing about Ritchie and I: at the time we're explorers, kind of. Greensville isn't very big, but it's not completely built up. There’s a huge forest over on the western half of the island, south of the fairgrounds and north of my house, and a single sharp mountain peak in the southeast corner, so there are always plenty of places for us to traipse around and get very close to lost. Backpacks, full of survival suppliss, are essential. Ritchie's more of a scout than I am, so it's he who insists that we keep flashlights, pocket knives, sandwiches, a first aid kit, and somehere along the line he’d gotten his hands on a flare gun. Wish I’d asked him about that.

Back to Manny for real. He comes running up toward us, panting.

“What’s going on?” Ritchie asks.

He’s out of breath, hands on knees, heaving for any bit of air. He must’ve run here over several blocks, from his house, which is over closer to Main. Instead he just wiggles a hand behind him and sort of points at the thing that rounds the corner: an honest to god ogre.

I mean you see these sorts of things in cartoons and in some illustrations. I’d picked up a Dungeons and Dragons book at one point. I know a thing or two. Also I’ve played several video games. I can boast the position of biggest video game nerd in my grade, I would say. I have a whole carrying case of cartridges. Point is, I know an ogre when I see one: greenish grayish skin, knobbly hide, protruding tusks, really badly put together clothing made of animal skins, and a big old club.

Your average ogre, a fantasy beast, just walking around small town Greensville like it's supposed to be there. Oh, and it has a reddish bar hovering over its head with a few different segments showing it was also straight out of a video game, and at full health.

“Ohhhh-kay,” I said. “That’s an ogre.”

It lumbers around the corner, sniffing and peering about, club on shoulder, and looks around with squinting eyes, and finally gets a look at us. And here, I gotta wonder what it really sees: three stringy kids that might make a decent pot of stew, or had Manny pissed it off somehow?

There's no way of telling.

As a kid, you’re far less prone to standing around gawking at things. Everything is new and different, so everything’s worthy of an equal amount of astonishment.

“Do you think we’re the first people to ever see one?” Ritchie asks.

“Dunno, but we better get outta here before it stomps us.”

I go to my backpack and into the little compartment for the pocket knife. It's one of those lockblade ones, stolen from my dad’s workshop. He never works in there. It's just a thing he had so he could show it off to people when we had barbecues in our huge yard. I use my tire swing and treehouse the same way my dad used his workshop: to make other people crazy jealous.

So I slide the blade around until it clicks, unaware that one of the three Characteristic boxes behind me has filled in. It’s Quick, and it gives me an extra die to get moving fast. And boy am I moving fast. I run straight up to the thing, which barely has time to drop its club to the ground before I shove the blade up into its ribs. I probably does some damage, I mean I definitely does based on the way the red bar over its head shrinks by a third, but this early in the goings on, none of that stuff is visible. It'll take time for the dice rolling and the damage numbers and XP and stuff to start coming in.

“Donny what’re you doing!” Ritchie shouts, while Manny stands there in awe for a second. I’m not a big Manny fan, we don’t really know him, but you don’t just follow a kid into an alley with a club and get away with it, right? Well not in back of my house you don’t.

The massive monstrosity peers over its gut down at me, then opens its mouth and roars. Spittle and awful breath roil down towards me, but I’ve already danced away by the time it pulls its massive club up into the ready position, and I’m around at its eight o’clock, stabbing it again just over the hip this time.

Again, there are no Domains as of yet, not that I know of anyway. Nobody has any clue if my dice, which we don’t know about, are rolling well, and if they’re exploding 6’s or not. None of that is information I can go on. Instead I try to jam my four inch blade into the ogre’s guts, and this time it gets turned away by the thickness of the fur and the knobbled hide.

It huffs and looks around below for me, but I’m already behind it, at its six, so it apparently just considers me a non-threat and stomps on after Manny. It unleashes a mighty swing, which does (I learn later) about enough damage to half kill me with one blow. Instead the club slams into the tree that’s grown into the chainlink fence behind my house. It bounces off with a mighty whokk sound. Manny and Ritchie have retreated, which is a shame because I know Ritchie’s got some decent gear in his backpack. Well, ogre’s now between Ritchie and his backpack.

My go. I dart forward and jab this thing in the leg this time, where it’s just skin and no armor. More of that red bar falls, but not enough. The ogre stomps around, trying to get at me, but I’m just too quick for it. That’s right, sucker! I duck in between its legs and rake my knife over the already-wounded leg again. More damage, with a sliver of red remaining in the health bar hovering over its head.

Instead of its massive, unwieldy club, it just backhands me, which only scores a glancing blow. Still, it’s enough to send me spinning away into several trashbags on the ground. Thank the gods for trash, because otherwise I’d be more worried about the road rash than the impact damage.

It stomps over toward me again, and this time has the club raised. I’m too slow to get up. Wound penalties are a thing, whether I can see them or not. I’m a goner, I think. This thing is going to pound me into jelly. I’m going to die before my tenth birthday in another week.

Just kidding, obviously. A rock bounces off its big dumb head, and it peers around, dazed before another rock takes it right between the eyes. That does it: the remaining red goo in the health bar is gone, and the ogre topples back away from me. It lands hard, shaking the earth, and it’s just gone after blinking a couple times.

What’s left behind are a pair of gold coins, one rolling on its edge, the other spinning like they do sometimes. Ritchie goes over and collects both, and peers at them.

“What. The. Hell.”

From there we take Manny into our house and start bombarding him with questions. He’s in shock, clearly, because he doesn’t know how any of this got here, and why that thing was chasing him. All he knew was full-on panic, the need to get away from it, and so that’s what he did.

I’m curious at this time about the HP meter. I’ve seen that before. It’s both real, the ogre, and video game, the HP thing with the red line. It reminds me of a game I think that’s called Castle at Black Cliff. I don’t have it, is the thing.

“I think we’re going to have to go to your house,” I tell Manny.

“Huh?”

“We have to figure out where that thing came from.”

“I don’t know…” he says.

“Hey. We’re gonna take weapons. If there’s another one, we’ve got it handled.” I’m an overconfident nearly ten year old boy, at this point, who has just successfully killed his first ever actual supernatural threat, and he did it without difficulty. Radical, right? At this point I’m riding high on the feeling of slashing that thing apart. Even if Manny and Ritchie had to take the last hits, clearly that was mostly me.

I’m like… a hero.

In my own mind, of course. I had all the stupid overconfidence of a kid who’s mastered several video games, who has successfully done a kickflip at least twice, and once in front of people. I’m halfway toward being a god.

***

We interrogate Manny as best we can, which isn’t well because he’s out of his mind. Plus we’re ten year olds who have no idea what questions to ask. Cookies and ice cream help, and after a while he’s back to relative normal: at least he’s eating well. He talks almost nonstop about how big and awful and smelly the ogre was, and about how awesome I am for helping kill it.

Which maybe isn’t very useful, but is at least quite nice to hear.

Eventually he gets to the real meat of the discussion: he’d been playing video games after his brother left, and suddenly the thing was stomping around in his house, making a racket. One moment not there, the next, there. And although he has no idea about the health bar, or where it came from, we have at least the first clue we’ll need in our first ever adventure together. Time to head out on bikes.

We pedal over to Manny’s house, but not before we clip some non-essential baseball cards to give the spokes a little bit of extra zip and rattle. He only lives a couple blocks away and we’re there before too long. Honestly, older me has a much sharper sense of time than younger me, so I can’t actually be very sure: five minutes? Ten? Does it matter? I mean time is going to matter later, and it will matter a lot, but for now everything’s sunny with a chance of blood rain rather than the other way around.

His house is a squat ranch in brown, with a hideous, loud yellow door and matching yellow shutters on all the windows. 244 Broadleaf. Outside there’s evidence Manny’s older brother has been here: footballs, baseball equipment, frisbee sticking out of the bush, and a lacrosse stick beside the front door. Manny doesn’t want to head inside. The ogre had him spooked. So Ritchie and I shrug, and head in together.

It’s spooky because of the quiet, but not that spooky once the birds start up and the breeze gives the aspen trees a bit of that late summer glitter. You know, where the leaves flutter back and forth between bright and not-so-bright, with the hushed whisper of wind heading through them. The kind of sound you really only hear between the age of seven and eighteen, though I’d wager you hear it a bit more after retirement age.

~end chapter 1

I hope to have 2 chapters a week (Monday and Friday)

Stay tuned for Chapter 1.2 - The Battle At Black Cliff.