Revealing Project Green

A litrpg with 8-bit music, severe beatings, and Scrappy do

By Nolan Locke

CHAPTER 1.10- The BBEG Slip n' Slide

The room itself is larger than any we’ve been in so far. Those light beam squares dot the four corners, with another four spaced out, forming a second square in my imagination. And at the far end is the biggest shrimp I’ve ever seen.

That’s not exactly fair either, because if I saw a shrimp that was the size of a lobster, that would be the biggest shrimp I’d ever seen in my life. This thing towers over us, easily eight or ten feet tall, with scything blades for front legs, a ridiculous amount of other legs tucked back in there, and antennae that seem more like whips than anything else. It has to be at least fifteen feet long. I hadn’t really investigated the anatomy of a shrimp before, but apparently they have big spiny drill things for noses. Big black eyes, the size of grapefruits on stalks seem to both ignore us and take us in at the same time.

Oh, and 8-bit music starts up out of nowhere. This is clearly End Boss music.

“Use the cover,” I say, and cock my head over toward the pillars of light. Then I pass my RUSTY SWORD back and forth between my hands and shout. “Hey ugly, get over here and give me some love!”

Dice clatter: these ones for my Panache (4d6+1), and end up with 6, 5, 3, and 1, a result of 15. I start off to my left, and it rushes forward on clicking legs, toward me, before it stops. It then rubs its forelegs against its spiny alien face, then rushes at me again. It stops, six feet away. Man, it’s quick.

My Will dice clatter without me asking them to, and end up with a result of 7. Well, that can’t be good, whatever it is.

I have an idea, and scrape up a bunch of greenish muck before this thing rushes at me again. With a quick Moves (4d6+1) roll, I score a 20! Greenish goop spatters all over one of its big old eyes, and some bits of slime get on the other for good measure. I dive off to the right, toward where I hope its blind side is now.

This time my Moves isn’t as good: a 5, 3, and two 1’s. Only 11. However, its Skirmish is only 3d6+2 for some reason, and it rolls an equally bad 10. Twin legs slam down on the place where I just was a second ago, while I slip and slide around on dungeonscum, and just manage not to take any damage.

The HP meter above this thing’s head decreases by a fraction, and the whole shrimp flashes from a mottled rock color to bright red for just a moment. There we go, the first of what I hope are a series of sneak attacks.

In a flash, the thing curls its tail and dashes backwards, leaving me really far from it, and the boss staring with its one clean eye at Maya and Ritchie.

Crap.

“Hey! We’re not finished over here!” I bang my RUSTY SWORD against the ground, hoping the shriek of metal will give me a bonus on whatever roll I’m making here, but instead the last of its durability gives way and it snaps in half. However, I end up with another 20, with a 6, 5, and pair of 4’s again. Cowabunga!

The shrimp rushes forward off to one side of me, and I see Maya drag Ritchie away from being run over, or smashed with its massive tail, because in the next moment it pivots around toward me again.

“Okay okay okay,” I mutter to myself, while scooping up another glob of green grime and trying to splat it on the other eye. 6, 5, 2, and 1 give me a 15, and in response Megashrimp rolls (4d6+1), for a total of 12. The slimy grenade ends up all over its face, with the majority covering its other eye.

“Boom!”

It rushes me.

This time its Skirmish doesn’t mess around, and ends up with a pair of 6’s and a 4, plus re-rolls on those 6’s: 5 and 4. 26 all told. My 13 does not cut it.

A single long arm, like a mop handle, strikes me across the stomach and throws me aside for 6 hit points. My first wound box is obliterated in an instant, and I skid to a stop on more green yuck. The world blurs out a bit.

However, when I look up again, another chunk of its HP bar is down.

“That’s right!” I shout.

“Donny!” Ritchie is shouting, and I see why: the megashrimp is advancing on him, and he’s trying to keep a light pillar in between them.

“Well shut up!” I shout at him. “I got it in the eyeballs.” Case in point, the megashrimp stops and pivots back toward me.

I bash what remains of my RUSTY SWORD against the floor again, and scream out a war cry. “That’s right! Dinner, right here!”

The cat and mouse game we’ve started, amazingly, works. I keep yelling and screaming and banging the tiny sliver of sword I’ve got left (followed by just the hilt) against the wall and ground, and the other two attack while the thing beats me up. And all that sounds great, except I go from -0 on the wound penalties to -2d in a heartbeat, and that makes it practically impossible to accomplish anything. If there’s one bit of good news, the megashrimp is now blinking red on and off even when they’re not attacking it.

They really need to get things in gear. I’m not going to be very effective like this for long.

“That all you got?” I demand, after it slams up against me for the third time, then spurts away and pivots back towards Ritchie and Maya. I’m at -3d now, as good as useless. Honestly, I also feel like a heap of crap. These hit points are a concrete monitor of both my will to go on as well as physical punishment my body’s taken, and I’m close to done. My single die rolls a 4. Megashrimp ignores me and pounces on the other two, slaps them aside, and goes for Ritchie. When he takes the first thrashing, it’s for 10 damage somehow. He drops to -1d, tries to strike back, but a Skirmish of 1d gets him nowhere. The boss evades his feeble attack, darts forward again, then sends him straight to -2d with the next 6 damage. That’s all she wrote for Ritchie.

And here you’d imagine Maya would leap into the fray and do some insane amount of damage. So far there haven’t been any critical hits at all, and right here is the place where she walks up and sticks daggers in its eyeballs.

Sorry to inform you, it doesn’t happen. She does get another hit in, but this thing has just under a quarter of its life left, and one strike for 5 damage isn’t going to cut it. Doesn’t cut it. Sure it’s blinking red faster than ever, but still moving about exactly the same as it had at the beginning of the battle.

We’re forgotten, and the megashrimp advances on her with expressionless cruelty. Even after she charges up a last ditch strike with her psychic energy, forcing a nosebleed on herself, and boosts the damage by 9 for a total of 15, it’s still not enough. A tiny blob of red remains in the boss’s health meter, and it smashes against her Moves roll of 9 with a Skirmish of 11. The -1 she was already suffering on account of the psychic self-damage gets an extra 4 damage from a claw, then another 5. She goes to attack again, but this thing has some sort of late stage quickness Characteristic. Either that or it was saving it up.

Ritchie limps on over to me.

“This is bad,” he says.

I snort laughter, then lurch to my feet and relieve him of his DAGGERS. They go into sheaths that I didn’t know I had attached to my belt. Fun!

“We got any sandwiches left?”

He shakes his head. Beyond us, Maya takes another pummeling, and drops to -3d.

It’s the last idea I’ve got, and it’s a stupid one: I hobble over to the megashrimp’s megatail, and try to climb aboard. Wonder of wonders, the game doesn’t force a roll out of me until I’m halfway up, and at that point, my single remaining Moves die rolls a 3. Since 4 isn’t enough to do anything, the boss suddenly pivots and throws me off. I land hard, and take another hit point of damage, then roll to my back to find all the legs in the world around me.

Now. Now is when Maya finally figures out her Characteristics. She activates Scrappy and Fierce at the same time, which allows her to ignore wound penalties for a short time (Fierce), and add a die to a Will or Skirmish roll (Scrappy). She burns with a purplish aura for a moment before throwing out 4d6+1 in psychic damage, with the 6 re-rolling. The numbers flash in front of my face at the same moment knife blade legs do the exact same thing: 6, 5, 4, 1, and an extra 4 for good measure. The 21 damage ends this thing, which collapses on top of me (slowly, so as not to crush me to death). Then, after a few suffocating moments, the body vanishes.

Ritchie’s beside me, but my eyes are on Maya. She sinks to her knees with silvery stuff leaking from her nose, and wipes at it with her forearm. Then she laughs.

I laugh too, weakly though. After a moment, Ritchie follows suit.

We’ve done it.

Right below my feet, where the center of the beast was (roughly), a glowing orb now hovers. It burns with liquid white flame, and I’m almost certain in the center of it is a trapped… something. Fairy goddess maybe, or a princess, or some eldritch being that should never be released upon the world.

“Don’t touch it,” Ritchie says.

“Duh.”

“I mean we will touch it, just not now. We have to do it together. Maya?”

She says something in a language I’m pretty sure isn’t Spanish. Then, with a look of utter confusion, she says something else in that language. Finally, slaps herself across the face and says, “That was weird.”

We’re all pretty wobbly in getting up, but I’m in for a sweet surprise: there’s a ring of loot around the floaty orb. We count five gold pieces, twenty silver, eighty-five copper, a NECKLACE that gives the wearer 5 extra hit points, a SWORD that has neither rust nor nicks in the blade, and a durability of, get this, 49/50. Still no goodies attached, but maybe by the time we hit the twentieth dungeon we might get a 3% knockback enhancement. Who knows. To top all that off, there’s a SHIELD, a round metal thing only slightly larger than a dinner plate.

With all that gathered up in backpacks and secured in scabbards, Ritchie has us all grab the floating white fireball on the count of three.

“Are you sure about this?” I ask.

“Do you feel any heat?”

He has a point. So, on the count of three, I brace myself for searing agony and awful death, and touch the orb at the same time Maya and Ritchie do.

When I open my eyes, it’s to a scene that’s both familiar and wrong: the forest where we found the door. The trees aren’t spiraling in their branches. There aren’t any fairies bobbing around, glowing like lightning bugs. None of the trees have tiny furniture growing out of the roots or branches, and none of the rocks either. It’s like we’ve imagined it. Furthermore, we don’t spot a creepy hunched figure off in the distance of the forest. Either it was a big lump of earth brought on by a tree falling in the woods, or the light was playing a trick on us. Or, of course, whenever the supernatural video game situation rears its ugly head again, he’ll be back.

I rummage around through my backpack, and sure enough, I’m going crazy. No sword or shield, no copper or silver pieces– wait. I come out with a couple of trading cards. One has a picture of a sword on it, and reads ‘durability 49/50’, while the shield has ‘durability 200/200’. The card containing our treasure says ‘85 copper pieces’. Maya’s hanging onto the silver, and Ritchie’s got the accumulated copper from the beginning rooms, and the gold pieces. He’s also holding onto the necklace. The cards look like Magic cards, or what Magic cards will look like eventually, except the backs don’t have any words. Ritchie’s also got a card (SPECIAL ITEM!) with the ladder picture on it. It has no stats, but simply says ‘Reusable’ with the sideways 8 denoting that it’s good forever.

More importantly, my character sheet says we’ve been healed. I feel… good. Good like I’ve just come down the stairs and seen an extra fourteen Christmas presents. Good like my mom says I can order extra bacon and a milkshake.

And perhaps most importantly of all, our bikes haven’t been stolen.