A Gamer's Guide To Beating The Tutorial

“...So, you’ve been taken off the donor list, but Moleman still feels confident that he can figure out some kind of vaccine to cure all of this. Of course, I’m still fairly sceptical about all of this, but he seems to like working on it just for its own sake, so I can’t be too negative. Oh, but he’s doing very well as mayor! Someone did try to attack him yesterday when he was holding a speech, shouting something about a human plague or whatnot, but it’s not like they got even close. Besides, the whole event gave me a really good excuse to show off my body-guarding abilities! I was quite effective. Hehe.” Carefully, more carefully than she would ever have expected a person such as him, Kitty placed her back on her bed for the night. Taking a seat next to her, he smiled to himself. “I’ve heard deterrence isn’t actually any effective, but I’ve got a feeling not too many goblins will be interested in attacking Moleman any time soon.”

She let out a wheezing breath, her chest screaming from the exertion. Sweat covered every inch of her body, leaving the hospital gown she wore almost slick. If this was a fever, then the Sahara was a tundra. With no little effort, she rolled her eyes over to look at Kitty. Her one source of hellish entertainment. So far, she hadn’t said anything all day. Speaking hurt. But she couldn’t take it anymore.

“Why…” Her voice came out like the scratchy backdrop to an old record. “Why did you become… like this…?”

“What do you mean?” he asked, cruelly forcing her to speak again.

“Your… parents. What were they like…?” Pain blossomed up from beneath her ribs and she stifled a cough, knowing it would only hurt more.

“My parents, huh…” Crossing his arms, he hummed for a second, his eyes finding the window and the dark evening outside. “My mom was a Swedish teacher at a nearby middle school, and my dad worked at a nuclear powerplant until it was closed down. After that he worked at some big company in Malmö, but I never figured out what he did there.”

“You weren’t poor?” she croaked out.

“What? No, not at all. Well, I mean… It’s not like we were rich or anything, but we had a house. Everyone had their own room, and we had a TV and everything. Maybe not the newest model, but we had what we needed.”

“Were they cruel… to you?”

That gave him pause. The waning light from the window suddenly seemed very interesting to him, as he squinted into the gradually darkening room. For once, she couldn’t read the look on his face. “No,” he said, after a long pause. “I don’t think they were. They did what they could. Sure, things got a bit weird there at the end, and they weren’t exactly present all the time, but…” He finally turned his eyes to her. They were clear and bright. “They did their best. What I did, what happened to me… That’s my own fault. I’m lucky to have had parents who loved me, even if it was hard at times.”

An uneasy sort of confusion settled to the bottom of Myriam’s chest. She drew in a shallow, uncertain breath before speaking again. “Then… why…?”

“Why, what?”

She turned her eyes to him. To where he sat, his bony chest exposed to show the brand he wore with neither pride nor shame. “Why did you do all of this…?”

His lips fell into a frown. “Okay, now I’m confused. Are you trying to ask, why, if my parents were nice and all that, did I do… everything?” The frown slit deeper across his face. “You mean, the bad stuff? Why did I do that?” He looked away from her, his gaze moving steadily around the room, letting his internal thoughts bump together like sheep in a too-small enclosure. “I’m not sure. I ask myself the same thing, sometimes. But I never really figured it out. I guess…” He turned back to her, a quizzical look on his face. “I guess I just wanted to?”

“You… wanted to…?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. It’s like… You know when you’re playing a game, and even though there’s no tutorial or signs pointing you a specific way, you still know where to go? The game’s design is simply done in such a way where you’re led down a specific path? It felt kind of like that. Not to say that it’s not my fault or anything—it was absolutely my own choice to do the things I did. Honestly, I didn’t even really try to do it any other way. There was probably some solution that didn’t involve death and murder and everything like that, but it just… I didn’t try it. And I’m not sure why.

“But isn’t that just the way things work? Most people don’t pause mid-bite and think to themselves, ‘Hang on, why am I eating a ham sandwich with no mayo on it?’ Why? Because it’d be insane! Sure, we think over some decisions, like whether to watch this or that at the movies, but for the most part, we’re simply automatons, slave to our own whims. Heh. Pretty philosophical, right?”

“Is that… your… excuse…?”

His face morphed into an expression of neutral apathy. “No. I don’t have any excuse, because there’s no need for one. What’s your excuse for not eating mayo, or for wanting to watch ‘The Thing’ instead of ’Die Hard’? Is it that you think mayo’s unhealthy, or that ‘The Thing’ has a better soundtrack than ‘Die Hard’? Because if so, then it’s a poor excuse.” His eyes were like that of an animal. Calm. At peace. At horrible, bloody peace. “The simple fact is that you don’t eat mayo because you don’t like it, and you want to watch ‘The Thing’ because you like it. It’s that simple. Reason is a slave to impulse. Not the other way around.”

And now, he smiled. A dog-toothed smile, so, so proud of his clever philosophy. If it hadn’t been for the bout of nausea overcoming her, she might have liked to ask where he got that funny little bit of dogma from. Was it Nietzsche, or maybe Hume? Whatever it was, she swore she’d burn their books once she beat the tutorial and got back to Earth.

She wanted to scream. If she could have moved, she would very much have liked to leap from her bed, screech like a harpy about how his justification was horsecrap, and plant her knuckles in his face. She was certain it’d make a delightful crunching noise.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t do any of these things. Her hands had curled up a few days ago and would no longer make anything more than a half-formed fist. She had a feeling that within days, he would be feeding her as though she were a child. Maybe if she asked politely, while she still had her voice, he might kill her before that happened. She knew he wouldn’t mind it one bit. She could see it on his face. There was no life he valued anymore, save for maybe Mole. Somehow, she knew with startling certainty that he wouldn’t mind dying.

While she had still been studying, she had summer worked at a mental institution, where she’d seen plenty of people laid in for suicidal ideation. There was a certain look on their faces. Not all of them were necessarily actively trying to kill themselves, but with many, she could tell that if a truck had been barrelling towards them, they wouldn’t have stepped out of the way. It was all visible on their faces, etched on into a kind of half-limbed shuffle, and an apathetic look in their eye. Not despairing. She seldom saw them cry.

But there was something missing. Whatever it is that apathy replaces in a person, that’s what had been lost in them. The same thing whose absence was so marked on Kitty’s face.

Not that she pitied him. She didn’t know if she could pity him at all anymore. What was there to pity?

If he died, he got what was coming for him. He would certainly be okay with it.

No, at this moment, the only person she could bear to pity was Mole. He had a monster at his side, and he didn’t even know it.

Kitty gave her a tired smile. “Ah, now you’re looking at me like that again.”

“Like… what…?”

He leaned in closer. “You used to look at me like that a lot. From the very first time we met, at that symposium. Remember? I was all covered in mud, and you wouldn’t let me talk to Moleman. Heh. It was pretty funny, in hindsight.” His smile quirked, and all of a sudden it wasn’t a smile anymore. She wasn’t sure what it was. “Not that it felt funny at the time. But back then, you looked at me like that. You always have. Until the past few weeks. I was so happy to see it! Not a lot of people look at me nicely anymore. That is, like I’m a proper normal human. Of course, thanks to my skill, most people don’t look at me at all. It’s good. I prefer that they don’t look at me, rather than looking at me like that. That is, the way you’re looking at me right now.” It wasn’t a smile. It was some horrible grimace. Something animalistic, that wasn’t supposed to be expressed with the flesh of a human face. “I’m sorry to ask this, since you’re so close to losing your voice, but… What did I say? What did I do, to make you look at me like that? That is, like I’m a monster?”

She couldn’t move. Even without the paralyzation keeping her arms bound down, she would’ve been unable to move. Before, she’d wondered if she might be able to write a message using only her tongue, since her hands couldn’t do it. Now, the question became more relevant than ever.

The expression on his face shifted again. A pleading element came to it, like a dog asking for a bone. “Please. I just want to know what I can do to avoid this kind of thing in the future.” Eyes like that of a cat. Cruel moonbeams, shining down. “You see, there’s someone I’d rather die than see that look in.” He inched closer. His face, mere inches from hers. Myriam had never had sleep paralysis. Now she knew how it felt. “Have I told you that you have less than a week to live? Ah, but your voice will probably be gone before then. Your tongue hasn’t turned black yet, but I can smell it.”

Something about the way he said black gave her goosebumps. “Pl—please…”

“Oh, on that note,” he said, lifting the blanket off her legs. Both of her feet were entirely black. She couldn’t feel them at all. Somehow, she knew that if she could, then that’s all she would be able to feel. She didn’t like looking at them. At the dried, almost mummified skin. Her pale white toenails. All of it a cruel reminder that even if she somehow survived, she’d do so without them. “Moleman is considering amputation. We’ve done a few tests on goblins, and amputation has so far led to an extension of life of up to ten days! Marvelous, really. But they do still die, so I don’t really see the point in it. What do you think, Ursula? Would you like to try amputation?”

Unable to speak, she shook her head, the movement filling her neck with static pain.

He smiled—it was a people-smile this time. That only made it worse. “Good! That’s what I was thinking, too. Dying in a week or dying in two weeks… You’ll still die, right? So, it doesn’t matter.” A thought struck him, and he suddenly leaned out again, finally giving her space to breathe her wheezing little breaths again. “Oh, I just remembered! I have good news for you! I was hoping I could give the news as a reward for telling me why you’re suddenly looking at me like that, but you seem to have lost your voice, so I guess that’ll have to wait, unlike the good news.”

His smile widened, and now he looked so much like a real, normal human that whatever it is he’d been mere moments before seemed like a hallucination, or a bad dream. “We’ve almost finished the hazmat suits! Moleman wanted it to be a surprise, but I think it’s good if you know in advance. I’m not much for surprises myself, so… Yeah. Oh, but they aren’t totally finished. They’ll probably be done sometime next week, so I’ll try to get them finished before you die, yeah?”

At this—and for that she really wanted to curse herself—she almost thanked him. It was such a natural response that it took every inch of her waning willpower not to smile gratefully and nod.

The absence of gratitude was apparently noted by him, as his smile lost a bit of cheer, and he glanced away. “That’s about it for tonight, I guess.” Meekly, he stood up and headed for the door. “I’ll see you in the morning, and I hope you’re looking forward to the visit!”