Jolt Country

When Half-Life II finally came out, makers of mods for the game finally had an engine powerful enough to make their dreams come true. Some of these dreams were haunting, grayscale nightmares. Others were clever takes on the multiplayer experience. And others still were immature code abortions that left the sectors of your hard drive forever punch-drunk. The bytes left behind'll be forever shaky, like Muhammad Ali on the $25,000 Pyramid.

One such mod of the latter revolved around some guy's obsession with crabs in a bucket. The urban legend relates that crabs trapped in an aquarium or bucket do not want to see any of their fellow prisoners escape. If one crab starts to go over the top, the other crabs will pull him down. I don't know if it's true or not because the closest I ever get to the beach is the Sandy Cove in Zork I. And that's really pretty far away on a few different levels when you think about, what with how the water isn't modeled very well in that game. And, right, that it's a game.

The city of New Haz is kind of based on that crab theory. Everyone's trying to bring each other down. Only they don't do it with crab pinchers but electric pistols. That's in part why I left.

Roscoe's Fillet Emporium is the sort of restaurant chain that would normally have set up a franchise in New Haz only if they had the full support of the mayor to remove all local crabs. And then buckets. And then water. So when a Fillet Emporium did spring up in the city of my origin, I attempted to convince my girlfriend Clara that we ought to go back and celebrate Valentine's Day there.

"My love," I said as I removed a pair of orange gauntlets, "I was wondering."

"Yes, Ace?" she said as she doffed a flowing red wig and set of gold shoulder pads. "What were you wondering?"

I sort of paused here for a second because she removed the light blue space skirt she was wearing and changed into those other things, those whattayacallthem... clothes. "Did you have plans for Valentine's Day?"

"What kind of question is that?" she asked. "I was going to spend it with you."

"I thought maybe we could spend it at some other time, some other place." I wasn't sure if the characters we were formerly dressed as were able to time travel or what. But look, you sort of have to spring the question "Will you go to New Haz on a date with me?" carefully. Normally you could just mention a few terribly undesireable locations for dates and make New Haz sound good by comparison. But how was I going to do that? I had burned through Beruit and Belfast yesterday when I gave her my response to her query regarding the two of us going shopping for lighted soul candles down at the mall.

I cleared my throat. "I thought maybe we could spend it deep within the bowels of the Black Mesa Research Labs," I said.

"I don't think so, Delarion," she said, sort of cocking her head to the side. "It's too dank and dark there."

"Well, perhaps we could spend it on the planet of mutants one is shunted to when one fails to properly defend the innocents in Defender."

"I want to wear some red on Valentine's Day!" she said with a little bit of a laugh. "If I did that there, I would be completely camouflaged. You'd lose sight of me."

(That wouldn't be any good. She's right about that.)

I was going to then suggest that we should spend a quiet evening on the set of Custer's Revenge but I caught myself. I'm getting better about not disgusting the girl I am with outright.

"We could go to the new Roscoe's Fillet Emporium in New Haz," I said. "Say, is that a new painting of yours?" I quickly got up from the bed and went over to her easel. I pretended to study the water colors like it was a multicolor guide for passing the GRE.

"It is, thank you for noticing," she said. "And sure. Why not? It's been months since we have been back. It would be nice to see Porn and Trott again." After a second, she continued. "Don't get me wrong, however. That city is a noose-endearing orc-hole, and you're terribly brash about suggesting going back there, but I think we could have a good time for an evening."

Because Roscoe's is such a high-energy, high-cost, high-society affair, Trott felt that he needed a date for the occasion.

Trott is one of my best friends. He works two jobs, well. I used to work one job, badly. I don't know how he does it. Well, I suppose I know how he does it, it's not like there's some dark ritual to punching the timecards, but I'm not quite sure why. He works at the city morgue and freelances as a Dungeon Master. He was at the morgue when his mealy-mouthed protests rained down upon Clara, Porn and myself like open-palmed, sissy bitchslaps.

"I haven't dated in a while," said Trott. "I've been working my ass off because I've been trying to save up for a better apartment. One that has heat, for starters. And walls that aren't yellow, peeling and diseased." It's true: some people keep geraniums, cacti or orchids around, Trott just smears penicillin on the walls of his apartment and encourages them to feed with the occasional exclamation of "GO GO GOOD TEAM!"

"You're around beautiful women all day long," said Porn. "Sure, some of them get a little too cozy under these blankets, but -- " Porn unzipped the body bag of the corpse on the nearest slab.

"They're dead, you idiot," said Trott. "What good is it for me to meet all these women when they're all dead? I 'meet' them a few hours too late!"

"Hey... lots of cute girls get fucking zorked in this town," said Porn, barely listening. "Yar, c'mere," he said. "This girl's birthday is today! She died and was born on Valentine's Day."

Trott looked over her records. "Yeah, she was celebrating her birthday last night and took a piece of window shrapnel when somebody got thrown through the window over at Sunrise Sushi. It went through her jugular."

Nobody said anything for a moment. We all kind of looked at the walls, ceiling and floor like we really needed a tilecount badly.

"We could take her out, you know," I said. "It wouldn't be that hard. The better the restaurant, the more the help is doting over you."

Porn cackled with glee. "Yeah, come on, Trotskie!" said Porn. "She's already decked out to the nines." Porn sort of turned her head a little. "She just needs a scarf or something..."

Trott frowned. "I can't take someone outta here. They will fire me."

"It would take them two weeks just to find enough noseless applicants to interview to work here," said Clara.

"So it's okay?" I asked. Porn and I sort of have problems with immaturity, and we look to Clara for the correct heading of our moral compass.

"I don't care. It's fine with me if you want. We need to decide and go. It's getting late."

Porn sniggered. "Late as in the late...." Porn desperately tried to find what the girl's name was. "Er..."

"Let's just go," said Trott.

Yar, that narration is pretty freaking entertaining. Good job.

The five of us piled into Trotskie's SUV. Clara was riding shotgun, Porn passenger side window, myself driver side window and the body of Missy Van Camp, 24, between us.

Trotskie had his shocks done recently or something, because the dead girl's head only slumped on my side six or seven times. I was expecting Porn and I to have to endlessly push it back and forth onto each other, but that wasn't the case. Porn's tolerance was lower than mine, though, and at one point he tried to make up some rules on the spot.

"This is my space," said Porn, sort of half-drawing a line across most of the backseat. "Make sure she doesn't get on my side. I claim this area for myself. She stays over there."

"Shut up," I suggested. "Shut up, Qix," I quickly added, letting him know that I wasn't going to let him get away with claiming 85% of the backseat on some sort of slow draw-created Line of Demarcation.

"Haha," said Porn, "Hey, guess what, Yar? I saw a Qix II arcade game last week. They moved it into the theatre after this guy got the Ironman Ivan Stewart game removed."

"What?" said Trott from the front seat, "Why did they get rid of the Ironman racing game there? That was fun."

Porn sort of giggled. "Some guy was playing it and was getting real into it. I heard this second-hand, but still. The guy was driving like it was the Daytona 500 and he needed the bonus money to save grandma's honeypot or something. Who the fuck knows..." Porn opened a packet of 'Bit o' Honey.' "Anyway, he apparently doesn't get first place and advance in the game and gives the steering wheel on it this vicious twirl at the end of the game, just spinning it as hard as he could."

"Well, anyway," continued Porn, "His hand slides off the steering wheel at an awkward angle and unpredicted angular velocity and he punches himself right in the pills. Just lays himself out."

"I can see why they'd want to get rid of that," I said. "He was too stupid to 'be' Ironman Ivan Stewart."

"That's not why they removed it though," said Porn. "Get a load of this -- the guy was going in for radiation treatment of testicular cancer like three days later. He had to save up and make a deposit in the semen bank in case they microwave his crotch to the point where his jimmies just stop showing up for work, but he didn't do it yet, and that wasn't going to be possible after he practically threw his fist right through his sac. He was out there playing video games because his life was in the shitter and he was trying to get drunk."

"You can't get that kind of surgery moved, either, around here," said Porn. "I mean, they could, but it's every man for himself for the thing they use to fry you in this town. Can you imagine if your Big Day came and the doctor was all fucking like, 'Hey, some guy punched himself in the nuts. Any chance you want to let him go first and you reschedule for like two months from now?'"

"So what happened?" asked Trott.

"They put in Qix II. Haha, you need to check out the side art on that -- some crazy Japanese animator just started drawing dragons and shit on it. It's like he saw the game he had to develop for, and made about as much sense of the Qix there as Pacific savages do when they see fighter jets whiz by so he just started working on his portfolio for the cabinet."

"No," said Trott, "What happened to the guy?"

"Beats me," said Porn. "I'm sure they can get those bruised thingies out of him. Who knows? He sued, though."

Nobody said anything for a few seconds.

"Well..." said Trott, finally, "We're here."

The valet came up to the car and helped Clara out. Porn and I sort of both took the opportunity to check out Taurus or Vitiligo or some other constallation.

"You tip the valet after your meal," said Clara, and our mutual interest in astronomy suddenly faded.

Porn and I had also forgotten about the corpse we had left in the backseat. The valet was sort of making encouraging sounds and gestures to get her to come over to him and be politely assisted in stepping down to the curb. But she was having none of it.

The valet started to piece things together when Porn went into the car and brought her down himself.

"Hey... she's... she's dead!" stated the valet.

"No, she's not," said Porn. And he had control of the conversation at that point. Really, how can you argue with that? When you declare someone to be deceased and someone else gives a commanding, "Incorrect!" there's very little you can do, socially, to respond. Especially if you're part of the wait-staff to some restaurant. When I was working at the arcade I couldn't effectively prove to some of my customers satisfaction that their quarter was placed in the wrong slot and that the machine was fine if I ejected their token and put it in the working slot myself. They had that little faith in me. I wasn't about to argue life and death with them. So the valet just let it go, I mean, you don't want to be reported for that if you're wrong.

Trott put the dead girl's arm around his shoulder and the five of us walked... well, the four of us walked, she sort of dragged, into the Fillet Emporium. The hostess behind the counter asked us how many people were in our party and I responded five.

I took the opportunity to really scan the place while she looked for a place to seat us. The color scheme was all light browns and oranges. They weren't working from a full color palette, I thought. I remarked upon this to Porn.

"It looks like a Quake level in here."

"Yeah," he said. "One of McGee's, too, I think. I was gonna say that, actually. The penis-shaped rocket launcher over there reminded me of it, too." I turned over to the direction he pointed to.

"I was kidding, dummy," added Porn, after a beat.

"Can we have a nice night out for a change?" asked Clara.

I thought it over for a second. "Tonight, you mean? You mean tonight, right?" Her silence sort of indicated that she did mean tonight.

The hostess said that she couldn't seat us immediately, but they would quickly clear a table, and would we like a seat at the bar? Porn was over to the bar before she got anywhere near that 'q.' Trott was relieved, because the girl was sort of becoming a little heavy to him. He set her gently down at a chair.

Porn had ordered us all drinks -- he got a Christmas lager for himself, some RC Cola for me, a Mai Tai for Clara, a Budweiser for Trott and a salt shaker for the girl. (I presume he was going somewhere with that, but I never ended up asking him.) He demanded that the bartender sling the drinks down the table, Tapper-style, or else he wouldn't leave a tip. The bartender shrugged and acquiesed.

Porn immediately slapped down five bucks for a tip, slugged down his drink and fired the empty glass off back to the bartender. In the game Tapper this is all quite expected and fair and legal. But one of the downsides of nobody comprehending you when you leave your arcade emulators became apparant when the bartender -- obviously not a gamer -- went back behind the bar to fetch something and the glass shattered on the floor when he streaked off the bar.

The bartender returned from behind the bar upon hearing the crash, and Porn at first insinuated that a customer next to him was responsible, but then halfway through he changed his mind and pointed to the dead girl. Trott wasn't at all happy to see attention drawn to his date like that and, if I recall correctly, asked Porn if it were possible to take him anywhere.

Clara let me have a sip of her Mai Tai. I had never tasted anything like it.

"I used to get these all the time, when I was a freshman in college," she said. "Do you like it? There is coconut rum, creme de noyeux, banana liquer and brandy in this, alongside such flavors as orange juice and pineapple juice. Most of the ingredients are alcohol and, actually, perhaps you had just better sip this."

I was sipping it, just over and over again. I don't normally drink, and I think that I was going to be the designated driver, so I returned back to my Discount Liquid Cola that Porn had ordered for me.

Whether to stop us from breaking more scenery or because they had a table, we were seated rather quickly. Our waiter asked Trott what was wrong with his date, but he didn't get a chance to answer.

"She has a kind of MS which is why she's like this... MSN, the worst kind," I said, confiding in the waiter. Porn started in about how she was really allergic to butterflies as a result before Clara elbowed him in the ribs.

We sat down and Porn took a look at the winelist. He shut it within five seconds. "I only scanned this," he said, "And that was all that it took to successfully cobble together a bottle of wine that the five..." he checked to make sure that Missy was still dead, "... four of us can enjoy." The waiter, on cue, dropped by for our order. He had a Palm Pilot in his hand -- all the waiters did, as this was the sort of steakhouse of the future.

"I'd like a bottle of Stone Street," announced Porn. "The tavern on Rakhir Str--"

"You have it wrong," I said. "You wanted to order a wine that was the same name of a street in Bard's Tale, but the name of the street is Stonework, not Stone."

Porn didn't say anything immediately but just flashed the waiter a half-hearted grin. "Kendall Jackson, I guess," he mumbled, finally.

Our waiter sort of caught on to the fact that there was something odd with the fifth, silent member of our party as his jaw didn't scrape alongside the ground when he walked and his knuckles were utterly free from floor grime. He took our meal orders graciously, however, and didn't deign to judge us.

I ordered the New York Strip. The waiter asked me how I wanted it prepared and I told him rare, well aware that in cerain circles requesting it "well done" -- which would have been fine -- would be making a Gazpacho Soup type of social faux pas. And I'm all about being smooOOOoth when I'm out with my girl.

The appetizers arrived. Trott and Porn were engaged in a discussion about some money-making scheme in New Haz, and Missy was really staring intently at the delicious escargot that Trott had placed onto her plate. I took my date by the hand and looked right into her beautiful green eyes. I had always thought there were stunning from the moment I (remembered) meeting her.

"You look gorgeous," I told her, simply. She was wearing a pair of boots that lifted her height to almost that of mine, black stockings, a short little red skirt with an almost-floral pattern and a sexy night-colored camisole. She looked far too good for I grungily and warezily brought to the table, fashionwise.

"You look pretty good yourself," she said, her lips hardly moving. "I like what you did with your hair tonight."

I paused. "... Which was?"

"Combed it," she said with a laugh.

"Your eyes really stand out here. There's very little of their color to be found in this room. They're so pretty! They are." I didn't realize I was babbling. "I like them because they are green like money." I realized I was babbling. She took it well, though.

The waiter brought us our entrees.

Mine was delicious. Clara had a type of crap-steak dish -- the best seafood I can remember having in my life. So succulent. A bit through she had to remind me what it was that she got.

She told me that they had prepared it Oscar style.

"What does that mean?" I asked her. "They prepared it in a trash can?"

That was a better explanation than what any of us could remember, so we all went with that.

Porn raised his glass and the rest of us who could do the same did the same. He made a toast.

"In the many ways we waste our time... there are many, many ships." He grinned. "There are starships... there are pirate ships... there are spaceships, alien ships, motherships and when finding yourself in Ninja Gaiden III, the Ancient Ship of Doom."

I concured this fact for the others who wondered if he had made that up or not.

"But the best ship of them all is friendship." We clanked our glasses together and all drew in a long taste of the flavor of the merlot. I took Clara's hand once again and whispered to her that I thought the world of her.

And somehow, someway, I knew that everything for the rest of the night was going to be... perfect.

I stepped into the hall, the dark shadows fleeing from my presence, as I gave the surroundings a good look-over. And I was suddenly overtaken with an insatiable need. An insationable need. To BOOGIE. So I did the chicken dance. In place. Then I sat. Down.

This is good. You need to do more of this. Not you, Max.

Debaser wrote:This is good. You need to do more of this. Not you, Max.

Hey, thanks. I was trying to come up with an original way to discuss Valentine's Day, and I felt bad that I didn't contribute shit to the other thread on here.

I've been throwing some ideas around on what I want to do when I finish the text game I'm working on. It changes like every day. I'm sure I come off as scatterbrained on here. I'd love to learn how to make a shoot 'em up (for instance) but probably the best thing I could do from a career stand point would be to try to write a FoD book, because if by some chance it sold I'd have accomplished a major goal of mine (get a book for sale on a Borders bookshelf).

I thought that was pretty solid, too. I didn't know that you were going to keep on going.

Trott saying "GO GO GOOD TEAM" was a warm, tender moment.

I really enjoyed it. Any more?

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:I've been throwing some ideas around on what I want to do when I finish the text game I'm working on.

I wouldn't worry about it.

BA-ZING!

pinback wrote:

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:I've been throwing some ideas around on what I want to do when I finish the text game I'm working on.

I wouldn't worry about it.

GO GO GOOD TEAM!

I'm going through my old e-mail here. Whatever happened to that Trotting Krips banner ad that was talked about for some time? Was it ever finished and put up?

I like this so much. It's just great. I didn't think that Clara was really the kind of person to go along with that kind of thing, but I guess she's seen a lot in her life, and she is your character, so I think you probably know her better :p.

Roody_Yogurt wrote:I'm going through my old e-mail here. Whatever happened to that Trotting Krips banner ad that was talked about for some time? Was it ever finished and put up?

What, this one?



Bruce

No, the other plaid cum rag banner ad.