Moxyland - Lauren Beukes [38]
I haven't made it two steps from the entry portal, let alone figured out the fucking buttons, when three furry blobs land on top of me, all claws and teeth.
'Shit! Wait!' The wall blanks suddenly and Moxy fills the screen. Cos Moxy is always watching. He waves a stubby little paw in disapproval.
>>So sorry! You have been booted from Kiwi Pop for bad behaviour! If you promise to play nice and not swear any more, you can play again for sure!
I'd forgotten the vocal interactions. I turn it off, no sense betraying my age by my voice, and click on the 'I promise to behave' button.
I respawn in the arch only to be immediately ambushed by the little bastards, who are clearly waiting for me.
>>Hi guys! Will you be my friend? says Romper Stomp, one of the default pre-selects in case you're too lazy to type or vocalise.
>>Die, newbie scum! yells the one called Fluffoki in a little girl's voice brimming with malice.
I hit back, punching and kicking, but they've got more experience and there're three of them. I've just got the hang of the Shaker-Quake, knocking Fluffoki off her feet and doing some serious damage when one of her little chums takes me out with a blow to the head, KO-ing me one time.
The screen blanks again.
>>So sorry! You have died. But at least you tried! Would you like to try again? You've still got nine lives out of ten.
This is Unathi's revenge for the chicks dig.
When I call her for help, Lerato is the antithesis of sympathy, giggling so mega-hysterical, I'm sure she's gonna pop a valve. Which would serve her right. 'That's a new record in lame, Toby,' she says, when she manages to breathe again. But she cuts me some slack and saves my ass.
It takes genius girl a full minute and a half to circumvent the entrance portal where Fluffoki and Co. are waiting for me in ambush, rerouting home™'s IP address so it looks like I'm logging in from Melbourne with a whole new character. She's done this before on my home™ sys back when we ordered those medical-grade biogen 'shrooms from Thailand. It took three weeks to get the damn things with the bouncing around to fake addresses, but it was so worth it.
Anyway, thing is, spawning is random the first time you play, but once you touch down in the special hell that is Moxyland, whichever portal you emerge out of becomes your home base. You die, you go back there again and again and again, and if some psycho bratlings are waiting to maul you every time, it gets Sisyphean quick-quick.
I re-surface as an all-new character, a Popling Ludo, special move the Reverb Roar, in an allnew home base, this one pseudo-Halloween with creepy husks of trees and lumo moss that hangs off the branches like beards, miles away from that little bitch Fluffoki and her crew.
This time, I'm prepared for any juve delinquents who even think of jumping me. I ditch the greets and wade in bloody as soon as any new character makes an entrance, despite the shaky finger and more trite couplets from Moxy.
>>On your scorecard, here's a blot, for playing mean; that sucks a lot.
Who writes this shit? And worse, gets financial remuneration for it? I need to get in on that game.
It takes four and a half hours to battle it out to level six, get to the sacred Maori hideout in the Waitomo caves and beat the pulp out of the guardian spirit, which resembles a giant cuddly platypus, until he surrenders the purple BlinkaStinka.
Trophy in paw, I invest another hour twenty backtracking to find my original spawn-in spot, and reduce Fluffoki and her little friendlings to so much dead flesh, although sorry to say, it being a kids' game, they die in splatters of sparks rather than bloody gibs. Fluffoki does break out some very bad words, not entirely appropriate for an eight year-old girl.
And as a finishing touch, I put in a special request to Lerato to trace the little bastards' user names and get them banned from the gamespace for violating protocol. The pretext for