10 Minutes before game commencement.
Ollie's morning had started in much the same way as any other morning, at least as it had been for the past few months. He woke up feeling thoroughly dehydrated, suffering a thundering headache, and wondering when exactly the night before he had decided to strip his shirt off and write the words ‘KING OF BEANS’ in large block letters across his chest.
As he stood staring at the bathroom mirror, he also wondered how he had managed to write the words in reverse so that they appeared perfectly legible while he was facing the mirror. Having spent no more than a few seconds pondering the profound mystery, he shrugged and bent down, scooping cold water from the faucet onto his face in an effort to wash away the cobwebs.
“Fuck a duck!” he shouted, somewhat baffled at the chilled water despite the fact that he followed this same routine each and every day. “Come on!” he said, slapping a hand across his face, teeth gritted, eyes heavily bloodshot.
He’d spent the night before gaming with Pete and had woken up with a euphoric sense of achievement having cleared the final level of Shadowklein and completed the last boss on hardcore mode. That sense of euphoria had lessened significantly in the minutes after waking up, but now that he was freshly bathed—which, for Ollie, typically meant a splash of cold water in the face—he was ready to start the day proper with a jaunt to his favorite corner store in search of a large coffee and a chocolate donut.
He was in good spirits as he walked the two blocks from his apartment to the store. The thudding headache and other aches and pains he was feeling seemed somehow less potent given his accomplishments the night before. He made a mental note to call Pete once he was fully caffeinated and relive their glory.
His friend would doubtless be in a worse mood than Ollie was because, of the two of them, Pete utterly despised his job and tended to be fairly pessimistic about life in general. Ollie, by contrast, had locked into a breezy tech job where he started every day at ten in the morning, worked a few hours tweaking code and offering advice, attended a few meetings, and responded to a couple of emails before closing up at around three in the afternoon, all from the comfort of his own apartment.
It was a dream job that paid well enough to keep him stocked with food and to cover rent, utilities, and his extremely basic clothing needs. It took next to no mental energy and, somehow, over the last ten years, he'd gathered enough of a reputation that people tended to accept that he knew what he was talking about.
That was in large part because he had lucked onto several very successful IT projects when he'd first started working, and the momentum had just carried on from there. He was also no slouch when it came to fixing broken code, troubleshooting more general IT problems, and offering advice to incoming projects on how they should handle their IT architecture needs. This was primarily because every project ended up being the same, and it was very rare to come up against any unique problems. That made Ollie’s job a hell of a lot easier, and because he was dealing with different businesses all the time, his advice seemed efficient and knowledgeable when, in reality, it was the same spiel he gave over and over again.
The biggest challenge with his job was to counter boredom, but Ollie was nothing if not inventive when it came to that particular task. To begin with, it had been by using games like Stardew Valley to while away the hours, nodding to the camera as discussions went back and forth in virtual meetings, and responding when he was called upon to offer advice.
More recently, however, Ollie had begun developing his own game. It was painstaking work but a thousand times more interesting than his day job. So, he spent the bulk of his time gradually building out the game bit by bit, writing the story, creating characters, and slowly constructing the world of the game. He hadn't come up with a name for it yet, and so far, it was just a simplistic, top-down role-playing game with a character modeled roughly after himself who fought enemies primarily by means of devouring cans of beans that supercharged his ability to fart at enemies.
As he approached the corner store, Ollie finally realized what the writing on his chest must have been in reference to: King of beans. It wasn't the best name for an indie game, but it wasn't the worst either.
“King of beans,” he mused, feeling the words in his mouth and nodding to himself as he pushed the door open and walked into the store.
His mood darkened a little as he saw the dull-eyed clerk with a mullet standing behind the front desk instead of the cute young woman with the nose ring and the attitude who he had hoped to encounter. Anthea, that was her name. She was the primary reason he started his day at this corner store. And the coffee wasn't great; the doughnuts were stale, but it brightened his morning every time he saw her, and that was worth the cost.
But instead of the dark-haired temptress, he was confronted with Malcolm, the perpetually half-stoned moron who looked like he was perpetually in the process of taking a shit. Now it seemed that Ollie would have to endure the too-hot, too-bitter coffee and the stale doughnut without the sight of Anthea to raise his spirits.
“Fuck a duck,” he hissed as he waved to the non-responsive clerk and headed to the coffee machine.
Ollie got himself a coffee, picked up a donut, and walked to the front counter.
“Just these, thanks, mate,” he said with a grin that took the least possible effort.
No point showing his pearly whites to this bozo. He’d reserve that for the next time Anthea was at the counter.
Malcom didn’t acknowledge the comment but simply typed in the code for each item and pointed to the card reader sitting in front of Ollie. Ollie paid, picked up the coffee and donut, and then walked outside, trying not to think ahead to what the day’s work would look like as he caught sight of something shooting down toward the earth from the sky above.
It was large, but it looked too uniform to be a meteor, and it wasn’t coming down at an angle but shot directly down toward the ground as though it had been dropped from a couple of hundred feet straight above. Whatever it was landed with a loud thud that echoed around the area.
Ollie stood for a few moments, looking down at the coffee and doughnut he had just acquired, mind racing. Whatever this was, it wasn't normal, and that made it interesting. Decision made, he ditched his coffee in a nearby trash can and started running, taking bites out of the donut as he sprinted through the streets, heading roughly in the direction where the object had landed.
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No smoke rose from the impact point, and most of the people Ollie passed as he ran through the neighborhood seemed blissfully unaware of the strange object that had just fallen from the sky. He finished the donut, half choking as he wolfed it down, and headed up a nearby hill, which he hoped would give him a clear view of the impact site.
As he reached the summit, he scanned the area below, squinting against the morning light and trying to find the object. It might have been harder to see if it weren’t for the sheer size of the obelisk and the fact that it was jutting up from the ground like a perfectly formed, vertical, giant tooth.
He shook his head, reasoning that there could only be one explanation for what he was looking at. The obelisk was standing in the middle of a nearby park, just sticking up like it was an art installation and the artist had made no effort at all to have it blend in with its surroundings.
Grinning, Ollie pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked the local news sites as he walked down toward the obelisk. There were breaking stories already starting to appear with footage of similar-looking obelisks that had apparently appeared all over the world. News headings like “Aliens Among Us?” featured on tickers beneath panicked anchors who spoke to the camera, shuffling papers and trying to pass on what meager information they had to hand.
“Shit!” he said, flipping through different sites and swapping over to check firsthand videos that were being live-streamed at that very moment.
Dozens of videos showed the obelisks falling to the ground in exactly the same way Ollie had seen it. Some of them showed scenes of destruction where the obelisks had landed, while others had touched down in open spaces or avoided causing any damage.
After a few more seconds flicking through videos, Ollie had already decided that he knew what this was. He knew where the closest obelisk had landed. The park was just a few blocks from his apartment, and it would be practically empty at this time of day.
He called Pete and picked up his pace as he walked toward the park, keen on reaching the obelisk before anyone else got to it.
Pete answered.
“Dude!” Ollie screamed. “Have you seen this shit? Aliens, bro! We’ve been invaded by fucking aliens!”
“Yeah, I know,” Pete responded, sounding nowhere near as pleased about that fact as Ollie was.
“It’s all over the news, dude!” Ollie said. “There are thousands of these obelisk things all over the place. A bunch of people even got crushed by the damned things.”
He moved from a fast walk to a jog, picking up his pace.
“I’m heading to one of the buggers now,” Ollie went on. “When those little green fuckers come walkin’ out, I wanna see it with my own eyes.”
“I don’t think they’re green aliens, Ollie. Listen, there’s…”
Ollie rounded a corner and started heading down the steep hill, legs straining as he realized that flip-flops definitely weren’t the best choice of footwear to be wearing under the circumstances.
“Shit!” Pete snapped.
“What? What is it?” Ollie asked.
“One of those obelisk things,” Pete said. “I’m standing in front of one right now. It’s been speaking to me.”
“What the… Seriously?! Dude! What’s it saying?”
“It says I’ve got thirty seconds before enemies start spawning. I need to pick up some kind of gauntlet and fight in a gladiatorial contest or Earth’s gonna get screwed. Shit, I think we’re screwed either way.”
“Well, what the fuck are you waiting for, bro? Grab the damned gauntlet already!”
“It might be a trick?” Pete suggested.
Ollie grunted, twisting his ankle a little as one of the flip-flops slid under his foot. “Who the hell cares? You don’t have a choice, right? Just hit me up when you’re done. I’ll come get you.”
He hung up, gripping the cell phone tightly in one hand and moving into a flat-out sprint. Gladiatorial contests? Gauntlets? Voices from some other world speaking from the obelisk? There was no way in hell Ollie was going to miss out on any of that!
Once the heel flattened out, Ollie broke into a sprint. Arms and legs pumping, chest heaving, he ran as fast as he could manage through the suburban streets, heading to the park, which was now no more than a block away. Strange images ran through his mind as he sprinted down a path that led between two apartment blocks to the park beyond.
What kind of aliens would they be? Would he find the typical almond-eyed, swollen-headed representations that Hollywood had propagated for so many years, or would something far less recognizable emerge from the obelisk?
As he headed into the park, Ollie looked left and right, confirming that there was, miraculously, no one else in the area. No one walking dogs or taking an early morning jog, except for him, of course. Though what he was doing could hardly be called jogging. Sprinting probably wasn’t a sufficient term for it either. Given his extreme level of unfitness and the fact that he hadn’t run like this for over a decade, in addition to the ungainly gait sprinting with flip-flops produced, Ollie’s running could best be described as a desperate vertical shamble. A more poetic description might be flip-flop fiasco.
Whatever it was, his movement came to an unceremonious halt as one of the rubber flip-flops caught in a divot in the grass and jerked Ollie’s right leg sharply backward. His momentum carried him forward, tumbling over his own legs as he hit the grass, rolled over, and tumbled ahead, arms and legs flailing.
Amid a string of curses, he got back to his feet, quickly inspecting the now-ruined flip-flop and tossing it aside, along with the other, as he ran toward the huge obelisk in the distance. It was standing near a large sycamore tree, its alien strangeness dwarfing the tree and dominating the area.
Some of the locals had begun to stir, stepping out onto balconies that overlooked the park and pointing at the obelisk or recording footage with their cell phones. Others were emerging at ground level, but as Ollie sprinted toward his goal, he realized with relief that no one was approaching the obelisk.
As he drew closer, Ollie moved from a sprint to a fast walk, chest heaving as he tried desperately to suck in air. His arms, legs, and back were aching, and sweat poured from his brow, running into his eyes. He wiped away the sweat, then wiped his hand on his gym shorts as he stepped up to the huge object.
Without hesitation, he walked right up and pressed his left hand against the surface of the obelisk. It felt cold to the touch, but not unreasonably so. There was also nothing particularly alien about the sensation, not until a small compartment opened up with a floating ball of white energy hovering directly in front of Ollie.
“Fucking yes!” he managed between breaths.
>> Greetings, human. The inestimable Tongsly Belch, High Baron of the Dominion and Managing Director of the Tongsly Belch Corporation, welcomes you to the Dominion Ultrimax Competition, a cosmos-spanning gladiatorial contest in which your planet has been selected to take part.
“Sweet!” Ollie shouted, looking around to check that no one else was nearby and that no one was likely to steal the opportunity from him.
>> The Mammon System is in the process of integrating with your world and establishing key event zones and game facilities. During this integration period, individuals from your planet will be selected to fight a variety of enemies and, if they survive initiation and prove themselves worthy, they will progress to a novice-level Gladiatorial Arena. Contestants who are successful in this endeavor will be ushered into the wider gaming experience, where they will have access to exciting rewards and wealth beyond their wildest dreams.
“Yeah, I got it! Sign me up!”
>> Enemies will begin appearing in sixty seconds. If you wish to participate in the Dominion Ultrimax Contest, please reach out and accept your gauntlet.
Ollie didn’t need to be told twice. He reached out and grabbed the orb of light, but his hand passed right through the sphere without making any physical contact.
>> Gauntlet accepted. Please select your companion soul so that calibration can begin.
“Ah, I don’t have a companion soul, whatever the fuck that is. Do I need one? I could probably find a rat or a bird or something, or is this a chick thing? Wait, am I gonna need a girlfriend to play this game? Pete doesn’t have a girlfriend, and he got in.”
>> It is not necessary to select a companion soul. If you wish to participate in the contest as a solo player, simply state your preference.
“Yeah, I’m gonna go solo.”
>> Commencing configuration.
Darkness began to descend all around, and Ollie grinned like he’d just won the lottery.
“Fuck a duck!”