Glitch Techs: Mega Mayumi
After years of searching, Miko has finally gotten her hands on one of the most unattainable gaps in her video game collection: a disaster sim titled "Uncooked Peril". But when her Mom unknowingly gets sucked into the game, Miko finds herself trapped and facing up against the scariest monster of all:
Her own mother, at 500 feet tall.
Tags:
Feet, crush, digital avatars, reformation, fate worse than death
Author's Note:
“Awwww yeah… come to Me_K.O., baby!”
Miko didn’t even wait to give final salutations to the mailman before slamming the door in his face and slamming her butt into a seat at the kitchen table. She tried to open the crumpled packaging with care on the off chance the item was a dud. No point in wasting money on a new envelope after all. Halfway through seeing that shiny Uncooked Peril logo though, the plum-headed girl’s grin stretched across her face, and she simply had to claw it open with an efficiency that had been practiced over years of unwrapping factory-sealed midnight-purchased video game releases.
“At last!” Miko jumped to her feet, holding the rectangular box like her very own key item. “Oh, the years of pawn shop perusals, failed eBid snipe sessions, and used game store odysseys… finally, mine own white whale is within my grasp! Mine own… wait, the game is in here, right?”
Miko stiffened up, and with perhaps a touch of apprehension, she slid the dusty gray case open. Then, she breathed a sigh of relief. And she continued.
“Mine own CROWN JEWEL of my vintage game collection wish list… is complete!”
“Complete, huh?”
“GAH!!”
Mayumi Kubota knew her daughter well, and she was quite aware of precisely how twitchy she could be, even in the comfort of her own home. So, when Miko jumped and the disc case launched out of her hands, Mayumi—fresh from the garage with a warm basket of clothes in her arms—was at the ready, and the item landed harmlessly on the pile.
Mayumi chuckled at her blushing daughter and said, “I certainly hope so, if it means I won’t need to hear you screaming to yourself all the way from the garage. ‘Uncooked… Peril’?” she said, taking a glance down at the case packaging. “Sounds like a food poisoning simulator.”
Miko grimaced like she’d taken poison damage and glared daggers at her mother. She snatched the case back, rubbing her cheek and making a few indiscernible grumbles. Mayumi was nonplussed. “Is this really a game you’re interested in, sweetie? It doesn’t… it’s… not your usual fare, is all. I mean, I’m not seeing any futuristic ray guns or scantily-clad kung fu women.”
“Mom, do you even know what you’re looking at?” Miko said, and she brandished the disc box with extra gusto and an even more insane expression on her face.
Mayumi remained just as visibly confused.
Miko sighed, and she started: “Three mergers. Two bankruptcies. Seven buyouts, three studio disputes, and one. Voice actor. Cancelation. Have made this game all but impossible to get your hands on—doubly so stateside.” Then, she smiled. “Studio Mire’s Uncooked Peril is an edge-of-your seat adventure where you play as a mild-mannered high school teen who gets caught in a city on the brink of disaster! Dodge earthquakes, tornadoes, crumbling buildings—frickin’ Godzilla shows up, Mom! How are you not getting this?!” she said with a few pointed claps of the box.
“O-kaaay, honey,” Mayumi said, hoping her concern could be masked behind the love she fed into the word. “Didn’t really need the commercial but, if it makes you happy, I’m happy.”
Mayumi was halfway across the kitchen toward the stairs when she paused with all the urgency of having just received a divinely inspired warning. And turned back.
“Miko. How much did this rare game cost?”
Miko froze. “Uhhhhhhh—”
“Miko. You didn’t… use my credit card for this game, did you?”
Miko’s mouth was a zipper. Then, she exploded: “Can’ttalknowMomgottagotoworkseeyoulatertellLeeIlovehimdon’tforgettofeedCloudandAerith bye!!”
The violet blur was out the door before Mayumi could even call out how Miko didn’t actually have work today. Or mention to her that she left the game case on the kitchen table. Mayumi glanced at the box art, and she raised a brow.
“Uncooked Peril, huh?” A closer look at the box revealed two characters, a boy and a girl, running towards the camera down a debris-strewn city street. Above them, the stark red eyes of an indiscernible, building-sized monstrosity peered down at them through the fog. The funniest thing was the girl character… didn’t look terribly dissimilar from her own daughter.
Mayumi Kubota’s imagination began to wander. There was always something captivating about the idea of a giant monster, rising skyward toward the heavens as its very existence was an existential threat to those beneath them.
Then, Mayumi shrugged. “Heh… ridiculous.”
***
“MAMA. I brought you some Spaghetti in a Bucket!”
Miko kicked the door closed quickly, bucket in one hand, phone in the other. “I didn’t even eat that much this time so you and Dad and Nica and… Lexi and… maybe Geoff… can probably share!” Even after hanging out all day with Five and delivering spiel after spiel about her plans to crush the game once she got home, she didn’t have it in her to stifle the conversation. She was obsessively sending him text after text after text, brainstorming speedrun strats, exploits and shortcuts, and plain ol’ excitement at what secrets will be in the game to explore.
“MAMAAA?”
The spaghetti had been freshly made, and even half-eaten the bucket was starting to singe her armpit, so she put it—and her jacket—down on the counter. No sign of any dinner preparations, so clearly grabbing something from Miyamoto’s was the right call. But still, even though it was evening, it was still only 7 PM. For her mom to have already retired for the night by now would be… bizarre.
Well, don’t look a gift Chocobo in the beak is what Miko always likes to say. With mom asleep that just meant more time for her to game uninterrupted! That is, if she could find the game.
“Where… I know I left it…” Miko checked over and under the table, as well as the counters, but the case was lost.
“No, no, no… did somebody move it? Did Mom…”
Throom…!
Miko’s head turned on a swivel. The TV was on, and the logo for Uncooked Peril was emblazoned across the screen in all its early 2000s 3D glory, accompanied by a few stock sound effects of quakes and rumbling. Clearly, her mom must’ve already put the disc into her console for her!
“Awwww… wicked cool, mom!” Miko didn’t need her mother to be as into games as she was, but it was always a treat to know that she cared.
“Anywho, what’re we waiting for! I’ve got some disasters to report!” Miko launched her butt into the couch seat, turning her Virtual Reality headset to Full Dive setting. As fun as it would be, it would not sit well with her parents if she was running around the house and jumping over armoires pretending to escape from perils of unspecified origin. Full Dive was the way to go.
“Let’s bounce!” Miko said. She shuffled in the couch cushion as she got comfortable, and with one click of the remote, the headset twitched, and Miko’s consciousness was beamed into cyberspace.
“So exciting… whoa, whoa, whoa—!!”
At once, Miko’s external voice ceased. The Full Dive compatibility on these older games was always a bit of a bumpy start, but though her body might jitter every so often, to an outside observer Miko would appear to simply be having an especially interactive dream. Internally though… Miko was flying, being transported to the digital realm at lightning-fast speeds.
This never gets old…! Miko squealed, clasped her hands, and angled her body in superheroic fashion as she zoomed through the tube of cyberspace until—
“Ooph…”
Miko looked around. She was… sitting on a bus.
“H-huh…” Miko poked her head into the aisle scanned up and down at the other faces. Mostly teenagers with nondescript hair color. They were impressively polygoned, even for the era, but nothing that can hold a candle to more modern specs. Miko’s own avatar alone was probably constructed with more pixels than the bus itself. But fidelity was never the thing Miko harped on anyway; all she knew was that this game was the bespoke article. Everything, down to the poorly-translated, poorly lip-synced NPC voices, told her this was the real deal.
“Ahhhh, last day of school! So, what’re you gonna—”
Miko rolled her eyes as she skipped the dialogue. She hadn’t even noticed she wasn’t alone in her booth; a male NPC—doubtless the avatar you would’ve played with if you were a boy—was currently babbling about the requisite amount of nonsense necessary to get the player to care about their probably short life. Miko, on the other hand, had seen this stuff before. She wanted action. She wanted the good bits.
“Yes, I do hear Coach is pretty tou—” Skip. “—and Saori then kissed—” Skip. “—might cool be visit in spring when—” Skip. “—id you hear that?”
Rumbling. Finally! Miko shoved past another NPC—booooring, she thought, ignoring his hapless protests, and she planted her face on the bus window. It was stuck in traffic, and twilight was beginning to fall. The driver honked the horn a few times as Miko’s giddiness prepared to erupt. She ran through her memory of some of the reviews she saw online.
“Okay… so, it starts with the earthquake. A falling rock crashes through the bus, that’s how we’ll make our escape. A bit of running around, maybe some trinket scrounging before the act two tsunami hits. Ooooh, I’m getting chills just thinking about it.”
The NPC next to Miko looked at her with an odd face. “Um, what you are talking about?”
Miko ignored him. “Tsunami, tornado, and then that’s when the big ol’ monster comes in. This might be the best first run in video game history!”
As if to punctuate her point, the rumbling returned.
“Here it comes, here it comes!!” The girl was vibrating in her seat. She paid no heed to the increasing apprehension of the fake high school classmates she’d been plucked into. She didn’t even pay attention to the various NPCs outside who began running in the opposite direction of the bus, even though that was somewhat odd to happen this early in the game. It was only when the rumbles continued to increase in strength while refusing to transition away from the dull, monotonous thumping that Miko started to wonder if something was up.
“Okay, I’ve never been through an earthquake before… but this does not sound like an earthquake. What gives?”
Miko got up and shuffled through the shifting mass of faux classmates to the head of the bus, ignoring the driver’s canned dialogue about “Return to seats!” and “You can’t here!”, and she gazed out the window.
Feeling it through the bus was unsettling enough, but seeing it with her own eyes was downright harrowing: an entire phalanx of multicolored cars, each beeping in a cacophonous symphony… and then…
Boom…
Every one of them shuddered in unison. For a brief moment, the horns were allayed.
Then the cacophony started up with renewed vigor. Until…
Boom…
Everything stopped.
Miko felt her knees get weak at the display. Whatever this was, Uncooked Peril it was not.
“Did I get a dud after all…?” Miko ran through the pack-opening experience. The case had a bit of wear and tear… but the disc itself didn’t have a scratch on it! Pristine, even. In fact, the only one who’d touched it between her opening the package and her heading out was…
Boom…
Miko gulped. “Oh nertz…”
Please, please, please don’t let this be what I think it’s gonna be…
***
Where… where am I?
The speckled blotches that made up Mayumi’s vision told her little about her location… and the sound of traffic was so odd and distorted that it told her even less. She seemed to be surrounded by a series of spires roughly the same height that she was. Mayumi thought to herself… was plausibly in a city… but as her vision cleared, it was becoming increasingly apparent that this wasn’t a city like any she’d ever seen in the conventional sense.
My… head is funny…
Mayumi tried to think back to what she remembered last. Miko had been gone for a few hours… so she took another look at the game. I’ll just check it out, she’d thought. A quick look. I’m sure my daughter won’t mind, she’d imagined. Heck, she’d be excited to see me playing! Of course, this didn’t account for the possibility of a glitched system causing major side effects. A possibility that was entirely foreign to Mayumi up until she was struck by a bolt of electricity and zapped into the game.
As for where the game had placed her…
Gotta… lean on something…
Her vision was clearing up, but her balance was all of kilter. Mayumi took a step forward and felt something crumple beneath her bare foot, realizing at once that she was not wearing shoes. “Ach!!”
Mayumi lurched forward with an unusual feeling of weight—desperately, she squabbled for something to grab onto, making do with the edge of one of the spires.
Ah… ah… I’m okay.
Mayumi breathed a sigh of relief…
Just as the object she was pushing against began to wobble.
“Whoa… whoa!!”
Quickly, Mayumi planted both feet on the ground, hearing that sickening crunch yet again. What was that? But more pressing to her was the structure which seemed to be the precise shape and visual profile as a skyscraper was now tumbling to the ground.
Throooom…
Rather than shatter, Mayumi noticed that the object seemed to utterly collapse into a cloud of opaque dust. The cloud spread through the corridors of the lanes, some of the backwind even coating her feet and toes in a thin layer of soot.
“That seems a bit… dramatic,” Mayumi voiced to herself. “Though… it did feel kind of… good.”
Then: “Why does my voice feel so… large?”
Then, a piercing ache invaded her head.
“ACH!!”
Mayumi grabbed her temples, buckling her knees as she struggled to stay upright. “W-what… is—”
And suddenly…
It stopped.
Mayumi opened her eyes again, and this time her vision was clear. She knew exactly where she was.
A lime green light blanketed the city as energy surged throughout the 500-foot tall mother’s body, an energy that ultimately pooled in the pits of her eyes, bathing them in a sickly emerald glow.
But Mayumi was not worried. In fact, every worry within her had been swiftly erased. Nothing replaced it, necessarily. All that was laid bare was a burgeoning pleasure… and a desire to destroy.
The creature that was once Mayumi but was now a colossal glitch in the shape of a motherly woman… smiled, and it licked its lips.
“Fee… Fi… Fo… Fum…~”
***
“Oh, heck no…” Miko had seen enough. “Mom, when I said I wanted you to actually take an interest in my hobbies… this isn’t what I had in mind…!” Seeing the monster turn the corner of the building hours before its scheduled arrival in the game would’ve been pretty cool, on its own terms. What self-respecting gamer wouldn’t want to exploit that speedrun strat? But the monster, the 500-foot scion of rage and destruction, being her own mother dulled the excitement.
Miko didn’t wait; even if it would kill her, she began to push and shove with a single-minded determination to reach the frontmost bus doors. Around her, every single NPC collectively forgot their lines and began screaming whatever jumbled combination of canned dialogue best expressed their utter disbelief in the current situation. Earthquake? Sure! Fire tornadoes? Why not? Eldritch abominations from the deep? Throw it on the pile. But a gigantic mother? This wasn’t supposed to happen at all!
“Everybody run!!”
“She crushes us!”
“Everyone, stay your seats!”
Miko rolled her eyes. AI used to be a lot dumber back in the early 2000s. Not one of them had her brilliant idea of simply going to the bus door and, um.
Hm.
The door wasn’t working.
“Um, Mister Bus Driver?” Miko asked quite hesitantly. “Do you mind unlocking—”
“Everyone, stay your seats!”
Miko caught another glance out the forward-facing windows, and her heart dropped, just as another pale-toed footfall crushed a cavalry of stopped cars in a dreadful THOOM… The intermittent jiggling of the fat on her thighs stuffed in those white mom-jeans, coupled with the tight-fitting pink sweater vest… and Miko was beginning to have some incredibly odd feelings.
Feelings which she was going to ignore. Miko tried again to get the driver’s attention.
“HEY! Bus Guy! In case you haven’t noticed, we’re all gonna die if you don’t unlock this—”
“Everyone, stay your seats!”
And that’s when Miko realized… of course he couldn’t hear her. He couldn’t actually respond to anything she was doing or saying—he was only an NPC. All of these characters were hastily adapting the only script they knew how to recite, and it was a woefully inadequate one for the glitch-storm they were about to weather.
Moreover… this wasn’t a “bus”. This was a set piece. A set piece that was supposed to culminate in a rock from the earthquake creating a hole in the roof from which to escape. None of these doors or windows were designed to open.
Trapped.
With no escape.
“No… no no, no-no-no! Okay, Control Alt Delete time—whoa!”
THOOOOM…
As another quake sent Miko to her knees (thank the maker digital bus floors weren’t even close to as dirty as meatspace ones), another set of vehicles had been utterly wiped from existence. Not even their pixels remained. Mayumi scraped the underside of her foot off on the sidewalk, inadvertently erasing a few dozen escaping people. And all this was happening barely a hundred feet away from Miko’s own vehicle.
“Uh-h-h-uhhhh…?! Why is this thing not working?!”
She didn’t get it. Her headset was supposed to have a way to hard quit out of the game! But, try as she might, no menu or UI appeared. And considering she was in Full Dive mode, her body would remain blissfully asleep until someone on the outside managed to rip the thing off of her head.
“Oh God, it wasn’t just an anime. It was a warning! And I didn’t listen!”
As Miko lamented, a shadow fell upon her.
With apprehension, she inclined her gaze and looked up. And what she saw made even the rest of the bus fall silent.
Her glowing, green-eyed mother was hanging her bare foot above the bus. Miko had contended with plenty of giant monsters before. Most were goopy, dripping colossi, while some were large enough to devour buildings like they were candy. But here, stuck in this tin box… not a single one of them awakened the fear in the girl that currently stirred as she was beneath the porcelain sole of her indifferent mother’s perfect foot. The fact that the smooth-skinned sole was the precise size necessary to crush the bus into sheet metal didn’t exactly help… it’s like the foot was made for snuffing out Miko’s abode specifically.
“M-Mama…?”
There was no way the woman, the utter giantess… could hear her. But you can’t blame a gamer for trying.
THROOOOM…!
One single stomp, and the bus was no more. It, and all its digitized occupants, had been reduced to corrupted data. Mayumi paid no heed; she hadn’t even realized her own daughter was one of the occupants—hadn’t realized that her own daughter was perhaps the only occupant of any note. Her entire mind was under the control of a glitch which told her to do nothing but… destroy…
Destroy…
Destroy…
Which, of course, wasn’t a hard thing to convince the mother of. It felt good to be bigger than everyone, and everything else. When you’re a working Mom, the idea of growing beyond your problems, your work, your life, even your family… is unexpectedly tantalizing. And as Mayumi took another step past the depixelating remains of the bus, that was the singular urge which drove her to continue forward. Nothing, but the complete and utter pleasure of destruction.
Mayumi wiggled her toes, grateful at how rapidly the debris was able to depixelate on the digits. And she targeted an especially meaty crowd of running NPCs for destruction.
***
The door slammed. Nica, the vapid eldest sibling of the Kubota family made sure to take her shoes off in the atrium as she stepped inside. Her fingers were rapid-fire on the phone keyboard, and her eyes never left the screen. She was on autopilot to the living room couch, texting: I mean, its not that I think she can’t pull off the fit. Its just she definitely didnt pull it off today. by telling her that, I was just being a good friend ;) Yes, even in public. its important to be honest even in—
Crrrunch!
Nica shot up. And she looked down at the empty couch seat, where a still warm, yet deactivated VR headset had just been reduced to pieces beneath her jean-clad derriere.
“Ugh!” Nica heaved, rubbing her rump tenderly to smooth out where some of the sharper pieces of plastic and metal jutted into her backside. And she returned to texting.
Sorry, one sec. Dumbass sister left her game out on the couch again. I hope she knows I’m not paying for this lmao
“Ugh… my head… is this Gamer Heaven? Where’s Iwata?”
Miko blinked the blurs away as her vision returned in short bursts. Her hearing, on the other hand, was better than ever, and it told a grim story.
“Ahhhh, last day of school! So, what’re you gonna—”
“Jumping Jigglypuff, I respawned?!”
Miko didn’t even give her seatmate the dignity of having her skip through his dialogue—she pushed through him to the front of the bus, and her eyes widened in horror. Just as before, her mom was scarcely a mile away, the size of a colossus, and was coming toward her at the agonizingly slow pace that only an unbeatable superboss could convincingly make seem menacing. Her feet, like last time, were bare, and surprisingly unscathed.
“She… she reset too…”
Miko tested the bus doors briefly, then swore again. Still closed.
“Okay, now isn’t the time to panic. Your Mom is a 500-foot giant who seems heck-bent on stomping you flat. It’s fine! I just need to get out of the game somehow. But, wait, Miko! You can’t exit the game. You can’t even exit this bus!” Miko’s breathing got heavy, and panic was setting in as another tremor shook the vehicle. “Just think… think…”
Slowly, Miko’s eyes rose to the roof of the bus.
It was unmarred. The event that was supposed to lead to her egress in the game proper hadn’t happened, and seemed as though it were not going to happen. But… oftentimes in games, things are not quite what they appear to be.
Miko looked back to her mom, whose gorgeous body seemed to occupy more of the window with each passing moment. Being stomped by her wasn’t entirely unpleasant… but it was not an experience the girl was eager to relive anytime soon. And this was the only plan she had.
Hopping atop the seat cushions was easy enough (despite the protests of the NPCs), but balancing on the tippy top of the headrest of one of the booths was a challenge. Not because Miko couldn’t do it—she was more than capable of just about any gymnastic feat you put in front of her. Rather, every time she tried to get her balance, another tremor would radiate through the bus and knock her off her center. But finally, she was able to crouch, feet placed perfectly on the seat back, giving her a scarce few moments to test her theory.
Miko reached her hand out to the ceiling of the bus. Her memory told her that this was exactly where the hole in the roof would be…
Her hand phased through the ceiling like it was mist.
“Success…!”
Miko wasted no time; she leapt through the hole that was not a hole, and emerged from the bus to breathe in that sweet, sweet digitized smog as she rolled out across the hot metal rooftop.
“Oh, thank ye gods…” Then, Miko looked up.
In the time it took for her to figure out her exit, her mom had caught up with her.
Miko gulped. Her mom’s foot somehow looked even more pristine when she was viewing it from this close. The young girl could make out the impressive fidelity with which her mother’s sole had been rendered. Mayumi was well into her adult years, and the signs of age as well as birthing five children had begun to show in her body. That being said, Mayumi aged incredibly gracefully, and an active life meant that she could be convincingly confused for early thirties, rather than being in her thirties.
All this to say, while Miko had never been a feet girl (and much less the feet of her own mother), she had to admit. If ever a foot could be hot, then that description could apply to her own mother’s.
It was a petite size when they were normal, something which Miko was grateful for inheriting (even if it meant she needed to put more force into kicking Glitches’ keisters), but as it hung above her head, the appendage seemed to pulse with energy, strength, and power. Miko could almost swear she saw it glowing slightly amidst the dust, and the light bluish veins just beneath the skin were so incredibly lifelike and realistic that briefly Miko had to remind herself this was even a game to begin with.
The idea that rather than a game, her mom had been transported to a nondescript metropolis and hypnotized into wrecking it without remorse was… a potent thought for the young Miko. One which left her with a lot of confusing feelings.
Feelings she did not get time to ruminate on when her mother’s foot snuffed her out with just as much unceremonious cruelty as it had the last time. The only consolation was that rather than being compressed inside a tin can, Miko at least got to feel the texture of her mother’s supple foot before she was reduced to disorganized bits and bytes.
***
“Oh, come the heck on.”
This was starting to get embarrassing.
Miko didn’t even pretend to pay attention to the NPC dialogue as she hopped out of her newly respawned seat. She didn’t need to look out the front-facing window to know her mother was slowly but surely quaking her way down the lane, intending to plant her foot directly on her daughter’s face. All she knew was that, hidden in the ceiling of the vehicle was her exit. Her legs dangled above the hapless NPCs, sneakers threatening to slip off as they flailed wildly while she dumped her torso on the digitized metal rooftop of the bus.
Miko wanted to give herself a breather, but the steady thoom… that pervaded the city shocked her to attention. Now wasn’t the time to rest; she’d gotten a head start for once, but that would be useless if she couldn’t identify her next move. Which would be…
Um.
Miko’s head was on a swivel. The road was a corridor; the buildings on either side of her were, through video game nonsense logic, unenterable. The cars were glorified props, most of which couldn’t drive even if it were possible to hijack one. Even if she parkoured as hard as she could, there was no way she could outrun the pace of a woman as gargantuan as that. If Ally were here, it’d be different.
Then—Miko’s eyes locked onto a target and became stars.
She saw.
Her savior.
A bench.
“Perfect! Marker has been set! Now, I just need to—”
Miko had barely dragged the rest of her body out of the bus rooftop before a shadow fell over her, reducing her to digi-dust.
***
When Miko respawned, however, it was with a renewed sense of hope, tempered by urgency. Benches in video games were never just benches. Some refilled health; some offered opportunities to purchase items. In the case of Uncooked Peril, this would allow Miko the chance to save her game, which if nothing else would give her the chance to escape the stuffy bus. From there, she should be able to navigate the menu and hopefully de-rez out of this heck-hole.
That is, if she could reach it. The bench was a good hundred yards away, and her mega-Mom’s stride could make that distance in literally a single step. This is what Miko was pondering when she once again surveyed her surroundings to plot out a route—and was subsequently smushed.
“This is starting to get ridiculous…” Miko grumbled, her head beginning to ache as her body wobbled in the wake of her latest resurrection. Even with perfect precision, the girl had barely a minute’s worth of leeway to get an overview of the field; by the time she’d made one note about the map, her mother’s foot was already atop of her, and Miko was toast.
Miko gulped as she got to her feet. She hadn’t been eager for this part… but she was going to get no further by planning.
So, the next time Miko exited the roof of the bus, she didn’t wait.
She ran.
Miko hopped off the bus just as her mother’s foot slammed down on the metallic husk, crushing it and every other meaningless NPC life inside to a twisted hunk of metal, then disparate glowing bytes, then… nothing at all. Miko spared a single look back, then resumed hoofin’ it. No time to waste; the bench was within sight, but it was still a long way to go. If she wanted to reach, she would need to be efficient.
Problem:
This traffic was tight.
Miko slid through the gaps in an agonizingly slow sideways crab-walk, each second offering another thoom that resonated down to her very bones, only to be stopped dead in her tracks by a motorcycle that had attempted to circumvent the gridlock.
“Um, Mister? You’re in the way, in case you haven’t noticed! I’ll need you to—”
Miko didn’t get the chance to tell the man to his face what she needed—she wasn’t even sure he had a face through the opaque motorcycle helmet’s mask—because at that moment, her mother’s foot rained down and stomped the pair of them into paste.
“Nertz.”
Okay, take two. Miko decided to go perpendicular to the road, making it to the sidewalk. Fewer cars, but this presented its own challenges. For one, the sidewalk was far more chaotic. It was a frenzy of low-poly avatars that the game never expected you to interact with. “’Scuze me, sorry, comin’ through!” Miko blurted over and over, before coming to the realization, “Wait, why am I even being nice to you? You’re not real! You’re—”
Miko’s meanspirited musing came to an abrupt end when she was, again, flattened.
Briefly, Miko considered the merits of taking the road vs taking the sidewalk before her mother’s shadow descended once more. But her reflexes were getting better—the girl rolled off the bus rooftop and once more condemned her cardboard-cutout classmates to disintegration, even if she herself landed hard on the concrete, her lower chin digging a single crack into the asphalt that made Miko’s already aching head spin.
“Ach, ACH!!” Ugh. Miko rolled over and looked to the sky, half-expecting to see stars and songbirds flitting about her head. But no, instead she was greeted with an image of her mother. It was the first time in a while that she’d paid any attention to her giga-sized mom beyond whatever quirk of her feet texture happened to be most potent on a given crushing. She was just as demonically unphased as she’d always been, big green eyes staring down at Miko with absolutely nothing behind them.
Miko didn’t want to admit it to herself…
But…
She could no longer lie.
Being here, supine, at the mercy of her utterly gorgeous and mature mother was far, far…
Far…
From the worst position she’d ever been in.
Then she was crushed, and she was reminded of the drawbacks.
***
Over.
And over.
And over.
Take the road, get crushed. Road was no good, take it before slipping onto the sidewalk. Get crushed. Take road, switch to sidewalk, sidle through until it’s too stuffed to maneuver and transfer back to the road. Get crushed. Transfer back to the road after taking the sidewalk, hop on top of a taxi. Get crushed. Top of taxi makes you too visible of a target—try to jump to a hanging lamppost. Miss. Get crushed. Catch lamppost…
Now what?
Get crushed due to your lack of prior planning.
But every attempt, Miko inched closer.
And closer.
And closer.
To the sweet, sweet bench. Each regeneration gave her new knowledge, new skill, new expertise. A few times she’d needed to entirely change her strategy, only to realize that starting from essentially zero again sucked, and she decided to switch back to what she knew even if it wasn’t working as well as she wanted it to. And soon enough, this determination paid off; the taste of freedom was hot on her tongue—the stupid bench was literally in spitting distance.
Miko lunged…
And…
Success!
The second Miko’s pinky made contact with the bench, time stopped. Not a moment too soon, too—her mother’s foot was inches away from flattening the violet vixen for the umpteenth time.
And finally…
Finally…
Ye gods, a menu.
“I have never known the ‘Pause’ feature to be so beautiful!!” If it weren’t a UI element, Miko would’ve kissed it. But she was not here to sight-see. Miko was still in her lunging animation, but internally she was navigating the menu that had been overlaid atop her entire field of vision. There were a few options—Resume for one, which Miko avoided like the plague. She immediately hit Save instead and breathed a sigh of relief. Braving that gauntlet was heck, and she was keen to never need to do it again. Aside from that, this was a pretty barebones user interface feature; all that remained were the Settings and Quit feature.
Do not mind if I do, Miko thought cheekily. She mentally switched the cursor to the button, and pressed.
Nothing happened.
“Ahem.” Miko coughed. “I said, ‘don’t mind if I do.’”
And she pressed the Quit button again.
And again.
And again.
With mounting panic, she continued over and over and over, practically wanting to scream. “What is this jank? Why is it not working?! Why is it…”
Miko finally caught an error message in the bottom left corner of her field of view. It had been showing up each time she’d clicked on the quit button, but in her single-minded focus, she must’ve missed it.
Error: Hardware Not Found
Oh ye gods.
Miko had no idea who could’ve unplugged her game, but right now that was a problem. It also confirmed her worst fears; when the game glitched out, Miko had unknowingly been sucked inside herself. She was trapped not just conceptually but literally as well.
“Oh! Well… that’s… fine. You’ve gotten yourself out of worse scrapes, Me_KO! All you need to do is keep playing and eventually you’ll find an unpatched exploit you can wriggle out of here from! Let’s just go ahead and Resume, and we should be able to—”
Miko was crushed.
Hard.
***
“Ach!” Miko spat dust out of her mouth as she respawned on the bench. “God, that sucked. But at least I’m out of that—”
She was crushed. Again.
***
There was no leeway, no downtime, barely even a chance to pause. In a moment, Miko and everything around her had gone from polygons to data, as if the massive creature above her had been lying in wait for her daughter’s resurrection, just to put her down again with the vindictive satisfaction of landing a killing blow on an Unsent Vermillion in Darkest Depths. The little demons refused to stay dead after all.
Miko didn’t have the time to think about this when she respawned, because once again, she was turned to paste.
“What the?! Why is it—”
And again.
***
The girl respawned with slack-jawed indignation punctuated by an all-body ache that was not helped by her subsequent fatal stomping. The window of opportunity to open the menu was so small it was practically non-existent, and when she respawned once more, it was with the dread of finally realizing what she’d feared happened.
She.
Was softlocked.
If the internet creepypastas of Gamer Hell were true, Miko could dare say she’d discovered it. Trapped with no way to progress forward or back. The worst-case scenario in real life was you turn off your device, or in really extreme cases you start a new game.
But Miko was the game.
And her game—nay, her life—had become respawn. Get crushed. Die.
Repeat.
Respawn.
Get crushed.
Die.
Repeat.
At the mercy of her mother’s foot, Miko tried desperately to spam the pause button, but her buzzer-beater of touching the bench was simply too immaculate, too good. Opening the pause menu was more than a challenge—the bench technically didn’t become interactable until roughly a second after the game world loaded. It was there, but it was impossible to utilize before getting crushed again.
Even her own thoughts were merely the strung-together scraps of ideas that she had to desperately hold onto before they—like the bytes that made up each manifestation of her avatar—were dispensed into the aether of cyberspace. Had she the time to ponder it, Miko wouldn’t be able to imagine a more gruesome fate. But all she had the time for now was familiarizing herself with the digitized underside of her mom’s sole.
After the first one thousand three hundred and thirty-seven attempts, Miko gave up trying to open the pause menu.
After the first thirty-two thousand seven hundred and eight, she gave up thinking.
After the first two billion, one hundred forty-seven million, four hundred eighty-three thousand six hundred forty-seven, she gave up altogether.
Comments
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