Scene 3

There was an insistent knocking at the gate of the keep. This happened from time to time and Fyndraxis was familiar with how this operation would go down. The plague that sullied his land didn’t just affect him, the constructs that populated the land would also get swept up in the narrative.

Some unsuspecting sap would find a magic sword, or a box with a demon in it, or take instruction from a disembodied voice from the sky, and start their very own hero’s journey. This rube was usually a local dirt farmer or truant youth. They would be informed that they were, against all odds, the only person around that could save the world and that they were the scion of some unknown magical lineage. This was a powerful intoxicant for those who lacked a real future.

They would go forth and follow the compulsion to rid the world of some perceived ultimate evil. This involved setting off into the world, solving some mysteries, and getting very tough. This process culminated in a showdown with this perceived ultimate evil, usually at the gates of a floating castle in the sky, or something to that effect.

Fyndraxis was well aware that his keep was cliche. When he had created it, it was with a bit of a sigh and an eyeroll or two, but it served a very specific function and he thought of it as a rather elegant solution to an ugly problem. If he had placed his keep on the ground, it would have been subject to the narrative, and he would have been trapped in a state of mindless delusion for the rest of eternity. He was currently working on his narrative sobriety, so that just wouldn’t do.

The everstorm that enshrouded the keep was just one in a set of obstacles that were placed deliberately to confound potential solicitors. All of these obstacles were merely inconveniences though. He could have placed his keep on the Moon, and agents of the narrative would eventually find their way there in a rocket, or an enchanted airship, or just teleport there with whatever all powerful magic they had come to possess.

Fyndraxis arose from his desk where he was trying to abide, and made his way toward the armory. It was down by the gate, so he had a bit of a walk ahead of him through dim and dusty halls. Abiding was something that he enjoyed doing. From what he could tell, this was a state that all creator deities eventually settled on after their work was completed.

After lighting the fuse on a big bang, or dashing out some frost giant’s brains, or making sure that the waters of the heavens did something or other with the waters of the sea, it was important to have a bit of a rest.

In the Venn Diagram of abiding and dicking around on his computer, there was a rather significant area of intersection. In his exploration of his computer he had found some rather interesting things. There was an intrinsic connection between the computer and his mind. The fact that he had created everything in his realm meant that he still had an amount of control over it. If he found a chain of mountains distasteful in some way, he could smite them to dust and have them replaced with a tasteful chain of glacial lakes, or a handsome patch of desert, just by thinking about it. It actually took a rather incredible act of will on a daily basis to not smite the whole thing in an Old Testament hissyfit. He had done this before, and it amounted to deciding to re-paint the garage. The fundamental truths of his universe persisted no matter what havoc he wreaked on the land itself.

Hidden rather deep in the file structure of the computer, there was a text file that described the landform of his realm. This wasn’t a collection of flowery prose describing seafoam and the majesty of yonder peaks, but information organized in an extensible markup language. Things like continents and oceans had defined boundaries that could be changed and edited. An oversimplified example would be something like an M could represent a mountain, if he changed that to an L it would be a lake.

This meant that there was some sort of link between the universe, his mind, and the computer in his sanctum. The snake that he had summoned to do his bidding, did its work on this text file. Python is a programming language that is rather good at going through text files and picking out a signal of information in the inherent noise and chaos that those things tend to have. He had written a script that rifled through this text file and looked for anomalous things. So far, he had only had a single result, but that result was endlessly fascinating.

Fyndraxis had reached the armory. It was located rather close to the gate for convenience. Contained within its vaulted interior were weapons and armor of every description. On his way down to the armory, he had spied his solicitors out a window so that he would know what he was dealing with. This made his selection rather easy. All he needed was a robe, preferably a black one. He could have grabbed a scythe as well, and that would have canonically fit with the type of party that he was dealing with, but it wasn’t strictly necessary, so he skipped it.
He had a set of armor that he had forged from a meteor, but that was for more formal occasions, and the solicitors at his doorstep didn’t really look like they warranted that sort of finery. He selected a robe from the armoire where he kept most of his evil wizard stuff, and donned it with a swooping flourish. He drew the cowl over his head so that the only distinguishing features he presented were robe and beard.

“Coming,” he said musically, to the knocking that had moved from persistent to annoyed.

He approached the gate and summoned some mist to play about his ankles and billow out dramatically when he bade the doors to creak open through some arcane working of black magic. He really didn’t have to do any of this. He could have simply deleted the solicitors while he was sitting at his computer, but they had come all this way and he didn’t want to be rude. It wasn’t that they necessarily deserved a final showdown, but he saw these constructs as victims of his inherently flawed creation and had some underlying guilt that he was working on. This whole floating castle in the sky thing had really been a pretense for him to work on himself for a while.

The doors of the gate did their arcane black magic thing, and the mist billowed out to an acceptably dramatic degree. He made sure that the everstorm put a little stank on the whole thing with some well timed thunder and lightning. Before him was a party of five.

The solicitors tended to show up in groups of four or five for some reason, occasionally three, but that was a rare thing. There was usually a warrior, this was almost always the one who had originally been compelled by the narrative. A former truant youth forged into an ultimate warrior through grit and determination, and receiver of the knowledge that it’s the friends we made along the way that really matters.

There was inevitably a healer, usually a scantily clad young woman. She would act as the love interest as well if the narrative chose to have a romantic subplot. The healer frequently brought up the rear of the party because the narrative was a bit of a misogynist and assumed that women were fundamentally weak. It also had a bit to do with balancing powers in the party, but it ended up being kind of a blanket statement about how the narrative felt about women in general. Fyndraxis, not being a fan of blanket statements as a rule, did not agree.

A black magician was almost always there as well. This was a person that usually focused on elemental magic. The narrative typically phoned it in with these guys, which was a shame, and they were usually just there to soak up healing spells and do a decent amount of damage when they weren’t subject to some sort of status ailment.

The last two in the party were wildcards. This was where the narrative usually cut loose and let things get weird. They could be anything really, but in the case of the party before him, there was a rather sizable robot and a ninja.

The leader of the party launched straight into some practiced speech that he had prepared for the final showdown. The everstorm was pretty loud, and Fyndraxis couldn’t really hear him all that well, but he probably said something to the effect of:

“Dear Ultimate Evil Guy,
We’re sick of your shit, and we’re going to kill you now.
Warm Regards,

–So and so.”

Fyndraxis nodded his acceptance to this scathing rebuke and let the battle commence. There was some rather creative swordplay from the main guy and some interesting uses of ice from the black magician. The healer looked to be a bit cold because of her unfortunate attire, and Fyndraxis was tempted to give her a conflagrative solution to her problem, but thought better of it.

Despite the playful manner in which he was approaching the situation, he wasn’t there to toy with these people. He certainly had in the past. His exploits and acts of cruelty were a vast tapestry of sadistic indulgences. In the last thousand years or so, he had lost his taste for it. He preferred to let them have their fun for a while and then he would delete them without much ado. They would eventually return to the lives that they had been playing at before, and remember nothing of their times as adventurers.

The ninja was pulling some rather sneaky things, and was making sure that the air was thick with thrown weapons. The robot had turned itself into a sort of laser cyclone, and if circumstances were different, this party would probably be giving him a run for his money.

He was immune to all of these attacks. He was a god. He was this universe. They were mere chess pieces trying to attack the board on which their game played out. His physical manifestation was merely the avatar of his will, a representation of thought. So their efforts were quite fruitless. After a few minutes, when they had run out of novel ideas to try to defeat him, he deleted them.

He let out a mournful sigh, and headed back to his sanctum. He was exhausted. Not physically, but mentally he was completely wrung out. He had truly had it with this place.