Death by Cliché Read Free

knew?”
     

Chapter Two
    “Never name the main character after yourself. That’s just pathetic.”
    —Bob Defendi
     
    ho goes there?” a voice shouted.
    “Bob Damico.”
    A figure stepped into the light. He was at least six foot nine and wore chainmail on his arms and legs, a breastplate, and a helm with a T-slit like Boba Fett’s. In one hand, he held a large ax. On his back, he carried a beaten leather pack, a bow, a quiver of loose arrows, and a sword. A polished mace and a morningstar hung from his belt. Daggers lined a bandolier across his chest. A five-foot-tall tower shield hung from one arm, battered and splintering around the edges. He didn’t seem to notice the weight as he approached.
    “What do you want?” he asked, holding up the ax to strike.
    Damico threw up his hands. “I’m friendly. Don’t attack!”
    The man’s expression fell with disappointment. He sulked off into the darkness. Damico called out after him, but he didn’t respond.
    Strange.
    Damico stared after the man for a while then took a step after him. A new person materialized into the light.
    This one wore a pirate shirt and green tights. He carried a rapier on one hip and a mandolin over his shoulder. On his head perched a folded cap, like Errol Flynn.
    “Um, hi,” Damico said.
    “Prithee, good my lord! What brings thee to this dungeon of peril and dread?”
    And suddenly he had it. LARPers.
    Live Action Role-Playing, basically grown men playing dress up. Some would call them the pimple on the ass of the gaming world. Damico didn’t mind them much, except at conventions where they spread like a virus, annoyed like crotch rot, and generally brought the entire industry a bad name. They were drunken, obnoxious, and horny. Convention LARPers made Damico wish he could call in an airstrike on his own position.
    “I don’t know why I’m here,” Damico said. The guy seemed nice enough, despite the getup. “I think I’m lost.”
    “Where did you come from?”
    “The hospital, I think.”
    “Ah, a temple of healing, the cool soothing touch of the gentle menstruations of the clerical arts—”
    “I think you mean ministrations.”
    “What is thy injury, sirrah?”
    Damico blinked a few times, and the little man in his head gave up completely and decided to kick back in the back row, knock down a little popcorn, and wait for the realization to hit.
    “I was shot in the face,” Damico said.
    “Ah,” the bard—he must have been a bard—said. “A grievous wound. Seems healed, though.”
    The last didn’t sound like Elizabethan English. The guy couldn’t keep character.
    “I got better?” Damico ventured.
    It was a test, and the man burst out laughing, slapping his knee and stroking his Van Dyke. So, he was a gamer. Or a Renaissance nut. Someone who watched a lot of Monty Python, regardless.
    “Good sirrah, of course you did! So, are you here for adventure?”
    “I’m trying to find my way out,” Damico said.
    “Alas, there is but one door out. It seals behind, and it was guarded by a deadly slime.”
    Damico glanced back toward the charred spot down the hall. “I think someone torched the slime,” he said.
    “That would be us, good my lord!” the bard said. “We are a group of prowess and might, of bitter blades and boastful songs, of—”
    “Give me the Cliff Notes, Bardykins,” Damico said.
    “We kick ass.”
    “I see,” Damico said. “Why are you all lurking there in the dark?”
    “It isn’t dark!” a voice said from the darkness.
    “No, it isn’t.” Another voice.
    “I have a torch right here.” Fourth voice. How many people were there?
    “Where?”
    “It’s written on my character sheet.”
    “No it isn’t.”
    “Well I have a lantern.”
    “Where?”
    “On my sheet.”
    “Well you don’t have it out.”
    “Yes I do!”
    “No you don’t .”
    “I distinctly said I pulled it out!”
    A light flared now, not thirty feet down the passage. It came from a lantern grasped in the