Characters: Pip, Tony, Neil, Marcus, Gibbers
Meanwhile, panic had overtaken the hardworking Game “Masters” (GMs, for short) at the Central Neverquest Network (CNN, also for short). The new virus had been discovered in their systems! Alarms rang, whistles shrieked, and the hallways were flooded with scurrying people. One of them burst through the doorway of the primary control room.
“I win!” Pip shouted as he dove into his chair with his ham-and-cheese sub in hand.
“No…fair…” wheezed Tony, jogging through the door a few seconds later. He clapped his palms over his knees. “I’ve never seen somebody run so fast. You got to the cafeteria and back before the lunch bell even stopped!”
“Got to be fast when you’re around me, big guy!” Pip laughed. He slapped Tony’s rear end as he returned to his station.
“Yeah, yeah. You’re just lucky they didn’t run out of subs this time.”
Before he could sit his big behind down, though, a freaky little guy who looked to be in his mid-teens with pencil-thick limbs ambled through the doorway. He had a doughnut in one hand and a cup of coffee folded over a greasy computer printout in the other.
“Hey, guys,” said the pencil boy. “Looks like somebody discovered another bug in our systems.”
“Put it with the rest, Neil,” Pip said, jerking a thumb towards a trash bin of an incomprehensible numbers of files and documents.
But he just put his coffee mug down and unfolded the paper. “I dunno… This one looks kinda important.”
“So what?” Tony shrugged his wide shoulders as he sank, quite literally, into his chair. “You make it sound like it’s our job to fix them.”
“I thought it was?”
“Naw, kid. You’re new here. I’ll show you what we do.” He motioned the pencil boy over to his flat-panel computer screen where his e-mail inbox was loading. Fifty-two hundred and thirty-three messages popped up.
“Wow!” Neil gasped. “That’s a lot of e-mails.”
“Won’t take long to answer, though,” Tony said. He opened the first e-mail, and it went something like this…
“help!!!111@ i gave away my passwrod 2 sum stranger and he deleted all my charcters!1111!11!1 do sumthin!1!1!!@!1!!!1 kthxbye”
Tony barely glanced over the message before clicking a program on the bottom of the screen that brought up a list of a dozen pre-written responses. He copied the top one—“Please contact technical support for assistance”—and pasted it into the return e-mail. Then he pressed send. “Piece of cake!”
“Amazing…” Neil said. “It’s almost like we care!”
“Yeah, almost!” Tony laughed. “Would you like to try the next one?”
Neil dropped his doughnut onto the printer. “Sure!”
The next e-mail went something like this…
“omg u guyz suck!!!!1! i called technikle support and they sed they were only open on the second tewsday of each week!!11! i cant wait for leap year!!!1!1!!!2@2 PLEASE HELP!!!!1!!”
Tony brought up the list of pre-written responses. “What will it be?”
Scratching the pubic hairs on his chin, Neil pointed to the fourth one on the list—“Try restarting your computer.”
“Good choice,” Tony said. “But in the future, might I advise a number six: ‘Thank you for your e-mail. Your issue is very important to us and will be addressed in the order it was received. Thank you again and have a good day.’ This way, you actually give them that small dose they need to keep paying—I mean, playing.”
“Clever, clever!”
“You’ll get it in no time, kid.”
“Kid? I’m thirty-five!”
“Oh… It’s kinda hard to tell those things around here.”
“Hey, what are you dorks doing in here?” came a voice from outside the doorway.
Pip groaned. “Oh, great. Here comes Marcus, the cool foreign guy.”
In through the doorway marched a greasy-haired Canadian wearing a beige polo shirt and jeans. He was followed by his ever-present counterpart, Gibbers, who took pleasure in kicking over a life-size stuffed Pikachu. Laughing, Marcus grabbed the doughnut off the printer. Neil tried to knock him away, but Marcus won the slapping contest and ran around the room with the doughnut in hand.
“Haha, nerds!” Marcus snickered, tossing the doughnut to Gibbers, who caught it in his mouth. “Why don’t you go get a date already?”
“Shut up!” Pip snapped. “We can’t all be sexy foreign Canadians.”
“Yeah…true, true…” Marcus ran an invisible comb through his slick hair. “The girls do dig the eleven-inch biceps.” He flexed. “Jealous, bitches?”
“What do you want? Go back to your engineering room.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“There’s some sort of virus overtaking the system. I thought you nerds had something to do with it.”
“Why would we intentionally put a virus into our own system?” Tony breathed.
“To force our customers to constantly upgrade? You do it all the time, Tony Bologna!”
“Don’t call me that…Mucus!”
“That’s enough!” quipped Pip. “We’re all civilized adults here. We must act in a rational manner.”
Neil looked up. “You mean fix the problem?”
“Of course not. We’ll send it to tech support!” He spun around in his chair. “Tony, get them on the phone.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“It’s not the second Tuesday of next week.”
Clenching his fist, Pip cursed the sky with all his one hundred and two pounds of might. “Darn you, tech support! You will rue the day you were fabricated!”
Giantess World
