Johnny Hard Drive was in a pickle so big that it was a real shame the Guinness Book of Records people weren’t around to measure, verify, and immortalise it. I should have brought some of those guys with me, he thought, when I got dragged into this place.
It would have been really easy, because Johnny was the greatest hacker in the world and so was always being followed by an entourage of record-keepers keen to note down his jaw-dropping feats of cyber-athleticism. He should have grabbed one that day his computer screen melted and a viscous green hand reached out, picked him up by the scruff of his leather trench coat, and pulled him into Shite Mordor.
In the few days he’d spent here, Shite Mordor had not been kind to Johnny Hard Drive. It became clear that it had no Internet, no electricity, and worst of all, was plagued by some kind of hippie bullshit called ‘magic.’
Johnny was dimly aware of the concept of magic because it was physically impossible not to be when you were a computer guy. The problem was, ever since Johnny had first laid hands on the slick gleaming curves of a laptop, he had instantly become too cool for the nerds, geeks, and dweebs who could’ve educated him on the finer points of fantasy. The charisma that emanated from his pores with every TikTok he pushed to the GitHub cloudbase kept him simply too busy (from the near-constant sex-having) to learn about fire lizards and glowing balls of power. Besides, his already glowed, so what was the point?
In short, Johnny was the most genre-blind man to ever be transported to an alternate dimension that was every other computer hacker’s wet dream.
Which is how he found himself being slowly edged off a cliff by a big man with an even bigger sword — and not in the fun way, either.
‘Come on,’ Johnny said, spreading his hands out reasonably, like the lovechild of Spock and Mister Rogers. ‘There must be some other way to settle this.’
The big man laughed like a nineties Internet connection and pressed the sword harder into Johnny’s neck. Johnny winced as he shuffled backward — because of the laugh, not the sword, which was kind of turning him on (being horny was Johnny’s primary emotional regulation strategy, and the only reason he wasn’t having a DEFCON 1 panic attack right now).
‘You make me laugh,’ said the big man, redundantly.
‘Aww,’ said Johnny, batting his velour eyelashes. ‘Are you flirting with me?’
The man’s face changed, like an interlaced PNG file loading on dial-up. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he growled, as his pupils dilated ambiguously. ‘I’m going to kill you.’
The sword bit into Johnny’s throat like when you’re building a computer and cut your palm open on one of the metal plate thingies. He shuffled back a few inches. Unfortunately, so did the sword — very clever.
‘Killing me won’t bring back your enchanted ambulance,’ said Johnny. ‘I’m sorry I ate it, but it just looked so much like a Tide pod, and —’
‘Amulet!’ the big man shouted, so loudly that Johnny almost jumped off the cliff himself. ‘It was an enchanted amulet, you wretched fool, and by eating it, you robbed me of its power forever! Killing you may not bring it back,’ he continued, with a smile like a poop knife, ‘but it’ll make me feel better.’
‘I can make you feel better,’ tried Johnny, with a coquettish head tilt. He tried to angle his hips seductively at the same time, but overbalanced and one of his feet skidded off the cliff edge. He scrambled, like a cartoon egg, and regained his footing, doing his best to style it out, which was difficult when the sword hovering near your face was literal and not metaphorical. Nonetheless, he settled for leaning his cheek against the flat of the sword and licking it.
The big man turned red immediately, like an LED. His face was now the exact colour of Johnny’s code when it wasn’t working right, a shade he encountered extremely rarely and therefore found extremely distressing. Johnny lurched backward, his feet now half off the cliff. A few rocks came loose and plunged into the abyss behind him, doing that falling object whistling noise that Johnny always thought was non-diegetic until now.
Does this place have magic rocks? he wondered.
‘Stop making that damn sound,’ growled the big man, and Johnny blinked in surprise as he realised the noise was indeed coming from him. It had been years since he had done it — it was his former primary method of emotional regulation before he switched to horniness. Now it only happened in times of truly great stress.
‘I don’t think I can stop it,’ Johnny said. ‘Maybe if you put down the sword. And let me let you make me make other noises,’ he added with a charmingly crooked smile, like Doug Judy with scoliosis.
The man became even redder, and the whistling noise got louder.
Johnny wondered whether dying in Shite Mordor meant you died in real life.
His foe pulled his sword back, ready to let Johnny find out.
Johnny whistled harder than he ever had before —
— and the big man exploded like a viral Internet challenge, shooting out gloops of blue, orange, and white liquid that reminded Johnny of all the laundry he hadn’t yet done. The only trace of him that remained was the sword, which clattered to Johnny’s feet like the belt of a soon-to-be sexual conquest.
The whistling noise quietened, turning into that cool low whistle that people do when something impressive happens, before falling silent.
Johnny felt something shifting in his guts — not in a sexy way — and then he remembered the big man’s demented ravings as he’d chased Johnny out of his home and onto the cliff.
‘That amulet is mine! Its power was mine, to do anything I dreamed of, but now you’ve gone and eaten it and the thing I need to explain to you so this story makes sense is that the amulet binds to the first person who touches it so even if you shat it out, it’s useless to me, stuck to an idiot who’s too stupid to even use it, or you would’ve by now, to stop me chasing you onto this cliff!’
Johnny smiled and picked up the sword, licking it. He didn’t need to, but now it was a habit. He formed habits very easily.
‘Too stupid to use it, huh?’ he said to himself, to distract from the fact that he’d just accidentally cut his tongue on the sword. He paused, cinematically, so the people who filmed his life and streamed it as HBO’s most profitable show would have time to add a dramatic cut, and looked directly into one of the many cameras that had successfully followed him into Shite Mordor.
‘I think you mean “too stupid to use it deliberately.”’
Big thanks to Joey Marianer for suggesting the title. If you’ve not read the first Worst Chapter, here it is!
Okay I must run away now because this is an extremely quick update I’m posting when I should be getting ready to attend to other obligations. SEE YOU NEXT WEEK. I SWEAR TO GOD no more hugely long gaps between updates because it’s fucking paralysing lmao okay cool hope you’re well thanks for sticking around byyyyye <3