[Deliver the Pizza to the Customer - Time Remaining - 40:39]

Alex pounded his forehead onto the long table. According to his [Burrow Sense], and if he was feeling it right, the table was filled with energy vampire Essence. It wasn't spelled out exactly, but he had been sitting for all of two minutes and already felt a yawn coming on from the absolute drivel the Monsters were prattling on about. The cards in his hand, which had been passed out by the rat in the power suit, were sticky and smelled like saliva. Around the table, the Monsters droned on about velocity alignment.

"If we're not constantly reminding them of the table of contents and the values we want them to aspire to," the watercooler with a marker face that was filled with blood and bone said extremely slowly, "how can they synergize with the company culture?"

"Excellent point, Bertram," the gorilla stapler Monster said. He seemed like a nice guy, actually. "But I think what's really required here is a re-alignment of assessment protocols and a rebuild of the approval system for the distribution of agendas to the relevant information streams and stakeholders. Perhaps an addendum to the addendum and a redistribution of the materials, Patty?"

Is that the stupidest way to say, 'Send an email?' WHAT AM I HEARING?

Time was ticking. Francesca was going to rub it in his face and then steal his tips. Patty clenched her fat sausage fingers around the Relic klicker like it was her boyfriend. Alex just knew that if he let them go on, he would be here forever. The real Monster was likely the energy vampirism that was slowly working its way up through his butt cheeks. Come to think of it…they were feeling…extremely comfortable in this chair. Maybe poker planning wasn't so bad after all…

SNAP OUT OF IT

Alex shook his head and sat back up, only to see Patty the potato looking project manager smiling strangely at him. Almost seductive, but instead of sex, it was a promise of constant recurring meetings and dangled corporate perks that involved a couple gifts that cost nothing while you gave them everything. All that from the buck-toothed smile and the possessive eyes she laid on him as she finally clicked the Kicker.

Oh, there was Essence there. The slide displayed on the wall did a powerpoint morph that achieved exactly zero, but Alex had his [Burrow Sense] just tickled on, and what he saw woke him the hell up.

That little click sucked a little fraction of Essense into the Klicker upon her click, which he would see suck into her bloated psoriasis hand. It was his Essense she was sucking up. It made her tingle too, which Alex found disgusting, given that her tingle made the Rat man quiver his little feet under the table in hidden excitement.

Alright, that's enough of this.

Alex realized they had got him. Tricked him with the promise of a reasonable meeting in exchange for treats. Looking around the meeting room, he could see it now that he paid attention. The whole room was an Essence siphon, and within his chest, he could see just a thin tendril drifting out and distributing into Patty's fingernails, Rat Man's quivering tail, and the other Monster's orifices.

THEY'RE SUCKING ME DRY.

He also realized that he could not move. Upon trying to shift his arse in the chair, he found that it was stuck in place. The Monsters droned and droned, and he looked around frantically, only to find Patty's ogling him and rubbing her little Klicker with her rough fingers.

[Deliver the Pizza to the Customer - Time Remaining - 36:22]

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!

There was no way that it had been four minutes since he smacked his head against the table. It hadn't felt like that, anyways. To Alex, it had been just a few seconds, as Patty had just clicked the Klicker the once. The plastic shifted under her meaty thumb once more, and the presentation, still stuck on slide one, did another slight animation while the Monster's argued in the most corporate compliant way. They hadn't even gotten to the first card scoring. Wasn't that the whole point of the meeting!?

But he did notice that as she clicked the thing, Essence went into the Klicker, into Patty, and then into the room to be siphoned off to somewhere else. He just hadn't been paying attention, distracted from pure boredom. Now he could see it with his [Burrow Sense]. She was controlling the whole room with her raw, terribly boring personality and that bloody Klicker.

It's a trap, damnit! Think, Alex, think!

He thinked as hard as he could about how he was supposed to escape this trap that he had waltzed into. The seconds, or minutes, he wasn't sure, ticked on, and the Monsters hadn't even made it past slide one. With little options left, Alex tried to hone in and figure out how to escape. A [Phantom Step] was blocked and glitched out and fizzling his Core. Brody? What other options did he have?

Patty waved the Essence sucker Klicker that Alex just knew hid even more power. If it was controlling the whole meeting…?

Have to time it just right.

[Burrow Sense] was one, just slightly, allowing him to splice out the Relic in his mind. The Essence was routing him to his chair, taking his Essence, and controlling the stuffy meeting room. With just a wee nudge, he probed [Shiny Snatch] to it's active state.

Stolen story; please report.

A deep, tired focus rolled over Alex. The kind that washes over you in the middle of falling asleep, when things start to slip together in one's mind, but then you fall asleep and your greatest ideas are gone with the ungrounded neural pathways. Hazy is what he felt, but locked in on that greasy Klicker coveted by a creature morbidly obsessed with keeping the task board filled and unending.

The Skill locked onto its target. Alex let it fly, and his right hand, which had never left the pizza he delivered before, shot out. Faster than the Monsters could see it snatched and took his body along for the ride. The table was wider than his arm was long, and he and the chair he was attached to leapt up intime with his arm firing out.

Phasing through the Monster to latch onto the Relic felt like shoving his hand through a petri dish of germs and disintegrating plastic, all wrapped up in a neat little bow of standard operating procedures. For a moment, his hand and Patty's hand intersected in reality, and he felt her vile satisfaction at ensuring the world's longest deliverables. She wanted the project to go on forever. What else was she to do without her meetings? Allow others to work?

His hand wrapped around the Klicker and ripped it out of her hand. In a few short milliseconds, he had snatched the Relic, his butt unstuck from the chair, and he promptly fell backwards onto the floor with [Patty's Keynote Klicker 2000] firmly grasped in his hand. He flailed and hit the floor as the Monster's gasped in unison at the interruption. Swift as he could, which wasn't very swift at all, he rolled and got his legs under him before leaping up to gaping faces of the Monsters.

Alex stared at them, Klicker in hand, and the Monsters gaped at him. Even the watercooler filled with blood had an emoji surprised face etched onto him.

With great pride and personal satisfaction, Alex jabbed the giant off button on the Klicker, and the endless presentation shut off to blessed nothingness. Just the 'No Signal' box remained. For the first time since he sat down and been trapped, silence ruled in place of droning.

He'd done it. He'd snatched the Klicker and broken out of the trap of circular meetings.

Alex scooped up the pizzas to [Phantom Step] across the room in a blink. His Core was tired, but he wasn't done just yet. He paused long enough to shove the Klicker Relic in his pocket and turned to face the stunned board room. With his free hand, he leveled a single finger gun at the Monsters around the table.

"Sorry to drop off, but I've got a deliverable to make."

Bang.

He spun and bolted, flames billowing behind him.

"ESCALATION!" shrieked the rat.

"LOSS OF SYNERGY!" bellowed Stapler Gorilla.

"SOMEONE PLEASE MARK THIS AS AN INCIDENT! I DON'T KNOW HOW!" sobbed the bloodcooler.

Patty howled so hard it shook the floor beneath his sprinting feet. Her voice had lost all of it's detached, uncanny presentation style as her rashy bulk lifted off the chair for the first time in years. The project manager who never left her slideshow barrelled after Alex.

Time to run!

Alex sprinted on fumes as Patty shrieked behind him about presentations and gantt charts. The next room was a puke-purple branded merch, where polo shirts and tote bags tried to strangle him to death with loyalty slogans stitched throughout their fabric. He burned through, snarling and heaving air, into the path of a hulking office chair Monster. It coughed up plumes of dust and spat screws the size of his fist while throwing knife rollers on the floor like caltrops. He juked and watched his feet with burning legs as he left Patty in the dust.

[Deliver the Pizza to the Customer - Time Remaining - 22:12]

The Dungeon felt massive, but Alex's feet took him through quickly as one could. If he hadn't been sprinting there would be no way to ever get through this maze of corporate deathtraps. The zen garden room snapped at his heels as he disturbed the manicured grass. A room dedicated to plaques of achievements opened traps beneath his feet that went all the way down to a very chipper paper shredder monster. He even almost fell for the old corporate credit cafeteria room before realizing that it would likely be full of polished silverware Monsters.

Running on fumes, Alex just knew he was getting closer to the end of the Dungeon. He went by instinct and guts, not relying on his GoCoin, since there wasn't a moment to be spared in the corporate hellscape he sprinted through. He had gotten his shiny, Patty was in the dust, likely crying and complaining over hushed tones to a colleague. The constant threat of losing to Francesca urged him on.

[Deliver the Pizza to the Customer - Time Remaining - 15:41]

Finally, after what felt like the longest Dungeon he had ever sprinted, he spotted the end. It had to be. Alex dashed across a purple marbled floor in a giant room filled with plastic plants. The lighting was less straining on the eyes, and there wasn't any Monsters around to disturb the wooden door that stood shut. What confused him though, was that it felt like he had sprinted through the entire Dungeon and hadn't spotted those thousand odd people that were supposed to be occupying it.

Where the hell are they?

He slowed his sprint to a walk and caught his breath for a moment. There was practically nothing left in his Core, and with the amount of siphoning happening in the Dungeon, he didn't anticipate the Boss would offer a quick way out. With all the weaving and traps he darted through, a nice happy exit couldn't be expected. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and knocked on the wooden door that read:

Scrum Lord Supreme – Richard Shaftwell

BANG. BANG. BANG.

"Pizza here! I got a pizza here for a Mr. Scrum Lord Supreme!" Alex yelled into the polished wood.

There was a scrambling in the room as someone coughed. Alex heard the same individual use a zipper before shuffling to the door. The handle twisted, and Alex prepared himself to be fantastic in the customer service department. Maybe that would win the Dungeon Boss over?

What Alex didn't expect was to burst out laughing when he finally laid his eyes on Richard Shaftwell, Scrum Lord Supreme and Silver Grade Dungeon Boss.

"You know," Scrum Lord said in an annoyed tone through the top of his head, which Alex supposed was his mouth. "It's really quite rude to laugh at the way people look. This is why I have a cameras off policy."

Scrum Lord Supreme, also known as Richard Shaftwall, was about Alex's height, and stood stiff and shiny in an ill-fitting expensive suit. His 'skin' was rubbery stiff, smooth, and glossy pink, and looked like it had been polished by machinery or a hand over the years. There was also a very large fake vein running all the way up to his head. Big blocky glasses perched high on his rounded 'head', with a bushy mustache glued onto his 'chin', trying to prove he was, in fact, a respectable professional and not a phallic object stuffed into a suit. His tie cinched and tugged over his blunt, curved form meant to hit the perfect pleasure zone. Oddly enough, tiny arms swung next to his phallic shape.

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