The King of Superiority Complex

It’s true that no one liked him. It’s true that his always-contrarian attitude landed him in a heap of trouble. It’s true that he visited McDonald’s more often than one should. It’s true that he had never contributed anything to the society he lived in. It’s true that the only accomplishment of his life was becoming a level 80 warlock in WoW, but dammit, Andy was a winner!

To hell with what his classmates said about him, to hell with his parents’ constant whining that he couldn’t live with them indefinitely, and to hell with the Department of Sanitation, who told him that his room wasn’t fit for human habitation.

Andy was a fucking hero! He was a god! He was the God! He was the center of the universe, and all the clowns trotting about in their big clown shoes were his humble servants. They were his to rule over, and they just didn’t know it yet. He was a vengeful god too, as you may have noticed, and one golden day, Andy would turn his heavenly magnifying glass on all those who had ever wronged him.

Playing his video games, ruining the fun of others by attacking and trolling them, was just practice for when the time came where he’d be able to get back at his surroundings. When traversing the magical world of binary code, Andy would always seize an opportunity to pick out some random noob and tell the kid to hang himself, and he would continue to do this until some admin showed up. He was a badass, no matter what his contemporaries thought of him, and no force on Earth could convince Andy otherwise.

One Tuesday night, while watching his favorite anime with his pants down, Andy saw that the computer began to glitch. I haven’t even pirated any games today, Andy thought, wondering what could then have been the cause of his PC’s malfunctioning. Perhaps it was a virus, he considered, and it that case, Andy would have to use his elite hacking skills (by looking up the problem on Google, then downloading a proper patch).

To the dismay of our lovely protagonist, the browser wouldn’t open. Damn Internet Explorer, Andy thought, frustrated that technology wouldn’t abide him. How dare the computer not obey its supreme leader? His parents had paid a lot of money for it, so it had better work one hundred percent objectively perfectly in any situation.

Well, it didn’t. Quite against Andy’s expectations, letters now appeared on the screen, forming sentences. Andy wasn’t afraid of anything, and the warm stream running down his legs was nothing but pure surplus testosterone oozing out of his macho groin. He saw the words flickering right in front him, barely able to read their message:

“1 H34RT U, ANDY.

W4NT M4K3 U SM1T3 F00LS.

P0W3R T1LL 3ND T1M3.

U R G0D.

S1GN3D, L10N31R.”

Then the screen cut off, and Andy sat there for a while, contemplating what the hell he had just read. When Andy turned the PC back on, it worked just fine. Better than fine, actually. The computer was faster than ever before, loading pages in a billionth of a second. He tried downloading the latest JRPG game, and not only wasn’t the torrent a virus, but the downloading took a grand total of 0,000001 seconds. Andy was also surprised to find that, despite having never played the game before, he managed to make his way through it as though he was an MLG. He even got all the achievements – on the first playthrough!

Andy went to bed that night, feeling like the champ that he totally was.

He woke up to his favorite weather: intense rain, pouring down and flooding the streets, thunder roaring in the skies above. Outside of his window, he saw his neighbors and their stupid dog being pulled away by the current, and Andy pointed his finger at them, laughing like a benevolent emperor of creation.

Andy’s father knocked on his door, but it was only to tell him that he could stay under their roof for as long as he pleased. His mother had even made him waffles, drowned in syrup and with a pack of butter melting on top of the huge stack. Andy ate them all in matter of minutes, then he went outside, seeing that a luxury cruiser was resting quietly on the flood, waiting for its brave captain to take command and head out for great adventures.

Like a true boss, Andy made it to school and headed for the social studies class, ready to share some of his controversial political opinions. He had always loved thinking outside of the box and being out of his mind, and this opportunity to make the other students see him as a loose cannon wouldn’t go to waste! They were discussing World War II, and Andy let it be known that he thought Hitler was a savior, and that the Jews were nothing but rich bastards, shoving their wealth in other people’s faces. To Andy’s surprise, everyone in class applauded him for “having said what no one else had the guts to.”

During lunch break, all the douches that had picked on him in the past came over to apologize to Andy, saying that they only did it because they were madly in love with him and wanted his attention. All the girls Andy had ever had a crush on came over to confess as well, and thank goodness none of them minded being in a relationship with no strings attached. The almighty Andy now had his own harem of courtesans – right there at his school!

When mathematics class came around, Andy found to his great surprise that he could solve even the most advanced equations, like (2:4) ∙ x + 7 = 23, and his teacher was absolutely stunned that a 20-year-old could solve such complex arithmetic. Andy then got up from his chair and protested that these things are even taught in school, as they serve no practical purpose, and the teacher completely agreed with him that math was just a stupid waste of time.

After an awesome day at school, it was time for the ultra-popular Andy to head back home, so that he could play some games, watch some funny videos of kittens on the internet, and then head off to bed. However, as he got on the cruiser and set sails, he saw a strange figure emerging from the flood, crawling its way onto the deck. It was a man, but not quite.

Water dribbled off his long, slender shape that seemed humanly impossible, and the blackish-grey skin merged with the darkness engulfing the area. His eyes were a brilliant blue, and they were fixed directly on Andy, their astonishing beauty making Andy question his sexuality for a brief while. The locks of white hair cascaded down the sensual curves of the man’s shoulders, making him seem delicate and benign.

For some odd reason, Andy felt like he had seen this man before, but that simply couldn’t be the case, or could it? Maybe the man was a cosplayer that Andy had met at a convention? The god of all there was simply couldn’t put his finger on it.

The handsome man got on one knee in front of Andy and presented himself: “Supreme god of all there is! I am thy humble servant, Lioneir. I see thou hast done well with the power I bestowed upon thee. This land of the wicked, of the unfair and illogical, is more refined now. The evils that govern with iron fists and feeble minds have had to see their strength reduced to a size insignificant when juxtaposed with thy unfathomable greatness, Andy.”

At this, the almighty Andy had no response, and the god of everything merely stood there in the rain, eyeing this strange fellow. Andy scratched his holy ass, unsure of what to say, hoping the cosplayer would elaborate, and he did: “I have travelled through time and space, milord, journeying from a realm of mankind’s wildest dreams. My quest has been to search for a proper deity to rule supreme in my homeland, one who can lead the drow to success in any battle, and who can make every coming harvest greater than the one before it. I chose thee for this task, Andy!”

A drow is like a dark elf or something, right? Andy thought, and it was true. This strange fellow was a mythical creature from a fantasy world, like the ones Andy would always fantasize about living in. He imagined there would be all kinds of wonderful cities and dungeons, with magic present even in the smallest crevice, and so many sexy elfish women to entertain himself with. Perhaps they even had hobbits. No more World of Warcraft, no more League of Legends, I can be a real warlock now, one of unlimited power!

“Should thou be willing to take the mantle of drow overlord, I can take thee through the void between worlds straight away,” promised Lioneir. “With a world of endless opportunities awaiting thee, this very planet pales in comparison, thou will find. There will be no reason to return here, I believe thou will learn. Dost thou agree to leave this dull place in a favor of a wondrous realm?”

Was that supposed to be a question? Andy thought, for to him it was a no-brainer. He nodded in agreement and stepped towards Lioneir, ready to leave this boring world in favor of a new, grander one. Lioneir raised the back of his hand to his face, seeming as though he was coughing or giggling, and then he chanted the words of some archaic language, causing a shiny, opalescent portal to open. He gestured towards it, this vivid mirror of astonishing beauty.

At first, Andy reached his hand out to touch the portal, then he stepped through the light, arriving in a small, rural village under a bright blue sky. All around him were ordinary people in ragged clothing, soaked from the sweat of hard labor.

No drows were in sight, but merely peasants, and they all turned their heads to look at the newcomer, their dirty faces displaying first smiles, then broad grins, and Andy thought it was because they were happy to see their new, glorious god.

Andy didn’t understand why he had been sent to this village and not some enormous, golden castle, though. He turned around to ask Lioneir, but the drow hadn’t come with him, and the portal was gone.

There was no throne waiting for the moronic sack of shit, no kingdom, no power, and no attractive fantasy women. Andy, idiot as he was, had let himself be suckered into abandoning the only world in which he had relative freedom, and as he now spent his days as one of the many peasants, bound by chains of programming code, he cried intensely – or would have, if that was even possible.

Andy was unable to do anything but that which the unknowing developers had allowed for him to do, which is to say not very much at all. He could only plant seeds, harvest, and spew one-liners when spoken to by a human player.

When the noobs went online, they would often go on a rampage, killing all the NPC peasants for mere sport, and Andy felt such excruciating pain every time someone shot a fireball at him or rammed a bronze dagger up his ass. The game wouldn’t even allow him to enjoy to the bliss of death, and he was trapped in an endless cycle of dying and respawning.

Occasionally, a new peasant would appear in the village, and although Andy couldn’t communicate with him or her, he knew it was someone who had shared the same fate as himself – trapped in a shitty MMORPG.

To pass the time, all he could do was think back on the short while that he’d been a god, and upon doing so, the gap between omnipotence and impotence would seem clearer to Andy than to anyone else in the entire world…

…well, maybe except for Lioneir, the drow deity of trickery, who was no doubt out there in the real world right now, seeking to claim the soul of another foolish, deluded human.