Mini-Grand 5104 (Game Complete)

Originally posted on MSPA by Pick Yer Poison.

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Manfred Keklovitch raised his stamp dramatically, then brought it down with the fury of the heavens onto the form in front of him. It made a quiet thump sound as it marked the form invalid. To Manfred's disappointment, it was still the same quiet thump that it always was. It was weak and wimpy no matter how he imagined it. The time he had come closest to making it sound impressive had been when he'd made it a blacksmith's hammer, forging a sword that would overthrow tyrants and win wars. Manfred, of course, was the blacksmith in that instance. He had to be; after all, someone needed to swing the hammer, and he was already holding it. He moved the form in front of him into his outbox and pulled another paper from the inbox's stack. He glanced over it, more going through the motion of reading it than actually doing so, then lifted his stamp again.

Thump. No one ever brought anything that was actually valid down to his office, so Manfred rarely bothered to read them. Sometimes he resolved to re-evaluate his method, since it had been a few years since he'd decided he was never going to get something that wasn't invalid. He'd then check a few of the forms, give up, and go back to simply stamping them and dumping them in the outbox. He figured it wasn't the best way to do things, but since it was a good deal better than neither reading nor stamping them before putting them in the outbox, it was at least 50% better than the next worse option. He swapped out the current form and raised his stamp again.

Thump. He hated that noise, the one the stamp made whenever it declared a form not fit for survival. It reminded him that he was stamping papers. He'd known people who had become astronauts, war heroes, doctors...and here he was, stuck on the lowest rung of the food chain in a company that he just knew had way more interesting jobs. He pulled a new form out of the inbox and raised his stamp. It could always be worse, he mused. At least he wasn't the janitor.

CRASH! The cheap plaster wall of Manfred's office burst open and Agent 7 flew through. He hit the opposite wall and flashed red. After he picked himself up, a strange tank appeared on his back, connected to a nozzle that appeared just as abruptly in his hands. He pulled the handle on the nozzle and a blue mist shot out of it just in time to make contact with the elephant that charged through after him. Its front began freezing over, causing it to back away, snorting. "I'm putting you on ice," Agent 7snarled.

The elephant apparently did not approve of this one-liner, and charged again. Agent 7 fired the freeze beam again, but the elephant charged heedlessly through the frigid mist, crushing Agent 7's last health out against the wall of Manfred's office. It let out a rather unimpressive trumpet from its frozen trunk, then trundled back through the whole it had made in the wall, leaving Manfred to look at Agent 7's dead body, his stamp still clutched uselessly in his hand.

It took The Player a few seconds before he was able to form a coherent sentence. "WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT HORSESHIT!?" he demanded of no one in particular, still trying to make sense of the Game Over screen. "Since when is an elephant stampede a hazard? I've never even seen one of those in the game before!" He hit a button and returned to the main menu. He navigated to the LOAD GAME screen and resumed from the last checkpoint, which was just before Agent 7 had gone into that weird battle to the death. He played up to the point where he had been abducted, then stared at the screen in confusion as nothing out of the ordinary happened. It began to dawn on him that whatever had happened was definitely not supposed to have happened, and definitely wasn't going to happen again.

The Player jumped at the sudden banging on his front door. "Open up!" someone shouted from outside. "This is the Multiuniversal Police! We're here to arrest you for having unknowingly participated in an illegal Grand Battle!"

The Player had no idea what a Grand Battle was, and he'd sure as hell never heard of the Multiuniversal Police, so he decided it was one of his friend's infamous pranks. "John? Is that you? What the hell are you doing? I thought you weren't coming back to get your game until next week!"

Some bustling outside was quickly followed by a series of loud THUMPs, after which a police-issue battering ram knocked down The Player's door and three cops filed in. One of them stepped forward. "You're under arrest for illegal unintentional participation in a Grand Battle. Your name will be going on record as--"

The cop's sentence was drowned out by the sound of a police-issue brick crashing through The Player's window, followed by three more police officers clambering in through it.

"--you say can and will be held against you." The officer turned to the group of five that had clumped together. "Bag him, boys." They nodded and moved in towards The Player, who had a horrified expression on his face. They handcuffed him and led him out of the house. Two minutes later, a third squad came down the stairs, having finally finished prying the attic door open with a crowbar. Seeing that everyone had left but still determined to make themselves useful, they looted The Player's game console, throw pillows, and silverware, then rushed off after the other squads.