Moxyland

Toby

Digging through my laundry to find something relatively fresh and suitable for public consumption, I happen upon Jasmine’s scarf, which she left here after the raid last night. It smells like her, very faintly through the musty wool and the overwhelming notes of Fairtrade caramel butter, cos Jazz isn’t the kind of girl to wear perfume, but she’s not the great unwashed specimen of activist either, which I appreciate. I take a deep breath of that warm girly goodness, and then trash the thing. Hey, it’s not like she’s going to be coming back to get it.

I stagger over to my console, clip the Moxy chip into the game socket and, instantaneously, there are little blobby monsters bouncing around all over my projecta walls and singing. This, after all the sugar, and with the residue ache of being sucker-punched in the face, is a very bad thing, kids. My cheek has turned a bluish-yellow where that bastard Tendeka got me.

I reduce the display to just one wall, skip the jangle, choose the first character I’m offered (some furry blue thing with oversized paws – RomperStomp, special move the ShakerQuake) and connect to the gameworld along with the 1,487,763 other players currently online, 99% of whom are in the eight-to-twelve demographic. The remainder are like me, gatecrashers cashing in on the system, or maybe paedophiles looking to hook up. I suspect the former group may be the more evil of the two.

The trip connects, and RomperStomp shimmers into existence in some cheesy-ass neo-classical archway in a candy-coloured jungle, swampy pools burping oily bubbles that pop to release weird little flittering manta rays, and, in the distance, weird looming rock things like you’d get in Vietnam or somewhere, craggy columns with a thatch of greenery on top and a path of floating step blocks leading away. It’s vomitously cute.

I haven’t made it two steps from the entry portal, let alone figured out the fucking buttons, when three furry blobs land on top of me, all claws and teeth.

‘Shit! Wait!’ The wall blanks suddenly and Moxy fills the screen. Cos Moxy is always watching. He waves a stubby little paw in disapproval.

I’d forgotten the vocal interactions. I turn it off, no sense betraying my age by my voice, and click on the ‘I promise to behave’ button.

I respawn in the arch only to be immediately ambushed by the little bastards, who are clearly waiting for me.

I hit back, punching and kicking, but they’ve got more experience and there’re three of them. I’ve just got the hang of the Shaker-Quake, knocking Fluffoki off her feet and doing some serious damage when one of her little chums takes me out with a blow to the head, KO-ing me one time.

The screen blanks again.

This is Unathi’s revenge for the chicks dig.

When I call her for help, Lerato is the antithesis of sympathy, giggling so mega-hysterical, I’m sure she’s gonna pop a valve. Which would serve her right. ‘That’s a new record in lame, Toby,’ she says, when she manages to breathe again. But she cuts me some slack and saves my ass.

It takes genius girl a full minute and a half to circumvent the entrance portal where Fluffoki and Co. are waiting for me in ambush, rerouting home™’s IP address so it looks like I’m logging in from Melbourne with a whole new character. She’s done this before on my home™ sys back when we ordered those medical-grade biogen ‘shrooms from Thailand. It took three weeks to get the damn things with the bouncing around to fake addresses, but it was so worth it.

Anyway, thing is, spawning is random the first time you play, but once you touch down in the special hell that is Moxyland, whichever portal you emerge out of becomes your home base. You die, you go back there again and again and again, and if some psycho bratlings are waiting to maul you every time, it gets Sisyphean quick-quick.

I re-surface as an all-new character, a Popling Ludo, special move the Reverb Roar, in an allnew home base, this one pseudo-Halloween with creepy husks of trees and lumo moss that hangs off the branches like beards, miles away from that little bitch Fluffoki and her crew.

This time, I’m prepared for any juve delinquents who even think of jumping me. I ditch the greets and wade in bloody as soon as any new character makes an entrance, despite the shaky finger and more trite couplets from Moxy.

>>On your scorecard, here’s a blot, for playing mean; that sucks a lot.

Who writes this shit? And worse, gets financial remuneration for it? I need to get in on that game.

It takes four and a half hours to battle it out to level six, get to the sacred Maori hideout in the Waitomo caves and beat the pulp out of the guardian spirit, which resembles a giant cuddly platypus, until he surrenders the purple BlinkaStinka.

Trophy in paw, I invest another hour twenty backtracking to find my original spawn-in spot, and reduce Fluffoki and her little friendlings to so much dead flesh, although sorry to say, it being a kids’ game, they die in splatters of sparks rather than bloody gibs. Fluffoki does break out some very bad words, not entirely appropriate for an eight year-old girl.

And as a finishing touch, I put in a special request to Lerato to trace the little bastards’ user names and get them banned from the gamespace for violating protocol. The pretext for locking them out is killer.

Overage players.