(See the end of the chapter for more notes .)

It is with a heavy heart, I announce a hiatus to Society. Will Society update again? Probably at some point, but I'm not working on it for the short-term future at the moment.

Chapter Text

“Norman, don’t blow it on your first mission,” said Cyla. I don’t know how to say this lightly, but if you fail- you’ll be mocked by the entire organization.

“I know,” I spoke with a sense of false bravado.

The last two days I had done nothing but train. We were attacking a Citchadel facility center. The entire complex was filled with top of the line security, one missed step and we would suffer fates worse than death.

Nobody knew that much about the Citchadel facilities. The type of horror stories that the occasional prisoner told if they escaped turned the stomachs of gamers across the globe. Even then, there weren’t that many stories to tell. As far as I knew, nobody had managed to pull off a successful escape in decades.

During the time before the mission, I had bonded with some of the others. They were all broken people. Years of riots, biological experimentation and violence had broken down most hope that anyone initially seemed to foster when they first picked up that controller.

The ones who had all of their sanity intact? They were the scariest of us all.

Cyla and I had bordered the hovering jet. It was outfitted to fit a small building worth of people, a large upgrade from the initial capacity size. The inside held various weapons, modded to be more deadly than your average black market equipment.

I saw a weapon that sparked my interest. An NES Zapper! It looked a little different then it’s the first rendition, bearing a contractible switchblade at the barrel of the gun. I picked it up and hooked it onto the side of my belt.

Avery had just finished making my new outfit, a protective ‘clown’ themed garb stylized with a black coat of paint. The costume was a metaphorical middle finger to the Citchadel, mocking their attempts to silence my fellow gamers. I’d chosen the code name ‘Jester’ to bring this persona to life. I didn’t want the Citchadel to trace my real identity to the Society of Gamers.

Some of the people I was working with had their identities leaked, causing the Citchadel to go after their friends and families. The Citchadel could never be too cautious when it came to gamers. Others had acted as their gaming personas for so long, that any person under the mask had been long gone.

I sat on the row of benches, right next to some other gamers. They were all wearing protective armor, designed with gamer memorabilia. Some of the more notable members had different designs like Dew and Kuro. A perk for being an old member of the organization. I was happy that Avery agreed with me that I needed a unique style of dress, with my gaming prowess I needed something to stand out from the crowd. You think I’m your average nerd down the block?

The plane flung through the sky at a breakneck pace, with clouds disintegrating as we charged through the horizon. Eventually, we came to a halting spot, and a cautious descend into the world below.

We had arrived inside Chadopolis.

Our pilot had the right idea to stop the plane outside of the general chad domain. Our collective unit emerged and stepped onto this off beaten road, only a stone's throw away from the Citchadel facility.

Weapons were being passed around, gaming strategy guides slipped into trench coat pocket, and energizing drinks were being slurped down.

Looking next to me I saw Dew panting, in the middle of the long-grassed pathway next to the road. Cans littered around him as he got more and more reckless. I saw a glint in his eye. He wasn’t messing around. I feared his leadership of this mission, it was almost certainly going to be a disaster.

“Listen up CHUMPS,” He cackled maniacally. I had never seen someone cackle in such a ridiculously cartoon manner.

“This mission is on MY orders, I’m leading this. Not Cyla, not Kuro, and NOT Jester,” he announced to the crowd, with the last remark being briefly snarled in my direction. “I’ve been working in the Society of Gamers for years, the upper management never let me have leadership until now. Those cowards FEARED that I would undermine all their expert strategy guides and walkthroughs. Don’t give me that fucking bullshit. Any gamer who relies on outside help is a disgrace”.

“I never wanted this day to transpire,” Kuro muttered at my left side.

“If everything is clear about my leadership, let’s go destroy this pathetic excuse of a facility, and regain MY city”.

Murmurs were heard from the group, not wanting to speak too loud in fear of getting overheard by Dew. I couldn’t exactly say that Dew had that natural leading charisms, the type that festered in the majority of Chads.

Our group approached the building. It stood at a colossal size, in the middle of the lonely field that we all were positioned in. The complex balanced the ratio between a horrifying ward and a cookie cutter corporation.

“I think we’re over our heads on this,” a fellow gamer whispered to me.

“Nonsense,” Dew snarled. “They’ve never seen me at my peak skill. Those cowards will shake in their fucking boots”.

Calling the Chads cowards? Pretty bold.

Cyla approached the rest of the team, where she had been following a little ways behind, lost in thought.

“I’m glad we’re doing a stealth plan for a change, too many gamers are killed by reckless behavior because of their fragile egos. Trying to act as if they have something to prove to the world,” she said with a sigh.

“This mission will be a success, guarantee it,” I said, though I wasn’t so sure of the validity of the statement.

Dew slipped a contraption out of his backpack. A futuristic-looking contraption, probably conceived of by Avery and built by the team of virgins back at the SOG.

Dew flung it at the wall of the building, and it latched on to it, with a sense of stretchy elasticity. The ooze around the device was spreading over the entire wall before it went static.

“GET BACK!,” Dew shouted at us.

With the split-second warning we tried getting out of the way, but the bomb exploded way too close to us.

I closed my eyes, before opening them to the sound of Dew heartily laughing.

“You losers actually thought it was going to have a massive detonation, but it was an extremely controlled explosion. You think I’m so much of an idiot that I’d off myself?” he said dying of laughter.

Hilarious.

“Ignore Dew’s antics, we gotta focus,” Cyla said to me.

Right, couldn’t let a toxic gamer like him disrupt our mission. There was a lot at stake here, I wasn’t going to let some asshole wreck it for the rest of us.

Our squad moved into the building, from the gaping hole in the side, with small pieces of charcoal floating around the air. A gamer walking at the back of the group erupted into a coughing fit, as his buddy tried to silence him, but slugging him in the face.

This was supposed to be a stealth mission, but after Dew’s ear-piercing screams, I was surprised that we hadn’t been pounded into the pavement by the security chads.

The sight that emerged for us was like nothing that I had never seen before. Gone was the usual dingy looking hallways and decor, the pathways in this place were straight out of a nightmare riffic exaggerated horror film. I almost questioned the lack of a maniac doctor walking around in a massive lab coat, with an assortment of peculiar vials spilling out of his pockets.

The bright white blinded a couple of the more introverted of us in the team, before they finally seemed to adjust to the translucent walls, and sterile environment that we had found ourselves in.

Dew with a triumphant sense of swagger, stomped violently through the pathway. He gestured with his hand, beckoning us to come to him. The rest of us followed through the newly made pathway, to explore this strange and mysterious facility.

I tried to ignore the bickering from some of the more immature members of the team. This was no time for such jovial manners, we were in the dragons den.

On the sides of the walkway, translucent holographic screens, of standard, nondescript notoriety, covering up whatever loomed in the connected rooms to the main corridor. Seemed like they required some sort of gateway that requires top-level security clearance to enter the area.

Our group continued to journey through the hallway before moving up the expansive staircase that was waiting at the end of the hallway. Each step that we stepped on glistened with a pearly white texture, that dispersed upon a touch of our feet. We paused for a split second to note this abnormality, but when we did, well, everything went wrong.

The entire complex as far as we could see at least started flashing blinding shades of reds violently at every direction, blinking louder and faster with the corresponding wailing siren that bellowed in the background.

I saw my teammates reaching to cover their ears before something unexpected happened.

The staircase opened up, revealing a vast, haunting fall to the unseeable depths below. A sizeable amount of our squad dropped down through the trap, as they tried to scramble towards the top of the stairwell.

I ran towards the top as my footing was lost with the disappearance of the steps. I closed my eyes and flung myself forwards the top.

My outreached hand found a grasp as I hanged over the looming pit, inches away from an unfortunate demise.

Cyla had caught my hand at the top of the stairwell. I was saved! She pulled me up, and we both collapsed into a sweaty, exhausted pile of relief.

“T-that was a c-close one,” she panted at me.

“Y-yeah, but what about all the gamers who didn’t make it?,” I managed to say between gasps of air, as I stood at the edge of the horrifying, ginormous trap door.

Dew stood at the top, looking a little shaken at the loss of our brothers in arms.

“Listen up y'all, I know we might’ve suffered a mighty blow to our gaming spirits, but the plan ain’t foiled yet. All we have to do is get that flash drive to the Chad’s main system, activate it, and scram,” He said, looking a little less confident then the attempted morally uplifting speech, had portrayed.

He quickly snapped out of his rut and guzzled some kind of beverage that was attached to his belt. Connected were multiple cans of different types and colors, all hanging onto the top of the line material that protected him from harm by any stray bullets.

He bellowed a massive burp before casting the can aside, chucking it into the pit below, to fall to its unfortunate fate below.

We trudged onwards.

Going down the path we saw more angelic looking white walls, littering this maze of a complex. The red glowing from whatever kind of security system and its corresponding noise seemed to have died down from where we were at the time.

“We have to take down a Chad,” Dew spoke to us.

Everyone froze.

“B-but, D-dew-,” a gamer was cut off.

“THIS is the only way, we need a passcode to enter the locked parts of the complex. As much as we brag about our hacking ability in SOG, at the end of the day, you can’t bypass chad systems. It’s impossible. While this will be unpleasant, hard, and terrifying for the weaker members of our squad, everyone has to show their merit. Especially those who are newer members to our squad,” he finished the speech glaring in my direction.

I eternally sighed.

The conversation was shut off by Cyla stopping the rest of us.

“I’m getting a read on the scanners, a chad is approaching”.

Everyone froze.

Down the hall, there was a faint humming in the air. Steps shifted in the ground at his sheer mass. He lurched forward to the rest of our squad, panting and out of breath. Next to him walked his assistant, a captured virgin. He stood behind the chad cowering in fear of him.

“T-the g-g-gamers are over there, Officer V-Vlad.

“EXCELLENT,” his booming voice slurred the word.“You gamers, well, you’ve fought long and hard to get to this moment. What are you going to do now? Fight me?” Why, I haven’t been humored like this, since our very own Captain Tad captured an entire lot of you people.

Dew trudged forward, walking past our entire team, that was cowering in fear.

His expression was confident and cocky. He walked all the way to Vlad and spat on the floor.

"Y'all should've stayed in your gross little man cave", roared Vlad the Mad Lad Chad. "Like the little disgusting basement dwellers you are."

All of a sudden, Vlad's head was struck by a stray energy drink, thrown by Dew. The can exploded with fluorescent green liquid shooting out all over the place, covering Vlad in the drink. He turned to the perpetrating gamer, having not budged an inch.

"Care to explain what the fuck kinda stunt you just tried to pull, you worm?" roared the big bad Chad, as he lifted his opposition by the neck.

"Do you know what concentrated Gamer Fuel does to the body?" retorted Dew without missing a beat.

"That doesn't answer my-"

As if on cue, the Mountain Dew had melted through the flesh and bones holding the once giant man together. In a matter of seconds, and without so much as a scream, all that laid upon the ground was a puddle of blood and energy drink. Nothing else remained of Vlad.

"Gamers rise up, bitch."

We all stood in stunned silence.

Eventually, Proc, a well-respected member among the team spoke up.

“Where the hell did you get that kinda tech, Dew”

“Heh, you thought my little visit to Avery the other day was nothing,” he said in myself and Kuro’s direction. “ I’d been working with her for weeks to mod my energy drinks, give them a more, deadly edge. Now every one of those drinks can be drunk safely by us gamers, but Chads? It counters their biology perfectly,” he said with a jovial laugh.

Proc wandered over to the unpleasant sight of Vlad. Inside a slot in Vlad’s armor, Proc emerged holding something.

Security Clearance.

Cheers went out from our squad. It wasn’t every day that a Chad was taken out. This was an occasion to remember.

Amidst the cheers and celebration, Cyla spoke. “I think we’re forgetting someone,” she murmured.

Our attention snapped to the young man standing next to Vlad. He stood in frozen fear, not moving a muscle.

Proc dashed across the floor of the complex, pinning the youth to the side of the wall.

“Where is the main system located, tell us now, and we’ll let you go, without a hair on your head missing,” he spoke quietly, but still firm.

“It's just d-d-down the corridor and to the l-left. Y-you c-can’t miss it”.

Proc unpinned him, letting the poor soul breath a sigh of relief.

“B-but n-not e-everything down that way is o-ok. You need to l-leave, while you still have the chance,” he pleaded.

“No can do,” Dew walked next to Proc, stopping beside him. “We came here to take out these Chads, can’t be a loser like you, and cower in fear of their leadership forever.”

“Forgetting the mission already Dew,” Proc said with a tired look.

“Nah, just not being a weak beta,” Dew changed his expression, snarling towards the pair's direction. “Any case wimp, you should scram. Let us gamers take care of the Chads. Know your place”.

The virgin trudged his way to the opposite route that we were taking and left without some much as a farewell.

Our group now bearing the Chad security pass, walked next to the giant door at the location we were told.

The door was shaped like a giant man's face, in a two-dimensional format. He had comical hair that looked like a cone-shaped object, and a jawline so strong, it could break a controller in half.

Proc walked up to the face and inserted the card. The ‘Chad’ like face swallowed the card whole and started making a sequence of strange, mechanical noises, before opening up to the sight that the inside held.

Rows, upon rows of jail cells, lined the interior of the building. Inside the cages were infants inserted in cubicles, some playing in a type of play area. One giant baby lurched forward off the slide, that he rode, knocking into a small shriveled looking infant, knocking him to the ground. The baby started beating its chest manically as the baby on the bottom cried, limping around the floor.

The closer we looked, there appeared to be some sort of divide between the babies. The shriveled, disgusting looking, black-haired ones, and the pudgy, big blond babies.

Our mouths were agape. Could this be how they tested if children were virgins, or if they were Chads?

Proc passed the rows of cubicles containing the infants arriving at the end of the corridor. He opened up the door at the end, revealing the main computer set up of the Chad’s.

The rest of us exchanged worried glances at each other, before remembering our mission. To stop the Chads. As much as I wanted to try and crack the mystery behind the children, now was not the time.

Proc approached the computer that was waiting inside. The monitors flashed strange texts that I couldn’t decipher and lots of techno jargon.

Dew snatched the flash drive out of Proc’s hand and stuffed it into his own grubby paw.

Cyla screamed at Dew to stop what he was doing.

“My scanners got a read on Captain TAD. He’s coming right NOW!”

Everyone halted, and Dew dropped the flash drive on the floor.

“Damn it at to hell, I take out an Officer, and now we have to deal with a Captain as well. Thank fucking tastic,” as he stomped madly on the floor.

Dew seemed to keep his cool around the previous Chad, but he was slowly losing his patience.

Captain Tad stomped into the massive room that we were located in, passing the infants and cells that lined the previous area.

“Well, well, well. What do we have here? A nice juicy pack of gamers. Fresh meat to be vaporized by my banhammer,” he twirled the hammer through his massive hands, before pausing in the air, pointing it at us.

“Game on, motherfucker,” Dew laughed and pelted Captain Tad with more of his drinks.

The power suit that Tad wore didn’t seem to offer enough protection against them, with the side of his robotic, armored hand, starting to burn.

“It even affects, your little armor too, punk,” Dew laughed.

Dew’s fake bravdo was shattered just a moment later.

Tad started roaring like a ferocious lion, exploding the rest of the oncoming drinks, with a parry of his banhammer.

Dew’s jaw dropped.

Tad’s screams became so ear piercing that some of our squad, started covering their ears, to protect themselves from the strain.

Tad exploded three gamers to my left, their own protective gear not helping them against the mighty blows of the banhammer.

They simply disintegrated. Not even the clothes remained.

The ban hammer started glowing with increasing frequency, blinding lights span around the white complex, making people drop in its mere presence.

It glowed red, then blue, then white. Dust in the air was being vaporized when it touched the hammer, causing some sort of air pocket around the entire thing.

Tad’s meaty face beamed with psychotic excitement, his face turning red, as the sweat ran down his cheeks.

“Oh, you gamers. You NEVER learn”.

I thought of my old gaming buddies. The ones that the Citchadel made ‘disappear’. Determination ran in my veins, as I charged Tad, grabbing my NES zapper, jumping in the air and spamming the entire ammo of the weapon.

Tad was sent flying back, crashing into the walls, toppling them over in the process.

Fiery sparks of dust and wood chipped around the building, as Tad jumped to his feet, roaring, once more, and charging us as if was he was a human battering ram.

He crushed four gamers in front of me, sending them in a collapsed pile of gamer goo.

He locked eyes with me, who was cowering in fear behind my protective mask. He picked up two gamers and threw them at me. I tried dodging the human bullets, like I was a character from one of the banned futuristic films, making it out of the danger in the nick of time.

Kuro popped up behind Tad, and slashed the Hammer out of his hands, making Tad lose his massive hand in the process. Tad screamed out in pain.

This was our chance.

I ran past everyone, snapped up the flashdrive, and flung myself into a stumbling mess in the monitor's direction. I inserted it into the computer, as the system beeped, receiving the input of the device.

The Mystical Clowns appeared on screen once more, dancing across the screen. The plan was to steal some of the tech and return to the Society of Gamers. Fat chance that would be working out now.

I pressed play on the game and everything stopped.

I was blasted backward, with the flashdrive exploding out of the device in a flash of green light. My entire body started shaking. I couldn’t control my movements at all. My body sprawled on the floor, with my muscles spazzing out, as I prayed that Tad wouldn’t spot me in such a vulnerable position.

Well shit.

He noticed what was happening on the monitor, and with a flash of realization in his eyes, he charged forward, weaponless, at me.

His giant hand collided with something. Kuro protected me with a block of his katana, as Dew was flinging energy drinks madly in every direction, trying to stop Tad’s fast movements.

Tad towered over the pair of us, as we cowered in fear. Kuro crumpled onto his knee, Tad’s remaining armored hand was just too strong.

Tad stopped suddenly. He reached into his pocket and brought out a device. A remote of some kind. He pressed the big, comical, red button on it, causing the entire complex to lurch.

Half the floor of the room lurched, dropping down to the abyss below. A good chunk of gamers spiraled down into the depths below, as I and Kuro peered over the edge. Tad stood on our side of the building, grinning at us. He thought he had won. As far as I was concerned, he was right.

“K-kuro, I spat out. Put the flash drive in my pocket. P-please,” I whispered to him, my body still in an unusable state.

Kuro quickly stuffed it into my pocket, as we both shivered in fear. We knew what would happen next.

A last battalion of gamers came to our rescue, led by Cyla. They hit Tad with everything they had, but it was not enough. Tad walked forward, using his only hand to pick up gamers and chuck them into the gaping hole.

One gamer after another was thrown into the expansive gap, until it was finally just me, Kuro, and Cyla. Tad snarled at us, bearing his white gleaming fangs, that some would call teeth. He picked up Cyla and violently chucked her into the expanse.

“CYLA!,” I screamed as she fell down into the depths.

“Now even your pathetic little gamer girlfriend is gone,” Tad snarled at me. You think you two can do anything to stop me now?”

I looked around, it was just the two of us left. Even Dew wasn’t here, going out in a raging furry, chucking energy drinks everywhere, as the green liquid stained the walls dripping down.

“Go”.

I looked at Kuro.

“I can buy you time. You do like her right? Go, save her”.

I crawled across the floor, towards the gaping hole, my body still recovering from the earlier incident.

“WHERE DO YOU THINK YOUR GOING!,” Tad screamed at me. “YOU THINK A PUNK as YOU CAN SURVIVE DOWN THERE. DON’T MAKE ME FUCKING LAUGH!”.

Kuro slid across the floor, his cargo shorts getting stained with the green energy drink in the process.

He blocked the onslaught of blows that Tad aimed at me, protecting me from an unfortunate fate with his katana.

Did he really want me to do this?

I looked at Kuro, and as if he read my mind, with his other hand he removed his fedora, tipping it in my direction.

I nodded back.

I was going to do this.

I crawled to the edge of the hole, and dropped in, as the air whirred past my ears, the darkness devouring me whole, as I dropped to my uncertain fate.