My fingers. I can’t feel my fingers.

I can only watch them, suspended in perpetual motion, clicking plastic sticks violently. The controller is soaked in sweat. My eyes can only watch the buttons before long before they turn back to the screen. A purple dragon charges through a barrier. Monsters roar at him, dead eyes betraying no human emotion.

I burn them all.

Where is it where is it where is it I need to find those last gems. I have to get the perfect score. They’re all counting on me, every one. Every single prying eye they have been waiting they have been watching.

Watching my videos.

He is pleased. He sent me a message. It blinked, dead light in an ivory field. 1 NEW MESSAGE. Oh how I wept when I saw the sender. When I saw his name.

Simply Simon. The King of the Forum. The Founder. He ruled over his small section of the Realm, steely eyes narrowed in judgment as he beheld the fruits of his labors. For in the years past he forged my duty, my service, from the fires of inspiration and with divine blood he breathed life into that which would forge the cornerstone of my existence.

He turned to us, a game held in golden fire fingers. He spoke. What the weak would request, he simply suggested. Nay.

Demanded.

“Let us Play.”

And we, we puny mortals, we blood industries, we leaned in. We peered through the lens of madness.

We played.
*                                                                                *                                                                                               *
There were once many roving names, many vagrant vanguards. LP was a free-for-all, wild and untamed. The weak rose only once, before the battery fell upon them.  The vicious onslaught, a verbal volley, leveled even the most thick-headed miscreants. Impotent; the were crushed by the weight of their own incompetence, helped along by a blood-thirsty mod of sadistic purists who craved only a fresh morsel to sate their unyielding appetites.

As the blood of the weak trickled down the digital valleys of the forum, the Stars arose. The LP Super Stars. The names that echoed across the forums, that rang in chat rooms and instant messages, that were immortalized by the leeching Nerd-Ghouls of the sarcophagus metropolis Troperville. Binary edifices rose in their honor, these faceless sentinels who burdened themselves with the Founder’s craft, who took his inspiration and forged ahead, blazed a trail, concocted evolution in innovation in revolution—blessed be they! Blessed be who lit the way, who illuminated the pathway to enlightenment.

But I , I am but a shadow of their glory. I am the passable, the average, the unexciting but not unpleasant enterprise. My game is old, and many have LPed it before. It is a weak offering, but my effort, my vainglorious effort, the sweat I have dripped onto the creaking plastic keyboard has not gone unnoticed. Now that the Founder has smiled upon me, surely the path to glory shall be mine to walk. Surely I would be gifted the opportunity to serve in the Wars.

The Console Wars. What man would not yearn to be recorded as a hero, like the Chemist, whose crisp, informative style dismissed so many wide-eyed barbarians to the Pits of Obscurity, where they languished forevermore. Or the Southborn, who stood beside the Founder for ages and ages, and met his glorious end at the hands of the Utoob Mass, claiming many millions of lives before his final cries were silenced.

Big Friend Computer stopped them as best he could. He cut them off from their own weak, numerous broadcasts. Their LPs were disgusting things, rancid vats of disease that, nevertheless, consumed fair and honorable souls with their sheer vile appeal. The Founder detested them most of all—the Utoob war machines were called abominations.

A task force was created. The very same force that I hope to one day be invited into, the unbreakable fist of LP. Its General is known to be as hard as Iron, a chiseled façade carved into still dripping metal. Behind him stand the Oblivion Meat, the Shadowed Subconscious, Proteus, and Karoz, the Science King.

They are the champions of the realm. In the haze of war, they led onwards, crushing the weak LPs, keeping the barbarous masses of the Netrealm from overtaking us all. We built this sanctuary of learned madness, and in its bastion we paid our dues and bled sacrifice for the privilege of our status. Now, when only grotesquerie looms at every barrier, with the Fanboy Scourge and the Corporate Council gathering up every errant Netgang and Webzone, we are the only ones who can stand vigilant. The only ones who can oppose the control, the slave chains that would choke yet the very soul that we fought so hard to birth.

We are the champions of the Internet.

I sit in the dark sanctum of my lair, the hum of CPU’s playing concert to my mythmaking. As I sit here, carving legend into the annals of Netrealm history, my name will ring throughout the hallowed halls of immortality. I will be remembered, one day, one day soon, I will be marked for greatness, and all the e-fame will be mine. All of it. For I am-

Oh shit my mom’s calling me I g2g.