[Writing Prompt] – Like The Seventh Seal, people can challenge Death to a game to earn more time. Nowadays people tend to challenge Death to play video games, which Death absolutely sucks at
Death Is A NOOB
“Shit, not again.”
Not a single kill. Yet another pre-teen whelp had washed the floor with Death.
The haughty little turd was sipping a bubble tea without a care in the world. He hadn’t even broken a sweat this time. This was the third challenge to Death and the third time he had won himself another year’s respite.
Fuck Ingmar Bergman, Death thought to itself, as it did every-time it lost one of these matches, which was happening more and more frequently. Before The Seventh Seal was released, the gamesmanship rule was a little known exception, a novelty instituted by Death thousands of years earlier to make a repetitive job just a tiny bit less boring.
Back then Death looked forward to the challenges. It was not a publicly shared rule and very few people ever asked about it.
But more importantly, there were only so many games available to chose from, and they were all what Death fondly considered Games of Wisdom.
In the beginning it was all Go or obscure Roman and Greek board games, and eventually chess. Death was great at those kinds of games, and part of the reason no one knew about the rule was because almost no one ever won.
But then that damned movie came out and since then every other schmuck thought he might beat Death. The rules were unspoken but firm, no games of chance, and only one “round” of the game, however that might be defined.
Luckily, in the late fifties and sixties, most games were still analog. But things started changing in the seventies. Suddenly people started to challenge Death to a game called Pong. Death was honor bound to oblige them as it was definitely not a game of chance.
Unfortunately for Death, It sucked at Pong. Pong was all about response speed, something Death absolutely never needed, for countless millions of years. Death’s hands were made of un-ligamented bones for Christ sake. Death didn’t need to act fast, it was used to being inevitable.
Those first few games of Pong were the first challenges Death had ever lost. Suddenly word started getting around that there was a foolproof method of beating Death, and the number of Pong challenges skyrocketed.
Luckily, Pong was not a particularly difficult, nor particularly complex game, and soon Death’s atrophied fingers had limbered up and he was able to take back a decent win/loss ratio. It was no where near 100%, but it was close enough to dissuade people from issuing knee-jerk challenges.
Unfortunately, things did not get better from there. With every new generation of video game, the challenges to Death’s authority increased exponentially.
Pac-Man was the big game changer. The first ten thousand games were a total bust. Death couldn’t avoid those damned ghosts. The problem became so serious that Death had to take a hiatus, the miracle of 82 they called it, when three months went by without a single fatality.
During that time Death memorized the perfect strategy for defeating Pac Man, and when he returned, not a single challenger defeated him ever again.
But the games kept evolving, more and more games, and for each new game Death had to become proficient. By the early 90s Death was probably the most talented video gamer in the world.
Right when Death thought he had a handle on things, the shift to three dimensional graphics occurred, and it just messed with Death’s head. Death had gotten so used to the two dimensional gaming that the 3d games made him sick to his stomach.
Goldeneye was PacMan all over again, but 10 times worse. Death just couldn’t wrap his head around it. People around the world spoke so positively about medical research and reductions in child fatalities – that was the video game revolution at play, and Goldeneye in particular.
Since then, Death had been playing a constant game of catch up, training for a particular game, getting pretty OK, and then finding out another game had taken over.
More than anything, it was the first person shooters Death just couldn’t wrap Its eyeless skull around. Looking at the debrief screen for the third lost round of Call of Duty, that prick of a kid sipping his bubble tea so haughtily, Death was on the cusp of an emotional breakdown.
Death felt bad about what he did next, but really, how far can a 15 year old asshole push a timeless specter of doom before he gets what’s coming to him.
The kid had his feet up on his desk, slurping the final black beads of tapioca through his over-sized pink straw, when he shrugged. “At this rate I’m gonna live to be 200 I guess, cause you fucking suck.”
Sitting, hunched and morose over his laptop, Death said “fuck this”, reached out a bony finger and tapped the little prick on the shoulder. The kid slumped over, face down into his keyboard.
Death frowned, sighed, and loaded up another game against the A.I.
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