Consultation 126.1

“God, how do I overcome killer’s block?”

I closed my eyes. Then prayed that when I opened them this client would be gone. I’d enjoyed quite some time without seeing her, but it seemed she'd finally completed her little game of Sudoku. Now that she’d done so, she was finding it difficult to reach new heights in her degenerate form of art.

When I opened my eyes, sadly, my client was still before me. Well, I didn’t really expect much to change.

“So… you committed Sudoku?”

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“How did you feel when you did it?”

“Amazing, God. It was… beautiful. Truly, too beautiful. Words cannot begin to describe its beauty. It brought tears to my eyes when it was completed. It was the peak of my life, but ever since that day... no matter how I kill people, it’s just not the same. Nothing I do evokes the same response as the day I reached that peak. It was my magnum opus and I’ve been in a slump ever since then, God. Haaaaaah. Killing people the old way just isn’t the same anymore.”

I was afraid to probe further, but I still asked anyway, “What exactly have you tried after committing Sudoku?”

“I’ve tried everything I can think of. I first tried a jigsaw puzzle before I moved onto The Game of Life. After that came Monopoly, the most recent being Connect Four. Despite Connect Four turning into a wonderful piece of art, it still didn’t reach the same level Sudoku did.”

“I see…”

She’d listed some rather tame games. In fact, to someone oblivious to her history, given no prior context, what she said might sound extremely normal. However, if you knew what Sudoku meant to her, you could only imagine how horrifying those games truly were.

“God, what am I doing wrong? What am I missing? Why can’t I surpass Sudoku?”

“Well, about those… art pieces you listed. How did you go about making them?” Curiosity had gotten the best of me.

“Haaaah. Well, for the jigsaw puzzle I locked a bunch of people in a room together. I then told them that if they wanted to escape they would have to create a complete human body out of their own body parts. Everyone had to contribute at least one part of their body.” 

“It was quite fun watching them fight over which two people would give up their head and torso, but after I’d committed Sudoku on such a large scale, this game was just too small scale to truly satisfy me. It lacked the bigger picture that Sudoku had and it left me wanting.”

“In The Game of Life, I replaced the currency with human lives. If a player received X amount of dollars, X amount of people would die. The number you span on the spinner for a given turn determined how people died that turn. The higher the number, the more horrid the means of death.”

“This was what a true game of life looked like. There was an associated price to pay for going too fast in life, more pain. Hehehe.”

“As for Monopoly, each purchasable space on the board was assigned a random person. Altogether there were 28 people for the 28 purchasable spots on the board. Four additional people took on the role of players in this game.”

“If a player was sent to jail, they faced a randomly selected form of torture for each turn they are stuck in there. If a player lands on a purchasable spot, the player has to perform a certain act of torture to the person assigned to that space on the board to take ownership of it. As you advance further down the board, the acts of torture to claim ownership over that property on the board become increasingly sinister.”

“If another player lands on one of your spaces, you extract and receive a certain amount of blood determined by the value of the space you have ownership over. It was possible to increase how much blood a person had to pay when they landed on one of your properties by paying the associated cost of blood in your possession to upgrade your property.”

“The higher the property was valued, the more blood it took to upgrade it. When a player died as a result of blood loss, the person who was last to receive blood from that person took ownership of all properties owned by the deceased player.” 

“To avoid blood levels reaching critical levels, players could trade their properties in exchange for blood with another player. If a player ran low on blood, they could even mortgage their properties to extract a certain amount of blood from the person that was assigned to that property on the board. Players that land on a property while it is mortgaged don’t need to pay the property owner any blood.”

“If a player mortgaged a property, there was the expectation that they must pay back what they borrowed. Every three turns, they had to return a quarter of the total amount of blood they received for mortgaging that property. They needed to pay this fee five times altogether before it is fully paid off as there was interest accrued on the blood they borrowed.”

“The only way to win this game and survive was to kill the other three players through blood loss. Running out of blood and dying in this game was equivalent to bankruptcy in the normie version of Monopoly.”

“Honestly, I quite enjoyed this particular piece of art. It told a deep story. It depicted the dream of big businesses’ forming a monopoly by bleeding their small business competitors dry.”

“Haaaaah. Lastly, was Connect Four. Of the aforementioned pieces, this was the one I enjoyed the most since I directly participated in it as a player. I thought I could bring the piece to a higher level by infusing myself into the piece...”