Work Text:
“Sorry! That name is already taken.”
Nnehhnaa stared at the text field on the “Adopt-a-Nurgling” page containing the name she’d chosen for her little green friend, pressing the “go!” button a few more times, clicking buttons on the mouse again and again with her hoofed hand, just in case the red warning text would disappear.
The goatgirl snorted in frustration, flicking her long ears and flaring her nostrils. She wanted to name the little guy “Goober”, because he looked like a glob of green snot, but someone else had already named their Nurgling “Goober” first.
Nurglepets was one of the biggest social games hosted through the Hellnet, the warp-based communications network used by the Black Legion. There was no form of communication quite as reliable as warp-hosted networks. Astropaths, physical mail, getting a maildaemon to deliver a letter through a portal were not instantaneous and reliable as a network of Neverborn relaying thought patterns across the galaxy which could be read by specially-attuned devices and displayed as images on a screen.
One of Nnehhnaa’s friends had excitedly referred her to Nurglepets. In this magical game you could “adopt” a Nurgling and play various minigames and earn a virtual currency called Putripoints which could be used to purchase items for your Nurgling. And you weren’t just adopting a virtual pet; the game claimed you were connecting to a real Nurgling somewhere out there. All the children who lived in the barracks were playing it. At least, all the cool children.
Nnehhnaa lived in Fort Pfranabad, a Black Legion military base that many other children of Black Legion beastman soldiers called home. The children spent their days running errands for the grownups and learning how to be good future soldiers from their junior scout leaders. But between all of that they still had time for games, and right now it was Nnehhnaa’s turn to use the base’s Hellnet connection to play Nurglepets. The kids took turns with the base’s computers, impatiently waiting behind the grownups who were using them for work-related purposes, ignoring the warnings that they were selling their souls to the Grandfather without knowing what it entailed, and complaints that they should be using the Hellnet for useful things like learning about galactic history.
Hellnet service was provided free of charge to warbands and their associated territories. Although as the saying went, if you weren’t paying for a product, you were the product. Informed grownups knew there were warp entities collecting your data, feeding off the emotions you bled into the network. Some services were more risky than others. In all likelihood, everyone who played Nurglepets had already signed their soul over to Grandfather Nurgle.
Being less than ten years old (approximately), Nnehhnaa didn’t understand any of that. All she knew was that Nurglepets was provided for free out of love for children, like a public drinking fountain full of fruit juice, and not dependent on any sort of soul economics to stay in operation.
Anyways, Nnehhnaa hadn’t even started playing yet, and the game was throwing obstacles her way. It didn’t make any sense. Sure, the Neverborn had unique “true names” and all, but it was not as if you were picking one for your existing Nurgling. And didn’t the technology exist for the game to support multiple Nurglings named “Goober”?
The game helpfully suggested modifications to the name so that it was unique.
“Goober619” – ugh, no. Nurglings weren’t machines that you gave numbers to!
“xx_Goober_xx” - how did you even pronounce that?
“Goober_Goober_Nurg” - Ehhhh.
But of course, Nnehhnaa was a creative child. Several additional letters later, Nnehhnaa was the proud “owner” of a Nurgling named Gooberovichik. In her mind it was just named “Goober”, of course.
The world of Nurglepets was now open to Nnehhnaa. Nurglings adopted through Nurglepets lived on the Daemon World of Putrifax, with sub-divisions with themes like underwater, giant fungus, jungle, mountain, and more. Each of these lands had shops and minigames. Nnehhnaa couldn’t wait to play them all.
Nnehhnaa had completed the new user tutorial and played a few minigames with Goober when a soldier in black fatigues ordered her off the computer to do boring stuff an almost-10-year-old didn’t understand.
Every day, after the children had finished their school lessons, Nnehhnaa would walk through the base looking for a computer to play Nurglepets on. Some days she couldn’t find a computer at all, leaving Goober alone and unfed, and other times she could play for hours, only stopping when ordered to the mess hall or to go to bed.
Feeding, playing games, grooming, reading books, dressing up, and battling. There were many activities you could do with your Nurglepet.
The Neverborn didn’t need to eat food, but eating food made Nurglings happy. They liked to eat all sorts of things: moldy cheese, moldy bread, cakes that had been dropped on the ground, and even fresh fruits and vegetables. But it turned out that there were certain foods that Goober refused to eat. It wouldn’t eat whole fermented pizzas, but somehow ⅚ fermented pizzas were totally fine. And it liked its ambrosia salad in a glass bowl but not a plastic one.
Similarly, Nurglings would refuse to read books of certain genres. Goober didn’t like to read books about the Blood Bowl, but adored books about people hitting balls with bats and books about water-borne parasites. Every time it read a book, its intelligence statistic would increase on its profile page, and the book would disappear. Eh, what a strange rule. Apparently it was to keep the value of books high. Nnehhnaa wondered what would happen if Goober wanted to go back and re-read its favorites, but found no books to re-read. Certainly, grownups in her life would panic if suddenly, all their favorite books vanished because someone read all the pages. Maybe Neverborn had photographic memories, just like Space Marines.
Nurglings’ pickiness extended to toys as well. Goober’s favorite toys were wood, and it enjoyed making wood rot in its mouth. But it was picky about what kind of wood it liked to sully with its mouth slime. Pine tasted too strongly, while apple and maple had milder flavors. And it could always decide it was bored of its current toys and demand new ones.
There was a battle arena where Nurglings would battle other users’ Nurglings, or against NPCs. Nnehhnaa was the only one of her classmates who knew about the desert shrine where you could visit each day for a chance for the shrine spirit, who resembled a giant Welwitschia plant, to bless your Nurgling and increase its stats. However, she refused to buy training currency to improve Goober’s stats, because it was expensive and users selling the currency were being mean and unfair pricing it that high. Goober battled in the arena, but being low-level, lost a lot. Luckily, there was a free Ichor Springs feature in the game to heal any hurt pets.
Nurglings, being Neverborn of the God of Decay, were dirty, messy creatures, but there were ways to “groom” them to make them happier. Various shops sold seed growing kits to make your Nurgling more beautiful, and brushes to trim unwanted growths off. There were exciting perfumes in scents like mildew, stinkhorn, petrichor, swamp, and roadkill that you could spray on your Nurgling. You could even stick fake eyelashes on them and paint their faces with makeup.
Grooming items could dramatically alter the appearance of your Nurgling. The very rarest ones could make them exciting colors like purple and white and even give them wings. You had to compete with thousands of other users to “restock” one from the shops, or get one from a very rare random event. Otherwise, you were stuck paying more Putripoints than a 10-year-old could ever hope to obtain to change your Nurgling.
Nnehhhna decided to wait for a random event, whenever that would be. She supposed it was fine to keep Goober plain green. She did buy a moss-growing kit, so that it looked like it was growing moss on its head and back when equipped.
Although Nurglings were commonly thought of as happily naked, Nurglepets stressed the value of providing clothes and accessories for your Nurgling to keep it happy. You could buy wigs and hats to put on your Nurgling’s head, shove them into brightly-colored sweaters, or give them objects to hold. You could buy backgrounds so that Nurglings on your profile page looked like they were standing in different locations on Putrifax, such as a leafy grotto, a castle in the clouds, or in a restaurant inside a beached sailing ship.
There were wearables that could be bought with Putripoints, but the very best clothes and toys in the game cost real money.
As a social game, Nurglepets let you interact with other players who had adopted Nurglings. You could click on the profiles of other players on the game forums and see how their Nurglepets were doing, or search for names of players and pets in the game’s sidebar.
Nnehhnaa looked up the name “Goober” to see who exactly had gotten to the name first. She found a sad Nurgling on a long-abandoned account wearing nothing. The user hadn’t even sent scores for many minigames at all. It seemed whoever had adopted this Nurgling wasn’t good at playing the game, and had left soon after signing up. What a waste.
Not all users were like this unskilled noob. One day, Nnehhnaa visited the profile page of a player whose Nurgling had won the Pet Spotlight. Their Nurglings were all wearing fancy clothes and stood against beautifully-rendered backgrounds. The spotlight winner sported long horns and magnificent bat wings. It stood on a battlefield with ash raining down from the sky, holding a sword of living flesh. Its battle arena statistics were amazingly high, as well. Its user had obviously spent a lot of time and money making it look nice. Some of the items Nnehhnaa had never seen before. When she mailed the user asking where she’d gotten all those nice things for her Nurglepets, she replied that she’d bought them in the Putricash Mall, linking Nnehhnaa to an external guide to the game with a list of cash shop only items.
The goatgirl burned with jealousy at all the pretty things that were out of her reach. In order to buy Putricash to spend in the PC Mall, you had to pay real money on mystery capsules that contained limited-edition items. And you couldn’t pay with cash, but with an adult payment card. Besides, the clothes cost more money than Nnehhnaa was given as an allowance.
Nnehhnaa, being approximately ten years old, had no payment card, and no amount of begging the junior scout leader or her parents could convince them to spare to buy mystery capsules in the Mall for her.
“It’s way too much money to spend on a game you’ll get bored of eventually,” they would say.
Nnehhnaa was stuck in free-to-play mode. To be fair, there were plenty of fun features. But every time she looked on the profile page of some user with more time and money to play the game, she would get jealous of how fancy their accounts looked in comparison to hers. She dreamed of the day she would have time to play Nurglepets all day and make her Goober the strongest.
Sometimes, a grownup would snap at Nnehhnaa for playing Nurglepets when she ought to be doing her part to prepare for an uncertain future. Life in the Eye could be unforgiving. Her parents, certainly, were unhappy she didn’t have a more productive hobby. This only caused her to retreat further and further in the fantasy world of the game.
Nnehhnaa doodled pictures of her Nurglepets on her notebooks. She sculpted Nurglings out of clay and kept them in a box under her bed. She tried to make a stuffed Nurgling out of rice bags and insulation foam. She entered her art in the game’s Art Gallery, but it seemed like it wasn’t good enough to win a prize.
It wasn’t enough just to have a Nurgling. A Nurgling needed a pet. Not all thoughts of decay and creepy crawlies were strong enough to coalesce into a Nurgling. Some ended up as balls of lint, or flies the size of tennis balls with too many eyes. They were called petpets, and they kept your Nurglepet happy when you weren’t playing the game.
For a few thousand Putripoints, Nnehhnaa bought a petpet for Goober that resembled a one-eyed catfish. Goober refused it, and Nnehhnaa was forced to buy a different petpet for Goober, a coconut with googly eyes that he was delighted with.
Each Nurglepets account was allowed to have 4 Nurglings in total, although there were over 40 varieties of Nurglings available in-game. Goober was soon joined by his siblings Morpborp, Beerlupp, and Frug.
Morpborp received the one-eyed catfish, and any items that Goober didn’t want. And if Goober AND Morpborp didn’t want something, or got bored of their toys, the items would get passed down in order of seniority.
For a year Nnehhnaa played Nurglepets as much as possible. She experienced her first in-game battle plot and scored a meager amount of plot points with Goober. She collected her prizes almost every day from the Winter Solstice Advent Calendar. She even bought a cheaper color-changing item to make Beerlupp frosted with white, like a mullein plant.
But this blissful time wouldn’t last forever.
In the Empire of the Eye, children grew up quickly. An 11-year-old goatgirl was expected to take on increasingly adult responsibilities, and study for her school exams. Nnehhnaa found herself travelling away from home on field trips and taking on complex school projects such as building rockets and bombs and running through an obstacle course, dodging simulated gunfire.
There were rumors of a war, of unrest in the star system. Nnehhnaa’s teachers and the parents at the base would talk to each other with worried expressions. They would mention stockpiling, preparing for power outages, for the possibility of being cut off from food and clean water. An officer sat Nnehhnaa’s class down for a talk on the current political situation, making it clear that there were people out there who wanted to hurt us.
Nnehhnaa’s friends outgrew Nurglepets, or simply forgot their login information and moved onto the next fad. Nnehhnaa too found that she was too busy to log onto the game and take care of her Nurglings.
Inevitably, Nnehhnaa became a soldier like her parents. She graduated from school and received her adult soldier’s uniform, a set of hand-me-downs in various states of repair. Every day she would wake and receive orders and participate in training drills. She became knowledgeable about things like cleaning and replacing the parts on a land raider, or programming a turret.
Years passed, as much as time could pass in the Eye of Terror. Eventually, Nnehhnaa was assigned to a military base across the planet, in the port city of Sujand. She found herself with an abundance of time. Not much happened at this base. The end of the world as the adults in her life had predicted hadn’t come yet. It was a big galaxy, and not every place was engulfed in war, not even in the Eye of Terror.
Mostly, it was waiting, and waiting. Waiting for orders. Repairing machinery. Cleaning the base and organizing supplies.
Nnehhnaa decided to revisit her childhood. She pulled up the familiar homepage. Nurglepets was still up and running, and plenty of new content had been added. While all her friends were locked out of their accounts, 11-year-old Nnehhnaa wisely wrote down her Nurglepets login information in her diary. She returned to four sad Nurglings who quickly cheered up when given bowls of jelly and willow wicker balls.
Whenever she had free time, Nnehhnaa would play Nurglepets at her workstation. She leveled up Goober at the training academy, upgraded her home in Putrifax with new furnishings, and “painted” her Nurglings expensive colors with the Nurglepoints she won from minigames and betting on Putrifaxian sports matches.
A soldier of the Black Legion received a modest salary, but it was far more money than child Nnehhnaa could ever have dreamed of. She splurged on PC Mall mystery capsules for her collection of Nurglings. In a few months Nnehhnaa had opened dozens of such capsules and her Nurglepets were looking more stylish than they ever had.
For example, Goober had been “painted” to resemble an old, weathered tree covered in moss. It was dressed in a ragged cloak, holding a scythe and wearing diaphanous wings. It looked like a miniature Mortarion, standing in a fungus-filled grotto with a bed of leaves in the center, lit from a skylight high in the ceiling. The background was animated, and anyone visiting Goober’s profile could see water dripping from the ceiling, down the waters of the grotto. Nhehhnaa had traded many PC Mall items for that particular background, and it was her favorite.
“You’re still playing Nurglepets? I think mine all died of starvation by now,” another soldier said, upon discovering Nnehhnaa playing on her datapad.
“They’re Neverborn. They can’t die!” she corrected him angrily.
Nnehhnaa continued to achieve her childhood dreams on Nurglepets. She won an art gallery competition with her drawing of one of Putrifax’s battle arena NPCs, a shambling mass of jelly with a mop of grass hair on top. She got high scores on her favorite minigames, and the number of trophies on her user profile grew each week. Everything was going so well.
Imagine Nnehhnaa’s shock when one day she tried to log into her account, only to find a message stating her account had been frozen for breaking the rules of trading real money for in-game items.
Tales of people unfairly frozen on Nurglepets, for cheating on game features they never used or because of a case of mistaken identity were as numerous as flies on meat left out in the sun. Nnehhnaa was a rule-abiding player, and assumed that such a thing would never happen to her. She was one of the lucky, chosen ones. At least, until now.
Nnehhnaa did everything she could to retrieve her account. She had spent too much time and money on this game to just be dumped like this. She pleaded with the game’s support staff. She posted her story on Nurglepets fansites, hoping someone higher up would hear her. But as the days passed without a response, she realized it was over. Finished.
She could make a new account, but what was the point of starting over? She would never get the hours she spent on her old account back. She would never get to see Goober, Morpborp, Beerlupp, or Frug again.
Stupid game. It was probably all computer data. Fake. A money making scheme. There wasn’t actually a Nurgling on the other side of that connection, was there? Nnehhnaa had fallen for it.
For the next few weeks everyone who crossed Nnehhnaa’s path noted she was in a foul mood. Rumors flew that she had gone through a particularly nasty breakup. It was true, in a sense.
Nnehhnaa eventually moved on. She foud new obsessions. Whether it was the history of blown glass, or shipwrecks flung through time into the Eye of Terror, or the history of the Tyranids in the Milky Way, she soon forgot all about Nurglepets.
As it turned out, there were more important things to worry about than a video game.
Nnehhnaa lay buried under rubble, staring up at a hole in the roof. The purple sky was filled with smoke and fire. Dun-colored warplanes droned overhead, burning with malevolent intelligence, belching fire, scanning the world below in search of their next victims.
War had come to Sujand. Two warband leaders were squabbling, treating millions of lives like a game. They ordered cities to be bombed as if they were two children knocking over houses made of play blocks because the other boy had built his taller, with more towers, with a bigger garden out front.
A bomb had taken out the building next to the one Nnehhnaa had been hiding in, and the adjacent buildings were caught in the blast. She didn’t know how many of her fellows were alive or dead.
The goatwoman winced through the pain. She looked down at the gaping hole in her side. Her entire right side was covered in burns, and she couldn’t open her right eye. Though the wound was cauterized, she knew that something vital had been damaged, and she would eventually die unless given new organs. Even if a rescue team found her, she doubted a common soldier like her would be considered worthy of such expensive treatment.
She wondered if she could move the rubble and free herself. The rubble felt so heavy on her legs, and the pain made it hard to think.
Nnehhnaa waited, and waited. The area around her started to stink from the decaying bodies buried under the rubble. With every passing hour she grew more delirious from lack of food and water, and it was clear her wounds were infected. She drifted in and out of consciousness, replaying the events of her life over and over again.
It was dusk, or was it dawn, from the quality of the light? In the dim light, she saw shapes moving in the corner of her vision. Had a rescue team finally come? Or was it enemy soldiers ready to finish the job? Let them come. She clenched her fists and sucked in a ragged breath.
The figures drew nearer. On top of the smell of decaying bodies, burnt flesh lingered and smoke drifted the new scents of fallen leaves, rotten bark, and fungus under the fertile earth. Through blurred vision Nnehhnaa could make out four figures the size of toddlers. Nurglings. It was Nurglings.
One was wearing a cloak and had wings of some sorts. Another was reddish with bits of orange. Another was pale green, almost white. Another was dark green. It couldn’t possibly be. Yes, it was Goober, Morpborp, Beerlupp, and Frug! Her Nurglepets, they were real after all! Or were they? Nnehhnaa wondered if she was hallucinating in her last moments.
Now that she was dying were they ushering her soul to Grandfather Nurgle? She remembered what the adults had said about the “catch” to a free game. It was alright. If her soul was going to the Warp, let it go to the loving embrace of the Grandfather.
The tension and pain that Nnehhnaa had been holding inside ebbed away. She let her hands go slack and closed her remaining eye, waiting for the Nurglings to take her away. The last thing she knew before losing consciouness was four sets of little hands grabbing hold of her.
Nnehhnaa opened her eyes to find that she was no longer inside the ruined building. She could no longer hear the drone of warplanes or feel the ground shaking from airstrikes. Instead, she was inside some kind of cool, pungent room lit from a latticed window in the high ceiling. She heard the trickle of water somewhere, and a few drops fell on her face.
She looked down, moving her limbs. She was on a bed of leaves of some sort. They felt waxy under her fingers. As she focused her vision, she recognized this place from her favorite Nurglepets background. She was in the Leafy Grotto Nest!
She blinked, realizing both her eyes worked. She held up her hands. The fur on her right hand was gone, replaced by skin that was whorled and ridged like tree bark. She looked down where the wound in her side had been. It looked long healed, the missing chunk of flesh filled in, the skin around it the same whorled and ridged texture. Moss had already started to grow on it.
“Ah, Mistress, you’re awake!” exclaimed the moss-covered Nurgling. Goober held a bowl of stinky soup.
“Goober. You’re real. I thought…”
“That it was just a game?” asked the mossy Nurgling.
Beerlupp was the next to approach Nnehhnaa. The red and orange Nurgling held a mirror in front of the goatwoman so she could see her healed face. Her original right eye had been replaced by a green, insect-like one. There were patches of green and orange lichens on her fur. It was the Grandfather’s blessing.
“Nothing is ‘just a game’ in the realm of the Powers! Didn’t your parents tell you that?”
“Uhhh…”
“You played with us over the years. We had so much fun. We had so much fun, that when we saw you were in trouble, we had to help you. And now you’re safe on Putrifax and can play with us forever!”
“Really?” asked Nnehhnaa, still incredulous.
Morpborp and Frug joined their siblings in a circle around the goatwoman, holding up various objects: her sketchbooks, her box of clay Nurglings, even the rice sack plush toy she’d thought had gotten tossed long ago. She looked around the room, seeing her winning gallery entry printed out on a banner.
“Yes!” the four Nurglings exclaimed.
It seemed that all her years of playing Nurglepets had paid off, after all.
