Crack Attack: A Collection of One-Shots and Other Disturbing Shit

Parkour (Crazy Craft; Poofless)

He said it would be easy. He said it would be fun. He said I would want to do it again. This is why you never trust a cactus. Preston dragged me all the way out here to the edge of existence to try out a new parkour map he had heard about in the Hub, and here we are, standing at the corner of a very steep, very rocky cliff. He already started jumping ahead of me and he is looking back at me with a smirk on his face from about ten blocks down the path. Well, not ten blocks - more like ten jumps. Why did I ever think this was a good idea?

"Come on, Robert! Live a little, you massive pleb! Just jump!" he yells with a toothy grin, his lava mob bandana billowing around his neck in the strong wind. How can he stand out there on a single block platform in a gust like this? How does he not get blown off? Why does he think this is a good idea? "Ermagerd! Rob! Come on!"

"I don't know if I can..." I glance down at the massive, sprawling meadow below, spattered with cheerful flowers and peaceful mobs, minding their own business and living their lives. I would rather be down there with them than up here with Preston.

"You can! I know you can! You got away from the Bac during the last Battledome, and those jumps were a lot harder than these ones! These are just a couple three-block jumps! Come on, Rob! Don't take all day!" I can tell he's getting frustrated, but this is starting to look like a really, really bad idea now. It has to be at least a fifty-block fall down there, and I seriously don't want to fall that far. I don't want to die a terrible, crushing, bloody death down there on that beautiful meadow; I would rather just walk around and meet Preston at the end of his precious map. "Robert!"

"I'm coming!" I yell back against my better judgment, and I back up away from the edge of the cliff and get a running start toward the first block suspended out there in midair. Who in their right mind builds things like this? Since when was watching people fall to their deaths from floating blocks a rewarding career, or a form of entertainment? I make it to the first block and stumble when I touch down, wobbling precariously close to the corner and nearly falling off. "Are you happy now?!"

"I'll be happy when I meet ya at the end! Now don't take too long or I'll hafta beat you!"

"What kind of threat is that? You're going to beat me, anyway!"

"With my fists?"

"Oh." He gracefully bounds from one block to another, doing a 720-pirouette in between two of the closely-spaced blocks. Here I am, barely staying upright in this wind, and he's doing acrobatics? Sometimes I seriously wonder why I like this guy. I cautiously jump to the next block, then the next and the next. When I go to reach the fifth block, my foot slips on the edge and I tilt backward and rocket downward, falling from the sky like a flame charge in the Nether. I can hear myself screaming and Preston laughing somewhere overheard, but I can't move my body. I am paralyzed in fear, gaining more and more speed every second as the ground zooms up to meet me. This is exactly why I'm afraid of heights with Preston around.

The impact happens in slow motion and I experience every second in excruciating detail. I feel my ankles snap first, buckling under the extraordinary pressure and the awkward angle of my descent. Next, my legs shatter with a deafening crunch and my right femur shoots upward into my hip, completely negating any self-control I had left. The rest is just a bloody, jumbled blur, my pelvis being pushed up into my abdomen and my ribs splintering inward, compressing and mutilating my organs before the top half of my body just explodes from the impact. The screaming stops, but I'm not sure if it's because the pain is over or because I no longer have a mouth to scream with. Nothing makes sense in those last few seconds of life.

When I respawn at the top of the parkour map, I just want to slump down on the ground, pass out, and forget any of this ever happened. I have died thousands of times since I was Created, but it has never been so gruesome or brutal before. I will never forget that death until my data corrupts. I open my eyes and see Preston bent over, staring at me wide-eyed from three blocks away, unsure of whether he should comfort me or continue his damned parkour. He does things like this, then Jerome wonders why Poofless isn't a thing. Fucking pretentious lava mob.

"Hey. Are you okay?"

"Do I look okay to you?!"

"Well, yeah. But-"

"No, Preston, I'm not okay! Why didn't you tell me you were bringing me to a torture chamber so you could kill me over and over again?!"

"You aren't supposed to die, silly. You're supposed to make it to the end without dying. That's the whole point." He looks at me like I'm being a completely ridiculous idiot, like I had thought he had brought me cliff diving without any string. How can he be so smart, yet so stupid?

"Preston. You know how graceful and athletic I am. You knew I would fall a hundred times on this map. Why did you make me come?"

"I dunno. I thought it'd be fun?" He seems less sure of himself now, like he legitimately hadn't thought about how horrific this whole experience would be for me. I look down and see that bright green meadow below, the long grass fluttering gently in the breeze. I turn my attention back to Preston and he looks guilty now, like he hadn't realized ahead of time that he wasn't parkouring with Kenny, and that me having a mass over one hundred times greater than his might affect my relationship with gravity. "Look, you don't hafta finish it if you don't want to. Just use game mode and coast over to the end and you can watch me die. It's fine." I sigh and catch myself playing with my hair again.

"No, I promised you that I would do this with you. You waited all week for me to finish my projects on Cosmic, and I won't go back on my word. With that in mind, is there a way to do this that is... less painful?"

"Yeah. Just use your knife. If you do it right here," he points to a spot on the left side of his sternum, "you'll get it just about every time. It still hurts, but not like crunch time when your body hits the floor like a giant, juicy cockroach. It gives you an incentive to make the jumps without making it completely over-the-top zombie-pigmen-horde painful."

"So you're telling me to kill myself, over and over again?"

"Would you rather go squish-squash like a chili pot every thirty seconds?" He looks pointedly at me and when I don't answer, he continues. "Besides, what else are you gonna use a golden knife for? If you try to battle with it, it'll just get bent and chipped. Kinda like you." He snickers and jumps out of my reach, bounding away into the distance while I try to work up the courage to follow him.

"Why do I like you so much?" I mutter to myself as I hurl myself toward the next block, my dagger clutched tightly in my hand. This is going to be the longest parkour map in the history of the program. I can hear him laughing at me already, and I can't even see him anymore.