I was on my twelfth cigarette in two hours when I got the call. Some wannabe adventurer, one of those jerks who grow thick mustaches and tart around with elephant guns, went and got himself stuck in /b/ again. Happens every damn week, but I wasn't about to say no to a paycheck. I finished off my last ounce of Wild Turkey and put a bullet into the back of my epic mount's skull. I couldn't take her where I was going and I sure as hell wasn't about to leave her for someone else to steal. It's a brutal Web and I don't pretend to be the exception.

I rounded up the typical loadout. Before I let the boat off its moorings to putter on down that cruel river, I did a head count. On the rudder I had Rufus the anime nerd. From the outside he looked like any other Japanophile tweak, but I had it on good authority that he'd been moonlighting as a yiff porn artist. Some would call me crazy for bringing a bucket of boards-chum like him along, but it's a rookie mistake to staff your barge with sane folks when you're taking on 4Chan. And anyway, if I needed to throw somebody to that particular horde of Sodom, I knew who was first on the list.

In the cabin with the maps I had some old hackzor named Clyde who claimed to have found a hidden level in Diablo. I still don't know if I believe he did, but I do know that some dark experience put that weird look in his eye. Just ahead of the cabin on the gun was some sicko called HateHat who had been booted from SecondLife. Don't ask me what a guy's gotta do to get the slumlords at Linden Labs to cancel your account. Maybe he was a griefer.

I told Clyde to plot a course that wouldn't go through the front page. We needed to be sly about the rescue and 4Chan's landing is about as subtle as Las Vegas (not the city. I mean that awful TV show from a few years back with James Caan). Sure enough, we found ourselves on some twisted route full of porn and anti-Scientology protests. I had to end the lives of no fewer than five jabbering morons who attached themselves to the boat spouting "Good sir! Good sir! I vehemently disagree, good sir!" It was damn messy.

When we got to /b/ the jungle was pretty thick, but there was smoke in the air. Somebody had been burning... everything, I guess. HateHat saw some local flagging us down on the shore, so I decided to give it a shot. We all had our guns on the thing as I stepped onto the sand. The local was some kind of wandering merchant with a sack across his shoulder seeping a mysterious fluid. When I asked him what he was selling he opened up the sack to reveal a quivering pile of disembodied breasts.

"Tits or it didn't happen," the local said, "I can make anything true."

I asked the tit merchant if he'd seen some outsider with a big mustache. He said he'd only heard rumors, but the chatter on /h/ was that some insane fop had been going full-on guro so the powers that be were bringing the heat down on him. That explained the fires. There was supposedly a trail of amputees heading east. Far east. I didn't like the sound of that, but before I could get any more information out of the merchant he got spooked by a sound in the bushes. Before we knew it, a gang of jabbering mutants weilding broken Super Nintendo consoles was on us. They turned the merchant into a pulp before HateHat could get the gun on them. I took a few down myself and shouted to Rufus to grab the tit bag.

Where we were going, we'd need currency. At 2Chan, flesh is king.

log on next week for part 2