DAY 5: For Old Time's Sake

I have a lot to unpack when it comes to the Storm King.

Typically, it's the Greater Demon boss that I tackle first. Since I laid out my usual itinerary yesterday in regards to getting through 4-x for the easy level grinding, plowing through the Old Hero drops you on the doorstep of what might be easiest boss in the game. If you know what you're doing and know the layout of the arena, the Storm King is both a trivial challenge to overcome and bountiful horde of insane experience grinding.

It also reminds me of having cancer.

Now, I have a lot of memories of my time with cancer: throwing up in a hospital chair, shoving food into my face as fast as I could after chemo so I wouldn't throw up at home, watching my then- brand new wife watching me fall asleep, those kinds of things. Deeper stuff. Personal stuff. But when I think about cancer as a period of my life, the most lasting, continuous phantom of that is the Storm King arena.

We generally spend Sundays with my wife's family. At first it was more utilitarian; we lived in an apartment at that point and wouldn't say no to free laundry. Over time, it became the norm, especially in the warmer months. It sounds cliche, but a few beers and some grilled food was a routine that most people can abide by. And we certainly liked to have a few beers or more. But cancer and its treatment will wag its finger to that. I was placed on a pregnancy diet of no uncooked lunch meat, no shell fish, and most importantly, no booze.

I stopped going to my in-laws on the weekends. It wasn't a matter of people being shamed into imbibing or not, but trying times in people's lives have a strange way of playing guilt reversal. People would feel bad for me because I was sick. I would feel bad for them because I might ruin their good time. I know it's not entirely right-thinking, but the longer the treatment carried on, the more I wanted my wife to have some sort of release from what was happening. If she wanted to do it with her parents and a few drinks, I call that the best possible situation.

This left me a lot of Sundays in our apartment alone. Not long before coming to this decision, I had started to use Demon's Souls as a way to cope with what was going on around me, I started digging deeply into what else was going on in the game in regard to character builds, hidden magic spells, and world tendency events. I was using a character I had already built to test these things, thinking that it would be easier to sort of bolt new abilities onto a something instead of running through the game with an avatar built for specific things from the ground up (though, I did that eventually). This meant a lot of time grinding for levels to mess around with this spell or that weapon, effectively turning my first character into a jack-of-all-trades that could steal your life with a stupidly unfair bit of magic or crush your skull in with a meat cleaver.

Most weeks were research periods. Most Sundays were sitting in the shack in the back of the Storm King arena as I silently killed flying monsters. I carefully manipulated the world tendency for maximum experience farming. I outfitted my character with gear best served to double that. For hours and hours and hours at a time, the only sound coming from the room was the occasional "well, fuck" if I were to accidentally get killed off (because of that I finally discovered podcasts). It was a redundancy that I found myself craving, a routine my body could adjust to while I sat in my own malaise. I missed being with my new family, but grinding over and over for all these long hours felt safe and comfortable. Getting stronger as I grew weaker, if you want to slap a metaphor on it.

Yesterday, I killed the Storm King yet again with ease. Like everything else with Demon's Souls, the first time was the most challenging, nearly everything that followed propped by the scaffold of prior experience. I remember cheesing the fight during my first go round by worming myself into a glitched chunk of the environment and screwing the game's physics. I don't need those things any longer. I hit the archstone to return to the Nexus, and while I was leveled beyond the need for it, I couldn't help but come back to that lonely, broken house by the sea, murderously obliterating whatever flew above me. After the previous day's frustration through the catacombs of 4-2, I was taking back control. It was satisfying and bittersweet. Any extra help would be welcome at this point, too. I was gearing up to take on the worst boss fight in the game.

But we'll talk about that tomorrow.