‘...What do you want me to do here? Nuke the place? Because that's the only option left. But the sad thing is, that even if I did, you'd all just find somewhere else to be retarded. You'd retard up Facebook or Twitter, or the BioWare forums. It turns out that human beings are simply just fucking retarded.’
The Dark Underlord stopped typing, and sighed. From somewhere outside his apartment came the sound of a thousand wild bogans beating an infant to death and planning to blame it on the dingos.
He could not deny it. Ten years had changed him. He no longer felt the same pleasure watching over Codex City; in fact, it had driven him to despair. The problems refused to go away. Doctor Prosper was caged - for now - in his own private cell, free to dabble in his own bizarre experiments. Jim Profit had gone, God knows to which foul corner of the internet. But there were always more retards, exploiting the unmatched licentiousness of the city and turning it to their own diabolical advantage. And one man was not enough to stop them.
Time, he decided, to retire; leave the site in the hands of the moderators. Let them shut down all the nonsense, take a zero-tolerance on any stupidity or shitposting. They could call it ‘The Vault Dweller Act’. He himself could live quite comfortably on the cash that he and Taluntain had siphoned off from the various faked site crashes and ‘fundraisers’ over the course of the past decade for the rest of his life. Yes. Time to abandon Codex City to the chaos.
A sudden, hideous wailing; a staff alert. Someone, somewhere, had been reported.
The Dark Underlord, with a certain aged weariness, rose.
*
‘I keep telling you, I can’t give you full staff access to the site, I only moderate Weeaboo Discussion - aiieee!’
The moderator slumped to the ground, lifeless.
Above him, horrifying and imposing, stood a peculiar figure; improbably-muscled (surely the result of years of steroid abuse), vaguely of Middle Eastern origin, with the mad gaze of a fanatic.
‘Search the corpse,’ the monster growled to one of its underlings. ‘The passcodes will be there. And with them - entrance into the staff forum.’
Wham! Pow!
A familiar dark-caped figure, wielding his trusty boomerang, crashed through the windows and onto the scene.
‘Andhaira!’ he cried.
Andhaira (for it was he) let out a low, throaty chuckle.
‘Dark Underlord. I knew you’d come to try and stop me. You’re looking tired, old man. Could it be that ten years of running this cesspit have finally taken their toll upon you? Discuss!’
The Dark Underlord screamed, and attacked.
But somehow - as if according to some dark art - he could not bring the troll down. He struck at Andhaira once, and his opponent rose again from another side, grinning and relentless. And the Dark Underlord, despite every bone in his body crying out that this monster had to be stopped, found himself beginning to weary of the fight.
And Andhaira struck, lifting the Australian high and slamming him down against his knee with a hideous snap.
‘You’re beaten,’ he sneered. ‘Fool - you thought that the Codex could be both a bastion of open, knowledgeable discussion about RPGs, and an anything-goes community encouraging biting satire and button-pushing humour. Now I will show you what this city really is; a colossal General Discussion, filled with racist nutters brofisting each other as they masturbate to naked pictures of Putin and feverishly defend Christianity against imaginary hordes of libruls, repetitive memes, trolling, and - most importantly - in-depth analysis of the spiritual decline of the West.’
The fallen man could only moan,
‘No...no...no.’
Andhaira loomed over him.
‘When the Codex is devoted to the glory of Islam,’ he whispered, ‘you have my permission to die.’
*
Andhaira was as good as his word. RPG Discussion, the Playground, and Gaming Discussion were detonated; the denizens of Codex City were warned only to post in General Discussion. If they attempted to venture out of it, he warned, the entire site would be nuked.
‘You are free,’ he declared before the flashing cameras, ‘free from the abuses of over-zealous moderators, free from bannings and ‘discouragements, free to do as you will - at last the Codex is liberated to fulfill its full potential!’
Civilisation, as you might expect, collapsed. Trolls trolled trolls. Doctor Prosper, released from his prison, was put in charge of bannings; Commissioner Jaesun, who had not only earned the wrath of many of Andhaira’s army, but whose sexuality seemed to personally offend most of them, was forced to hide underground in the secret pocket of resistance that was the Workshop. Outsiders who had once been sympathetic to the chaotic but vibrant city could only shake their heads in despair.
And the Dark Underlord, broken and beaten, could only watch all of it from the same dark and bottomless prison that had once held Andhaira - the abyss of RPGWatch.
There was, he knew, only one way out of such a hellish place; the same desperate route that so many banned trolls had taken before. He had to create an alt.
*
The moderators, bloodied and bruised from their beating, stood before the courtroom of Site Feedback.
‘What is this?’ yelled the young rookie hothead known as Phelot. ‘This your idea of due process?’
Doctor Prosper, balancing the judge’s wig upon his head, gave a cheery bearded grin.
‘You have a choice banana monkey refridgerator,’ he declared. ‘Banishment...or Retardo Land.’
Several of the prisoners paled.
‘There’s no way,’ someone insisted, ‘that we’ll go to that hellhole willingly.’
‘Banishment it is, then,’ Prosper cried. ‘Banishment...to Retardo Land.’
*
The condemned moderators stood in the darkness, gazing out at the frozen horrors of Retardo Land.
A flare landed at the feet of the moderators.
‘Light it,’ growled a familiar voice.
And as the flare shot up into the sky like a beacon of hope, it caught on a trail of carefully-spilt gasoline, which spread and swelled across the nearby bridge - expanding into the fiery shape of a colossal troll.
From the top of a nearby hastily-constructed minaret, Andhaira gazed on in horror.
‘Impossible...’ he murmured.
*
Andhaira fell back, his mask shattered, his breathing ragged and tired. From outside, the sounds of the moderators and trolls joining battle, banning upon counter-banning, could still be heard.
‘I don’t understand,’ he wheezed. ‘I defeated you once before - and it was so easy, too. How is it that you defeated me so easily this time around?’
The Dark Underlord placed his boot upon the broken man’s chest.
‘You don’t scale to my level,’ he growled.
*
It was never made certain exactly what happened to the Dark Underlord after the reclaiming of Codex City. Certainly a shadowy figure continued to moderate the site and pointlessly create new forums - 'Discussion of RPGs made in the month of September' 'Discussion of RPGs with the letter 'Z' in the title', shit like that. But rumours continued to circulate that the Dark Underlord had given his profile to a chosen successor, left the duties of moderating the cesspit to them, and escaped from the site for good.
And it was Taluntain, that old faithful retainer, who swore he'd seen a familiar man in a brothel in Sydney, surrounded by cocaine and suspiciously-masculine prostitutes with bulging Adam's apples, forking out wads of cash from a bag marked 'For The Attention Of B. Fargo' and spending it on rounds of tequila. But Taluntain, partly out of respect and partly because he was himself, like, really fucking high on crack bought with money from an envelope marked 'Essential Site Maintenance', did not think to approach him.
THE END.
Long Live our Shwarze Unter Fuhrer! 
.
