Magnus Opus With Rodents

The game began with a short video with a voiceover:

In 1938, twenty Nutria, or swamp dogs were brought to Louisiana to be raised for their fur, but escaped captivity rapidly. Bigger than groundhogs, but smaller than beavers, Nutria have yellow front teeth, long white whiskers, and thin tails. These large rodents have lush shorthaired fur many compare to seal. They breed with great enthusiasm producing five to thirteen pups per litter, three litters a year. Because they have few natural enemies, Nutrias have proliferated well beyond Louisiana and currently number in excess of fifty million. They are plant-eaters and consume 25% of their body weight in vegetation daily, destroying marshlands, causing massive sinkholes and damaging foundations of structures. Determined trophy hunters are needed to deplete the population before they infest the world. 

The game environment was a series of underground tunnels, dug by Nutria over the last hundred years within a vast semi-tropical swampland with thousands of connecting passageways. Each hunter was virtually equipped with sixty spring traps, a semi-automatic shotgun and a motorboat. Nutria kills were calculated by the number of tails deposited in each player’s cache, valued at five gluco-coins per tail. The trophy hunter with highest number of tails after completing Level 50 of the game won the Golden Nutria Trophy, the accumulated gluco-coins, and the opportunity to have sex with a consenting live human, choice of gender.Magnus was shocked. The trophy and gluco-coins were ‘same old same old’ rewards, but he’d never heard of a game prize package that included sex! It seemed exotic and so random, but the news feeds had been mentioning the aging population problem frequently, as well as, the smaller number of boys being born due to warmer temps – the last census 60/40, female/male. Those little boy sperms were delicate. Even NYC was under two million after the last pandemic. Magnus read parts of the Midwest were totally empty, but didn’t know