After our victory in the graveyard, I knew that I owed Argyle an apology. Not only had he almost died fighting a boss, but he had only gone out because I had used the game’s manipulation against him. I promised him that I would stick with him until we had paid for his sister's treatment. And, as an apology, he could take all the crafting materials from our adventuring and didn't have to give me a cut of our crafting profits. I promised myself I would never use the whammy against him again. I just felt so horrible.
I made it through three days of crafting before I couldn't take it anymore. Sure, Argyle did have the notion to spend the whole week focused on making money, but after the excitement in the graveyard and the clear gains he had made, he was easy to convince. Getting back to adventuring had awoken something in him, or that’s what I told myself. I couldn’t stand the idea of sitting in the crafting hall all day. My palms were itching. I needed to be in the heat of battle.
It didn't help that my dreams had been haunted by thoughts of the outside world. My full memory still eluded me, but part of me knew it was bad. Camping in the woods, scavenging. I didn’t want to think about it. Who would want that when they could be in here?
I had a flashback to that therapist, after the server motel. My parents had paid so much and it had been so pointless. What had he told me? “You have to accept the real world, not the fantasy world.” Well, the real world was obviously a mess. I didn’t even want to remember it. I didn’t want to hear Argyle talk about his sister, or why she hadn’t written. I just needed to game. So, I convinced Argyle to go.
The Forbidden Forest was cast in dark tones of purple and gray blue. The path bent and twisted under looming, barren trees. Wolves, mountain lions, and psychotic squirrels would dart from thorny bushes to attack out of nowhere. Bats and ravens struck down from the twisted woody canopy above.
The only thing more dreary than the drooping moss-covered trees was the timbre of our conversation. I knew that Argyle was worried about his sister. It didn’t help that any time he really let himself start to actually think through the implications of his sister’s silence, the system would put a whammy on him, and he would rush headlong in to danger.
He wanted to project the image of relaxed indifference and celebration of our achievements, but I could tell that he was not doing as well as he wanted me to believe. I wished he would just focus on the game.
It was difficult starting a conversation just right, so you could actually talk about what was important without one or the other of us being redirected by the system. I had tried asking simple things like, “Tell me about your sister,” or, “What's your sister's favorite music?”
To which, a moment of panic would cross his face. “Yeah. My sister.” He would rub the back of his neck and looked away. “I really worry about her, you know? If this game is a flop maybe I won’t be able to pay for her treatment. Maybe I worry too much. But don't worry, I'm holding it together.”
“Are you though?” I wanted to ask. “Let's not do the traditional masculine bullshit of pretending we don't have feelings.” But I couldn’t say that. Because I didn’t want the feelings either. I don't think I've ever been good with feelings. I was beginning to realize that this was all an escape for me.
The outside world was gone. Erased. At least, the world I'd grown up with. There wasn't any school to go back to. No garage apartment on the west side of Santa Cruz. Why had I signed up for this game? Clearly I had given up on that life. I don’t remember exactly how I had gotten here, but I was here now. Better to focus on where I was and the danger I was in now.
“I am here; this is me. This is the me that everyone sees. So it must be the real me. Sure, this body felt wrong, but even if it wasn’t the same as my body out there, that doesn't matter the only thing that truly matters is finding my way back to her.”
Where did that idea come from? We had been together in my last memory. I don’t remember why I left her to come here. Kara. I doidn't know how, but I would find some way for us to be together again.
“She plays the violin. Did you know that?” Argyle was talking. “She took a class on aerial silks. You know, that thing that they used to do in the circus where some performer seems to almost fly. Just holding onto too long pieces of silk suspended from the ceiling. She was a singer too, you know.” He went on, talking about his sister. I listened. It didn't matter to me. I was at war. “Should I be here now, or look for her?”
But it mattered to him, so I tried to listen.
At some point, he realized he had been going on for a long time and did the polite thing. “So, who do you have on the outside? I've been talking about my sister this whole time. I don't even know. Do you have any sisters? Or a family, a partner?” That word. Partner.
Kara. I needed to talk about Kara. “Yeah, I've got a partner on the outside. At least, I think so.” And I started telling Argyle the story. About how we met at a gay bar, about a whirlwind romance, about our discovery that we were both students in different departments at the same university.
About our dalliance in polyamory and our realization that we weren't mature enough for it yet, but maybe someday. About me disappearing into the computer. About me losing time on video games. About us both agreeing to a digital detox.
Putting our phones on Do Not Disturb and trying our best to avoid social media. Heck, I deleted half my social media accounts. We had both been detaching ourselves from everything when it all ended.
“What do you mean it all ended? Did you guys break up?”
Sadness crushed my heart like a vice. I knew I hadn't been thinking about this because I didn't want to have to tell him. The system’s mental health protocols would prevent me from breaking down if the feelings got too intense. I could have talked about it if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to. But what was retreating into the game getting me? Y
Yeah, I'd been having fun. Argyle and I had been kicking a lot of ass and making progress. I had gained so many levels. This is what was important to me, right? No. Kara was important and I didn’t know where she was. Argyle’s sister was important and for the second time, I had convinced him to go adventuring instead of crafting. Why was it so hard for me to just be real and open up?
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“You see Argyle, things have changed on the outside.”
“What do you mean changed? Like 'the game was a flop and no one who wants to play it anymore' kind of things changed? Or has there been some kind of, I don't know, new political thing? Or some storm of the century that came up that no one was expecting?”
“I don't know exactly; I've been living in California for the last couple of decades, but... it seems like some new change in the whole wide world happens every other week,” I replied lamely.
“I hear ya.”
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing ahead.
Up ahead, a rainbow fluttered between trees. It dipped, bobbed, and darted between branches, like a great majestic bird hopping from perch to perch.
“Did pride come early this year?” I wondered aloud. As it drifted closer it became clear that it wasn’t light, but wings. Light from the wings of a giant butterfly.
Argyle pulled out his drum and began backing up “Oh no, oh no, no, no.”
“I didn’t peg you as the type to be afraid of rainbows. Or is it butterflies you don’t like?”
“That’s not a butterfly bro; it’s a fey-touched dragon.”
“A what?”
He didn’t get a chance to respond. The creature’s full form burst through the tree’s canopy, finally coming into full view. Its green body was the size of a Great Dane and its head was distinctly wolf-like. It had four legs that ended in massive cat-like claws.
“Oh! Oh crap!” I started to run. It took me only a moment to pass Argyle on his stubbly little dwarf legs. I felt the wind from massive beating wings overhead and dove to the side. The creature’s claws raked the ground where I had been the moment before.
Heard Argyle chanting a summons. A giant round shape bounced at speed from where he stood. I realized it was a smaller version of the Flesh Monstrosity we had fought before. The meatball was fast, but the butterfly dragon was faster. It beat its wings and kept in the air and Argyle’s summon bounced harmlessly beneath it. The ball continued off for about 30 ft before dissolving in a puff of smoke.
The dragon wheeled around and dove for the source of the offending flesh mound: Argyle. He tried to get out of the way, but he wasn’t built for speed. A red 38 drifted above his head as the dragon took a chunk out of his shoulder.
He fell back and the creature came with him, clawing at his chest. A red 15 and 20 soon drifted up from my friend.
It looked bad for Argyle, but I saw my moment. It was on the ground and I had my hammer. A down swing launched the massive creature several yards away.
“You have hit Fey Touched Dragon for 52 damage.” Nearly a quarter of its Health bar disappeared.
“The good news is,” I extended a hand down to Argyle, “3 or 4 more hits should do it.” The creature righted itself and took to the air. “Bad news is, neither of us can attack things in the air.” Green-blue fire bloomed out of its maw as it glided and strafed over us.
“And it can breathe fire. No fair.”
We dove and rolled in opposite directions. I got up, spitting grass out of my mouth. “Is is just me or are we spending more time on the ground than it is?”
Argyle was already rolling out of the way of another dive strike. I ran in to strike while it was on the ground, but it was too late. The Fey Dragon was already in the air.
“Fez, anything you can do to hold it still?”
“Well, buddy, funny thing is, I am small, and it is large. Also I'm a healer, so no. Well, I could make it a hat. For some reason, I think it would look good with a sombrero or maybe a ten gallon cowboy hat.”
“Well, why aren’t you healing Argyle then?”
“Because someone left my settings on heal undead, and not heal allies.”
“You’re supposed to be a hyper-intelligent AI and you can’t change your own settings?”
“As a matter of fact, no. No, I cannot.”
I threw up my hands in exasperation and immediately regretted it. I had to jump out of the way of razor sharp claws. “Fez, start healing Argyle!” One of the creature's claws caught my leg. “Oof, and me!” I fell on to my back as it stalked toward me.
A red wrecking ball of meat slammed into its side with a wet squelching sound, leaving behind a floating 60.“Thanks for taking one for the team, bro.”
“There has to be a better way than letting it attack us so we can get it on the ground.”
“If you have a better way to get it to hold still, I’m all ears.”
I thought back to the fight in the graveyard and the Health fountain. I remembered how the attacking monsters had paused until the ad stopped. “I’ve got an Idea; I’m going to try something.”
It had always bothered me that on my character sheet, next to each of my stats, was an Icon that would give me a temporary boost to it if I watched an ad. But, for once, I was grateful. It dove for me and I waited until it was right in front of me. I activated an ad.
The dragon froze inches from my chest. A screen appeared in front of me, like a giant big screen TV, floating among the trees. It depicted a scene of a bored-looking teenager with braces in a polo shirt. He was holding an old-school console square game controller on the screen. IIn front of him, a pixelated figure bounced from platform to platform.
Rapidly, the boy seemed to age and his outfit shifted through several decades worth of fashion as the controller in his hand changed again and again into more modern controller designs. The voiceover said “The world of gaming has changed. Are you changing with it?”
I recognized him wearing goggles identical to my very first non-haptic VR goggles. They shifted into a much sleeker sunglasses-looking set, then into a full immersion pod where I could just see his face poking out through a window of the sleek aluminum frame.
“Now the world of gaming is going to change yet again.” Now there was no controller, no pod. He just sat in a comfortable gaming chair. Floating around him were bubbles with images of battles. Wizards in combat threw fireballs at an army of green-skinned solders. Spies sneaking through German military bases. Cute, cartoonish characters juggling each other and launching slime balls at creatures with mouths full of teeth.
“Wireless VR: the future of gaming. Who needs a rig to play? Wireless VR available on any device with Bluetooth 3, no additional equipment necessary.” The voice sped up and I could barely make out. “Note: working video and audio channels are required for activation sequence.” It returned to a clear commanding tone. “Wireless VR: the future is here without limits.”
While the ad was playing, I couldn't move. I tried, but I was locked in place. My legs were anchored to the ground, like they had somehow been sunk a foot deep in concrete. The best I could do is focus on starting a swing. I had already had my club raised. I put as much time as I could imagining the creature diving towards me as a golf ball.
It didn't work. Once the ad ended and the normal flow of time resumed , the dragon immediately collided with my chest.
“You have taken 38 damage from Fey Touched Dragon.” I toppled backwards and my warhammer fell out of my hand. “You have taken 19 damage from Fey Touched Dragon.” Its claws slashed across my chest.
A bouncing ball of zombie meat crashed into its side, shaving off the majority of its remaining health. My reprieve was short-lived, as it was right back on top of me. “You have taken 33 damage from Fey Touched Dragon.” I couldn't take much more of this. One, maybe two hits.
“You have been healed 19 hit points by Fez, your fairy companion.”
“You have taken 26 damage from Fey Touched Dragon.”
If it hadn't been for that healing, I would have been waking up back at the tavern. To my right, I could see another one of Argyle’s attacks bouncing towards us. The dragon was wise to us, at this point, and it left into the air. The Flesh Monstrosity spirit just bounced past us harmlessly. Dragons claws were pointed down in my heart as it dove.
“You have been healed 25 hit points by Forest Fairy.”
“You have been healed 22 hit points by Forest Fairy.”
“You have been healed 31 hit points by Forest Fairy.”
“You have taken 31 damage from Fey Touched Dragon.”
I didn't know where these prompts were coming from, but I was alive. One more bouncing ball of destruction collided with the creature on top of me.
“You have defeated Fey Touched Dragon. Level up! You are level 18.”