“All right, bro. If we're gonna be here a while what do we do?”
“Well, in order to explore the game I guess we've got to play the game.” I could feel the familiar itch in my hands. The desire to go off and play the game and explore was intense, but there was playing the game the way it was supposed to be played and then there was playing the game the way only we could play it.
“I guess we could assume that like any game, this one is based off of getting the best gear and getting money, so that's where we should start.”
“Does that mean we're gonna get a car?” asked Argyle.
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not right away,”
“Aww, man.”
Looking around, I saw a vending machine that sold weapons and ammo. Above each item was a price in hundreds or thousands of credits.
“Whatta you think?” asked Argyle with a gleam in his eye. “Are we just supposed to steal stuff?”
“Maybe,” I said. “That might boost our notoriety, though.”
“Well, I don't have any money. Do you?”
“No.”
“Well, to heck with it,” said Argyle, reaching forward to grab one of the guns on display.
“Wait, I've got a better idea.” I opened up my character sheet and navigated over to my stats. “Here goes nothing,” I said and activated an ad to boost my Dexterity.
A portion of the crowd behind me disappeared as a celebrity chef popped into its place. He was standing at a stove rolling a fried egg around a pan in the way that they always seem to think is so impressive.
I didn't stop to watch. Instead, with an extreme act of will, I turned my attention to the vending machine. I put my hand on the biggest most expensive gun I could find. It was glued down; impossible to move. Trying to force it loose did nothing. I focused my attention on dropping it into my inventory the way that I had with the gummies. It vanished from the display case.
I quickly put my hand on the next gun over. I was able to snag three more before the ad behind me ended with a smile from the celebrity chef and the word, “Delicious!”
I pulled my hands away from the display as quickly as I could and waited, holding my hands up. I looked around. My notoriety meter remained in the green. Not quite at zero though. It had ticked up a few points while my hand was near the case after the ad had ended.
“Well?” asked Argyle. “Did it work?”
“I think so,” I said. I checked my inventory. Sure enough, I was now the proud owner of a ‘P3X 90’, a ‘Significant Sour’, a 'UMMM K 42 Assault Rifle,’ and a ‘Ribbed Magnum Pistol’. “I don't know who names guns in this game, but they all seem kind of gimmicky.”
“Let me see! Let me see!” Argyle was practically jumping up and down with excitement.
“All right.” I pulled one of the guns out of my inventory and handed it to him.
This was apparently the wrong thing to do. Everyone in the crowd around us simultaneously started yelling and running. My notoriety instantly shot up 40 points and kept climbing until it turned red at 75.
Somewhere in the middle distance we started to hear police sirens starting to blare. Argyle and I looked at each other for just a moment before we took off running, followed by a small army of uniformed officers.
“This would make an excellent exercise routine, if it wasn't so darn repetitive,” I yelled at Argyle.
“Speak for yourself,” he huffed. “I feel like I'm going to die sweating. Look, we've got these guns. We might as well use them.” Argyle whipped around and pointed his weapon at the pursuing officer only to for both of our notoriety to spike even further.
“Think that might be a bad thing,” I said.
“What the heck is the point of having guns if you can't use them?” asked Argyle, panting behind me.
“I think it's that you're supposed to use them sparingly, or maybe just not in public.” We ducked down an alley and once again tried our best to hide.
As we crouched in some very suspicious-smelling liquid, Argyle pulled out the gun and started examining it. Out of public view, it seemed that holding a gun didn't affect our notoriety. “That's interesting.”
“What's interesting?”
“The gun has a stealth stat. From the looks of it, this gun isn't at all stealthy.”
“Is that why we immediately got attention?”
“Might be?”
“Alright, so what do we do about it?”
Argyle smiled and looked at me. “You know that Skill book we picked up?”
A goofy smile spread across my face. “You mean the one for enchanting and enhancing weapons?”
“That's the one. If I use one of those spirit essence cores to enchant this...” He pulled out the small sphere that had been dropped from one of the spirit creatures we'd fought in the Haunted Graveyard. He got the far away look that meant that he was navigating through the system menus.
“Heck, yeah! It worked!” I felt a sudden chill and the gun glowed with a cold blue light. “I just raised the weapon's stealth and damage.” He held it out to me so I could get a good look at the newly enhanced weapon. The gun now seemed slightly translucent and light blue energy trails followed it when he moved it. “That's not all: it’s value just went up by 10 times.”
I could feel my eyes growing wide as I looked at him. “Wait, you mean?”
“Yup! Now all I need to do is figure out how to sell it.”
It didn't take long to find another vending machine. Argyle walked up. “Wait, why can't I sell it?”
The familiar smarmy announcer voice popped into both of our ears at the same time. “A weapon like that's too hot. You can't just sell it anywhere. You got to find yourself a good fence. Someone who could sell something discreetly without getting too much attention.”
Argyle's face turned angry and he kicked the vending machine. His notoriety jumped up to 15.
I looked around. “No cops.”
It was about then when I saw a ripple in the crowd up the road. Something or someone was pushing people aside, knocking over carts and heading this way.
I looked up just in time to have her run into me head first. We bumped, rolled, and got to our feet. The hair was different. Instead of beautiful hand-turned braids there were purple spikes and her skin was covered with glowing purple and gold tattoos, but it was her.
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“Kara?”
She had already gotten to her feet and was bolting through the crowd. At the sound of her name she paused and looked back at me.
“Kara, it's me!” I saw several uniformed figures pushing through the crowd from the way she had been coming.
She looked back and said, “I don't recognize you; I have to run.” She continued on, leaping over a pretzel cart and dashing through a group of tourists.
I looked at Argyle. “Follow her!” I chased after her.
Argyle threw up his hands and chased after me. I followed her down the street, turning down an alley. She started running up a fire escape. I leaped after her, grabbing onto the aluminum bars and pulling myself up.
“I gotta hand it to you. You're persistent,” she shouted at me.
“That's what you said before our first date,” I yelled after her.
“Flirtation check failed.”
“Harsh,” I thought to myself.
She hoisted her self up onto the rooftop and ducked behind an air conditioning unit. I followed and crouched down next to her. Argyle, with his shorter legs, found it difficult to keep up with us. I could hear him huffing and puffing up the ladder.
“Who are you?” She asked, looking at me. “Why are you following me?”
“It's me,” I said.
She looked at the name floating above my head and then at me. “Finch. That's the name she used to use online. Fiona?”
The name seemed to awaken something in me. Had this game got me so turned around that I'd forgotten who I was? No, I have been Finch in other games before. Finch was one version of me, but Fiona. Memories of how she had said it so tenderly. “Yes, it's me” I said.
She lunged at me and wrapped her arms around me. She pressed her forehead against mine. “How did you find me? I've been running for days. This place is insane.”
“I can't believe I got here. I've been looking for you,” I said. “I’ve been wanting to find you. I didn't know where you were. I…”
Argyle crested the lip of the building, uniformed officers on his heels. He hopped up, turned around, and summoned his flesh horror behind him. The giant meatball bounced down the stairs, knocking the officers off the rungs, causing them to fall back to the street below.
I breathed a sigh of relief and gestured Argyle over. The three of us looked at each other. Now that I had a moment to examine her, the name above her head read, 'Scarrah'. I hadn't noticed before, but there was a large, round case strapped to her wrist that she was holding.
“Why are they after you?” I asked.
“I’ve got a mission. I’ve got to get this package to the top of the ZURB Corp tower. From there, I’m supposed to fly it to the target point,” she said, gesturing across town to a tall building standing several stories above the rest of the skyline.
“Can't you just blend in and make your way there?”
“No. As long as this thing's on my wrist my notoriety is set to 100. Anywhere I go I'm instantly chased. Any car I drive is marked.”
I looked across the city. Argyleflopped down next to us with his back the air conditioning unit.
“Okay, let's get it off your wrist.”
“No, you can't do that. If it's removed, it explodes. It's a bomb.”
“A bomb. How did that happen?” I asked.
“Game logic. It doesn't make sense. There's a bomb on my wrist. I've got an hour to complete the mission.”
“All right,” I said. “Let's get you there.” I stood, looking across the city. I saw the giant ZURB logo. “That's a ways to get in an hour.”
“It is,” she said. “If I had another choice...”
“I get it,” I said before she could finish. “What happens when you die in this game.”
“Oh, you respawn at the beginning of the mission, but you lose money, items, and reputation. For me, I’ll lose so much reputation that another mob boss would be after me. Wait, haven't you been playing the game? You were with me in the Waffle Hutch when we got trapped. Haven't you been here since?” She looked at me, taking in my outfit and finally noticing my leather armor and warhammer. She looked at Argyle with his long, braided Dwarven beard. “Also, why are you dressed for a Renaissance faire?”
“Long story short, we were in a fantasy game. I tried to do the trick that the old man always talked about. You know, escaping by breaking the game’s expectations, but instead of getting back to reality the game sent us here.”
“What happens if you die in the wrong game? Do you respawn or go back to the original game?”
“We don’t know. I don’t really want to find out.”
“That might be a problem. It’s kind of easy to die in this game,” she said as she lifted the bomb strapped to her wrist. The display ticked down to 50min. “I had better go. Anything you could do to help me get there would be good. Although, you look like you're ready for a dungeon crawl, not a race across town.”
“Accurate,” I said. “But at least we’re together.
“I’m so glad you're here,” she said, squeezing my hand.
“You two keep those public displays of affection to the bedroom. We’ve got a job to do,” said Argyle in a way that I wasn't sure if he was joking, sarcastic, or bitter. Sometimes it's just so hard to tell the tone of things. Somehow it sounded like he was sad or disappointed.
I wanted to just fall into Kara’s arms. I wanted to hold her and talk about everything that had happened over the last week or more I had been in the game. I wanted to ask her how she had survived everything that had happened, but now, clearly, was not the time and we needed to get moving.
If I had been more aware, I would've realized that I was once again falling into the trap of the game. The urgency of her situation made me forget everything and I was caught up in the moment.
“We can't get there on rooftops alone,” I said, looking at the checkerboard of roofs, porches, and skylights between here and there.
“No,” she said, “but maybe we could get far enough away that the police won't immediately see me.”
“So,” said Argyle, still panting, “are you going to make introductions or am I going to have to?”
“Oh, right. Argyle, this is Kara. Kara, this is Argyle. Oh and the fairy is Fez.”
“Oh, you're the girl, this meatbag has been blabbering about. Can I interest you in a hat or maybe a boutonniere?” asked Fez.
“Kara?” exclaimed Argyle. “You mean, your girlfriend? The one you were looking for?”
“That's right.” I said.
"So, then who is Fiona? I thought I heard you say that name.”
I raised my hand, tentatively. “I'm Fiona. Or at least, that's my name in the real world.”
“Oh! I thought you were a dude. So, then, should I like call you bro or brodet?”
I had to pause and think. I wasn't even sure of my own gender when I joined the game. I just went with the default biology of my avatar. I hadn’t even realized who I was in the outside world until Kara had used my name. “Bro is fine. It just feels right coming from you.”
“All right bro. Well, good news: we found your girlfriend. I was worried you might have us scour the whole game just to find her. Can we go back to the other game now?”
“Maybe the system brought us to this game because she was here and already linked by the ad program.”
“Oh god,” said Kara. “There have been so many ads. I hardly escaped the first one. Ever since then, it's been a never ending barrage.”
“Same for us,” I said.
“I’ve seen ads from everything from insurance to toothpaste.”
“Guys, I can see a flower shop down there. We have to go.”
“At least sometimes I get something from the ads,” I said, ignoring Fez.
“Does it ever interrupt you as you're about to do something important?” asked Kara. “Because I was trying to sneak through a bank and it went off just as I was trying to sneak past security. By the time the ad ended, security had already surrounded me.”
“Oh no,” I said. “Nothing like that, but wow. No, we've just been getting ads for bacon and sausage every morning and ads for all kinds of things as we're exploring the woods. We actually got here because of an ad.”
“I can't believe you made the old man's trick work. I tried to escape a commercial for male pattern baldness cures He made it sounds so easy. Just look for a flaw and pretend you're lucid dreaming. All I got for my troubles was a headache” Kara rubbed her temples and winced with the memory.
“Yeah, it’s way harder than he made it sound. Ever since the first one, they’ve been much harder to break free from. Eventually I got a Skill that helped. I was trying to escape an ad and, well, I created enough of a problem for the system that it just kicked us from the fantasy game we had been playing and into this place,” I said, gesturing around.
“This game is pretty… well… let's just say I would never choose to play this game. It's some kind of open world vigilante simulator, where all you do is blow stuff up and get in car chases with police.”
“I mean, that does sound pretty cool,” said Argyle. “I wouldn't say no to a game like that.”
“Yeah, but it gets pretty tiring when you're stuck in it for a couple of days. Like, it's hard to even sit down to eat a proper meal without being chased down by the police or something.”
“Man, it must be rough spending a few weeks not being able to rest because the police are around.”
“Yeah,” said Kara, “no rest, no relaxation. Can't walk anywhere. Gotta be wary of the police 24/7. What else is new?”
I laughed. “What did they say about art imitating life?”
“I don't know if I'd really call this game art,” she said, “but I get your meaning.” She sighed and looked at me for a long moment. “Look, I want to catch up but...” she gestured to the package strapped to her wrist. The display ticked down to 56 min. “If I don't deal with this, I'm done for.”
“We'll help you,” I said. “I don't know how we can help you, but if there's any way we can help you get there, we'll do it.”
“Not unless you have some kind of fancy driving skills,” she said, looking across the city.
“Well, actually...”
“No,” she said, turning to look at me. “I don't mean horse and buggy driving skills.”
“I think I might be able to do something,” I said. “Besides, it’s a better plan than just sitting here talking.”
“Sure, I’m desperate enough. Let's give it a try.”
“You two just lead the way,” said Argyle. “Apparently I'm just along for the ride.”