It’s madness. The kind that mushrooms up, and then out. Beneath the hushed crowd, a sort of ache trembles first in everyone’s stomach. I can tell by the way moans are let out. Then there’s a great plume of dissent. People shouting, some jumping to their feet and pointing immediately in protest.

“You bastard!” someone yells near the back.

The mayor, seemingly stunned himself, takes a moment to pull himself up stiff, disregarding the crowd’s reaction to his decision. What is he doing? Thoughts of him dance around in my head before I can make them stop. Him looking nervous as soon as I stepped on stage. Then trying, and failing, to hold that in. Or hide it. Then, after I beat the game, him suddenly becoming enraged. Enraged? The word fits so perfectly. Who’s side is he on, the player-characters, or his town’s NPC’s? At first, I thought he might have been having a stroke, or had become dehydrated from all the sweating. But now, it’s clear. My beating the game made him angry. No, furious. What was that all about?

I can feel my body flush with heat, as I glance back at the projection again. Why would he do this? Surely, he must realize that he lives in this town as much as anyone else does. The player characters will be here cleaning us all out, and he is no exception. Or is he?

A light bulb goes off in my head, and it almost splits my skull in half. I slap my hand to my forehead. His wink! The whole thing. The nervous shakes before that. All the way back to my father’s wink. They’re in on it. They have to be. This is some kind of trick they must be playing on the town. I almost smile, but then laughter, actual laughter comes up from my stomach.

I must be laughing so hard that I can’t see straight, because my vision goes blurry, and after a few moments, I make out who I think is Caitlyn, her nose, then her eyes, then her whole face, the shape of her head blocking out one of the stage lights in the rafters above the auditorium. There’s a glow surrounding some of her frizzy hair.

“Snap out of it Anna!” she says. Then slaps me. I barely feel the sting on my cheek. I must have been somewhere, in a daze maybe, because when I come to, everything seems clearer. Caitlyn, whose now much taller than I expected, is staring down at me, mouthing something. No, yelling. With her hands around her mouth, like making a megaphone cone to help her voice carry. But it isn’t. There are things being thrown in the air, tossed across the room. I see a piece of lettuce, then a tomato, someone’s shoe, take the trajectory of one of those planes that used to exist—the ones we’re taught about in school. These items start ascending above the sea of heads, sailing for a while—in the dark space above everyone’s heads, but below where the lights hang from the rafters—until finally, with speed and downward trajectory, the items fly and land in spaces just in front of the stage. Where they land, I don’t know—somewhere on the floor I’m sure. They’re trying to hit the Mayor. One seems to almost hit my foot, but it’s just the distance in my eyes. It goes up, sails, then disappears behind my sneaker and the stage.

That’s when I realize it. The back of my head hurts, like a small pressure, and I’m lying on my back, my head leaning up, trying to lift myself up on at least my elbows, on the stage. I fainted. Or did faint, and Caitlyn snapped me out of it.

Caitlyn notices my eyes adjusting. Sees me come back. “I’ve done all I can do girl. You’re on your own now. Good luck,” she says. She has this look on her face. Like, girl, if you don’t wake up and look around you. Then she rushes off, furiously tapping some buttons on her kit, until she’s out of my sight.

It takes me a moment to find my place again. Where am I? What’s happening? When I look over at the podium, the mayor is working on something. As he mashes buttons, the projector changes. It’s a screen I’ve never seen before. A menu screen. On it, there are basic categories, like number of player-characters joining the game, name of individual missions for non-player-characters, the arena settings, and roles of the non player-characters, and a whole bunch more. He’s working fast, and the system is responding to every one of the things he does. Only it’s not the system, per say, that’s responding. I realize, the player characters on the other side of the wall, the viewers, the ones who’ve been watching me since this morning, probably more by now, are responding. When I look at the category that’s for number of player-characters joining the game, the number is astronomical. Their class ranks so high it scares me.

Suddenly, I realize my kit is vibrating, no, rattling, sending me all kinds of alerts rapidly. But before I grab it, the crowd takes my attention. It’s like there has been a sudden shift in their perspective. Their perspective about what to do, now, and how. Nobody is making much noise. There are no longer things being thrown. Everyone is simply staring down, their noses in their kits, dialing buttons furiously, as they focus.

I see Mrs. Albright, smiling, as though content, walk to the end of her row, then, having made it to the center aisle, turn and exit the building. Noticeably, the entire group around her, the ones that seemed to have been angry at her, or arguing with her, or whatever it was that they were doing when the shout of “don’t pick my pockets” went out—that same group of people exit shortly after her, seemingly content as well.

That’s when I see the reason why. On the projector, under the category of non-player character roles, Mrs. Albright’s name appears in a role isolated as a box on the screen. The other people that left behind her, at least about the same number of names as the people I saw exit shortly after her, appear in other various boxes with roles attached to them.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

A lightning bolt streaks down my arm, and I reach out to my kit instinctively. This screen on the projector is organizing how we will play the campaign battle going forward. And what’s happening right now, at this very moment, is a race to find your position in it, and select your role as a non-player character. There are a ridiculous amount of boxes on the screen, and information and categories. I wonder, briefly, what the player-characters must be seeing on their side of this equation. But this question doesn’t linger long in my mind, because, although I know I have to begin to participate, and participate quickly, my heart calls out to my brain in a panic. I want to, no, I need to make sure Petey is okay.

My hands find a good position on the stage, and I lift myself up. When I descend the stairs and find myself among the crowd, I spot Petey and my father, making their way across the back of the assembly, along the wall. My father is looking at me as though he means to meet with me. So I go there now.

When I get there, I’m almost out of breath.

“Hey buddy, I told you everything is going to be alright,” I say to Petey, lying. He looks confused, like he couldn’t possibly figure out what is going on if he tried. But at least his eyes don’t seem so puffy from the crying anymore. Still, I know he can’t comprehend the gravity of the moment, so I take over.

“Let me see your kit buddy,” I say. When he hands his to me, I make an adjustment on the screen for him to accept a donation. “Okay,” I say, handing it back to him.

Then I grab my own kit and bring up the screen where I can make a donation. But I pause here. It’s not the screen I was expecting. I mean, it is the same screen, but there are new boxes, and new categories. In fact, my entire user interface seems to have been upgraded, or somehow changed, so that there is now more information. Also, instead of the amount of money I’d saved up from when I was little, my screen includes more money. I’m not exactly sure where from. I think of the possibilities, like maybe this is standard fare from being entered into the game as a non-player character. But that can’t be, because Petey still had his little amount of money. Nothing for him had changed. Then I remember all my point farming from this past year. There’s a manual in my kit, the one that I’d gotten from Randy when he’d jailbroken the gun’s ammo schematics. The manual was some old information, from who knows where. In it, there was this idea that as non-player characters, we earn money as we earn points, those of us who are contestants in the Game Start Screen. But no one in town ever knew that exactly, because every contestant lost, up until now.

I’m not sure if this is the case, the money coming from my points, but that’s no matter now. Petey is my utmost concern at the moment, and all I can think of is to help him prepare for what the older among us have a better chance at preparing for and experiencing. This campaign battle.

I take all the money I have and place it into donations. And then I click submit.

“Accept it when it comes Petey,” I say. And moments later, I hear the chime on Petey’s kit. Then I see him press a button.

“Good boy, Petey,” I say. I’ll be back to him in a moment. I turn to my father.

“I don’t know what you pulled back there,” I say, feeling myself almost cuss, but holding back the urge. Then I see his face, as though he has no clue what I’m talking about. “That wink,” I say, sort of stuttering, and sounding confused myself. He tilts his head, even more clueless about what I’d just said. Then I can’t even finish saying it. I don’t even know where I was going with it.

“Listen,” I say, straightening my voice, stern. “You better take care of Pete—“

My father cuts me short, shooing me with a hand. Not only that, he clicks his teeth at me. Then turns and leaves. And I almost can’t believe it. It would feel like a stab through my chest, if it weren’t so swift. His exit. It was more like a feather. A deadly one.

There’s no time. I’m angry. Frustrated. It bottles up inside of me and I have to let out something guttural. Then I turn to the projection and see the Mayor still hard at work on the digital proceedings.

“You can figure it out, I promise!” he yells, like a madman, his voice booming acoustically throughout the assembly hall. Though a balding man, in this moment, he looks as though he should have wiry hair, as though struck by lightning, and somehow playing some digital piano at the same time, rocking out to a concert hall full of people.

“These are video game constructs…game mechanics” I hear someone next to me whisper, or mumble, looking at the projector up at the stage. He’s young, and his hands are interlocked while he rests his elbows on his knees, like he’s praying.

I focus my gaze back on the projector. Lord, I think. It’s already changing so much. The categories. The settings of the arena to come. How many player-characters are involved. The roles left.

The roles left! I think. And before I know it, I’ve pulled my kit up to my face to scan the options. There are literally three left. I grab Petey’s kit, selecting something. Something in me hoped by choosing his first that there’d be a better option chosen for him, somehow. Like something I remember from math class. The law of averages or something, right? Anyways, I concentrate on my kit next, clicking the role, some role, as quickly as I can.

There’s a chime. Then my heart sinks. If it were in one of those funny videos the kids do these days, where it’s obvious it’s sketched out, as a parody or something, I don’t know, I almost would laugh then. Find some way to chuckle. But this isn’t funny at all. In fact, it hurts me to even look at it. The box with my name in it appears suddenly, highlighting what I am supposed to be in the game. My role is wife. And I’ve been assigned to take care of a baby. Not only that, the wife has a husband that’s already been selected, and when I see the name, I know he’s already in the room.