It is expected that a dog who chooses to live with humans will often be out of his element. Although domestic life in Airy Zone meant long stretches of quiet days during which the greatest excitement was the discovery of opossum droppings in my backyard, it also brought with it stranger, more exploratory days. Lisa once brought me to a “tailgate,” the title of which strongly implied animal festivities, but instead it was just humans standing outside their cars. I got loose in a parking lot, stole a child’s hot dog, and was doted on by a gaggle of sorority alumni before she found me. The point is, with humans, it can be a bit of a roller coaster.
But nothing like this.
The world—the Shard—had stretched away in bright streaks, and we floated in the great big night that I had seen when we fell into the Screenwilds, the vast, inky firmament in which the cosmos swirled… whatever those were. But although the sky was filled with distant lights like stars, the plate of the Screenwilds, the last remnant of Exe, was not visible to me. Neither were the adjacent Shards, or any other, which made up the petals of the “stone flower” of this place.
It felt less like we were launched into space, and more like Platformia itself peeled back from us. How our bodies were transported through the strata upon strata of rock and earth above our heads unharmed I could not even hazard a guess.
We floated, twisting and detached from any land, any ground. Gravity renounced us. Up and down abandoned their duties. Even a fish in water knows how to orient itself upright, but we did not.
Commander Zideo let go of me.
“Look,” he said, his hands turning me in freespace. The Platformia remained before us, but had undergone a change in its perspective. It was largely flattened, straightened out for our benefit. I knew a little about human maps, although it was a long time before I understood what they were, and yet perceive no relevance to Airy Zone’s lumpy, sometimes mountainous manifestation in reality. In my opinion, the practice of interpreting a three-dimensional picture into a flat rectangle is pointless. A dog cannot look at a map and find the vole he is sniffing around for, and neither does it portray individual trees on which to pee. You see? Pointless.
“It’s the Overworld,” said Zideo. “Sheeeeeesh. The Pr—her majesty showed me this at the tower. But I wasn’t ready for it and I almost blew chunks.”
The map, as it were, was exaggerated and alive. Trees with simplistic eyes swayed in time to an unheard tune. Rocks quivered in place, concealing secrets. The irregularly shaped Shard was cast in bright vertical stripes: A light blue-white swath on one end, then golden yellow, spring green, and then capped at the other end reds and browns, laced with glowing yellow rivers.
He pointed to each in turn. “Blue Frost. Golden Plains. Rolling Green. Red Hot Picante Whatever it’s called Zone.”
Anchored to nothing whatsoever, his body turned away from the simplified map in space. He flapped his arms, kicked his Jordan-shoes. His revolutions were governed by the work of some other physics, however, and he could only look at the map when he was afforded an angle. “C’mon, man,” said Zideo. He tensed, and flaming sparks surged from his contours, sending him forward all of two inches—I assume he was attempting his Air Dash. But powers that be held him in place. Destiny had placed him here, and here he would remain.
“Wait,” he said, upside down and facing away, craning his neck to see the map. “Overworlds aren’t just maps. Maybe we can just… go back, and help them?” He waited an awkwardly long time until he could point at it. “Why am I not seeing an entrance to the Purple Deeps?”
He made several frustrated noises that betrayed the true animal nature of man, poorly veiled by several ages’ worth of evolution. Still unable to break the hold, he gave up and allowed himself to wobble and float free.
“This is so annoying.” I felt the draw of my eyes pulled by the same mental attraction that formed the critical path back on terra firma. Here, it was much plainer, straight line segments attaching the various locales on Platformia at stoic, static right angles, while the details of the lands nearby bobbed pleasantly. Frost-capped pines nodded along to the tempo in Blue Frost, coconuts swung from palms in the Rolling Green, volcanoes and standing stones raised and lowered their eyebrows in the Red Hot Caliente Zone.
“Let’s retrace our steps,” he said, reaching for the node within Golden Plains. His hand hesitated. “But… we’d have to fight our way through the Trackin’ Field, which is not friendly territory. Then get that trap door to work without getting caught. Then… find our way through the caves, and fight the horde from the other side.” He talked himself out of it. “We’d have to… Cormac, did you see what happened in there? I think the entire g-word-world turned into one of those Dynasty Warriors things for a minute. Where you hit like twenty guys at once?” He glanced at me. “Of course you don’t know. Did the Princess do that?”
He contemplated this silently for two or three entire seconds. The fundament shorts filled my view, which is fine, because there are no secrets between my human and me. “If she can change the gametype… why are we doing any of this? Why not just cheat? Just make it something easy, like, I don’t know… Duck Hunt, and go blast all the Bosses?”
I shared a supportive bark, but beyond that had no informative answer for him. He knew at least as much as I did.
“Maybe we should go straight to the base? The Boss Zone?” He eyed the volcanic wasteland at the opposite end of the Blue Frost. “Yeah. Let’s end this. Hold your horses, Cormac. I’m not sure how this is going to work.” He tapped, poked, and clawed at the map, but could not draw any function out of it. The red zone icon, a castle made of gears, flashed gray and refused him. A white circle which I later learned is called a “speech balloon” in human iconography displayed the symbol of a small sun, and the glyphs “x 4.”
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“We can’t get in,” he said. “It’s gated. Four Radians, and we only have one.” He was spinning upside down now. “Maybe we can go back to Pengoon Peaks and get help?” Then he remembered seeing the transports in the sky. I saw them pass over his face like a shadow. “Right. It’s probably… not good over there.” He continued to spin. He slapped and kicked at the map. The green symbol resisted him as well, graying and showing an “x 3” after the sun. “Such bullshit. Why is there an overworld map if I don’t have actual options?” His hands clawed unseen frustrations. “Argh! The illusion of choice. I hate that shit.”
We spun and reflected. I tried to lick his face when I passed close enough. “Maybe we should just stay here,” he said. “We’re safe here.” Hardly a second passed before he dropped this illusion. “Oh. Look!” Far to the left side, on the edge of the Blue Frost, a walled fort icon. “We could go back to Fort Weepus. I’m surprised that works?” He rubbed at his cheek. “It’s not part of Shard Platformia. But it’s accessible here, which means it obeys the Shard’s platformer rules. Why?” Once again, I could not supply the answer. “We could go back and see the Princess. Tell her what happened. Ask her to change the game for us.” He snorted sardonically. “Let her know that we failed utterly in the mission. And that Bailey Blastoff is dead, and Xue-Fang knows all her plans because he was disguised as DuChamp. And that the Game Fellows are captured… hopefully.” He shook his head, which introduced a new motion into his body and righted him, if only briefly. “Nah. Hell no. I can’t face her like that. We fix this ourselves. We free the others, we get the rest of the Radians. We make her majesty undo whatever magic she did to bring us here.” He sighed.
“If she even did. Did you hear that… thing, Sourgorge? It sounded like it wanted me back. It sounded like it knew who brought me here.” He stared into the infinite night, then perked up and looked to me. “Us, I mean.” He reached across the empty space and pet my head, such as the absence of gravity would allow.
“Back to Golden Plains,” he said. “We do whatever it takes. Are you up for some goddamn platforming?”
I did not approve of his language, but voiced my agreement.
“Let’s do this.” He touched the Golden Plains icon, which was next to an oval of marble that was surely the Trackin’ Fields. If this was not that, where would we set down? “Wait!” he shouted, and heaved his body to face me, swatting at and grabbing my paw. At the moment we touched, the stars turned into lines, and the map expanded in every direction around us. In a way, we were falling. We rocketed through an distance against all probability and sense. He screamed, and I did too in my own canine way, but there was no impact at the end of the journey.
We sat on asphalt of what I recognized as a parking lot, due to its series of more or less evenly spaced, painted lines. This was not the rustic landscape of the Golden Plains. No fields of wheat, no autumnal treelines except for the few in the distance lining the edges of the developed plot.
One thing I know of human-made places is that parking lots often contain unmanned and unattended vehicles. You might even find humans walking around, drinking beer or wine coolers from the trunks of larger vehicles, as was the case at the tailgate. This parking lot had neither vehicles nor humans, and certainly no beer.
Another thing that was missing: a sense of the critical path. I scanned in every direction but did not feel its pull, and believe Zideo did and felt the same. It was just sort of a parking lot, and we were just sort of in it.
While cars were absent, their crudely-crafted facsimiles were present. In a number of the parking spots stood erect wooden planks and plywood boards, painted ineptly to indicate (if not actually resemble) cars and other vehicles. Broken windshields and windows were a splash of blue with a spiderweb of white, bumpers were depicted as crumbled gray rectangles, and door latches dangled from joints. Often one or more lights were broken. This stands reiterating: Someone had done a bad job of hastily creating fake wrecked cars.
Lead by no strong sense of where to go, but a feeling of curiosity, we found that the parking lot featured more elaborate plywood and balsa creations: an entire false city like the ones I am told they rapidly build in a country far from Airy Zone known as Hollywood. I am lead to believe it is where many pre-recorded entertainments are created and transmitted to glowing rectangles of all sizes—even the fabled mega-rectangles in a facility called Movie Theater. (I have asked around about this. There is, apparently, some disagreement on its spelling. You are allowed to say theater or theatre, but arbitrarily never theatur and definitely not theatr, which to me is the most sensible spelling. The nuances of written human English evade me yet.) Facades of buildings which were labeled BANK or LIBRARY were propped up by rickety two-by-fours. Cardboard doors sagged in their mismatched doorframes, the hinges of scotch tape having come loose. More “cars” littered the “street,” and atop their “dented” “ceilings” stood orange, upside-down jellyfish I realized were supposed to be flames.
Who missed being surrounded by a rundown city so badly that they would go to these great lengths, but no further, to recreate it? And of course the answer, revealing itself to us presently, was: Street Toughs.
They appeared in “windows” and came through “doors.” They were playing dice in the “alleys,” which were really just open parking lot space between building facades. We drew their attention before long, and they circled in on us from every side, a sea of sunglasses, mohawks, frayed denim, no small amount of leather, and shining chrome chains.
“We don’t want any trouble, guys,” said Zideo. They herded us toward the “plaza,” over which looked a building labeled CITY HALL, lavishly furnished with walls and a ceiling.
“Criminals!” shouted one. “That means you do crime!”
“Yeah!” agreed another, and then several more voiced their accord.
“We don’t take kindly to crime in New Rampage City.”
“New Ram…?” Zideo muttered. “What is this doing here? Rampage City (19∞9) wasn’t a platformer.”
“We said NEW Rampage City,” said another, cracking a whip. “Let’s take them to the mayor!”
“Yeah! Then we can punish them for crime!”
“What crime?” demanded Zideo. “I just walked into your city.” As he spread out his arms in protest, he knocked the really badly drawn fire off the top of one of the really badly drawn cars. It folded over backward and broke on the ground.
“Vandalism!” shrieked a broad-shouldered bruiser. “That’s a crime!”
“Crime!” shouted others. “Crime! Crime!”
“That’s not a crime, you dunce!” protested Zideo. “If anything, I just put out a fire!”
“Crime!”
“Crime!”
They closed in on us. I’m sorry to say I did not give them the full Blunderworld treatment. After the fight in depths, I honestly didn’t perceive much of a threat here.
They hoisted us, and chanting “Crime! Crime! Crime!” paraded us down the apparent downtown avenues of, if the Street Toughs were to be believed, New Rampage City.