[Player Log Start!]

[Log Holder: Verity Monroe]

[Level: 1]

Michael disappeared into the Warp Point, leaving the other two outside to dawdle around, killing time in the early morning light. Which very quickly turned into midday.

Verity immediately got down to business, stalking out the location, looking for places to hide and areas that she might miss when doing rounds. The perimeter wasn’t secure, and there were a fair number of zombies straggling around, so she had to stay on high alert the whole time through. Food needed to be secured, water needed to be found and cleaned. Could they safely make a fire without attracting attention from enemy groups?

The normalcy of this process was so well-rehearsed and ingrained in her mind that she quite forgot that Ben was even there, as the older woman elected to simply sulk under a tree, picking at the bark with a knife.

“What are you doing?” She finally asked, her voice crackly and muffled through the gas mask.

Verity turned to her, not quite comprehending the question, “What am I doing? I’m making sure that nothing gets the drop on us, is what I’m doing.”

“A little paranoid, doncha think?” Ben shrugged, “Relax a little, it’ll work itself out just fine.”

She couldn’t believe what she was hearing, “It won’t just work itself out, Ben.” Verity told her, trying to keep her voice restrained and not hysterical, “We need food and water, and shelter, and there will be people coming to take it all away from us-”

“Yeah, okay.” She agreed, putting a hand up, “Breathe, kid. All those things are important, but you need to keep yourself grounded, or else you’re going to get lost in the sauce.”

“What?”

“Yeah! You need to breathe and accommodate the current changes you’ve gone through to not waste your precious time, attention, and money.” Ben insisted, “Just… take a breath, and now work through the things we actually need, instead of moving through the script and procedure you’ve worked out before.”

Verity frowned, bits and pieces of her clashing against each other, as her regular workings fell in conflict with these new directives.

“We need food.” She finally said lamely, “And water.”

“And the Console will give them to us.” Ben assured her, lifting up the coveted laptop. Verity didn’t like having her life and resources dependent on such a slim, compact device. It was an impossible thing to imagine. Almost as impossible as the Game itself, but for some reason, her brain had no problem agreeing with that. It was only when food and water got involved did she doubt it.

If she could survive using this thing, then humans could, too. A traitorous part of her mind that she wanted to rip out whispered. This was new, it had never spoken to her so clearly before.

It was also a vile thing to be saying in regards to other people.

“Fine.” She replied, crossing her arms as she sat down, “What do you expect me to do in the meantime? Just wait? Because zombies will bite our heads off if we’re not careful. You’ve grown complacent in all the years you’ve spent here.”

Ben’s face twitched, and Verity knew immediately she’d stepped on a sore spot. She wasn’t the best at reading people, not as good as Jared, anyway, but she had grown to have a sixth sense for when she had pushed someone too far, and currently she was brushing up against danger territory. Could you blame her? Ben wasn’t exactly being sensible here.

“Well, first of all, kid-” wow, pulling out the condescension, were we? “- we should start off by getting the high ground. Rotters are notoriously bad at climbing.”

Verity nodded, already jumping up to scale the high branches of the solid oak tree they were standing under. From branch to branch she jumped, much too practiced at this for someone who hadn’t seen a tree solid enough to climb in half a decade.

When she was at the topmost branch that could hold her weight, she turned around to look below at where Ben was staring up at her, gobsmacked.

“Woah.” She breathed, “That’s. That’s something. How’d you do that.”

“Guess.” Verity replied drily.

“Oh, alright, we got jokes, do we?” She laughed, a sharp, jagged thing, “Come on, help me up. I can’t reach the lower branches.”

Verity would have let her brave the plight of reaching lower branches all on her own, but she didn’t want the woman pointing out how Verity barely reached the five-feet mark, so she slid down to help pull her up. It was a foreign experience, not just because she wasn’t entirely strong enough to heft Ben onto the branch, but also because she… hadn’t done this much before. There usually wasn’t another person at her back who needed a hand every now and then.

She’d given Jared piggyback rides back in the old days when his legs were having a particularly hard time, but then he’d ended up taller than her and it was too embarrassing for her to continue. After that, company in her travels was rare. Sometimes Michael, other times the odd survivor she’d picked up from the side of the road. If you could describe anything on Wayside still being a road.

Finally, with much effort, they managed to get Ben onto the first, broad branch. She grimaced, hands outstretched as she weaved from one direction to another.

“Balancing is hard.” She whined, “How’re you doing it, kid?”

“Stop calling me a kid, and maybe I’ll tell you.” Verity told her, sitting stock still on her own branch. Below them, a zombie was snuffling and growling in their direction. It slammed directly into the tree trunk, not even reacting to the pain.

“These things aren’t very smart, are they?” Verity asked, watching as it turned up to look sightlessly up at them, and then slam into the tree again, “Their tracking abilities are very inconsistent.”

“Not if you take into account the levelling system the Game is using.” Ben replied, fishing a rock out of her pocket to throw at the zombie. It hit its head, immediately flooring the creature. Its skull broke like an eggshell, and brains went flying everywhere, even with that slight hit.

[Benedict Carrey Has Killed the Zombie (Lv. 1)]

[She Has been Rewarded 30 Exp!]

[Zombie (Lv. 1) Will Revive in 5 hrs]

[4:59]

Verity didn’t even bother to hide her sneer at how easy it was.

“That was pathetic.”

“I guess.” Ben replied, her eyes still stuck on looking at the fallen corpse, “But I think that might have been someone I knew.”

Verity flinched, turning to stare at the creature’s face. There were no recognizable marks on the creature, as far as she could tell. It was just a vast expanse of greying, green skin, sliding off its face and leaving raw, maggoty flesh underneath.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“How would you know?” She asked.

Ben sighed, slumping in on herself as best as she could while clinging onto the branch, “The first zombie I ever saw was my brother.” She explained, “He wasn’t as far gone as a bunch you’ll see nowadays. He looked… normal. Except for this layer of ash stretching over his face.” She made a retching sound as if her stomach was revolting at the very memory.

“Do you… want to talk about it?” Verity asked, trying not to sound too excited at the prospect. She was going for subtlety here.

Even with her blunt way of probing for information, Ben’s words spilled out like a waterfall, “His name was Gerard. Stupid name. Always wanted to change it as a kid, but didn’t know what to. Two years older than me, but now I must be older than he ever got the chance to be. He’d been at the ER when the outbreak happened in our town. Came in complaining about some sort of feverish infection and got put in one of the rooms as they tried to patch him up. In the wing closest to the Contagious Diseases wing where the rotten disease first sprung up. When everything went to crap, Tench got him out. Brought him to my place. Thought we could be safe.”

The image was clear in Verity’s head. Masses of people, fleeing for their lives, as more and more of the roving, mindless hoard rose up. The raw carnage of it elicited a type of excitement inside her that she immediately wanted to crush down under her foot.

“We didn’t understand what was happening. The news was blaming some terrorist organization. Foreign spies. Bioweapons. It was all so confusing. All I could do was barricade us in there, watching it all happen through barred windows. And the real danger was with us the entire time, and I didn’t notice.”

She let out a quiet sob, and for a moment, Verity reached her hand out to steady her. Just in case she fell. But Ben latched onto it with a force that nearly pulled Verity off the branch herself.

“Tench freaked out so bad, I had to kill Gerry myself. With a lamp.” She sobbed, full tears and everything.

“I’m sorry.” Verity murmured, but it was little comfort to her.

“I guess now, every time I take out a zombie, I find myself squinting at them and wondering if they were someone I knew.” She continued with a hiccup.

Ah, trauma. Never a fun thing to have.

Ironic for her to be thinking this, because she was partially aware that half of her life was probably some sort of trauma or another, but that wasn’t really the point right now. Actually, wait, sharing experiences was good, right? She’d seen Jared do it a bunch.

“My mother disappeared right before the apocalypse hit.” She announced, as if that would comfort her.

“Huh?” Ben sniffled, turning to look at her with eyelashes frosted with dried tears. Verity felt a lump fix itself in her throat at sharing this factoid, but she forced herself to keep going.

“She wasn’t really my mother. It was more of an… adoptive situation. But she was nice. Seemed to care. I wasn’t even shocked when she up and vanished one day. Thought that the universe simply didn’t want me to be happy. And then… two days later, the apocalypse came. And I found myself thinking, maybe it wasn’t an accident. Maybe she knew what was coming, so she ditched to save herself. I simply wasn’t important enough for her to take me with her.”

Saying it out loud sounded even more pathetic than it already was. Verity felt hollow inside, in a way that she seldom acknowledged otherwise.

“Shit, kid.” Ben whispered, reaching over to wrap an arm around her, “That’s not fair on you. Maybe it was just a coincidence? She wouldn’t have done that to a kid like you. Bet she had no idea what was going to happen. After all, how could she?”

“The Console we’re using was found in a room off-limits to me.” Verity explained, the pangs of sorrow echoing through her empty chest, “It was just sitting there.”

“Right, never mind. Maybe she was just an asshole.” Ben corrected herself, “Don’t sweat too hard about it, bad parents are a dime a dozen, and they don’t deserve your sympathy.”

“It’s easy to say that when you’re not the one who has to deal with all this.” Verity replied, swinging her legs a bit in an effort to distract herself from the heartfelt conversation. Every time she tried to open up to someone, she was filled with this electrical urge to move, to run, to get out. She had never been able to parse why.

“I guess it is.” Ben agreed, “Don’t exactly have much experience of that on my front, so I guess I’m a little short-handed in this conversation. I just need you to know that whatever the circumstances were, you didn’t deserve it.”

“If you say so.”

“No, no, you gotta say it back to me. With conviction. Did you deserve it?”

“I. Didn’t.” Verity gritted her teeth, voice so sharp that it could draw blood.

Ben’s face broke into a smile, “Good job. You’re on the long and arduous road to healing.”

“What about your road to healing?” Verity asked, “Seems more to me like you’re constantly stuck looking at the things which traumatized you.”

“And you’d be right.” Ben agreed, “There’s nothing to be done except compartmentalize. Letting out the pressure bit by bit here and there, but for the most part, you simply can’t dwell on it. Except that isn’t healthy for kids like you, so I need you to talk about things that bother you this much.”

Verity glared at her and looked away.

“Have I upset you?” Ben’s voice was quiet and comforting.

“Why do you keep calling me a kid?” She asked, “I’m not.”

“That’s… literally what you are. I’m not being condescending or trying to put you down, simply stating facts. There’s nothing wrong with being a kid, you know? Even if you’re a scary emo murder kid.”

Verity snorted at that but tried to keep her stern face on anyways. With no proper way to respon to that, she just remained silent, watching the clouds skim through acid-green skies. And then a scream cut through the quiet breeze and gentle chirps.

It was raw, animalistic, probably a deer of some sort, judging by the hoarse braying quality of the yell. It was also full of fear.

Immediately, Ben had flung herself off the branches of the tree she had taken so long to climb and began running into the forest. Zombies all around her turned and sniffed in interest, immediately attracted to the ruckus, but she didn’t spare them a single thought. Verity would have to be the one to do it, lingering in the background as the creatures thought it was safe to descend.

Not so fast, bastards.

[Applying Killer Instinct…]

Red and grey took over her sight, but once she began to move, green panels sprung up at every target she hit, followed by a cacophony of cheerful dings.

[You have Killed the Zombie (Lv. 3)!]

[You have Killed the Zombie (Lv. 2)!]

[You have Killed the Zombie (Lv. 3)!]

[You have Killed the Zombie (Lv. 2)!]

[You have Killed the Zombie (Lv. 2)!]

[You have Earned 150 Exp!]

She burst through every notification with sharp tenacity, heading directly to where the screams were beckoning Ben into the forest.

The woman was standing behind a tree, peering over at something she could see. By this time, the screams had died out, with only the heavy breathing and desperate but quickly fading whines of the dying creature.

“What’s the situation?” Verity asked popping up behind her.

“Deer.” The woman replied, her voice shaky under the mask, “A couple rotters attacked it, realized it wasn’t human and just… wandered away.”

Sure enough, the creature was sprawled in the grass, blood pouring out of a bite torn straight from its neck. Its legs were splaying, twitching and kicking in the final throes of life.

Verity lifted her shotgun and killed it from where she was standing. Killing it now was a mercy, but she didn’t have the heart to come closer.

“Think we can eat it?” She added, eyeing the bite uncertainly.

“Er… yeah.” Ben agreed, still frozen in shock, “Just cut out the bits that were contaminated.”

“Will do.” Verity agreed, already readying her knife to bleed it out and skin it. Ben was a veterinarian once, so she probably didn’t have the stomach to do this job. No worries, Verity would pick up the slack for her.

“The sun’s going down.” She noted, trying to keep the conversation going, “Think we should set up camp soon if Michael hasn’t made it back yet?”

“Definitely.” Ben still sounded faint, but slightly steadier than before. A hesitant pause, followed by, “Hey, Vera? Where’s the Console?”

Verity bit back the instinctive, ‘Only my friends call me Vera’ to focus on the more important bit of conversation. Her hands were empty, except for her knife and gun. No solid weight of the magical laptop.

“You don’t have it?” She asked, somewhat desperately.

“No.”

“Fuck, we must have left it behind.” Ben swore, “Let’s go get it before it falls off that tree.”

They made short work of heading back to the Warp Point, but by then they had realized there were bigger concerns than the laptop falling off the tree.

The laptop was gone.

Verity stared at the tree where they had put it, not a hair out of place, except for the fact that the laptop was no longer there. A red notification popped up, sending alarm bells ringing.

[Console No Longer In Possession of Party(Main)!]

[You Have 100 Hours to Retrieve It Before Ownership Transfers to Thief]

Of course. Of all the bloody things to happen, this was when it started going sideways.

Just to make matters worse, that was when green pixels exploded into the air, and Michael appeared in front of them.

“Hey, guys!” He grinned, which quickly melted off as he looked above him, “Oh, boy, what did I miss?”

[Player Log End!]