[Player Log Start!]
[Log Holder: Lucky Paine]
[Level: 2 (Sub-Level)]
The woman continued to smile at them, and the silence stretched between them like taffy. Tench didn’t respond, simply staring at her as she smiled and smiled, the motion becoming gradually more strained.
“I believe that you are offended?” Lucky asked, inserting themself into the conversation, “Because we are going through a rough patch in our Party. No one will actually be kicked out.”
“Some rough patch.” She noted with a sniff, “You should know better than to speak of your teammates like that. It breeds resentment.” There was a certain way she sounded out the words that put her on edge. A tad too deliberate to be mistaken.
Lucky looked at her with narrowed eyes. The woman met the gaze stonily. There was something undeniably wrong about this.
“So, uh, madame, who are you?” Tench asked, finally gathering his wits, “Why were you listening to us?”
The woman threw her head back and laughed, “Paranoid, aren’t you? I don’t suppose your Game is anything like our own?”
“What makes you think that?” Lucky tittered nervously. She’d been hoping to keep a low profile for a little while, at least.
The woman clicked her tongue, and her eyes turned pitying, “You wouldn’t look as shell-shocked as you do now if you had lived the life that we get to.” She waved a hand towards the collection of fields and huts, where charming music continued to play, “I mean, are you looking at this?”
“We sure have!” Tench agreed, nodding his head in a motion more feverish than actually believable, but it seemed to work to soothe the woman’s stance. Now that he’d been given an inch and had gotten over whatever had struck him into silence, he pushed onward, “And we’re trying to get to the town hall, so if you’d let us…” He squeezed past her, and she stepped aside gracefully.
“Of course! That must be your hut that’s loading currently!” She nodded towards a hazy gray silhouette of a hut on the edge of town.
“Uh… sure.” Lucky agreed, even though they were not staying past sundown this whole place was a hotbed for cult behavior.
“And if you see some kids wandering around, send them down to town hall, will you?” Tench added as she dragged him away, “There’s three of them, and they might try to kill you, but they mean no harm!”
“I assure you they will mean harm. And these people are not equipped to deal with that harm.” Lucky told him under their breath. Jared shrugged, completely unrepentant, as he wove his way towards the town hall, a charming one-story building that seemed like an ornate inn rather than the center of political activities that town halls were really meant to represent.
Another cheery facet that made her mistrust this place on principal. It just wasn’t right to be so happy.
“Should I be worried about that face?” Tench asked nervously, just when she had thought she could get away with a couple moments of rolling in silence.
“What face?”
“The face you’re making right now. That’s a mutiny face.”
“So help me, I will kill you if you begin roping me into this cabal of treachery.”
“Actually, the word cabal doesn’t mean what you think it does, and you using it in that way- okay, stopping! Put the knife arms away.”
Lucky rolled her eyes, folding away the threatening arms to instead shift her focus onto the board set up outside the town hall. It was a rickety thing, with an optimistic ‘Bulletin Board’ printed atop. But the board was filled with a surprising number of papers, all covered in legible text and notices for various functions happening around town.
It was curious the level of literacy these people had, for being simple farmers. Most simply would not bother spending all that coin on getting an education if they planned to spend a life looking after corn anyway. Or maybe that was just the expectation in Lucky’s world.
“You seemed unreasonably shaken by that woman.” Lucky teased Tench as she passed him, “Something curious I should know?”
Tench gave her a bizarre look as he asked, “How didn’t you notice?”
“You will have to be more specific about what I have failed to observe.”
“She looked exactly like Michael! Our Michael!”
No, that couldn’t be, Lucky wanted to refute immediately, just on instinct. After all, Michael may have distinctively pale coloring, but that was nothing too unknown. The woman just happened to have similarly whitened hair, and glacial eyes, and beauty spots just like he was beginning to develop, and-
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“You do not think that was his grandmother, do you?” She asked, distraught, “We cannot have been discussing our suspicions of our young teammate in front of his long-estranged grandmother who he might not even know the existence of!”
Tench’s eyebrows clenched together, “That- I hadn’t even thought of that.” He admitted, “I was just thinking about how they might both be sorcerers and it was a genetic component that they all had the white-blond hair and unique teal eyes.”
“A more sensible solution, no doubt.” Lucky nodded seriously, thinking it over, “But that was not what came to mind when you pointed out their similar physical characteristics. Usually, you do that to point out blood relations.”
Tench laughed shortly, “Yeah, no. I talk a lot of shit, but I don’t really think Michael’s capable of coming from a different Realm where a Game was already being played only to be integrated into Wayside without any memories of the out…” Here he trailed off. Perhaps finally having realized he was repeating bits of Verity’s story verbatim.
“Noticed the irony, have you?” She asked lightly.
“Oh, shut up.” He sniped, feet perhaps a little too harsh on the ground as he walked. The scrape of soles on the ground was victory to their ears. Perhaps as much victory as it could be before they reached the town hall, only to be greeted by…
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me.” She groused, staring at the flight of stairs in her path. What earthly reason could anyone have to put stairs here?! There wasn’t any reason to do that. It was only five steps. They could have made the foundations five steps shorter, it wouldn’t have hurt anyone.
To his credit, Tench looked appropriately disturbed by this lack of accommodation, awkwardly looking around him, “I could… find someone to help you?” He offered, “You want me to carry the chair up?”
“No need to worry. I thought that this might happen.” Lucky replied, twisting out the cricks in her neck, using the motion to pull at the joysticks built into the arms of the chair. In a flash, her metal arms were unfolding themselves, twisting around to land on the ground and pull the wheels off the ground, skittering up the steps. She grimaced as they were put down on the floor again. Not even a few days off the legs, and they had forgotten the flashes of pain that constant swinging subjected her to. Still, no time to show weakness, she opened her arms out wide, “Ta-dah!”
Tench clapped, which was expected. What was not expected however, was the adjoining clapping coming from God knew where. It was perfectly reasonable for her to lurch around in a panic, well-trained fingers already reaching for the weapons systems before Tench was darting forward and wrapping his hand around her wrist.
“It’s just a guy. Leave him alone.” He hissed into their ear, before laughing nervously at the man, “My cousin… she’s a lark, isn’t she?”
“Unhand me, mongrel.” Lucky bit out, “And never say that again.”
The mild-mannered gentleman in the tartan suit and tortoiseshell spectacles looked down at her bemusedly. And with such condescension that Lucky half regretted leaving out the height-changing mechanism during the rush job of converting the chair into a wheeled one. If she could just make proper head-on eye contact with this man, she’d show him…
“I was just going to say that it was an incredible thing you had built.” The man continued, a bead of sweat trailing down from his temples, which was very validating to her, “Is that a hydraulics tube you used to put all the spring into their steps? Because that hissing was distinctive. Steam or fluid?”
Lucky’s opinion of this man just went up several notches. They flashed them a charming smile, “I prefer to stick with fluids. Much easier to deal with than adding in a heating component to something I sit on.”
“Urgh, that’d be such a hazard.” The man shuddered, “But good for winters, I think.”
“You have winters here?” Lucky asked. There hadn’t been any winters back home. Not after the smoke had really started getting its hooks in. She had been hoping for a return to form this year, and while it had been getting cooler when she left, she hadn’t gotten a taste of a true, crisp, snowy winter. Surely it wouldn’t be too much of an issue if she were to… indulge.
“Not for a few months.” The man laughed, crushing his hopes under her heel.
But then again, the last Level had lasted nearly a year, hadn’t it? Perhaps they would still be here when the white flecks began drifting down, blanketing the ground.
“You better not be thinking what I think you are.” Tench whispered to her with a disappointed frown, “What was all that about not being fooled?”
Lucky rolled her eyes, “No harm in looking forward to winter.” She justified stiffly, “A quick pop in and out during that time. I wasn’t thinking about staying. Not like the others inevitably will.” The idea of stagnating just wasn’t appealing to her. If the TrackLands weren’t enough to keep her occupied, then this place had no chance.
“Anyways, sir, I’ve been told that this town hall is restricted area?” Tench smiled at the kindly man, “Danny Winston offered us a tour of the place, and if Blue was telling the truth, this was where she ended up after entering the Game?”
The man hummed, tapping his chin, “Danny, Danny, yes! Ms. Winston by the Cherry Blossom Hut. She came in recently looking awfully conspiratorial. I’m not surprised that this is where it led, though I would have appreciated a warning.”
“You are not going to be happy about the rest of us left out there to fend for themselves if that is how you feel.” Lucky informed him drily, half out of a genuine desire to tell him, and half to gauge his reaction to this massive security breach.
Instead of showing any of the appropriate alarm, he simply laughed, “Oh, what does it matter? The more the merrier!” He walked deeper into the town hall, lifting his hand up to beckon them along, even as he continued nattering away to the silence, “I’ve always been in awe of people from Survival Games. Tell me, is it enjoyable? Do you receive a thrill from it?”
“Not particularly, no. Unless you count mind-numbing fear and panic to be a thrill.” Lucky said, perhaps a smidge too harshly. The man looked a little disturbed, but not enough to be put off asking questions.
“Well then, what’s the appeal in it?” He asked, “Why do you keep playing it, instead of leaving?”
Lucky’s hands shook, and the metal spokes of her wheels rattled along with them, “We can’t leave.” They said, trying to withhold the enormity of their coldness, “There isn’t a choice in the matter. The world is ending. And we need to make sure it survives. Simple as that.”
“Well, that doesn’t make any sense.” He tutted, “Surely if you wished to, you could load up a different Game? No need to spend all your time worrying about what happens elsewhere.”
Those words were spoken with wisdom. With experience.
What world had he left behind to lose himself here?
[Player Log End!]