Like Ellie had, Teddy stared out the small crack in the wood covering the window on the right side of the shop. I went over and sat on the dog bed, and decided, since Teddy wasn't very talkative, and looked pretty tense, I would spend a little time trying to meditate. Last time it hadn't gone all that well, but I did feel like I’d made some progress nonetheless. I knew one thing, though—if I wanted progress, I needed to practice. Just like grinding to level up.
The only thing I'd ever practiced at had been the guitar when I was ten years old. I got good enough to play a few songs, and I knew a couple scales off by heart. But then having friends and playing video games with them all the time monopolized my attention. No, not school. School never took up my attention, not even when I was physically there. But my friends, I spent a lot of my attention on them. And we all spent our time playing video games together.
So technically, I guess I’d practiced playing video games a lot. It hadn't felt like practice, because it was something I enjoyed so much. It never seemed like a task, or skill that I needed to learn. It was just… it was just all I really wanted to do, every single day.
Of course, who among us could have seen the end of the world coming, and our reality being took over by an alien video game, or some shit like that.
At least it wasn't some kind of sadistic reality TV show, broadcast throughout the galaxies.
I stopped, my eyes widening, and looked around. Now that was a chilling thought. I was sure that these aliens were sadists, but I didn't think that the point was entertainment. No, something was telling me this was something bigger. This was super important to them, and not in just an obsessive need to play a game kind of thing, with dopamine hits and prizes awarded.
They had destroyed our world and pretty much enslaved us to play a game for a bigger reason. A bigger reason than entertainment.
Well… I hoped they had. It would be pretty shitty if they had decimated our world and enslaved us just to have us play a part in some shitty fucking reality TV show.
I saw Teddy look over at me, and for a moment I thought he was going to ask me a question. But he looked away, not even shaking his head.
For a moment I wondered if Wood’s irritation at me was some kind of new virus, and Teddy had just caught it.
Fucking shitballs, I hoped not.
I shut my eyes, and imagined myself breathing. Again. It wasn't hard to imagine myself breathing, it wasn't hard for me to imagine that my chest was rising and falling, and that I was taking in breath. But truthfully, it was really easy to also remember that I couldn't actually breathe, and I was just pretending.
Fake it till you make it, right?
I doubled down on concentrating, and before I knew it I could practically hear myself breathing in and out, and just like Ellie said it would, my mind started to wander. For a moment I thought about my old dog had died at the beginning of senior year—Henry. He had been a ludicrously large, one eyed golden retriever. A rescue dog. I really missed him. If it hadn't been for him, I probably wouldn’t have left my room after my dad died. But Henry demanded to be taken outside at least once every two hours to relieve himself, and while he was doing that he always insisted that I scratch him and play with them for a few minutes, before we headed back in. And then he would happily follow me back upstairs and lay at my feet while I play video games with my friends.
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Whenever Ellie came over, Henry would lie on my legs, with his head propped in her lap. He knew that if he lay there, he would get optimal scratches, both from Ellie on his ears, and me on his belly.
We had buried him in the backyard.
At first, when the dream started, I mistook it for just a passing memory. I was surprised at how vivid it was, though.
Oz and I were playing Palworld, back when it first came out, and we couldn't get enough of it. It was like everything we wanted Pokémon to be, and lately hadn’t been, no matter what they did to the old games, or what they did with the new games. Playing Palworld was scratching an inch we didn't know we had.
The fact that it was only thirty bucks… that was also a mitigating factor. Who can resist good deal, after all?
Oz was busy putting his captured sheep to work in a sweatshop he'd built. It was a little creepy, but what video game wasn't?
I was still out beating the heck out of a hippopotamus creature with wings, who could blast you with a huge torrent of water every twenty seconds.
“You know,” Oz said as he added yet another sheep to his sweatshop. “Nintendo is really pissed about this game. They said that they’re investigating.” It was funny how Oz said investigating.
“They should be investigating why they didn't think of all that stuff already. Especially the giving them guns thing.”
Oz snickered. “Yeah, the guns are pretty cool. But more than that, I like this whole capitalism thing they’ve got going. I'm making so much gold off of this.”
“Capitalists are bloodsuckers!” I say, and Oz jabs his elbow into my ribs. “Hey!”
“Don't call me a blood sucker,” Oz said.
“Okay,” I said, and then scooted over just a little closer to him. Oz always smelled of Smarties candy. I saw his eyes look over to me right before I dived in and grabbed a hold of the hair on the inside of his thigh, giving him a cow bite. He screamed, and grabbed at my hand, trying to pry my hand loose.
“So, you're not a bloodsucker, are you a little Ozzy? Then what are you? Are you a capitalist pig?”
That's when Oz leaned his head back and I felt his breath on my neck. I had a moment of terror as I imagined he might bite my neck and drain me of all my blood.
I was pretty sure that wasn't what I was thinking when he’d actually done that. No, I was thinking something really weird… something that kept me up that night, and part of the next night before I finally let it go. But like what had happened in real life, Oz leaned in and crammed his tongue into my ear, giving me a wet-willie.
I let go of the hair on the inside of his thigh, and reeled back from him, faking a retching sound. But I really was super grossed out. The only place I liked a tongue was in my mouth, and that was only when Ellie was the one using the tongue? Otherwise, I was completely tongue averse.
Whatever, I was busy wiping his spit out of my ear, as he jumped up and started running towards the door of my bedroom. I looked after him, wondering what he was doing. That's not how this memory ended. That's not what really happened.
But I had the sudden urge to run after him, and I did. I jumped off my bed, I ran after him out my door… and suddenly I was chasing after Oz through All Saints Graveyard. It was inexplicably night time now, and the moon above really made all the tombstones stand out. I felt myself really get engaged, kicking into run-the-asshole-down gear as soon as I heard the chase theme music come on. Very ala Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When Oz zigged, I zagged, seeming to intuitively know which way he was going to run, even when he would feign another direction.
Being a vampire, he could run really fast, but so could I. After all, I was the Slayer, right? I was the first male Slayer ever in Sunnydale history. Right?
Okay, that just didn't make any sense, and didn't line up with Buffy the Vampire Slayer canon. But fuck it, I was chasing down Oz, the girlfriend-stealing bloodsucker. What else did I need to know?
I pulled a throwing star out of my pocket, and threw it at the back of Oz's right leg. It caught him right in the Achilles heel, and he staggered, knocking into a headstone. Amazingly, Oz kicked backwards hard enough to dislodge the throwing star from his ankle, and continued to run. But that gave me just enough time to catch up and I jumped and came down on him hard, punching him right in the back of the head.
Oz fell down, rolling to the side, and smacked his face right into another headstone.
These headstones were starting to be really convenient.