CHAPTER 19 - INFINITESIMAL GATEWAYS

Michaelah watched Chaz stretch in his player pod. She giggled. She liked looking back and forth at him and the screen because he looked so completely ridiculous with the helmet and gloves on, standing in his player pod, and he hadn’t even started running yet.

From behind Chaz’s player pod she heard a commotion. As Chaz continued to warm up, she thought it would be a good idea to go get him a bottle of water. Chaz’s mother had given Michaelah money for that exact purpose, and it would be a good opportunity for her to explore a little. Her first stop being the pod behind Chaz.

A player was yelling at an employee. The employee, a small white cat, was apologizing continuously. Michaelah thought she was so cute. The employee cat had on the Gamer Central outfit, a red shirt with a blue collar. She was soft spoken but also trying to talk loud enough so the player could hear her over his own complaining. And that’s exactly what is was. This very overweight, black and white cat guy was absolutely offended at the player pod. His coat of fur looked just like an emperor penguin, even with all the blubber underneath.

“This is just unexceptable!”

“I’m so sorry, sir. We had no idea.”

“How am I supposed to fit in this dreaded contraption?”the player said as he stuck in the same setup Chaz had so easily slipped into before. This guy was so fat it kept him from fitting all the way into the ring. Think about a cupcake in a tray that’s top is too big, so the bottom doesn’t touch the floor. His feet dangled. And so, the treadmill did not elevate, which meant the station did not activate.

At this point, there were several other employees now helping the overweight finalist. Two giant hairless cats with bulging muscles, practically bursting out of their red and blue uniforms were helping the fat cat shove himself into his ring. Michaelah was finding it very hard not to laugh. She held her hand over her mouth and released some light giggles.

“Mister Buster, you’re just going to have to use the at-home controllers. We do not have any other player pods to accommodate your-”

“My what? My condition? My fat? You people have no right to publically harass me like this.”

“Please, sir, if you would just stop what you are doing,”the tiny white cat employee begged him to stop, while her coworkers continued plunging him into the ring like they couldn’t hear her, “We have looked into the device schematics and the maximum weight of occupancy might exceed-”

Crash!

Fat cat Buster had managed to get a foot on the platform, activating the treadmill, which elevated enough to support his weight and then immediately broke. The two muscle cat employees along with Buster went tumbling into the broken gear and everyone around them laughed. Michaelah let it all out after that. If everyone else was laughing, what was the harm if she joined in as well?

The laughing stopped when Buster jumped back up. He opened his mouth as if to yell at all of them and then started sobbing like a kitten. He stormed off and everyone continued laughing, except for Michaelah.

After that, she kept looking for a beverage vendor and used Maeve’s money to buy two waters. She looked at the other options at the stand and instantly remembered she was in a cat world. Funny how those things slip past the mind once enough time goes by.

Instead of there being soda or fruit drinks, there were different fish and meat flavored water and milk bottles. It was disgusting to Michaelah. There was also something called Cold Broth, which she imagined was like soup. Michaelah handed the paper bills to the vendor, an old gray cat, and he handed her back several other paper bills in change. It seemed a lot like money back home, but without any coins and cat people printed on the bills instead of old guys.

Michaelah took the long way back to Chaz’s player pod. At this point in the morning, the tournament was about to begin so the place was packed. She was finding it hard to get past people to turn corners. Every time she tried to squeeze through two people she laughed because they would sandwich her, and in doing so, she would feel their fur on her cheeks. It was such a strange, yet wonderful place. It might’ve been a different story if Gamer Central was filled with humans instead of cat people.

She returned to Chaz’s station just in time. All of the finalists were booted up (except for Buster) and ready at the starting gateway. There was a huge digital clock on every wall of the main room counting down to zero. As it went from 11 seconds to 10 seconds all of the timers went read. A bell sounded off for each second and the players all got ready.

“This is it,” Chaz said to Michaelah. Did he even realize she left?

“Good luck!” she said reassuringly.

Chaz smiled and the starting bell went off. He began running in place as the treadmill below his feet turned on. His screen looked like pure chaos. His player, even with the lightning shield, was getting slammed into and pushed by other players. The shield didn’t seem to have any affect on them. It must only be for enemies, Michaelah figured. Chaz was in the middle of the group as they rushed down the first hallway.

At the end of the hallway, it broke off into eighteen different paths, enough for everyone to split up, creating tons of space. Chaz could get his bearings. He looked at all of the paths. He was the only one who didn’t make a decision right away. Everyone ran off. And he let them. It was the oddest thing.

“What are you doing?”Michaelah asked him.

He waved her over, his player mimicking the motion to no one on the screen. Chaz whispered to Michaelah, “There should be twenty ways to go here. Two are hidden.”He toggled something on his glove and the treadmill boosted up as his player jumped on-screen. Then his player lunged forward into a wall. The wall did not break, so Chaz’s player bounced off it. Chaz himself was thrown back in his rig. After that he tried two more walls. Michaelah was starting to get worried. He was wasting a lot of time with this. Other players had already advanced to the level 2.

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

Chaz’s violet lightning bolts stopped and started recharging. He ran towards another wall, the last wall between the different hallways branching out. He braced for a collision but there was none. It was a fake wall! Michaelah was shocked and now glued to the screen above Chaz’s player pod. Behind the fake wall was a staircase. Chaz took it and it led all the way up to level 25!

Another series of bells went off, signifying the first player to make it to level 25. All of a sudden, the four digital clocks on the walls of the main room all shifted into a leaderboard with CHA$$YGL0RI0$ at the top. Michaelah smiled. He really did know what he was doing. Unfortunately, this meant Chaz would most likely be the first one to go up against Barrage.

Michaelah was expecting to see a giant cannonball or torpedo or something. That’s not at all what Barrage looked liked. After a while of being over-precautious, CHA$$YGL0RI0$ finally decided on a hallway and took it. There were no other doors at first. After he turned a couple of corners there was a hallway with two doors, one on each side. Chaz continued past the doors. He turned one final corner and there was only one other door at the end of the hallway. He now had to choose between three doors.

The easy choice was the gateway at the end of the hallway. Chaz pressed a button on his belt and something that looked like a camera sprung out of it. He held the scanner and looked at the gateway through it. Then he turned around and ran back to the other two doors, scanning them as well. By the time he was done, someone was standing in the gateway he had originally came to this floor on. It was another player.

Another announcement bell rang, and the Leaderboard flipped a name into second place, DemTheseKnocks, was the name of the player. It was a girl cat with long white hair and a frumpy face, she had the hair on her head pulled back in a ponytail. Chaz panicked. “She must have doubled back and found my shortcut!”

He put the scanner away and watched her check the hallway he was standing in. She popped out her own scanner. It looked like a cheap disposable camera. Michaelah could tell it was not as good as Chaz’s scanner. She was finding out firsthand that there were many levels to this game.

DemTheseKnocks went for the gateway on the left and Chaz screamed, “No!” He grabbed her wrist and rushed her off. It was too late though. She had already triggered the gateway. It was not a door to the next level but a portal for Barrage to enter the floor. And so, he did. Just because a floor only had a 25% chance of the mini-boss attacking didn’t mean it would never happen. Welcome to the finals.

Chaz led her to the door at the end of the hall as Barrage, what looked like an inverted ghost, a dark body with white eyes and a white outline, chased after them. He looked like he got bigger as he got closer to them. There was one storage box in the hallway besides the gateway. When Chaz got to it he did not open it right away but hid behind the box, the girl followed, even though they were no longer holding hands.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

“He’ll just follow us up to the next level. We need to stop him here.”

“How?”she asked.

“The other door.”

“Oh, great.”

There was only one other door in this hallway and right now Barrage stood in the way. He had slowed down. After they stopped moving he had lost track of them. DemTheseKnocks grabbed Chaz. Michaelah gasped as she watched his screen. She was going to throw him at Barrage.

“Oh no you don’t!” Chaz said. He slapped his boots and the violet lightning bolts stretched out, shielding him. Just like before, they didn’t pry her off of him because she was another player. She laughed, dragging him out from behind the box. When she tried to release him and go for the door he did not budge. “What the?”Chaz was also holding onto DemTheseKnocks.

“I gave you a chance,” he said loudly, practically screaming, “Now you get what’s coming!”

Without much warning, Barrage slammed down on top of them, he annihilated DemTheseKnocks. Chaz fell over but his lightning shield took all the damage, disintegrating before him. DemTheseKnocks’ name was removed from the leaderboard and replaced with three more as Chaz opened the door to the level 26.

Michaelah watched him race through the following floors. The other players were relentless. Every time Chaz got ahead, they quickly made up ground on him. In no time, he was racing for his place on the leaderboard. It was hard for Michaelah to look away from the monitor, but on one occasion she noticed that fat cat Buster was walking by. He had returned and only Michaelah noticed. She looked around for the red and blue shirt employees, but they were nowhere to be found. So, Michaelah followed him.

He went back to his player pod and took out a toolkit from under the table. He was very familiar with it, which told Michaelah it had to be his. Maybe he was just retrieving it. He was doing an awful lot of mumbling under his breath. He didn’t leave after that but went deeper into Gamer Central.

Soon, Michaelah had left the main room and was following Buster down to the basement. Above them in the hallway were giant cables and wires all going in the same direction Buster was walking with his toolkit. Michaelah was getting increasingly worried something bad was going to happen. She tried looking around for help, but he was taking her in such a way that there were no other people.

Finally, they got to what looked like the central server for the convention center. Was Buster planning on sabotaging the entire tournament? He took out a wrench and opened the panel to reveal big computer. He raised the wrench up as if to smash it and Michaelah yelled out, “Stop!”

Buster jumped. He thought he was alone. Once Buster realized she was some girl, and a weird looking one at that. He raised the wrench up. Michaelah took a deep breath, did a cartwheel, and then kicked the wrench out of his hand. He hissed at her and immediately recoiled to all fours, attack position. For a fat cat he was pretty fast. Buster whipped his claws out and went to scratch Michaelah’s face.

Before he could reach her his paw was caught and he was punched in the face by a panda. Koji has appeared out of nowhere to rescue her. Michaelah hugged the panda. She was so glad to see him. But how did he get her?

Buster didn’t get back up but rolled over and kicked his toolkit off the platform. The kit tumbled down into the server and opened up, spilling all of his tools into the machinery.

“Oh, no!” Michaelah screamed. It was too late.

The computer running Gamer Central started short-circuiting and glitching out. The hardware in the basement with them was breaking as the tools clogged the system. The software was glitching so hard it was blending the lines between video game and reality.

From back on the main floor, Chaz took off his goggles to see Barrage coming through the ceiling into Gamer Central. Screams and panic proceeded. Back in the basement, Buster ran out of the room while it flashed and smoked as the server continued to break.

“We have to get out of here!” Koji screamed over the grinding metal and explosions.

Michaelah grabbed his paw, the familiarity of his fur instantly making her feel better in the chaos. They were back in one of their adventures, and this was no different than anything they had faced in Scary Territory.

That’s when the primary processor shattered and all the colors of the rainbow flooded out into the basement, up into Gamer Central, and through Kitty City, pushing everything in greater Pandamonium out of whack, everything except Michaelah and Koji.