Part 1: Character Creation / Chapter 10

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“Where’d you come from?” Robbie exclaimed.

“Oh, don’t have a heart attack,” Nancy’s mom said in a chipper, sardonic tone as she surveyed the room. She poked at one of the ferret bodies with the toe of her sensible nurse shoe.

“What. A. Mess.”

“Where’s the real nurse?” I asked.

“Oh, she’ll be along shortly.”

I couldn’t be sure, but I got the distinct sense that my various attempts to contact the nurse’s desk had been muted by whatever supernatural forces were powering the waking nightmare I’d been living since I woke up that morning.

“Who are yo—” Robbie started to ask Nancy’s mom.

But I cut him off, yelling at her, “I’ve had it with you!”

I’d been fed up with this crap since the last time I saw her, and I was determined to shake some real answers out of her before she poofed away again.

“For the last time, why is all this happening?” I pressed. “And don’t you dare say—”

“I forget,” she cut me off, taking my dare.

Then she started the vibrating schtick again, and I clenched my teeth.

“What’s coming out of her mouth?” Robbie cried.

“She does this all the time,” I groaned, as six slips of paper inched their way out of Nancy’s mom’s mouth.

She tore each one off, collecting them in a tidy little pile.

Then she said, “Well, you two have a lot to talk about, so off I pop.”

Tossing the slips into the air, she yanked open the door and walked out of the room.

“You know, you could just hand them to me!” I called after her as the slips fluttered to the ground. I knew there was no point in trying to follow her.

“Who was that?” Robbie asked, finally finishing his earlier question. “And how did she print that stuff from her face?”

“That . . . was my high school girlfriend’s mom.”

“Ahhhhh!” a nurse screamed as she walked by the room. Nancy’s mom had left the door wide open, giving passers-by a good look at the ferret carcasses still adorning the floor of the room. Sure enough, it was weird, but apparently not supernatural, make-it-like-it-never-happened weird. In fact, knowing whoever was in charge of things, it may well have met the “hilarious” criteria.

“What’s going on here!” the nurse demanded.

“Hi! Yeah . . .” I answered. “Somebody just . . . threw these in here.”

But that didn’t seem motivated enough, so I added the first nonsense that popped into my head. “They . . . yelled something about the mayor.”

Another nurse arrived, presumably in response to the first nurse’s scream.

“What the—?” he said, with a horrified look as he took in the gore on the floor.

“Somebody’s mad at the mayor,” the first nurse explained.

I didn’t know how anyone could connect the dots between the ferret slaughter and the mayor, but I figured if it was too big a leap it wouldn’t matter, because everybody would just get mindwiped. Case in point . . .

“Did you guys see that other nurse?” Robbie asked.

“What other nurse?” the newly arrived nurse answered.

Robbie furrowed his brow. Under ordinary circumstances, there was no way they could have missed Nancy’s mom walking out. I thought it was clear enough that their memories had been adjusted, and it wasn’t worth risking my Life-O-Meter to confirm it.

What stumped me was Robbie’s clear recollection of the situation. Wasn’t he due for some memory-mangling? I supposed he had more forgetting to do than the nurses. Maybe the process was still spooling up?

“Uncle Henry?” he asked. “What happened to all your scratches and bites and blood?”

I felt my head, thigh, and shoulder, where the ferrets had ravaged me. The wounds were gone. Pulling away the band-aid on my temple, I discovered the cuts from my scuffle with the Cutie Pants dolls were gone too. My shirt wasn’t even torn. Apparently, at level 2, I’d developed accelerated healing—and so had my clothes. Sure, my Life-O-Meter had been bouncing back after my run-ins, but the wounds had remained, like stubborn artifacts of reality. Until today, the newly developed hyper-healing would have been a showstopper. But today, I just threw it on the pile of miracles my brain was feebly trying to digest.

My cover story for the ferrets may not have been the most well-conceived, but apparently the universe-bending forces now at work in my life had gotten on board. Within twenty minutes, the news had reported the police had arrested an animal rights activist who believed the mayor had a lot of ferret blood on his hands. I supposed, with the state of modern politics, a mayor having beef with the ferret community was more or less par for the course.

Given the mess, I would have thought we’d be moved to another room, but maybe there wasn’t one available because they just sent in a janitor to bag up the bodies and mop up the blood. In the meantime, Robbie was getting checked out by the staff.

“What happened here?” the attending nurse asked, noting his torn gown and scratched abdomen.

“Oh,” he said. I thought he was stalling for time as he tried to sort out whether to follow my lead and lie. Boy, was I a great influence on the kid.

“I got snagged and scraped myself on the bed railing when I got up to use the bathroom,” he finally answered.

The nurse nodded. It was a plausible explanation—far more plausible than the truth. She applied a band-aid, took his blood pressure, and eventually headed out, followed soon-after by the janitor. Once we were alone again, Robbie just looked at me, expectantly. I had to give him credit. What nine-year-old can keep mum for that long after what he’d just witnessed?

Then it occurred to me that maybe he hadn’t been keeping mum. Maybe when he’d paused after the nurse had asked him what had happened, he hadn’t been trying to make up his mind to lie. Maybe his mind had finally been getting reformatted. But wait. Just before making her exit, Nancy’s mom had said, “You two have a lot to talk about.” Why would we have a lot to talk about if he wasn’t going to remember what had—

“So mutant rodents are trying to kill you?” he said, interrupting my circular guessing game. “And how did you heal so fast? And why aren’t your clothes ripped anymore?”

I did a double take and responded, “You . . . remember the ferrets?”

He looked at me like I was nuts.

“Not really the kind of thing you forget.”

“Right. It’s just, Nancy’s mom told me your memory would be adjusted so—”

“Your old girlfriend’s mom who pukes paper told you she’d erase my memory of the ferret hit squad?”

It sounded extra crazy when he put it like that, but all I could say was, “Yeah.”

“Got it,” he said. “So why isn’t it happening?”

“Maybe it takes a minute,” I posited.

We both sat there for a moment, looking around the room, and up at the heavens, awaiting the mindwipe.

“Anything?” I asked.

“Nope,” he answered.

“Wait,” I said, wondering if his memory had been stealth-adjusted. “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

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

“Ferrets,” he said, reading the suspicion on my face. “And mind wipes.”

That checked out.

“Hm,” I said, trying to figure out my next move.

People weren’t supposed to remember any really crazy stuff. And an assassination attempt by malevolent ferrets scored pretty high on the crazy scale. Did the rules not apply to Robbie? I didn’t know, but Nancy’s mom had said we had a lot to talk about, so I decided it was time to start talking.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m . . . trapped in some sort of game-based reality. And if I try to tell anybody about it, I start dying.”

“You start dying if you tell anybody?” Robbie said, a note of concern creeping into his voice. Incredibly, he seemed to have believed me so instantly that he was already worried for me.

“But you just told me about it!” he cried.

“Yeah,” I said.

“And you’re not dying.”

“Maybe it takes a minute.”

We both paused again, waiting for the dying to start. But again, nothing happened.

“Anything?” he asked.

“Nope,” I answered.

I didn’t feel my Life-O-Meter reducing by even a single tick. I yanked back a sleeve and glanced at my forearm to double check. Sure enough, I was holding steady at my most recent peak of twenty.

“Okay, so I’m . . . an exception?” he said.

“I guess?”

“And you can tell me everything.”

“I guess.”

He was freaked out to be sure. But more than that, he seemed . . . excited. I could chalk some of that up to the fact that he was a kid. For him, the concrete of reality was still wet, mushy and, malleable—it hadn’t yet dried and hardened to merge the inexplicable with the inconceivable. But his youth couldn’t account for all of his credulity. What he’d seen would unseat even the biggest fan of the fantastical. It struck me that his acceptance had been souped-up by his need to set the rules of reality aside. In a world where ferrets were out to shank his uncle, maybe there was room for doubt about his prognosis.

Whatever the case, I decided to tell him the whole story—from the doll attack to my near-death experience at the hands of Marty Malomar. Was it sensible to drag him into my bizarro existential crisis? No. But he was one of the only two people in the world I trusted. And after what he’d seen, he wasn’t going to let it go.

When I finished, he took a moment to consider everything I’d told him. Then he asked, “You really don’t know Nancy’s mom’s first name?”

“That’s your question?” I rebutted.

“It’s just weird that you call her Nancy’s mom.”

I shrugged.

“She probably wouldn’t tell me her name if I asked. She hasn’t given me a straight answer to a single one of my questions.”

“Like what?”

“Like ‘What the hell is happening to me?’”

“You asked that?”

“Of course.”

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘It’s RIP, you nitwit.’”

“What?” Robbie cried. “Are you kidding?”

“No. Why?”

“Because I play RIP all the time!”

“It’s an actual game?”

“Yes!”

“That kids play? ‘Rest in Peace’ is kind of a grim name.”

“It’s not Rest in Peace. It’s Rest in Pieces.”

“Ah. Much better.”

“And now that I think of it, you’ve played it with me!”

“What?” I exclaimed.

“The MMO we played last Thanksgiving!”

My memory flashed back to the pre- and post-meal gaming sessions. I hadn’t picked up a game controller in a decade. I’d had no idea what was going on. I’d reminded myself of my father the one time he’d tried gaming with me when I was a kid. As Robbie ran ahead killing goblins left and right, I’d lagged behind, disoriented by the inversion of the controller sticks and bewildered by the buttons. I’d run into walls, fallen off cliffs, jumped when I meant to slash, slashed when I meant to jump, and failed altogether to find the spell-casting triggers hiding beneath my index fingers. Robbie eventually ended up fighting the boss on his own, after I was eaten by something called a Rorshark, which was an amorphous floating blob of cockroach-like creatures that took on the form of a shark as they devoured their prey, leaving nothing but bones.

For a once-avid gamer, it was a traumatic showing and you’d assume I’d have blocked out most of the experience. But in fact, I’d treasured it. Robbie had been feeling great that day and we’d done some big-time bonding. Which is to say I thought I recalled the name of the game quite clearly.

“I thought that game was called Titan’s Sword,” I said.

“Sort of,” Robbie answered. “The game’s RIP. Titan’s Sword was the name of the DLC.”

I cringed at his use of “DLC.” It’s always bugged me. It stands for “Downloadable Content.” So the acronym should just be “DC.” Alas, some nimrod plugged in an “L” in the middle. I don’t know much, but I do know adding extra letters to an acronym kind of defeats the purpose of an acronym. Anyway, I digress.

“Since last year, they put out two more DLCs,” Robbie went on. “Rangor’s Singlet and Dragon’s Kiln.”

I frowned, and not just because he was following the lead of knuckleheads the world over who’ve agreed that saying “DLC” is okay.

“That doesn’t make any sense. That game is all killing ogres and slaying dragons. There’s no sword and sorcery theme to what’s happening to me.”

“Same franchise, new genre” Robbie countered. “You know they’ve got D&D in space now.”

“Huh. I suppose,” I responded, trying to take all the reality-smashing impossibilities in stride.

“Oh!” he exclaimed. “Have you died?”

Context aside, the question took me off-guard.

“Uh . . . no.”

“Probably better to avoid it,” he suggested. “RIP is strictly hard core. If your character dies, there’s no respawning. You gotta make a new one. Which in this case would be hard because you’d be dead.”

“Avoid dying,” I said. “Got it.”

Then his face lit up again.

“Mentors!” he cried.

“Huh?”

“In RIP, new players can select a mentor at any point after level 2, and veteran players can earn XP by being mentors.”

“Okay,” I said.

He looked at me, dumbfounded that I wasn’t picking up what he was putting down.

“I’m your mentor!” he cried.

I began to understand.

“So you’re a player,” I said.

He nodded.

“That’s why my memory hasn’t been wiped.”

“Huh?”

“From what Nancy’s mom said, I thought everyone was an NPC but me,” I explained. “And I get dinged for talking to NPCs about what’s happening.”

“Even the ones who are already trying to kill you?”

“Don’t know. Haven’t tried talking with them much. Maybe they’d kill me faster.”

It was all starting to make sense—at least in as much as any of this madness made sense. But this meant Robbie was far more involved than I wanted him to be. I grimaced.

“What’s a matter?” he asked.

“I never meant for you to—”

“Die a glorious death at a young age in a battle with an orc or a Rorshark instead of dying a super lame death at a young age from a stupid heart condition?”

“That’s not what I—”

“Don’t worry about it,” he cut me off. “I’ll probably be fine. Mentors can’t really get involved in their mentees’ battles. They’re mostly just spectators.”

“Probably?” I repeated. “Mostly?”

“Yeah.”

I didn’t like the equivocation. Considering he’d already taken a hit from one of the ferrets, I was sure he was in some danger. I just didn’t know how much. But he had a different concern.

“What’s whacked is, I don’t know anything about this release.”

“That would make mentoring hard.”

“Exactly,” he agreed.

Then he let it go and carried on.

“Anyway, what are you playing for?”

“What do you mean?”

“Every DLC has a prize. When I finished Titan’s Sword, I got a broad sword that gave every weapon in my inventory 2X damage. And Rangor’s Singlet gave me leg armor that debuffed all sub-bosses by 25%.”

“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know. Nancy’s mom didn’t say anything about a prize.”

“Well, what’s the name of the DLC? That usually gives you a hint.”

“I . . . don’t know.”

But I did know. Suddenly, my dream came back to me.

“Wait! Kool-Aid. Something about Kool-Aid.”

“Kool-Aid?” Robbie said, his eyes lighting up yet again. “Kool-Aids are potions! And they’re badass. Super powerful and super rare. And tradeable, so you can sell them for a buttload of in-game currency or give them to clan mates to accrue massive influence.”

He was starting to lose me.

“Do you remember what kind of Kool-Aid? Like a flavor?”

I was about to shake my head, but again, my dream came back to me.

“Lazarus!” I said. “Lazarus’ Kool-Aid.”

He frowned. “What’s a Lazarus?”

“Not what, who,” I explained. “It’s a guy from the Bible. Came back from the dead.”

“Whoa!”

His eyes went as wide as if I’d told him I’d won the lotto.

“I bet it’s an extra life!”

“And that’s . . . a big deal?”

“The biggest! Like I told you, RIP is strictly hard core. You die, you lose your gear, your XP, your character name—everything. But this Kool-Aid sounds like it’d give you the power to respawn with full health.”

“Full health?” I said.

“Yeah.”

I was starting to understand.

“And you said Kool-Aids are . . . tradeable?” I asked.

“Yeah. Why?”

I looked over at his fluttering EKG and suddenly, I knew what I was playing this insane game for.