Part 2: Next Level / Chapter 15

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“Are you a player too?” I asked Darla Cunningham.

“A what?”

“A player. In RIP.”

“I don’t . . . know what that means.”

Her eyes scanned once more across the piles of storefront wreckage, liberally sprinkled with charred doll limbs and innards.

“What is going on here?” she continued.

I dragged myself to my feet and looked her over more earnestly. Despite my dating embargo, I couldn’t deny that she had a bemused charisma that captivated me. A few whisps of her scarlet hair danced over her freckled cheeks, framing a gorgeous pair of green eyes. But superficial appeal aside, I didn’t know what to make of her. Was she as clueless as she was letting on?

Some of my wariness stemmed from the fact that in my experience the second you start trusting someone, they break your heart or drop dead or run off to Guatemala, leaving no forwarding address. But also, her out-of-the-blue arrival was suspicious.

And yet, there was something about her. Some aura that pulled me in. Not to mention, she could see the dolls. Did that mean I could talk to her about RIP without draining my Life-O-Meter? It was try-it-and-see time.

“This is going to sound crazy,” I said. “But I think I’m trapped in some kind of video game where dolls and ferrets and car salesmen try to kill me.”

“That does sound crazy,” she said. But she seemed unfazed. In fact, I thought I detected a note of relief. I didn’t know what to make of that.

“Yeah,” I went on. “And if other people see what’s happening, they’re supposed to forget it and if I try to talk to them about it, I’ll die.”

“But you’re talking to me about it.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“And you’re not dying.”

Déjà vu, I thought, recalling my conversation with Robbie. My Life-O-Meter was indeed unperturbed. And it didn’t seem like her memory was being adjusted. She wasn’t an NPC. But if she was an RIP player, I thought she’d know by now. Then again, Robbie hadn’t known until we’d worked out that he was my mentor. Maybe she was a second mentor. Was I allowed to have a second mentor? And if so, why would I get one who seemed more clueless than Robbie, or even me? It didn’t make any sense.

“You’ve got to know something about what’s happening here,” I said.

“Afraid not,” she answered.

“Well, what are you doing here then? And why do you know my name?”

“Oh,” she said. “Um . . . well, this is also going to sound crazy, but I think I’ve been getting messages from the future. And they kind of led me here.”

“That does also sound crazy,” I said.

So, crazy stuff on both sides. Even if it was different flavors of crazy, I felt a little less alone. She seemed to feel the same. Now I understood the note of relief I’d picked up in her tone.

Of course, I didn’t have the energy for more mysteries at the moment. So I just left her standing there as I ambled around, gathering up the XP slips, which were worth 105 XP each—a touch more than the lower level Cutie Pants dolls I’d faced previously.

It was annoying that I could only get credit for my labors after the fact. There was no leveraging XP as it was earned, which would have been handy in situations where I was on the verge of death—like the one I’d just encountered.

I gritted my teeth and doubled over as tattoos were formed and reconfigured on both my forearms.

“Are you okay?” Darla called, dismounting her bike and rushing over to me.

“Yeah,” I gasped in pain. “Yup. Just getting my rewards.”

She frowned, presumably wondering what kind of rewards I was getting and why they were making me cry a little.

On the upside, as I gutted it out and finished picking up the slips, I realized that there were way more slips than there had been dolls—some of them for different amounts of XP. At first, I didn’t understand why. But as the pain subsided, I looked down and saw a new section header on my left arm: Achievements. Below that, there was an entry that read, “Defeat forty enemies at once.” I tapped it and found I could swipe left to see a bevy of other newly arrived entries, which explained all the extra XP. There were a bunch of milestone achievements for group kills, ranging from five to twenty-five. But there were also other achievements, from “bite a bad guy” to “cast an incantation” to “s’mores fork fatality.” What the hell? I thought. Why would achievements only be introduced now? Most games started awarding them from the get-go, so players could accrue easy XP for basic actions during orientation. But this dumb game was dumping them all on me at a seemingly random point, despite the fact that many of them were based on things I’d done hours ago. It felt like someone was playing catch up. Was this another freaking glitch?

Once again, I was struck with the uneasy sense that whoever was in charge here wasn’t firing on all cylinders. But I supposed I couldn’t complain. I’d come looking for more XP and I’d gotten it. I’d just leapfrogged more than three levels, to top Level 7. My stats had all been boosted big time. My Life-O-Meter had sky-rocketed to fifty, and my Muscles stat was at forty. Based on that alone, I was well on my way to being ready for the next Car Guy I ran across. But there was more.

My Street Smarts stat had jumped from five to ten, perhaps rewarding the outside-the-box thinking involved with seeking out the dolls. I also had a new stat titled Noggin Weaponization at level 1. And glancing at my inventory, I saw that the doll pelt count had jumped to (44) and there was a new listing: Freebies (01). I didn’t know what the deal was with that or the Noggin Weaponization stat, but neither sounded bad.

Granted, there were things that did sound bad. My new ink featured several insulting, functionless additions, including a so-called stat titled “Learned to ride a bike” with a magnitude of “Never? Seriously? You’re a grown man who can’t ride a bike?”

Yes. I’d never learned to ride a bike. And I hated most of the bikers I encountered. I had my reasons but I tried not to hold those reasons against Darla as I looked up from my forearms and noted her ten-speed. It had a little pink and yellow basket on the front, making me wonder if she’d had it since she was nine years old. The thought was endearing and did a fair amount to off-set my deep-seeded bias.

“Did your pants just . . . grow back?” she asked, snapping me out of my ruminations.

“Oh, uh, yeah. They do that,” I answered, trying not to think about the fact that I’d been virtually pant-less for the entirety of our conversation thus far.

Eager to change the subject, I asked, “So, you’re getting messages from the future?”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“I think so.”

“How?”

She swung off her backpack and rifled through it, coming up with a stack of paper.

“My great uncle’s computer is spitting out gibberish, but it seems like it’s not gibberish and it’s finally being translated.”

She flipped through the pages, scanning various highlighted passages.

“And one of the entries mentions today’s date and time and your name and this address and . . . ”

I sighed and shrugged.

“Maybe . . . maybe you’re a player in your own version of the game,” I mused.

I’d written off the multi-instance idea earlier, but I thought I might be getting some pretty compelling new evidence for it here.

“Did you have a weird dream this morning?” I asked.

“No,” she replied.

“Have you been attacked by any insane stuff?”

“Uh uh.”

“Any bizarre tattoos popping up?”

She shook her head.

“Oh!” I exclaimed, prepping her for the clencher. “Has the parent of a high school boyfriend or girlfriend materialized from out of nowhere to shower you with hurtful barbs?”

“Um, no?” she answered.

Then she elaborated unexpectedly, “And it would have been a boyfriend.”

“Oh,” I answered, unsure of what to do with the voluntary disclosure.

“But I didn’t have one in high school. Don’t have one now. Not really sure I’ve ever had one. How do you define ‘boyfriend’?”

I shrugged and said, “I guess some dude you hang out with a lot and fool around with?”

“What if you fooled around but didn’t hang out?”

“Tough to say.”

“What if you hung out but didn’t fool around?”

“Tough to say.”

“What if you did both, but you never agreed on what to call it?”

I sucked my teeth, pensively. Then the revelation struck.

“Did you hold hands?” I asked.

“Sometimes.”

“That’s a boyfriend.”

“K. I’ve had one. But I’m not being haunted by his mom or dad.”

“Got it. So, just the messages from the future.”

She nodded and I sighed. What were the chances that we’d both be trapped in totally unrelated reality-bending scenarios? I didn’t think they were very high. But so far, I didn’t see the connection between her situation and mine.

“We should . . . stick together,” she said. “You know, because of the crazy stuff happening to us both. Not because of any other reason.”

I hesitated. Her phrasing was a little odd, making me wonder if she might in fact have another reason for wanting to hang around. My reflexive distrust came rushing back. It didn’t take much. I liked her gorgeous green eyes and all, but I was who I was.

“So where do we go from here?” she asked, reading my prolonged hesitation as agreement to a partnership. I went to correct her, but suddenly reversed course. My suspicions aside, she definitely had something to do with what was going on. And she didn’t strike me as a direct threat.

“We need to go to the hospital,” I answered.

“To treat your stab wounds?”

“No, those are healed.”

“Like your pants?”

“Yeah.”

“So, why the hospital?”

“I’ll tell you on the way.”

###

We took my car to the hospital. En route, I gave her the whole story about Nancy’s mom and RIP and Robbie. I didn’t trust her, but if she was another evil video game sprite, nothing I had to share would be news to her. If she wasn’t, I thought maybe she’d be able to help me connect the dots. But instead of connecting the dots, she just gave me more dots that didn’t line up.

She told me her about her uncle and his mansion that was now her mansion and all the effort involved with keeping the old computers running and the TRS-80 beeping and Dean Merrick showing up at the front door.

My first question wasn’t what you’d expect.

“So you never actually opened the door?” I asked as I parked my car in the hospital garage with her bike sticking out of the trunk.

“Huh?”

“When you were talking to Merrick.”

“Oh, uh, no.”

“Was he like really scary or ugly or something?”

I’d heard Merrick’s name in the news, but I’d never seen the guy.

“No, he was nice,” Darla answered. “And good-looking.”

“Oh,” I said. “Like, how good-looking?”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Just trying to . . . picture him.”

I wasn’t trying to picture him. I just didn’t like her saying he was good-looking. I didn’t know why.

“Anyway, it’s a coincidence that he came asking about the equipment, right?” she asked.

“What else could it be?” I answered.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But it is weird that I didn’t open the door. I’ve never been a ‘talk to people through the peep hole’ type. I just had this feeling. I guess sitting alone in a dark room, scrolling through endless screens of gibberish can make you a little paranoid.”

“But not paranoid enough not to seek me out and tell me all this?”

“That’s different.”

“Why?”

“Nevermind. You’re right. It’s not different. What’s wrong with me? I tracked you down, found you killing a bunch of dolls, and then invited myself into your car. I didn’t even ask the dolls for their side of the story.”

“They were all dead.”

“Well, yeah.”

“And I’m pretty sure their side of the story is ‘Wanna be friendsies’.”

“Says you.”

“Well, if there’s something wrong with you, there’s something wrong with me,” I assured her. “I believed your whacked-out explanation of how you ended up at GetGet and let you get in my car.”

“But you’re a dude,” she said. “Dudes aren’t programmed to assume they’re going to get kidnapped and tied up in a secret room in a cellar and end up in a dateline story. Seriously. What is wrong with me?”

I felt her vulnerability shorting out my trust shields a little bit.

“I live in an apartment,” I said.

“So?”

“So I don’t have a cellar with a secret room.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, that’s a relief.”

Then she frowned.

“But you could rent one of those storage lockers.”

“Not sure I could afford that. I mean I could maybe swing it for a few months, but then I’d probably have to give up a streaming subscription or two and—”

“I’m not worth a streaming subscription?”

“I said ‘or two’.”

“Oh. Mmkay. But . . . nevermind all that. Nevermind you. What about the messages from the future? Seriously! None of this seems real. I mean am I even really here having this conversation or . . . ”

It seemed like a dam had broken and she was coming untethered—not all the way, but a little bit. As worried as I’d been about my brain being broken, she seemed more so. Despite my baggage, I felt myself wanting to comfort her.

“Look, you’re not alone,” I said. “I mean I can’t say for sure that any of this is really happening, but we’re both in the same boat.”

She threw me a grateful look and a fragile smile curved her lips. My trust shields took another hit. As I looked into her green eyes I thought again that there was something about this woman—something special or important. But I tamped down that feeling and refocused, as she yanked the printout from her bag and start perusing it.

“So what’s it say about me, exactly?” I asked.

“Oh, right,” she said.

She flipped through the pages until she found what she was looking for, then traced a finger over a highlighted passage as she read aloud: “May 7, 2022, 2:08 a.m. Henry Hubble gets a Street Smarts boost. Cha-ching! Hope for the human race!”

“What?”

“Yeah, it’s a totally different tone from every other entry that’s been translated so far. And it had a time of day, which none of the others have.”

“A weird message about my stats, the address for the GetGet, and a date and time? That’s it?”

“Yeah. That’s . . . that’s it.”

“And that’s why you came all the way here?”

“Well . . . like I said it was a totally different tone, so I thought I should check it out.”

I frowned and reached for the printout to give it a look. She yanked it out of reach.

“What gives?” I asked.

“I . . . my uncle trusted me with this. Whatever it is . . . whatever’s going on, I’m responsible for how much of it gets out. I’m . . . like a guardian.”

I raised an eyebrow. Her seemingly-contrived secrecy certainly didn’t quell my suspicions. But I shrugged and let it go—for now.

“Alright then,” I said. “So . . . what’s ‘hope for the human race’ supposed to mean?”

“Not sure. I thought maybe you’d know.”

“I don’t.”

“Obviously.”

“Well, whatever it means, it feels like a lot of pressure.”