Name: N/A

Level: 2

Experience: 0/3

Health: 0/50

Stamina: 0/50

Mana: 0/5

Body: 1

Sense: 1

Mind: 1

Intuition: 1

Yin: 1

Yang: 1

Stat Total: 6

Jonathan’s cold. He’s wet, shirt soaked through with sweat, and Kopernick's relentless AC is blasting across his body. He’s still alive.

A second later he’s on his feet. He actually crashes into the stall door with his shoulder before he remembers it’s locked. Ages pass as he fumbles with numb fingers to get it open. The bolt slides back. He bursts out. Rushes to the mirror.

.His reflection stares out at him skin pink and miraculously unmarked by monkey bites. He raises a trembling hand to his forehead where the second one had tried to chew off his eyebrow. He isn’t hurt. It didn’t happen, at least not in this body.

Oh shit, the avatar. What if it’s dead? What if he can’t go back?

He taps through his phone to Seven Gates so fast the screen blurs and he wonders if the cpu’s stalled out.

He doesn’t miraculously travel to another dimension. He’s still right here, in the bathroom at Kobernicks, tiles a little grungy because DJ hasn’t cleaned yet. The screen reads, “Respawn in: 7:59.”

Even as he watches, it ticks down to 7:58. He waits several painful seconds. Breathes in and out. The number doesn’t change. Not eight minutes then. Eight hours. Eight hours till his avatar is alive again.

On the one hand, he feels weak with relief. Like actually weak, legs rubbery and uncertain as stilts. He’s been in Seven Gates for less than twenty minutes and already it’s changed his life. He isn’t ready to let it go.

On the other hand, what the hell is he supposed to do for the next seven hours and fifty-eight minutes?

The obvious answer is work. That doesn’t go so well.

He emerges from the bathroom sweaty, shaky, and so pale DJ actually stops him in the aisle and asks if he’s all right. Kat keeps shooting him worried glances from under her bangs. He hears a customer wrong. He misspells his password on the employee computer nine times in a row. He bumps into a rack of TVs and nearly brings the whole thing crashing down.

It gets so bad Adam, their legendary hardass manager, tells him to go home. For chrissake, he says, Jonathan shouldn't come in when he's feverish and shaking. What the fuck does he think sick days are for, huh?

He drives home in a daze. The minute he steps inside the door he’s back on Reddit. He wants to check the original post, maybe find some clues. He can't find it. He scours r/Gaming, goes pack through more than 8 hours of posts, but it’s just not there. The picture of the clouds is nowhere to be found.

He checks the app store. Maybe he can find some reviews or something? Only problem is, he can’t find Seven Gates on the app store either. After fifteen minutes of trying every conceivable arrangement of letters, (Seven Gates? 7 Gates? 7 Gaits? Se7en Gates? Gates Seven?) and sorting through many pages of increasingly irrelevant, increasingly shitty-looking games, he gives up. The publisher must have removed it from the store. But why? It makes no sense.

Jonathan has to keep checking the icon on his phone to reassure himself that it does, in fact, exist. The only thing that happens when he taps on it is that his screen goes blank and says “Respawn in: 6:23”. There’s no settings, no creator’s info or anything. But it's still an app , so his phone should have some information about it. He goes to “settings”, “apps”, and finds the butterfly icon. He learns that Seven Gates was downloaded today at 11:21 am. It takes up a grand total of nine megabytes of his hard drive, which is more than like, his calculator, but not by much. For a game it’s nothing. It requires no permissions. It hasn’t used any data or battery.

In short, he doesn’t learn shit.

Time to try something else. He googles “seven gates”. Apparently, there’s a haunted spot in Pennsylvania called the Seven Gates of Hell. After a few minutes of reading about burning insane asylums and crazy doctors, Jonathan’s pretty sure it has nothing to do with his Seven Gates. He tries “seven gates game”, “seven gates app”, “seven Gates disappearing app”, “seven gates VR”, and even, in a moment of profound desperation, “seven gates isekai”. Nothing.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

But it turns out there are real bearded monkeys. They’re called, he learns, bearded saki, they’re native to South America, their diet consists mostly of nuts and berries, and they're generally considered pretty harmless. They’re quite a bit smaller than the monkeys that chewed on him and their fur is mostly black, not brown, but otherwise there's a fair resemblance. Maybe he was magically transported to Bolivia. Honestly, Jonathan isn’t ruling anything out at this point.

And, hey, it turns out Brazil is the biggest producer of apples in the world. He googles “tasteless apples”, and is swiftly lost in a sea of articles and opinion posts about which kind of apple is the best, organic orchards, transporting fruit long distances, and global warming.

He isn’t getting anywhere. Fuck it. Jonathan goes to his closet, pushes past the winter coats and moves a few shoeboxes until he finds the slim box his highschool graduation hat and robes came in. He opens it. The hat went missing on graduation day, but the robes are still here and, tucked inside them, is a pack of edibles. He takes one out and roles it between his fingers, checks the Seven Gates app with his other hand.

Respawn in: 5:56

Almost six hours. These particular edibles aren’t that strong, he should be able to take one and sober up in six hours. His psychiatrist said not to use weed while on his medication, but fuck that guy. Maybe it will help him think clearly. He pops it into his mouth.

While waiting for it to kick in he goes downstairs and puts a couple of frozen chalupas in the microwave. He drinks two full cups of water watching the glass plate go round and round. A full stomach and solid hydration keep his highs mellow. Short and sweet. He eats the chalupas.

“Respawn in: 5:39”

With both his parents at work and nothing particular to do, Jonathan turns on the TV and starts casting twitch from his phone. He’ll lean his dad’s recliner back and watch streams in style. Misty Kim streamed this morning. It was Geshin Impact, not his favorite game, but he watches all her stuff.

“Hey guys!” she beams at him from the TV. “Thanks for coming to my stream! Geshin has some new drops today, and I love them! We want to get them, fast as possible!”

She punctuates the last sentence with a little fluttering clap. It’s one of her signature gestures. Jonathan settles in to watch the stream.

She’s been putting a lot of time off-camera into her English, and it definitely shows. Jonathan discovered Misty when she was a little, Korean streamer with a shitty mic who only played Minecraft. He got hooked right away. It wasn’t just her looks, though, yeah, there’s that too, but the obvious enthusiasm with which she’d given tours of her psychedelic, sprawling mansions. Jonathan’d watched it all even though he hadn’t understood a word. Now she’s acquired a great mic and thousands of subscribers and some fairly subtle cosmetic surgery, but she still brings that energy to her streams. He’s proud of her. He doesn’t exactly have a lot of experience, but he’s pretty sure this is what love feels like.

Under the effects of the edible, his mind starts to wander.

He thinks about Seven Gates. Should he tell someone? Who? His parents? His psychiatrist? The police? What if they don’t believe him? What if they lock him up? What if they take his phone away and he can’t go back?

He thinks about Misty’s tits. Way back, someone in chat said that Misty’s boobs were as perky as she was. Dude got banned, but Jonathan had felt that on a spiritual level.

He thinks what will happen if they do believe him. Lots of scientists and brain scans, probably. Would they still let him play? Would they monitor him all the time? After batting ideas back and forth for like an hour, he decides that, whether they believe him or not, nothing good can come of telling people. He’ll have to keep it a secret for now.

There’s no new information, but he’s a bit relieved just having figured that much out.

He thinks about Misty’s lips. Pressed tight in moments of tension, split into a huge smile when things go well. He wonders what it would be like to kiss them. This is not new territory for his brain. A number of well-worn fantasies pop into in his mind, but even with the edible, there’s just too much else to think about right now.

He thinks about the, he checks, four hours and eleven minutes he still has to wait before he can play Seven Gates. This isn’t the first game he’s played that has a cooldown before you can play again. There are a bunch of mobile games that have an energy system where you can only play so many games in a row, or where heroes who die need time to recover. For those games, the design philosophy is obvious; get the player hooked on a supposedly free game and then make them pay real-world money if they want to play without waiting for the recharge. But if Seven Gates is after his money, it’s playing the long game. It hasn’t even asked for his credit card information.

Why a death timer then? Every game he’s played without microtransactions has let him try again immediately after dying. Usually, you go back to the last checkpoint. Sometimes you lose money, items, or experience when you die. To get those resources back, and to get back to where you were, takes time. The game punishes you for being bad by making you play more, giving you more practice. A really hard-assed game like Dark Souls threatens to take all your stuff unless you can make it back to the place you died without dying again. If you play bad, you’re forced to play better.

Seven Gates punishes bad play with a fucking eight-hour cooldown. Why?

Then he gets it. He sits up so fast the recliner snaps back to his upright position and almost throws him to the floor. Misty Kim complains loudly about drop rates, but Jonathan isn’t listening.

Seven Gates is a black box. A total mystery. The technology is impossible, the method of dissemination makes no sense. It's gone from the app store, it doesn’t exist on Reddit or Google. There’s no information about it anywhere except in the game itself. The only way to figure it out is to keep playing. But what happens if you die? You’re slapped with a hefty eight hours in the no-play zone. Bad players are effectively banned from making progress. The only way to figure out Seven Gates is to be good at it.

And that’s perfect, because if there’s one thing Jonathan’s good at, it’s games. Legendary rank in Call of Duty. Every single steam achievement for the Witcher 3. Four thousand hours in Minecraft. You name a game, he’s a hundred percented it. He’s a completionist. Doesn’t know when to quit, doesn’t know how.

There’s nothing he can’t beat.

Seven Gates caught him by surprise. He wasn’t thinking about what he was doing when he approached the monkey. Or at least, he wasn’t thinking like a gamer. Of course the game would put an enemy encounter in front of the quest reward! That’s what games do! He should have expected to have to fight the monkey. He shouldn’t have given up his only weapon so easily. He should have attacked the moment he saw it.

Jonathan settles back in the chair, rewinds the stream a few minutes in case he missed anything. He checks the Seven Gates app.

Respawn in: 3:58

Jonathan points a finger at the ceiling. He can feel the zen focus of marijuana in his veins, the smile creeping onto his face.

“Four hours you monkey bitch! I’m coming for you!”