Joy and the boy suddenly appeared in a room. There were pink tapestries covering the walls, and the floors were covered in a green fuzzy carpet. There were no windows, lights, or fires in the room, and yet it was perfectly lit. In the center of the room sat a single couch and a couple of red cups filled with some sort of fizzing concoction.

The entire room was an affront to anyone who enjoyed any sort of home décor, yet its audacious colorings gave it a certainly homely feel.

The young boy looked around and shrieked, “all my connections are severed. My sins! Where did you take me?”

He charged towards Joy but tripped over his own feet before getting too close to Joy. The warm embrace of the fuzzy rug was more comforting than anything he had ever felt in his life. Only comparing to his mother’s embrace.

The boy was exhausted, it had been a long battle that took a lot of effort out of him. His body was still malnourished from his time as a mere slave, and he could feel his eyelids drooping. He was so comfortable, even though he shouldn’t be sleeping in front of an enemy, the boy couldn’t help himself.

As the boy drifted off to sleep Joy said, “think of this place like a luxury penthouse of reality, I won the key a long time ago. Sleep well…” an awkward pause filled the room as Joy realized something. “I don’t even know his name, what a travesty.”

Then the boy fell into the sweet embrace of Sleep.

When the boy rose from his slumber, the room looked quite different. Instead of lying in on the luxurious green rug the boy was now in a massive bed the seemed to never end. Whichever direction he looked the bed continued forever. It was soft and nothing like the boy had ever felt, but it was quite disconcerting to be in a bed that kept going forever.

A hatch in the ceiling above him opened and Joy stuck his head into the bedroom.

“Sweet, you’re awake! Okay if you promise two things, I’ll let down the rope ladder and let you come out of the bedroom.” Joy tantalizingly held the ends of the ladder over the hatch, just letting the boy get a view of them before hiding them away again.

The boy’s voice was weak and dejected, “there’s not much I can do without my sins. Sure, creepy old guy, I’ll promise to do whatever.”

“Awesome sauce-some! Just promise not to attack me, and to listen to my explanation.”

The boy did so, and as he started climbing up the ladder Joy began to explain.

“This place is a little odd, and there are a couple rules that you need to understand. You have been formally challenged in the eyes of the god Game, and using some mumbo-jumbo magic you have appeared in their domain.”

“This place is an extension of everything that Game represents, so for all intents and purposes, it represents gaming. Since you have been challenged you must defeat me in a game where your freedom is wagered against something of equal value.”

“Until such a time where you defeat me in a freedom winning game, or if I decided to let you go, we will be stuck in this place.”

“Anything can be created, however it must be under the guise of a game, so if you want to eat, we need to do a speed eating competition or if you want to drink, we must chug. Every game needs a wager, but we can get to that later. Thankfully Game installed some bathrooms in here, otherwise we would have to do pooping competitions of some form to get access to any sanitary products.”

“Last thing, the time goes faster in here. We could live out our entire lives in this place and only an hour or so would have passed out there.”

Joy and the boy stared at each other in silence. The boy realized that he was probably safe here; Joy’s intentions and look weren’t malicious, instead it seemed oddly whimsical.

The boy was a tad frightened, but the rules of the place seemed straightforward. He bravely looked Joy in the eyes and declared, “then let’s play a game, I would like my freedom back very much.”

“Delightful, you should choose the game. I will wager your freedom from this place, while you shall wager your name. If I win, you must tell me your name.”

The boy replied almost too quickly, “deal! We shall play a game from my people. Two people stand in a line, and one will make footprints in the snow. The other person must follow in their footsteps as perfectly as possible. Whoever makes the most mistakes within the other’s trail loses.”

As soon as the deal was made, and the game was explained, the floor around them turned from shaggy green carpeting into a deep crunchy snow embankment. The snow went up to the middle of their shins and a bitingly cold wind ripped into them.

There was a horrifying dissonance to it though, since the two of them were obviously still in the same room, the awful pink draperies still on the nearby walls. The boy put it out of his mind and just told himself that it was magic.

The two of them took turns and tried to make the most difficult to follow path. The boy was quite proud of himself, he had chosen this game to take advantage of his smaller stature. Joy’s feet were much larger than his, so he assumed that all he had to do was calmly walk through the snow and Joy would automatically lose.

He was wrong.

Joy moved like a cat, lithely and gracefully. Every step made no sound as he glided across the surface of the snow, somehow sneaking his feet into the tiny indentations that the boy had left behind.

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Conversely, the boy found himself unable to match Joy’s steps. Just like how the boy took advantage of his small stature, Joy took advantage of his body’s height and fitness, doing acrobatics that the young man had no way of matching.

The boy lost at his own game horribly.

“So, what’s your name?”

The boy didn’t answer, and just smiled at Joy.

A frown appeared on Joy’s face.

“The room would make you answer, that’s how the magic works. Since you aren’t answering, that must mean you don’t have a name. That is rather sad to hear.”

And so, the two of them started a game of cat and mouse. They would play a game and Joy would wager the boy’s freedom, while asking the boy to wager answers to his inane questions.

He asked about the boy’s favorite color, his first memory, what was the first thing he thought of in the morning, and what his favorite season was. Slowly but surely, Joy was developing a mental picture of who this boy was.

The boy was willing to answer but became more and more frustrated the more the two of them played. Joy would always calmly and concisely explain the rules of anything that the boy didn’t know, he would spend hours or days explaining the intricacies of games so that the boy would not be at a disadvantage.

But the boy couldn’t win. It didn’t matter if they played a game that the boy had come up with on the spot, he simply couldn’t beat Joy.

Days, weeks, months passed like this. The two of them would play games and Joy would mercilessly destroy the young man.

Their hair grew to new lengths, Joy sported a fashionable beard, while the boy grew a bit of peach fuzz, which did not suit his porcelain like skin.

One night, the two of them were about to have a pillow fight when made a unique request for his winning demand.

“You will tell me about those tattoos on your body if I win.”

The boy’s eyes narrowed. Joy’s questions had never been particularly invasive before this moment. If his previous questions had been skimming the surface of the boy’s character, this was the equivalent of diving right in.

The boy nodded and prepared his pillows for the epic battle.

The pillows came in all varieties. Some were filled with feathers, others were filled with straw, and some were made something called “memory-foam.” Each of these types had a special place in the two combatants’ arsenals.

The battle commenced as pillows flew and strikes were thrown. The boy found himself grinning as he was thrown around this way and that. Bouncing off the infinite bed to get to a pillow fort he had made earlier as a final line of defense.

The smile immediately dripped off his face as he remembered the stakes, but he couldn’t shake the exhilaration out of his body.

Deciding the winner of a pillow fight is a laborious affair, there are so many metrics by which to measure winning, is it decided by whoever got the coolest looking hit in? Is it decided by the highest total of hits? Is it decided by whoever gives up first?

No one truly knows, since pillow fights are rarely fought in a competitive nature, but the game room was equipped for such decisions, and scored each of their moves appropriately.

Unsurprisingly, the room declared Joy the winner of the fight. Immediately, the boy felt his mouth open, and he was compelled to answer the question he had been dreading.

“I was a slave. There are so few resources on this continent that there is no way to support everyone to live plush and kind lives. So, the chief who came before me used his gift to fix the problem. He could enslave people that he bled upon, wherever the blood fell chains erupted on their skin. If we disobeyed him the spikes that were tattooed on the chains would become real and rip at us.”

Tears started running down the boy’s eyes as he continued his story.

“The elders said that he started to do this because his gift had a side effect, that anyone enslaved by him needed much less sustenance to sustain themselves. But he grew drunk on power and just enjoyed forcing people to bend to his whims. My mother was killed by him, and I remember that everyone cheered when I finally showed him his sins and he became a husk of a man.”

At the end of his monologue the boy’s teeth were clenched and his eyes burned red in the soft lighting of the realm.

Joy looked at the boy with endless sadness, and the day ended early for them both. Neither felt like continuing their gaming considering the day’s realizations.

Joy’s next question that he won was, “can you read?”

The boy had to answer honestly, and he told Joy, “No.”

Joy knew his parents had spoiled him a bit by letting him learn how to read. He had been given a beautiful opportunity that he took for granted on a daily basis.

But this knowledge sparked a new question in Joy’s mind.

“Have you ever read the words that are carved into your back?”

The boy refused to answer, since he felt that he needed to make Joy work for the answers he refused to answer any question that Joy had on principle, unless the room forced him to answer.

The two of them played something called a “videogame” where Joy gambled the boy’s freedom, and the boy gambled the answer to that question. Joy “five stocked” him. The boy could’ve sworn that the controls were drifting, but a loss was a loss. So, he answered the question, “no, I have never read the words on my own back.”

Joy added a new game into the rotation after learning that. It was a spelling game, where the boy learned what each of the letters were and how they corresponded to each sound. He was slowly taught how to read by Joy.

After reading, Joy made games around math and science; they even moved on to a bit of contemporary history and poetry.

The boy found that his life was being enriched little by little. He was still a growing boy, he was a few months past his thirteenth birthday, yet he had been given an opportunity to flourish and grow in a stress-free environment. He was truly free for the first time in his life.

An incredible amount of time had passed by this point and Joy had turned into a caveman. His hair was greasy and unkempt, a massive beard was flowing down his face, while the hair on the top of his head had grown beyond his shoulders into a flowing mane.

The boy had long hair as well, but he seemed more refined. The time spent in this space had cultured him, unlike how it deteriorated Joy.

The two of them could feel it in the air. Their time in this space was coming to a close. The water tasted of finality.

Joy finally spoke as he addressed the growing tension, “how about we make our final game be memory chess?”

The boy had learned of Joy’s antics by now, so instead of exacerbating the problem by asking ‘what memory chess is’ he stared off into the distance looking uninterested.

With a sigh, Joy deigned to give an explanation.

“It is like normal chess, except our most core memories are stored inside of the pieces. So, for every piece you take you must experience the other person’s memory.”

“So, I am playing for my freedom, but what are you playing for this time?” The boy asked Joy.

“This time, I will play to create a binding set of conditions that you will live by for the rest of your life. You will cherish life and never harm another being, you will become an arbiter of kindness and justice, bringing benevolence and happiness to those around you in life. You will bring every person around you a slice of joy.”

“A little self-centered, aren’t we?”

“A boy can dream.”

“It’s a deal.”

The two of them sat down at a table that had appeared out of nowhere and brought mugs of tea and coffee to their lips. The pieces were on the table, they were beautifully stylized pieces, intricate works that would bring tears to the eyes of any craftsman.

Joy took each king and hid them within his hands. Moving his hands behind his back and shuffling the pieces around, he grinned at the boy.

From behind the layers of hair, a gleam could be seen in Joy’s eye.

“Left, or right?”

“Left.”

Then the game began.