Gary, OH - June 2025
----------------------------------------
Agatha shot another snotty little kid in the chest and checked her watch. Fifteen more minutes. Then she would be free to take her complementary slice of pizza and go home. LaserQuest had seemed like a fun job up front, and usually it was, but it had actually made Agatha kind of sick of laser tag altogether, which was sad because it had been her favorite thing in the world when she was younger.
As the last notes of the dubstep game soundtrack faded away, Agatha slammed the large yellow button that turned on the arena lights and started the end of game alert. Kids filed into the armory and chattered loudly about getting shot or sniping their friends or whatever else, and she gave the arena a halfhearted sweep with her eyes for the telltale flashing of a stray laserpac. There was no flashing, but she did notice a light she didn’t recognize in the fog across the arena. Agatha knew that far wall was usually all dark, but something was lit up back there now.
Agatha slid open the door from the armory back into the main store lobby, setting the excited children loose upon their parents, and was just going to turn back to investigate the mystery light when her manager waved her over across the lobby.
“Agatha, walk with me,” his voice was unexpectedly deep for his lanky body, and even after six months of working with him, Jenkins’ voice still caught Agatha off guard every time.
Agatha was going to protest re: the light, but she knew it was futile to try to change Jenkins’ mind about a walk. She grabbed her coat from a hook behind the front desk and threw it on as she went to the door.
Agatha held the door open and asked, “so what’s up Jenk?”
“You’re being promoted to senior QuestMaster,” came his plain response.
It was a little too warm for a jacket after all, Agatha thought. Then, realizing what Jenk said, “Wait, what does that mean exactly?” His tone had raised her concern.
“You’ll be able to close the store by yourself, train new junior QuestMasters, and have access to the 401k plan.”
Agatha’s eyes narrowed, “and a raise?”
They walked past all three of the beat-up sports cars for sale in the corner of the lot in excruciating silence before Jenk replied, “five cents more per hour.”
Agatha sighed, and they stepped through the puddle that perpetually occupied the far end of the shopping center lot in even more potent silence. When the two completed their circuit of the parking lot, Jenkins had taken out a cigarette. He stayed around the corner from the door to smoke, and Agatha went back inside to clock out and grab her keys.
A week later, Agatha was working her first solo close. Her coworker Brian had closed the lobby and supposedly cleaned the bathrooms while she Marshalled the final game of the night. He was gone by the time she got the last drunken college kid out of the armory, so either it was done or she’d chew his ass out tomorrow but she couldn’t be bothered to pick up his slack today. She started her final rounds of the store, glancing over the lobby and the alcove where arcade games go to die, then walking into the “airlock” where they go over rules for the game, and then into the armory. Agatha punched the orange button that turned on the main floodlights for the arena and walked out into the bleak light and settling artificial fog of the cavernous room. She walked through the low maze in one corner of the arena and then through the upper level on that side. Down a ramp toward the other front corner of the space and then through the lower corridors at that end and up the side ramp to the upper level. Through the upper floors and at least a halfhearted effort to look at the lower level through the grate flooring. Down the back ramp and over to the back right corner of the arena.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
As she stepped into the mirror maze section, Agatha actually began to focus on what she was doing. She had walked straight into a mirror three times during training and she was going to lose it if she walked into another one now. Rounding a corner into a wider opening of the maze, Agatha noticed a light reflected in some of the mirrors and suddenly remembered what she saw after that birthday group last week. She turned carefully around three times, trying to track the reflection of the light. It didn’t leave this space, so the source had to be somewhere right in front of her, but she just wasn’t seeing it.
Finally she realized the light was reflecting in a certain mirror but not the one directly opposite. Agatha stared at the spot where the light should be and then realized the inside of her reflection seemed to be glowing. She looked slowly between her double and herself, and back again in a confused wonderment. Snapping out of her mesmerization, she looked around the edges of the mirror and realized there was a small doorknob in the frame. Agatha turned the handle and opened the apparent door slowly, and with great effort, as the door dragged right against the cement floor. Agatha looked through the door to find an utterly disappointing broom closet, with an ancient mop and bucket tucked into one corner, and a faded bottle of some cleaning agent spilled over and long since evaporated in the middle of the floor. There was a dying fluorescent bulb in the ceiling, which Agatha clicked off with a quick pull on its short chain. She turned her attention to the back of the door which she was still holding in an absent-minded death grip. Opening it at arm’s length for a better view she glanced it up and down and then closed it partway before opening it again, concluding that the front of the door was a one-way mirror.
A broom closet is disappointing, but a combination broom closet/secret one way shooting alcove is much less so. Agatha finished closing with an increased vigor, excited to use this new discovery on the unsuspecting customers that tomorrow would hold.
When Agatha got to work the next day, it was no small effort to keep herself from revealing the secret broom closet to every one of her coworkers. When she was finally on deck to Marshall a game she was practically giddy. The group that awaited her by the airlock was primarily college students older than her, so she felt no guilt as she plotted their ruin. She went over the rules, then ushered the group into the armory, where they put on their laserpacks. She put on her yellow Marshal pack, which didn’t have the normal hit sensors but still had a gun on the side (one of the advertised highlights of the job), and hit the green button to start the countdown to the game.
After fifteen seconds, the dubstep soundtrack started up and blaster noises echoed through the dark cavernous space. Agatha walked slowly through the arena as she was supposed to, but once she was in the back corner she ducked around into the clearing with the broom closet. She looked around to make sure nobody would see her, and pulled open the one-way mirror. She sidestepped backwards through the door and then pulled it shut.
In that instant, Agatha ceased to exist on this physical plane of reality. For some unknowable reason of miracle, as Agatha closed the door, her molecules were split into infinitesimal particles indistinguishable from points of light and scattered around the world at a speed more than two million times that of sound. As the world was suddenly awakened to the extradimensional forces that had long existed in silent, invisible tandem with their daily lives, a certain LaserQuest in Gary, Ohio burst into inexplicable flames. A new era was dawning upon humanity and it wouldn’t be until its twilight that people would realize the cost of power and the importance of one Agatha Jones.
[https://marts.notion.site/image/https%3A%2F%2Fs3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Fsecure.notion-static.com%2F14769f9b-5ccb-4947-aac1-01452fd94de6%2FScreenshot_(76).png?id=b4c695c5-e73f-4bf5-851e-68904d9edfe7&table=block&spaceId=f55aaa38-563a-4fb9-b6f7-a8add6e64006&width=2000&userId=&cache=v2]