School had gone well that day, the teachers were used to the remote schooling method of virtual attendance after the sixth pandemic. Peter spent the whole day curled up in the dark room while he “attended” classes as a ghost. He didn’t log out and go inside the house for lunch, it wasn’t worth getting noticed. He was able to have a relaxed lunch time with Warren and Pham, chatting about nothing while his virtual self perched on a garden edge beside Pham and facing Warren’s wheelchair. By unspoken agreement they had all avoided discussing the game and their home lives. It was too pleasant a day with a gentle breeze rustling the verdant green space they were resting in. The sun shone down through a shade sail making a rippling crosshatching on everything, just warm enough to offset the cooling of the wind. Peter was reminded of his very first day in The Age, in the garden where he had fallen asleep.
A lot of water had passed under the metaphorical bridge since then. He had friends he could count on. Had counted on, when life, or at least a terrible beating, was on the line. He had started to accept himself in a way he couldn’t a year before. The instances of random dissociation had turned into moments of meditation. He could still feel the void down in his chest and knew there were things that moved in that darkness, but instead of letting them consume his mind he now had a path towards harnessing those feelings to use for good.
Peter pulled his thoughts back to the present, where Pham and Warren were discussing the attest episode of some anime that had aired last night. It brought a smile to Peter’s face, imagining the former track and field star Warren hiding in his bedroom in a mansion having to flip channels to a football game the instant someone opened the door in case they discovered he was watching an animated show about talking cats or something.
It soured slightly with the knowledge that he hadn’t watched any shows in nearly a month. After school Peter was expected to clean the house then help prep for dinner. If he was seen accessing his implant he would be shaken to shut it off and if he wasn’t doing homework, told to read a book or go outside. As he had already read every book in the house multiple times, he resorted to reading another book in an overlay in his vision with one from the shelf open in front of him. So far nobody had twigged.
At least his nights were his own. Once dinner and the dishes were done he could head to bed, a behaviour that his grandmother approved of immensely. “Early to bed, early to rise,” she would recite. What old people’s fascination with going to bed and getting up early was, he had no idea. Even his own dad had been a victim of the trend, sometimes getting up extra early to sit there waiting for everyone else in the house just so he could say that he had been up for hours.
Not that Peter was going to sleep when he went to bed. The realism of The Age of Steam and Sorcery, barring the censorship that had been thrust on the company by pearl-clutching Karens and Keiths, meant that every moment was like living in another world. Food tasted good, stinks stank, DB’s fur was fluffy and unfortunately getting stabbed hurt like a bastard. Those same pearl-clutchers that had such an issue with drinking, gambling and nudity were a-ok with death and violence provided it wasn’t coming at them. This meant that any free time Peter had was occupied with action, excitement and occasionally agony and pants-wetting terror. It made the mundane abuse he experienced in the real world a pale spectre in comparison.
Eventually lunch was over and the students returned to class. Lessons were even less interesting, there being no chance of an explosion or Nobel Prize wining revelation between end of lunch and end of day, so Peter drifted along paying just enough attention that he could answer when called on. He didn’t even pull out a book while the teacher was describing something boring, he just looked around bemused, seeing his fellow students attentively taking notes, passing notes, or trying to look noteworthy. There was something calming about the atmosphere of academia happening to other people. It was a balm for his soul.
When the school day ended Peter didn’t rush inside. He pottered about in the shed, reading the textbooks and trying to interface with the devices. The computer was a standalone, the first Peter had ever seen in person. A computer that didn’t connect to the wider internet was something out of a documentary or museum. It had network connections, all the devices in the room were connected to it, and it could connect to the internet. It just wasn’t.
The last time Peter had been completely disconnected was when he’d gotten lost trying to walk home from school. It had been terrifying. Now he found the concept somewhat comforting.
With time to burn before dinner and nowhere in particular to be, Peter took the washing off the line and folded it, leaving the basket in the laundry. He listened for movement in the house and, finding it still and silent, wandered into the garage. Gentle curiosity prodded at him and he tried opening some of the dusty boxes in the back to see what they contained.
Glittery dresses and shoes, it turned out. Bedazzled runners and pompoms. One held a shiny purple baton with metallic streamers from both tips. “Wildcats colours?” He wondered out loud. “Grandma was a sports fan?”
Peter took the baton out of the box and waved it around. Gently at first, then more vigorously as the streamers fluttered about. After a near miss with the wall, Peter wandered out into the back yard to continue waving the baton around. The shimmering meter and a half rod spun through the air, a tail of silver and purple trailing behind. The motion triggered something in Peter’s mind, and he began stepping forward and back, sweeping his legs side to side, as all thought drained from his head. One motion flowed into the next as the rod whirled about. Time ceased to matter.
Peter stepped on a prickle plant and threw off his groove. The baton spun out his hand and hit him in the shin, his knee buckled and Peter landed face first into the patch of prickles. He sat up groggily and tried to pull the barbed seed pods from his skin. The problem was that the pods were absolutely covered in spines so every time he tried to grip one he flinched as the spines punctured his fingers.
As he tossed the last one to the ground, he heard a quiet harrumph from behind him. “I was going to commend you for trying something new, then you threw my baton across the yard. Go pick it up, put it back and go for your shower. Dinner is in half an hour.” His grandmother had stood watching him the whole time he was sitting on the ground in pain and made no move to help nor offered a word of comfort.
“Yes, grandma,” Peter said dully. He watched her think for a moment as though considering adding something, change her mind and leave. The stinging of his skinned knees added themselves to the fresh bruise on his shin and the dull ache in the back of his head as he stared off into the distance. Slowly he felt the cold in his chest suffuse his body once more and the pain was sucked away into the void. He did as he was told, even putting the box back exactly as he had found it, and went for a shower.
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Dinner was early for a change, perhaps owing to the fact that it was only his grandmother, his mother and him at the table. There was zero table talk, his mother putting away drinks as fast as she could pour them, to his grandmother’s pointed but ignored glares, and Peter eating at a pace deliberately intended to finish at the same time as his mother. His grandmother, tired of being disregarded so blatantly, excused herself and left. A moment later her dishes clattered into the sink and she stalked out of the kitchen into the lounge, grabbed a book and threw herself into her favourite chair where she proceeded to read as though interrogating the pages.
“Boy,” she called to Peter with a voice dripping with venom. “You’d better get off your ass and get to washing those dishes. I know men have no idea how to keep a clean house, but I’ll be damned if you aren’t going to learn while you’re in my home.”
Peter tossed the last few morsels from his plate into his mouth, collected his and his mother’s plates – though he left her glass, he didn’t want to lose a hand attempting that – and went to clean the kitchen as best he could. Not just the dishes, but scrubbed the stove and benchtops, even wiping down the cupboard doors to remove streaks and spills. He knew for certain it would be checked and doing only what had been asked for was begging for trouble.
He leaned on the doorway to the dining room and said his goodnights. His grandmother just waved him off but his mother lurched to her feet and gave him a drunken hug, slurring something about “my big baby boy” before kissing him on the top of his head and letting him slink off to the bedroom.
It was with utter relief that Peter soon found himself sitting comfortably at the writing desk in Bani’s house. DB leapt off the desk top to scramble up his front and burrow into the neck of his suit. The comforting warmth of DB’s lump under his shirt eased his troubled spirit. He leaned back into the chair an heaved a sigh. He could smell the dust in the air, see the motes dancing in the light, feel the grain of the wood under his fingers. He listened to the swish of the grain outside in the wind. Overhead the same breeze made the candles in the chandelier gutter for a moment. He was too early for Pham or Warren and the house was empty save for himself and DB.
Placing a hand over the lump on his shoulder to prevent DB from slipping around, Peter stood and wandered around the cottage. The carpet underfoot in the lounge area was thick and plush, dark threads woven through with coppery strands in a basic skull and cogs motif on a charcoal background. “Makes sense,” Peter murmured, “it is death’s home.”
The couch was some dark wood stained even darker to almost a dead black with extremely faded once-crimson upholstery. The stuffing wasn’t coming through yet, but it was threatening to if he didn’t do something soon. Peter added it to the list of things he needed to do with the little hourglasses.
The remainder of the floor was slate tile, the black surface shot through with white veins. They met the wall at a dark wooden skirting board above which was off-white wallpaper that curled in places. The curtains that framed the wooden window frames were of a similar faded felt-like material as the couch upholstery. Peter ghosted into the kitchen area and ran a finger over the windowsill, looking at the dust that came away. “This place is almost too real,” he said to DB, easing a hand in through his collar to give his pet a scritch.
The kitchen table set was a stark contrast to the rest of the cottage. It too was wood but whitewashed to a dead white colour. The same tone as washed up driftwood dried out for months. The backs of the chairs formed a stylised skull shape as well, while the table top was circular with a cog wheel embossed in it. Peter hadn’t really taken the time to look around like this for a while and he felt that the building had changed a bit since he’d moved in. It was becoming more home to him than any place in the “real” world.
“Still, it’s quite the fixer-upper,” Peter said loudly, the first he’d said at that volume since logging in that day. It felt good, like he had finally accepted the place as his.
Peter was at the writing desk taking notes from the list of updates when the rest of the crew tromped in the front door. He looked up at everyone arriving at once and asked them to wipe their feet as they came in.
“Seiously mate?” Dani asked, though she complied, wiping her feet on the new mat at the front door.
It had only cost a single hourglass point and Peter felt it was worth it. “I’m trying something new. Growing up a bit, maybe.”
“What’s this I hear about cooking?” Warren followed Dani’s example as he came in the door.
“Pete’s gonna make us dinner,” Pham slipped past Warren’s bulk and threw himself on the couch. He made a sound like a donkey braying. “Yo couch!” he rubbed his boots on the upholstery. “I’m Rick James!”
“You are at best Charlie Murphy, now please get your feet off the furniture,” Peter deadpanned.
“Ice cold!” Pham complained, but did as asked. Dani claimed the spare seat after brushing the nonexistent dirt off the cushion.
“Dani was dithering in the control room when we arrived,” Warren said, dragging a chair over from the kitchen. “She said something about upgrades to the house and knife-ears here got very excited about scones. You want to fill us in?”
“It goes like this,” Peter brought his notes over and spread them out on the coffee table, now back in its proper place in front of the couch. “I’ve found that the hulking out works great on bosses. Paragon mode gets us big hourglasses.” He looked around as the other three nodded along. This wasn’t new information. “But since taking down Lust I’ve found I get a… mini-Paragon state? I think it’s tied to the upgrade to the scythe. Anyway, when I take out mobs it fills the gems and sometimes drops little hourglasses. If I hit ‘em with the noisy cricket I definitely get little hourglasses. With me so far?”
“Ish?” Dani gave the wobbly hand gesture to indicate partial understanding. “Enough to keep going with.”
Warren shrugged and Pham gave him the double thumbs up.
“Ok, so. The little hourglasses can be spent to upgrade the house. With every upgrade the upkeep increases though, and if the upkeep isn’t paid the house auto downgrades. This here is a level one house. There is a level zero though, if you want a roof over our heads we need to keep collecting the hourglasses.”
“Congrats man!” Pham held up a hand for a high five. “You’ve got your first monthly quest. Welcome to the grind.”
“Not the point, but thanks,” Peter tentatively completed the gesture. “What I’m saying is that killing these, uh, globlins, is giving us the points for upgrades we can build into the house. Pham called dibs on cooking, but there’s a shed out the back we can turn into a makerspace and after a few level ups the house gets bigger too. I think. There’s not a lot of context clues in the menu so I’m making a lot of guesses.”
“Most of all, we need to get to the end of this dungeon and win the race,” Warren said. “Chad was over at my house today and boasting about clearing the pipe room in record time. We’ve run this dungeon many times since the first, but that was always one of the hardest fights. There’s other ways through, but we always come back here because fighting was what we’re good at. Peter’s, what did you call it?”
“Noisy cricket,” Peter supplied.
“Right, that,” Warren continued, “gave us a good edge. DB’s help with the robots was good too. Now we’re not diving into the factory with a massive globlin at our backs. It means we can probably solve the puzzle of the room without casualties. My guild has always had to brute force the solution.”
“It’s ok, Woz,” Pham reached over and put a comforting hand on Warren’s leg. “Brute force is kinda your thing.”
“You have three seconds to move that hand or lose it,” Warren rumbled. “And both of you quit making obscure references.”
“Boo,” Peter and Pham said at the same time.
“Jinx, you owe me a coke,” they said, also at the same time.
“I said quit it,” Warren snapped.
“Does anything they do make sense to you?” Dani asked, leaning towards Warren.
“Enough that I know they’re both being insufferably smug right now,” Warren grumbled. “So that means its time to go beat the smug out of them.” He stood up and grabbed both Peter and Pham by the scruff of their armored clothes. “Let’s go, we’ve got a race to win.”