Chapter Two
The power
stayed off for the rest of the night and all the next day. Makoto spent the
second dark night lying awake in bed. That was unusual for him. Marielle could
stay up late, whenever he became semiconscious in the middle of the night he
could make out the sound of her radio turned down low. Ken tended to do the
same thing only in his study, and Chen never seemed to sleep at all. Their
mother’s steady complaint was that their father was teaching them all bad
habits and causing chronic sleep deprivation which lead to unsatisfactory
grades. Makoto, on the other hand, worried her by spending long hours daydreaming
in the afternoons and sleeping in whenever he could get away with it. He spent
most of his classes either napping or in such a deep daze that it amounted to
the same state. None of his teachers ever noticed or cared enough to report him
for it, which was lucky. If his mother had even suspected she probably would
have called in a doctor.
Usually he
had a knack for pushing troubling thoughts down to the bottom of his mind where
he could go on with life without thinking about them. That was what he did with
all his parents’ arguments and worries over water, blackouts or politics. He
couldn’t do anything about any of it so none of it was worth thinking about.
The Simulade they had activated was his though. Maybe that was why he couldn’t stop
his mind from wandering back to it or forget Marielle’s question.
His sister
seemed to have forgotten about it. It was as though she’d passed the thought
from her mind into his. He wondered if their Sim was just sitting trapped in
that little room until they managed to come back. Marielle had said Sims were
alive, or grown at least. Did they need to eat? Did they use the bathroom? If
the player controlled the Sim completely could he even sit down while he waited
for them to return?
The answers
to these questions might be in the booklet that had come with the disc, but
when Makoto had checked in Chen’s room he’d found that the booklet had been
swallowed up by the maelstrom of papers and electronics. This was the sort of
thing that happened around Chen all the time, a natural phenomenon perhaps even
a field of some kind. Their mother wouldn’t even look into the room any more
since Lyn had moved out, which was what made it such a convenient if messy
haven. The trouble was made worse by Chen’s tendency to tear a room apart when
she was searching for something so that the spread of debris was constantly
shifting. Makoto was worried but not
enough to mount the massive search effort it would take to locate the booklet
now. People would notice and ask him what he was up to and the only person he
dared talk to about it was Marielle.
His parents
barely approved of them playing regular net games; he could imagine their
reaction to a humanoid creature grown in a lab. Anne had once explained to him,
with a calm rationality that half made Makoto believe she was insane, that an
obsession with video games had been the major downfall of her generation.
They’d given up on improving the real world in favor of the virtual one, she’d
said. Makoto hadn’t known how to reply but fortunately Chen had been in the
room. Once his sister had launched into one of her philosophical inquiries
there was no need for anyone else to say anything. She’d started saying
something about virtual realities having existed since the origins of myth.
He’d been able to use her lecture as cover to slink out of the kitchen as soon
as he’d finished washing the potatoes before his mother could instruct him to
slice or boil the things too.
The house
was as silent as it ever got. Even Ken had gone to bed. Makoto could hear the
faint rasping sound of Marielle snoring. Clouds had covered the sky outside his
window leaving his room dark. He stared into nothing, unable to find any
distraction from the unfamiliar twisting in his gut. Over an unknown expanse of
time, his anxiety morphed into a realization that he couldn’t move. He hadn’t
gone numb, his limbs simply would not obey the commands his brain sent to them.
The paralysis brought back a vivid memory of how he’d imagined death as a
little kid, eternal awareness forever trapped inside and unresponsive and
buried body. A dull sleepy panic began to overtake him and the room failed to
provide any comforting landmarks. He tried to wake himself up and knew that it
would do no good because he’d never fallen asleep.
The air
tasted wrong; it smelled of basements and the stale cool of industrial
ventilation. He kept breathing it in short even breaths and that was perhaps
the most worrying thing of all. He’d lost even the nervous acid feeling in his
stomach. He was terrified and his body remained as unaware of the emotional
current as it was of his desperate mental struggle to break free.
A voice
spoke to him sounding quite close. He couldn’t understand what she was saying
but felt that he could have, should have, if only his mind was clearer. Still,
just this proof that the world around him still existed and hadn’t been reduced
to a dark void calmed him. The paralysis let go like a cramp. He lifted his
arms and stretched them to their full length, relishing the motion. There was a
door, or at least an opening of some sort, on the far side the room with a
faint light coming through it, not bright enough to allow him to see but enough
to give him a sense of his surroundings. The shine caught the side of one his
hands making it look silver like a disembodied ghost hand hovering above the
black cloth of a long sleeve. Dreamily he folded the fingers against his palms
and felt the points of his claws dig into the flesh.
The
pounding on his door startled him awake. Makoto dropped his arms with a heavy
thud. The moon shown through a scrim of clouds, it’s light showing him the
familiar objects of his bedroom. He had fallen asleep at some point without
even noticing. There was no way of knowing how long he’d been dreaming but the
frozen tingling numbness in his limbs suggested that he’d been holding them up
in his sleep for a long time.
Anne was
shouting for them to get up and light was coming through the trapdoor, very
bright light. Power’s back on, he
told himself. This was not as cheering as it should have been. He felt
exhausted but rational, not filled with the usual early morning fuzz. It was
like he’d never slept at all. Today was also Marielle’s birthday he remembered.
Somehow that thought was strong enough to pull him free of the remnants of the
dream and he was able to get moving.
Normally
the blackouts didn’t faze their family. Some of Makoto’s best memories were of the
outages when everyone crowded into the living room to share the lamplight. He
and his sisters had played endless board games. Lyn had been on the math team
in school and loved strategy games, including going through an intense craze
for speed chess in her early teens. Marielle could hold her own against Lyn for
a round or two but Makoto always found himself trounced in the first seven
moves. Their father was the only one who could ever beat her. Chen didn’t even
try. She preferred games like Parcheesi where luck was a major factor and she
could zone out while waiting for her turn. Since Lyn had moved out they’d
mostly moved on to card games which were Marielle’s forte. The trouble was all
card games worth playing required at least four players, which meant roping a parent
into participating. Usually this wasn’t hard because Ken and Anne spent
blackout nights curled up together on the couch reading, but the first night
they’d stayed in the kitchen and had one of their long cynical conversations.
The next night Ken had secluded himself in his study after dinner and Anne had
gone straight to bed.
But the two
of them rallied for Marielle’s 15th. Anne spent most of the day
preparing a massive meal. Ken made the extra effort to cart a carload of
Marielle’s school friends up to the farm. The kitchen was packed full of guests
and food; everything was bright and noisy. Makoto sat in his seat, which had
been crammed in so close to Chen’s that they kept knocking elbows, and spent
dinner trying to figure out how he could sneak off. No convenient opportunity
presented itself and somehow he ended up helping to clear up the table after
dessert while Marielle and her coterie tromped upstairs to play games. This
meant the end of his chances for the evening; he’d been hoping they’d decide on
a movie instead. Then he felt bad; it was Marielle’s party and poor Chen had
been banished from her own bedroom and was managing not to complain though she had
departed for the screen in the living room immediately after dinner without even
a pretense of helping with the cleaning.
“Thank
you,” said Anne when he’d finished doing the dishes. “I’ll put everything away.
You can go join the party.” Makoto shrugged without enthusiasm. “Oh come on.”
“I don’t
blame him,” said Ken. He looked up from the ice cream container he’d been
meticulously scraping out with a spoon and smiled. “All that giggling, I don’t
think I could stand it either.”
Makoto
didn’t mind Marielle’s friends much since he’d known most of them almost all
his life, but he couldn’t even begin to explain the real trouble to his
parents. Not knowing what else to do, he made his way up to Chen’s room. He
stood in the doorway undecided as to his course of action and unnoticed by
everyone. There was a loud and pointless argument going over what map they were
going to play on the shooter game they’d picked out. The two males in the group
had claimed the couch in the way of any outnumbered force going for the more
defensible high ground. This was probably a wise move on their part since the
argument over the match setup had become physical. One girl’s foot hooked on a
clump of wires yanking a tangled mess of electronics, empty soft drink bottles
and a desk chair across the room.
“Help,” she
pleaded from underneath the pile.
“You’ve got
to be careful in here,” said Marielle.
“No
kidding,” said Marielle’s long time friend Jaida. The girls mounted a rescue
mission, disentangling their friend took some time. Jaida traced the wires to
their source and began pulling things out from under Lyn’s desk. “Look at all
this stuff,” she said. She put the remote for a defunct DVD player on the desk
and tossed two books over her shoulder. Makoto recognized the cover of one of
them right away.
“Hey, I’ve
been wondering where that went,” he said.
“Well today
is your lucky day,” said Jaida. “It might have been gone forever.”
“What is
it?” asked one of the boys stretching out as far as he could to pick up the two
books. He was blonde and older than the rest of the company. Makoto didn’t know
him well but he suspected he might be Marielle’s boyfriend, not that he would
ever take steps to confirm that suspicion either way.
Marielle
was busy shoving the coils of cords back under the desk but she looked up and
Makoto saw her recognize the Oneiros book. For a moment her face was
unreadable, it was almost grim, then the look was gone replaced with
disinterest that could have been genuine or feigned for all he knew. “It’s just
the manual for some old game,” she said. “Here, we’re playing team survival.” Everything
else was forgotten in the wave of dissent that followed this declaration.
Makoto was able to nab the book from the older boy’s hand and slip away to his
room.
He settled
onto his bed and fished around for his hidden stash of candy. Lyn’s birthday gift
had turned out to be some special chocolates. She knew their mother and sisters
were fiends for sweets, if they’d found what she’d sent he’d have lost them all
in a day, so she’d wrapped them inside a wool hat and mittens. He popped one
into his mouth, letting it melt slowly, and saved the rest. The Oneiros book
was bent and all ready dusty but not torn. Everything seemed to come with a
manual but nobody ever read them. At some point he had absorbed the idea that
they contained nothing but deliberate and sadistic misguidance. If he couldn’t
play the game though he might as well read about it; maybe he’d find the
answers to the questions that had been bothering him. They had to have
something to fill up such a thick book.
The page
after the one with the code printed across it looked like a checklist of system
requirements. Makoto skipped past it without a second glance. He paused at the
section detailing the controls, which was long and unusually complicated, and
then turned past several pages that seemed to concern themselves with basic
setup issues. He skimmed until he came to a picture that caught his eye and
stopped him.
The image
of the tower tickled something in the back of his mind. He stared at the page
waiting to see if it would come clear. The building in the picture was dark
against a dusky sky and shot at an angle that gave a sense of size to the
curving wall but failed to show details. His eyes picked out green vegetation
sprouting from between layered tiers. Bits and pieces jutted out from the main
structure but whether they were decorative or functional Makoto couldn’t tell;
the photograph was too dark and small for that. His mind seized on the word
“photograph.” He wasn’t looking at an artist’s representation or a screenshot
of an animated virtual world. The photo stuck in his mind in a way no CGI
special effect could.
That was
scary because it suggested that the place he was looking at existed somewhere
in the real world. His stomach went cold, the way it had when he’d first seen
the Sim’s face. He could almost accept that someone somewhere would grow a
creature in a lab just so random strangers could play with it. Lots of things
were engineered in labs, from vegetables to synthetic organs and viruses; it
was probably even comparatively cheap to make a whole person. He knew adults
did things that didn’t make much sense either because they could or because
there was money to be made somehow. Something like a giant tower had to be
built though and that meant architects, construction crews and materials, years
of concerted effort and planning.
There were
words on the page opposite the photograph of the tower serving as a kind of
caption. He looked at them without absorbing their meaning. Finally, he spared
some attention and read them. Then he blinked twice and reread them.
“In
the land of eternal darkness beyond the rising sun dwell the Oneiroi. You stand
at the edge of their world in the deep hollows beneath the Tower. Enter and
ascend through the Gates to Aether’s Zenith and wake the sleeper.”
He’d seen
the same quasi-mystical gibberish in the prologues of more books, games and
comics than he could count. The sudden introduction of a plot, in stark
contrast to the reality of the photograph, nonplussed him. His trepidation left
him and the feeling of unreality he’d had when they’d first loaded the game
came back in force. If he had thought to examine that emotional shift, and its
cause, he would have become more suspicious than ever, but instead he welcomed
it as a retreat from the anxiety he had been feeling all day. He turned the
page and began to read.
“Hey!”
Makoto
jumped. Marielle was standing over him wearing her bright-eyed eager look that
he always found a little alarming. He’d been so absorbed he hadn’t heard her
come in.
“So are you
ready?” she asked.
“Ready for
what?”
“Oh come
on, to log back into that game. It’s a good thing that book turned up. I’d
totally forgotten about it.”
“Did the
others go home all ready?” He felt drowsy and disconnected from events the way
he did after he’d spent an entire day reading, usually it took longer than hour
to bring on that state and something more absorbing than a user’s manual.
“Yeah, it’s
like 11. Wake up would you? Chen’s downstairs watching some show with Mom;
we’ve only got about 20 minutes.”
“Is it even
worth it?”
“We can at
least sign in to make sure our account doesn’t go inactive.”
“My
account.”
“Fine, so your account doesn’t go inactive,
happy?”
Makoto
didn’t bother to answer. He just climbed to his feet and headed for Chen’s room
jumping most of the steps down from their attic. Marielle followed suit,
smacking hard into his back and grabbing his shoulder for balance.
“At least
it’s the weekend. We can play tomorrow if we can get Chen out of her room for
once,” she said.
Makoto
didn’t question her desire to hide the game from Chen. He was glad Marielle had
decided to keep it from her friends though. It was like all the make believe
adventures they’d played together when they were little. Some of them could be
shared with Chen or Lyn, and others were for specific groups of friends, and
then there’d been the ones that were just between the two of them, and they’d
never needed to say aloud which were which they’d both always known the
difference. That they needed to hide the details from their parents went
without saying. Almost, he wished he’d been by himself when he’d found that
envelope. The thought arose out of the sleep haze that if he had been alone
he’d have carried the disc up to his room and thrown it in his desk to forget
about it. Maybe that was what he was really wishing for.
The screen
was turned on and sitting at the default menu. A window across the bottom noted
that whatever the rest of the family was watching downstairs was being recorded
which would make their connection slow at best. Marielle didn’t even complain,
just clicked the button the activated the disc drive. She was more eager to
start puzzling through this mystery than he’d realized.
The couch
had been pushed around quite a bit during the party. Makoto did his best to
slide it back to more or less its old position then he took up a controller,
there were plenty scattered around the floor, and made himself as comfortable
as he could. His stomach was tight and he felt an odd reluctance to look up at
the screen. He felt like he was waiting to receive bad news.
“Did we name him?” asked Marielle. She
launched herself onto the couch making it scrape across the floor again.
“No,” he
answered. He heard an unaccustomed sharpness in his voice but Marielle failed
to register it.
“What do
you think of Tyr?”
“Never
heard of it. Where’d you get it from?”
Marielle
dug between the couch cushions and then brandished a book at him. It was a fat
paperback with its cover half separated from the spine. He could still see the
picture on the front; it depicted a man in a cloak and winged helmet standing
before a giant starving black wolf. He realized it was the other book Jaida had
pulled out from under the desk.
“How long
was that under there?”
“Well,”
said Marielle as she turned the volume over in her hands, “it’s from the middle
school library so… two years, at least.” She fanned the pages raising a visible
cloud of dust. “It’s an omen, this book turning up now.”
“It’s
probably too late to return it.”
“That’s
fate’s doing, not mine.” Marielle shoved the book back between the couch
cushions. “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”
“I guess
Tyr is fine, I can’t think of anything better.” Makoto looked up and saw once
again the grey room and the grey figure seated at its center.
“Has he
been like that the whole time?” asked Marielle. He glanced at her and saw her
face crinkled in doubt. Somehow that made his worries easier to bear. He pressed
the analog stick on the controller and the name box reappeared.
He entered
T – e – a – r
“You need a
Y,” said Marielle.
“Really?”
“That’s how
you know it’s fantasy.”
Makoto
selected T – y – r. “Like that?”
“Yes. The Y
is the source of his powers,” said Marielle solemnly.
He shrugged
and hit the button to confirm. This triggered another especially long load.
Marielle didn’t even bother to sigh in exasperation. The silence was heavy. Makoto
realized that he had yet to hear any sound in the game at all. Sound effects
and background music were so ubiquitous that he’d never thought about them
before. Their absence was somehow eerie. The load sign disappeared with an
awkward jerk that suggested their network connection was feeling the strain.
Makoto nudged the stick on the controller again and Tyr stood up.
“Can you
change the camera?” asked Marielle, her eyes intent on the screen.
“Not in
this room I think. This is just the start area. It’s like the basement, level
zero. We have to navigate him out of here.”
“So you
read the book?”
“Sort of,
yeah.”
“Do you
know what we’re supposed to do then?”
“Get to the
top of the tower.”
“What’s at
the top of the tower?”
“A
princess.”
Marielle
laughed. “I shouldn’t have asked, towers are natural princess habitat.”
“It
wouldn’t be much of a tower without a princess at the top,” said Makoto feeling
a smile stretch across his face.
“All right,
so you’ve figured out how to steer him. Go make him open the door.”
“Hang on.”
Makoto
directed Tyr in a circle around the little room as an experiment. There was lag
between pressing the controls and response. He couldn’t say for sure whether it
was caused by their staggering rural net connection or to do with however the
commands were relayed. The book had only told him he controlled Tyr, it had
never explained how. The fixed camera angle also threw him off. If he steered
Tyr into a corner he could lose sight of him altogether. He was used to games
where the screen tracked his character from either a first person point of view
or a hovering godlike perspective that could be adjusted with a flick of the
analog stick or the tap of a button.
“All right, I think I’ve got it.”
“Can you
walk him into walls?”
“No, I’m
not going to do that.”
“Why not?
Wouldn’t it be better to find out how careful we need to be here on the
tutorial?”
“Later,
there’s stuff we need to pick up.” The door was not actually a door, just a
dark opening. Makoto steered the Sim (the book called them “Oneiroi” but he
wasn’t even sure how to pronounce that word) through it without any tripping or
banging into the walls. This led them into a dark corridor. Their view of the
scene flicked from a side down shot to a direct down one that showed Tyr’s
messy mop of hair but not what they were aiming towards.
“Oh my god,
this is useless,” said Marielle.
“There are
commands to control the cameras in the book,” answered Makoto. “You could look
them up if you want.”
“Didn’t you
read the book? Fix the camera.”
“I read
some of the book and I’m still trying to figure this out. It’s all weird you
know.”
“You’d
think they’d make this stuff more intuitive. What does the right analog stick
do? That’s usually the camera.”
“It doesn’t
do anything right now. I think the controller’s just for Tyr unless you change
its settings.”
“Did you
leave the manual back in the room?”
“I’m
sitting on it. Here,” said Makoto scooching one buttock so Marielle could yank
the book out from underneath. She began to page through it.
Freed, for
the moment, of her attention, Makoto focused on the task at hand. He tried to
nudge Tyr forward and instead ran up against a wall until he realized that
while his view had changed the directions hadn’t. He managed to reorient and a
few steps in the correct direction down the corridor prompted another dizzying shift.
This time he saw Tyr from the back, his body outlined against the entrance to a
brighter room. Emboldened, Makoto pushed onward. A door slid shut behind Tyr,
locking them in the new room, and windows suddenly crowded the screen.
He found
himself confronted by lists. As always in such situations his mind tried to go
blank on him. He resisted the impulse because he recognized the equipment
select screen from the book. From all the bolded text in that section he
gathered that what supplies they managed to take from this room would be very
important. It was too bad he didn’t recognize the names of many of the items on
the list. What, he wondered staring
at the window on the far left, is a glaive?
“Hey
Marielle, can I have the book back? I need to check this part again.”
“I figured
out how to change the cameras I think.”
“That’s
great but I’m kind of in the middle of something else here.”
“What?”
asked Marielle. She looked up as she jabbed the book in his direction. “Do you
think the font on that lettering is supposed to be fuzzy or is our screen
junk?”
“I don’t
know,” he replied. He had to drop the controller to pick up the book and look
through it. There wasn’t an index or contents page and it was long enough to
have warranted one. Marielle grabbed the controller while he was distracted and
began to scroll through the lists.
“For
weapons I think we should go with some kind of giant hammer.”
“Why?”
“I’m
feelin’ it, like the hammer of justice.”
“Well he’s
got to carry whatever we pick out. There’s no magic inventory screen where we
can stash a giant hammer when we don’t want it. It’s more like we’ve got to
outfit him for a long journey.”
“Hmmm, what
kind of journey?”
“What do
you mean?”
“Well what
are we up against? Cold? Rain? Snakes? You know, there are a lot of weapons
listed here but no firearms. Are there other players?”
“Yeah,”
said Makoto answering he last question first.
“What do we
do if we meet them?”
“I don’t
know. We’re supposed to beat them to the top of the tower, that’s all I know.
And it’s a tower so I don’t think there’s going to be rain, or snakes.”
“You can
have snakes in a tower, you can have snakes anywhere. The weapons have to be
for something after all. The other thing I haven’t seen yet is a chat option,
if we do meet other players we can’t talk to them.”
“I guess
we’re just supposed to race not team up or anything.”
“It’s still
weird. I’ve never played a game with no chat feature, not even text.”
“Yeah,” he
said agreeing without really listening. He was finding it hard to converse and
read at the same time. “There are combat commands.”
“Then we
definitely need a knife. Always bring a knife when you’re in the woods.”
“It’s a
tower.”
“Same
principle applies. Nothing on this damn list just says “knife.” That’s all I
want to start with.”
“Maybe it’s
because that’s the weapons list, try tabbing over and checking the tools if you
want a pocket knife.”
“I want
something bigger than a pocket knife, that’s for sure.”
“I dunno,
just look.”
“I thought
you had the list there in front of you.”
“You keep
distracting me.”
“Sorry, I
had no idea your concentration was so fragile. Hey!”
“What?”
“We can
change his clothes.”
Makoto
rolled his eyes and made a sound of complete disgust.
“Don’t be
stupid; clothes are important on a trip. They might be the most important
thing.”
“If you’re
a girl.”
“If you’re
someone who wants to be comfortable and alive. Don’t you remember our camping
trips?”
Makoto
remembered being dragged up muddy trails in heavy rain. He also remembered the
time he’d lost his leg down a crevice between two rock ledges on the mountain
and scraped all the skin off the inside of his thigh. His leg had bled and
burned a lot and then he’d had to walk home on it the next day.
“Yeah, so?”
he asked.
“The proper
clothing for your outdoor activity is essential,” insisted Marielle. She was
scrolling through the list of wearable items.
“He’s not
outdoors. He’s in a tower.”
“The same
principle applies. We probably don’t need rain gear. We want something light
and rugged, and since I’m not seeing anything like a knapsack listed we’ll need
pockets. Is there a ‘Put this in your pocket’ command?”
Makoto
stopped looking for the equipment page and turned back to the front of the book
to read about the commands he’d skipped over the first time. Marielle selected
a shirt which opened another box that showed the items they’d chosen.
“All I can
get about this stuff is a little text description, that’s a pain.”
“The
descriptions are somewhere in the book too.”
“Well it’s
dumb not to have a picture for clothing.”
“We can
probably try everything on before we leave. This is the main equipment stop;
it’s not like we’ll be looting stuff off monsters later… I think.”
“That
stinks.”
Marielle
hit the confirm button on an outfit. There was a moment of loading then a panel
flipped open with the items she’d chosen neatly stacked inside like it was a
normal closet. She started to point out this achievement but interrupted with a
startled yelp when the Sim started to strip.
“Oh that’s
just wrong.”
Makoto
looked up to see what the fuss was while Marielle covered her face with the
controller. He noted, in a distant way, that the body was human in every
respect except maybe color. Their Sim had a wide build with big shoulders but
his body without his shirt looked surprisingly bony. Makoto could see his ribs though
he could also clearly make out the muscles in his arms. Overall, he had the
stretched look Makoto recognized from the locker room back at school. For the
first time he wondered just how old their Sim was and if it mattered for a
creature that had been grown in a tank.
“You’re the
one who wanted to change his clothes,” he said.
“Not
because I’m a pervert! There should be a changing room.”
“This is
the changing room I guess.”
“That’s
sick.”
“…Not
really.”
“Yes it is.
What if I’d ordered him to walk around naked?”
“Well they
did send this program specifically to me and I’m a boy so they probably didn’t
think it mattered.”
Marielle
peeked out from behind the controller and lowered it back into her lap. She’d
picked out some kind of grey cargo pants that did indeed have many pockets. His
shoes were thick black hiking boots; Makoto only caught a glimpse when Tyr tied
the laces. On top he had a light black jacket over a red T-shirt with a
stylized black dragon on it.
“Looks all
right to me,” said Makoto.
“No, the
shirt screams “shoot me!” Look for something grey or green.”
Makoto
liked the shirt. It made the Sim stand out against the drab walls but he could
see that was Marielle’s point. “You look for it. I’m still reading about the
controls. I can only look up one thing at a time.”
“Well read
faster. Chen could be up here at any moment. Where are we supposed to be going?
Besides to the top of the tower I mean.”
“To the
first shelter, it’s like a safe zone. If we leave him in a shelter he can eat and
sleep and stuff. There’s a shelter at the end of the start area but I think
we’ll have to make them later, I read how to in the book.”
“Sounds
complicated, you can’t just click a button and leave,” said Marielle. She was
making the Sim change his shirt for an olive colored one with no design. He
noticed she didn’t bother to look away the second time but watched with the same
candid interest he had. “He’s got a scar down his side and another on his back.
Did you notice?”
“No.”
“Well he
does, big ones. So he does need to eat then?”
“Yeah,
though not as much as a human does. A lot of the book is about that. We have to
keep track of his vitals, real ones, not like a stats bar.”
“Do we do
that at the shelters or anywhere?”
“Anywhere,
there’s a menu for it. I’ll open it later; probably crash the game if I tried
right now.” The screen kept flashing up spinning load signs as Marielle went
through changing their gear.
“What if he
gets hurt?”
“I think
you can get medical stuff at the shelter too.”
“Do we need
30ft of cable?”
“What?
“It’s on
the list, so is rope but I figure rope would be a pain to haul around so maybe
cable is thinner? I found him a knife and a multi-tool, I don’t really know
what a multi-tool is but it sounds good. Still no backpack and I don’t know
what to do for the weapon. I’m thinking just a straight short sword if you’re
really worried about weight. I can equip a buckler to his other arm but if we
have to climb that’s going to be a pain. Do you know how big a buckler is?”
“What’s a buckler?”
“It’s a
little shield, I think.”
“I don’t
know,” said Makoto. He stared at the screen feeling tired and overwhelmed.
“Tell me what you’ve picked out so far.”
“I’ve got the
survival knife, a multi-tool, water bottle, flashlight and cable.”
“Batteries.”
“What?”
“There were
batteries on the list; you probably need them for the flashlight.”
“Good
call.”
“Gloves,”
he added scanning the equipment. Marielle was right, the words were almost
unreadable.
“Gloves?”
“If he’s
going to be climbing anything he’ll want gloves. Look for matches.”
“You’d
think they’d have put this stuff in alphabetical order.” She selected gloves
and then flipped down one where “chocolate” was listed for some unknowable
reason and added that to their list as well.
“Oh, take
the compass,” said Makoto spotting it on the list.
“Why? We
won’t even be able to see it and there’s no map.”
“Maybe
there’ll be a map later. They wouldn’t put a compass on the list if it was
useless.”
“I don’t
know about that, some of this stuff is obvious bait. Ha! Playing cards,” said
Marielle selecting those as well.
“Come on,
there’s no “play poker” command.”
“We each
get one useless thing, you take the compass and I’ll take the cards.”
“Fine,”
said Makoto because it was quicker than arguing. “Go back to looking for
matches.”
“Have you
ever heard of firesteel?” Makoto shook his head no. “Sounds promising though
doesn’t it. I’m going to go for it, hopefully it’s not heavy I think we’re
running out of pocket space. How are we supposed to get him to use any of this
stuff?”
“He’s been
trained.”
“Trained?”
Makoto
shrugged. “Want to read the book?”
“No way.”
“He knows
things but he can only do stuff if we unlock it. It’s like… everything’s in
there but we have to send the signal.”
“Ah,” said
Marielle as if she understood perfectly. “We really need to pick a weapon and
get going. I saw a crossbow on the list. I think that legally counts as a
firearm.”
“Yeah but
how many bolts does it come with? You have to get slingshot ammo off the supply
list; did you see anything about crossbow bolts?”
“No and you
don’t want to need a weapon and not have ammo, you’d be screwed. Let’s go back
to looking at all the kinds of weapons. How big do you think the axe is? We
could probably use it as a tool too.”
“It’s under
weapons… I don’t know.”
“I really
wish you could preview this stuff.”
“What does
the text say?”
“War
hammer, single handed weapon, 23 inches long, weighs 3 pounds. How long is 24
and 1/2 inches really?”
“More than
two feet, want me to go check Mom’s measuring tape?”
“You might
as well. We could at least get some sort of idea.”
Makoto
scrambled to his feet and padded down the stairs. The house felt very dark and
quiet after an evening full of noisy teenagers. He could hear the sound of
whatever program his parents and Chen were watching as a faint back drop that
only emphasized the silence. Anna was in the kitchen getting a drink; the
rattle of ice was disproportionately sharp and loud. He went past her to the
things drawer beside the sink hoping he was being inconspicuous.
“What are
you looking for?” asked Anne.
“Tape
measure,” he answered because it would raise fewer questions than trying to put
her off.
“It’s in
the cabinet in the back of the living room, or it should be unless your father’s
borrowed it again. What do you need it for?”
“Trying to
figure out how big a war hammer is.”
“All right.
I hope you two are planning to go to sleep at some point tonight.”
“Soon,
Mom.”
“If Chen
wants to go to bed you get out of her room.”
“We will.”
He started for the living room and stopped. “Do we have anything that weighs
three pounds?”
“You could
check my exercise weights, they’re behind the couch.”
“Thanks.”
He crept
into the back of the dark living room and unlatched the cabinet door as quietly
as he could. He spotted the tape measure in a basket. If Chen and his father
heard him they didn’t bother to acknowledge his presence or so much as glance
away from the screen. Chen was stretched out on the couch and didn’t seem to
notice him rummaging around clanking exercise weights together. After some
searching, having to squint to read the weight labels in the dim light, he
found what he was looking for and left without raising any comment.
The weight
was the kind made to be strapped around a leg. It felt impossibly light for
anything meant to be a weapon. He wondered if the weight mentioned in the
description was just for the head. He wrapped the weight around his fist and
swung an experimental punch knocking himself off balance. He walked into Chen’s
room doing arm curls and wondering how heavy three pounds would be after you’d
carried it for a day. Standing where Marielle could see him, he placed a toe on
the metal end of the measuring tape and rolled out 24 and a half inches against
his leg. It came up to his thigh.
“That’s
really long,” he said waiting to get Marielle’s attention. “I could put it on
the ground and lean on it.”
“But you’re
not a tall muscle guy. It’s a weapon, it needs a long reach.”
“I wouldn’t
say he’s a lot taller than us. How can you even tell?”
“I guess if
we get the hammer we could compare.”
“That
description has to be lying. This weight is three pounds,” said Makoto. He
tossed the exercise weight from one hand to the other. “I think the hammer in
our tool box weighs almost this much. I know the sledgehammer out in the shed
weighs way more than this.”
“Well you
wouldn’t fight with a sledgehammer it would be way too slow. You’d never be
able to recover if you missed a swing.”
“Still,
something this big…”
“Well,”
said Marielle, her mouth twisted in the way that meant she was doing her
absolute best to avoid an argument but that it was going to be a close run
thing, “weapons aren’t really my thing so I don’t know.”
“What else
is there on the list?”
“Tons of
stuff I don’t really know anything about. If we try to close out to look stuff
up the whole thing will probably freeze. At least a hammer is something we know
for sure how to use. Hammers are pretty straight forward.”
“Except for
a sword,” said Makoto. He wasn’t concentrating on the argument though. What
Marielle had said was running through his mind and connecting with something
he’d said earlier. He couldn’t believe that Tyr was supposed to know how to use
every single item on that list. How could so much information be stored in one
mind and then closed off? The book has said they would unlock his abilities as
they went but how could that even be possible with a living creature?
Marielle
had continued to talk. “Have you seen this list? I’ve been going through it and
there are more kinds of swords on here than anything else. You want a sword and
we’ll be here all night.”
“What are
you guys playing?” asked Chen from the door.
They both
froze. Makoto dropped the exercise weight which thudded onto the floor beside his
bare foot. He hastily scooped it up, letting the measuring tape recoil with a
loud snap.
“It’s a
game,” said Marielle.
Chen
snorted and strode across the room to settle on her bed, watching the screen.
“What’s it called?”
“Oneiros,”
answered Makoto. He stuffed the tape measure into his pocket and went to perch
on the couch, playing with the weight again in his nervousness.
“We have to
get to a save point before we can log out,” said Marielle.
“What are
you trying to do?”
“Pick a
weapon,” said Makoto.
“Oh,” said
Chen with understanding.
“Makoto
wants a sword,” said Marielle. She was relaxing. Makoto could still feel his
heart pounding. He kept his eyes on his next older sister’s face. Chen looked
only mildly interested but you couldn’t trust that expression.
“Swords are
boring,” said Chen a veteran of many an RPG.
“I’m
thinking hammer,” said Marielle.
“Hammers
are good,” answered Chen. She stretched and gave a big yawn that was meant to
get a point across. “You trying to build a tank?”
“Yeah,” said
Marielle casually, as if this were obvious. Makoto wasn’t even entirely sure
what they were talking about.
“Then you
want a single handed hammer and a shield. How far is the save point?”
“Down the
hall, not far,” said Makoto though really he had no idea. Marielle was hitting
buttons in rapid succession making windows vanish. Once again they had a view
of Tyr and a panel opening in the wall. Makoto wasn’t sure what buttons
Marielle hit, if any, but Tyr began to place the equipment about his person in
the smooth fast manner of someone who had done the same thing many times. The
hammer did not look so big in Tyr’s hand. Its head wasn’t the giant slab Makoto
had envisioned but a narrow shiny wedge of metal with a spike to one side and
another on the end of the haft. The Sim attached the weapon to a loop at his
waist.
“You can’t
send him out like that,” said Chen, her brow winkled. “Where’s his armor?”
“We’ll do
that tomorrow,” said Marielle. She clicked through a confirmation window and
steered Tyr out the entrance that slid open before them. The controls didn’t
seem to present her with the same level of challenge that they did Makoto.
“Where’d
you get this?” asked Chen.
“Birthday
present,” the two of them spoke at the instant.
“Jaida gave
it to me,” Marielle expanded. “We’re still figuring it out.”
Makoto felt
a wave of unreasonable anger sweep through him at Marielle’s simple statement.
It made sense to say the game had come from Marielle’s friends, saying it had
arrived in the mail would only raise questions. He knew it and was still
annoyed. He wanted to take the controller back, to just snatch it out of her
hands, but he stayed curled up on his end of the couch while Marielle skipped
through informative text boxes without reading them
“I think
here is good,” she said exiting all the way to the network login.
“Did you
save?” asked Chen.
“Yup. You
want the controller?”
Chen stuck
out her arm and made “give it here” motions with her fingers. Marielle leaned
over the back of the couch and tossed it to her. Makoto looked around until he
found the game manual. It would not be a good idea to leave it where Chen could
pick it up now. He got up and left followed shortly by Marielle who closed the
door behind them.
“Good
night,” he heard Chen call after them.
“Sleep
tight,” answered Marielle. That had been their mother’s night time saying back
when they’d been little. The next part was “don’t let the bed bugs bite” but
Makoto didn’t bother to supply it.
“What’s
wrong?” asked Marielle.
“What?”
“You look
upset.”
“I’m just
tired,” he said and shrugged.
“We can try
it again tomorrow; maybe see this tower you mentioned.” She crossed the hall to
the bathroom.
“Yeah,” was
all Makoto could say. He started up the steps to their bedroom.
“Aren’t you
going to brush your teeth?” she asked, annoying him all over again.
“Later.”
“All right,
good night.”
“Night.”
