Chapter Two

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 15^th. 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.”