Gamelit 33 (just where you left me)

            Ray’s phone woke him up, which he didn’t appreciate because anything before 10 in the morning was too early, and 4 am definitely counted as too early. He dragged it over the comforter and squinted at it until it unlocked. Seong? Seriously? Man probably hadn’t gone to bed yet. But seriously?

HEY LOSER

get to work we have material

            What the heck. Ray tossed the phone aside and pulled the cover over his head. Nothing was that important. Even if Seong had bothered to text him about it. Probably had to do with Tankydoo. And Donner’s Beck. And Bard Boy. Whatever. It could wait. What could possibly matter?

            The text alert went off again. With a groan, Ray rolled over.

KILLZ CAME

            Ray dropped the phone and was out of bed so fast he didn’t remember the trip from bedroom to computer. Jamming on the headset, he logged into the Omen streamer keys and skated backwards until he discovered what had set Seong on fire.

            “Literal OMG material.” Ray sagged into his chair, staggered. He hadn’t expected Killz to find out about Donner’s Beck so quickly—had, in fact, been worried about him hearing about it too quickly and ruining things before they had a chance to develop. Instead, Killz had shown up and delivered a spectacle worthy of an epic movie. The one-on-one duel with Tankydoo–“white knight vs evil rogue”–was full of absolutely stunning shots just waiting to happen. Then there was that enigmatic moment with Pony Mom… oh, Ray could just hear the fan speculation now. Why had he spared her? Was this a hint of a change in heart? What were the villain’s motivations? Was Pony Mom just that special? When would they meet again? Because surely they would, or there wouldn’t be an arrow stabbed into the ground next to the sapling, like a challenge.

            Then the absolutely fantastic sequence with Killz and Goldie firing the town while Pony Mom did her valiant damage control, up to the finale where Killz departed, and Pony Mom cheerfully said ‘that’s life, time to fix things’ and gone at it while literally singing. SINGING.

            “I don’t know what I did to deserve this,” Ray told the universe at large. “But thank you. Or Thank Killz’s sense of drama. Something.” He bent to the keyboard, beaming.

***

            For the first time since he’d been accepted into the beta, Nick did not want to hurry awake and into the wireset. It was nice to be alive and in a world where Mom wasn’t in a hospital. He thought about it while scrubbing his hair in the shower: that he could think about it now, from a distance, because it was over. He’d craved excitement, adventure, and drama all his life… and now he’d had an experience that most people would call dramatic. Was he happy about it? Mostly, he was relieved it was over. Maybe that’s what it was like for everyone?

            If that was true, then why did people long for adventure? Did all the people who wanted it spend the entire experience wishing it was over? The way he had?

            Dropping onto his bed, he checked his messages. His girlfriend had left him one about the series they’d been watching for a while, about the latest episode. The group chat was going strong, mostly from Falcón complaining about the summer reading, because he’d done it assuming he’d be in the regular class but he’d just found out he was in the AP version instead, and they had different assigned reading. ‘Now I have to read an extra two books!’

            Blythe had sent him a message, too: ‘you okay? Want to do coffee?’

            He’d typed ‘yes’ before he thought better of it, and it was too late then to take it back. Was coffee alone with Blythe a date? She probably wanted to know how he was, that was all. And she was the only one he wanted to talk about the experience with, because she’d been there, sort of. He tried to imagine explaining it in the group chat and failed.

            He did want to talk about it. Maybe. Or not. He was so confused.

            The smell of bacon was wafting from the stairwell. Halfway down it, he could also smell pancakes. Both his parents were in the kitchen, laughing, and the sight was so familiar and so gratifying that he tried not to overthink things. “That smells great!”

            “I took the day off,” Dad said. “So I could make my special pancakes.”

            Mom smacked his arm lightly. “You took the day off because you need a day off.”

            “Right. To eat pancakes. You want blueberries in yours, kiddo?”

            “Sure. Can I help? I can make stuff now.”

            “Perfect. Go sit down, Amanda, the men are taking over.”

            “God help us all,” she said, laughing, but she also sat.

            Nick took over at the stove, overseeing the bacon, while Dad managed the griddle. The bacon was mostly done, though, so he rescued it from the pan and then went into the refrigerator. “Want eggs, Dad?”

            “Sure, two would be good.”

            Just like that–‘sure, two would be good.’ Encouraged, Nick took the pan off the heat until the bacon fat stopped trying to throw hot drops at his face, then cracked four eggs in. One of the yokes broke, but the other three stayed intact and fried themselves perfectly.

            Mom set the table, and ten minutes later they were passing around syrup and pouring coffee, like it was a normal morning. And it was a normal morning. He was grateful.

            “So while you all were sleeping,” Mom began.

            “Wait, you were up while we were sleeping?” Nick said.

            “You have no idea how boring it is to be stuck in a hospital bed.” She paused, fork dripping syrup. “I really hope you never find out how boring that is. But anyway, I decided to play Omen! And I’m afraid that guy came back and torched the village again. But I got pretty far in putting it back together. Oh, and he left your tree alone. I asked him nicely.”

            Nick wasn’t sure what was weirder: that his mom had popped out with gaming talk at breakfast without being prompted… or that it took him a hot second to remember why any of that mattered. When he did remember, it rushed back to him but somehow the sea of outrage and confusion wasn’t as extreme as he expected. It still mattered more that everyone at the table was alive, and that pancakes were delicious, and that his dad had vacuumed up the eggs with an approving noise. “Uh… maybe you should back up and start over.”

            “With more detail,” Dad added.

            Mom obliged, and that story struck him as whacked. Why would Killz come back? Why would he bother with some grand duel? Why set fire to Donner’s Beck again, when there were other things to do? Unless he was doing it to troll… but if he were trolling, why didn’t he kill Mom, too? PVP trolls loved to corpse-camp pathetic lowbies who couldn’t fight back.

            Something wasn’t adding up. Or maybe he had the equation wrong. His algebra teacher had been fond of saying that if you got the wrong answer, it was either you failed at executing the process… or you used the wrong process entirely because you didn’t understand the question. He felt like he didn’t understand any of the questions today. Like he’d woken up with a different brain.

            “I’m impressed,” Dad was saying. “It’s like the setup to some movie.”

            “It is, isn’t it?” Mom said. “I totally understand why you love these things, Nick.”

            Rousing himself, Nick said, “Do you?”

            She started to answer, then laughed. “All right. Maybe not completely. But I’m starting to see it.”

***

            “Is it permanent?” he asked Blythe later at the coffee shop.

            “No,” she said, as if he hadn’t spent several minutes fumbling through a disjointed description of his mental state, one so bad he wasn’t sure he’d conveyed it. “It’s just that right now you’re not in the extreme world, and you’re not in the normal world. You’re moving from one to the other.”

            He stopped stirring the sugar sludge at the bottom of his black coffee.

            “The way I see it,” she continued, “is there’s the normal world we spend most of our lives in, where things are basically okay and we make up things to be excited about, or depressed about, because nothing’s exciting or depressing. Not seriously. But we need to be excited or depressed to feel like we’re alive, so we pick the stuff that looks close enough and hype it up.” She tapped her chest, and Nick tried not to stare. “But here in our hearts, we know it’s not really that important. That’s why a lot of people are sort of dissatisfied and don’t know why. But then there’s the extreme world, which is when something actually exciting or horrifying happens. Like people we love dying or… uh… winning the lottery, I guess. Or falling in love. Or fighting a war. Then our emotions about those things are real, and match what we’re going through, so we’re not only feeling those things, we’re also feeling like it’s right to feel those things. We know when those things match, and that’s good for us.” She frowned at her mocha. “Sometimes if the extreme world sticks around long enough, I think the opposite process starts happening: instead of finding normal things to make more hype, we start looking for ways to make the hype things feel more normal. It’s like what we need is change, otherwise we can’t do compare and contrast and figure out if our perspective is janky.” She smiled. “Long story short, the transition between the worlds is trippy but it wears off.”

            “So in a few days, I’ll go back to thinking Omen’s beta is the most important thing in my life.”

            “A few days, a few weeks… but yeah.”

            He frowned. “What if I don’t want that? There’s got to be some happy medium between ‘my life is so boring I’m stuck pretending a game is as important as real life’ and ‘my life is so exciting that I’m desperate for normal again.’”

            She cocked her head. “Maybe that’s the real use of games? Maybe games are supposed to give you some contrast, normally. A way to live briefly in the extreme world, so that you can come back and appreciate the normal world better?”

            “Except like you said, you know it’s not real so you feel bad about feeling real feelings about it. Or at least, I do now.” He rubbed his forehead, embarrassed. “Except she wasn’t almost dead, it turns out. It’s stupid to be this freaked out when it was nearly nothing.”

            “It wasn’t nearly nothing,” Blythe said. “Just because it was easily fixed doesn’t make it nothing, Nick. That’s a reason to be grateful for modern medicine, not a reason to beat yourself up. I would have freaked if my mom had passed out and not woken up when I tried to wake her up. And my mom’s not even pregnant. That would have been even more scary. Scarier. Um, whichever one’s right.”

            He glanced at her, then said, hesitant, “You said something about having family in and out of the hospital…”

            Her smile was sad. “I’m not sure you want the story. It’s a long one.” She tried smiling brighter. “You have a beta to play, after all. You quit in the middle of an epic quest!”

            “I did,” he agreed, “but I’ve got time for a story. Even a long one.” He eyed his cup. “And maybe something else to drink.”

            She giggled. “But drinking it black is very manly!”

            “It’s how my dad drinks it, but I don’t know how. I’ll be right back.”

            “I’ll be here, just where you left me.”