Characters: Malkav, Adam, Grandpa, Aisha, Siarra
“I don’t suppose we’ll ever get out of this game,” Malkav said, looking down at his scarab necklace. “Even if we do find the other three pieces and the beetle doesn’t drive us all to madness and we can find the Dark Lady Sorena and defeat her as well as Gena, who are both far beyond our powers, how…how are we supposed to make it back to our world? There’s no guarantee that any of this will matter.”
As usual, the only one listening to him whine was the good sir Adam. “We have to do this. If we don’t, Sorena—or worse, Gena—will keep growing in power until she takes over this land. And if she does, then you can bet that when we die under her footsteps, there won’t be any Clerics around to revive us.”
“But don’t you see!? This isn’t reality! What you’re suggesting is that we keep playing this game to achieve an ending that’ll never come! You just want us to…remain here…forever.”
“No. I want to go home, like you. I’m not as emo about it as you, but I would like to see my family again.”
“Must be nice,” Malkav grunted.
“What? To see my family again?”
“To have a family. People who care about you.”
“Oh, come off it! I happen to know your parents have been happily married for years and that you have a really cute girlfriend.”
“Who has been trying to step on me for over an hour! Why is she making us walk anyway!?”
Adam shrugged. “Maybe you shouldn’t have said those things about her before.”
“Things? What things?”
“You remember… We were on her shoulder and you were complaining about how she ‘uses’ you and you use her too, and then you rambled on into some crap about how you’re just ‘trying to get by in this life.’ Somehow, I don’t think you understand how a relationship works.”
“And what would you know of relationships?”
“…I don’t tell many people this, but I’ve had an Internet relationship with a girl for almost two years now. We text each other every day and call each other on the phone and, as far as I know, she’s never wanted to crush me under her slipper. Seems I’m doing quite a deal better than you.”
Malkav kicked a rock. Siarra, who was walking behind him, also kicked a rock and it rolled over Malkav like a great boulder. She stepped over him and walked on. Aisha stopped, sighed, and revived Malkav for the sixteenth time that hour.
“Please,” Malkav said to the gentle Cleric. “Carry me. I beg you!”
“Sorry, I can’t…” Aisha said softly and scuttled to catch up to Siarra.
Cursing under his breath, Malkav dusted himself off and shoved his hands into the holes in his pants. “What’s her problem now?”
“Don’t be mad at Aisha,” Adam said. “She’s still in shock from killing that turtle. Don’t put any more stress on her.”
“She’s not even real!” Malkav snapped, grabbing Adam by his round shoulder. “Look around you, Adam! These trees, these stars, this rotting antelope carcass—they’re all fake! Just pixels on a screen, moving around to fool us. Well, not me! I’m not fooled. I see through them. I see what they’re worth and they ain’t worth the spit in my mouth.”
“You just don’t get it. Like it or not, this is our reality now. So what if it’s not the one we grew up with? We may never be able to go back. You said that yourself, but I don’t think you want to believe it—or maybe you just can’t believe it, that we’re here now, perhaps forever, in a world where we’re the ones not worth spit. You’re afraid to admit that this is one game you can’t win, that you have no control over, aren’t you?”
Malkav scowled, but it wasn’t directed at Adam or anybody else. “…Tell me about this girlfriend of yours.”
“Natalie?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Well…” Adam looked ahead as they walked on. “We met in a chat room two years ago. I told her I played football and she told me she was a swimsuit model.”
“What? You don’t play football!”
“I play fantasy football. Besides, it’s the Internet. You’re supposed to exaggerate the truth.”
“Oh… Okay, so she’s not really a swimsuit model?”
“Well, she showed me pictures of her posing in a swimsuit. That’s enough for me.”
“Alright, I guess that’s cool. So you’re not the hermaphrodite I thought you were.”
“Glad to hear that,” Adam said, somewhat slowly.
“Hmmm…you said you talk to her on the Internet, right?”
“All the time, why?”
Malkav slowed down so that he was sure Siarra couldn’t overhear him. “Neverquest is run on the Internet. I just got an idea. What if we could find a way to contact the outside world?”
“You mean through cyberspace?”
“Yeah, we can try cybering with Natalie!”
“Trust me, I’ve tried that.” Adam frowned at the memories.
“But this might be the key! Think about it. We send an S.O.S. to Natalie, saying that we’re trapped in this game. She can call our parents and have them come to our rooms and shut off our computers.”
“I’m sure our parents have already tried to get us out of here… We’ve been here for over two days now.” He paused. “Of course, we’ve been known to stay locked in our rooms for days on end when it comes to video games. They might never know that we’re gone.”
“That’s why we need Natalie! We have to let somebody know where we are. Unless…of course, she has Neverquest and is trapped here too.”
“No,” Adam shook his head. “I’ve tried to get her to play. She says this game is for geeks.”
“And she lets you play?”
“Unlike you, I’m not controlled by my girlfriend.”
“Well, that might change. We’re going to have to put our fate in Natalie’s hands.”
“How? We don’t have any way to contact her!”
Malkav pondered his thoughts, but what he didn’t know was that Grandpa had been standing behind them the whole time, smoking his crooked pipe.
“We’re in quite deep, aren’t we?” he said through a smoke ring.
Any plan he was formulating now vanished from Malkav’s head. “…Great, it’s the old man. Look, you better not tell your granddaughter about our idea. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say she likes it here more than the real world.”
“Fantasies can indeed be quite exhilarating, no doubt, but all things eventually subside. Siarra wants to go home as much as you.”
“She better because we’re not sticking around here to get ourselves killed again.”
Grandpa blew another smoke ring. “So what’s your plan?”
“…I already told you! Or, more correctly, you already overheard us!”
But Grandpa continued to blow clouds of smoke, that chronic twinkle in his eyes, as he squinted to study Malkav through the fumes.
“…Oh, fine,” Malkav sighed. “Adam has a girlfriend who lives in the outside world, but she has connections through this thing called the ‘In-ter-net.’ That’s the thing we’re on right now.”
“And to think I spent eighty-seven years calling it grass.”
“…You explain it to him, Adam.”
“Um, okay…” Adam stepped forward, frantically waving his hand over his face to clear away all the smoke. Grandpa was really going at it tonight with the pipe. “You see, we’re in a virtual reality dimension of this thing called cyberspace. It’s…kind of like another universe, only it can tapped into by anybody with a computer.”
“And you can’t pull the plug?” Grandpa asked.
“No… Well, in theory, you may be able to. But there’s also a chance that the neurons in our mind have actually attached themselves to the electrons in the game, which is how we’re able to ‘see’ and ‘experience’ this world. That’d be fine if this game was working properly, but if the virus that Narsis—he’s an old friend of mine—put into the computer has taken over, then this world as well as our minds have become a part of the virus. …In short, you pull the plug, you pull our minds.”
“So it’s nothing like pulling one’s finger…”
“More like pulling the trigger of a gun to our heads.”
Nodding, Grandpa pulled the pipe from his lips and whistled out a slow smoke stream. “Looks like we’re going to need reinforcements. That’s what the boys back in ‘Nam would say.”
“Were you even in half of these wars that you claim?” Malkav began to ask, but Adam cut him off.
“We do need reinforcements, yes,” he said. “The problem is that this isn’t Vietnam. We can’t just fly people here because—first of all, nobody knows we’re here, and second of all, because this is a computer game that’s barely available on the market yet.”
“You know, that reminds me,” Malkav said aloud. “Do you think the Neverquest GMs have discovered the bug in their system and are diligently and efficiently working on a solution as we speak?”
He and Adam looked at each other and got a huge laugh out of that. Grandpa remained quiet, blowing his trail of smoke.
“…Natalie’s the key,” Adam said after a moment. “I agree with Malkav. The thing is, though, we have to keep playing this game in case something goes wrong. We may have to face the fact that we’re going to be here for a long time.”
Malkav glanced over his shoulder. “And don’t forget about the girls. The only reason they don’t squash us now is because they’re trying to help us defeat Sorena. If we tell them that they’re on their own, we might as well just walk right under the shadow of their footsteps.
“I doubt Siarra would turn against us,” Adam said. “Like Grandpa said, she wants to go home too. And Aisha—are you kidding? Look at the state she’s in now after killing a monster turtle. She won’t even go back to the river to look for her scepter! How do you think she would react to killing a human being?”
“Even so, we mustn’t take any chances.”
“I agree. Besides…we owe it to Aisha and the other girls of this world to defeat Sorena at all costs.”
“Well, we can come back and do that after we get hold of Natalie and get back into the real world.”
“Did you have a plan of contacting her?”
“Yeah,” Malkav said. “I just thought of it, conveniently at the end of the scene. Since Aisha has agreed to purchase a new scepter in Felwinter instead of wasting the next two days searching for her old one, we should be in town by morning. There we can regroup with your other nerdy buddies and maybe one of them knows a way of how to hack into the system.”
“I don’t think so… The only good hacker is Narsis and he’s with Gena now.”
“Gena… Gena… Do you think she’s in Felwinter too?”
“There’s a good chance. As far as I know, Felwinter is open to all alliances, including the Forsaken. It would also be the best place for her to gain power since the Queen’s castle is there.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do! We’ll go see the Queen tomorrow and warn her about Gena. She’ll have her guards search the town high and low and bring Gena and her friend to justice. Then, we can interrogate Narsis, figure out how to contact Natalie, and she can figure out a way to help us out of here.”
“And then we’ll come back and defeat Sorena, right?” Adam asked.
“With reinforcements!” Grandpa cheered.
“Yeah…” Malkav said. “Yeah…that’s it. We’ll come back.”
“A-HEM!” thundered a voice from above and the guys all stared up to see a very angry Siarra glowering dubiously down at them. “Is there a reason you boys felt the need to take a ten-minute break while Aisha and I were practically a mile ahead!?”
They gulped.
“What’s the matter?” she boomed. “Do you need a lift!?” She lifted her leg and slammed it down, her heel on Adam, her sole on Malkav, and her toes crunching down on poor Grandpa. Not one of them made a peep in the soft earth as she lifted her leg again, shook them off like dirt, and stormed away towards the distant town of Felwinter.
Aisha sighed and prepared her resurrection spell for the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth time that night.
Giantess World
