“Come on, Papa, it’ll be fun!” Siarra said, tugging on her grandfather’s wrinkled hand.
“Eh?” he grumbled. “I just came over here to watch little Frankie and maybe some Oprah. I didn’t plan on playing any confounded children games! I’m too old for this.”
“Frankie is going to play. What better way than to play too? Then we can both keep an eye on him!”
Grandpa muttered something incoherent that old people would mutter and followed his granddaughter upstairs to her room.
Unlike his granddaughter, who was simply splashed in color and life, Grandpa was colored mostly in grays and whites. He had a beard that was thick and yet skeletal at the same time, almost like its fibers crept their way into his furrowed, dry skin like the rivers of his veins that so easily popped out. He was wearing his gray bathrobe and slippers—his usual attire for a night of babysitting Frankie—with a swirled pipe sticking out from between his lips. The newspaper was folded under his one arm, the other arm being dragged up the stairs by Siarra, and they soon entered her room where little Frankie was waiting for them.
“Neverquest!” the boy cheered.
“Neither’s Quest?” Grandpa scratched his head. “Eh, is this anything like checkers?”
“Not exactly,” Siarra said, holding up a Neverquest game helmet and strapping it onto Frankie’s head for him. “We play this on the computer in a virtual reality dimension that holds no bounds to reality whatsoever.”
Grandpa held up a finger—an instant clue to turn off your ears. “Why, back in my day, we didn’t go conjabbering around in worlds unknown to man! We were happy to have a heaping of reality and some cold hard bread crumbs set down in front of us. You kids have it so easy today with your tech-null-ology and hulliginations.”
“Stop making up words, Grandpa,” Siarra said sweetly, tightening the strap on her brother’s helmet. “Is that too tight, Frankie?”
He shook his head.
Siarra grabbed another helmet. “Ready, Grandpa?”
“Eh? What’s that? Do I have to urinate in that thing? My bladder is completely dry.”
“No, Grandpa, you put it on your head.”
“For what? Back in my day, we only wore helmets if we were about to do something really stupid and dangerous—and even then, we usually didn’t wear them! What kind of game is this where you need protective gear? Eh? I don’t like it!”
“You need to wear the helmet in order to link the neurons in your brain to the game,” Siarra sighed. “Then when the game starts, your mind is absorbed into the game through a potentially lethal process that kids like me shouldn’t have access to and you become a part of the virtual reality world. It’s perfectly harmless, except for the side-effects, which include dizziness, vomiting, diarrhea, indigestion, and should not be taken with alcohol. If symptoms should continue to occur—”
“You had me until you said no alcohol, munchkin.”
“This isn’t bingo night, Grandpa.”
“…I don’t know,” he said, taking the helmet from her in his shaky hands. “Do your parents approve of this?”
She shrugged. “Who cares? You probably didn’t approve of half the stuff Daddy did.”
“I still don’t! I can’t believe you’re eighteen years old and he hasn’t taught you how to decapitate an enemy’s head yet. Why, when I was your age, I was serving front lines in WWIII with fifteen pounds strapped onto my back!”
“There hasn’t even been a third world war, Grandpa.”
Grandpa put the helmet on his head, backwards. “For the record, I approve of none of this! …I’m only doing it because I don’t trust what these games do to your fragile children minds.”
“Whatever you say, Grandpa.” Siarra adjusted the helmet the right way and tightened the strap. “Comfy?”
“Confound it, I can’t see anything!”
“That’s because you have the visor down.”
“Why, yes, it’s just like flying an AG-52!”
“I’m going to pretend like that’s an actual plane.”
“Commander, we have lift-off!”
“…Yeah,” Siarra said, grabbing the third helmet. She plugged each of the cords into the computer and loaded the game. Frankie squealed in delight and closed his visor. Siarra looked at him, smiled, and then turned to her grandpa as she plopped on her own helmet. “Hold onto your hairy little…ears. Here we go!”
She clicked start.
Giantess World
