by Sara Thorn
So far, the three of us had tried out every game in the place at least once. The role-playing ones were the most fun. I always set the timer so we would know when to hit the exit lever and jump from the game. It was easy to get swept up in some of them, and Athan would have a fit if we were late to rehearsals or if we came into the dance studio looking like we hadn’t slept all night. The longest we had ever stayed in a game was just under four hours, which could feel like days or even months, depending on how time passed in the game.
When we all got inside the room, David closed the door behind us, and we fit our virtual reality glasses and headsets on. Instantly, the room melted into a lush landscape unlike anything I had ever seen before. The terrain that spread out before me was nothing short of the type of emerald-green hills one would find within Middle Earth. The grass was so defined that each emerald-green blade seemed to dance synchronously in the breeze. Thanks to the amazingly immersive effects of the gaming den, I could feel the gentle wind on my face and smell fresh rain off in the distance. The only thing that seemed slightly out of place was the lighting.
It was illuminated but not bright, and from what I could tell, there was no actual light source—no sun, no other-planetary orb, no artificial lighting. It just seemed to be lit-up. Maybe that was something I could mention on the feedback that followed the completion of every gaming session. Aside from that, the world was so real and believable that if I hadn’t known better, I wouldn’t be able to tell I was inside virtual reality. I turned around to gawk at the impressiveness of this new scenery with Gillian and David, but when I looked back, they weren’t there. Strange, we entered the game at the same time, and therefore should have all spawned in the same place. Maybe there is some sort of glitch.
After what seemed like only a few minutes of walking toward the sprawling hills in front of me, the timer rang. There must have been a mistake. There was no way four hours had passed. I exited the game and removed my headset to find Gillian and David standing right next to me.
“Where were you guys?” I asked. “I didn’t see either of you anywhere in the game.”
“Where were you?” Gillian said.
“Looking for you,” I answered as I tried to figure out what went wrong with the timer. “Maybe this is a one-player game?”
“Nah, it’s not,” David said. “Gillian and I were together as soon as we entered, and we stayed together the whole time while we explored and searched for you.”
“Weird. Well, at least it wasn’t that long. Maybe we’ll be together when we go back in this time.”
They both looked at me as if they were confused.
“But it’s time to go,” Gillian frowned. “Sorry we didn’t get to play all together, but we can try again tomorrow.”
I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and checked the time. There’s no way, I thought.
“You okay, Mara?” David asked me as he put his hand on my shoulder. “You look kind of pale.”
“Yeah,” I answered as I tried to shake the feeling of cobwebs from my brain. “It just didn’t seem like we’d been in there for so long. I thought maybe the game had glitched.”
“Nope,” Gillian said as she opened the door for us to leave the gaming room. “No glitch. And it felt like forever to me. We explored the whole city.”
“City? What city?” I asked.
“The giant capital city,” she answered. “I know it was just virtual and all, but I swear my feet actually hurt from walking all those streets.” Gillian laughed, and David nodded as though he were in agreement. “You okay?” she asked, obviously picking up on my completely blank expression.
“Yeah,” I lied. “I’m fine. Just tired. Cool game, though, let’s play it again tomorrow after rehearsals.”
“Sounds good.” David smiled.
On the walk back to my apartment, I couldn’t get the thought out of my head…there was no city in Mystreuce.
I should have just said something to David and Gillian about it; I wasn’t sure why I didn’t. They both seemed to have had the same experience in the game, and I was the odd one out. I didn’t want to come across as being crazy. I’d never heard of having a differing game experience while inside the same virtual room. I didn’t even think that was possible. I made a mental note to ask the owner of Inside Out tomorrow when I went back to play. I wanted to check out the city they were talking about, and most of all, I wanted to see what was on the other side of those rolling, green hills.
I wish David and Gillian could have seen what I saw. Telling them about grassy hillsides would seem vastly underwhelming, but there was something about it inside Mystreuce that was more captivating than any other game I’d ever played. I wanted to go back in and find out what made it feel so enthralling.
When I got back to my apartment, I was way more tired than I thought. After a cup of hot tea and a small snack, I climbed into bed and pulled up my white Sherpa blanket until I could feel the fuzziness just under my chin. When I closed my eyes, my head sank into the pillow as if the bed was swallowing me up inside it. And when I dreamed, I found myself running over the crest of a high green hilltop that kissed the sky on the horizon. I could feel the soft grass between my bare toes as I curled them against the ground and looked out at the castle ahead.
The next day, I didn’t wait for Gillian and David. Instead, I headed straight to Inside Out on my own right after rehearsals ended. I absolutely expected them to give me shit about going off without them, but I was fine with that. My curiosity was burning hotter than my loyalty.
The owner of Inside Out was an older guy, probably in his early forties, and he always had on some sort of retro T-shirt that made him look like he was trying too hard.
“Hi, Mara,” he said as I walked in.
I felt bad; he always knew my name, and after more than a couple of years coming here, I still didn’t remember his. I thought it was something unremarkable like Greg or Bob. “Hey.” I smiled, hoping that a cute grin would distract from not knowing his name. “I had a question for you about that new game.”
“Ahh, Mystreuce? It’s a good one, isn’t it?” He smiled slowly as if he were enjoying a sip of well-aged bourbon.
“Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Is there something different about the way that game operates?”
“What do you mean?”
Does he look guilty? I thought as I notice his odd expression. He looked both confused at my question and also not confused. There was a slightly unnatural lift at the end of his last word that made him seem as though he were overcompensating for something he’d done.
“I mean, when I was here yesterday with my friends, the game split us up. My friends were together in one part of the virtual reality, but I was alone in a different part.”
“How odd,” he said as he lifted two fingers to stroke the bottom of his chin.
“And the time seemed strange, too. I could have sworn I was only in-game for a few minutes, but when I exited Mystreuce, I saw that hours had passed.”
“Well,” he said as he regained his composure, “good games will do that to you. It’s easy to lose track of time inside VR.”
“Okay, but what about being separated from my friends? That’s never happened before. We all went into the same game room and entered the game at the same time. But they were in some city, and I was off on some green, hilly landscape,” I said.
He looked as though he had seen a ghost. “What did the hills look like? What did they feel like?”
“I think you’re missing the point,” I started to say; this guy was really starting to get annoying.
“No!” he nearly shouted at me. “I’m not missing the point at all. I just wanted to know what it felt like in there.”
Okay, he has completely lost it.
“Why don’t you go into Mystreuce yourself then?” I asked. Something didn’t feel right about this at all.
He immediately changed his demeanor back to one of routine doldrum. “Nah, I need to stay out here and help custom
ers. You want to play something today or not?”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling a sense of trepidation start to vibrate beneath my skin. “I want to go inside Mystreuce again.”
He smiled and handed me the key and a headset. Just as I started to walk toward the game room, he called after me. “And by the way, my name is Greg.”
I looked back for a second and then continued toward the room. I honestly didn’t care what his name was. I only wanted to take a look inside this game again. I put on my glasses and headset and started the timer for four hours, although I wasn’t planning to stay in that long this time. I had rehearsal early in the morning, and I didn’t want Athan thinking I was slacking off.
The way the games always work was that you entered the virtual world in the exact same place that you were in when you logged out. But instead of the walls of the room giving way to the sea of emerald hills where I was the last time, they turned into the walls of a castle, and I found myself standing right in front of a towering gold palace; the same exact castle that I had dreamed about last night.
“This is impossible,” I whispered to myself. I hadn’t even seen this inside the game; I only saw it inside my head while I was dreaming. I walked forward and reached out to touch the cold, metal handle that hung from the massive door. When I opened the door and walked inside, the interior was dark, dimly lit only by a few candles that dripped a running stream of wax onto the stone floor. I heard voices whispering from within the corridors lining the wide, main hallway, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
I really hoped this game wasn’t going to have any jump-scares. It was marketed as a fantasy RPG, but sometimes the game designers liked to drop in a few scares or surprises just to be clever, and I really hated that.
“Hello?” I called out. My voice echoed off the walls and bounced right back off my mouth. “Is anyone here?”
The whispering stopped. So did the flickering of the candle flames. This game kept getting weirder and weirder. I slowly crept along the corridors of the seemingly abandoned—despite the eerie whispers—castle and took my time exploring each of the rooms and even some of the gardens in the courtyard. It was all quite beautiful, and it all had the same blank stillness that the lighting did, as though it both existed and didn’t.
When I had looked around the entire castle, I found my way back to the door to leave. I checked my timer before I opened the door to step outside, realizing that it felt like it might have been encroaching on the four-hour mark. When I looked at the clock, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It had never gone off, and although I knew I had been inside the game longer today than I had yesterday, I didn’t expect the amount of elapsed time to be anywhere near what my timer was indicating. Eighteen hours.
I quickly left the game, and as soon as my eyes had adjusted back to the real world, I checked the time on my phone. There’s no way, I mumbled to myself in disbelief. There’s no way I was in that game for eighteen hours. I raced out of the room and back to the counter, where Greg would be waiting to take my key and headset back. But when I got to the counter, he wasn’t there. In fact, no one was there in the entire place.
Chapter Three
By the time I got to the conservatory, I had missed rehearsals completely. The rest of the dancers had already left the studio, and I dropped my eyes as I walked into Athan’s office. I was expecting more than just a sarcastic scolding this time. I was so close to graduation, and now was definitely not the time to start slipping up.
Athan had warned me when he first lifted me from the city streets and brought me into the school, that if I ever failed at keeping up, he would throw me right back out on my ass. As much as he had grown fond of me over the years, I didn’t doubt that he would fulfill that promise. He didn’t even turn around to look at me when I walked in, but he definitely knew I was there.
“Mara,” he said as if he were inviting me to take a seat without being bothered to acknowledge me.
I got ready to launch into an elaborate excuse, but then realized I owed Athan better than to lie to him. “I’m really sorry, Athan,” I said, and I meant it. “I was at Inside Out last night, and I got really into this new game, and,” I paused, realizing that my next words would make me sound insane. “And I lost track of time.”
“You lost track of nearly an entire day inside a virtual reality game?” He turned around slowly and stared at me, intently.
All I could do was nod.
“Well,” he said in a tone that was less than angry. “It must’ve been a damn good game.”
I looked up at him in shock. Where were the shouting and the threat that I had used up all of my chances and was going to be expelled from the dance school? Why did he look more amused than furious? Part of me felt a bit sickly that perhaps David was right; maybe Athan had more of an obsession with me than just being his prodigy. I shook that thought from my head immediately.
Athan had never tried anything with me. He’d never made a pass at me or laid a hand on me. In the slightly more than three years that I had known him, all he had ever done was help me to become a real dancer and carve out a future for myself. I had no reason to question that his motives were anything other than pure. I did have to admit, though, that it was strange how he didn’t get mad this time. I mean, I didn’t just show up late to a single class; I had missed an entire day of rehearsals. Anyone else would have felt his wrath full-force by now.
“You’re not mad?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why not?” I wasn’t trying to push my luck, but I felt like I needed to know why he was always making exceptions for me, especially this time.
“We all need to escape our world sometimes,” he said with a look that seemed wiser than his years should allow him to be.
“Wow, thanks,” I said in a relative shock.
Athan smiled, and then I found myself being excused from his office without even having to stay and work off penance for missing rehearsals. He shouldn’t have been so easy on me, because instead of feeling bad enough not to do it again, I headed straight back to the gaming den.
I felt shady sneaking back into Inside Out as if I were an addict sneaking into a crack house. And strangely, I thought I saw Athan around the corner as I took one last look at the street before going inside. It was a bustling city, though, so even if it were him, it wouldn’t be unusual to cross paths with the guy on his way out for an evening cocktail at one of the local bars. Still, I had a general feeling of unease and paranoia, likely due to my recent lack of sleep.
After this session, I’ll get back on schedule with things. I just need to go in one more time to see.
“Couldn’t stay away, huh?” Greg asked with a stupid smile on his face.
“You know I come here all the time,” I answered bluntly.
“Yeah, but I’ve never known you to spend the equivalent of a day locked up in one of the game rooms.”
“How did you know about that?” I asked.
He wasn’t even here when I had come out and looked for him. I ended up having to leave the key and headset sitting behind the counter.
Greg pointed up to one of the cameras in the corner of the ceiling. “Watched you leave on the security feed,” he said.
“So you just closed up the shop and left me in there? Knowing I was still playing? What kind of business owner does that?”
“The kind who respects the sanctity of the gaming world and trusts most of his customers not to rip him off. Besides, I know you dance at that fancy school, so I would have come and tracked you down if you had stolen any of my tech.”
“How do you know I go to Boston Conservatory?” I asked. My paranoia meter rose even higher.
“Your teacher comes in here sometimes, too; I think he’s secretly a gamer at heart,” Greg said.
“Athan comes here to game?” I had trouble hiding my shock.
“Yeah, at least a few times a month. I think he even tried out Mystreuce on the night I launched it.” Greg handed me
a game room key and a headset. “Surprised he didn’t tell you that he liked the VR world, too, maybe he doesn’t want his students playing with him.”
I swiped the key and headset from the counter and walked away without responding to his last comment. I couldn’t see Athan as a gamer, but then again, there were a lot of things I couldn’t see about Athan. I planned to mention Inside Out to him at rehearsal the next day. Maybe he knew more about all the weird glitches in Mystreuce than David and Gillian did.
I double-checked my timer to make sure there were no more mistakes. I absolutely couldn’t afford to be late to rehearsal again. When I put on the headset and the world of Mystreuce enveloped around me again, I found myself in the same spot that I remembered leaving. Good, at least there’s no glitch with that again. I had been just about to leave the castle at the end of my last session and was anxious to go out to explore the nooks and crannies of the terrain. Usually, in fantasy games like this, there were secrets and surprises to be found. I reached for the door and pulled it open, and what my eyes met with was not at all what I had expected.
Instead of the lush landscape I had seen before, there was a harshly contrasting dark and cavernous tunnel. I stepped behind me to go back inside the castle and try a different exit, but when I turned around, the entire castle was gone. The only thing that stretched around me on all sides was a dark and tangled web of dreary tunnels. I could always just leave the game, but I still had almost four hours left on my timer, and I wanted to explore some more. So I chose a tunnel and started to move.
The farther I walked, the closer I seemed to get toward the voice that I’d heard. At first, the voice sounded familiar but unrecognizable. But once I had made it a good way into the tunnel, the owner of the voice became clear—Athan. The tunnels seemed to go on forever, but as I reached the sound of Athan’s voice, the dark caverns seemed to converge in upon themselves. And in the center—upon a large rock as if it were a throne—was Athan.