Eight-Bit Ian—hero of Hyrule!
“And… what does he say?” Lilli prompted.
Oh. Right. It was a two-part question. I wrinkled my brow. How was I supposed to remember the man’s exact words? I definitely saw a meme about it somewhere online a while back. Someone handing over a small kitten and saying…
“‘It’s dangerous out there’? ‘Don’t go alone’?” I tried.
Another loud creak echoed through the cave, and for a moment, I thought I’d gotten it right. But then I felt water splashing at my feet. This time the pool wasn’t receding.
It was rising.
“I don’t think that’s it,” Lilli said worriedly, looking down at the rushing water. It was coming in fast—almost to our knees already—and it was freezing cold. So cold it made my bones ache. My mind raced, trying to remember what the man in the cave had said.
Ikumi stepped forward. “‘It’s dangerous to go alone,’” she declared. “‘Take this.’” Then she mimed holding up a sword, as I had done a moment before.
I slapped my forehead with my hand. Right! Take this. As in take the kitten in the meme. Or the sword in the actual game.
The water withdrew back into the pool, leaving us soaking wet, but once again standing on dry land. Well, sort of dry. The water had seeped into the ground, and we were now surrounded by a muddy mess.
“Good one,” I told Ikumi before turning back to the wall for the next question. Three down, two to go. We could do this.
IN CAMELOT’S HONOR, WHAT ARE THE NAMES
OF THE TWO WARRING SORCERERS?
I wrinkled my nose in distaste. “Camelot’s Honor,” I said, scoffing at the RPG game that was always trying to compete with the awesomeness of this one. “Who cares? Fields of Fantasy forever!”
No sooner had the words left my mouth than the familiar creak sounded again. At first I really thought the waters would recede, in appreciation of my total loyalty to the game we were playing. Instead, the water began to rush back in, even faster than before—and soon we were up to our waists. It felt colder, too—so cold my teeth started to chatter.
“Aw, come on!” I protested. “That’s so unfair!” I waded over to the statue. “Seriously, dude. Do you really want to drown your loyal fans?”
“Merlin and Morgana!” Lilli broke in. “The two warring sorcerers are Merlin and Morgana.”
“‘By Merlin’s Honor!’” Ikumi added, raising a fist as she quoted the game’s famous catchphrase.
Suddenly the water began to recede again. I gave the girls a grumpy look. “Traitors,” I muttered. “Everyone knows Fields of Fantasy is where it’s at.”
“And yet, we’re not submerged in water,” Lilli reminded me with a pointed look. “I’m going to call that a win.”
“Besides, even my grandfather played Camelot’s Honor,” Ikumi added. “And he, like, basically created this game.”
“Whatever,” I said, waving them off. “Can we get to the final question, please?” I turned to the wall, relieved to find the last question had appeared.
Until I read the question.
IN FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS, WHAT
VAULT ARE YOU BORN INTO?
My stomach sunk. After failing the last question, I’d really wanted this one to be something I knew. Another classic-game question—I was great at those. Modern games? Not so much.
And I’d never played Fallout: New Vegas. Mostly because it was rated Mature, which Mom was super strict about. And though I had a vague idea of the overall plotline—apocalypse, guys in power armor, some weird computer you wore on your arm—I had no clue about the vault thing.
I turned to the girls. “Have either of you played Fallout?” I asked hopefully. We were so close. We couldn’t fail now!
Lilli scratched her head. “I played Fallout 76 a little,” she replied. “In that one, you come from Vault Seventy-Six. But—”
Her words were interrupted by another loud creak.
“Hey!” Lilli protested. “That wasn’t my answer.”
But the game didn’t seem to care. Water gushed from the ceiling, raining down on us fast and strong and so cold I could see chunks of ice floating at the top. I screeched, trying to protect my head. But I was soaked in seconds.
“Think!” I cried, my teeth chattering on the words.
“Vault One-oh-One?” Lilli called out, her voice high-pitched and a little desperate. The water kept pouring into the chamber and rising from the pool until it was up to our waists again. “No, wait, that was part three.”
“And Vault One-Eleven was definitely part four…” Ikumi mused.
“Stop saying random numbers!” I cried, horrified. “It’s getting stronger.”
The water was raging now, a violent, icy river up to our necks. Soon we’d have to start treading water to stay above it. If we didn’t freeze to death to first.
“What else are we supposed to do?” my sister demanded. “I don’t know the answer! It could be anything!”
Panic spiraled through me as the water continued to surge. Higher and higher, splashing my face, invading my nose and mouth and making me choke. It wouldn’t be long, at this rate, before the cave submerged completely. For it to be game over for real.
“Oh for goodness’ sakes! You just declared your undying friendship and now you’re going to get yourselves drowned? What do you think this is, the Titanic movie?”
I turned to see Yano flying over to us, barely staying above the waterline.
“Can you help us?” I begged, gulping a mouthful of gross, slimy water in the process.
“Unfortunately, no,” he said apologetically. “I’ve already tried searching in all my databases, but nothing is coming up.”
“That doesn’t make any sense! Try again!”
“I’ve tried four times. Honestly, it’s as if the vault doesn’t bloody exist.”
“Oh my gosh, that’s it!” Lilli cried suddenly. I looked over at her, heart in my throat.
She was treading water fast, her mouth barely above the surface.
“What is?” I asked.
“Don’t you see? It’s a trick question! There’s no vault number because in Fallout: New Vegas you don’t come from a vault!” she said triumphantly.
BOOM!
The water surged, then swirled, creating a giant whirlpool, sucking up everything in its wake. I screamed, my stomach lurching as the current swept us up along with the rest of the water and debris, yanking us downward into a large metal pipeline. The frothing water tossed me like a rag doll from side to side, slamming me into the walls.
“Find something to grab on to!” I cried, my heart in my throat as the water dragged me down. But there was nothing; the sides of the pipe were slick and smooth. All I could do was go with the flow as the pipe twisted left, then right, then dropped fast, leaving my stomach somewhere in my throat as we shot down into an unknown world. I tossed and turned, unable to get my body back under my own control.
“Lilli!” I cried. “Ikumi! Are you okay?”
But the water was too loud, rushing in my ears. Drowning out all other sounds.
After what seemed an eternity, the pipe finally dead-ended and I shot out like a cannonball, arcing through the air, then dropping like a stone down into the large lagoon below. My body plunged into the pool, hitting hard and submerging completely. Water shot up my nose, and I gagged as I struggled to claw my way back to the surface. I saw my sister and Ikumi splashing around nearby.
We had made it.
With effort, I managed to swim to the shore, and I collapsed on the sand. Lilli and Ikumi waded toward me, drenched but alive. Behind them, Yano flew a few feet above the water, sopping wet and looking disgruntled.
“Water levels,” he sputtered. “I hate water levels.”
“Aw, come on,” Lilli teased. “You gotta admit, it was kind of fun. Like a crazy-big waterslide.”
“I hate waterslides,” I said with a laugh. “Though, I guess they beat drowning.”
I gave Lilli a smile. “Good job figuring out the Fallout thing. I never would have gotten that in a million years.”
Lilli blushed hard. “I just got lucky,” she said. But I could tell she was pleased.
I climbed to my feet to check out our surroundings. We had dropped into the most beautiful cavern I had ever seen. With soaring rock ceilings high above and snow-white walls dripping with multicolored crystals. A huge, gushing waterfall crashed into the pool at our feet, which seemed to sparkle with pale-blue luminescence, as if it were made of starlight.
“It’s so beautiful,” Lilli breathed, turning in a circle. “Definitely the most beautiful spot in the game so far.”
“My dad must have designed this level,” Ikumi declared, her voice rich with awe. “It looks just like the place where he and my mom honeymooned in New Zealand. He told me about the caves there—filled with millions of tiny glowworms.” She smiled dreamily. “He said they made the walls seem to dance with light.”
“That sounds awesome,” I declared. “I’d love to see that in real life.”
A shadow crossed Ikumi’s face. She turned away from the water, reaching down to grab her pack.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
“Everything’s fine,” she said quickly, though her voice didn’t sound fine at all. And then it hit me why. Because of her condition, she would never be able to see places like this in real life. For her, this was as good as it would ever get.
“What is real, anyway?” I said, trying to make her feel better. “I mean, this totally feels real to me. It was designed by a game architect. Built by a programmer. It takes up space on a server. Which means, basically, it exists. Maybe on a different plane of existence? But it’s real all the same.”
I wasn’t positive I was making much sense, but Ikumi seemed to relax a little, tossing her now-blue hair over her shoulder. “You know what, Ian? You’re right,” she said. “It may not be everyone’s reality, but right now, it’s ours. And we should appreciate it, right?”
“Absolutely,” I declared, flashing her a grin. And I meant it, too. This wasn’t just a game. We’d stepped into a whole new world. A beautiful, complicated, dangerous world.
Now we just had to save Derek and find our way out.
There was only one passageway leading out of the waterfall room, so we headed down, keeping our guard up the entire way, never knowing what could be around the bend. It was a low-ceilinged path, half-overgrown with moss and lichens. The walls themselves were crawling with more glowworms, painting our skin with a purplish tinge, as if we were walking through a black-light amusement park ride. Warm, slimy water drizzled down on our heads like rain.
“Yum,” Yano said, slurping up a mouthful of glowworms. When he grinned, the inside of his mouth lit up like a Christmas tree. “Now this is more like it.”
After what felt like miles, the passageway opened up into a small rocky chamber. There were no glowworms here; instead the room was illuminated by a soft white light shining from somewhere above. The light cast down on a single stone pedestal in the center of the room. On that pedestal was a tear-shaped jewel.
“Is that it?” Lilli asked. “Is that the Water Stone?”
“What else could it be?” I said, mesmerized by the way the jewel managed to catch the light and cast rainbows across the chamber. Around the pedestal was a ring of hieroglyphic pictures of cats and birds and dragons. Another puzzle, perhaps?
“The third stone,” Ikumi whispered, the awe clear in her sparkly eyes. “I can’t believe it!”
“I can’t believe no one’s guarding it!” Lilli added, looking around the room. “Where’s what’s-his-name the water dragon? Shouldn’t he be lurking around here somewhere?”
“Maybe he’s asleep,” I said. “D’ou said he was really old.”
“Well, let’s not wait for him to wake up,” Ikumi suggested. “Let’s get this thing and get out of here. Finish this game once and for all.”
She stepped toward the jewel, reaching out with her hand. My ears caught a weird sizzling sound as she yelped, jerking her hand away. “Ow!”
“What is it?” I asked worriedly.
“I don’t know.” She clutched her arm against her chest. “It’s like there’s some kind of invisible force field. It zapped me when I put my hand through it.”
“Really?” I quickly accessed the infrared setting on my goggles. Sure enough, there was some kind of barrier surrounding the platform—horizontal, squiggly red lines almost up to my head. “Ugh. I knew it couldn’t be that easy.”
“Is there a way to turn it off? Maybe another puzzle?” Ikumi asked, looking around the room.
“Or you could try to boost me over it,” Lilli suggested.
“Yeah, but then how would you get back?” I pointed out. “You’d be stuck in the circle.”
“Poor humans!” Yano interrupted. “Always so grounded.” He ruffled his wings. “Allow me,” he declared. “The most useful, talented, fantastic member of the Dragon Slayerz—ready to save the day, once more with feeling!”
Before I could react, he took flight over the red squiggly lines of the barrier and dropped down onto the pedestal. For a moment, I worried the pedestal itself might be electric, too, and would zap our little eager guide to kingdom come. Instead, with an overdramatic flourish, he plucked the stone up with his claws, holding it out for us to see.
“Ta-da!” he proclaimed. “Easy peasy, lemon squeez—!”
The ground began to buckle under our feet.
“What’s happening?” I cried as the cave started shaking violently. Rocks rained down from the ceiling. Oh no! No, no, no!
“Run!” Lilli cried, lunging back toward the passageway.
I didn’t need a second invitation. I dove into the tunnel, which was now buckling like the rest of the cave, as stones and glowworms pelted us from above. I tried to ignore the awful squishing sound the worms made as I accidentally stepped on them in my rush to get out of the cave. I put my hands over my ears and kept running, squinting to see my way through the dust and debris.
“Faster!” Ikumi cried. “We’re not going to make it!”
We could just see the light up ahead—the exit into the larger chamber—but it looked as if it were miles away as the tunnel kept imploding in on itself, constricting tighter and tighter like the trash compactor in Star Wars. Soon we were forced to our hands and knees, crawling through mud so thick it felt like quicksand pulling us down. I struggled to put one hand in front of the other, gasping for breath.
“Come on!” Lilli cried. “We’re almost through. Keep going!”
I gritted my teeth and made one final push, bursting back into the waterfall chamber and tumbling to the ground. Seconds later, a load of rocks and debris crashed down over the tunnel’s entrance, burying it in rubble. I collapsed onto the sand, sucking in a much-needed breath. That was way too close.
“Nice going, birdbrain,” my sister muttered to Yano, sitting up and plucking glowworms out of her mud-caked hair. “And here you call us noobs.”
I reached up to check my own head. No glowworms, thankfully, just a ton of mud and moss. I wondered if I should rinse off in the water.
“Hey!” Yano protested, also quite mud covered. “I got the stone, didn’t I?”
“Um…” I squinted at him. “Then where is it?”
He looked down, his eyes widening as he realized his talons were empty. He must have dropped the stone at some point during our escape.
He cringed. “Oops?”
“‘Oops?’” Ikumi cried, scrambling to her feet. Her grime-streaked face had transformed into an expression of pure wrath. “You dropped the Water Stone and that’s all you can say? ‘Oops?’”
“Of course not!” Yano shot back, looking affronted. “I have a vocabulary of forty thousand words, I’ll have you know. Which is five thousand more than the average human—”
But Ikumi was no longer listening. She ran over to the pile of rubble and dropped to
her knees. She started digging desperately, dirt and stones flying all around her. “We’ve got to find it!” she cried, her voice frantic. “Help me!”
We joined her at the pile, scooping handfuls of dirt, searching for something—anything that looked like the stone. But it was no use. Like finding a single teardrop in an entire ocean. There was too much dirt, too many rocks. And the tunnel had been so long…
I gave up, sinking down to the ground and letting out a sigh. “Well, that’s that, I guess.”
“No!” Ikumi shot back, surprising me. “We can’t give up! We need that stone!”
“Come on, Ikumi,” Lilli said. “We’re never going to find it in there. We don’t even know when Yano dropped it. It could have been way back in the original chamber.”
But Ikumi ignored her and kept digging, her eyes narrow and her lips pressed together with purpose, as if she were determined to find the stone by sheer force of will. I put a hand on her back, trying to calm her down, and found her whole body was shaking.
“Stop!” I begged her. “Just stop. We’ll figure it out. It’s going to be okay.”
She whirled around, her face as dark as a thunderstorm. “Okay?” she repeated incredulously. “How can this possibly be okay? That stone was our one ticket out of this place. And now it’s buried under a mountain of rubble! Without it, we’ll never be able to defeat Atreus. I’ll be stuck in this stupid game forever!”
Her voice broke and tears began to stream down her face. Lilli stepped forward and reached for Ikumi, but she jerked away, stormed down the beach, and then sank into the sand, head in her hands, and sobbed uncontrollably.
Yano’s shoulders slumped. “This is all my fault,” he said meekly. “I should have never tried to help.”
“It’s okay,” Lilli assured him, patting him on the wing. “Your heart was in the right place. Um, not that you have a heart. But you know what I mean.” Her eyes traveled to Ikumi. “Maybe you should talk to her,” she said to me.
I nodded glumly. “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll try.”
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