by Dustin Brady
Beans put his head down and pushed on the wall.
THUNK!
The panel was so flimsy that our small kitten pushed it over. Again, very convenient. We emerged in front of a door with a big exit sign above it.
“We did it!” Eric exclaimed. I wasn’t so sure. Beans seemed downright terrified.
“It’s OK, buddy,” Eric said. “We’re not leaving you behind.” That seemed to make Beans even more upset.
We opened the door and stepped inside another one of those white cube rooms that Max seemed to like so much. The only thing inside this one was a small cage on top of a pedestal. “Hello?” I called out. “Max?”
I crept into the room. Eric followed close behind with Beans under his arm. By this point, Beans was shaking like a leaf. As soon as all three of us were in the room, the door slammed shut.
“Max?” Eric called out. “We survived your courage test. Uh, good job on the clowns. Really scary. Can we have our trophies now?”
HISSSSSS!
Something burst in the ceiling, and green gas started pouring into the room. “Get out!” I yelled.
Eric yanked on the door, but it was locked. Gas continued pouring in, slowly covering the ceiling.
“Beans! What do we do?!”
Beans looked sad. Suddenly, the white wall in front of us flickered and turned into a screen showing Max’s face. “Made a new friend, I see.”
Eric hid Beans behind his back.
“Don’t worry. I know that the only way through here is to follow the cat. You’ve made a wise choice. Now you’re going to have to make a courageous one. You see, that’s hypocortezoid gas pouring into the room. Hypocortezoid gas is something I invented to put digital bodies to sleep. In three minutes, the room will fill with gas, and you’ll fall asleep. Forever.” Max paused. “However, there is a choice you can make to save yourself. A courageous choice.”
At that moment, the string of coincidences, the impossibly cute cat, and the cage suddenly made sense together. This had been Max’s plan all along.
“Courage is all about sacrifice,” Max continued. “It’s about giving up something good to get something great. You’ll never become a true warrior until you’ve mustered up the courage to sacrifice something that really matters to you. So do you have what it takes?”
Eric looked at me, baffled. “He’s very confusing.” Then he turned to the screen. “Why don’t you say what you mean for once in your life?!”
I felt sick. I knew exactly what Max meant.
Max pointed to us. “I hope you didn’t name that cat. It’s going to make this next part much more difficult.”
“Don’t touch Beans!”
“You can get rid of all the gas in the room by simply placing the cat in the cage.”
“I’m not doing that,” Eric said.
“Eric,” I said softly. “You’ve got to do it.”
Eric spun around with a shocked look on his face. “What did you say?!”
“That’s not a real cat. It’s a video game character programmed to make you fall in love with it so this would be a hard choice.”
Eric hugged the kitten to his chest and started backing away. “Don’t touch Beans. Don’t you dare touch him.”
I glanced up. The gas was now covering Max’s forehead. “It would be one thing if the cat were real, but just look at those eyes,” I said.
Beans looked at Eric with impossibly huge puppy dog eyes.
“No cat has eyes like that. It’s like a cartoon. Max is just messing with you. We’ve got to play his game so we can take him down for real.”
Eric had fiery eyes. “Maybe Max did invent Beans . . . ”
“He for sure invented Beans.”
“. . . but I’m not going to play his game. I play by my rules.”
I started to panic. “What are you talking about?! You’re in the Reubenverse! You play by his rules!”
HISSSSSS!
The gas sounded like it was pouring in faster.
“Ooohooohooo!” Max chuckled and rubbed his hands together. “You still haven’t decided? This is getting good!”
My mind raced to figure out an argument that would convince Eric. “He doesn’t want you to hurt Beans,” I said. “He’s just asking you to put a cat in a cage. That’s it.”
Eric stepped toward the cage and considered it. I glanced up nervously at the gas. Finally, Eric removed his watch and tossed it into the cage.
I waited a moment and breathed a sigh of relief. “See? Nothing to worry . . . ”
CHOMP!
The cage suddenly grew teeth and crushed the watch into a million bits.
Eric jumped backward. “YOU STILL WANT TO DO THIS?!”
“I don’t. I really don’t, but . . . ”
“It’s like I don’t even know you anymore!”
The gas was so low now that it touched my head. I ducked. “It’s either us or a fake computer animal!” I said, getting angrier. “That’s your choice. And by the way, if you choose the fake animal, you’re choosing to doom the entire planet. Just remember that, OK?”
“OK, OK, OK, just let me think,” Eric said.
“There’s no time to think!”
“There’s another secret passage. There has to be.” Eric started running, clutching Beans with one arm and feeling the wall with the other.
I took one last look at the gas cloud before gritting my teeth, crouch-running across the room, and tackling Eric.
“OOF!”
The hit caught Eric by surprise and knocked Beans out of his arms. As soon as Beans landed on the ground, he sprinted to the opposite wall. Oh no. I started crawling after him.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Max said. The gas had completely covered the screen, but I could still hear his voice loud and clear. “Looks like you weren’t courageous enough to do what needed to be done. That’s a shame because hypocortezoid gas is nasty stuff.”
I kept my eyes on the cat, who was now clawing at the wall.
“Now comes the painful part,” Max continued. “The gas will settle in your lungs like . . . ”
I tuned out Max so I could concentrate. “Come here, kitty!” I slithered along the ground like a snake. That wasn’t getting me where I needed to go fast enough, so I started rolling. I rolled once, twice, three times, then my lungs started burning.
“Eric, hold your breath!” I said. Or at least, that’s what I tried to say. Instead, it came out as “Errrrrffff fffffffffffffmmmmmmmmm” because my mouth had stopped working. I tried again. “Mmmmuuuuhhhhh.” My lips felt numb, my head started to cloud, and my lungs felt heavy. So, so heavy. I drifted off to sleep.
Chapter 12
System Overload
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
I woke up in a fog. Not an actual fog—that was gone. Instead, my head was swimming with half-memories and blurry images.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
I knew only two things for sure . . .
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
. . . that I was soaked from head to toe . . .
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
. . . and if that beeping didn’t stop soon, I was going to lose my mind.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
I shook my head to clear the fog and found the source of the beeping. It was my watch. I squinted. Two days, 15 hours, and 47 minutes—that was only three hours after we’d entered the courage test. But even though the clock hadn’t reached zero yet, the alarm was going off. I unbuckled the watch and threw it across the room.
Next, I sat up and found Eric lying facedown across the room. His arm was still outstretched like he was reaching for me. “Hey, Eric.” He didn’t move. “Eric!” I felt a twinge of panic in my chest and ran across
the room to shake my friend. “Eric, wake up!” I noticed that he was all wet too. I shook him harder.
“Come on, wake up!”
Finally, Eric’s eyes opened. He stared at me for a second before asking, “Blarg blarggened?”
“What?”
“Mutt mappened? Grut. Blut. What! What shappened?”
I closed my eyes and tried to remember. What had happened? Weren’t we supposed to be dead?
Eric sat up and moaned. “Why is it so hot?”
I hadn’t even noticed, but it was really, really hot. Wait, were we all wet with sweat? I sniffed my armpit and wrinkled my nose. Definitely sweat.
Eric’s eyes snapped open. “Where’s Beans?”
“I don’t think he made it.”
“Beans! BEANS!” Eric jumped and scrambled to the front wall. “BEANS!”
“Eric, I . . . ” My voice trailed off when I saw what Eric had noticed. Scratch marks leading to a hole punched through the wall just large enough for a kitten.
Eric poked his head through the hole. “BEANS!”
I peeked inside. It was another all-white room.
Eric shoved me aside and kicked the hole over and over until he tore an opening big enough for us to step through. “We’re coming, buddy!”
I cringed as I followed Eric into the next room, bracing myself for the worst. But I didn’t have to worry. There was no dead kitty—just two trophies, a collar, and a burnt blue circle on the ground.
Eric picked up the collar. “He saved us,” he said quietly.
“You think?”
“Of course. He tore a hole in the wall so the gas could escape before it got to us.”
I highly doubted that’s what had happened, but since I didn’t have a better theory, I kept my mouth shut. I let Eric have his moment of silence, then I picked up a trophy. As soon as I touched it, a warm feeling washed over me, and I beamed into the pod.
“W-w-w-welcome,” Siri Lady stuttered. Her face blinked.
A second later, Eric joined me.
“Welllll-ell-ell,” Siri Lady tried.
“Well?” Eric asked. “Uh, thank you for asking. I’m not doing too well, actually. You see . . . ”
“Siri Lady, what’s wrong?” I interrupted.
“Sy-sy-sy-system overload.”
The panic twinge returned to my chest. The heat, the alarm, the glitching—it all made sense now. This is what Mr. Gregory had warned us about. I watched the screen helplessly as it cycled from Siri Lady’s face to a wall of buttons to an error image. Finally, it settled on a single button: Planet Poodle.
Eric looked at me, shrugged, then pressed the button. The pod dinged a couple of times instead of just once, then we fell for a long time. Finally, the door reopened.
Planet Poodle, as you might imagine, had many, many poodles: pony-size poodles, purse-size poodles, poof-ball poodles, poodles wearing poodle skirts. It also had extremely hot temperatures, a storm on the horizon, and no signs of XP-giving enemies anywhere.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
Eric shrugged. “It was the only option.”
“Yeah, that’s cuz the thing was glitching. We need to . . . ”
“WHO GOES THERE?!” somebody with a Scottish accent screamed.
I spun around, fully expecting to see a suit pointing a gun at us. Instead, it was a crazy-eyed, scraggly bearded man holding a tree branch over his head.
“Hi. I’m Eric, and this is Jesse.”
“HOW DID I GET HERE?!” The man took a threatening step toward us.
Eric and I looked at each other, confused.
“IF I NEED TO CLOBBER SOMEONE TO GET ANSWERS, I’LL START CLOBBERING!” The man took one more step to get within head-clobbering distance and cocked the branch behind his head. I felt for my backpack. Good. It’d returned. I didn’t want to fight this guy, but I would if I needed to. Just then, one of the pony-size poodles jumped and grabbed the stick out of the man’s hand.
“HEY!”
The dog got down in a playing pose and wagged its tail. Before the man could get his clobbering stick back, Eric and I ran back to the pod.
“CLOSE DOOR!” I yelled as we entered.
The door closed halfway, then got stuck.
Eric and I pushed with all our might to shut the door manually. As we did, I checked outside to see if the lunatic had followed us.
What I saw instead was much more terrifying. The storm on the horizon had gotten closer. Much closer. Close enough that I could now see that those weren’t raindrops falling from the sky.
They were people.
Chapter 13
Devil’s Food
“It started,” I said after we’d closed the door.
“What started?”
“That Rapture thing.”
“What?!” Eric looked at his wrist, forgetting that his watch had been chomped by a death cage. “I thought we had like two days left!”
“Looks like we slept for two days.”
“I’ve slept for two days before, and I can tell you that was certainly not two days.” Eric started to panic. “So how many people are here now? Everybody in the whole world?!”
“Twennnnnnnnnnty,” Siri Lady answered.
“Twenty people? That’s not bad.”
Siri Lady wasn’t done. “Twenty thousand, four hundred fourteen.”
“AHHHHH!”
“Twenty-one thousand, six hundred seven. Twenty-one thousand, nine hundred seventy-two.” More buttons began joining Planet Poodle, showing us where people were landing—World of Yodeling Yaks, Liger Lake, and Planet Peeved Porcupines. Siri Lady kept counting. “Twenty-two thousand . . . ”
“STOP!” Eric yelled. “What do we do? WHAT DO WE DO?!”
All of the worlds disappeared, then a half of a single grayed-out button flickered onto the screen. “ENDURAN—” it said. Above it was a number. A very large number: 35,000 XP.
I don’t know why, but at that moment, I felt calmer than I had all week. Twenty-two thousand people was a lot, but Max still had a long way to go before he sucked everyone into his little game. And 35,000 XP was a big number, but we’d earned big numbers before. We had a mission, and I was determined to continue that mission until the Reubenverse burned down.
“Siri Lady, show us the toughest planets in the galaxy.”
The screen made a fitz sound, and a wall of buttons blinked on. I nodded to Eric. “We got this.”
Over the next half hour, we bounced around to the scariest planets we could find.
DING! “Welcome to World of Warlords.”
DING! “Welcome to Magnus the Murder Moon.”
DING! “Welcome to Black Hole of the Heart.”
DING! “Welcome to Scorpino, Home of the Giant Scorpions.”
We didn’t even get out of the pod on that last one. As soon as the door opened, a scorpion the size of a dump truck tried jamming its stinger into our pod. “CLOSE DOOR, CLOSE DOOR!” Eric screamed.
The door closed on the stinger tail, which wiggled around in our pod for five terrifying seconds before the scorpion yanked it out. I put my hands on my knees for a moment as I tried to catch my breath. “What’s our combined XP now?” I asked.
“Cur-ur-ur-urent commmmmmm,” Siri Lady tried before giving up and just displaying the number on the screen: 19,475 XP.
Eric started taking off his shirt. “It’s too hot. We have to get XP quicker.”
“Put that back on. I don’t want to see your pasty belly.”
Eric wrung out his shirt and tied it around his head like a Rambo bandanna, which could not have been more opposite of what I’d asked. “We have to go back to the Dark King.”
“And do what?” I asked. “Die in 10 seconds instead of five?”
“I have the flaming sword now. And you have that heavy ax thing.”
“There’s no way.”
We leaned against the wall, s
weating and thinking. Suddenly, an idea hit me. “Do we have any more devil’s food cake from that chocolate planet?”
Eric looked through his backpack. “Three pieces.”
I rubbed my hands together. “Perfect.”
“Not perfect. That’s the one that makes you explode.”
“Right.”
“And our whole goal is to kill the Dark King without exploding!”
“Right. We don’t want to explode because we don’t want to lose XP. But now there are a whole bunch of people here who don’t care about losing XP.” I grinned and waited for Eric to congratulate me on such an awesome idea. Instead, he looked at me with disgust.
“They care about exploding.”
“They won’t even know it’s coming.”
“So your plan is—what—grab three people from Planet Poodle, feed them cake, shove them in front of the Dark King, and watch them explode?”
“That’s exactly my plan.”
Eric gritted his teeth and shook his head like he wanted to say something but was holding it in.
“Listen,” I tried. “If you think they need to know up front, I’m sure we could ask for volunteers.”
“Stop.”
“That guy with the stick seemed like he’d be up for a battle with the Dark King. Maybe we could . . . ”
“Stop. Talking.” Eric’s voice was all shaky.
“You OK?”
“You’re not OK,” Eric said quietly.
“What?”
Eric got angry. “You are not OK! You’re like a different person since we got here. A bad person.”
“A bad person? I volunteered to save the world, and now I’m a bad person.”
“Yes! Jesse, you wanted to kill a kitten!”
“For the last time, it wasn’t a real kitten! It was a computer program!”
“And now you want to kill three innocent people.”
“OK, you need to get a grip, Eric. There’s a
big difference between exploding someone in a fake world where they come back and exploding someone
in real life.”
“YOU LITERALLY WANT TO BLOW SOMEONE UP!”
“Eric, I’m sorry we have to do things we don’t want to do, but this is Max’s world. We have to play by his rules.”
