"Klein? Where are you?" I called out, cupping my hands around my mouth to amplify the sound.
Luna paced back and forth. "They couldn't have gotten far. They were on foot, and I'm sure since Rose was tied up that she wouldn't be running."
"That's assuming she is still tied up," I said. Suddenly the idea came to me—I swiped open my menu and saw Klein's name still visible under PARTY. Luna looked up and smiled when she had seen what I had.
"Okay, still alive. That's good. Where could they have gone?" Luna asked. "Logically I'd say it'd make the most sense that Rose found some way to escape and they went to pursue."
I looked around but couldn't find any unique landmarks within view. The trees stand tall, looking exactly the same.
"I…I don't know, they could have gone anywhere," I said.
"Well see if the tracker works. Click on his name there."
I did as she said. A transparent arrow glowed underneath our feet and shot outward.
"Come on, let's go," she nodded. And so we followed it into the treeline.
I followed behind not letting her out of my sight. The arrow shot to the left and we turned with it.
"You been here long?" Luna called back to me.
"About as long as the game's been out. I've been thankful to have met someone who knows what they're doing."
"Yeah...I know what you mean. That's what I felt like when I first met Rose."
"Don't tell me how she wasn't really all that bad once you got to know her." A glimmer of a smile formed on her face. "No, she's not really changed at all the past few months—people usually don't. Being a savage online doesn't usually mean too much when lives aren't on the line. It's easier to justify being in that kind of guild. We all have characters who we designate as the bad one."
"I guess so. I don't blame you, if that's what you mean—for being a part of them. If I didn't find Klein down where I started and one of them showed up trying to recruit me I'm sure I would have gone along."
"It's nice of you to say."
"That...actually isn't true." I said.
"Huh?"
"I'm pretty sure if someone came up to me and asked me to join a guild I would have told them to fuck off. I...I don't really do well with other people. It kind of defeats the purpose of why I'm here in the first place."
"Why are you here?"
"I joined this game to ignore a lot of things—the shitty people out there, personal problems, the shitty things with me. Being around other people reminds me of those things all the time."
"Well, excuse me if I'm intruding, but you really can't blame other people if you do the things you think are shitty."
"But see that's the thing. I don't blame other people," I said while scratching the back of my neck. "I just don't want to be around them. If I do something wrong or dumb then only I have to pay for it—it doesn't come down on anyone else."
"You don't seem to be so lone-wolf in here."
"Well, of course. My actual life is on the line. It'd be suicide to go at this game alone now. I'd be dead if Klein wasn't where he was and we joined up."
"You don't sound too happy about that...god I'm doing the thing where I turn into a therapist—promise I'm not one. I'm just curious is all, figure I'd get to know you a bit."
"That's because it's also the time I first killed someone. Of course in the moment I thought it was still just a game—we all did. I'm sure I don't have to explain the rest."
She nodded, and then said, "Well, yeah. That part we're all gonna have to live with for the rest of our lives I think. Some people are going to die here, but not all of us."
"You think?"
"I do. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of us that get out. Some people will drink to forget. Some will load up on as many drugs as possible—die that way. Others will be okay. They'll move past it and try to live as best they can considering the circumstances."
"Which do you see yourself being?"
She took a moment to think about it. The wind whipped across my face as I looked at her contemplating it—her hair the color of moonlight flinging behind her. "I hope that I'm out there with someone—someone who understands this. It's a real mess and I don't know if I'll be able to move past it alone."
The air was silent after she said it—it almost seemed like an invitation, but I wasn't sure that it was—and if it was then I doubly wasn't sure exactly who it was for.
At least, not until she spoke again.
"I think I'd like to see you out there, Dex."
"Me? Why?"
"You seem nice."
"I do?" I asked, not believing it. I knew of all the things I tried to be nice wasn't one of the ones I was good at. Okay, maybe decent at best—a bother or worse most likely.
"Well, not nice per se, but friendly. Well, friendly enough."
"You sound like you're trying to convince yourself of it."
She shrugged. "You think you have a lot of yourself figured out, but it's clear that you don't so you hold it out on your wrists like it's a bother. It's not exactly a healthy mindset for you or for those who want to get close to you," she said.
"So what about this was wanting to be with me?"
"You're cute," she said. "Can't that ever just be enough?"
"That seems a bit backwards." I said.
She shrugged. "You look like you could be okay with yourself, but aren't yet."
"That's not your responsibility," I said.
"And I'm not taking it as one," she said. "I don't expect anyone in here is going to be okay with themselves for a very, very long time. I just think that it'd be easier to heal with someone who is also healing—someone who knows how to pick up pieces is all."
"I don't know quite how to respond to that," I said.
"That's fine. I'm not pressuring you or anything." she said.
"I think it's on me to decide that..." I said.
"Am I?"
"..." I thought about it. There was a lot that I was running away from when I booted up this game—a lot of responsibility that I couldn't bare to face in the real world. But was the fact that I was able to say that a step further than I had been back then? I don't think I could have ever admitted it to myself."
"Well, you think on it," she said. "I don't want to force you into anything you don't want, but I don't think that you don't want it—I saw how you looked when I came to your rescue."
"I don't know," I said. "I don't know how to feel about it right now, I'm going to need some time. There was...there was someone else I thought I liked and things didn't progress any with them."
"With her, you mean."
"Yeah. Not a huge blow to the ego since we'd only just met but it did swirl a bunch of feelings in me either way. Is it wrong of me to tell you this?"
"No, not particularly." She shrugged. "I liked a boy before that didn't share those feelings with me—he actually looked a bit like you, coincidentally. I guess I have a type."
"Oh yeah?" I asked.
"Yeah, something about you just...I dunno, makes me burn inside. Is that wrong of me to tell you?"
"No." And I left it at that. My cheeks flushed and I looked away at anything to distract myself. Luckily, we reached as far as the arrow would bring us. Unluckily, Klein, Rose, and Sam were still nowhere to be seen. We exited the brush to find a giant amber wall that reached higher than we could see. There was giant writing inscribed on the face of the wall:
05:19:03
"What? Are you kidding me?" I asked, banging my hand against the wall. "Who progress locks this early into a game?"
"The bigger question," Luna said, pointing down below to the arrow, which extended past the wall and curved right into the distance, "…is how Klein managed to get to the other side."
As she pointed it out, the timer went down to 05: 19: 02, meaning that we'd have to wait almost five and a half days according to get through.
"That's way too long," I said.
"Anything can be happening back there. It must have only just gone up..."
I kicked the wall hard. "Damn it!"
"Maybe there's a way through—maybe Klein and them found a hole somewhere. Let's split up. You follow it down that way and I'll follow it this way, if we find nothing in ten minutes we turn back around and meet up here."
I sighed, not convinced that there would be anything of note, but knowing that if we didn't check there definitely would be. "Yeah, okay. Meet you back here."
And so we split up.
And met back when we didn't find anyway to get through the barrier. Our weapons were useless against it. It was impregnable to everything we tried.
"I guess...we'll just have to wait," she said. "There isn't anything we can do."
"God you don't know how much I hate having to wait in here."
"I'm sure I do, but I get your point. Everyone was in such a mad dash to get out of here, that the GM must have wanted us to slow down."
"To marvel at his masterpiece," I spat.
"Yeah, probably."
I groaned. "Okay, I guess we'll have to head back to the first floor and find something to pass the time with."
She nodded, a glum look crossed her face, and in that instant I reconciled within myself that I never wanted her to look like that again.
~...~
The town wasn't as bustling as it originally had been when I'd entered it the first time. There was a tension in the air that everybody felt, but nobody addressed. People eyed one another suspiciously—even though towns were safe locations from player death, that didn't stop suspicions from rising. The sun rose brilliantly in the sky—a complete contrast to what time it had shown in my menu—8 o' clock in the evening. There was something cartoony about how the sun radiated—almost as if we were in an arid desert and the heat waves were all centralized to one small point in the sky. I wondered if it could be possible to reach space from this world—or if you would just smash into the sky like some flat border.
"I heard it was quite the scene when the GM descended from the sky," Luna said, walking past me and staring up at the sky. The sun shone off her brilliant hair and made me feel a warm sort of feeling inside.
"You didn't see it?" I tried to steady my own thoughts.
She shook her head and then turned back to me, "No, I was in the forest away from all the chaos when it went down. I...I didn't know until I saw people on my friends list dropping like flies. I heard about the whole thing afterward from some players who aren't alive anymore. The forest got to them...imagine that." She chuckled without any humor. "It's a weird thing to laugh about, you know? You see people one second and the next," she mimicked an explosion with her hands and then let her arms drop. "Part of me wishes I could have seen it so maybe those guys wouldn't have died the way they did. Maybe if I took responsibility for my own lack of information..."
"It's easy to blame yourself for things you couldn't have known," I said. "That's life."
"Yeah, that's life." she nodded, and then bent down to touch her toes. "Aaaaall right enough of this mopey business!" she sprang up and reached her fingertips to the sky.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"I'm doing a full body reset. Getting rid of the bad energy and starting a new mindset."
"Where'd you learn that?"
"Didn't really learn it anywhere. It just feels right, you know?"
"I guess."
"Come on, don't doubt it," she said, pouting at me. "You have to do it too! Or else your bad juju will follow you around all day."
"I don't know if there is such a thing."
"Of course there is, now come on! Bend down."
"Okay, okay. You only have to ask once."
"I never asked," she grinned and winked.
I bent over and stretched out my hands to my toes. Our bodies in here didn't strain like out in the real world, so I felt no physical benefit to the stretch, but when I closed my eyes I could almost believe that a shadow was lifting from my body.
You cannot change what has happened to you; only what you do about it.
I never really was a religious sort of guy, but when the perfect, simple sort of advice comes to you what else can you say but, "thank god"? I reach my hands up into the air and can bet plenty of people around me are giving strange looks at the weirdo doing yoga inside a video game.
"Don't worry about them," she said.
"So there are people looking at me?!" I asked. "And...how did you know I was worried about it?"
"You made a face."
"What did it look like?" I asked, my eyes still closed.
"Your brow furrowed. I can't really show you what it looked like with your eyes still closed."
I opened my eyes to her face approaching mine and her lips on my lips. It lasted a second but I looked back in shock.
"I'm not sorry."
"I...wouldn't want you to be," I said, fumbling for the right words.
"You know what they say about anonymity—that people express their realest selves behind masks, right?"
"We're hardly behind any masks in here—The GM removed all of our altered looks." I said.
"Yeah, but my body feels different. It may not look different, sure, but what else could be the greatest mask than this?"
"Are you implying that you're not like this out in real life?" I asked.
"Like what?" she asked.
"Forward. Brave, whatever you want to call it."
She laughed—tried hiding it with her hand to her lips. "Oh god, no. I never had the courage to even talk to the old boy I liked. I only watched him from afar with wonder."
"I guess I know what that feels like."
"Was that how you were with the other girl?"
"Yeah, but it was in here, no less. I never really felt that way about any other girl I knew. I mean, I knew plenty from my school—"
"Ah, so you're a public school kid."
"Yeah, kind of have to be. Are there any private schools still left in Colorado?"
"Not that I know of," she said. "I was home-schooled back in London."
"London?"
"Can't you tell by my accent?" she asked.
"N—no, not at all."
"Huh, weird. How about now?" She talked in a very forced British accent.
"It sounds like you're faking it."
"Huh, I didn't really notice I had lost it. I guess it's one of those things you don't notice until it is gone."
"So you were from London? I've never met anyone from outside the US." I said.
"Yes, it is quite rare around this place," she said. "But I don't really remember much of my time there. I was a lot younger when we moved."
"So you probably don't remember then if London was..."
"Was…?"
"All messed up like we are."
She thought on this, and then shook her head. "I don't know. I never really left my house. If anything I think this country is a bit more free because of that."
"Free isn't the first word I'd think of," I said. "...but I guess it works."
"Well, it is as good a name to call it as any, but I guess it doesn't really apply to us here," she said.
"No, most definitely..." I agreed and looked down at my hands. Clenching and unclenching them into fists I felt anxious about waiting so long until we could move forward. "Hey, do you think we could train a little while we have the time?"
Her brows furrowed, and then she nodded. "Yeah, that's a good idea."
"I really need it, thank you so much. I really don't want to have to kill anyone...but I figure learning to defend myself better is only in my best interest."
She smiled small, "Yes. We all could use some more preparation. Come on, I know a place we can go."