Index – Chapters
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
He was entranced. The flurry of movement on the screen. The rhythm of hands on the keys. A new enemy appears: offensive rotation, 1, 2, wait – a debuff. Physical type, cleanse it. Hit-points dropped, shield and heal. Back to rotation, 1 is off cooldown, then 3. Teleport to reposition. There’s only one open corner of the small room. Enemy turn, a new foe charges down the unseen hallway. It strikes him in the back, shield pierced, half his health gone. He freezes. Hands hung over the keyboard awaiting the next chord. His heart pounds. Carefully, he moves the mouse over the new enemy and sees it is a randomized boss, rogue and marauder dual class. A muttered curse. His mind races:
Deep breaths now, what defensive options do I have? Secondary shield, and three turns until primary is off cooldown. That’s about 700 HP extra, plus my 200 current. Teleport is on cooldown. Freezing ray? Also on cooldown, I had just used it on a minor enemy last turn. Last option: sprint. I carefully activate my secondary shield and activate the sprint ability. I move one tile, two, three. The next corridor is blocked by a random-elite enemy. If I kill it, my sprint will be lost but I can step into the corridor immediately. Otherwise I have to run for the far corner and hope I can make enough space, buy enough time.
The player moves, the icon of his character shifting along the tile-grid until the sprint ability expires. It’s the enemy turn now. The random boss uses backslash to teleport behind him and strikes for 500 damage. The player blinks. “Okay” he thinks, “secondary shield still up.” The other enemies move, each of the three elites in the room drawing one tile closer according to their A-star pathfinding algorithm. It is the players turn again. He knows he could take a single step toward the nearby corridor, the potential escape rout which lay so tantalizingly close, but there was another option. He could use the stunning blow skill to disable the boss for at least one turn, which would let his primary shield refresh and enable another defensive window. He thought through the options.
If I take the step, I gamble that the boss is the same speed as me and doesn’t have any other gap-close abilities that it hasn’t used yet. If I stunning blow, I gamble that the stun passes his physical save and doesn’t fail.
The player was struck by a fleeting sensation of fear. Five hours logged into this character could be wiped clean in this next turn. He suppresses the fear. “I have to choose.” He activates stunning blow, and the boss doesn’t save. The player exhales sharply, giving a small cry of exultation. There is a moment’s reprieve, but only a moment. Three turns to be precise. After the stunning blow lands, it is the enemies turn and the boss spends the first of it’s stun turns. The elites move closer. Now in range, one shoots an arrow which strikes the player for 150 damage. Then it is the player’s turn, and he moves toward the hallway, ignoring the elites get make further space from the real threat. Secondary shield spent, now he has only 200 HP and 50 shield left. Enemy turn again. The boss uses it’s second stun turn. The archer elite shoots again, striking for 150. Player’s turn again, he activates the primary shield and gains a 750 health barrier, followed by another step toward the corridor. The boss uses it’s last stun turn. The player is now inside of the corridor, and the elites cannot see him to shoot. The player takes a step deeper, eyeing the cooldown of the freezing ray. The boss activates rush and sprints toward the player, but it cannot get close enough to hit. The player feels his mind ablaze with focus.
My turn, freezing ray is still 1 turn down, and stunning blow for 2 more. Sprint is on cooldown. Secondary and primary shields are on cooldown. I look at the boss. Surely it can’t get through 800 HP in one turn. I can hit with my most damaging spell, or use a less damaging one with a small chance of applying confusion.
A saying flashes through his mind, “there’s a difference between playing to win and playing to not lose.” He knows that even if he got the confuse, it would only buy him a turn, two at most. For that to happen, the ability has to proc, the boss has to fail the mental save, and at the start of the bosses turn it has to fail the confusion check. One unlucky dice-roll and the boss would break the confusion, and it would mean that the player used a weaker attack for nothing. He closed his eyes a took a deep breath, knowing his mind was made up. He turned to the boss and used his strongest attack. It seriously damaged the boss, taking off 35% of it’s total health. Now it was boss’ turn. It used flurry attack. The player watched in horror as the numbers appeared in a pile on the screen. 147, 142, 152, 154, 150, 148. In one turn the boss completely shattered his shield and shredded the players remaining hit-points. The screen goes grey. A box pops up and says: “You died. Your hardcore-mode character has been deleted.” Below there are four buttons with the text “Do you want to play again?” and the buttons give the options “play with the same character”, “play with a new character”, “exit to menu”, and “exit the game”.
The player stares vacantly at the screen. He feels strangely hollow in his chest. After a moment he remembers to breathe, and gradually moves the mouse to hover over “exit game”. He looks wistfully at the text-log describing the final moments of his character before violently jabbing his pointer finger onto the mouse. The player closes the computer and stands up.
A man named Willow Henderson paces about his tiny apartment. “Stupid game… waste of time… unfair… why do I even play it…” he mutters to himself. Pale light shines around the edges of the blackout curtains which obscure the apartments window on the outer world. A perfunctory glance at the cell phone tells it as ten past four. The man pulls on the chain to raise the curtain, squinting out of the revealed gap. His window, right next to the apartment pool, reveals the sights and sounds of playing children. Muffled screams penetrate the glass while sprays of water and the rhythm of running feet come into focus. Willow makes a displeased sound and pulls on the chain to close the window.
The player flops onto his bed, sighing heavily and staring upward at the darkened ceiling. “Not much to do here…” he says to no-one in particular. A few moments pass. He reaches over and grabs his phone, opening a messaging app and seeing that his friend was last online 8 hours ago. He starts writing a message.
“Hey, how are things over across the sea? Is the weather changing? It happens so suddenly here, one day I’m wearing a t-shirt and the next a hoodie and a windbreaker. It’s been a warm autumn, so I think the winter will be harsh when it eventually comes. That’s just a feeling I have anyway. It will come, right? Are you excited about any new prospects at work or in your home life? My work is going okay, but I guess, same as usual. Actually most days are starting to feel that way. I feel as if I’m getting into a rhythm, but I’m always a little behind. It gets cold, and it takes me a day or two to get used to it, but by then it’s getting warm again, and I need to get used to that. So I never quite feel… maybe settled? Comfortable? It’s like the worlds slowest treadmill, and I just have to keep walking. Some weeks I really give up and just lie down. Thankfully the treadmill isn’t too fast, so I have time. Once or twice I’ve really felt like I was starting to go over the edge – fall off the end – and it scared me a lot, so I jumped back into running. Well, running slows to walking in time. I bet I could walk in my sleep at this rate. What was I talking about? Oh, yeah, getting used to things. I feel like I’m always getting used to things, but part of me thinks that’s probably life. Maybe you just get used to “getting used to” things, you know? Do you ever feel that way? Anyway, I guess I’ll get back to it, the code don’t write itself. Hope you’re well.”
Willow signed his name and looked at the paragraph on the messaging app. He hovered over the send button. A voice from somewhere in distant memory came to him.
“Send it, why not, you wrote it didn’t you?” It said. Willow dialogued with the voice.
“What’s the point? It’s not like she’ll answer me soon anyway. Isn’t this all… contextual? Will I really feel the same way a week from now? What if she replies and then I am staring at a conversation I long-since abandoned and forgot about? These words in particular don’t mean anything in particular, I’d say.”
The voice retorted swiftly. “So you’d abandon another interest just like that? Whatever flicker of impulse drove you to write this message in the first place, you’d smother it? What’s the point in that. If you ask me, there’s a wisdom in letting go – seriously letting go. That doesn’t mean seeing pointlessness in everything, but the idea of pointlessness in your head, Jim! You need to let go of the idea that pointless things aren’t worth doing, and beyond that, let go of the idea of pointlessness altogether.”
Willow sat back on his bed, resting on outstretched arms with his neck craned back. “Damn, I think he’s got a point.” He said to himself. Then he unlocked his phone and pressed send. The message joined it’s brethren, maybe a dozen or so meandering thoughts, photos of the landscape, internal dialogues, and musings since his friend had last replied. When the message popped up in the log, Willow closed the app and his phone. He stood up and stretched, thinking he might go for a walk.
The cycles of nature unfurled themselves once again. Arguably they never stopped unfurling. This was leaf-dropping season, among other things. The landscape was decidedly colorful in yellows, reds, and browns, but the tree-lined places seemed to grow sparse. The slanted light of a sun that always seemed to be on the verge of setting or rising shone through places that were once hidden by thick foliage. The homeless tents and small campsites seemed to vanish, traveling like the migratory geese: to somewhere else for the winter.
Willow walked, his pace picking up as he fell into the rhythm. Headphones would ensure a mostly undisturbed passage by the school and through the neighborhood, places which held the risk of children or vehicles screaming by at any time. He enjoyed the music for a time, but soon his mind began to wander. Wander back to that woman. He scarcely noticed when his thoughts slipped to her, she was always that way, far too subtle. He remembered the last thing he had said to her. Sent, rather. The lines of spoken conversation and message log blurred together these days. He had asked her if she would prefer that he not speak with her. As usual, she didn’t answer.
It was so frustrating. Whenever he asked, he would wait a truly painful duration of time for her answer. If she gave any at all, it would simultaneously not answer the initial question, and bring up another idea which needed clarity. If he asked a yes or no question, she would somehow manage to answer with something that was part yes, part no, and neither at the same time. What was the point of it all? Willow felt that it was better to say what you mean, and mean what you say. Then, he would always have a ground to fall back to if the situation got dicey. “Hey, at least I know what I’m about!”
The sun dwindled. A cold breeze flew from the north, rustling the leaves. A highly unusual number of cyclists had passed Willow as he walked along the forested area by the river’s edge. He felt like he needed space, but there were always people. So many people, emerging like fruit flies from even the most hidden places to gorge on the sweet nectar of, what exactly? Why were there so many people? Willow heard a strange voice over his headphones. He took one out to listen, and heard a loudspeaker from somewhere beyond the trees.
Climbing the hillside from the river-bank, the voice grew louder. Willow thought it must be some kind of sports commentary. He squinted through the leaves toward the fenced-in baseball diamond area and saw bicycles going around, seemingly in a large circle. Then he saw there was a half-pipe, and the cyclists would get nearly perpendicular to the ground when they went around it. The announcer said something about someone pulling into first, and a round of cheers erupted from the bleachers. Willow turned away. He snuck back into the dwindling foliage, thinking that he didn’t have time for people who just went in circles, and turned back the way he came.
What was the deal with that woman? Thinking about her made him so angry, but it was a strange, impotent anger. It was different from the flashes of hot rage that he felt so often as a kid. When the red mist as his father had always called it descended, and he could only lash out or run or stand frozen and quivering. No, this was a strange, drawn-out kind of anger. It was cold. Then a part of his mind, who’s wandering was spurred by the movement of feet, wondered what it would be like to have her. Complete control, what would he do with it? Would he put his hands around her throat and watch the fear in her eyes, or would he just follow the animal instinct toward reproduction. His mouth felt dry, and he swallowed roughly, moving his mind toward other things.
He crouched by the river’s edge for a time, watching the strangely placid waters reflect a mirror-image of the sky. The dark silhouette of an iron bridge. The greens of grasses, streaked with yellow like the graying strands in his own hair. The blue which seemed to stretch forever beyond the wisps of white cloud. When he found himself thinking of the woman again, he rejected it, focusing on the landscape. When his thoughts wandered there again some minutes after, he turned and began to walk home, putting in headphones and using music to distract. When music failed, he tried a chapter of an audio-book, but he kept having to go back 30 seconds and re-listen. Eventually he gave up, and accepted that he was thinking about her.
Why was he still thinking about her? It was not like anything had happened to prompt his mind. She had replied some days prior, but it was just like the previous week, and the one before that. Totally cyclical, nothing ever really changes. It was frustrating… and yet… enticing. The state of never quite completing anything. Never quite finishing a thought, never quite having a question answered. It wasn’t as if there were small goals building toward a larger conclusion. He had tried that when they were dating a year ago. A pat on the shoulder couldn’t escalate to a hug. A hug couldn’t escalate to a deeper embrace. Sharing dinner never became dinner and a movie. When they did manage a consistent activity, playing video-games on voice call once a week, that seemed to lose it’s interest within a month or two. Then, they continued it just for something to do, but eventually that stopped as well.
“She never even liked me.” Willow thought to himself, walking slowly through the darkening neighborhood toward his apartment. What was it all for? What goal could he have possibly wanted that wasn’t dead from the start. Pointless, pointless, none of it mattered. Why try to find a connection with anyone? It’s all doomed in the end. False start. Only endings. He stopped walking.
He stared down the street, grey concrete illuminated beneath the pale blue of a fading sky. Little bits of trash, plastic, discarded fast food cups littered the grass along the curb. The grass was more yellow than green, and it looked like someone had driven over it recently, leaving tire-marks on the pale concrete beside flattened fronds. Street light began to turn on, casting a pale white glow onto the sidewalk. Willow walked home.
When he arrived, he took off his shoes and sat on his bed. He opened his phone and scrolled through the messages with his friend. Paragraph after paragraph he had sent to her, maybe one in twenty responded to, long distances of weeks or even months between. It felt like nothing at all. “Strange” Willow thought to himself. He closed the messenger app and went to his email, opening the chain that he had with the woman. He felt a loosening somewhere in his mind. A hidden knot that just came undone. He pressed new email and wrote something brief and direct. Then he closed the phone and went to have a shower.
After showering and preparing dinner, the player placed his plate at his desk, and booted up his computer. He looked at the desktop icon for that game he had spent the morning losing to, and felt slightly disgusted. He clicked on another game to occupy the screen. When he stood up from the chair, it was late, and he felt sufficiently numb of mind to sleep. He lay down and drifted off.
Morning came and went, when he awoke it was nearly afternoon. He performed his usual morning routine and sat down to sip his coffee. Willow’s pursuit of a YouTube video to watch was interrupted by the sight of an email in his inbox. He felt a strange pang in his gut, and hoped he didn’t make the coffee too strong. The email was a reply from the woman. It only said: “Fine, ‘yes’, is that what you want to hear?” He froze, re-reading the email and the one it was a reply too. He scarcely remembered sending it. His heart rose in his throat. He quickly penned a reply: “When?” While his mind raced to right itself, the reply came in: “I’m free today, I’ll come by in a couple hours.”
That time seemed to vanish. A couple hours spent in jerky half-actions, abandoned before they could be started. When the woman arrived, willow stood frozen in the doorway. She stared at him until he moved. She strode into the tiny apartment, taking off her shoes, and sat down on the bed. She looked at him and said “here’s how this is going to work. You can do whatever you like. I won’t resist, complain, or hold it against you. Whatever you have to get out of your system, now’s the chance. As far as I’m concerned, this next hour doesn’t exist. Let’s be clear, you can do whatever, but you can’t make me do anything that I don’t want to. If you want me to take off my clothes, I wont. You have to take them off yourself. Do you understand?”
Willow stared emptily. Eventually he nodded a vacant recognition. The woman started a timer for one hour, and then sat upright on the edge of the bed. Her face seemed to go blank, and a great emptiness lay within her eyes. Willow stood for a while, mind slowly processing the information of what lay before him. His throat was so dry. He went and got a drink of water, pouring a second glass for the woman. He brought it to her, but she didn’t seem to react. After asking brought no change, Willow leaned close and looked into her face. He gazed for a moment, seeking any hint of human recognition in that visage. Another moment passed. Something jerked deep within Willow as he recoiled from the woman, spilling some of the water on the floor. He jumped back, placing the cup on the counter and quickly stepping into the other room to grab a towel. When he returned, the woman had not moved. Face frozen in placid vacancy. Willow dried the water, seeing that the puddle had spread beneath the woman’s left foot. Her sock had absorbed the water, but she offered no reaction. Willow looked up to her face, looking for anything. He turned away empty handed. He cautiously reached out and grabbed the thin elastic edges at the top of the sock. Glancing upward occasionally, he slowly pulled down, separating the sodden fabric from skin. He took the sock and looked again at the woman, then went into the bathroom and hung it to dry.
When he returned, Willow patted down the exposed foot with the towel. He couldn’t help notice the delicate, lithe shape of it. The easy strength of that which was used to be trodden on. The glaborous, smooth, skin – tough and flexible like fresh leather. A slight rustle caught his attention and he looked up to see the woman was staring at him. The tendrils of her hair swinging past her chin. He thought he saw, if only for the briefest moment, an expression of something on her face. Before the recognition crossed his mind, it was gone. That eerie blankness had returned to a face now trained on him. He looked away, taking the towel back to the bathroom. When he returned, she was still looking down. He spoke awkwardly, asking if she wanted to do anything, if she wanted anything to eat, if she wanted to watch anything. After receiving silence for all, he gave a sharp sigh of exasperation and sat on the other end of the bed.
“What is this for, anyway?” Willow asked after a period of silence. “Are you trying to… like, are you making fun of me? Are you trying to tell me something? What’s the point of this?”
There was no reply.
“Why can’t we just talk? You can say what you want, and I can say what I want, and we can see how they fit. Maybe it could work, maybe it couldn’t. Are you avoiding that conversation with this stupid shit? Come to my house and just sit here like you’re braindead for an hour? How long has it been anyway?”
Willow remembered that the woman had set the timer on her phone, which was nowhere to be seen. “Where did you…” He started to say, before realizing it was pointless to ask. He stood and walked over to the woman. “I’m just going to…” He moved closer to her, slowly reaching his arm near her waist. “Need to check the timer…”, he reached, arm trembling, until his hand contacted the pleated fabric of her skirt. He patted gently. A thought crossed Willow’s mind and he jerked his hand back. “Skirts don’t have pockets!” He exclaimed in a loud voice. He moved around the apartment, checking the tables. When he looked near the door he saw the woman’s bag and picked it up. He glanced at her face and saw the same blank look, her face now turned over toward him.
“I can’t find it, where is…” He said, slowly pulling back the zipper on her bag. There was a lump in his throat and a strange feeling in his gut. It was such an invasion of privacy to go through someone’s bag, wasn’t it? The woman gave no reaction. He peered inside, none of the items holding any meaning for him, and there was no phone. He closed the bag and placed it back where it had been. Sitting back on the bed, he moved closer to the woman.
“So I’m just supposed to have some fun?” He asked idly, looking down at his hands. Then he moved them, as if pulling the string of a large puppet, and placed them on the woman. Her head turned mechanically, pulled by it’s own string. These puppets can dance, but only with their limbs. There are no strings for the face. When the alarm began to sound muffled from somewhere, the woman abruptly stood. She gathered her clothes and phone, which she had apparently been sitting on, and went into the bathroom – closing the door.
Willow lay in a haze. A pile of tangled sheets and half-worn clothing surrounded him. There was a strangely neat vacancy on the bed, an empty spot where a body had just been. Space enough for a small frame, arms tucked at the sides, legs together. The chaos of fabrics caused by Willow’s moving body seemed to end in that space. When the woman exited the bathroom, her clothes and hair had returned to their prior state. Orderly, proper, even pristine. She shot a brief glance at Willow, and he thought he heard her make a slight dismissive noise with her mouth. Then, before he could react, the door closed and she was gone.
The next week moved in a languorous half-dream. Willow moved slowly, mind elsewhere. In starts and spurts it would return to him, and he would be momentarily shocked by something. He worked poorly, proceeding but not completing anything. His personal time was filled with slow walks in the cooling evenings, while the sun set earlier and earlier. He ate simple food, lacking the intention or focus to create anything more. By the time the weekend came around, he was exhausted. He woke from another long and dreamless sleep to the usual morning routine. Animal habit dictated nearly all of his hours. When he saw he had another email, that same habit checked it and replied. When the woman knocked on his door, he let her in. When she sat on his bed and said nothing, he approached and began the dance.
Again, the timer rang. Again, she left. Again, he felt emptier than he ever thought possible. He had even lost the sense of marveling at how deep the emptiness went. Now, it merely was. The work merely was. The woman merely was. Life, merely was.
The man named Willow sat in-front of his workstation. Diligent as always, he put one finger in front of the other, typing out the function name. One function in front of the other made the code. When enough time had elapsed, he closed the terminal and logged his progress. His boss had been telling him how consistent his work had been lately. Willow acknowledged this, but felt nothing. When he closed the terminal, his mind lingered for a moment. Diffuse light filling his half-open eyes, he gazed at his screen background. He didn’t know what, but something seemed to catch his attention. Before he could register what it was, a timer began to ring. It was the timer that signaled his evening walk.
Routine: a walk after work, a small meal, the woman would come on Saturday, he would reply to his friend twice a month or so, and he would thoughtlessly play one game or another in the offtime. It was winter now, and a thick blanket of snow seemed to obscure all things. It was five, but the sun had already begun to set. Willow soaked in the remainder of it’s light, and when it was gone he would go home, go to sleep, and start the day again. A hundred days, always the same order of operations, but never quite reaching a conclusion. When he got home and took off his winter clothes, something seemed to nag in the far reaches of his mind. He shook his head, trying to dispel it. During dinner, it came again. He fought it back for a while, but eventually gave in and accepted the strange visitor in his mind.
The routine continued, and he turned his computer on after dinner to play some game or another. He had been playing through a mystery game set in the middle ages, which was entertaining enough, he supposed. As he sat in the chair, his eyes began to drift. They landed in the far corner of the desktop, where a particular icon lay among the pile of others. It was the game from before. It was strange, he thought. How could it be from “before”? He hadn’t thought about it in so long. Something tugged at him deep within, and he opened it up. Familiarity rang out with the menu music. He pressed new character, and selected the hardest difficulty.
When his character died, he jumped up from the chair. Frustration and exultation coursed through his veins. “I have to go somewhere” he thought. Putting his shoes and coat back on, he rushed out of the apartment. It was the middle of the night, but he didn’t care. Feet carrying him, he made a turn away from the usual walking route. Hot blood coursed through his veins. He rushed into a part of the city he had never been before, mind aloft. When he finally arrived back home the sun had since risen. His eyes appeared darkened with soot but held a flame within. The player planned out his next moves:
I see it now. I must take back the ground I ceded. My time, it is mine. My energy, it is mine. My love, it is mine. The direction of my life is my own. I hold the flame, the others merely feed off it’s warmth. Reject! I must reject it all! Acceptance is for plants and stones. I should turn off my phone.
The player went out into the city. He walked along paths that lay somewhere deep in his mind, but he had forgotten them. Now, the vividity of novelty and familiarity made one as he walked with purpose through the streets. He went to a cycle shop and left with a new bicycle, freshly equipped with winter tires. When he arrived home, the woman was standing outside his door. She was looking intently at her phone, and seemed perplexed. She didn’t notice as he walked up and began unlocking the door.
She jumped at the sudden presence and blurted out: “Who are you, what do you want?” When she recognized him she made a chocking sound. Willow looked over as he wheeled his bike in, smiled and said “that’s the first time you’ve asked me that” before shutting the door in her face. He checked his cell-phone, left idly on the counter, and seeing it had half a dozen missed emails, he laughed. He deleted the email application and opening the map. After some brief planning, he made a list of things he would need. Face mask and goggles, a new back-pack and water container, efficient food, cash, electrolytes, bike repair tools. There was a hotel on the outskirts of the city that had the required stores nearby. He packed what he had, preparing his clothes and belongings in a neat pile next to his bike. He sent his friend a message to share his plan, and knew she would enjoy hearing about it. He slept early that day.
He was woken the following morning by loud knocking. Looking through the peephole, he saw the woman, his boss, and two police officers, who announced “wellness check” through the heavy metal doorframe. Willow moved quietly, changing and grabbing his belongings. He went to the back door of the apartment, which opened onto a raised area with the pool that was tarped over for the winter. A now garbed and backpacked man softly opened the door, allowing a snowdrift to spill into the small room. He wheeled the bicycle out and closed the door behind him.