Connor slammed his hands on the table with the energy of a man who had been slowly losing his mind for the past forty minutes and had finally reached the bottom of his patience like a kid hitting the floor of a ball pit except the ball pit was filled with idiots.
"Ok ok guys can we PLEASE focus," he said. "Diego. What. Are. You. Going. To. Do."
Diego leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling with the expression of a philosopher confronting the void.
"...I don't know," he said finally. "Kiss him."
The room was quiet.
Connor blinked. "Kiss him."
"Yeah."
"You want to kiss the orc."
"I want to see what happens."
"Diego you will get TONSILLITIS—"
Andre looked up from his phone. "What the hell is that."
Connor spun to him immediately, grateful for literally any opportunity to be educational. "It's the inflammation of the tonsils — two lymph nodes at the back of the throat, usually caused by a viral or bacterial infection, symptoms include—"
Diego squinted. "So basically like covid."
Connor stopped. "What. No. It's not like— it's a completely different—"
Zhang Wei looked up from his chips very slowly with the expression of a man who had been personally accused of something. "Ok to be fair," he said carefully, "my people wasn't the reason that happened."
Andre said "then who was."
"Well—" Zhang started.
"It was a complex geopolitical and epidemiological—" Connor began.
"UH," Zhang said loudly, cutting Connor off, "maybe the Indians?"
"ZHANG.!"
"What! I'm just saying—"
"That's not— it doesn't even— GUYS." Connor pressed both hands to his temples. "It's not like covid. It's a completely separate medical condition that has nothing to do with any ethnicity or nationality or—" he paused. Took a breath. "I need some ice."
Diego's chair scraped back so fast it almost tipped over. "No no NO don't call them—"
Connor stared at him. "Diego I meant ice. Like frozen water. For my head. Because you people are giving me an aneurysm."
Diego slowly sat back down. "...Oh."
"Yeah. Oh."
"You should've been more specific bro."
"I didn't think I needed to be MORE SPECIFIC about ICE—"
"In this house you do Connor," Andre said. "In this house you absolutely do."
Connor opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at Diego. Looked at Andre. Made a sound like a man who had accepted his fate.
"Never mind," he said quietly. "Never mind the ice."
Andre stretched and looked at the TV in the corner. "So can we play Fortnite."
Connor's eye twitched. "Can we— ANDRE. No. No Fortnite. We are playing Dungeons and Dragons which I have spent—"
"Two weeks," everyone said in unison.
"TWO WEEKS on—"
"Bro," Zhang said, setting down his chips with the gravity of a man about to deliver a TED talk. "We already established this. Games are for cool people. DnD is for Reddit users."
Diego pointed at Zhang. "And that's a fact."
"THAT IS NOT A FACT—"
"It's a little bit a fact," Andre said.
"IT IS NOT—" Connor grabbed his notes. Held them up. His hands were shaking slightly. "Ok. OK. I swear — I swear on Zhang's left tit, I swear that this game is actually fun. I SWEAR."
"Hey!" Zhang said.
"You guys just have to give it a CHANCE—"
"We gave it a chance," Diego said. "The orc is still alive."
"BECAUSE YOU WON'T DO ANYTHING EXCEPT KISS HIM—"
"I said I'd CONSIDER kissing him, there's a difference—"
"THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE DIEGO—"
"Bro why are you so against love—"
"I AM NOT AGAINST LOVE I AM AGAINST KISSING ORCS—"
Zhang raised his hand. "What if the orc is into it though."
"ZHANG—"
"Rizz is universal Connor, we been through this—"
"OH MY GOD—"
Andre was already laughing. Zhang was already laughing. Diego was nodding seriously like he and Zhang had just solved something. Connor stood up, sat back down, picked up his notes, put them back down, and pressed his forehead directly onto the hand-drawn map he had spent four hours making.
"I just want to play the game," he said into the map. "That's all. That's the only thing I want. I am nine years old and this is my one joy."
"Bro you need therapy," Andre said helpfully.
"I NEED FRIENDS WHO—"
And then the map started glowing.
Not the LED strip. Not Connor's phone. The MAP. The hand-drawn, four-hours-of-work, pencil-and-marker map that Connor had made himself, sitting in the middle of the folding table, was emanating a deep amber light from underneath the paper like something had been switched on inside it.
Everyone stopped.
The laughter died.
Diego slowly uncrossed his arms.
Zhang put down his chips.
Andre looked up from his phone for the first time with actual attention in his eyes.
The miniatures — the little plastic figures Connor had placed carefully on the map — began to move. Not falling over. Not sliding. Moving. On their own. Walking across the paper surface toward the center of the map where Connor had drawn a dungeon entrance. One by one they stepped into it and disappeared.
"Connor," Zhang said very quietly.
"Yeah."
"Is that supposed to happen."
"...No."
The light got brighter. The table vibrated. The dice rattled. The Mountain Dew cans fell over.
"Guys," Diego said with the tone of someone who was somehow still not scared, "this is actually kinda sigma ngl—"
The map EXPLODED with light.
Not an explosion. Not fire. Just light — white and gold and ancient, filling the entire basement, flooding every corner, swallowing the LED strip and the beanbag and the Dorito bags and Connor's two weeks of carefully organized notes — and then the floor wasn't there anymore—
And neither was the basement—
And neither were they.
Connor's last thought before Valdenmoor swallowed them whole was that he had not saved his campaign notes to Google Drive.
Connor felt something wrong.
Everything was black. Total darkness. No LED strip. No Dorito smell. No sound of Zhang chewing which had become so constant in Connor's life that the absence of it was actually alarming.
He laid there for a second processing this.
Why was everything black.
Oh wait.
His eyes were closed.
He opened them.
The first thing he saw was trees. Not normal trees. These trees were wrong in a way that was hard to immediately explain — like someone had described trees to an AI that had never seen one and this was the result. The leaves were grey. Not autumn grey. Not dead grey. Just grey, like color had been a subscription service and these trees had cancelled it. The bark was so dark it was almost black, with thin veins of something faintly luminescent running through it like the wood itself had bad WiFi signal and was buffering. The sky above was the color of a bruise that was still deciding how serious it wanted to be.
Connor sat up slowly.
He was on the ground. Forest floor. Dark soil that felt too cold for whatever season this was. He looked down at himself and stopped.
He was wearing robes.
Long, dark blue, slightly tattered robes that looked like they had survived at least three separate apocalypses and were working on a fourth. On his head was a hat — tall, pointed, floppy at the tip, the kind of hat that said I have read many books and suffered for it. His big round glasses were still on his face which was somehow the most comforting thing about the entire situation.
"Wha," he said.
Then a box appeared in front of his face.
Not a physical box. A floating, glowing, translucent rectangle hanging in the air in front of him like a notification from God.
CODEX SYSTEM — WELCOME
Name: Connor Liam
Class: Chaos Mage
Level: 1
Location: The Ashfields — Dark Forest Sector
Status: Confused
Spells Known: 1 (unknown effect until cast)
Connor stared at it.
"Whoa," he said.
He reached out and touched it. It flickered. A second notification appeared.
Codex Note: Please do not touch the interface.
"Sorry," Connor said automatically, then felt insane for apologizing to a floating video game box.
Behind him there was a series of sounds — thudding, groaning, the crinkle of what was somehow still a chip bag — as the other three woke up.
Diego was on his feet first because Diego was always on his feet first, his body operating on some primal frequency that didn't require consciousness to function. He stood up, looked around at the grey trees and the bruise sky and the general atmosphere of a world that had given up, and tilted his head like a dog hearing a weird noise.
Andre unfolded himself from the ground slowly, all long limbs and afro, his hair somehow completely undisturbed, and stood up to his full height which in this grey dead forest made him look genuinely threatening.
Zhang Wei sat up, looked around, looked down at himself, looked back around, and immediately reached into his robe pocket and found it empty.
His face did something tragic.
"My chips," he whispered.
Nobody acknowledged this.
"Where the heck are we," Andre said. Not panicked. Just asking. The way you'd ask where the remote was.
Diego looked up at the grey sky. Looked at the black trees. Looked at the ground. Sniffed the air which smelled like cold ash and bad decisions.
"...Hell?" he said.
Zhang stood up fully, assessed the situation with the gravity of a man who had just realized something very important, and said "damn. And I didn't even lose my virginity first."
A beat of silence.
Andre turned to look at him. "And who would even want that. Who is volunteering for that."
"HEY." Zhang pointed at him. "Maybe girls like that. You don't know. Some girls like—"
"No girl has ever in the history of human civilization looked at a situation and thought yeah I want that jiggle dick," Andre said.
"Okay ACTUALLY—" Diego raised a finger with the energy of a man about to say something extremely regrettable— "Jenny Li—"
Zhang's hand shot up immediately. "Yeah. Hard pass."
Diego blinked. "Bro she literally—"
"Hard. Pass."
"But she said—"
"HARD. PASS. DIEGO."
Andre squinted. "Hold on why are you passing on Jenny, I thought fat people liked each other"
"Okay FIRST of all," Zhang said, spinning on him with sudden fury, "she literally got CAUGHT licking her own sweat in PE. In front of EVERYONE. I am not letting my lips go anywhere near a person whose hydration strategy is LICKING THEMSELVES. I will have chapped lips for the rest of my LIFE. My lips will be drier than—" he pointed at Diego— "than Mexico."
Diego stopped. Stared at him. "...hahaha very funny."
"I thought so."
"GUYS." Connor's voice cut through the forest like a blade. All three of them turned.
Connor was standing with his pointy hat slightly crooked, his robes slightly too long, his glasses reflecting the grey light of a world that shouldn't exist, pointing at all of them with one finger.
"Don't you understand where we are right now?" he said. "Look AROUND you. Look at the TREES. Look at the SKY. Does this look like my mom's basement to you?! Does this look like EARTH?!"
The three of them looked around. Really looked this time.
The wrong trees. The wrong sky. The cold ground. The silence of a forest that had no birds in it because birds had apparently made the correct decision to be somewhere else.
"...Hell?" Diego said again.
Zhang pointed behind Connor. "Andre's mom's house."
Andre said "yeah— wait. What."
"NO." Connor's voice cracked. "We are in the GAME. We are in Valdenmoor. We are in the actual real life version of the DnD campaign I built, which apparently is a real place that EXISTS, which means everything I wrote in my notes is HERE and REAL and—" he stopped. Grabbed his robes. "I am wearing a HAT. I am wearing a POINTY HAT. There was a floating box that told me I'm a Chaos Mage and I am LEVEL ONE which is the WORST level—"
"Hold on hold on," Diego said, suddenly very alert. He looked down at himself. He was wearing armor — white and gold, gleaming faintly even in the grey light, with a symbol on the chest that looked like a sun. A large, extremely serious looking sword sat in a scabbard at his hip. A floating box hovered in front of him.
CODEX SYSTEM — WELCOME
Name: Diego Carlos
Class: Holy Paladin
Level: 1
Location: The Ashfields — Dark Forest Sector
Status: Ungovernable
Diego stared at it for a long time.
"...Bro," he said quietly, with genuine reverence. "I'm a KNIGHT."
"You're a PALADIN—"
"A KNIGHT. I am a KNIGHT bro." Diego grabbed the sword hilt and pulled it out halfway, looked at it, put it back. "Bro I am so SIGMA right now you don't even—"
"DIEGO THIS IS NOT SIGMA THIS IS A CRISIS—"
Zhang's box appeared in front of him. He squinted at it.
CODEX SYSTEM — WELCOME
Name: Zhang Wei
Class: Shadow Rogue
Level: 1
Location: The Ashfields — Dark Forest Sector
Status: Hungry
Zhang read it twice. He was wearing all black — thin, dark leather armor that was clearly designed for someone who moved silently and quickly and without detection. He looked down at it. Looked at himself. Looked back at it.
"Shadow Rogue," he said.
"Yeah," Connor said.
"...Me."
"Yes."
"SHADOW. ROGUE."
"ZHANG—"
"I AM NOT A ROGUE I AM A LOUD PERSON CONNOR—"
"I KNOW—"
Andre's box appeared last. He read it once. His face did not change.
CODEX SYSTEM — WELCOME
Name: Andre Darius
Class: Berserker
Level: 1
Location: The Ashfields — Dark Forest Sector
Status: Unbothered
He was wearing heavy dark armor with jagged edges and a massive axe strapped to his back that was nearly as tall as Connor. He looked like a war crime. He looked at the box. Looked at the axe. Looked back at the box.
"Hm," he said.
That was it. Just hm.
The four of them stood in the grey dead forest of Valdenmoor — a Chaos Mage in a floppy hat, a Holy Paladin who had tried to kiss the first enemy, a Shadow Rogue who had never been quiet in his life, and a Berserker who couldn't be less interested in being one — and let the reality of the situation fully land.
Then all three of them looked at each other.
And simultaneously, at full volume, in a dark forest in a world that had never heard the sound before, they yelled:
"AWW HELL NAH."
Somewhere in the distance, deep in the grey trees, something heard them.