Chương 53: Book Two - Chapter 3: Welcome to Zone Two

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00: 15: 43 The blue neon countdown timer hovered above us in the center of the room. I'd outlasted the bastard this far, and now we were minutes away from the beginning of Zone Two. After we ran out of things to break, we moved to trying the exit. The red door didn't budge when I tried it, or when Liam yanked on it, and by the fourth attempt we'd stopped testing and started arguing about whether it was a door at all or just a rectangle somebody painted on the wall. That killed an hour.

We moved to the cots, which lasted about nine minutes, because prison-grade slabs of foam over broken mesh wire are only comfortable if you're unconscious. So, we voted to sit on the floor, in a loose circle, and sparked the first joint. We were on the second one now. My leather jacket had emerged from the dryer much differently than it had gone into the washing machine. It was immaculately clean. The scorch marks from the cabin fire were gone, as were the mismatched patches the Repair Kit added in the diner.

Along with those improvements, the jacket lost the worn-in quality it had before, like the heavy crease in the left elbow where Dad used to lean whenever he was deep in thought. The day he was killed, he'd left it hanging on the hook by the front door, because it was seventy degrees out and he was heading into work. It was some real Ship of Theseus bullshit. If Maltheris replaced every atom of my father's jacket with a perfect replica, was I still wearing a memory?

Then again, the jacket I originally found in my closet was already a fabrication because none of this was real… so, the memory had always been the lie. The nostalgic look and smell were fake from the start, put there only so it would hurt more to lose them later. Even so, I was bummed the jacket no longer retained that classic Dad smell of bad cologne, cigarette smoke, and weed embedded in it just from existing in the 70s. Now, it smelled like lavender, like everything else we'd washed.

The Inventory app had ticked the armor rating back up to where it had started. Good as new, as far as it was concerned. Tre, Liam, and Isabel had decided to test what the latter two could and couldn't remember from the real world. Tre grilled them about the last decade of internet culture. He'd started with Vine, which everyone fondly remembered ("Hi, welcome to Chili's"), and eventually moved to Animal Crossing obsessions during the pandemic, which they also remembered happening.

"Why can I remember that, but not what my parents look like?" Isabel asked.

"Maybe you don't have access to any of the memories he changed or scrambled to make you into characters in Whisperwood," Tre suggested.

"All the other stuff is probably in there somewhere, untouched."

"It's frustrating there's no clear logic to what we can and can't remember," Isabel said.

"There's no logic to any of this. Like, why do we reek of lavender now? Why that scent specifically? It's all just random," Tre agreed.

"What do you think, Nora?" My eyes flicked back to the timer. Only twenty seconds had passed.

"I think he's letting us marinate." Three confused faces turned toward me.

"Huh?" Tre tilted his head, glass eyes reflecting the green sign.

"Were you checked out this whole time?"

"No," I lied.

"I'm just saying Maltheris is letting us marinate in this room. And the mundanity of lavender-scented clothes is just part of it. He's trying to drive us nuts." Liam took a hit off the joint.

"Or he's gifting us eight straight hours of no screaming and running for our fucking lives."

"Are you feeling 'nuts,' Nora?" Concern pulled Isabel's mouth into a frown.

"No. I'm saying that's what the game wants." I jerked a thumb in Liam's direction.

"I'm with him; super grateful no one is trying to slaughter us right now." Tre squinted at me, silently accepting the joint from Liam.

"There's still so much we don't understand about this place," Isabel said.

"Yeah, like why doesn't Tre have a butthole?" I replied. Tre snorted and coughed out a cloud of smoke.

"And yet, he can get drunk," Isabel said.

"And smoke. How does that work?" Liam turned to Tre.

"Do you have lungs? Seems unfair to give you lungs and no asshole." Tre held up his tiny hands.

"Okay, okay, I get it. It's easy to laugh at the guy who got turned into a doll. Why can I get drunk? Or high? How come I still have a decent-sized dong? These are great questions." Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. Isabel winced.

"I purposely didn't look at any dicks."

"Decent-sized, like… to scale, bro?" Liam asked earnestly. Tre passed the joint to Isabel on his left.

"Maltheris is freakishly generous sometimes."

"I've still got a ton of questions," Isabel said, steering the conversation away from private parts.

"Like, will Liam and I get turned into toys or monsters if we die?"

"You and Liam aren't going to die," I interjected. Isabel talked over me.

"And how does the whole recycling thing work? Are we gonna have to fight Mr. Thornton in Zone 3 or something?"

"I got one," Liam chimed in.

"If Whisperwood wasn't a real place, who was mowing the lawns and stuff?"

"I don't think the lawns needed to be mowed. They weren't real," Tre said.

"Whoa," Liam said to the floor. Tre caught my eye. He wanted me to soften it.

"The weed's not bad," I said, taking the joint from Isabel.

"I got stuck on the grocery store for a bit," Isabel said.

"Where all the food came from."

"Okay, but take the mailman." Liam sat up.

"He's been delivering mail in Whisperwood for as long as I can remember. Was he a real mailman? I mean, on Earth, before the game or whatever? Or is he some random dude that Maltheris stuffed into a mailman suit?" Right. They don't know about you, do they? Tre's words appeared in my head as if he were talking directly in my ear. I wanted to scream at him not to say anything. To warn him against telling Liam and Isabel the truth: Maltheris could put us in whatever bodies, with whatever memories, he wanted.

Waking up in this fake body, fully aware of my old life and self, had been jarring enough that I couldn't imagine what the truth would do to minds already this fractured. I clicked my skeletal pinkie and ring fingers against each other, glancing between Liam on my left and Isabel to my right. They had no sense of self to begin with, informing them they might not even look like what they looked like was simply too—"I'll be straight with you," Tre said, "he was probably just some random accountant from South Dakota."

Dammit, Tre. I slipped my LifeLine out and checked the Companions app. LIAM BECKER Form: Human Role: Awakened NPC – Bound Fear: 48% (Nervous) Loyalty: 59% (Uncertain) Liam had ended Zone One with sixty-eight percent Fear and sixty percent Loyalty.

"So, you're saying he could've been a doctor or something in real life?"

"Yeah, Liam." Tre shook his head.

"I wasn't a talking doll in the real world. I'm a twenty-something-year-old human man." Liam's Fear spiked to sixty-nine percent in the app. I was about to check Isabel's next when I felt her eyes on me.

"Who were you in the real world, Nora?" she asked.

"A fifty-year-old dude or something?" The LifeLine's screen clicked off as I slid it into my jacket. The truth was going to hurt, but lying to them further would've obliterated their trust.

"No, I'm not a guy in real life. And I'm not an eighteen-year-old with a perfect body—""Humblebrag," Tre fake-coughed. Isabel's eyes narrowed, assessing me in a way she hadn't before.

"So, how old are you?"

"Twenty-eight." I met her stare.

"Tre's got a year on me."

"Unconfirmed," he barked.

"And her IRL body is fine."

"Thanks, buddy," I said, looking down at myself.

"But it's not whatever this is." Liam scrambled to his feet, sneakers squeaking against the floor. He crossed to the sink, bracing his palms against the porcelain as he stared at his reflection.

"I could be anyone," he whispered. Isabel didn't move; her expression never changed. I couldn't get a read on where she was or what this new information had done to her. If anything at all.

"Tre and I both still have our memories from our real lives," I added, unsure if that was a consolation or not.

"So, if you guys have memories, they're likely tied to your real—" The lights blacked out.

"They gotta stop doing that," Tre said in the dark.

"Weeeeeelcome to another exciting Trial in The Grindhouse," Plaxx's voice announced from the darkness. A spotlight lanced down from the ceiling and pinned the imp in place, perched atop the washing machine. The intense white light revealed a pink blazer vomiting a psychotic, repeating print of neon green giraffes. His matching bow tie and fuchsia pants were a desperate swing at whimsical energy, but the entire ensemble clashed with his deep-red skin.

"It's time for—" He stopped, looking down at the lidless washing machine. He glanced around at the rest of the gutted room.

"The fuck did you guys do in here? You know what? Doesn't matter. Let's get this over with. It's time for Zone Two…" There was a long, dramatic pause before a title treatment began to coagulate out of the surrounding darkness above the imp's head. Basement of the Boargore King The words appeared in a serrated, rusted font. Each letter was wrapped in barbed wire that slowly constricted, drawing beads of blood as it tightened.

"The Boargore King's basement." He added vibrato to it, then let the name sit for a beat.

"It's named after the location's mysterious owner." Drops of blood from the title treatment spackled the washing machine all around Plaxx, somehow never hitting him directly. Whatever had thrown him off a minute ago was gone. He was back in it, which was a letdown, because I'd really hoped beating his ass at the end of the last zone would have left a bigger mark.

"You're about to enter his complex maze of puzzles, traps, and deadly consequences, designed to see who among you is willing to sacrifice the most to save others."

"Sacrifice the most?" Liam asked under his breath. Tre raised his hand. Plaxx paused, cocking his head to the right.

"You got a question, black Chucky?"

"First, racist. Also, I was hoping you could explain the name." Plaxx straightened, scanning the still-dripping words hovering above the washer.

"What's to explain? You never heard of Burger King?"

"Is it just a pun?" Tre asked.

"I don't get what a Boargore is supposed to be." I turned to Tre.

"Obviously it's a boar who loves blood and guts. Right, Plaxx?" Plaxx stomped his left hoof on the washing machine.

"Stop it! No! We're not doing this!"

"Doing what?" Tre asked.

"Yeah, what?"

"What're they doing?" Liam said, smirking. None of us wanted to talk about what was behind the red door, and the imp was standing right there in a neon blazer that was practically a target on his chest." This shit!" Plaxx's voice rumbled, carrying an unexpected undercurrent of deep bass.

"The bits, and the back and forth. Let me get through this without your constant fucking—" He cut himself off. His eyebrows went up high on his forehead and stayed there. Plaxx smoothed the front of his blazer with both hands, eyes down, taking a breath. When he looked back up at us, the showman was back.

"I won't be goaded into a fight." Even Tre didn't have a comeback for that.