The school year was over. I no longer had to worry about projects or tests. I could just kick back and look at the final projects of some of the engineering students. They had made mousetrap cars or rigged up an experiment for testing the strength of balsa wood. As I observed them, a woman came up to me. I recognized her as the wife of my engineering teacher from the previous semester.
"So, where is your project?" she inquired.
"Um, I don't have one. I took this class last semester."
She frowned. "Even last semester students had to make a project to present here. We were expecting such great things from you. Are you really going to fail now?"
My gut writhed. How was I supposed to know that? No one had said anything. I rushed off to get to work on a model car that would be propelled by candles. Each flame would send hot air up towards the blades of a tiny propeller and would force it to spin. This propeller's shaft was connected by gears to the rear axle of the car. It was a clever enough idea, but I simply did not have the time to build it. The stress built until I reached the point of indifference. So what if I didn't complete the course perfectly? I had done everything asked of me and could not be expected to read their minds about other assignments. If I got a C in the class, then I got a C. With that, I sauntered off to enjoy myself at Gen Con.
When I arrived, I saw the expected melange of cosplayers and nerdy T-shirts. In the sea of geekiness I could not find my friend group, but it didn't matter. I had been signed up to participate in some elaborate, interactive storytelling adventure. It stood to reason that whoever had signed me up would also be there. The place where the event was held was sectioned off with temporary walls and tent canopies. Heavy black curtains hung in the entrance, and when someone wished to enter, the ticket collector pulled one of the curtains back only as much as he had to to let the patron pass. Finally, my turn came to enter.
What I saw on the other side did not surprise so much as confuse me. A large walkway led up to a room colored by slime and shadow. The floor was not a floor, but a pit of green glowing goo. Black walkways crisscrossed the room over the goo, and those walkways were marked periodically with green dots. The ramp connecting directly to the walkway had a dot labeled "start". The moment I stepped onto it, another worker popped up in front of me.
"Welcome to the story," he beamed in a half whisper, "I'll be your guide. Have you played before?"
I shook my head.
"Excellent! The way this works is, at each dot along the path, you will be given some information. It may be in the form of text, pictures, videos, anything. Once given the information you will have to decide what to do with it. If you decide correctly, I'll roll my dice and give you a random number of points and you can move on to the next dot. Choose incorrectly, I will roll again to determine how many steps back you have to go. Then you'll have to make a different call from before. Remember! There are many right answers, but far more wrong ones."
"Uh...okay. Was that the clue that I get at this dot or is there something else?"
His smile turned sickly sweet. "Those are just the instructions, sweetie. Here's the information."
Before I could react, he plopped a large helmet onto my head which covered my eyes and a video started to play on a tiny screen built into it. It described how some sort of fish woman had trained her watery companions to live in people and take them over. When not living in humans, it appeared they liked to live in the muck covering the floor of the room I was currently in. A human by the name of Dirk Strider had recently been taken over, though he did not yet know it.
"Now then, what would you like to do?"
"Well, I want to find out how those possession fish work."
"Correct!" And we marched off to the next dot.
We proceeded in this fashion for some time. Every so often I had to go back and fill in the gaps in my understanding by taking a new route. It seemed to be that the possession fish did not simply control someone. They reshaped the person's body into an armored monstrosity that looked somewhat like an imperial drone in Homestuck. They could be driven into submission, and the person would look mostly normal, but "wrigglers" stayed behind in the person's skin and made it difficult for them to move. The fish woman in charge of it all stayed in the shadows of the story.
After my fiftieth time having to go backwards, I was fed up.
"Look, the story's cool and all, but why can't I just go through on my own? Why do I have to be sent back? It's ridiculous and frustrating and your dice hate me."
"If you really feel that way, I could always force you out," he suggested, honey and venom dripping from his words.
"You know what? You can't. You aren't even real, are you?" I didn't know where my words were coming from, but I knew they were true. "I'm going to see this stuff my way."
With that, I stepped off the walkway and onto a side area and through an inconspicuous door. The guide was powerless to stop me.
When I went through, I was amazed to see that I was no longer in the convention center. Heck, I was no longer in the city. An orange sky spread over the world, and a building similar to the palace of Versailles loomed in front of me. I entered and explored the new story lines I found. It seemed that the fish woman's schemes included the enslavement of all living beings the universe over. Disturbingly, some of the people I saw participating in the story seemed to have wrigglers in them. I wasn't sure about that until a man carrying a small girl ran past. I followed, intrigued. He kept running up to little flames burning in the floor, but as he reached them, they went out.
"What are you doing?" I called.
"If I get her on one of these flames, I can kill the wrigglers, but they keep going out!" He huffed.
I wasn't sure how to help, so I moved on. At some point, I came across a ballroom. Scores of people, presumable convention goers by their clothes, danced together with whomever was available. Some boy I thought I'd met once before and school took my hand and pulled me into the dance.
"What's going on?" I shouted over the music.
"I'm not really sure. People just started dancing. I have to do it to get to the next dot. Where are you on the path?"
"Oh," I said, blushing, "I gave up on following the path. I just sort of stormed off on my own."
"Really? Oh well, that's probably for the best. I've been stuck on this path for days. Be sure to look at the conquer of the forks," he recommended just as the dance finished.
"I'll do that," and I skipped off to get more of the story. I was looking at a transparent coffin with Dirk Strider age 82 inside when my friend that I'd been trying to find finally appeared.
"How's it going?" he asked amicably.
"Pretty well. I think I just figured out, I think the point of this entire thing is to mess with Dirk's head. Even when he got old, he just popped back in time to mess with himself and get the ball rolling."
"Well obviously. Everything else the fish woman does is just for show or to mess with Dave, which just messes with Dirk more. Have you seen the forks?"
"No. People keep telling me I should."
"Do it. I can't tell you where it is, since that would guarantee that it isn't there, but keep an eye out."
With that we headed off in our own separate directions, with him on his path and me on my own. After a bit more wandering, I went outside and saw something strange in the distance. It looked like a giant plate of spaghetti, and when I say giant, I mean the size of a city. However, instead of steam, smoke rose from it, and rising from the center of it was a fork with dented and blackened tines.
"The forks!" I cried and rushed towards it, exploring every inch. I know it was fascinating, and I know what I saw made me cry at times, but that part of my dream is blacked out in my memory. It isn't that I forgot it. It's that I was never allowed to remember. Afterwards, I headed back to the Palace of Versailles and pretended not to be disturbed by the memory loss. As I headed through the palace, I came across a man at a prize booth. The first prize for completing the entire story in the shortest time and with the most points was a large container of colored balls that were either candy or toys or both. Whatever they were, I wanted them.
"Excuse me sir. How much for first prize?" I asked as politely as I could. The man stared down at me.
"Where's your guide?" he replied.
"Not here. Anyway, about the prize..." my voice withered at his glower.
"You can't afford it, not when you've gone off the path."
"I beg to differ," and I pulled out a vacuum cleaner from who knows where and presented it proudly. The man's eyes widened.
"I'll give you this whole vacuum in exchange for the prize."
"Done," and he handed over the container and snatched the handle of the machine. "Silly girl, trading a $600 cleaner for a $100 item!"
"Oh, I don't think it was too silly of me. That's a piece of junk. It doesn't work." With that I trounced off and smiled at the barrage of swears he hurled at my back.
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