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Let’s Make a Game of Finding Heaven - 14

This is a repost of last year’s Choose Your Own Adventure November. More info here. I’ll be posting these twice a day until we get to part 16—where YOU will once again get to choose how the story continues… and ends!

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Let’s Make a Game of Awkwardness

“Oh,” Nel frowned, “Jesus, is Caplan really back?” She couldn’t deny how much it set her blood on edge to think that the Captain had snuck back into the hotel without seeking her out. She’d been in the main restaurant all day. It was a strange, cold kind of anger: not just the threat of the man that was so insistent at beating her, but also a rival’s fury that he hadn’t even done her the courtesy of making his next challenge known.

“Who?” Ephraim raised an eyebrow.

“Caplan… the Captain. His name is Caplan,” Nel dismissed the question with a wave of her hand. She had to get back to her room and prepare for this.

Ephraim and Ruth shared a worried look, Ruth finally breaking the pause.

“…you’re on a first name basis with the Captain?”

“Why’s that strange?” Nel was already rising up from her bar stool.

“He’s a pretty menacing dude.” Ephraim’s thick eyebrows were bunched up over the bridge of his nose.

“He’s not so bad,” Nel smoothed her sweater. “Besides, I won a bunch of his memories, if I can’t call him by his first name, nobody can.”

“I’ve just never heard anyone use his name before…” Ruth set down the glass she was polishing.

“Maybe he’s manipulative,” Nel shrugged. “Maybe he’s lonely. I don’t know. I don’t care. I need to go back to my room and plan what I’m gonna do when he asks me to play.”

“Hey, maybe you’ll be lucky and he won’t?” Ephraim scratched the cleft in his chin with a thumb.

“He will.”

And she wanted him to.

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She’d had plenty of time to look through most of the games in her room by now: hundreds. Maybe thousands. The shelves full of them reached up high above to the vaulted ceiling, a ladder on a track that wheeled back and forth around the room was needed to reach the top shelves.

Digging through them now, just about every one looked familiar. The rules came to her in flashes here and there looking at the box:

“Player three spins the spinner to find out which cake they will be baking…”

“…the shoulder buttons control the seal migration patterns…”

“…should the same player take all 19 tricks, a penalty is incurred…”

“..until the player to the left of the first player steals the second-from-the-right player’s play (assuming these are not the same player)…”

“…play continues until the flan has melted…”

“…sentient plants gain a +19 buff to cunning against psychics…”

On some level, she wanted to challenge him in Fekiss once again. She’d come so close to winning… though, technically, they had never finished their game the last time. Earning memories from her time alive was a huge draw, but if she was honest, winning Caplan’s memories was also a rush. She had torn her room apart that first week trying to find a small jar full of Fekiss story-tiles hoping to be able to play. But no luck. She had to have every game in existence—and had played through most of them—but she certainly didn’t have her set of Fekiss tiles.

What else, then? She had plenty of card games, perhaps she could convince Caplan to play those? Or another board game?

All at once, it struck her: whatever the Captain was, he was an old soul.

Video games.

She felt a perverse satisfaction at her scheme, though there was almost an immediate sense of guilt. She loved games, she had always loved the stories you could tell: whether it was a simple game of chess or the most immersive RPG. She had a Task here in Purgatory—it said so on her little slip of paper. Was it playing all the games? Was it beating all the games?

But ever since her minor defeat with the Captain, she had become obsessed with the idea that if she could just beat Caplan…

But Caplan would be asking for a game. She was fairly certain of that. And playing on her terms could be a positive boon. That is, if Caplan would even play a game where there was no wagering. Especially wagering something high stakes as memories.

She could find a cooperative game? Force Caplan to play with her instead of against her. But who knows if he would go for that? Would she miss the thrill of competition?

Nel sighed. She hadn’t been this stressed out in a long time. Collapsing on the foot of her bed, she wrapped up on a blanket and switched on War of the Monoliths. It had been a while since she spent any time in the Grontion 37H galaxy. Other things had been getting in the way. She pulled the blanket up over her head and loaded her last save.

There was a knock at the door.

Cursing, she paused the game and shluffed out of her blanket to open the door. Ephraim was on the other side, hands in pockets, rocking nervously back on his heels.

“Oh, hey Nel! Umm, you left pretty quick and I just wanted to check on you—WOAH!” His eyes got wide when he saw the walls full of shelves behind her. “I’ve never seen your room! That’s… that’s crazy!”

The wonder in his voice made Nel smile, and she stepped aside and gestured him into the room. He stepped in tentatively, head whipping back and forth to take in all the colorful game boxes.

“Thanks for checking on my Ephraim, I just needed to take a little break. To be honest, this whole deal with Cap—erm, the Captain has got me a little stressed. I was just plopping down to play a game.”

“Oh man, is this it?” He pointed to the screen. “It looks awesome!” It was just the pause-menu screen. “What’s it about?”

A few minutes later, Ephraim in his stocking feet was lying on his belly watching Nel play War of the Monoliths. Nel sat by crosslegged and explained the game as she played, careful to go to gameplay sections to avoid talking over the cutscenes.

“So then, these people captured a Pelethet Obelisk—“

“--The ones that alter physics to make FTL travel possible?”

“—yeah, those. They captured one, and they gave me the choice to help them, and now I’m helping them reprogram the obelisk to defend their galaxy.”

“Oh my gosh! That’s exciting!” He propped his head in his arms. Nel could feel him bouncing his leg on the bed. Once the game had his rapt attention, Nel felt comfortable actually continuing on the story sections.

“Doctor,” said an Ugomor Fanatic, “Now that you have found the Spatial Augmentation Codes within the obelisk, you have an unprecedented opportunity to give glory to the Ukmans…”

“He wants you to reprogram it for the Ugomor order!?” Ephraim raged, scooching forward on the bed. “But they’re fanatics that want to terraform the homes of all those Klephthyst monoforms!”

“Yes, but that was their territory before they were driven off by the Oia Empire.”

“Who knows what they could do with the obelisk, though?”

“Same could be said for anyone that gets their hands on it, though. It’s incredibly powerful.”

“But the Ugomor has an agenda that’s more than just ‘keep the peace.’”

“Sure. But I bet the Grontion Council doesn’t just want to ‘shield the galaxy’ against other Pelethet Obelisks. They’re gonna wanna launch a counter-offensive, right?”

“Yeah, but you can stop them from doing that! Make sure they just use it as a shield!”

“I could do that a lot easier with the support of the Ugomor Cult on my side…”

“Bwagh!” Ephraim’s face paffed forward into the quilt. He leaned his temple against her leg, and Nel almost missed a jump she was trying to make on the screen. When she didn’t move away, Ephraim cleared his throat, scooched his body further up the bed so that his shoulder lay against Nel’s leg.

“Do you wanna try it, for a while?” Nel offered, gently, holding out the controller.

“I think I might screw something up…” there was an honest blush in Ephraim’s ears, but he held eye contact with Nel for a long moment.

There was another knock on the door, and it swung open tentatively.

“Nel? You still awake?” Ruth poked her head in the door, holding a bottle of champagne and what might have been a placemat, “I know you were worried about how you’re going to get one up on the Captain so I—“ she stopped when she saw the two of them on the bed. “Oh geez… I’m sorry guys…”

“We’re playing one of my video games,” Nel cleared her throat. “Come on in, it’s a big bed…”

“Well, no actually,” Ruth pulled her long braid forward over her shoulder and tugged it firmly. “I just was worried about you so I thought I’d give you an out if you wanted. Here, I’ll leave the champagne.”

She set the champagne inside the door and whirled around—braid flying behind her as she rushed out the door.

“Oh, I should go to bed,” Ephraim stood, just as quickly.

“What? Okay…” Nel paused her game.

“Maybe next time I’ll really give it a shot,” he pointed to the tv screen. “G—Goodngiht.”

He stumbled over the champagne bottle on the floor on his way out, sending it rolling against the wall, and he was gone in another moment.

Nel fell back onto her bed with an exasperated sigh.

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The next part of this story was chosen already… but in you can Choose once we catch up to Part 16! Please keep reading?

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