Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 88010 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 440(@200wpm)___ 352(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88010 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 440(@200wpm)___ 352(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
My nephew looks like a younger version of me; well, technically, my brother. He has the same long, dark hair, golden eyes, and a general facial resemblance, albeit less mature. He is wearing an oversized pink sweater and sitting in front of equipment designed in the human realm. He begged for it. He promised me he would work on tools I could use in the human world. The computer is a mystery to me, but he gave me very specific instructions for what he wanted.
He does very little other than look at those screens now. I haven’t actually seen him in months. He’s been working on a project, some kind of code. He explained it to me once, but I wasn’t entirely listening. I have little interest in human baubles with no inherent virtue or value.
He pulls the headphones away from his head and gives me a smile. Equinox has been in my guardianship since the unfortunate incident with his parents, my brother and sister-in-law, when he was just a little whelp.
“Hello, Uncle.”
“I have taken a human mate, Equinox.”
“Good for you, old man.”
I just barely resist the urge to cuff him around the ear. He may yet be due a beating, but I want to make sure I give it for the right reasons.
“Why does my new human mate, who has only just arrived in our realm, already know the entire geography of our continent?”
I ask the question quietly and carefully, not wanting to tip my hand to him. I want him to make a confession.
“Oh,” he says. “Well.”
“Well?” My brow arches.
He looks nervous. “I can explain. Almost.”
“You can almost explain?”
He has the grace to look very slightly ashamed. “I wanted to tell you, but once it all blew up, I couldn’t find a good moment and I thought maybe it would all blow over before I really even needed to tell you.”
“What blew up, Equinox?”
“Well, you know, the humans were hiding from the sickness, and we couldn’t go and visit them for years. I missed their company.”
“Go on,” I prompt him.
“So I used the computer to make a video game. Which…” He looks at me, as if trying to gauge how much I will possibly understand. “It is a digital world that people could enter from their phones, or their laptops, or their desktops, and then it came out on consoles. The phone version was a cut-down version, in which some currency could be transferred to the main game, so you never had to stop playing.”
“None of this explains why a human just told me the geography of a world she has never seen before.”
“I had to make a world for the game to take place in, and I already knew this one, so…”
“Inspiration? Or you designed our world inside this game world and now millions of humans have been exposed to the realities of a realm they were never supposed to know about, let alone be familiar with.”
“Okay, so. It might be more the latter, but to be fair, Uncle Ornix, nobody ever said I couldn’t do that. Am I wrong?”
“Yes, Equinox. You are wrong. The primary edict when it comes to the human world is that the secrets of the realm…
“Should never be shared unless the human is to be brought here for all eternity.”
I hear my voice come through the speakers of the computer, finishing my sentence the way Melissa finished one earlier.
“I might have recorded some of your more common sayings and used them for the world boss,” Equinox explains.
“I’m the boss of a game world?”
“Well, sort of. It doesn’t mean the same thing to them. You’re not in charge of the world, assigning tasks. World boss means you’re more the final villain. Humans have to team up in groups of fifty to try to defeat you.”
“You created a game that reveals our world, and encourages them to group up and slay me?”
“It sounds bad when you say it like that.”
“It is bad, Equinox. It is very bad. I should destroy that computer of yours.”
“Well I don’t run the servers from here anyway so all that would do would delay the release of the DLC.”
“And the DLC is?”
“I’m adding an expansion pack in which players can build ships and use them to battle dragons.”
“Oh, so yet again, the humans are encouraged to, let me understand this correctly… hurt dragons.”
“Humans have always wanted to slay dragons. It’s not my idea. I’m just running with what works. You’ve got to follow the market. You can’t define it. That’s just arrogance. Humans slayed us out of existence in their world. They’re very into it.”
“Equinox, you are on the verge of spending the rest of your life in my deepest, darkest dungeon. I imagine they are also a playable area in your little game.”
“They might be.”
I sigh. Deeply. “Shut it down. Shut it all down.”