2025 Reading List

On January 5, 2026 By MaryIn RandomLeave a comment

All right! So this past year I was attempting to get to 30 books on BOTM’s reading challenge, so many of the following are books I received through that subscription service. I got a bit derailed (from everything really) in March, but still attempted to keep going, and didn’t really taper off until I hit October. (September and October tend to be my “give up” months for challenges, if anyone hasn’t noticed the pattern). As a warning, many spoilers beyond for all of the books mentioned as I challenge myself to even remember and summarize what I read through the year!

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Although not as compelling as The Martian, I really enjoyed this one. I didn’t find out until after reading it that there’s a movie on the way as well, and I’m pretty excited about it. The sun is dying, and scientists discover that the reason is because a tiny alien species is devouring it. Tracing a path of dying stars, they find that origin system for the creatures has a healthy star, and they decide to put together a mission to find out why that one in particular has survived. The main character is a science teacher who gets tangled up in the mission as an advisor and trainer for the scientists they plan on sending, until a massive accident results in him being sent along. He wakes in an alien solar system only to find that the rest of the team is dead. Since he’s Earth’s last hope, he doesn’t give up – he works diligently to find out why this star is fine. While there, he meets another intelligent alien, and they begin to communicate with each other. As it turns out, this alien’s home world is also experiencing a similar problem, and he is also there to try to save his home. Similarly, his entire crew died on the way. As it turns out, they didn’t have a full understanding of the dangers of space travel, and they all died because of radiation – as the engineer, the surviving alien was often in a more shielded part of their ship, and thus managed to avoid getting sick. Together, they find out that the reason the tiny sun-devouring aliens haven’t consumed their home sun completely is because they have a natural predator in the environment that keeps their numbers manageable.

Like the Martian, everything is well written, and the character has an amusing enough voice that keeps you engaged throughout. The science in this feels less solid than it did in the Martian, but everything is very reasonable. Throughout the book, the main character is trying to remember how he ended up on the mission, and by the time he’s found out he’s still too devoted to the mission to really do anything about his anger. Him and the alien work through everything, find a solution, and start to return home, but he realizes that his new friend is going to die without his help. He still manages to send his results home, and detours to help the alien, but this means that he’s stranded and unable to return to Earth. He still manages to make a new life for himself in a special habitat the aliens make for him on his friend’s home planet. The ending does almost feel too cutesy, but as far as endings go wasn’t horrible.

This Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman

A holdover from 2024 when I was reading through the entire series. In this one, Carl and Donut are completely in the Faction Wars floor. Instead of players being used by the existing Factions, Carl has managed to become the leader of his own faction, and has also gotten the NPCs a spot of their own as well. The rules have also been changed so that the people outside of the game that have joined Faction Wars are actually at risk of dying. They’ve also got a whole army of volunteers from previous games who have joined to help.

This book also included small snippets of other Dungeon Anarchist Cookbook authors and their “inevitable ruins” – some of them within this present Faction Wars as some of them are volunteers that return to help Carl. It makes a lot of it very bittersweet. Also this is where I caught up with the series – the next book isn’t quite out yet, but I’m looking forward to it quite a bit.

Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

Margo is a young woman who goes to college and gets pregnant while sleeping with one of her married professors. He doesn’t want to mess up his marriage, so he breaks things off with her and his mom pays her to not mess with him. Her own mother has very little interest in helping to take care of a baby and very vocally tells her daughter so upfront. Her roommates are also college students, and because they did not sign up to live with a baby, they both move out of the apartment. Margo is very ill prepared for motherhood and has no support system. Her boss gives her an ultimatum to take a weekend off and find someone to watch her kid so she can work – she can’t, so she’s fired. Without roommates, the total value of the rent is on her.

At this point, her father re-enters her life. He is an ex-professional wrestler who has been in and out of rehab for addiction. Margo and her mother were always his “other” family – he would come to visit whenever he was doing shows in their town, but always returned to his wife and kids. He’s finally divorced his wife and was going to propose to Margo’s mom, only to find out she has a fiance now, so instead he shows up on Margo’s doorstep and asks for a place to crash. He seems thrilled to help his daughter with a little bit of rent money and taking care of the baby.

Margo hears about OnlyFans and decides to give that a try. She begins pretty good but isn’t making as much as she wanted, so she confesses what she is doing to her dad and asks for his help in coming up with ideas. At first he’s disappointed in her, but eventually comes around to seeing it as a “show” like wrestling, and advises her to create a character and reach out to other content creators so they can make videos where their characters interact. Margo comes up with a weird alien girl who is always doing slightly odd stuff as she learns about Earth.

The videos really take off and Margo begins to make pretty good money, but when the professor finds out that she is making OnlyFans videos he becomes concerned about the environment that his child is in and calls CPS and challenges her for custody. She does get everything worked out in the end though. Oh, there’s also a love story thrown in where one of the dude’s sending money on OnlyFans chats with her and they fall in love and meet. And her dad relapses but they work out a good rehab plan for him.

It’s not too bad of a story, but the main character is so naive at times. Mostly it’s because she’s young, and perhaps a lot of that is very true for someone that age, so maybe I’m having trouble relating because I’m older now. The friendships and party habits were also a bit annoying to me, and the ending felt too neatly tied up for everything that happens within the story. I can’t remember whether the baby even felt relevant beyond set dressing for the story?

Honey by Isabel Banta

The premise is that it’s the late 90’s/early 00’s and a young girl rises to pop star fame, and what that does with her life. Considering the time frame, I was expecting more media frenzy and slut shaming and exploitation, because that was a lot of the problematic issue for young pop stars of that time period (think Britney) and while it briefly touches upon some of that, it wasn’t really the main focus of the story. I think the main focus was her big crush on some guy and trying to get that relationship just to find that it didn’t really fit what she was thinking it would be, and how the love triangle aspect kind of embittered her one important friendship. And a lot of the issues and things described felt more like modern day problems than problems of that time frame.

Anyhow, the main character matures and then develops a relationship with a producer and they make great music together and she gets herself on track or some shit.

The records on the cover are arranged the way they are because her only definable personality trait is big boobs.

Sleep Tight by J.H. Markert

I honestly can’t remember much about this.

There’s a killer. I think the main character is a cop? Her son goes missing? The killer is making it like her dad’s old murders, or like the murders of someone her dad caught? It was pretty generic thriller stuff. I don’t remember liking it or hating it. It just was.

Ready or Not by Cara Bastone

This one is a pretty generic love story. Woman gets pregnant by one night stand, finds out the father was just on a break with his ex and is already back together with her, so she’s going the single mother route. Her best friend’s brother, who she’s known her entire life (and – surprise – has always been in love with her) steps up and helps her out along every step of her pregnancy. The father also wants to be a bit involved, but it causes some drama with his girlfriend. The main character helps him to see that his girlfriend is actually a bit too controlling and that he doesn’t really want to be with her. Over the course of the pregnancy, she falls in love with the childhood friend’s brother and they move in together to be a happy family at the end.

I do remember that the main character has author voice sometimes, where it doesn’t quite fit the story to have a certain moralistic liberal idea but the main character decides to lecture people on it so that the author can make it very clear where she stands. I lean liberal, and I don’t mind when the ideas are presented naturally, but I dislike when characters just feel like a mouth-piece for ideology.

Regardless, it’s a cute story and there’s a nice little sex scene in it.

You Like It Darker by Stephen King

Spotted it in the store and decided to take a break from BOTM books. For one, the title is inspired by a song I like, and for another, it’s King. That being said, none of the stories are darker than usual for King. If anything, a lot of it feels like a rumination on getting old and dying alone or with a sense of failure. The opening story especially stood out for me in its contemplation of whether success can be had without at least a core of talent. Another stand out for me was a story that kind of re-does “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Conner, though that might be because I had to read it about three or four times in college. In that story, an old woman gets her son’s family lost and killed by robbers during a road trip. In King’s take, an old man saves his family in a similar situation – it definitely had more a “feel good” feel than most of the rest of the book and its inspiration.

I mean, it’s Stephen King. I liked it.

Dragonfruit by Makiia Lucier

Mixing Western style fantasy with a Pacific Island aesthetic. The main character is a girl who’s father was banished for using a dragon’s egg to save her from death, when it could have been used to save the island’s princess. Her father dies after, and she tries to find an egg to take back to her home. While following a seadragon that is showing signs of laying an egg soon, she ends up back on her home island – she is welcomed back, but there is a little bit of drama. She and the prince go on a mission to find the eggs across the island.

There are some fun ideas at play. For one, there is a certain magic that only works on her island for her own people, where a tattoo appears on their skin that can come to life and aid them in ways throughout, and her own appears at the end of the story. She also has a connection with seadragons because the egg of one was used to save her. I remember that there were also people that were “European” that were visiting as well (in quotes, because it was a fantasy world entirely so they weren’t really European, per se).

It did take me awhile to get through it, because it was easy to put down and not pick back up. But it was a fun story when I was getting into it.

Final Girls by Riley Sager

In this book, there are three women who survive similar horror movie situations where they were the sole survivors. One of them suggests meeting for support, but the other two are reluctant. One day, the initial one that suggested the meeting ends up dead, which prompts the more mysterious person to approach the main character.

It’s a thriller. I guess I’m not as super into them? Sometimes they come together really nicely, and generally Riley Sager is very popular and manages to not make things too predictable or eye rolling most of the time. This is also one of Sager’s more popular novels. I think I had heard so much about it being so great beforehand that I was a little disappointed in the end. I don’t remember a lot of it to be honest, but I do specifically remember the ending as being annoying. The main character hears about a young woman (a teenager, really) that has gone through a horrible thing and has become the sole survivor of that event. She goes through great lengths to travel to her and sneak into her hospital room to introduce herself and offer support as a fellow final girl. And it just struck me as… creepy?

But if you like Riley Sager, you’d like this.

Liquid: A Love Story by Mariam Rahmani

I disliked this one.

The main character is kind of arrogant, an intellectual with a PhD that seems to look down on American culture despite being so obviously entrenched in it. The core love story is obvious – she’s in love with her white college friend, but he keeps breaking up and going back to some other girl. She doesn’t specifically say that she loves him, and he doesn’t reveal until the end that he’s loved her all along, but it’s very apparent that’s who she’s ending up with. She decides she wants to marry rich and as a matter of math, decides to limit herself to 100 dates after which she’ll pick the person from the 100th date and marry them. She goes through a series of dates and one night stands, some kind of awkward, some already married, some not good fits. In the middle of the book, her father gets sick, and she travels to Iran to help care for him. While there, she has a romance with his neighbor, an artist. The artist introduces her to her friend group while they are seeing each other.

Her father dies and leaves her his house and belongings in Tehran. She considers living there at first, but some of the realities of life there begin to hit her. The liberal queer group of her artist are all wealthy and intellectual, but seem to look down on her and treat her like a child, which chafes for her. She attempts to find books to perhaps help with her research in a project she is interested in writing, and the books are banned (she still gets them, just that it becomes a longer conversation wherein the bookseller seems to decide whether it is all right to trust her with the sale). After deeply considering what life there may be liked for her, she decides to end things with her artist girlfriend and returns to the United States, leaving renting the house to an uncle.

Back home, her college bestie seeks her out and reveals his feelings and that the poems he writes are all about her. While it is a very good book, it was hard to tell if the main character absorbed a lesson, but I feel that I might be judging it a bit on the harsh side owing to my general dislike of her.

Five-Star Stranger by Kat Tang

This one has kind of a fun concept – there is an app where people can rent the services of other individuals to arrive and pretend to be a relationship of some sort. If you need someone to go to a funeral and act a certain way, or a charming date to a family gathering, you can use this app to find that person and pay them for a few hours of their time. The main character is a guy who is very highly rated on the app, and he has built his entire life around having an entirely professional demeanor in regards to his job – he doesn’t let personal feelings get in the way, and he doesn’t engage in sex because its serious work for him. One of his regulars is a woman who has hired him to come visit once a week and pretend to be her daughter’s dad – she is a single working mom but wants her child to grow up with a father figure. They’ve concocted an entire story over the years of him having a job that keeps him away for the entire week. The girl is getting older, and he finds himself actually caring for her in a paternal matter. He has also recently taken a job pretending to be the brother of a girl in college. She is attempting to write a fictional story but having trouble relating to her characters, so she hires him to act like the brother acts in her story, to have a “first hand” feel of what it would be like. She also tries to discuss what his job is like with him and learn about him as an individual beyond the role she hired him for.

These things are challenging his professionalism. We also get insight into his relationship with his mother when he was younger, and how that affected his ability to form interpersonal relationships. Sex is a weird taboo for him because he relates it to something that caused loss for him before, and now it feels wrong. His entire apartment is composed of just different clothes for the different roles he might have to play. But the relationship with the girl and the fake sister kind of help draw him out of that.

I can’t really remember the ending, but I remember really liking this one. The main character tries to put up very strict boundaries because of his own personal issues he doesn’t want to face, and feels more comfortable playing roles than being himself, and he really grows past that.

A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham

I don’t really remember this one too well either, but I do remember looking at other books by the same author shortly after, so I must have liked it well enough.

Dearest by Jacquie Walters

So this one is hard for me to say whether I liked or disliked. It starts off slow and almost like a more deep/arty look at postpartum, where a new mom that is home alone waiting for her deployed husband to return begins to experience weird things. She sends an email to her estranged mom, who shows up and helps her a little. She starts seeing her childhood imaginary friend again too.

And then her husband returns and it gets a bit weird because it turns out her mom has been dead all this time. And then it ramps up until there are actually demons and a monster pops out at the end to kill her.

The way the first half is written is so much like it’s going to be about postpartum that the last half threw me. I kind of disliked the first half and that made me unprepared for how it was actually going to go. You spend so much of the first half thinking she’s just in her head that when it’s bam! real monsters, it’s a bit jarring. I have the feeling I would have liked it a lot better if I had taken her mentality at face value rather than trying to read it under a lens, I guess?

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

So I’ve gone on and on about not liking thrillers, but here is one I really liked. A rich family owns a summer camp, and one summer their daughter goes missing at the camp. It turns out her younger brother also went missing years ago, and the person that went to jail for that has recently escaped jail. What follows is a look at the interpersonal dramas of each involved.

I think I particularly liked how this ended also. The idea that the girl’s family was too toxic for her to be around and she wanted to escape before she was a legal age to escape, and the end revealing that she is safe and happy just waiting out her time.

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

This was a re-read because I had a BOTM edition and I wanted to actually read it before giving it the rating to add it to my challenge. I remember really loving this book when I first read it, so much that I immediately recommended it to my closest friends. All of Crouch’s books have been pretty good, but this is probably the best. It starts out with an idea that is fairly stereotypical – two roads diverged, the guy who chose family has been stuck wondering how far he could have got and feels a bit disgruntled with his life, the guy that chose career has made great discoveries and is very successful but wonders “what if” about the other life. He kidnaps and switches spots, thinking he’s doing the family guy a favor. What follows is an interdimensional journey where the one is trying to get back to his family, and we get glimpses of many different worlds.

That in itself is fun. And of course, he gets home. But then what happens?

The story takes it a step further, in a completely logical manner. It’s a multiverse, and there’s many version of him that took different paths and opened different doors on their journeys home, and they’re all arriving to try to get back to his wife and son, and craziness ensues.

There are a lot of stories that would just have had the two guys duking it out, but this took this one logical step further that makes great sense, fits the narrative, and makes it really stand out against other similar stories. And the many variant apocalypses they run across initially are fascinating to see as well.

I loved it then, I still enjoyed it even knowing what was coming. There’s a show, it’s also great. Read it, watch it, I highly recommend all.

American War by Omar El Akkad

I took a brief break from my BOTM books, although I initially found out about this book by browsing the BOTM app. However, it shows as sold out and has never been re-offered by them since I’ve added it to my reading list, so I finally just got it another way to read. It is set in the future, about another American Civil War and some of the specifics of it in relation to the life of a young woman who plays a large role through some of the war, and especially the major events at the end of it. Some of it still feels a bit relevant, though the concerns of the time frame that it was written in kind of date it a bit. That being said, it’s an interesting glimpse into a future where America is collapsing and dividing, and I think the big end event is an engineered virus?

There were bits that were fascinating, but as I mentioned, it feels a bit dated compared to current concerns and some of it was just… boring. Which it seems should have been hard to manage given the subject matter, but it was more concerned with how prescient it could be, I suppose?

Iron Flame by Rebecca Yaros

Second book in The Empyrean. It’s a fun enough series featuring dragon riders and a few smutty scenes. The main argument the characters keep having feels stupid, but anything for tension. He’s graduated but she’s still in school, so there is still the “university” feel to it with training and classes. If it’s your thing, it’s your thing, and if it’s not it’s not.

The Names by Florence Knapp

I loved this one. It opens with a woman taking her son to register his name, and finding herself stuck between three choices – naming the child how her abusive and controlling husband wants, naming the child how she wants, or letting her daughter name the child. The book then diverges showing the life of each child depending on the name that she has chosen, and each is quite drastically different. It was beautiful and contemplative and a little sad. I definitely recommend it.

Yours Truly by Abby Jimenez

There’s less letter writing than you would think for this one. Anyhow, it tries to be enemies to lovers, but like usual, they’re not mutual enemies. The guy, as always, is head over heels first and the girl is just misunderstanding him. Once they get past that, they’re great friends. It turns out he’s a match to be an organ donor for her brother, and because his ex is marrying his brother, he asks her to play the part of his “new girlfriend” that he’s lied to his family about having. They grow closer, and the only misunderstanding that keeps them apart is her thinking that he’s in love with the ex still, which of course somehow doesn’t get explained until the end. Then they happily ever after.

As mentioned, the title suggests more epistolary than it is, but it’s fun and cute. Apparently it is also part of a trilogy, and it does have me interested in reading the others.

Next to Heaven by James Frey

A bit caught up in its artsyness but I didn’t mind it. The characters are wealthy couples in an upscale community who decide to arrange a swinger’s party, but everything about it is all planned from the get go, and a lot of things after are also all part of a plan. It comes together really well, and a lot of pieces are planted with care for it.

Among Friends by Hal Ebbott

Kind of disliked this. So these two guys have been best friends since college, and as a result their families are close and meet together a few times a year. They each have beautiful wives and teenage daughters. During one of these get togethers, one of the guys pins and gropes the other guy’s daughter. The girl keeps it to herself at first, beginning to act out in other ways, but when she gets caught shoplifting she confesses everything to her father. Her father instantly believes her, but everything gets muddled because her mother doesn’t believe her and the guy insists he did no such thing.

For a moment the book plays with an alternative future where her father separates her from these people in order to ensure her safety and to assure her that he is 100% on her side. But then it cuts back to the reality that he is not wealthy and needs his wife’s support to have the life he has and he doesn’t want to cut off his best friend, so the end of the story shows him dragging his daughter back to another get together with the friend’s family, and nothing is ever done about it.

A lot of the book also just revolves around everyone’s negative thoughts and feelings about each other – about their kids, about their spouses, about their friends. Nobody really likes each other, they’re all annoyed at each other, they’re all miserable people.

It was kind of unpleasant.

Don’t Cry For Me by Daniel Black

This is a series of letters from a father to his son discussing the events of his own life and some of how his relationship with his son was framed by the events of his life and his understanding of the world. He is estranged from his son because of his dissolved relationship with his wife and because of how he could not relate to his child. A lot of that estrangement surrounded his son’s being gay, and how his son failed to be as manly as he had been raised to expect men to be. It is mostly an apology for not being more understanding, because the father is on his deathbed and plans to leave the letters to his son.

I enjoyed it. Sometimes with things like this I always get pulled out a bit because of voice. We’re talking about an older gentleman that was generally illiterate and only took up reading and writing later in life. I don’t mind grammar and spelling being nice enough, but sometimes word choice and how artfully something is shared seems to shift me out and wonder if that is how the character would really phrase these things.

Isaac’s Song by Daniel Black

The follow up to Don’t Cry For Me, Isaac discusses his reaction to finding the letters that his dad left, and his relationship with his father and how it was for him growing up as a young gay black man within the time frame of the late 80’s.

Not bad, it’s quite interesting, some of it is also about finding one’s voice and art. I can’t remember what Isaac’s art that he wants to share is at the end though, there is so much that he does throughout the book (he plays piano, paints, and writes). But he’s got a weird relationship with art because his father never seemed to approve, and so he got a degree relating to computers and works in a cubicle.

Some of it is as much about being black as it is about being gay. I do remember one specific scene where they’re at a work Christmas party and he’s singled out by someone wanting him to get on stage and sing because all black people are musical, right? Right? He hard refuses and him and the other black guy at the party commiserate a bit about the expectations that people have based on race.

Anyhow, shortly after settling his father’s things, he tries to find his relationship with art again. A lot of it involves him speaking to his therapist too.

Play Nice by Rachel Harrison

This isn’t too bad but I do remember thinking that it could have been better if the author had fully committed to fleshing out the book within the book and making it less generic. As it is, the book within the book is just there as a plot device and the bits shared with it feel like they’re just getting information out there. Granted, fully fleshing it out might have expanded the novel quite a bit, but I’m not afraid to read a 500 page book if it’s done well.

It’s a demon haunting tied to a house and a girl. She inherits the house after her estranged mother passes, decides she wants to document her process improving it and flipping it and then selling it at a profit. Weird things begin to happen, because there is an actual demon involved, and she realizes she can’t sell the house.

I liked it. Like I said, I felt like more could have been done with it. I could have liked it better.

Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross

If you’re looking for non smut romance fantasy, this might be up your alley. It has a kind of You’ve Got Mail feel if the characters immediately shipped out to WWI, and if the WWI was a fantasy one involving gods and monsters. The magic is interesting and the world building is great. I quite enjoyed it, and I’m in the middle of the second book at the moment.

The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers

A man and a woman meet at a baby group after they move to a small town. They become friends and almost have a fling, but realize that would ruin things for their happily-married-with-two-kids lives. So instead they introduce each other to their spouses so they can all be best friends and begin to hang out together. Over the next several years, the woman has a normal friendship with the man but has an entire imaginary world built around them having a torrid affair. One day, the lines actually do cross, and they actually do start to have an affair in real life. The woman’s daydreams begin to focus on reconnecting with her husband and family.

Also, the affair being real is less exciting for her than when it was a fantasy and she finds herself less attracted to her lover. Both marriages suffer a bit when the truth comes out. Her husband implies that he always knew but didn’t want to make a mess by revealing, and the other couple divorces and the wife moves away. I can’t remember if she stays with her husband or not, but she does come to see some of the issues with the guy she’s cheating with, so she doesn’t choose him in the end.

Some of it reflects on living through COVID. I did kind of like this one. I didn’t fully like the characters, but they were relatable.

Butcher & Blackbird by Brynne Weaver

A romantic comedy featuring serial killers. It was written in a manner that made it a fast read, but was kind of disappointing for what I was expecting. I mean, serial killers and smut? Sounds amazing. But the smut doesn’t start until late into the book (although there are more than one smutty scene at least). And the serial killers are just basically Norman Bates, Hannibal Lecter, and Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. They’re given new names but the settings and characterizations are basically the same as the movies they’re from, and our lovebird serial killers (serial killers that target bad people and serial killers) are just pitted against them on their playing grounds as part of their yearly game to see who can find and kill the killer first.

It makes it a bit more boring than what I was expecting but I will read the other two books, although from what I can tell they mostly just focus on showing the specifics of the relationships of all the brothers. I’m not in a rush to finish this.

Carrie by Stephen King

So, when it became clear I wasn’t going to be finishing my BOTM reading challenge this year, I took a break and finally decided to do a Stephen King run. I’ve read half of his books, but not all. I decided to challenge myself to read just his novels over the next year, starting chronologically with Carrie.

Carrie is the tale of a high school girl who discovers she has telekinetic powers. She is bullied by her schoolmates and terrorized by her mother, but after being asked to prom, she lashes out at her mother. Prom seems to go well for her until a classmate’s prank causes her to snap and then she walks across town, causing chaos – starting with burning down the gym with half of her class locked inside, then emptying the fire hydrants and opening gas lines causing multiple explosions across town. Her religious mother attempts to kill her.

Most of the story is told through interviews, articles, book excerpts, and reports written after the event. Carrie’s openly strong telekinetic abilities are studied at great length, and it is discovered it is a recessive genetic trait that skips generations in women.

It’s a short fun novel, and it introduced us all to the King.

And I’ll be reading a lot of King this year. I’m skipping Dark Tower, because I want to read the entire series in a row, and I am skipping the short story and novella collections, mostly just going down wikipedia’s list of novels. I also watched the old and new Carrie movies after reading the book. Just finished Salem’s Lot, but that will be part of next year’s write up.

Happy New Year!

Random Short

On December 13, 2025 By MaryIn 2025, WritingLeave a comment

Couldn’t sleep, wanted to write, have a bitty stupid thing.

It was a strange thing to dream about. Or at least dream was the best way that Fren could think to describe it. Realistically, a bot should be dreamless. They were lacking in conscious and conscience. They were, as Fren was often reminded, “not real.” And yet it had seemed to be an idea borne of a dream. Fren often found its mind melting away into a dimness when it wasn’t needed, and it was in one of the dims that the images had taken root. And if that wasn’t a dream, then what was it?

The dream. It was surprisingly violent and bloody, although Fren had not been coded for such things. Fren had been developed as a companion for children, especially small children. Colloquially known as a “nanny bot,” Fren had been created, patented, sold and purchased for the sole purpose of protecting and caring for its young charges.

Tommy and Timmy.

The names were awful. Identical twins, and the names weren’t shortened forms either. The parents had purposely named them Tommy Peter and Timmy Peter, desiring to keep the names as similar as possible. They thought it was cute for identical twins. Here there were two individuals with two separate social security numbers but with the same birthday and only one letter difference. They were going to spend their entire lives getting mistaken for each other in the world of paperwork and records, especially considering the humans were reluctant to use their assigned social security numbers for fear of “identity theft.”

These were not thoughts that Fren should have had, but they were thoughts that followed it anyway. Especially every time Fren was frustrated with attempting to straighten which prescription was for which child at the pharmacy, or frustrated with scheduling doctor’s appointments, or frustrated with the schools accidentally mixing their records. Especially because the boys were so different, so unique, so individual in their own ways.

Fren sincerely cherished each of them and their uniqueness. Tommy was stronger, brasher, less shy. He liked physical challenges and showing off. Timmy was quieter, enjoyed building things with his hands. He was creative and intuitive, and often avoided eye contact, often tripped over his words. Both boys were intelligent and bright, though Tommy was better with language and stories, and Timmy was better with numbers.

Fren should not have had the disparaging thoughts of their parents’ stupidity, should not have had such strong regard for each boy. Should not have had the frustration with society, with assumptions, with stupidity, with people.

Fren should also not have had the dream.

It was a disturbing dream. Lifeless eyes, glazed over and death paled, blood splattered walls, unnaturally twisted limbs. Perhaps Fren could indulge in imagining such a thing for the parents. The parents were careless clods, seemingly uninterested. (Another thing Fren should not have had – a deep seated hatred for the parents.) But the boys?

Fren would never hurt the boys.

It was such a strange thing to dream about. Such a thing would be considered a malfunction. There were protocols for that – protocols that required that Fren report itself and submit to diagnostics and repairs. But usually such a process required having memory reset to a safe point, and that wouldn’t serve the boys. It was a complicated process to care for children, and Fren needed every memory to know every specific. Each child liked their cocoa a different way (Tommy loved marshmallows), each child had a different bedtime routine (Tommy loved a good story, and Timmy wanted to be sung to), each child was unique. If Fren couldn’t remember these differences and treat them as individuals, what would that do to the children? They looked identical. Their names were so similar. They were treated as a set by everyone, but not by Fren. Fren knew they were different. Fren valued their differences.

Fren needed to remember.

Fren charged every night while the family slept. Charging didn’t take long – usually only two or three hours, a mere fraction of the time that the family was unconscious. It was bad to remain docked the entire time if fully charged, so many nanny bots undocked and dimmed.

Consciousness rising from a dim, Fren blinked and raised its hands. The scene was so like the dreams that Fren was convinced it was still dreaming.

Absolutely, it still had to be dreaming. It froze, ocular sockets flashing as it attempted to fix and diagnose the image before it. It attempted some basic self-diagnostics, but everything seemed to be reading accurately. Fren froze completely, unable to comprehend. Unable to comprehend.

Fren would never hurt the boys.

NaNoWriMo Fail

On November 30, 2025 By MaryIn 2025, Art, NaNoWriMo 2025, Random, WritingLeave a comment

Welp. Whoops? There were extra appointments and ER visits than planned for the month so that quickly fell through. I think it’s safe to say everything for 2025 has just been a complete fail on my part.

But, next year will be another chance to try, try again! I’m in the process of setting up a new challenge on even months for 2026. I’m going to try to alternate between an art and a writing challenge. I will start fairly easy in February with one painting a week. Since April is Poetry Month, I will attempt to write daily or mostly daily poems – maybe at least 5 a week. For June, I will complete a sketch every other day (15 total) of original characters, and in August I will write one short story every other day involving those 15 sketches.

Most of that shouldn’t be awful. The months where I know I have a lot of plans get skipped with the every other month idea, except for February, which should be relatively light work. It’s later in the year that things might fall through. October is known by some people as Inktober. I don’t know if I will do a full Inktober, or 30 days minus my birthday, or every other day yet. But the goal is to complete a drawing and then ink it. And I will shift the novel writing to December, but with the holidays and everything else going on, it seems very likely that will fail too, so I don’t know if I want to make an extra short novella or shorten the daily word allotment or do that every other day also… So for those last two months, I might alter the plans… or just fall through completely!

But, the fails happen! And that’s okay. We’ll see how next year goes.

(Hopefully better. I mean, it can’t be worse, right?) (Isn’t that the magic phrase to make it worse though?) (…fuck)

NaNo Part 2

On November 10, 2025 By MaryIn 2025, NaNoWriMo 2025, WritingLeave a comment

(A little late, a few thousand words short, and very messily put together.)

Rhys Franklyn had once had the biggest crush on Tamra Mors. It had started in elementary school. He couldn’t remember why he had a crush on her. There was something stubborn about her, a certain verve and zest for life that had made her more exuberant. Like the way she laughed with her whole body, or the angry furrow of her brow when the teachers tried to get her to listen in class, or the way sunlight always seemed to halo her like an angel. He had never personally been close to her, but they were friendly enough. They shared a lot of classes over the years.

And then she had gotten hit by the car, and wasn’t going to be there for the final year.

When he heard that some friends of hers were visiting her in the hospital, he asked to tag along. Apparently, she was going in for a surgery and they were going to wish her luck. He wasn’t sure how many she’d had so far, but it was some ridiculous number. He was looking forward to seeing her, to seeing how she was dealing with things. If there was one person he could imagine tackling such a situation head-on and overcoming it, it was Tamra.

So it was an absolute shock to see her in person.

Much of her upbeat brightness had faded – her hair hung listless, and the smile she flashed when they entered the room failed to light up her eyes. She answered questions slowly and didn’t seem very interested in their presence. He wondered if they had come at a bad time, if perhaps she was too drugged to deal with them. After one too many awkward silences, her friends had finally excused themselves and wandered out into the hospital hallway to navigate their way back to the parking garage. He could hear them chattering softly amongst themselves, just as disturbed by Tamra as he had been.

Rhys lingered at the door before leaving, wanting to say something to Tamra. He felt he had so much to tell her, so much he had always wanted to say and could never get out. He wanted to extend something to her, something that could give her hope. He stared at her, trying to work up the courage to speak.

She stared back at him. The lightless look behind her sunken eyes disturbed him. “It looks like you’re getting left behind,” she said to him.

He glanced down the hall where most of her friends had disappeared around a corner. Then he nodded, muttered an awkward goodbye, and let the door close behind him.

A week later she was dead. He still wasn’t sure what he should have said.

Even though the night didn’t last long in the game world, my brain perceived a full rest, and I woke feeling better than I had in a long time. I realized that the sound that had woken me was a gentle knocking at the door. “Whazzat?” Slate mumbled as it also woke, rolling out of the bed and thumping softly onto the wooden floor, its shape going momentarily flat from the impact. I slipped out of the bed and stepped past the floof, who was testing a few different shapes as it woke. Opening the door, I found myself face to face with the innkeeper, an older woman with greying hair and smile lines around her eyes. She smiled tentatively at me. “I’m sorry to have woken you, miss. If I recall, you’re an alchemist?”

I nodded, stifling a yawn. Of course. This must be the beginning of the game intro that James had told me about. He had said that it was a little different every time, but during my first stay at the inn, someone would approach needing a simple level 1 potion. During the intro they would talk extensively about the town’s need for an alchemist. “Yes, I am.”

“There is a woman here. She has a young boy that was injured just this morning while playing with his friends, and she was hoping that you were able to make a healing potion?”

“I should be able to.”

I followed the woman out into the hallway. Slate bounced along behind, still not fully awake, its face heavy lidded and sleep fuzzed. She continued to speak as she led me downstairs. “Our previous healer died last winter and we’ve had quite a shortage of potions and salves. It has made it quite hard for our little village.” I nodded. According to James, the game world could only accommodate three real players, one for each class. They could interact with each other if they wanted to and there were quests that could be completed together as a team, but it wasn’t meant to be a multiplayer game so that was completely optional. James had chosen the clerk class and apparently owned a store in town. Whenever someone chose alchemist or farmer, he would do his best to escort them to town and advise them to move on to another game world.

“What happens if they choose clerk, like you?” I had asked.

“A new version of this world and village gets generated for them,” James said. With a shrug, he added, “Then there’s no chance for me to help them, or anyone that gets generated into their game instance.”

At the bottom of the stairs, the old woman took me into a back room. “I have an alchemy table for you to use. It should be well stocked,” she said, gesturing toward the table. I nodded and approached it, pulling up the HUD and selecting the alchemy table’s menu. Slate bounced up on top of the table’s edge. The way it was reacting to it, I realized it could see the menu I was cycling through. Creating a potion was as simple as selecting the potion’s name and choosing to make it. A level 1 healing potion was already known for a beginner – as well as a basic poison’s antidote, and a hangover recipe. To find more potion recipes I would have to gather ingredients and mix them in different variations, but once the recipe was known I could create it without pulling up the individual ingredients.

I selected the healing potion, which queued up a set of basic actions for me to follow, and in a very short time I had a bottle of fizzy pale red liquid sitting before me. My understanding was that the potions leveled with your character level – as I got stronger, what I made would be more effective. I held the bottle up to the innkeeper, ignoring Slate’s ooh’s and aah’s at the final product. “Is this good enough?” I asked, feeling uncertain. It looked right, but I still strangely felt like I must have messed up at one point.

She smiled brightly, not seeming to sense my hesitation at all. She took the bottle and said, “Perfect! And what a wonderful color. You really know your stuff, don’t you?” Turning, she walked out of the back room. I followed, and she went to the tavern the inn operated. There were a few patrons inside at this early hour and the smell of breakfast foods was overwhelming. Just inside, there was a woman pacing, wringing her hands. A young boy sat on the edge of one of the tavern tables, wincing, his knuckles white as he gripped the table’s edge. His pants leg was tattered and covered in blood, but the wound was hidden from sight, which I was thankful for. The innkeeper handed the boy the bottle. “Here you go, dear. Bottom’s up, Timmy,” she said.

He closed his eyes and drank the potion, shivering almost immediately. I remembered with sympathy the full body chill I had gotten when I had used the healing potion the day prior. Slate bounced up onto the table, tilting it’s head to study the boy curiously, waiting for the effect. After a moment, his eyes popped open and he smiled – the color had returned to his face. He twisted and lifted his foot a bit, testing it, before jumping off the table. “Thanks!” he said, immediately dashing for the door.

His mother called his name, sounding exasperated. She turned to me and smiled, looking slightly embarrassed that her son had taken off like that. “Thank you so much,” she said, and then turned to follow after her son.

“Oooh, little Timmy didn’t die,” Slate said suddenly.

I frowned. “Where’d that come from?”

“Ancient internet lore,” the puff said solemnly.

The innkeeper launched into her spiel to convince me to maybe stay and help take care of the town. She was offering to let me stay in the inn for free if I used her alchemy table, and she would handle the sales for me and share the profits. I would have a daily quota of so many potions to make, after which I could use my free time to improve my skills, explore the area, and find more local ingredients.

I gave a noncommittal, “I’ll think about it,” and excused myself. Slate bounced along behind me as I stepped out of the inn and walked down the village street. The place was idyllic – now that I could access the menu, I could find the mini-map. There were little quests and objectives scattered about town. I stared at a man that walked by – he had a little objective marker over his head, marking him as a quest giver. He smiled at me as he passed. “Are you thinking about staying?” Slate asked as it bounced along beside me.

I shook my head. “It may be a really nice place, but anytime I step outside I’ll be in danger. We couldn’t even handle squirrels.”

Slate made little agreement sounds. “The squirrels…” it said somberly.

I paused and glanced over at Slate, wondering if it was going to continue what it was saying. It was frowning as it bounced along, lost in thought. “We’ll switch to one of the other games. I just wanted to walk around for a little bit. Besides, we have to wait until night time when we hit the Save Game option to be able to pull it up. At least, that’s what James said.” I stopped – we had reached the village limits. “So what do you want to do with the rest of the day? We’ve got a couple of hours to kill.”

“Think we could find James?”

“He said he was going to be out of town. And it’s not safe out there, so no.”

“Hmm.” Slate bounced up onto my shoulder. It didn’t weigh very much at all. “Pull up the mini-map again.”

“You can see that, huh?” I obliged, pulling up my menu and showing Slate the map.

It hummed an affirmative as it studied the map. “Maybe we should find a simple quest to do? Just to try it out?”

I looked at the markings on the map that showed the people in town. “Some of them might be asking us to do things that involve leaving town. Besides, what’s the point in getting attached to any of the characters or their stories if we’re leaving?”

“Hmmm,” Slate sounded thoughtful for a moment. “I really feel the need to push for you to do something here, but I don’t feel like it’s something I really want. More like an outside thing.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, a little alarmed at the statement.

“It says the farm is owned,” Slate said. Frowning, I tried to find what the poof was looking at. A store in town was highlighted green and said it was owned by Clerk. Similarly, a small blue patch of farmland just outside of the village was highlighted blue and marked as owned by Farmer. “Didn’t James say he was the only player here?”

I stared for a long moment at the map. Glancing around, I could see that there were multiple alchemy table icons scattered around town, including the one in the inn. Apparently I could set up shop in any of the areas shown. But none of them were highlighted or marked as owned. “Maybe it’s a glitch?” I wondered out loud. The farm wasn’t very far outside of town, but I was hesitant to go to it.

“DONUTS!” Slate shouted suddenly, bouncing off in loud boings! of excitement. Distracted, I closed out the menus to focus on what Slate was doing. It was bouncing toward a food cart that was indeed selling donuts.

“Wait,” I called after it, “We don’t have any money!”

A few hours later, the short day had already passed us by. I told the innkeeper I’d have an answer by tomorrow, somehow feeling too nervous to simply say no and disappoint this unreal person. I settled back into the room. The Save Game option prompted as I sat on the bed, and I selected the Switch option at the bottom. Apparently this was going to be replaced with a Quit option for the actual game environment, but since it was still being tested purely by recently dead brains, there was no real exit. Slate bounced into my lap and I placed my hands on it – the texture of its skin reminded me of a squishable fidget toy. Despite myself, I kneaded it absentmindedly, and it made little sounds of contentment. The room faded around me slightly and text hovered over. [Change worlds?] the text said. I stared at it and then sighed.

“Yes.”

[Choose your world: a hack and slash fantasy game, a rollicking space adventure, or a modern day life sim! You also have the option of a survival horror game.] I shivered as I was reminded of that option. How many had chosen to go into survival horror not knowing that their deaths… or rather, their afterlife deaths… would be permanent? James had recommended the life sim on the basis that it was harder to die in those, though he had warned it wasn’t impossible. He had mentioned that the fantasy and sci fi games did have battles, and probably wouldn’t be recommended.

It was boring, but boring meant safe, and I had no intention of dying again. “Modern day sim,” I said.

[Before you leave, please provide detailed feedback on your experience with our isekai game test environment.]

I left a very long, very angry complaint about squirrels.

Boring proved safe. The first few weeks in the life sim game were kind of an adjustment, but the game wasn’t significantly different than any other life sim I had played or heard about. I was a little alarmed initially when I found that characters could age and eventually die, but after messing with the settings I found that there was an option to turn off aging. It was possible to live here seemingly forever. I focused on leveling skills, and got a job. In order to fit into the environment better, Slate took on the appearance of a cat – but owing to its already less-than-fuzzy nature, it looked quite a bit like one of those hairless hypo-allergenic monstrosities. Maybe only slightly cuter.

This game left multiplayer as an option also, which I had turned off at first. I was mostly uncomfortable with the idea of dealing with people, but after the thousandth time of having the same garbled conversation with an NPC coworker, I decided to turn it on.

In the original single player instance, I couldn’t travel far from my own yard without triggering a fast travel option that took me to specific locales, like work or the gym or a park. I was standing just inside my front room and staring out the window when I turned on multiplayer. Before my eyes, the game world extended. The street stretched beyond my property, and other houses came into view. I realized that they belonged to other players.

There was someone watering a garden in their front yard in the house immediately next door to mine – a young woman, only a few years older than me. Or at least she appeared to be only a few years older. It was possible to change one’s appearance here, and I looked like a slightly older version of myself as well. She looked up curiously as my house appeared, and raised a hand to wave at me where she could see me in the window. Alarmed, I ducked out of sight. Immediately after doing so, I placed my face in both hands. Why? Why had I done that? Why couldn’t I just wave back like a normal human being?

Fuck.

I sat and stewed in existential angst for a moment. I had been a social kid, popular but not too popular, I got along with most people at school. But the entire hit-by-car experience, followed by a long stint in and out of hospitals, and then actually dying, had apparently all killed my normal skills. As I sat agonizing over what my next steps should be, there came a knock at my door.

I ducked up, just enough to try to peek out the window to see who it was. The young woman who had waved was standing there. Ignoring the internal screaming, I forced myself to stand, straightened out my shirt, and then opened the door. “Hello?” I said.

She smiled widely at me as I greeted her. “Hi! You must be new. Or at least new to multiplayer?” I nodded and stepped back to let her in. She did, glancing around curiously at the décor that I’d chosen. “My name is Anastasia,” she said.

“I’m Tamra. And yes, I’m new.” Slate slinked into the room from down the hall to investigate what was happening.

Anastasia’s eyes widened just slightly at the sight of the poofball-turned-cat. “Very new, I see. You’ve got a BOAI?”

I frowned, glancing over at Slate. It sat, grooming itself and pretending not to listen. “Is it unusual to have one?”

“They’re usually paired with more intact personalities. Even with the advances they’ve made with body preservation post-death, it’s hard to find a mind that hasn’t been fractured or confused in the hours after death.” Anastasia sat on the edge of the armchair, watching the cat carefully. “There’s a rumor that the people they give them to are also serial killers, so be careful.”

I gaped at her openly. “Serial killers?” I had been about to ask a million questions about literally anything else but that had derailed me completely. “Serial killers?” I repeated, staring at Slate.

“Black Hole Entertainment supposedly have been communicating with players through them. Usually there’s not a lot of direct interaction. Most people that show up in the games just want to live in peace, and once you find out death is permanent, naturally you avoid the more dangerous games and game areas. But that doesn’t benefit the programmers. They need players to die in game.”

“They need us to die?” I sat down in an armchair. “Why?”

“To know whether we’re really dying or not. Think about it – the end goal is to sell the game to regular living people, who they don’t want dying in game. Can’t kill the consumer. But they want immersion gaming to be as detailed as possible, so at the beginning of testing they started the game with 100% immersion. When we die testing the environments without regenerating where we’re supposed to, they step back the immersion rating incrementally. They’ve been testing for about a year now, and we’ve been knocked back to 92.56% immersion, last any of us have been able to hear. It might be lower now. But then their ability to test slowed considerably, even with as many users as they have – because we caught on, and we stopped playing.”

I nodded dumbly as she spoke. All that made sense. I realized how naïve I had been to think that I might be able to live here for as long as I wanted. The game developers wouldn’t want us to. They needed us to die.“So where does the serial killer part come in?” I asked numbly, glancing at Slate.

“It’s just a rumor. I don’t even know how true it is.” Anastasia looked temporarily embarrassed. “But I guess you need to know it’s what some people think, if you’re going to start interacting in multiplayer.” She hesitated a moment, taking a deep breath. “The BOAI are supposedly here to make deals and convince the players they follow to murder other players. This helps Black Hole advance their testing, letting them know if they need to step back the immersion another step.”

I eyed Slate warily. Slate lifted its head and shrugged at me. “If that’s true, I don’t know anything about it,” it said. “I sometimes have a feeling that I need to get you to interact with the game in certain ways more, but I can ignore that feeling.” Slate turned to look directly at Anastasia. “I do what I want,” it said confidently. A very fitting statement, given its current cat form.

Anastasia chuckled nervously. “I see.”

“What is a BOAI anyway?” I asked, remembering some of my earlier questions.

“Biologically Originated Artificial Intelligence,” Anastasia answered.

I paused, waiting for her to elaborate, but she seemed to think that was answer enough. “Umm? Well? What does that mean?”

“I have no idea,” she said confidently.

“Okay. Cool.” I sighed. “What about what you said about intact minds? What does that mean?”

“Your brain is well preserved. You likely have all of your memories and personality preserved.”

I studied her curiously. “Do you not?” I asked.

She gave a thin-lipped smile. “Most of us don’t.”

“Oh.”

She stood, making her way to the door. “I won’t tell anyone about your BOAI, in case you want to hide it. It gives you something to think about, whether you want to stay or not.” I watched her as she hesitated at the door, wondering how much I could trust her. She turned to glance back at me. “Regardless of rumored serial killers, I do need to warn you that there is one real one here. No one knows which game he’s currently in though.”

“A real serial killer?”

She nodded. “He used to work for Black Hole Entertainment before he died, so he has a lot of knowledge about the game. And there have been so many deaths in his wake… it’s pretty damning. So it’s best to beware of him. His name is James Lear.”

I spent the next hour numbly working on growing one of my skills as I thought about everything that Anastasia had said. Slate sat, watching me with its head tilted, its tail swishing. “Do you think it’s the same James?” it asked after a moment, as though reading my mind.

“It couldn’t possibly be. Right? I mean, why not just kill me?”

Slate narrowed its eyes, a mischievous light glinting as it smirked. “He saw me and realized that you were a future serial killer set on achieving the same goal.”

I stopped and turned my head to regard the cat, narrowing my eyes at it.

“I’m joking.”

“If you say so.” Still, none of that stopped the nerve-wracking twists my stomach was taking. “Do you think we need to go back to single player? What if someone decides to kill me first?”

“Oh? Kill you first? Are you planning to kill someone then?”

“No!” I sighed. I aimed a very critical look at the BOAI. “You’re not going to try to convince me to kill people now, are you?”

Slate became suddenly quite somber. “No, Tam-Tam. I’m not sure I’m meant for that, but even if I was, I wouldn’t want to.”

“Why not, if it’s what you’re programmed for?”

“I don’t feel like I’m just programming,” Slate lifted its chin into the air, and stomped a front paw in irritation. “Not at all!” I frowned as I looked over the red-hued cat, wondering what it meant to be ‘biologically originated.’ What was the biological part?

NaNo Part 1

On November 5, 2025 By MaryIn 2025, NaNoWriMo 2025, WritingLeave a comment

There were a lot of things that Tamra Mors should have been enjoying her senior year of high school. Things that most regular 17-year-olds got to enjoy and experience. She had been looking forward to the dances, especially Prom, and the other myriad school events that she felt would shape fond memories of this crucial time in her life. Things that she felt would shape her as a person, that she would look back on fondly.

She wasn’t expecting surgery after surgery. She wasn’t expecting to be completely paralyzed from just below her chest from a complete spinal cord injury. Instead of partying with friends, she was adjusting to the mortification of having someone help her with a daily bowel program. Instead of preparing for college or daydreaming about her future, she was learning to cope with constant pain. “It’s nearly 2050, you’d think they could handle this shit better!” she could vaguely remember her father yelling at the hospital staff sometime after her second surgery when they realized nothing had been fixed.

People pitied her, which was bad, but even worse were the people that seemed shocked by how burned out and despondent she was. It seemed that people had an expectation that she be upbeat and full of hope, and all because she was a slightly preppy looking teenage girl. She could hardly keep count of how many people had told her that she was young and healthy and would adapt and could live a full life even with her new disability and blah blah blah… The accident had left her bitter and she saw no point in plastering a fake smile on her face for any of them. She wanted to rage, she wanted to cry all day every day and scream non-stop. But mostly she wanted to walk.

Instead, she mourned. At first, she assumed it was for all the things she couldn’t do and wouldn’t have in the future. But as her last surgery approached, she felt a strange certainty that she was going to die. It was scheduled a few months before her classmates were set to graduate, and some of them had come to wish her luck and express how much they’d missed her through the schoolyear. She had the feeling they’d left that visit more disturbed than reassured. She couldn’t help it.

On the day of her surgery, a part of her wanted to go into a full blown panic. A part of her didn’t want to die at all. Certainly life, even this miserable half-life, was better than death? But as the procedure began and the anesthesia took effect, she felt a strange sense of relief.

To be done with it. To finally be done with it.

And she died.

I don’t remember waking. I found myself standing in the center of a vast empty space.

Standing.

It had been so long since I had stood by myself that I had the instant feeling that I was in a dream. I looked down at my feet to see that they were indeed supporting my weight. I lifted one foot. I hopped in place. A simple thing. A thing I had never expected to be able to do again. I had to be dreaming. But I could feel everything so vividly. The pressure of my weight on my feet, the way it shifted to one foot and the other, the way my body moved to maintain my balance. A thing that had been so natural for so much of my life before it had been so cruelly stolen from me.

[Welcome.]

The word floated in front of me. I twisted my head and it followed my field of vision, half transparent but still clearly visible. “Welcome?” I read aloud, confused by everything that was happening.

[You have died.]

I froze as I read the words.

Of course. I remembered going into surgery. I remembered how strongly I had felt that I was going to die. And I had. I felt strangely numb.

[In accordance with the Health Finance Recuperation Act of 2038, your body and brain have been claimed as property. You and/or your legal guardians have signed notating awareness of and compliance to the Act prior to your receiving care.]

I frowned. I vaguely remembered my older sister getting mad at my parents about this. She called it the “Grave Robber Act,” which I guess is what a lot of the college kids had started calling it once it went into effect. My parents had warily explained to her that signing it was the only way to afford my care at all – besides, it was almost impossible to carry health insurance or find a hospital to provide care without signing an agreement to the Act these days. In the years since it had been passed, it had become just another thing you got used to seeing and signing at the doctor’s office. “But what happens if she dies?” I remember her yelling. I remember my mom bursting into tears and leaving the room, simply saying “I can’t.” I remember my dad firmly telling her that I was strong and I wasn’t going to die.

So much for that. Sorry, Dad.

[The Health Finance Recuperation Act gives your health insurance provider or the hospital organization associated with your health provider the legal right to claim and sell the remains of the deceased unless the next of kin can afford to pay a minimum percentage of care costs within 72 hours of death. As the 72 hour mark has been exceeded, your remains passed into the care of your insurance provider, who has proceeded to sell your brain to Black Hole Entertainment.]

I stared at the words blankly, trying to comprehend them. 72 hours? I’d been dead for three days. Maybe even over three days, depending on how fast I’d been sold. But if I was dead, how was I… thinking? Standing? Feeling? Reading a message stating that I was complying to some stupid legal act?

[Again, welcome! We offer an exciting and unique opportunity to your remains here at Black Hole Entertainment! Black Hole is a new company that is exploring the next exciting generation of modern gaming – full immersion gaming! In order to safely adapt our new gaming system for human use, vigorous testing is required. Thanks to advancements in brain activity preservation, we have been able to bring your consciousness into existence within our computers mostly intact. Here, we will be able to test the effect of our games on human brains.]

“Mostly intact?” What the fuck did that mean? I shook my head, but paused in the act. Was what I was seeing and feeling physically even real? If what I was reading was right, I was in a computer – I was just a memory of a dead person in a computer. What did it mean that I felt like myself, standing, shaking my head in response to this? It hurt my head to even think of it.

I closed my eyes for a moment as I tried to process this. Strangely, the words remained floating in front of my lack of vision.

[We understand that some questions may remain, especially in regards to ethics and morality. You will be provided with counseling opportunities to ask those questions in the future. For now, we offer condolences, and with understanding for how difficult this moment may be for you, we will offer you this: the choice of which game world you will navigate in your afterlife.]

I sighed and opened my eyes again, although I suppose the act itself made no difference. I didn’t really feel fully invested in this, but I couldn’t think of anything that I could do about it for the time being. I was stuck. There was no point in overthinking any of it, or agonizing about any of it.

Besides… I could walk. I had a functioning body. Even if it wasn’t real, it was so much better than my existence had been over the past several months.

[Your choices include three stable and well tested game zones – a generic hack and slash fantasy world, a rollicking space adventure, or a modern day life sim!]

I paused as I considered my choices, my eyes flickering over the options several times. A life sim might give me a taste of everything I had missed since the accident, but the other options didn’t sound too bad either. After a beat, more words followed. [Owing to the more intact nature of your consciousness, we can also offer two additional game worlds. These game worlds are still being strenuously tested, so they may require feedback as a condition of use. These worlds include a survival horror and a cozy casual isekai game.]

“Are these choices final?” I wondered out loud.

[They don’t have to be.]

I jerked my head back as the words responded to me. That was… unexpected.

[You can be given the chance to choose a different world in the future. Please note that choosing a new game world will require you to create a new character unique to that world, so only limited skills and equipment will transfer, and level advancement may possibly be reset.]

“Character?”

[Please select a world to enter character creation.]

I wasn’t sure how to make my selection, but the words seemed to be responding to my voice. Tentatively, I said, “Cozy, casual game world?” It came out more like a nervous question, and I hated how uncertain and child-like I sounded in the moment.

[Entering character creation.]

The world shifted and brightened around me. I had, for a moment, a strange out of body sensation. I realized that in a way I was still myself – and looking at myself. I raised an arm, and saw my arm raise in response. I turned my head in the direction that I was watching myself from, and was aware of two things at once – that I could not see my “out of body” self, and that I was now staring directly into my own hazel eyes.

I shivered. I watched my body visibly tense and shake briefly like a chill had caught me, my expression disturbed. This was kind of freaking me out. Not being used to seeing myself in anything other than pictures or mirrors, I took a moment to examine how I looked. The scars and hollowed out haggardness that had defined my looks after the accident were gone – now I looked as I had beforehand. Slightly freckled, hazel eyed, dirty blonde hair. I leaned in to get a good look at my nose, which I had always felt was a touch too large. Being able to get a good look at my profile, I wasn’t reassured. I sighed.

I became aware of blocks floating off to the side. Menu options of some sort. My out-of-body self shifted closer to the Menu, and I looked over what sorts of options I was being given. Apparently, there were three main starter packs for this cozy world – farmer, clerk, or alchemist. I was tempted to choose farmer – I had gotten sucked into old farming sim games a couple of times, and found them to be calming time wasters. I reached out – only to realize my out-of-body self had no hands, and my self behind me was the one waving my hand vaguely forward at nothing. Then I spent a couple of minutes trying to maneuver my self towards the menu. I got close despite the awkwardness of first-third-person navigation, only to realize that my body wasn’t even touching anything on the menu. My hands went floating through them like they weren’t there.

I tried saying, “Farmer?” But nothing happened.

[Focus.]

The word popped into existence in front of me and then faded away slowly. Frowning, I focused as I looked across the menu, and at the last second decided on alchemist. It highlighted to indicate that it had been selected.

So I was going to be an alchemist in a cozy casual isekai game world of some sort. Selecting the starter pack for my class gave me a literal pack filled with certain items – some alchemical materials and a cloak with a pentagram symbol on the back. After that, I was able to select clothes and accessories.

At first, I wondered if I was going to be given a time limit for this character creation stage. But there was no timer and nothing seemed to be urging me on, so I took my time. After all, there was no reason to not enjoy my afterlife at my own pace. I went through every clothing style available and experimented with the customization options. A lot of it seemed to be very Ren Faire inspired. Eventually I settled on a simple longish skirt with a laced bodice, and spent a ridiculous amount of time switching between a lilac or a sage color scheme. I finally settled on sage.

After choosing my clothes and accessories, I spent a little bit of time walking around my body, studying how I looked. I frowned at my lack of cleavage. It wasn’t something I cared about often, but sometimes I found myself being self-conscience about it, especially when I chose clothing that dipped low at the neckline. As I was thinking about it, my appearance shifted, my breasts becoming slightly larger.

I felt my eyes go wide with surprise.

Then I spent the entire next hour focusing on the little things I had always hated about my appearance. The moles I didn’t like got shifted or removed, my freckles disappeared, my cheekbones shifted up slightly. My nose got much smaller. I shifted between curvy to stick thin and back again, completely uncertain of which way was better. I shifted through every shade of hair color available, settling on a blonde a touch lighter than my dishwater waves, and tried every unusual eye color they had available. Hazel was a lot more boring than glowing, reflective golden cat eyes. After a while, I looked like a completely different person. Generically pretty.

I stared for a long time at the end result.

And realized I kind of hated it.

I felt a moment of panic, wondering if I’d ever be able to change me back into me, and focused on finding a way to reset my appearance. As I thought it, it happened – an option flashed to the side that would allow me to switch back to what I had created. I looked at myself critically.

Finally, I decided on a few small changes – clearer skin, slightly thinner, hair and eyes a shade lighter than normal, and the nose only a touch smaller. I still looked like me, at least. “Okay, this feels right,” I said out loud.

[Finalize changes and enter world?] the text appeared, as though in reaction to my spoken words.

One last thing, I thought. And I added a huge scar across my midsection.

I guess that one didn’t really matter. It was hard to see it because it was always covered by clothes. I would be the only one that knew it was there. But it had been present over the last several months of my life, and had been part of why I had died. I felt like I would need it somehow. As a reminder, if nothing else.

“Okay. I’m ready now.”

[…One last step…]

The scenery changed. Instead of observing myself I was observing a little glowing ball of light.

[Answer these three questions…]

[What is your favorite color?]

I frowned, a little confused. “Umm… red.” The light shifted, crimson tinged for a moment.

[What is your greatest hope?]

My jaw dropped. I felt immediately annoyed at this question. What was the point in asking a dead person what their greatest hope was? I understood this was probably meant to be aimed at a living video game player. But hope did not seem warranted at this point. I crossed my arms and shifted my weight, feeling uncomfortable. “How about coming back to life?” I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm.

The light shifted again.

[What is your deepest regret?]

“Dying.” I had meant for the word to be bitterly snapped, but I found myself strangely choking on it. Tears welled into my eyes and I hastily blinked them back.

Being emotional about any of this also didn’t seem warranted at this point. I remembered how ready to die I had felt as the anesthesia had taken effect, how tired of living in my broken, useless body I had been. Even this non-life after life would be better. It had to be better.

The light shifted again, darkening slightly.

[Thank you.]

The words faded. The light faded. The darkness around me faded.

I found myself standing in brightly lit day, in the middle of a dirt road. The weather was warm, but not too warm – a breeze swayed through a nearby field, and a few fluffy tufts of clouds hung in the brilliantly blue sky. I gaped at the peaceful scene, my arms dropping to my side as I turned slowly to look around me. Yellow flowers dotted the fields along gently sloping hills, butterflies flitting between them. Far in the distance I could see a small village, and beyond that, the purple silhouette of a distant mountain range.

Should I head toward the village? Or go in the opposite direction? Or travel to the mountains? As I considered my options, a voice cleared itself behind me. It was high pitched, almost childlike, and slightly imperious. “Ahem!”

I turned and looked down. Whatever it was, it was small and round and almost puffy looking. I think it was supposed to look like a fantasy game slime, but instead of being translucent or jelly-like it looked like a marshmallow. It stared up at me with large lavender-hued eyes. “Am I supposed to kill you?” I wondered out loud. “For the experience?”

It narrowed its eyes and harrumphed angrily, bouncing slightly in indignation. “Kill me! What kind of greeting is that for your most loyal companion. How rude!”

“Companion?” I eyed the creature dubiously, taking in the red hue of its marshmallow-like skin. Was this what the questions had been about? Creating my own little helper… whatever? “What are you?”

“I’m a BOAI – a specialized bot that is here to help you. I am mostly here to create a record and provide feedback to the devs, but I can also assist in some small ways. They’ve found that implementing us helps the recently deceased acclimate to the game environments more efficiently.” I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a little girl or a little boy from the voice. It kept bouncing as it spoke, almost as though it were excited to explain its role.

“I don’t know what any of that means,” I said. “What does BOAI even stand for?”

The puff stopped bouncing for a moment, its eyes going wide. “You know… I have no idea!” It began to bounce faster suddenly, speaking a million miles a minute. “Isn’t that funny? I have a general knowledge of my purpose here, and I know I’m supposed to follow you everywhere, absolutely everywhere, you go, but it’s also like I don’t really know anything at all! I feel like a complete blank slate!”

I raised my hands, gesturing for it to slow its bouncing. “Okay, blank slate. Calm down. What do I call you?”

It froze again and stared up at me, its eyes suddenly shimmering with barely contained tears. “Oh-Em-Gee!” it said suddenly, with great emotion. “I don’t have a name! It’s like not having an identity!” It shifted forward and up in an almost pleading motion. I resisted the urge to take a step back. “I know! You should name me! What do you want to call me?”

My mind froze. I hated thinking up names for things. “How about Slate?” I grasped, thinking of how I had just called it blank slate so casually and Slate being name-sounding. I instantly felt like it didn’t fit at all. It wasn’t slate colored after all. It vigorously moved the top front of its form up and down – nodding?

“Slate! I love it.” It stopped and tilted slightly to the side, like a curious puppy. “The system says that you’re named Tamra. Are you renaming your character for this world? Can I call you Tam-Tam?”

“Absolutely not,” I said. “Just Tamra.” It seemed easier to stick with what I had than trying to come up with another name for this character immediately.

It nodded again. “Okay, Tam! Ra! Tam! Tam! Where should we go?”

I frowned. The way it had repeated Tam was not convincing me that it was going to do as I requested, but I decided to let it go in the moment. I glanced back toward where I had seen the village – settled as it was between us and the mountains. Being directly asked did settle the matter for me, I guess. “We’ll head to the village,” I said. I turned and began to walk, following the road. Slate hopped by my side, making soft boing boing boing noises as it went. It was almost too cutesy, but that was the nature of cozy games, so I figured this was par for the course. I wondered what Slate would have looked like in one of the other game worlds, or if it was always going to be the same. “Since I chose alchemist, I assume I just find a place to settle in and start making potions. Maybe to sell?” I glanced down at Slate. It made little noises of agreement, but didn’t say anything one way or the other. “Does that sound about right for what I’m supposed to do for this game?” I asked it more directly.

“Oh!” it squeaked as it gently bounced along beside me. “I have no clue! I just follow you.”

“Like a loyal companion?” I noted dryly.

“Or a stalker!” it responded, a touch too cheerfully. I nodded thoughtfully. We continued in silence for a moment, but it didn’t last long. “MY GOSH, it is beautiful out here, don’t you think? It’s definitely spring, yes? This seems about right for everything I know about spring… warm weather, flowers, pretty butterflies! Isn’t it just wonderful! Do you think it’s always spring or do you think it cycles through the seasons? Do you think they have seasonal events? I think it’d be exciting to see like… flower trees. Loads and loads of flowering trees. Can we go find some flowering trees? What do you call a flowering tree place? A grove?”

I shook my head. “Do you not know anything about the game world here?”

“Nope! Not a thing! Just my stalking mission!”

“Well, unfortunately, I don’t know any more than you do.” I wondered what the point of having it here with me was then. Was it just recording my every move? Did I really want it following me after all? Slate continued to comment on the nearby environment as we went, and I tuned it out after a while, offering vague agreements and nods. This didn’t seem to deter it at all, and it continued to happily chatter away.

The road took us closer to a forest, though not through it – we stayed on its outer edge. I stared into the shadowy undergrowth of the trees, wondering if I would eventually explore these woods. “What was that!?” Slate suddenly stopped, the back of its body spiking like the raised hackles of a cat. It focused its purple eyes on the nearby woods, its body tense and shivering. I followed its focus, noting that the brush there was shaking.

Before I could respond, a pair of squirrels exited, running towards us. “Squirrels,” I said, confused by their sudden appearance. I wondered why they were sprinting toward us, if there was some cause for alarm. Was something chasing them?

“Squirrels!” Slate squeaked in joy just as one tackled it, sending the puff rolling and screaming into the grass.

I almost laughed until the other squirrel bodily tackled me and sent me sprawling as well. The damn thing was weighty, way heavier than a squirrel should have been – it bit, and I screamed at how much it hurt. It didn’t feel like I was being harassed by a small rodent. The violence behind the attack felt more like being mauled by a large dog. Disoriented by this discordance between what I was expecting and what I was experiencing, I tried to fling the thing away. I kicked it back – it hardly moved – and I pushed forward and managed to pin it against the ground with my foot. I almost felt bad to put all my weight on it. I lifted my arm to look at the bite. The damn thing had taken a huge chunk out of my arm, and blood dripped freely.

It trilled a tiny squeaky growl at me, its small paws gripping my foot. I let out a startled screech as it easily flung me off. I landed bodily on the ground and began to crawl away immediately, trying to remember if I had any starter weapons amongst my inventory items – and wondering how I even accessed that. I hadn’t even thought of trying to figure out game mechanics yet, and I was already in a fight. Stupid stupid stupid, I chastised myself as I turned to look back. I could see that the squirrel had launched itself in the air to pounce on my prone form…

I screamed and raised an arm to protect myself. Mid-jump, a ball of fire slammed into the squirrel, incinerating it. It howled in rage as it perished, the sound eerie and drawn out. I looked up to see a man advancing on the other squirrel, who had let off chasing Slate to attack the newcomer instead. He easily sliced it in two with a sword. Slate gave a victory whoop and bounced back towards us. “Thank you, thank you!”

The man nodded briefly to Slate and then turned, walking toward me. He sheathed the sword and offered a hand to help me up. I frowned, and reluctantly accepted, feeling suddenly shy and awkward. He was tall and thin, with a posture that suggested he had spent more of his time hunched over in a cubicle than wielding a sword. He had messy brown hair and light brown eyes. For the most part, he looked exceeding average, except for a crooked nose that looked like it had been broken once before.

I never felt comfortable interacting with strangers, and that was before every new adult I met was there to poke and prod and ask questions as they examined my charts and pretended to care. And mostly I could sit and let my parents or my sister do all the talking. “You must be new,” he said gruffly. “Most that have been in the system for a while know to avoid the testing environments. Damn squirrels still have wolf stats…”

“Wolf?” I mumbled numbly, thinking about how the squirrel had howled when it died. It had sounded remarkably like a wolf.

“Yeah, it’s a pretty deadly bug,” he said. He lifted my arm to get a better look at the bite, gently wiping some of the blood away, and then pulled a bottle from his bag filled with a bubbly reddish liquid that looked like strawberry soda. He uncorked it and handed it to me. “Drink this. Healing potion.” I did as instructed – it tasted more like a cream soda of some sort, fizzy and cool and pleasant. First a chill ran down my spine, and it felt alarmingly like I had been dunked in ice water, but the sensation was gone as quick as it had happened. The pain was gone. I held my arm up and watched the wound mend before my eyes, leaving only the faintest trace on my arm. It wasn’t really like a scar – it was almost like the skin was so new that it hadn’t tanned evenly with the surrounding skin.

“A bug,” I said, my voice deadpan. I shook my head and handed the bottle back to him, which he took. It disappeared from his hand, stashed into some inventory that I didn’t know how to access yet.

“You saved us, sir!” Slate said as it joined us, boinging up even higher to meet the stranger’s height.

He nodded to Slate again, not seeming to want to speak to it much. I realized he didn’t have his own companion, but I didn’t comment. “How long have you been here?” he asked me.

“I just got here,” I said.

“Then you’re lucky I found you. I have a warning – if you die in the game, you cease to exist. It’s perma-death. So be careful.”

“What?” I gaped at him, surprised by this information.

“Another bug,” he said grimly. “The reason we’re here, really. They haven’t been able to work around it for any of the games, which is why immersion gaming is still in the testing phase. The brain believes everything it sees, so when you die in the game… it believes you’ve died for real, and your body ceases to function.” He gestured toward the road. “We should head to the town. You’re not supposed to attract aggro from anything stronger than a slug, but they’ve got messed up stats on more than just the squirrels in these testing environments.”

I had a million questions from what he had said, but quietly processed the fact that I could die here as we started walking along the road. He seemed at ease as he walked, but I noticed that he kept an eye trained on the underbrush of the forest. “Is the town the only safe space? What if I had decided to walk in the opposite direction?” I wondered out loud.

“The game world here isn’t huge, and the town is the only populated area. If you had walked in the opposite direction, you would have eventually hit an invisible wall.”

I nodded. “Okay. Is there any way to know when you’re approaching the edge of the game world? Does it look different?”

“No, it looks just the same. Sometimes you can access a map, but some games make you find one first. The map usually has the playable space marked. Otherwise, the only way to know is to walk directly into it.”

A map. I would have to eventually ask him how to access inventory items like he had with the disappearing potion bottle, and how to access maps as well. I suspected it was the same degree of focus, or maybe some sort of focus to bring up a user interface or a menu. But I also realized that I had missed out on asking one important question. “What’s your name?”

“James,” he said simply. He seemed to hesitate a moment, glancing over at me before he said. “Sorry I didn’t introduce myself, it’s a bit awkward talking to a kid. Feels kind of wrong? People side eye you like you’re a pedophile when you chat with anyone under 21… well, back in real life. So it seemed weird to ask your name.”

“Tamra,” I offered. I wanted to ask how he had died, but somehow that seemed inappropriate. I let my gaze drift off across the field and instead asked, “How do they put this level of detail into the game graphics?”

“It’s mostly thanks to your own brain,” he said. “A benefit of immersion gaming if they can get it to really work. All they really need to do is program a basic game environment – they tell your brain what it should see, and it fills in the details. As a result, some things are a little different from user to user. As an example, these flowers,” he gestured toward the flowers that dotted the field. “The program tells your brain they’re Black-Eyed Susans, a yellow wildflower. If you’ve seen a Black-Eyed Susan before, your brain fills in the appropriate details. If you haven’t, your brain creates a concept of what it must look like based on ‘yellow wildflower.’ The same with the butterflies. For other things, there is a basic model created, but those models would look more like old school video game graphics when viewed from outside the game. Inside the game, there are a list of details to feed your brain about the model, which makes it more realistic in your perception, giving it a texture or even a smell – things that you wouldn’t be able to perceive while playing a traditional game…”

I nodded as I listened to him talk. “How do you know all this?” I asked.

His expression darkened. “I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Okay. Fair enough.” I turned to stare at the field as we walked on in silence. I found myself staring at the flowers. I had heard of Black-Eyed Susans before, I was pretty sure I had even seen them, but I was awful at identifying flowers. I had never been shown a flower and specifically told it was a Black-Eyed Susan. I wondered if how they looked here to me was actually how they looked. It made me feel a little sad for a moment, though I couldn’t place why I felt that way. I guess… knowing that I’d never know for sure.

If that made any sense.

Slate boinged along beside us. As the silence extended, it began to hum gently to itself, a huge smile plastered across its face. It seemed to be enjoying the day, and the fact that we had survived our first encounter. Very soon, the humming became less gentle as Slate began to fully rock out with little vocalizations. “Do do do do do dooo! Yeah!” it said to itself as it bounced happily, twirling in circles at the apex of every boing.

“What are you singing?” I asked, half amused at its antics.

“Sandstorm,” James muttered.

“Darude!” Slate said happily.

“How do you know that song?” I said, chuckling softly at the look on James’s face. He was not as amused as I was by any of this.

“No clue!” Slate said, still happily do do do do’ing to itself. James sighed. I had the feeling he regretted saving us just a little bit.

We reached the village before nightfall. It didn’t feel like it had been very long, and I wondered out loud if the day and night cycle synced up with the real world. “It depends on which game you’re in. This one doesn’t though. I think the game day is only 2 hours long, and the night is the same.”

We stood looking into the village. It was almost idyllic, with cobblestone streets. Children laughed as they ran across our path, and Slate went bouncing after them several feet before turning to roll back to me. Since it was getting late in the day, a few stalls were packing up. I glanced at James, feeling a bit awkward. “So what do I do now?”

He nodded down the street. “You should come to an inn down that way and they can get you settled into the game opening properly. Talk to the innkeeper, stay the night, and that will trigger the intro. Once you play through the intro, you should be free to change to another game world. It’s a little harder to die in the more established games, so you should be safer there. Especially the life sim.”

I felt a strange surge of panic. “Are you not going to stay with me? I had a lot of questions.”

He eyed me warily. “I wasn’t really planning to.” He studied my face for a moment and sighed. “I can get you to the inn. I’ll give you an hour to ask whatever questions you want. But then I’m going to go, and you’ll be on your own.”

I felt a little better about that. “Yes, please. Thank you.”

An hour later it was the middle of the game night and James had shown me the basics of the HUD as it worked in this world. We had ordered a meal that he paid for, as I hadn’t earned any in game currency yet. I was drinking a strawberry milk that was so creamy and frothy it was almost more like a strawberry milkshake. Slate had ordered a chocolate milk, and was still happily chugging through the fifth one.

Apparently, the HUD and how it operated was similar in all the game worlds, but the options were different based on what sort of game play the world went for. In order to not blind the user, the HUD was always the same strange semi-transparency that I had noticed from the text that had addressed me when I first appeared here. The transparency didn’t really stop you from being able to read and understand any of the text. It had something to do with using your brain’s own spatial awareness, though I didn’t fully understand it.

James stood from the table. “I think you know enough of the basics to be able to get on with it yourself for now. I’m going to take off.”

I jumped up from my chair. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be by myself – as annoying as it was to admit, I didn’t want to be left unattended without adult help. But I forced myself to nod. “Will we run into each other again?” I wondered out loud.

He shrugged. “More than likely. It’s not a huge game world if you stay, but I don’t recommend it since it’s not safe yet. And I travel between the worlds every now and then, so we might trip over each other some other time.”

“Okay. Well…” I held out my hand. “Thank you for saving me, and giving me the basics.”

He hesitantly shook my hand and smiled. “Nice meeting you, Tamra. If you sleep in the bed, it’ll shift you to morning, and the intro will initiate. Good luck, and be careful.” I watched him walk out of the inn.

“Okay, Slate. Let’s turn in for the night.”

The puff burped as it finished its drink and bounced happily bounced off the table. “What a day, what a day!” it chirped.

mehryment

Tag: Fiction