Gaming Legends

(Another short story I'm retiring from the submission grinder cycle for awhile.)

Black Hole Games, where you go to play and never come out. The tagline would be cheesy if the internet didn’t claim to be true. On the bus ride to the city, It’d been a mistake to scroll through the poorly made fan sites and blog posts dedicated to the place. Haunted, alien outpost, serial killer’s base of operations, a drug house, the lack of agreement added to the mystery.

I feel Billy’s large hand rest on my shoulder. “It’s time for Apollo to prove he’s a real man.”

I want to growl that I am a real man, but that would be unfair. The gaming club has never used the wrong pronouns or dead-named me.

Billy’s a tad obtuse. His gears are slowly turning. “I didn’t mean, dude..”

Cindy comes crashing in to save him. “Apollo will kick the ass of any three-armed murderer set to chop him up and shove him inside the arcade cases.”

“Even alien ghosts will tremble in fear from our Solo-mid.” Mike drops in.

“This is a bad idea,” Dylan says with a serious look before continuing. “A.P. will totally get Tron’d, or Big’d, maybe Jumanji’d.”

Our healer, always managing to make a rational thought into something unbelievable.

“It’s tradition. Even you had to sneak into the haunted factory for the tournament in Dallas.”

Dylan huffs, “It was awful. A rat stole my Cheetos. Don’t let Mickey take your treats, A.P.”

Grabbing a Dr. Pepper from the cooler in the middle of the room, I flick the tab. It opens with a fizzing pop. “To Tradition!” I say, raising it high.

The rest of the team follows suit. It’s not like I won’t have my phone and location tracking for this trip.

***

No service. The last text I received was a wall of UFO and ghost emojis from Mike.

My response of skull and crossbones paired up with a game controller sits with a notice saying it cannot deliver it.

The phone slides into my pocket, my hand lightly brushing the pepper spray I keep on my keychain. It’s not like these abandoned buildings are ever in the good part of town. The world might have gotten more accepting, but those on the extreme have gotten worse.

Crime, drugs, economic downturn, and the nail in the coffin of the pandemic left the Holmes Mall abandoned and surrounded by a chain-link fence. The mall had been struggling before all that, which had allowed Richard and Mortimer to buy a dead movie theater and turn it into their fantasy arcade, Black Hole Games.

No tragic deaths for the founders, their wiki has Moritmer becoming mayor of Sitedell and Richard becoming an engineer before retiring. The game store kept the name but changed hands two more times before shutting down.

At seven feet tall, the fence doesn’t seem like an impassable obstacle. I pull at the diamond links testing how sturdy it is. With dusk approaching, I don’t want to be out too late.

A few homeless tents sit along the outside of the fence. This area is the clearest, with a tent a hundred feet to either side of me. Being a run-down part of town, I might be safer on the other side of the fence, and I doubt those ramshackle dwellings would be here if there were killer arcade clowns or crime syndicates inside the mall.

A man with two weeks worth of beard and a dirty jacket, and two sizes too big, steps out of a tent. His gray eyes lock onto mine, “Hey, you!”

“Shit!”

I start clawing my way up the fence.

“It’s not safe, girl!”

That jolt of annoyance at being called a girl lets me pull myself up and over. Taking a few steps back, I immediately feel relief that the fence is now between this stranger and me. I immediately picture Dylan yelling, “Stranger Danger!” when I recount this portion of my quest to him and have to stifle a giggle.

The homeless man approaches the fence with a slight limp to his step. Doubtful he could follow me, but I ease back a little anyway and give him a defiant stare.

“Look, kid, there is nothing there. You’re not the first to be lured by the rumors. Why don’t you come back over and call your parents to pick you up?”

A tightness to his eyes and a lack of confidence in his voice didn’t make me want to come nearer.

“If there is nothing there, I’ll be fine. Some selfies for my friends.” Saying too much, I turn away.

“Hey!” He barks.

I jump a little and pick up the pace toward the mall, turning it into a jog.

“People get hurt in abandoned buildings!” He calls after me.

***

The main door is locked. So is the one next to it.  I step forward to get a selfie of myself and the sign for Black Hole Games, whose logo is two cartoony kids getting pulled into a black hole, so cheesy it is making me wonder why I was scared at all. If I can’t get in, this might have to be good enough proof.  I send it to the club and get rejected by my provider again.

There is another door off to the front, one of those solid manager ones that let them reach the ticket booth; jiggling, twisting, and pushing shows that it is locked too. I tap my head to the door in frustration. All I have to tell the team is my one strange interaction at the fence.

Lifting my head, I stare at the patchy, beat-up door that is my nemesis. I can see that the slightly off-color spot is a bit of paint that doesn’t quite match.  Underneath that paint, you can see the words -Use Door Around Back- had been scratched into it and later covered up.

Like a maze, I follow the wall until I reach a twist, an alley that leads to a back area. It is a small area with a dumpster and, yes, a side door to the arcade. The smell of rancid movie theater butter hits me, to think that it stuck around for years after this place closed.

Graffiti, this time uncovered, decorates the area. Aliens, ghosts, bloody knives prominently cover the wall. Nate was here,spray-painted on the wall. Beware! Is tagged above the door. Outcomes my phone to take more photos, this time using flash to counteract the growing shadows.

I shake the door, and it does feel a little loose. Backing up, I barrel into it with my shoulder, and the door pops open. I feel like I’ve leveled up my manliness. Then a chill goes up my spine as I stare into the swallowing dark of the inside.

Using my phone screen, I light up a back kitchen area, large wash bins, and an industrial fridge greets me. My eyes immediately search for butcher knives and find none, fears driven by my overactive imagination. Switching to flashlight mode, I move deeper into the building.

The kitchen led to the concession stands in the main lobby, cash registers empty, candy drawers barren. The edge of my phone’s light highlights two eyes in the dark. My embarrassingly high-pitched scream registers before my brain as my light shines on the culprit.

The trash panda screams back and then runs away.

The adrenaline drop causes my shrieking to evolve into a bubbling fit of giggles that echo in the empty lobby.

No gangs come running at my sounds, no other adventurers, at most poor animals like that raccoon are running away in fear. I’m alone. Relief floods into me, all that talk of killers and syndicates,  Aliens and ghosts. I stand up straighter.

“Who’s the man now! I’m king of the world!”

My yell echoes around the empty lobby. Time to see if any of those old coin-operated boxes still exist. Using my light to lead the way, I move towards the game room converted theaters.

Each theatre still has the signs up. Instead of listing the movie showing, paper signs announcing the theme of the room. Pinball alley, Shoot Em up square, Horror hotel, that one I’m going to avoid. Trials of Might calls to me. The sign’s artist had spent extra work detailing it with gold paint that sparkles under my light.

Tightly packed arcade cases rise out of the gradually slanting floor. Some sit at slight angles with the slopes like a field of basalt pillars casting odd shadows. All of them are bolted at the bottom to prevent some kind of horrible domino effect, probably why they never got moved out when this place closed.

The games are a mix of the strange and familiar. Boxy tombstones of gaming history, decorated by girls in chainmail bikinis and heavily muscled Conan knock-offs that went with the room’s theme and fit better these days on the side of a van being ironic. Classics found everywhere and rare ones, I’m sure some collectors would trade their left nut for if they still worked.

The front of the theater room had the odd ones out, two-person seaters, and big five-player team games.

A small sign with big black letters is underneath a light switch. KEEP SWITCH OFF.

That’s like asking me not to push a button. *Click*

A single strip of lights along the aisle lights up. A few screens start to boot on. The smell of burning plastic and a faint bit of white smoke drifts up from the game Double Axe. One in five starts to turn on.

“Holy shit!”

Turning off the flashlight mode, I start to take pictures of the scene. The team will get a kick out of this.

The games ran on arcade tokens, now they’re collectors’ items and sell for twenty dollars which drew this location to Mike’s attention when they were picking spots for the group’s traditional pre-tournament quest. The troll bridge, murder house, Native American cemetery were all abandoned for Black Hole Games. The focus on gaming was too perfect.

The spots where the machines exchanged cash for tokens are all bare, removed while the arcade cases remain.

Barbarian Bash, a game I haven’t played since middle school, screen flashes: Insert Coin under a thin layer of dust. Maybe quarters will do.

Crossing my fingers, I insert the coin.  Nothing happens. I start pumping the coin return button, and I can hear the mechanism rattling things around. Nothing comes out.

A boot of frustration. Clink, a coin rolls out. A second clink follows. There are two things in the return slot, the first is my quarter, and the other is the tiny, tarnished golden disk of a Black Hole Games token, the arcade’s logo on one side, and the other ONE PLAY in a fanciful script.

Barbarian Bash isn’t worth twenty dollars for a play. I can see the club arguing that we should make it a trophy. As light as the coin is, the possibilities weigh heavy in my hand.

A reverberating thrum cuts through the din of chimes and cheap music from the active boxes. “Enter a world of Infinite possibilities!”

The voice makes me jump a little even as it sounds like one of those trailer narrators with an edge of static electronics buffering it. The late bloomer to the active game list is one of those awkwardly shaped ones near the theater screen that didn’t fit with the classic stand-ups that take up most of the space.  The whole multi-seated contraption is lit up in sparkling lights.

Kingdom Campaigns, I’d never heard of it, and I’ve never seen anything like it. A fantasy-style game looking like it was converted from one of those sit-down ride-style games. I walk up to the beast snapping pictures as I go and send one to the team, but it fails to send again.

The screen’s animation is of adventurers pointing a sword and troops charging in that direction, transitioning to the game’s title and then the words, buckle up boy-o for the time of your life. A twenty-dollar token or the time of my life?

Setting my phone on top of the machine, I slide into the seat. Indeed there is a buckle, a four-point harness that connects at the center of my chest. Clicking the harness closed, there is only one thing left to do. I slide the old token into the proper slot.

A countdown appears. Prepare...ten… nine… eight… seven… six… five…

The lights all go out. The after image of the countdown is the only thing I can see in the darkness. In eerie silence and blackness, I fumble with the buckle until it’s loose and slide out of the machine.

Can’t see shit, not even dim light for my eyes to adjust to. My phone should be on top of the machine, reaching for it, my hand passes through nothing. Changing my swing, I try again.

Maybe I missed the first time. But my hand goes through the area I had been sitting in. Something should have hit my hand.

White letters that illuminate nothing fade into existence in front of me. Create Your Character.

“Oh, god.”

Of all the things that might have happened to me here, Dylan being right about being sucked into a game hadn’t even made my list.