“Your father’s dead! Your father’s dead! Your father’s dead!” The voices carried on behind Albaer in a constant loop. “Miss your daddy?! Miss your daddy?! Miss your daddy?!” But no outward tears stung Albaer’s brown eyes. They remained within, for now.

The sound of feet padding after him as he walked back to his apartment was a constant, and his slender arms screamed at him to cover his ears and lower his head to hide from the taunts. His legs screamed at him to run, every fiber of his being commanded him, ‘Get away!’

But he didn’t.

He walked on, the feet behind him were like a constant drumming, leaving him with no hope that it would stop. ‘Just tolerate it for now, you’ll reach your place soon, and they’ll keep going on to theirs just like they always do.’ He told himself, knowing he was right.

Behind him he knew every voice and face without looking. Six of them, some had been friends, once, when he and they were small and in elementary school. Now in high school, they were anything but.

The sun shone down indifferently, casting his shadow behind him, occasionally the sound of sneakered feet ceased to step and became the sound of two feet landing, they were jumping on his shadow, putting it beneath them.

A mockery of their childhood games. Still, Albaer said nothing when their laughter came on, ‘Don’t mind the bullies, they’ll get bored and leave you alone, just be nice, just tell your teachers, just… just… just…’ His mother’s admonition rang in his ear.

She was wrong. They didn’t get bored, this was their entertainment on the way back to their homes.

His dark hair hung loose and helped hold the heat in close to his head, but it didn’t burn as much as bad advice that he couldn’t bring himself not to follow. ‘Teachers are worthless.’ He cursed their inaction, even though part of him understood it. ‘Easier not to get involved, they’re like the other students, the pitying looks are all over the place, but nobody does anything.’

In spite of Albaer’s own resolve to show nothing to anyone, he wrapped his arms in front of his slender stomach and tried to ignore the growl there. He grabbed the dark straps of his backpack and hiked it up higher, pretending he wasn’t hugging himself. ‘Show no weakness.’ He said to himself again and again, and finally he reached his safe space.

Ahead was the path that led to the complex where he lived. It was a simple set of interconnected gray painted apartments, wooden structures with a plaster/mesh surface covered over with seashells, every time he looked at it, he remembered his lessons in science class. ‘Millions of years ago, all this was under water, that’s why you find shells so far from water today.’ Albaer enjoyed those lessons.

It made the present seem so small, to think on time scales like that. ‘In an eyeblink, this life will be over, and none of them can do anything to me then.’ Even he was aware of how depressing the thought was, but it wasn’t death he thought of, but his high school life.

Behind him he could hear the voices calling him, “See you tomorrow, Alby! See you, shadow boy! Later, bitch!” The taunts and jeers faded as the six of them began to talk of other things as they made their way on to their own residences.

He took out his key and unlocked the door, a simple two bedroom apartment greeted him. A kitchenette to his left with a stove, microwave, and refrigerator. A living room with a table and television, a sliding glass door that led out to the public pool he didn’t dare use.

“Mom, I’m home?” Albaer’s voice cracked a little, no answer came. ‘She must be out.’ He thought. ‘Good.’ He added, and went to his room.

Tears burned hot inside his body, but he couldn’t bring himself to let them out. He tossed his bag onto the single bed and turned on his own television, and the game system along with it. He didn’t need to select a game from the cases beside it, though there were several, there was only one choice.

“Hylarim, here I come.” He said in the cracked voice of a boy becoming a man. He slid down from the bed to the floor and synced up the smooth black plastic controller to the console. The green logo flashed across the screen, he selected the CD tray to load from, and began.

Hylarim was the largest and most popular open world game on the market… doubly impressive because it had been around for years. Sequels had appeared, but Albaer had no interest in them. They were MMOs, Massive Multiplayer Online games. ‘I don’t want to play with other people, other people suck, I want my own story, not to be part of theirs.’ He let out a shudder and selected his character, ‘Kami’.

Kami was as far from himself as possible, a tigerman with ripped muscles, powerful jaws, and most differently of all, maximum charisma. He had the same character for a very long time, and had maxed out stats to the point where the quests were not a challenge on even the highest difficulty level.

That was the point, that was the fun. ‘Here, I am a god.’ Thanks to his programming and editing skills... and a dev kit loaded console, he could create his own mods and then install them. The 3-D models were a bit pricey, but a side job got him the money to pay for models, so the game never got old.

And in this way, Albaer ensured he didn’t need anybody.

He let out a sigh and tapped his foot on the soft cream carpet that had begun to fade with age and imperfect cleaning. The new mod was ready and it was time to play the story he himself had written.

‘Time to lead the rebellion and destroy the six evil overlords.’ He grinned… ‘Even if it does have a long load time.’ He chuckled a bit at the joke that even he knew wasn’t really funny, and popped up to go get a soda.

The promise of the fun ahead made him impatient, but pushed aside the misery of only minutes before.

The off-white refrigerator door resisted his pull for just a moment, then gave in with the crisp crack it always did, and Albaer’s eyes searched the shelves. There wasn’t much, lots of condiments, most of those half empty, some fruit that wasn’t going to last much longer if it wasn’t eaten.

His eyes fell to what he wanted, ‘Beast’ a can with a single claw through the name, an energy drink that didn’t work well because it had no sugar. But he liked the flavor and it was cheap.

He snatched the black and blue can and popped the top. Just as the audible crack and fizz began, he heard something unexpected.

“What the hell?!” He heard a woman’s voice utter.

“What in heaven’s name?” Another equally feminine voice gasped out.

Albaer froze. ‘That came from my room.’ He recognized and looked toward the split in the hall between his mother’s room and his.

He turned his eyes toward the door, ‘Run, get a neighbor to call the cops. Get help.’ He told himself, but he didn’t move, he stood frozen and listened.

“Where are we?” The first woman asked, a hint of fear in her voice.

“How should I know?! I did the same thing you did!” He heard the second voice retort.

That gave him pause, ‘They sound confused, not criminal, and I have no window there for them to get in through… so where did they come from?’ He asked himself. He wondered briefly if they’d been hiding in the bathroom, but dismissed the idea as unlikely, they sounded afraid too.

‘If I call the cops, they’ll get in trouble, and they sound distressed already, mom will think they’re burglars, and if this is just some big misunderstanding… fuuuuck.’ Albaer cursed as he realized he was talking himself into going in there.

He set his sixteen ounce can down quietly on the counter, then reached into the pantry, moving with great care when opening the door to not make a sound. His hand wrapped around a broom handle, and then he headed back to his room.

Step.

Step.

Step.

His heart was in his throat, and it pounded there, his eyes were wide, he could hear the two women talking in his room, arguing was more like it.

“This is your fault! I don’t know what you did, but you did something! We should be facing Kami right now, but no! No, we’re not, and I know I did my part correctly!” The first voice said with abundant snark.

‘Kami? My Hylarim character?! Are they from the game company?! Did they find out about my black market dev kit?!’ Albaer’s panic became very, very different. Fines for software modification were hefty, and neither he nor his mother could afford it.

It was not enough to make him lower his broomstick, but it did make him less afraid that violent meth heads had broken in ‘somehow’.

He raised the broom up, clutching it at the base just above where the bristles connected.

“Me?! You always blame me! I’m powerful, sure, but even I can’t take both of us out of there to somewhere else! If I had screwed up, it would just be me here now! So something else must have gone wrong!” The second voice said just as his hand reached for the brass cylindrical knob of his door.

Albaer counted out in his mind, preparing to burst into the door. ‘Alright, on three…’

‘One’ He thought, and took a breath.

‘Two.’ He thought, and exhaled deeply and in silence.

“Youuuuuu!” He heard them blame each other again.

‘Three!’ He took another deep breath, wrenched the knob and burst into the room with the cracked shout of the sort that only a teenage boy could make, waving the broomhandle high like he was going to bring it down on the head of whoever was in reach.

Twin shrieks of alarm reached him in turn as the pair scrambled back in shock, pressing themselves against the wall.

Albaer’s shout became something else almost immediately. A shout of fear and confusion brought on by the unexpected.

From what he’d heard, he expected two women, what kind of women, anything from executives who had waltzed in to demand his console be turned over, to druggies hoping to rob him, either of which would have been a thing to shout over.

What he got presented before his eyes, brought another shout, “What the hell are you?!”

On its face, the question was stupid, because what they were was obvious, he’d seen their sort many times in fictions and games, but never before had he seen them in life.

Any teenage boy would have called them beautiful, with long slender legs and arms, classical hourglass shapes with oval faces and long hair, one blonde, the other inky black. Their features seemed quite delicate, and would have raised alarm in no one, if anything, by themselves, attraction and protective instinct would be naturally expected.

But it was their other features that brought alarm. On the left, the inky black haired woman had a pair of horns growing from the sides of her head, while black batlike wings sprang from her back, and her flesh was a bloody red. A long dark tail lashed frantically where it hung low at the height of her ankles. Her counterpart, a more conventional skin tone that you’d call ‘lightly tanned. Her hair was long and golden, tumbling down behind her. However, from her back, sprung wings of white feathers.

An angel, and a demoness, and they were in his home.

“What are you?!” He shouted again, and the pair, dumbstruck by the unexpected confrontation, had terror filled eyes of their own, as if he was the monster.

Albaer waved the broom over his head, clutching it tight with both hands, “How did you get in here?!” He shouted the question, and the pair of unexpected entries did something else he never expected… other than exist.

Their knees grew weak, they collapsed to the floor, and they began to let out a wailing, keening cry as if they’d come upon the corpse of a loved one. “It can’t be! It can’t be… it can’t beeee!”

The angel wept, while the demoness could not even manage words.

Albaer slowly began to lower his improvised weapon, his fear began to abate, and the obvious set in for more than one reason.

‘Something is very… very wrong here. It may be them, it may be me, it may be both, but ‘something’ is.’ And for the moment, he could only wonder what it was.