Revealing Project Green

A litrpg with kids and NES references and vanishing monsters

By Nolan Locke

Chapter 2- She Who Shoots Cheese Balls at the Sun

Manny’s family clearly doesn’t make a lot of money: most of the stuff in here is that 1970’s and even some 60’s style deco stuff, with a couple of newer hand-me-down things, like a slightly chewed orange corduroy sofa on the thick, green shag carpeting, with one of those glass tables piled high with breakfast dishes. The dishes don’t match, either.

The TV is at least respectable. Apparently Manny’s pops enjoys Monday night football or Jeopardy or some such, because they have a big old thirty or forty incher. This one isn’t hooked up to the NES, but the one in the back family room is.

We make our careful way through the house, trying not to look at the awful family portraits in wood frames on the wood paneled walls, which don’t quite match. Or the edgier metal frames that certainly don’t match. Being kids, we always teeter between not caring about this stuff in the slightest (if your friend is cool and fun) or hyper aware of every difference (if the person is a rival, or even a sworn enemy). Given that we’ve just been attacked by an ogre, and a video game ogre at that–though it had looked plenty real–we aren’t in the mood to roast Manny for his family not having enough money. The hall gives us two bedrooms on the right, and finally the back family room at the end. Around the left we could be admitted into the kitchen and maybe a dining room we’ve overlooked.

It doesn’t matter, because the video games are everywhere in the family room, in front of another boxy projection tube TV, this one only maybe twenty-two inches. It's a shrine of pretty epic proportions, given what I’d just seen of the rest of the house: a halo of games and accessories hung around the unit. Tucked into the beechwood TV stand is also a Commodore 64, with even more games in a carrying case. Wires, cables and controllers were everywhere.

“Holy cow,” Ritchie says, which makes me jump a little. Empty houses, especially strange empty houses, freak me out a little as a kid.

“Yeah.”

No ogre prints, no smashed up house, no nothing.

Ritchie must roll up a success in Insight or used one of his Characteristics, because he suddenly bends down and grabbs up an NES cartridge that glimmered silvery in the slanting light coming from a high window.

“What–“

“Look at this,” he says, holding it like it was a smelly gym sock. The one corner of the game has a silvery sheen of paint or something like paint on it. I’ve done a little bit of model painting, on a scale F-14, and this appears to be like model paint.

“Paint?”

It doesn’t smell like paint. Ritchie shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

As for the game, it's called The Battle at Black Cliff. I’d never heard of it.

We catch another glimmer of silver coming from the master bedroom, and veer in there to check it out. Here the high bedpost has a silvery handprint on it, or at least several fingerprints.

I reach forward, but jumped back when Ritchie hisses, “Don’t touch it!”

I jerk my hand away and turn wide eyes on Ritchie. “What? What?”

“We don’t know what this is… it could be poisonous.” Or worse. The threat hangs in the air. Ritchie, ever the observant one, bends to get a look at the rest of the room, and sure enough a second later gives the ‘a-ha!’ of having found something. That something turns out to be a broken canister of silvery stuff. Now that I see it in action, it clearly isn’t paint. It's too regular, for one thing, like someone had stirred it for ages. It's also too thin to be paint.

After that is the bizarre glass canister with the two metal ends. This looks like it belonged on a space shuttle headed to the moon. The glass part has some notches to measure how much was inside, which by now isn’t much at all: four ounces apparently, where it could hold up to sixteen. One end is cracked, and covered in more of the silvery goop. It isn’t possible to hold it by the goopy side and avoid keeping the stuff contained, or hold it from the secure side and have the goop leak out, so Ritchie takes his Pepsi bottle, dumps the last of the Pepsi, rinses it out, and pours the rest of the stuff from the broken canister into the soda bottle.

We don’t want to touch the stuff, so naturally I hold onto it with one of Manny’s dad’s shirts from the floor.

Once it's safely stored away in a watertight container, we both let out a deep sigh. I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath until it comes whooshing out in a long, loud rush.

“What do we do with it?” he asks me.

“Dunno. But we start with Manny, that’s for sure.”

“Good idea.”

We head outside to find Manny laying on the grass, hands under his head, and eyes closed. He's as far away from his house as possible without being in the street.

“Hey,” I say, then nudge his leg with my foot when he doesn't respond. Could he really go from terrified to asleep in just a few minutes? Maybe all the commotion sapped his energy.

“Huh?” he asks, and jolts awake.

“You sleeping?”

“I guess.”

“What’s this stuff?” Ritchie asks, and shows him the Pepsi bottle with the silvery goop in the bottom.

“No idea.” Manny yawns. “My dad brough it home yesterday I think. In a glass thing.”

“Well it was broken and leaking out. You know it got on your game, right?”

“What?”

It seemed like the daze he was in isn’t letting up. I help him up off the grass, but he sways and steadies himself against the big maple in the corner of his yard.

“Were you playing this?”

He nodds. “My brother doesn’t want me to play it. Says it’s his game. Don’t tell him I was playing, okay?”

I've never met Manny’s big brother, and have no intention of ratting him out. Whatever is going on is more important than a big brother punching his little brother because of a Nintendo game.

“You want to come with us?”

He peers around at the street, the house, and us for a few moments longer than he should. Finally he says, “Nah, I gotta go see my dad I think. He works at the fairgrounds.”

Something is really up with Manny. I mean I don't know him well, but there aren’t that many kids in Greensville. He's generally a pretty high energy kid, because kids have a lot of energy, so this is real weird. He goes to pick up his bike, falls onto it in exaggerated slow motion, then gets up and picks it up with extreme care. Even then he nearly overbalances. Lucky for him, Ritchie and I are there to get him steady.

“Thanks,” he mutters, and gets moving. We watch him bike out of sight before turning to face each other.

“Huh.”

“Yeah,” Ritchie says.

“You want to try and figure out what that stuff is?”

“I’m down with it. You got anything better to do?” he asks.

I shrug, then hop on my bike. “Let’s do it.”

***

Sometime later we're back at my house and looking through a little booklet for the Greensville Public Schools, the GPS Yellow Pages.

Ms. Gina is our only choice. She's a teacher at Greensville elementary who had come into our class and done a science presentation last year. She majored in science, I think, or just really enjoyed it, because she made things blow up, made foam, created an evil black carbon snake from fire, and that kind of thing, both in our classroom and during a whole school assembly. Since everybody knows about her (from the blue eyes and her very blue hair) and only the fifth graders actually have her classes full time, she's the source of many rumors: somehow people think she shoots cheese balls at the sun. She's also rumored to have an artificial face, and for whatever reason, people whisper she might be constructing a robot clone of herself in her spare time, at home.

Ms. Gina is actually Ms. Gina Rednick, and doesn't live too far away, so we decide she'll have the answers we need. Another short bike ride later, and we arrive at her unassuming house. No cheese ball launcher on the roof, no Ms. Gina robot.

The house is done up in white, with a well-kept lawn and a spray of flowers under the mailbox, which does say Rednick on it. Her garage door and front door are both robin’s egg blue. Weird.

We hit the doorbell, but we shouldn’t have. There is such a racket coming from somewhere inside we should know she can't hear us. But when you’re uncomfortable with the person you’re about to see, and it’s an adult, you ring the doorbell. Then later you can say ‘I rang the doorbell but nobody answered.’

Eventually we head to the garage and bang on it for a good five million minutes (kid time of course, probably a minute or two) before it rolls upwards.

Now Ms. Gina is pretty tall, pretty slim, and pretty… pretty, but not with a welder’s face mask on. We both shout in surprise and jump a bit, but she lifts the face shield up and reveals her sweaty, dirty face to us.

“Oh, hey! You’re… uh…”

“Donny, ma’am.”

“Ritchie,” Ritchie says.

“What’s going on?”

“We’ve got something that we hope you can take a look at. Tell us what it is,” I tell her.

“Oh, is that right?” she asks.

“That’s right,” I say. “It’s like a silvery… stuff. Paint maybe, but we don’t think it’s paint.”

Oh, right, her garage. Ms. Gina’s garage is not for storing cars. Like my dad’s workshop, her garage is mostly taken up by science junk and workspace, except she clearly uses hers. It's paint splattered and full of suspicious black marks that might’ve been from explosions, and has everything you could imagine: wood, metal pipes, pallets, a boxy old timey radio, what might’ve been a boombox except it's open and half torn apart.

On the tables are equal parts builder/carpenter’s workshop and mad scientist’s lab: beakers, burners, and pipettes shared space with a bandsaw, a router, and a bunch of hand tools on the walls.

Oh, and there is a kind of human-sized, human-shaped sculpture in the middle of the garage, a person who appears ready to throw a javelin maybe, only it's made out of old rusted metal pieces all stuck together somehow. Welding, I know now, but back then I had no idea.

“Come in, come on in then.” She gesturs back toward a more sciency looking table, and Ritchie fishes out the Pepsi bottle.

Ms. Gina squints at it. “Huh. Weird. Where’d you find this? Is this all there was? It wasn’t in a Pepsi bottle was it?” The questions go on, and come out rapid fire. She doesn't even give us a chance to answer for a while, but eventually we fill her in on the silver goop and how we also have a game cartridge with the stuff on it, in a plastic lunch bag in my backpack.

“This sure is a cool mystery!” she declares, and gets down to doing some tests. She puts a single drop of the stuff on a slide to look at under a magnifying glass, and puts another drop of it in a dish to add some fire to it. It doesn't really burn, but when she puts an electrical meter thing to it, the meter thing explodes. Which sends her, the dish, and the droplet of silver goop all to the floor.

For a crazy second, all the lights in here go nuts: they glow real bright, but then all blink on and off for a few moments, before everything goes back to normal.

Ms. Gina gets up and peers at where the silvery drop has landed: an electrical socket, where all her science or workshop tools are plugged in. She adjusts her wire rimmed glasses and goes, “Hmm.”

“What’s 'hmm' mean, Ms Gina?” Ritchie asks.

“I’ve never seen anything like that.”

Neither have we, but neither of us have advanced degrees from a university in this field of study, so we share a look of amazement.

“Do you have more of it?” she asks.

“Uhh… no. This is it.” And Ritchie quickly stows it away in his backpack. Maybe he's thinking about a reward for revealing it to the scientific community, or maybe he has advance warning of what's coming down the pipeline.

“Well if you happen to get more, we can head over to the high school and put it through one of the centrifuges and see what its elemental composition really is.” She thanks us for bringing her something so interesting and new, and we thank her for giving us confirmation on what we’ve already suspected: this stuff definitely isn’t paint, and it's potentially dangerous. Which is both fascinating and only slightly scary. It hasn’t eaten through the Pepsi bottle, which hadn’t occurred to us at all. So it isn't too much of an acid or base for us to handle.

We still have a lot of questions, but it's lunch time. We bike home for a round of sandwiches, apple slices, carrot sticks dipped in peanut butter, and some saltines with butter. It’s one of those things you don’t really understand if you’re not either a) from USA, b) from the eighties, or c) from a weird household where such things are the norm. My mother must have saved every three out of four pennies that came from my dad’s job by feeding me the absolute cheapest food available until I was ready to move out.