Revealing Project Green

A litrpg with dice rolls... finally.

CHAPTER 1.4- May I Partake of Your Refreshing Beverage?

It is around this point that I note the numbers floating above and behind my best friend. My jaw drops, and I go to point them out when they are gone. It’s like one of those new optical illusions, where it changes shape when you tilt it. One second you’re seeing one image, and then it shifts to something else. It also makes this satisfying sound when you rub your fingernail over it.

Anyway, I’m definitely seeing numbers and words at this point: Might, Will, Insight. Might says 1d6+2, and Will says 3d6… then they’re gone before I can make anything else out.

“Dude,” I say. “What’s mine say?”

“I think… I think it’s numbers for Castle at Black Cliff. Just like in the game. Look, there’s Might… what?”

“I saw Might floating behind your head, too.”

What a conversation to have in a mall filled with zombie corpses… actually, by now the corpses have vanished and a small pile of coins are all that’s left behind. I collect them up, which amounts to six copper, and two silver ones from the ogre.

Weird.

“I’ve gotta right this down!” Ritchie says, but I get him up and the hell out of here. I’ve caught the motion of men in official hats, and it’s got me spooked. Mall security’s going to start asking questions, and we can’t have that. Oh, right. I retrieve the game from the NES and try not to touch any of the silvery stuff. We can’t just steal a whole NES, which is the size of my whole backpack, but it’s probably got some bits of silver stuff on it. Hopefully nothing happens to anybody who plays on it, I think as we get out of there.

A few minutes later on our bikes, we come to a place where the highway shoulder is nice and wide. On either side of us is lush Northern California forest, without the redwoods rising up into forever. They’re big, but not mainland Cali big.

“Okay,” I tell him. “Did you see Will and Insight and that stuff, like 2d6 and 3d6?”

Something was clicking in my mind, but it wasn’t completely there yet.

“Yes!” Ritchie rummages in his backpack for a notebook and comes out with a strange sheet of paper that confuses him for some reason.

“Donny,” he says.

I’m next to him before he can ask me to come look. The paper says Name: Ritchie Dabriel. Below that: Might 1d6+2, Moves 4d6, Will 3d6, Insight 4d6+1, Panache 3d6, Skirmish 2d6, Luck 4d6. Which kind of fit him, honestly. He was really insightful but hardly fought at all. But there’s no scale to the thing, no minimum or maximum number of d6.

Off to the side are Domains, and his are apparently Bike and Wild. Whatever that means. Below that are three Characteristics: Easygoing, Focused, and Observant. Below all that is a stack of six boxes, with 26 HP written to the left. Below the boxes are more numbers: 6, 6, 5, 4, 4, and 1. Inside those boxes causes me to hitch a breath: the last box above the one says ‘Dead’, and the next-to-last box says KO. The others are minuses: 0, -1d6, -2d6, -3d6.

At the bottom left corner it reads: Items of Note, and beneath that are Backpack, Mysterious Goo, Hatchet 1d6+1, sandwich (minor), silver pieces, and Flashlight. It doesn’t explain why his sandwich isn’t a big deal, but the rest of his stuff is left out.

“You found this in your backpack?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

So I go to my backpack and root around until I find my own character sheet. That’s clearly what these are, anyhow. I don’t have the same numbers, Domains or Characteristics as Ritchie, but I have all the same stuff: seven stats, two Domains, three Characteristics.

Might 2d6, Moves 4d6+1, Will 3d6, Insight 3d6, Panache 4d6+1, Skirmish 2d6+1, Luck 3d6. Instead of Bike and Wild, mine are Bike and School. My three Characteristics are Charismatic, Quick, and Rich. Instead of 26 HP, I had 30. My six boxes go 6, 6, 6, 6, 5 and 1, which totals 30, so that’s something. Ritchie’s boxes also total up to his HP, which I’m sure I remember from my Dungeons and Dragons, is Hit Points. Currently I have 2 slashes in my first box. Two damage from a zombie bite, eh? All right.

And in the Items of Note place, there’s Knife 1d6, sandwich (minor), copper pieces, and Mysterious Game Cartridge.

Okay. Okay. We’re in a video game. That’s definitely what’s going on here. Which is why, immediately after staring at our character sheets for a good five or ten minutes, we bike home and have cookies with milk, and discuss it.

“What do you think it means?”

Ritchie shook his head. “I’m… not sure.”

“Can you make your Insight thing work, and get some idea of what we can do?”

He frowns at his character sheet and taps at the Insight. Nothing happens. “What’s a 4d6 anyway?”

“I think it’s regular dice. The square ones. In the Dungeons and Dragons book I read, there were these different dice, and the number of sides… d6, d12, d20, and there’s one that looks like a pyramid. Anyway. There aren’t any other numbers after the D.”

“So… if we maybe roll the dice?”

I don’t know at this point, because the numbers floating behind Ritchie are still unclear, but he’s rolled a failure. The reality, such as it is right now, is auto-rolling for us. Back when I fought the ogre, there were several chances for me to roll, and all that happened without me knowing. And that’s still happening, except now we know it might be happening.

We grab a Candyland box, and the Monopoly box, and come up with the four dice necessary to do any of these rolls. We have a moment of shared eye contact, full of utterly stupid hope, and he rolls the dice. It doesn’t matter, but they come up 3, 4, 5, and 5.

Nothing happens, except additional frustration. We glance around at the house for a few moments, and try to get a look at the numbers floating around behind our heads, but there’s a whole lot more nothing.

“I don’t get it.”

I’m starting to feel a little crazy. I mean clearly I shouldn’t. There’s the ogre, the zombies, the coins, and now the character sheets.

“What now then?” Ritchie asks, and I can only shrug. I have no idea what’s going on here, except for the dumb clues that don’t seem to make any sense. Eventually we start to wonder if we’re going nuts, but then have a look at the character sheets with our names printed on them. It’s not a joke. I did get bitten on the shoulder, though that’s beginning to feel–

I check the sheet again. The two slashes in the first wound box are gone. In fact… I pull my shirt up and have a look at my shoulder, only to find the bite marks are just bruises.

“What the hell?” I ask. We’re ten, next week anyway, but we know about big kid words. Like all little kids, we’re ready to be a part of the big leagues and say the nasty words, just out of hearing range of our parents.

Eventually my mom comes home from whatever she’s been doing. Shopping maybe. She busies herself with starting up dinner, and Ritchie and I head back into the den for some video games.

We stop and stare at the NES box like it’s a trap, like the light gray part and the dark gray part are going to pen up and there’ll be a nasty double row of shark teeth under there, and two eyes will appear… somewhere. Maybe the flap will open and the eyes will be under there, but like four of them, and shiny black spider eyes instead.

I absently pull the Battle at Black Cliff out of my backpack and just hold it. Ritchie notices, and for several silly moments looks back and forth between me and the game. Up, down, up, down go his eyes.

“No, Donny. Your mom’s here.”

Okay, so we’re both on the same page at least, with regards to this thing.

“What about the other silver goop? We could get a little bit of it on Mario 3 and see if there are big old turtles and Ba-bombs and stuff.” It’s a bad idea and we both know it. Mario has only one Hit Point, and then he falls off the map into oblivion. Two if you get a mushroom that turns you into a giant. Neither of us want a max of two HP. We don’t want to fall into nothingness. Neither of us want to be crashing through the door at twelve feet high, as awesome as that sounds. Because we both seem to get at the same time that with the cool stuff comes the opponents. That angry sun that swirls around in the sky and then dive bombs you, or the ghosts that cover their eyes when you’re facing them, but come after you when you’re looking away. We don’t want the angry bullets or the huge square shaped faces that try to squish you.

Nope.

There might be games to play, but I don’t want to take the risks. Zelda would be amazing. We could build up a collection of items that would somehow fit on our person, stock up on hearts, visit fairies for a full heal, and blow up walls with bombs. Except, no. That would mean monsters everywhere: big jellies that become smaller jellies shaped like Hershey’s Kisses, octopi that shoot rocks out of their mega huge mouths, and all the bosses. Plus, there’s a never ending forest I’m sure I don’t want to sift through.

I scold myself for this: I’m not a coward. Am I? I don’t want to look like a coward in front of Ritchie, at least.

“We don’t know what’ll happen if we mix another game with Black Cliff,” I tell him. It sounds lame coming out of my mouth, but Ritchie nods sagely, like this is sound logic. I’m sure now that he was just as scared as I was at the time, but ten year old me had no idea.

Instead we try to make things go back to normal, and put on some television. Nothing’s on at this time of the evening, but we surf channels with my new remote control. We get lost in the rain of images and speech and jingles and advertisements. The weird, scary reality of our situation fades a bit.

But not completely.

It’s times like these that made me force my parents to buy and put together a bunk bed set. When night comes, Ritchie heads over to his place and disappears for a little while, but reappears with pajamas and a set of clothes for the following day, climbs up the ladder, and bids me goodnight. By this point I’m also showered, changed, and have my teeth freshly brushed.

It won’t be. A good night that is. We don’t know that though, so I bid him goodnight also.

***

So there’s a little something you have to know about Maya: in 1988 at least, she lives in a little trailer home area of town on the south side, just north of Greensville’s DD Furniture company. It’s one of the biggest furniture makers in the state, and employs an absolute ton of people. The building is easily the biggest on the island, even bigger than the castle, which okay is up on a hill, but you can tell DD’s bigger. It will matter, but not now. So Maya’s dad works in the factory, and I’m pretty sure I recall her mom does too, though she might work in the big showroom attached to the warehouse building.

Which is to say that Maya has to be bussed in to school, hasn’t been here for very long, and we don’t go visit very much because it’s a long, long bike ride. But we’re friends.

How we became friends is fun, so I’ll just sketch out a little bit: in third grade we got put on a team project together, to make a science presentation. At one point Maya’s parents show up Maya with tamales, which were very weird to us. So while we all played around in the yard and ate authentic Mexican food, our parents became friends (though I’m not a hundred percent certain on this) and Ritchie and I became friends with Maya. Like, it literally took three hours of playing for us to befriend this giant-haired, dark-skinned, skinny athletic girl with a great laugh.

Yeah, you’re thinking the same thing, but no, we were too young to end up together. Sure I’m over forty now, but I’m telling you, a lot happens between 1988 and now. Things would get weird, and then weirder, and then weirder still, and finally just tragic.

So Maya’s the type of person, for instance, who sits on the roof of her house and just stares up at the stars. It’s probably because she has something in the neighborhood of eight siblings and lives in a small room with three of them. Or maybe five. I don’t go over there because Maya’s ashamed of the place, but I heard they had custom built bunk beds to fit them all, and rotate who sleeps on the floor.

I guess maybe it’s possible all of them sleep in the same bedroom. I hadn’t really thought about it before. That is frankly terrifying, but she never moaned or complained about it. Their house was always overflowing with people: kids doing homework in the yard, kids playing board games at the table while the others had dish washing duty, kids running and biking around the neighborhood at all hours.

Anyway September, early September, is a pretty good time to go sleep out under the stars, if you don’t mind bugs or have some good bug spray. Which is to say that Maya ends up at my house at 3 in the morning, climbing in the window. She wakes me up with an, “I’m really thirsty!”

And promptly drinks all the silvery goop stuff in the Pepsi bottle.

I bolt awake just in time to see her polish off the not-Pepsi, staring in horror at her. I’m sure she’ll explode. She’ll transform into a giant cyclops, or even worse, one of those things that’s just a floating ball of eyes.

Instead she winces, then burps.

“Oh jeez,” she says. “What the heck was that?”