"It's alright Slephner, I know you don't like me personally." Slephner never saw her again. Since then his first girlfriend hung herself in her room. With nowhere else to turn to my sorrow, Slephner turned to the arcades.

You can grow up with someone and never really get to know them. While Slephner knew there was something different about Ellen compared to his first love, he didn't know she would murder her father. There were some things that Ellen did not know about Slephner as well, one of the few regrets he had in my life not to get to know her more. Now that he was on the edge of death, he found myself wishing for a rewind. He was the best of gamers, the best of thieves. He could get the highest score with no questions asked. If he was put to the task during a gaming session, he took it in stride as an off day. He could always get better, you had to if you wanted to get better. This was his life. In some ways he would rather not want to live it in any other way.

In one of their first gaming sessions, he felt like tutoring Ellen in the ways of the world. As one of the few actual girls he liked, he found myself having conflicting feelings between the desire to be her father figure and her movie buddy. Except Slephner was just a kid too as was she, and all they wanted to be was free from the horrors of this world.

He had last broken up with his previous girlfriend; despite being three years younger than the minimum to drink, they found their solace in the drop. Like flavor of mild peaches under the false Summer heat of the tanning bed, of which he used to take her. But Ellen was different, he wanted something more. He thought that Ellen could provide it, after all she was one of the few girls that he found he could have a man to man discussions with. To others, he came across as someone who experienced mood swings. But he knew unlike anyone else that he was always thinking about things. Slephner thought about his previous relationship and his current. His last hope for desiring women at all. And yet, despite no other interest in Ellen I found there was something in her that made me want to hold on unlike others who failed.

When he found that his life was beyond the pale when his old girlfriend took his robot dog to the next state over, Ellen was there to comfort him unlike anyone else. Yet part of his affection was that he found something in her that made him be proud to be her friend. Slephner never liked baseball, at least not very much. He wanted to be her batter and have her catch his balls. He wrote one poem devoted to one of the previous girls he had broken up with. But Ellen was always there beside him, always there to hold him. Hold him into the night when he was down.

Slephner wanted to sleep with her, even though he had invited another guy to sleep in the same bed with them. In general he preferred guys. But for her there was something more than lust, something more than love that made him want to be held in her arms at night. Yet he had father like feelings for her during the day, would always instruct her about how to pull the right triggers on a hand guns, push the right buttons the on the Nihilist likes of the arcades. Some might view it as narcissistic, but he gave himself accolades, but also gave Ellen accolades. When she was shy Slephner would clap her hands for her on her behalf to herself, in order to build up her self-esteem. This would always make it stick her tongue out at him, but Slephner wanted Ellen to be only his own.

When you get so lonely, you want to be with anyone.

For Slephner, he would call up Ellen to see if she could come over, even before they ran away together. They had romantic feelings, possessive feelings.

Feelings they had for nobody else.

On some level Slephner knew he was going to die. It was only a matter of time. When the new gaming systems malfunctioned, he was left in a degenerating state. He was hoping to die, be left to fate.

The doctors in the laboratory did not expect Slephner to live for more more than a year. They were unsure as to whether this was because of cancer, or some other condition. His natural vision began to decline. He would eventually need prosthetic eyes to restore vision. He could have died in what they referred to as dream-space, but his ability to create his own world gave him just enough drive to survive to see the next day, but he soon found that the world created slowly lost its lucid quality. Desires he had that were left dormant for so long. Slephner joined flesh with fairies, fought amongst noble armies.

There was a wish about a falling star. He wanted to dine with the Tzar's. His desire had always been to visit Russia, before the revolution. As there was only so much in the history people were taught that he actually believed.

There was a certain unspoken contract. He was not suppose to share what I knew with anyone. Not suppose to share with the few family he had left, yet for him it was simply source code. He found that all worlds deserved to be free, especially if he could free them and get many a blow job. Wanting to share the dreams with his sweetheart Ellen, he knew she would love to hear a new story. Yet the dream-scanners told him not to say anything. Or that they might decapitate Ellen with a Guillotine Gun.

You know how it is when you just under your Freshman year in high school. If you get told one thing you always wanted to do the opposite. He didn't like being told what to do, he wanted the power.

This was his mistake, his greed.

His youthful creed.

"Are you ready to order?" Nadine heard Ellen say, as gradually as the vision from inside her dream began to fade way. He could distinctly remember various advertisements playing over in her brain.

"Yea I'll take a coffee." Nadine ordered, ate, then exited the building.

After she walked through the sliding glass doors, Nadine tried to remember what it was that made her want to remember what those ads specifically were. Perhaps they reminded her of a lost time, when she lived in the sky. Ads from when she was plugged into his deck. Somehow she got the impression that only worked, when Nadine was plugged into the pod-net network.

Blanci was outside to greet Nadine, in the thick green fog that covered the city. She saw her take the powder, choking and snorting on it after accidentally taking a breath into it. Fumes were tossed his direction.

"Remember boy, ... you need me. Or you will die ... cold during the night." Blanci, Nadine's Fruit Pie, said, in that near calmness that would give just about anybody chills. Almost like she wasn't even there. Nadine needed something for my mental fight. Bianca's generosity was the only reason he was even alive at all.

The next morning Nadine was disturbed by Bianca's cell-phone, woke up as if rising from a fall from the sky. "How was your sleep dear wanderer?" Blanci asked, eye-balling her like a cat to mouse.

I think at sixteen, I'm a little bit to old to be called a run-away. Besides she's not my mother, she thought. Nadine was not sure what felt more like a sledgehammer. Her grating voice, that can can through anyone like a sword, or because of his aching robotic arm and his immune-suppressant withdrawals. "So let's talk money for a minute."

"Do you wish to grab my only bullets?" Blanci said.

"I only wish to know how much, you think is reasonable to give me to take the medication that I need." Nadine said.

"That you can carry it around with you," she said, in that slightly less grating voice that was still grating. "To buy more of that powdery pill stuff?" Nadine wasn't sure why she was still getting on to her about it, though in a way she was like a mother her never had here. For this reason, he was still attached to her.

"Well I'm going out." The Fallen stood up in the nude.

"Hey cover yourself up -- with this blanket." Blanci said. Then dragged Nadine into the closet to try on some new clothes that would not make her girlfriend stand out.

Nadine, Malcolm, and Bianca sat at the diner just down the road from Purgatory. Nadine was of course, being the little inattentive asshole she was to the conversation, taking her immune-suppressant pills to subdue the physical pain from the robotic limbs. "At some point man," Malcolm said to Nadine. Then he snickered without really being amused, "you need to buy your own."

Malcolm raised one of his eyebrows at the waitress, who placed his hamburger plate down on the table.

"I will have a soda, make it a large." Blanci said, choking on a powder. She spewed powder on her shirt, causing Malcolm to growl at her. She puckered her lips mockingly at him, who smiled with a grimace. Blanci then pushed Malcolm away grabbing the soda from the waitresses hands. Malcolm quickly got it back from her, after she tried taking a sip.

You guys just can't get along can you, Nadine thought.

Outside the diner, Ellen and Slephner walked inside through the sliding glass doors. To the table right behind them they sat. The Purgatory dwellers tried not to pay any particular attention to the Dangervilles. Just eat quietly, then leave. Slephner eye-balled Nadine's famille with his grill. Malcolm did not really seem to notice or care.

Nadine did not really understand how anyone could get used to it, with that tension that was boiling under the surface.