PART THIRTY

It's a tradition in my part of America that chapter 30 of the first draft of your first book should be written from the perspective of one of your minor characters. And since the first draft turned out so well, I'm not changing a single word. How did I choose which character got the POV? Simple. I opened up a copy of Robinson Crusoe and jabbed at a page. The sentence under my finger said, 'After digging a trench around my hut I saw a cloud that looked like my childhood sweetheart, Nicola Valengerber'. Close enough.

Nikki Valentine's Personal Log, Stardate 3000

Dear Seabiscuit,

What a day! Have you ever had a day that was so hectic it made your head spin? Of course you haven't! You're my diary and you don't have a head. You have a name, though! I named you Seabiscuit because, as you know, some people name their diaries. And some people write things in their diaries that only make sense as a crude form of exposition. So silly!

So I woke up and IMMEDIATELY started doing girl things, assuming I'm actually a girl. I think I probably am. Like I'm 90% sure. Anyway, I went to the side of my room where I keep all my girl stuff in a fancy chest - I think I call it a vanity - and I started putting dollops of cream onto my wrists and then I selected from 8 identical bottles and chose the right one and I dabbed some of that onto my wrist as well. My wrists must be so supple and nice-smelling. And I probably brushed my hair and counted to a hundred. That's a thing, right? Or is that just in ASMR videos?

Then I went to my job or my school in my hometown of Boston or somewhere else. Then I played BetterVerse with my four sexy male friends who I am - no, stop laughing - just friends with. And we fought a wyvern or closed all the tears in the fabric of the universe or we just ran along the bottom of a mountain trying to power jump our way to the top.

BUT THEN I got an email from that guy who runs that dungeon. You remember, Seabiscuit? I told you his name was Hotlips. I don't know how I feel about him - maybe I think of him as just a friend but that would be confusing because I kissed him ALL OVER his mouth - but I do know that after I kissed him he got a bit distant and we haven't hung out since.

His email was pretty short: Here's what I've been doing lol.

And then there was a link.

It opened a video player. No ads, so you know it wasn't YouTube. It was on the BetterVerse platform, which is getting popular but is still small compared to YT or Twitch. The video's name was 'My Journey'. Not exactly search engine optimized. I clicked play and maximized the screen, which was refreshing at 144Hz which is a number I know because like all girls I care deeply about eye comfort (More Hertz Never Hurts).

The screen was filled with a kind of dark white. Indescribable patterns. Strange, powdery fractals like televised echoes of the Big Bang. I assumed something had gone wrong, but then the picture began to resolve and I understood I was looking at snow. A vast expanse of snowy darkness.

Crunch. Crunch.

Footsteps! Footsteps so crunchy they make me switch to the present tense!

Crunch.

A black shape resolves into... Billy-Bob Bain! Hotlips himself. Dressed in his magician outfit. He approaches the camera and looks bashful.

"Hi! I'm Billy-Bob. My friends call my 3B. Welcome to my channel. Pull up a chair. Make yourself at home." He wipes some snowflakes from his chin, looks into the distance.

"I'm on a journey. Headed north. It's dangerous out here so I won't be making long videos. Hard to talk and hear a yeti, you know? Short version is the end of the world being canceled was amazing. For me. I got some cool loot drops in the days before the end. Remember the way the NPCs were giving out free land and gold and magic items? The ones that knew the end was coming, anyway."

Bain stops walking, puts his hands behind his head and takes a few deep breaths. He looks around. Did he hear...?

He shakes his head and takes off his backpack. It's one of those big ones you'd see on an arctic expedition. He pulls out a horn - the type you blow into and it makes an enormous parp that shatters a wall. He waves it at the camera, which zooms in to get a closer look. "This is the horn of Jerry-Go. It lets you pass map barriers. What are map barriers? You know when you get to some mountain or river and you try to keep going and it says 'Leaving Play Area! You May Proceed No Further!' Well, that's an arbitrary barrier. Not arbitrary - that's the wrong word. Obviously, it's there because they haven't filled the next location with quests and things, or they use it for testing, or they sell it as a private space. No, I mean 'artificial'. The barrier is artificial. Get this, the whole world has been built. It exists. All of it. Those giant blank spots on the official maps? They're fake. If you could actually go there you'd see rivers, forests, volcanos. If you could actually go there... You just can't go there."

Bain takes a sip of water, then gets a cheeky look on his face. "You can't, but I can."

He holds up his horn, smiles, and puts it back in his pack.

"I've already crossed three barriers. I'm not sure, but I don't think a normal player has ever been this far north." He gets tense. "Did you hear that?" He looks around again. Slowly, he relaxes. "Let me see if I can share my map with you." His fingers twitch and a map appears. It's just whiteness with Bain represented by a symbol. He drags the map down, down, down, and finally we see the familiar shape of Gargantua. The map fades away. "As you can see, I'm way north of Auster. I should show you something else." He dips into his backpack and takes out a small, round, rubber disc. "Portable save point. Lets me log in from my last position. Essential, obviously, if I'm to make it to my destination."

He packs it away and starts to heave the bag onto his shoulders. He thinks better of it and grins again. Quite attractively. He fumbles around and pulls out a parchment, but doesn't show it to us yet. "So far, so dull, right? I mean, me being the first to get to the north pole is vaguely admirable but not really something to summon up the blood. Which brings me to this... This is a something I won on a single coin toss with a mysterious stranger. Absolutely no chance he'd have parted with it if he didn't think the end of the world was coming. Because look..."

Bain unfolds the parchment and reveals that it is a TREASURE MAP. It's instantly recognizable. A lot of empty space, some contours and landmarks, and then a blood-red X. "And what's the treasure at the end of this rainbow?"

He flips the parchment round and...

...and I nearly fall off my chair.

The treasure is a gun! A revolver! A six-shooter!

"But there are no guns in the BetterVerse," I say out loud.

"You might be thinking there are no guns in this game," says Bain. "And there aren't guns. There's one gun. Exactly one. Hidden at the north pole. And I'm going to get it."

He smirks again, but it's a quirky fun one, with no trace of arrogance. He's a little boy who has prepared a good-natured prank.

"Wait," he says, and he looks worried again. Suddenly, he's holding a deck of cards in his hands. Quick as a flash he throws two, three, four, and they burst into flames. Something large, muscular, and furry slams into him and the feed cuts out.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

Dear Seabiscuit,

I am shook. I have seen things you people would not believe. I can't even.

Bye.

Behold The Greatest Cliffhanger in the History of Literature

There isn't a character called Nicola Valengerber in Robinson Crusoe. That was just me being silly. But I'm deadly serious when I tell you that I spent the next three days learning about animal husbandry. NOT HUSBAND THAT'S NOT WHAT IT MEANS. Ugh.

Did you ever get sucked into some new hobby so intensely that you forgot your normal routines and didn't want to do anything else?

I know that's what happened to me because when I snapped out of it I had a series of emails from Valentine. The first pretty much went 'what the hell was that video?' And when I didn't reply within 48 hours she skipped whatever quest the Swords were doing and went to the dungeon to see if I was there. And then she wrote another mail which said, 'Why is the dungeon full of chickens?'