How did the game appear in our world?

Even Tony can't explain it. Does the world come into being only while a game is in session, or does it exist independently of players? Tony thinks the game only exists while someone is playing, and the NPCs are not real.

I am not so sure.

The experiences we had were so real, so bizarre, so unlike anything in our world, that it is hard for me to believe that world – their world – relies on ours for its perpetuation, except to consume fresh bodies from the outside to subject to its cycle of torments…

We are safe. We got out. I wonder how many other players are not so lucky...

--But I get ahead of myself. It all began last summer...

* * *

“What do you think of this?” my best friend Tony said, smacking the side of the humungous wooden box – the size of a crate. I pushed through the crowd of chatting, nervous, high-energy university students to see it better. Friday evening, getting close to sundown and we had come out onto the recently mowed sports field, with its big strobe lights shining down on us all. The choice of location was Tony’s – I thought it was over-dramatic considering what we were here for.

We were surrounded by a gang of 20 students like us who had all seen Tony’s fliers advertising some weird fantasy game that we on-campus students were invited to play on the weekend.

‘Charades’ Tony had called it. With elf cosplay.

He’d hoped to drum up even a little interest but probably wasn’t prepared when nearly half the Westside campus dorm rooms rocked up looking for cheap entertainment. More bizarrely, there were hot girls aplenty in the crowd who formerly probably hadn’t known either of us existed (and neither of us had a girlfriend) who had magically appeared out of nowhere to see what we were up to. It was kind of intimidating. I hoped what Tony had planned was good.

For a second I thought what he was holding was a Ouija board. It was actually some old, vintage board game. The box said: ‘GOOM’ in ominous plastic bubble lettering that glowed green when titled at a certain angle. The art style reminded me of one of those old Goosebumps ‘Choose your own adventure’ books. Underneath the title, in spidery black writing, there was a subheading that said ‘THE RL LARP’. The border of the game box was ringed with flames surrounding stony black runes. Purple smoke built up along the bottom.

A tall fair-haired boy called Chase (one of Tony’s friends) stepped back, laughing. Not a good start.

“I’ve never heard of that before,” he said. “What kind of game is that?”

“More like, what kind of name is that?” said an attractive goth girl called JJ, waving a hand dismissively. “I can’t go around telling anyone that I played ‘GOOM: THE LARP.’”

“I don’t even think it’s a real name,” said Mike. “I think they just took the word ‘game’ and switched some letters.”

“More like, GOOM: THE LAME,” muttered Chase, who I wasn’t overly close to.

“GAY: THE LAME,” said tall broad-shouldered Trent, loudly.

“LAME: THE GAME,” offered surfer dude Shane, his best friend. They laughed and high fived. I rolled my eyes, glad not to have much to do with them.

“Boy,” deadpanned a quiet voice I recognized, somewhere unseen in the back, “I’m sure looking forward to playing this LAME: THE GAME.” It was a metrosexual guy called Robby.

“It’s gotta beat Go Fish,” his best friend Andria said with mock hopefulness (a hottie in her own right, I had to admit, though I couldn’t see her amidst the crowd at the moment). But she was probably dating Robby or someone, therefore unavailable. No matter, I secretly had a different girl in mind…

“Hey,” spoke up Mike suddenly, looking at the game pamphlet over Tony’s shoulder. “Those idiots who titled it made a mistake.”

“What do you mean?” said someone.

“Well, ’RL’ and ‘LARP’ – they obviously don’t know what any of those acronyms mean.”

“’RL’ means ‘real life’,” said Jordyn drawled. She was a not unattractive, somewhat tomboyish girl who wore a backwards baseball cap covering her honey coloured hair. 

My heart began hammering. Jordyn’s sardonic voice was like a trumpeting herald from an angel, forewarning that there was Goddess in our midst. But it wasn’t Jordyn I was attracted to, rather it was her best friend, who was almost always in her company. My stomach swooped with dread and hopefulness – could she have showed up, too? I scarcely dared look around, in case I accidentally found her and made eye contact.

“‘LARP’ stands for ‘live action roleplay,’” Mike continued, “so saying ‘real life LARP’ is redundant because LARPs are real life.”

“Also,” I said, trying to distract myself, or impress...‘someone’, or give them a signal I was here, or something, “is this is obviously an old, antique game. But LARP and RL are pretty recent terms, imported in with the rise of video game cultures mostly. I mean, ‘RL’ pretty much means ‘not a video game.’”

“That’s enough nerdgasming from you, nerdlinger,” said Chase – not my friend personally, but friend of my friend, Tony. So kind of my friend by some abstract operation of logic. Props to him; I’d never heard anyone say ‘nerdgasming’ and ‘nerdlinger’ in RL, but I had to subtract points for not making any sense.

“Yeah, no need to split hairs,” said Mike, shrugging dismissively. “Besides South Park: TSoT was a virtual LARP. So it’s not redundant.”

Tony flipped the box over to find nothing but a single sentence, in that black spidery text, surrounded by foreboding shadowy green swirling clouds, out of which you might expect to see some Lovecraftian form emerging from another dimension.

“A Game For Those Who Dare Embrace,” he started reading dramatically, “A Bigger, Weirder Kind of Place.”

“Hey!” Zandra piped up, “That sounds like Jumanji!” Zandra was cute, but probably crazy so I kept my distance. She was known as ‘radioactive’ by some guys. She was the twin sister of Zaidan, who didn’t himself speak a lot and probably had mental issues of his own.

“Yeah, where did you find this?” asked Jordyn. “A Chinese black market?”

 “Looks like the game is so old it predates copyright claims,” said Mike.

“That makes no sense,” I cut in, not one to let a poorly structured joke pass without notice (and particularly looking to impress ‘someone’), “you should have said, ‘the game is so old that Jumanji is being sued by them.”

“Oh, shut up.”

Tony was now lifting the lid off and pulled out a brochure, which, when unfolded, became the instruction manual. We clustered around him, all staring at it.

“WHOA,” we all said.

The poster was chock full of horrifying detail. There were a bunch of assorted fantasy characters; sorcerers, orcs, dwarves, dragons, etc, all fighting each other around the corners of the poster, clashing swords detailed with sparks, and multi-coloured spells flashing through the air. Injuries were serious, cruel and gruesome; characters being vivisected, having their heads pulled off and eaten, their skeletons ripped out through their mouths, bodies set ablaze by dragon flame.

Sure as hell not what I imagined from a game whimsically called ‘GOOM.’  

The centerpiece of the image showed some elven giants herding little armies of goblin minions around, some of them accidentally getting underfoot, leaving tiny flattened bodies behind, while some of the elves had appropriated little goblins on their person, tucked into their belts, pouches, and riding on their shoulders, and some had tiny goblin skulls hanging from their jewellery.

The elves looked like normal people except for their long pointed ears – the points longer than Lord of the Rings, but shorter than Warcraft, somewhere around Magic: the Gathering length; around the length of an index finger. Somewhat lazily, the goblins just looked like the elves, except with upturned fangs protruding from their mouths and pointed fingernails. But the humanity of the goblin designs only made it more unnerving; the expressions on the little goblin faces were drawn up in excruciating detail, with little terrified, pained faces like sinners out of Dante’s Inferno. The faces of the elven giants were dark, and detached, like they had next to no empathy for the little goblin minions they were terrorizing and squashing underfoot; they were just nuisances or objects. In true Fanservicey soft-fantasy artwork fashion, a couple of those elven giants were actually scantily glad, hot giantess elf babes.

I couldn’t look away. There was something else real dark and uncanny about it: it looked less like a painting from the artist’s imagination and more like something painted from a photograph, or seen play out right in front of you. There were crazy little lifelike details you just couldn’t make up; like the way some glowing magic missile faintly illuminated the bluish vein under an elf’s temple, and lit up the corners of their dark eyes. The artist must have been tripping bad when they designed this wicked thing, I thought. It was like the cover of some ‘80s Heavy Metal album.

I wasn’t the only one to feel a chill, either.

“Oh my God, that’s kind of fucked up,” said JJ with a broad ironic smile. “Is this a kids game?” JJ was actually Jennifer Jaggard, a goth or emo, and definitely hot but too confident and audacious not to currently be in a relationship.

“I don’t know about you, but I kinda really want to play it now,” muttered Jordyn.

“Well, obviously you do, you little freak,” laughed JJ, “but maybe I’ll just watch.”

“Awww, come on!” said Zandra (JJ’s best friend) with disappointment. “What does everyone else think?”

“Yeah!” said Chase.

“You still in, Adam?” said Tony.

“I dunno. It looks complicated – there’s gotta be at least a hundred different characters on that picture -- it probably takes ages just to learn the rules, let alone complete a game. Maybe I’ll just watch to see how it’s played. There’s a book I wanted to finish...”

“Don’t be a party pooper,” broke in Chase. Only thing more LAME than GOOM is curling up in the armchair like a Granny.”

“Screw you,” I said, laughing, “I’ll fucking whip your ass at this. You’re gonna get crushed. And then I’m going to read my book.”

Tony laughed in surprise, and some other people in the crowd who heard me tittered. I didn’t usually talk like this – and around so many people – but I felt the adrenaline kick of possibly being in her presence. Still no visual confirmation but if Jordyn was here, then she had to be, too. I almost always saw them together at university game nights.

Tony began pulling out the game board and pieces and we all crowded around with interest trying to get a peek of what we were in for. I hoped at least there would be more errors with the game, at least enough for it to be unintentionally funny, in the ‘that’s-so-out-of-date’ sense. I could use a laugh to keep my confidence and nerves stable.

I could not have known that, in under an hour, there would be no laughter. Only screaming.