Game Over

The trip home had gone smoothly, including picking up the Abyss Auction intro package at the park. He had also worked out a story to tell his mom, consisting of half-truths and the most plausible ways he could think of to string them together. He had considered going with the full truth, but not for very long as that brought the unwelcome thought of a rat ogre getting a hold of his mom up again. Better to keep her, and the rest of his family, as isolated from the Abyss as he could for now.

As soon as John’s **** steps brought him from the pathways and onto the driveway of his house, he was greeted by his mother. Greeted wasn’t really the right word, though, as she was every bit the image of maternal disapproval. With her arms crossed and a reproachful frown, that almost made John want to go a second round with the rat ogre if it meant not being where he was right now, she gave a curt nod and turned to head inside.

“Grandma and Grandpa are inside.” Her tone was a carefully measured neutral, which was honestly worse than if she had yelled at him.

Evidently, sending the text to assuage worries also meant he had skipped past the relieved hug and straight to getting chewed out. A part of him regretted sending the text for exactly that reason. The rest of him felt guilty for having had that thought.

Brenda marched him to the dinner table, where his grandparents were indeed waiting. Grandma Liz had a stern expression, though not quite as icy as Brenda’s was, while Grandpa’s expression was more of a neutrally serious one. Given his usually cheerful ways, that wasn’t exactly a good sign.

John took a seat, followed by a deep breath, and tried to work up the courage to get started. It probably wouldn’t have taken more than a second or two, but he was preempted by his mother. “Do you have any idea how worried we were? The whole time I couldn’t stop thinking abo-”

Brenda cut her sentence short when Liz put her hand on Brenda’s arm. Whether it was a gesture of support or a gentle way to make John’s mother consider where she was going wasn’t clear, but his guess was a bit of both. In any case, it had clearly made his mother decide not to finish the sentence. Not that stopping mattered, John knew what she had been about to say, and the feeling of guilt hit him like a freight train all the same.

“I’m sorry. I have no excuse… An explanation, but no excuse…” John couldn’t manage to lift his gaze from the table to her face as he spoke, and his voice sounded dead and hollow. All of this, he was barely consciously aware of, as most of his attention was pulled inexorably inward by the suffocating miasma of guilt.

For a long moment, John struggled with those feelings in silence. His means of escape was no less than the thought, which had previously been so unwelcome, of his mother falling into a rat ogre’s hands. He had to say something, put something in the place of what was currently ‘John was gone for an hour and change’. Something that would take away most of the mystery and put the rest in his control. That way, his family wouldn’t risk stumbling into the Abyss in trying to find out what had happened.

“What happened is that I bumped into someone whose voice I recognized, from one of my multiplayer games. We got to talking and I got carried away. Really away. I think we both did. Anyway, the next thing I knew, we were sitting and chatting at her place and over half an hour had passed. I realized that I had ditched Grandpa, went for my phone and discovered that it was out of power. Then I borrowed her tablet to send the text, and came home.“

It was simple, brief, and mostly devoid of details, which was part of the point. By coming with a story of him hitting it off with a girl to such a degree as to forget about what he was doing, but give next to no details, he was pretty much dangling a huge distraction. Especially in front of his mother. He felt kind of dirty abusing the hopes he knew she had for him, and her worries about his social and love life, in this way, but not so much so that the thought of her and the rat ogre couldn’t chase the dirty feeling away.

In any case, the rest of the plan was to give up some details when probed, but remain cagey enough about it to avoid accidentally contradicting himself. That way, he could hopefully keep their focus on fishing details out of him, as opposed to digging by other means. Especially since this would also make for something a lot less mysterious and concerning than ‘John was missing’.

By the end of John’s explanation, life had mostly returned to his tone of voice. For that reason, when he finally looked up from the table again, he didn’t see the initial reactions to the tone he had started his explanation with. What he did see now was Brenda still being angry but much less so than before, Sam quickly packing away a self-satisfied smirk, and Liz still looking stern, with a pondering undercurrent.

It looked to John like his mom and grandpa had bought his story. Grandma, not so much, but John pulling the proverbial wool over her eyes had been a longshot bordering on the impossible from the start. In her case, the more realistic hope was that she would realize that he was leaving out significant bits, but believe that he did so for good enough reasons to not say anything about it. Based on the thoughtfulness in her expression, the jury was probably still out on that.

“That was very thoughtless and irresponsible of you, John.” Brenda’s tone was stern and scolding, but the reproach wasn’t raw the way it had been when he first sat down. “I understand that meeting someone you just ‘click’ with is very exciting, but you should have let Grandpa know what you were doing. I’m going to take away your computer privileges for two weeks.”

“Okay. I’ll go get the power cord.” An entirely symbolic gesture, since the cord for his extra monitor fit in his computer as well and they both knew. He would probably have been more **** about accepting that punishment, if not for his real life turning into a ‘game’, which he suspected he would be too busy with to play much anyway. Then again, keeping in mind the memories he had put his mother through reliving, he had gotten off fairly lightly. So maybe he wouldn’t have been particularly resistant after all.

He had barely begun rising when Brenda stopped him. “First, I’d like to know a little more about this mystery woman you met. I mean, you didn’t even tell us her name...”

“Right. Uh… her name is Qhila.”

“That’s quite an exotic-” At this point, John was on the receiving end of another frown from his mom, but it was of the ‘are you serious?’ variety rather than the ‘you fucked up’ one. “That’s her game name, isn’t it?”

“Well. Yes.”

Brenda rubbed her forehead with her index finger, which John knew was essentially her equivalent to facepalming. John had more or less expected that reaction, but he wasn’t going to come up with a ‘cover’ name for Qhila completely without her input. Besides, forgetting something like that when he got worked up over his hobbies was very in-character for him.

“Okay then. Do you know how old she is?” John thought he picked up a hint of a worried undertone to his mother’s question. Why that was, he had no idea.

“Early twenties. I think.” The last addition was an afterthought that kinda just slipped out. The reason for it existing, despite him knowing she was exactly 20, was that he had no idea if kobold aging worked differently than human aging. Sure, she looked the part of a 20 year old, height and monster bits aside, but even just by D&D sources kobolds could be adult at either ‘immediately after hatching’ or 1, 6 or 10 years old and her life expectancy could be anywhere between 50 and 500 years.

In response to his uncertainty, John got another ‘are you serious’ frown from Brenda. “You think?”

“As far as I know, it’s rude to ask a lady about her age,” John responded with a shrug and a bit of a mildly **** troll grin.

“He’s got you there, pumpkin,” Sam added with a guffaw. The old man only brought out that old nickname when teasing Brenda, who responded with an exaggerated eye roll and a light shove to his shoulder.

That more or less dispelled the rest of the bad mood that had hung over the conversation at the start, or at least pushed it far enough into the back of the minds of everyone for a feeling of normalcy to be restored. The next half an hour came and went with the conversation jumping between Brenda’s day, Qhila, recent events and local gossip.

John answered some of the questions about Qhila, shot a few down outright, and evaded a good bunch by pivoting into game talk for ‘important context’ until someone changed the topic for him. Overall, he painted a broad strokes picture of her being a somewhat reclusive, but bright, girl living in a basement studio apartment and ‘maybe’ studying chemistry. That should hew close enough to the truth, and be vague enough otherwise, that Qhila wouldn’t have issues with it. Hopefully.

Eventually, the talk started breaking up as Liz went to the kitchen to get started on dinner. Brenda was moving to join her, and John towards the stairs to fetch the power cord, when she dropped a bomb of a question he really hadn’t expected so soon, “So, when do I get to meet this ‘Qhila’?”

“Uhh… umm… that might be, uh… difficult…” What the hell was he supposed to say? Even if she was willing to meet his family, and he could finagle it so they met her one at a time to avoid her getting killed by the Veil, that would basically do the exact opposite of keeping them isolated from the Abyss.

“Why?” The cheery mood of the last half-hour and change evaporated very quickly from Brenda’s countenance at John’s wavering and faffing about. The brief moment of surprise she showed first, though, revealed that she wasn’t expecting anything more than bashfulness or banter in response to her question.

“She’s really not good with strangers. Like, ‘if not for the game, I might have gotten pepper sprayed today’ levels of discomfort with strangers.” Given what she had expected of him when she regained consciousness, that felt like an understatement if anything. Especially the ‘pepper sprayed’ part, since she was almost certainly capable of making something much nastier than pepper spray.

“What?!?” That clearly hadn’t calmed Brenda down, though her tone had changed from worried about John to worried for him.

What the hell could he say to fix that? He took a moment to back up to his plan for handling questions. If he needed to answer them, and he clearly did now, stay as close to the truth as he could without revealing the Abyss or contradicting himself. Okay, with that, he had an approach.

While he had been thinking, his mother had visibly gotten less calm about all this. In fact, she had just opened her mouth to say something, probably a demand for answers, when John got started on his response.

“She has had some very bad experiences. I don’t know many details, and what I know are very personal things that… I’m not sure it’s right for me to tell anyone, but I’ll say this much: I know of one case where she was nearly ****. And I’m fairly sure that wasn’t the worst of those experiences.”

“Oh.” That took Brenda completely aback. She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again without speaking.

After a few seconds of silence, wherein neither John nor Brenda knew how to proceed, Grandpa Sam, who had been quietly preparing a solitaire throughout the previous exchange, evidently decided it was time for a jest and a change of topic. “Sounds like you’ve got an affinity for birds with a broken wing, lad.”

John spent a moment wondering what on earth Sam was on about, and judging by her expression, Brenda was thinking much the same. Then, realization hit.

“Right. I had lunch with Christie. That’s the blind girl in my year, who enrolled out of the blue partway through last semester.” John didn’t know if his mom actually needed her memory refreshed. In any case, he quickly pressed on, and snuck in a good-natured barb at Sam, “And before this senile bugger gets carried away spinning a yarn where I am suddenly transformed into some incorrigible womanizer, my intentions towards her are entirely friendly and nothing else.”

He turned and left the room before his mom had time to cook up a slew of questions about this ‘new’ development. He had a power cord to get. With luck, his mom would be busy enough with dinner when he came back down with it, that he could just put it down somewhere and be gone again before she got started. That way, he could postpone those questions until dinner, and hopefully have time to check his notification stack beforehand. They had been sitting there for a long time, after all.