The newer normal pt. 2

Author’s note: Hi! Shame, here! I didn’t want to split this chapter into two parts, but unfortunately, while I was writing the previous chapter, the story got approved by mods and it published the draft lol. I figured instead of editing it, I’d just post the part that hadn’t been written yet as its own chapter rather than editing the other one so people who already read the last chapter don’t have to go back!

***

This stuff really got to him, Talia thought. “Hey, it’s just tricks, ok?” This was the kind of childishness she was hoping to get away from. “It was a good performance, but it’s all just—“

“Read your notebook.” He pointed to the nightstand. “It knows everything about you—stuff you don’t even know about you.”

“Hank—“

“Talia please!”

She jolted at his sudden burst. Hank could get loud, but not like that. Not suddenly. And not so savagely. To palcate him she reached for the book. “Ok, ok.” She shushed him, trying to calm the tone of the conversation.

“Think of something. Anything about you. Flip to any page.”

She furrowed her brow. He was really animated. She opened the first page and saw… her name. Just as she’d written it. Except it was centered and at the very top, where she had written it in the middle. Below the name was a veritable wall of text:

Age: 27 Years Old

Race: Caucasian

Height: 5’5”

Eye Color: Brown

Hair Color: Blonde

Hair Length: 16 Inches

Bra Size: 32 B

She looked up from the book, suddenly enraged and smacked his shoulder. “That’s not funny, Hank!” She yelled. “My bra size? Are you fucking kidding me?” He snuck into her room in the middle of the night and swapped her journal with this… stalker biography? How could he? Was this his idea of a joke?

He raised his arm up to intercept her slaps. “Pick another page! Think of something different!”

“Fuck you!”

“Talia!” He cried. “Talia! I’m not fucking around! Think about how many times you’ve slapped me! Think about it and turn the page!”

She began hitting his head with the book. After absorbing a few blows, his hand caught her wrist just long enough to flip the page. “How many times have you hit me?”

“Not enough!”

“Think about it and look!” He cried. “Don’t stop, but look!”

She didn’t know why she did it. What perverse pleasure he was getting from the ordeal. But she did look. At first just from the corner of her eye, until what seemed like movement drew her full attention to the page.

Number of Slaps Thrown in Life: 297

Number of Slaps Thrown at Hank Tock in Life: 7

Number of Times Slapped in Life: 358

The list went on, describing a variety of stats related to slaps given, received, witnessed. There were even statistics for accuracy, power, and placement of hits by body part before reaching the bottom of the page. But what made her suddenly freeze as her bones chilled, was that some of the numbers were changing.

She watched in horror as her final, limp slap fell onto his arm, and the dry black ink on the page suddenly warped into a new value. Some ticked up one. Some percentages shifted down. Decimals moved freely one way or the next. It was as if she were holding a screen instead of paper.

“No, no.” She shook her head, weakly slapping his forearm just to watch the numbers change again. “No, you’re—you’re doing this somehow. Someone’s watching and is doing something every time I slap you.” She refused to believe this was real.

“Think of a thought.” He suggested, as if speaking from experience. “Maybe a number, or a letter, or a conversation, or anything! Don’t tell me. Just think about how many times you’ve had that thought and flip the page.”

Seven-billion-five-hundred-twenty riding a horse shaped like a baseball, she tried thinking of a random string of words and numbers for some reason. She didn’t understand why she was even entertaining this. But she just felt too afraid not to scramble for tangible proof that this trick wasn’t real. She could make it fail and it would finally break the illusion she couldn’t convince the baser part of her brain that this wasn’t real.

Hank couldn’t read her mind. Whoever was controlling this weird book ink thing couldn’t read her mind.

Times thought about 7,000,000,520 riding a horse shaped like a baseball: 1

She stared at the entry, shaking her head before taking a deep breath.

Seven-billion-five-hundred-twenty riding a horse shaped like a baseball.

Times thought about 7,000,000,520 riding a horse shaped like a baseball: 2

No! She would not tolerate that! That wasn’t… “It’s real?”

Hank nodded slowly, eyes wide. “I flipped hundreds of pages, I’m always only halfway through.” He opened his book and then began fanning the pages. Seconds passed before Talia tried the same thing. To her horror, the end of the book never came. It wasn’t possible. The thing couldn’t have been more than a hundred pages thick. Yet hundreds of papers flew between her fingers, pages upon pages of statistics flying past. “But that’s not all. It has stories, too. How your first day of kindergarten went down, the account of your nineteenth haircut, even this exact moment is being written as we speak.”

Fearfully, Talia lifted the book and began to think about that very moment before opening to a random page. Somehow it was the right page. The book seemed to always open to the right page.

She felt her fingers tremble, following the black ink as it materialized just as fast as she could read. Reading this very page. She began expecting it to say something sinister, like:

“This is your end.”

“Run.”

“It’s behind you.”

SLAM! She shut the book, whipping her head around to address the creature she’d invented in her head, but found only the wall and it’s peeling paper.

“I tried to put away the board. It won’t move.” Hank asserted. “Randomly, about half an hour ago, my challenge card flew itself into the discard slot. My notebook opened itself and said that I failed to complete my challenge and so would suffer its penalty. And look here.”

He grabbed the rulebook and pointed to a block of text on the first page.

Roll a die to determine the minimum number of rounds the table must play before midnight. If the table fails to play the minimum number of rounds before midnight, then:

• Players who failed or forfeited a challenge that day suffer the punishment listed on their failed Challenge Card again.
• Players who completed all their challenges suffer the punishment listed on their previous Challenge Card as if they had failed to complete the challenge.

Talia kicked the blankets off of her, running out to the living room in a panicked rage to see the board sat exactly as it had been left. All the lights were on and the furniture was askew around the coffee table. But the board remained.

She bounded forward and tried flipping the board over, only to be stopped by a **** several tons heavier than the board game should have been. She tried pushing the coffee table over—a cheap rectangular piece just a step above cardboard—only to find it, too, was impossibly heavy. Nothing slid. Nothing budged. The two pawns didn’t even jiggle and when she reached for the challenge cards, she found the cage had again closed around them.

The only thing she could interact with, it seemed, was the challenge card she’d drawn earlier.

Challenge: Take another player’s virginity. If you refuse or fail, add a 0 digit to the end of your next number change. You have one hour.

The card had most definitely listed more time than that when she read it the first time. She looked behind her to see Hank leaned against the wall, hand resting on his beard to cover his mouth.

Talia’s vision grew blurry from the tears welling up. Her throat burned and her stomach flipped around inside her. This was the scariest moment of her life. “I refuse.” She managed to say, shaking her head. She had been referring to her refusal to accept this as real, though she also certainly had no intention of going through with the challenge.

The game took her at her word and Talia felt the card yanked from her fingers, as if stolen by an angry ghost. She fell back onto her rear and watched as the card slipped itself into a small slot on the side of the board marked Discard. The white paper vanished inside.

An orange glow flashed behind her and she shot around just as it faded, seeing that the source had been the rulebook in Hank’s hand. He opened it and started squinting at an apparent new entry. Talia clambered to her feet and rushed over to Hank, reading over his shoulder as he pointed out the new text to her.

Turn One: After the initial challenge phase ends, all players act as if they have just landed on square number one, a red square.

Squares and their meaning: At the beginning of the movement phase, players take turns rolling a D6 then advancing a number of squares equal to their roll. Then they draw a Category Card, which will determine what category of their biography will be altered. The nature of this alteration corresponds to the color of square they landed on.

RED: Number change. A statistic about the player will have its number altered.

YELLOW: Letter change. A number of letters within the player’s biography will be altered, changing the meaning.

BLUE: Word change. A number of words within the player’s biography will be altered, changing the meaning.

WHITE: Wild. This could be anything…

BLACK: Detriment. Will permanently impose an alteration to how one plays the game, either altering the difficulty against them, or intensifying future changes.

GREEN: Reward. Will permanently impose an alteration to either the player’s life or how they play the game that they will perceive as useful.

Just as soon as she finished reading the text, the board snapped, again as a cage opened up around the Category Cards. Talia’s heart jumped, but she stayed still, staring at the board with Hank.

How had her journal wound up on the coffee table? For a moment, neither of them said anything. They just stared at the wooden square shaped demon sitting in the living room. What were they involved in, now?

After a minute, there was an orange glow from the rulebook. “Oh, no.” Hank sighed, lifting it up so they both could read.

Delaying Play: Players must play in order. If a player delays drawing their Category Card for more than one hour, then two Category Cards will be drawn for them and the next player’s turn will begin.

“Talia,” Hank lowered the pamphlet. “I think you should draw.”

“I don’t want to. You draw.” She stared at the open cage, which looked like a bear trap just waiting to snap on her fingers.

“I think that would be considered out of turn order. You’re first an would have been considered on the square before me.”

“Who cares about turn order?”

“I don’t want to challenge the magical board game, Talia.”

He raised a good point. If ever there was going to be a rules lawyer, then the haunted demon game would probably be it.

But she didn’t feel like she could bring herself to do it. Maybe it was for the best, but she just couldn’t. “I’m scared.”

“Me, too, Talia.”

“I’m scared, Hank.”

“I know.”

She took a deep breath and shakily stepped toward the board, growing more nauseous with each step. She looked down at the cards like a toilet she’d dropped earrings into. She didn’t want to do it, but she knew she had to. Hank stepped up next to her.

“I’ll get mine right after.”

Talia let out a deep breath, shaking her whole body out. Then, in one motion, she reached down and snatched a card. She yanked her hand away, afraid the cage would suddenly snap shut on her fingers. But nothing happened. She had a card in her hand and flipped it over. Just barely more curious than terrified. She had to know.

Recent History with Other Players.

Roll the D6. The result will determine the new value of a statistic.

She lowered the card, relieved to have not been suddenly mutilated by a ghost or a demon. That relief vanished when she saw the die in her other hand. Reflexively she dropped it, shaking her hand off and recovering from her panic just enough to watch the result.

Two.

Both of them recoiled as her journal suddenly flew open, glowing. “No…” Talia fell to her knees, ripping the book off the table. She needed to know what was changing! She needed to know!

Amount of Sex Had With Hank Tock Over Past 365 Days: 0

The words were shining as black ink appeared next to the entry.

---

Result: 2

• Refused Challenge: Add a 0 digit to end of result.

Result: 20

• Failure to complete min. rounds: Repeat Challenge Punishment.
• Add a 0 digit to end of result.

Result: 200

• Cheated minimum round die roll: Repeat Challenge Punishment.
• Add a 0 digit to end of result.

*Result: 2000**Amount of Sex Had With Hank Tock Over Past 365 Days: 2,000- - - - - -*

Talia did not fully process what she was really looking at. Or even what was really happening. By the time the writing finished, the number 0 had been replaced with 2,000. An impossible number that suddenly made her feel a little silly.

Truly, what had she been expecting to happen, she wondered. The book had information about her, yes. But so what? It was going to change itself into being wrong? Go right ahead, she thought.

But then the smell hit her. Powerful, wicked, recognizable. It was if in an instant the air from a teenage boy’s room was teleported into the living room. The whole house reeked of sex.

Her eyes widened, finding ripped open condom packages littering the floors and couch. A trashcan in front of the couch filled with used condoms. A bottle of lube sat at each couch side table. And on the kitchen counter, and presumably a few other places. A soreness developed between Talia’s legs.

“Whoah, where did that smell—“ Hank coughed, looking up from his own open notebook, suddenly silenced by the sight around him. His hand suddenly shot to his crotch, aware of an uncomfortable feeling.

Had his change done this? Certainly not. His category had said

Obligations to the Other Player

He had rolled his die while Talia was distracted, wanting to get things over with before he could see what was about to happen and chicken out. He’d rolled a five.

His notebook opened and an entry began glowing.

Daily Minimum Number of Minutes Spent Making Out with Talia Lee: 0

An extremely specific and odd category, he decided, but before he could form an opining, new text began doing math in the margins.

Result: 5

• Failed Challenge: +1 to result.

Result: 6

• Failure to complete min. rounds: Repeat Challenge Punishment.
• +1 to result

Result: 7

• Attempt to damage board: Repeat Challenge Punishment.
• +1 to result

Result: 8

Daily Minimum Number of Minutes Spent Making Out with Talia Lee: 8.

“No!” Talia shrieked, curling up into a ball, pounding her hands into her temples.

Hank, thinking quickly, grabbed her shoulder, trying to keep a calm and even voice. “Get to the car, now.” He said, ignoring the rulebook’s glow.

Talia did as she was told, disassociating until she finally grew conscious of the ringing phone in Hank’s hand. The line picked up, a tired voice she recognized as Joel answered.

“Hello?” Joel grumbled. “Dude, it’s two in the morning.”

“Yes, I’m sorry.” Hank winced, making a hard right turn down the suburbs. “Look, uh, this is gonna sound weird, but I need a favor. I’ve got Talia here and, uh, some fucked shit you wouldn’t believe is happening over here.”

“Ew, gross. I don’t wanna hear about that.”

“No! Not like that! I mean… well, you wouldn’t believe me. But we can’t stay at mine, right now—“

“Absolutely not.” Joel cut Hank off. The refusal was extremely surprising, as Hank had let Joel crash in his guest room for months, before. Not to mention how close the two were in particular. They drank together, failed to pick up girls together, had gotten the same degree. If anyone was going to let them crash for at least a day or two, it was Joel.

“Listen, whatever weird situation thing you guys have going on, that shit stays at your house. I’m not letting you two fuck on my couch because of a power outage or something.”

“What!?”

“How can you sound surprised after what you guys did at Regina’s birthday? Whatever’s wrong at yours, fuck in your car or in a park or some shit, you guys gross us out and it’s time someone told you that.”

The line dropped and the rule book suddenly appeared on the dash, covering up a roll of condoms.