August 17, 2016

It was up to the two of us to stop the bomb set up in the warehouse. They wanted the password to control the drone but we refused to negotiate with them. I asked how people could remember their customers from 7 weeks ago, let alone 70 days. After an initial struggle, the bomb fell and smashed onto the cement below us but the time kept on ticking. The criminals let open a gas valve and had finished dousing the place in gasoline. One of them lit a stick of dynamite which quickly blew up in his hand.

The giant explosion had left us bruised in a pile of rubble. The world had lost its color as the explosion sucked the air out of our surroundings. We took our last breath as we searched for a way underground, in hopes that it would be more hospitable.

“If it’s bad, we’ll come right back out” I told my friend. We walked into the subway station so see a crowd of people in the stairwell rushing in the opposite direction. “Do we want to turn back?” he asked. “Wait.” I said. I mentioned the abandoned underground bunker we had discovered a while back which we had dubbed “our spot” and wondered if we could reach it from where we were. I quickly walked through the Staff Only door and followed the stairs down. We ended up on the first floor of a hotel, across the hall from room 50. I walked down the hallway and turned right to find myself in a mirror room. I felt an eerie sensation of being watched by surveillance cameras.

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I was playing a tower defense game but was unable to pause to build any defenses. All I had was my hero and crocodile companion in the middle of the X shaped map with enemies trying to cross from one corner to the opposite. I seemed to be holding them off nicely and thought about doing a no-building run.

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We were watching an interactive film that played on different screens as you walked through the building made to resemble an empty school in the middle of the night. The movie was rather cryptic and hard to follow but it seemed to have to do with time travel. Our walk concluded in a carpeted classroom that looked identical to the one we started in. The main protagonist had figured out how to stop the violent outbursts of sleepwalking individuals. He started scribbling with his marker on the white board as the same marks started to appear all over the walls outside of the screen. He finally wrote the word “Inspire” and underlined it three times but it was the only mark that did not have an analogous imprint on our walls.

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After getting out of our parents’ apartment, my brother and I walked across the red-bricked courtyard in front of the shopping mall. We passed by the bike racks and I told him that whenever I heard “soldier” I think of TF2 first instead of Overwatch. “But is that what we play now?” he asked. I said it was because I used to play a lot - thousands of hours a lot. “I still dream about [Diablo 2] and [Starcraft]” I admitted. That reminded him how his friend in the States should be up by now and that they wanted to party as three. We quickly ran into the mall as we lived on the upper floors. I considered spacing out in the elevator on the way up but I was afraid I would miss something that my brother said.

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We were to arrive at school at night by plane for a club related event. I recalled that we were supposed to meet on the roof but I got to campus early and waited by the entrance instead because I was afraid I had remembered incorrectly. The rest of the group had arrived and quickly walked through the front door. Someone turned their head and asked “why are you here?” without waiting for a response. Feeling unwelcome, I followed the group into the library while constantly thinking that I might have joined the wrong team. We were choosing roles for a game with an unspecified opponent.