The Nowhere Adventures

Cameron Crawford

(Fantasy/Adventure/Comedy)

A Tale For Those Rainy Or Overcast Days...

If you seriously look into the secrets of the universe, you might be going crazy, and you may just give up and write fiction. - Anonymous

Prologue

Simulation School

At the beginning of time, there was a school building that lived inside a dark void. The school’s technology created the environment that surrounded the building. It is a mystery how it all came to be. They lived in communities with their extended family. They were ruled over by robed elders called The Squa. When they came of age at five they were introduced to a new tool: the Genie Sphere VR world builder. This device was capable of generating virtual environments and was the foundation of many worlds that could be seen and explored by its users.

They knew nothing but the world they were presented with. Since the reality they lived in was so boring and devoid of fun, they decided they would make a world of their own for having adventures. What we now know to be Zentech Zones were created to end the tedious (and rather mechanical) passing down of knowledge in the classroom.

Of course, using the computers for anything but the established curriculum was forbidden by the Squa. So they had to sneak their computer time in after hours. The three cousins snuck into the computer lab which then had three genie sphere computers. When they started their adventures through cyberspace, they realized it was the most fun they’d ever had.

                Eventually, the six zones they constructed with the genie sphere were investigated by the Squa, and when they found that the cousins had applied what they learned in class to their creations, the Squa decided to create an adventure-based curriculum where all learning would be done in the real universe.

                One of the overseers of the school, Osric Ninfelden, ended up finding out about it and decided to investigate to see if any of the school’s rules were being broken. Finding no evidence of any rule-breaking, he decided to allow them to continue their simulation adventures. They continued to keep the simulation by the rules until one Friday night when the Overseer had gone home. The three cousins snuck out of the dormitory to see him leave to make sure they were not going to be watched. Osric was at his own house and they knew it.

So the three brothers entered the basement world they had created by using dream scans. They snuck into Evo Zone one night and went out fishing on the Cement River. They had more computer time than they had in real time. This was a great advantage of being a Virtual Traveler. The three brothers extended their lives by compressing time virtually. They walked through The Zones as Gods and they soon headed west. They had new plans now: to build a puzzle the world would never forget.

The Table Leg Forest

When they weren’t on tour for their band, Zach and Adam filled their time racing around Octavia in their shrunken red beetle and they had now entered the entrance from the Table Leg Forest. The legs of the table acted as the forest’s trees and stood hundreds of feet high. To get to Tabletop Park, you had to go through the forest and then go into the room’s second wall which contained an ascending spiral roadway. The spiral roadway took you to the level where Tabletop sat.

Zach turned to Adam and said, “We’ve got a show in Evo Zone Tomorrow.” Roger, who was on the wheel, suddenly pulled in toward the legs of the forest.

“I honestly can’t wait,” said Adam, and the beetle pulled into the path that guided them through the forest. The lights in the room that supported the legs of the forest were off, so it was a dark journey. They were on their way to a show for Table Top Park in Octavia which stood atop the Table Leg Forest. Octavia was kind of like a giant’s house which had shrunken wooden cities and highways which you could travel throughout the house. Think of it as a modest man’s theme park but assigned a much grander scale. It was a world of many old rooms.

Adam was skipping through satellite radio stations and stopped on a synth-pop song he liked. Adam was the drummer of the touring band Pure Extract (many critics disliked this name and I’ll tell you why later). Their debut five-song LP, It’s All Ripped, with covers of classic 90s tunes by reggae bands like Sublime and UB40, was a hit in Octavia. Octavia had a dense population, and the boys found it was much too dangerous to venture out of the zones. The Questeon Ocean was vast, and there were stories of travelers who took off into it and never returned. Whether this was because of the many creatures under the surface of the water that preyed on man, or great tropical storms that hit Questeo Zone at the height of summer, no one really knew.

 Tabletop Park was the show of the evening. The band played some of their original material and they played all five songs of their debut record. It was a wild party. People even got up on the stage with the band at the end of the show, drunk on beer. The Zentech Security Guards had to take action when things got too riled up. There were no deaths that night, but there were some injuries. There were also the relatively few people who came not for the experience, but to meet Roger and Adam. By now Pure Extract was growing a formidable following in Octavia. This made them famous to a degree. Backstage passes were few and far between. Roger and Adam were good enough to sign autographs after the show; many young women wanted to get into the band’s dressing room to get to know them personally. At their bigger shows, Pure Extract was famous but the show they were going to tomorrow in the basement-like realm of Evo was a charity gig.

After the show, the band went to a bar called The VCR. The architecture of the bar was essentially a CRT monitor (a 90s-made television set). For those of you who are younger and don’t know what I’m talking about, televisions used to be big square boxes, not flat rectangles with widescreen aspect ratios like they have today. For people of my generation, Sega Genesis and other classic video game consoles were all the rave. Hints of 90s culture were paid homage to throughout Octavia Zone. I like to think of it as your grandma’s old house, the one you went to when your mother and father went out to a movie or had to stay late at work.

As they ate and drank and watched various gamers playing away at their consoles, they started to discuss the future of the band.

“How far do you think it could go?” asked Adam.

Roger paused and thought about this question, then said, “I don’t really know…how far do you want it to go?”

“The way I’ve been feeling recently, I feel like I’d like to take it to the ends of the earth, you know.”

                Roger chuckled and said, “Well, there you go. It’s a done deal.”

However, when he started to think about this, he was still somewhat doubtful. He was especially doubtful when it came to unfriendly people. Octavia was rich in old antiques and wooden boxes of jewelry. Evo was rather sparsely populated, its government overrun by crooks and pranksters. Questeo was part ocean, part desert, and part jungle (it was the most dangerous of all the zones). Senneth was mostly a forest, but there were wooden fortress cities filled with people with diverse tastes in music. Zolvex, well they’d never been there. If Adam meant he wanted to take the band to the ends of the earth, did he mean he wanted to go there? This was a question they had both thought about, and maybe they even talked about it over their morning coffee, but they had never made any plans to go as far as Zolvex.

 In the Basement

In the concrete-floored basement of Pearson Hall lived two brothers: Kirk and Roger.  They lived, shrunken to the size of marbles, in Blanket Village, which was a small community. This municipality, being miniature in comparison to normal folk, sat under the giant beige wooden workbench that guided one through the entire zone. They lived in a modest corner of the world and had all they needed to live in what we now know to be the underbelly of the old house world of Octavia. Like I said, Evo was the basement or cellar of what is called the Adventure Zones. They had old-school television sets and on them, they played retro video games. They watched hockey and baseball from Octavia and various TV shows as well. The band they had made was the best one in all of Evo Zone which as I told you was an entire world made of the materials you would find in a modern-day basement or cellar.

Pure Extract was one of the coolest bands in Octavia and today they were coming to Evo Zone to do a show in the common area of Blanket Village. They had met and been in the same high school classes as many of the best artists at their school. They also knew The Full Mooners, a psychedelic rock band from Stonewest Secondary School, were set to play.

Kirk and Roger were big sports fans and liked to play arena soccer on the wooden floor playing field made by Mitchell Lyon, the woodworking professor. They listened to reggae radio while they did this. They knew that in Jamaica, soccer was really important and were also big fans of Bob Marley. Of course, the adventures don’t take us as far as Jamaica, at least not in this book. It can be said, however, that The Adventure Zones have a defined connection to the planet we live on, and that is solely in the author’s imagination.

                The people of The Adventure Zones, childish as they are, were very constructive thinkers. Not to say that being childish isn’t constructive, but it does take some maturity to scheme up a world of your own to live in. The houses of Blanket Village were a distraction from the mundane world they came from. The idea of camping inside apparently appealed to their childlike sense of the world.

The Chex Cabinet

The next morning the red beetle pulled into another gigantic room. The massive room was empty except for an interesting-looking wooden shelf that had many square compartments, which people could fit inside. On top of the shelf sat a potted cactus. Roger zoomed over to the left side of the shelf and parked the beetle. Adam and Zach piled out and you can see a ladder that was sitting in the corner.

                “Help me set this up,” Zach said. Adam said nothing and proceeded to take one end of the wooden ladder. It wasn’t too heavy. They brought it around to the front of the shelf and parked it on the third square opening from the left side of the shelf. The ladder was high enough to reach the third square shelf from the bottom. Roger put the ladder was the third square to the right. Roger started to climb the ladder and Adam waited by the car. Inside this particular shelf was a way to open up a secret passageway. There was an old black TV on a stool in this room. Roger turned on the television and scanned the channels until he got to channel 3. The daily passcode was displayed on the screen. 4650 it read. Roger picked up the remote control for the television, entered the password and the entire shelf started to grumble under his feet. It was moving!

“Ok looks like we’re good to go!” called Adam, as Roger climbed back down the ladder. As he ran over to the car, you could see the shelf moving to the right and a secret entrance was revealed! It was the entrance to Evo Zone, the basement of Octavia Hall. It opened up as wide as you could fit the comparably smaller red beetle and a ramp going downward into the dark realm of Evo was revealed.

“Here we go!” exclaimed Roger and he pulled the beetle into the secret passageway. After they had disappeared from the room, the shelf went back into its standard position, and the passageway was gone!

The Morning of the Show

Kirk and Roger had stayed up all night last night, excited for the Mind Distractions show. They decided they would meet up with the stagekeeper and the sound guy up in Rustic Falls. The stagekeeper’s name was Roger and the sound guy’s name was Kirk. There was no light show for the concert, Mind Distractions said they didn’t need them. They usually just let the band’s sound be the focus and everyone in Blanket Village dug it. The total population of Blanket Village was only around 175 people, with an average of 1 to 5 people per blanket fort. And most of those people were coming to the concert. At night, Evo Zone’s lights went off automatically at around 6:30 in the winter and around 8:30 in the summer. It had roadways and rivers, wooden shelves, and dark cellars throughout the zone. It was a vast place and like the other Adventure Zones was complex and labyrinthine.

Kirk and Roger sipped their coffee which they had picked up from the chain coffee shop Sunshine. You could find Sunshine throughout Octavia Hall and it was a commodity for those who chose to live in Blanket Village.

“Alright, I’m ready to start for Blanket Village. You up yet Roger?” said Kirk.

“I’m ready,” Kirk replied, nodding with a cup of coffee in his hand.

“Then here we go!”

 The stage was a simple plank of wood supported by stone blocks and was pulled around by a transport truck and the stage carried a sign that said “wide load” on it. The sound equipment was also carried inside the back of a transport truck. Kirk and Roger rode in the back of the audio truck and they listened to the radio for a while.

 The truck took a shortcut through Skeleton’s Cellar and as they passed the large deep circular hole that contained Deep Cave Lake. A colony of bats flew out from the cave. Kirk and Roger, the only people who could see the bats, were given a chill. These bats were quite large and their eyes shone red in the darkness. The two drivers were out of Skeleton’s Cellar at this point. They had heard rumors of vampires and other foul creatures that lived underneath the cellar.

Kirk’s digital watch read 6:58 AM. When the truck arrived in Blanket Village the lights of Evo turned on and the day had finally started. They got out of the back of the audio truck and waiting for them there was Roger and Adam’s red beetle. They exchanged waves and ran to meet each other.

After The Concert

After the concert, Kirk, Roger,  and Adam hung out in Kirk’s Blanket Fort. The people of Blanket Village had all gone home and gone to bed as the lifestyles of people in Blanket Village were laid back. Sleeping was almost a law down there, it was a guideline. This often meant that the people of Blanket Village were partially nocturnal. At night, when the lights went out in the basement. People could be seen with flashlights, either in their forts or outside going for long walks.

For dinner, Kirk made spaghetti and meatballs for the whole crew. It was a blanket fort designed for comfortable and convenient living. It was like an entire house, only made of blankets. There were various rooms: a bedroom, a bathroom, and a living room with his TV in it.

The night before, Kirk and Roger decided they would make the most of the visit from Mind Distractions. So they brought their guitars and amps as well as a CD recording they had made on Kirk’s USB microphone. On the CD were two songs “The Lagoon” and “Spread the Love.”

(lyrics printed below)

This is the happiest song ever made

And I won’t stop singing it until I get laid

So after Roger and Adam listened to the CD, they decided they would bring it back from their show and take it to their hometown in Yorkshire, Octavia where the Zentech Records headquarters resided.

                Kirk and Roger thanked the two musicians for taking their CD with them. They didn’t yet know for sure if anything would come of it. But they would soon find out.

Letter From Zentech Records

The builder of Blanket Village was a man named Brendan Lyon. He was a very skilled builder at that and people from all over the adventure zones came to see the structures he had built. In addition to being the builder, Brendan was also a fisherman, a laundryman, and a postman. The day after the concert, Brendan arrived at Kirk’s fort.

“Hello, Brendan,” said Kirk.

“Hey Kirk,” said Brendan. He took his mail sack off his shoulder.  “I’ve got some stuff for you.”

 Brendan pulled out a letter addressed to Kirk and Roger that had the Zentech Records emblem on it. Zentech Records, he thought. This should be exciting! He opened the envelope eagerly and started to read the letter.

Kirk  and Roger Henson,

I have heard a lot about your guitar jamming duo from Roger and Adam. I listened to your CD and I must say I liked “The Lagoon.” I was just wondering if you two would be able to make it out to Octavia One Studios in Octavia Tomorrow so that we may be able to lay down some audio tracks to perhaps make a more fine-tuned demo version of your CD along with a drum track that I could provide for you. I would appreciate it if you could.

Thanks,

Tim Moon

Kirk soon showed the letter to Roger whom the letter was also addressed to.

“Can you believe it?” Kirk said in admiration. “We get to make our studio recording!

“It’s amazing, I admit,” said Roger. But something about him wasn’t as excited as Kirk was. Kirk, after all, was the younger of the two and easily excitable.

“We could be famous in the Adventure Zones,” continued Kirk.

“Yeah that would be pretty cool,” said Roger. His face didn’t seem to share the enthusiasm.

For the rest of the day, Kirk and Roger composed a return letter to Tim Moon. In the letter, they said they would be happy to accept his offer and they would be ready to meet over the weekend.

The Harpies

Roger and Adam were on their way back to Octavia. Night had been set in the Evo basement and the boys were listening to some instrumental hip-hop beats on their car’s stereo. In addition to being recording artists, the duo were also hip hop producers and they sampled many beats that had been sent to them from all over The Adventure Zones. The beats were bumping loudly in the car. But even the loud music could not drown out the blood-curdling shrieks that suddenly started ringing out in the distance. Roger slammed on the brakes the second the sound reached their ears. Adam turned the volume of the music down all the way.

                “What was that?” said Adam.

                “I don’t know,” said Adam, “but it didn’t sound good.”

Silence followed. Something moved quickly past the headlights and back into the darkness surrounding the car. Seconds later, they could hear snarls and squeals being made outside. There was a group of winged creatures surrounding them. Suddenly, one of the monsters came into view. They had pale skin and red, sunken eyes and sharp decaying teeth. A foul smell surrounded them. Roger and Adam rolled up the windows by hand but they could still hear the creatures as they moved towards the car. At first, both boys thought they were seeing a group of blood-thirsty vampires, but on second glance they knew that the creatures were Harpies. Demons from the underworld.

                “Do you have a gun?” Adam asked Roger. The terrifying sounds of the creatures were getting closer.            

                “The gun is locked in the trunk. We’d have to get out of the car to get it,” Roger replied sheepishly. Roger wasn’t exactly expecting to be attacked that night.

                “Let’s get out of here!” exclaimed Adam. “Step on it!”

Roger pulled the car into gear and stepped on the gas. Several monsters were hit in the process and some of them were directed up on top of the car, up against the windshield. More shrieks rang out, this time even louder. Roger kept the car moving, though he couldn’t see where he was going very well with the harpies pressed up against the glass.

                In the distance, a gunshot rang out, loud and clear. This distracted them for a few seconds. Another shot sounded.  The harpies knew what this sound meant because within a second they were flying away in all directions. The boys let out a sigh of relief and the screams of the harpies trailed off into the distance. A lone, dark figure stood to the left-hand side of the vehicle.

The Postman Was Armed

“Not that I’d expect you to know,” said Brendan. “But you ought to be careful out here in the night hours. There’ve been rumors of nasty little fiends crawling out from the depths of some of the darkest places in this world.”

 It was Blanket Village’s postman, and builder Brendan Wilson, who had been their savior that night.

                “Buddy, we are so grateful you rescued us,” said Roger. The boys shook hands.

“Yeah they are pretty disturbing creatures, " said Brendan. “But they know a gun is our killing weapon so they’re pretty easy to scare off. I was on my way to Octavia to drop off a letter to your recording studio, when I caught sight of your headlights and I came running when I heard the screams coming towards you.”

“Well, we appreciate it. Hey, you must be delivering for Roger and Kirk. They’re fans of us turned collaborators,” said Roger.

“Yep, those guys are always doing something with their music,” said Brendan.

 Along the Wooden Workbench

Kirk and Roger started for Octavia Zone when the many basement lights were turned on for the day again. They brought only their guitars and their lunch sandwiches with them. In Evo Zone, the way most people traveled by foot was on the wooden workbench which was pretty much a shelf that sat against the wall. Evo was messy and labyrinthine and full of boxes of old stuff so traveling along the wall was the easiest way to get to the exit.

They started from a blanket village which was underneath the start of the workbench. To get up on top of it you needed to climb a ladder that was a hundred feet in the air. The bench would twist and turn along with the wall and every once in a while, you would have to climb another ladder to get to the next level of the bench. Because they were carrying their guitars and packs with them, they had to be extra careful on the ladder. They came to a wooden highway and waiting for them there was the taxi that they had called. Evo Zone was large and was known to be the basement of the adventure zones. You may meet some wild and crazy people there. They were nutty about how organization and information technology went against their philosophy of having a raw and powerful imagination. Also, they were never really concerned about politics. Come to think of it, their politics were most likely based on a severely childish sense of humor. Humor was the primary perspective for the people of Evo but that wasn’t all they did.

The Shooting Star Pub

There was a good deal of violence between the blanket dwellers of the basement and the result was a group of people who identified themselves as a government (mostly for great personal gain and almost unlimited resources) and another small percentage of people identified as police, who had been chosen by elders for being best suited for the job. There was also a particularly nasty group of people who called themselves the Moonshine Bandits. They were a combination of all the pranksters and gangsters from all corners of the zone.

                A group of Moonshine Bandits was sitting at a bar that stood at a wide corner of the workbench, called the “The Shooting Star” and it was at this particular time of day that Kirk and Roger decided to go in for a drink. The Star had a very rough scene, but Kirk and Roger liked that they could order drinks under the age of 19. The blanket village authorities tirelessly complained that the youth of Evo spent too much time camping out in odd corners of the Evo basement getting loaded, playing cards, and even trading stories of other worlds. Roger and Kirk embraced this lifestyle wholeheartedly and finally, their parents decided to move away from Evo, half hoping their absence would teach them more about the dangers of party life than any lecturing would do.

Donnie Komado and Mike Huddlehouse were the two gang members who had a reputation at The Star for bad behavior. The alcohol and the drugs were the only things that would temporarily relieve their boredom until they got to the point of causing terror in their homeland. The entire moonshine bandits consisted of about a hundred and twenty or more Evonian Humans. They pranked, they stole, they shot up houses and they played loud offensive music throughout the night. The authorities of the zone were outnumbered by half. No one in the basement wanted to stand up to them. This particular incident at The Star was a close call and it was Kirk and Roger’s better judgment that most likely saved their lives.

                So, at this bar, Don and Mikey are talking loudly, getting drunk. Then they go to the bathroom for a while and come out teetering high on whatever it was they did. Now Kirk was about to take his last shot and Donald Komado walked right up to where the last shot for Kirk was in a row of shots they had taken and downed it. Kirk decided to let this one go, and Roger was rather put off by this so he went to the other side of the bar and ordered another two shots. One for Kirk, one for him. The next thing the two of them knew, Donald and Mike came up and started wailing the two mild-mannered teenagers.

                “You think you can escape from me, you don’t know shit!” said Komado, the drunken bandit, slurring his words as he spoke. Kirk was going to retaliate when a loud gunshot sounded in the bar. It was Brendan.

                “You boys don’t shouldn’t be messin' around,” he said. The room went quiet and then Kirk started to sob, muttering swear words under his breath. The two bandits exited the bar and then before Kirk  could thank Brendan, he came up to them and said, “There is danger coming to the zones, we should go somewhere safe.”

Hazel’s House

As they walked along the winding roads of the workbench, Brendan told his story of the harpy attack on Roger’s car the night before. Kirk and Roger listened intently. They had never been in much danger from anything besides too much alcohol, except Mikey attacking them the moment before. It was all very surreal to them. The tales of demons from the underworld were supposed to be mere stories; mostly for the sake of telling to friends around the campfire. After a few beers

                Brendan Northwood told the boys how he managed to hunt one of the bigger ones.

                “It had four-foot wings and it breathed fireballs. The bigger ones are the mature ones, and they breathe fire at a certain level of maturity.”

                “Do you have the body?” Asked Roger.

                “I threw it into a pit in Skeleton’s Cellar,” replied Brendan. “I reckon that pit in the darkness of the cellar is the crevice where they came from.”

Silence filled the overly large room they were traveling through. Not even an echo could be heard as the basement was soundproof (the majority of the Evo Basement was made from nothing more than cement and the roads were made from wood. As I stated earlier, the houses the villagers inhabited were made from wooden frames covered with blankets. Some of the blanket forts even had second or third floors. The house they were walking towards was not a blanket fort, however. It was a doll house.

                The Sorceress had learned the ways of magic and knew the inner workings of my fictional world. She’s also my aunt, but she has various houses in the zones. Comfortable and aged homes. Each of these homes had fireplaces which served as teleporters so she could get from house to house. But it would not be used that day.

                Now that Brendan, Kirk, and Roger approached the old house, which was built from red bricks and had a tall pointed roof, Roger was getting uneasy. He felt terrible. What he had started to feel in the wake of danger was what I would describe to be an anxiety attack. If you’ve never had one of these, you’re lucky. There was a time in my life when I had anxiety every day for three months in a hospital’s psychiatric ward, which was when I got the name for this book. It’s not a fun thing in any way, I’m telling you.

                So with this new feeling that Roger had yet to find a word for came over him, Hazel came out the front door of the house and down the steps of the porch.

                “Hello,” she said. “You boys better come in.”

As the boys walked in, Roger momentarily lost his anxiety as he stared into the crackling fireplace, and suddenly he lost his grip on reality again as a devilish-looking face appeared in the fireplace.

Roger started to cry. He cowered and turned his head to the opposite wall.

“What’s the matter?” asked Kirk.

“I just saw someone’s face in the fireplace,” said Roger.

“Don't look at him, Kirk! It could have been Osric spying on us,” said Hazel.

“There is trouble going on in other parts of the zones. It was on the news today. Octavia is going to war with Osric Ninfelden and his technocratic government.”

Silence. Suddenly the sound of footsteps could be heard from up the stairs and silence fell on the room.

It was Brendan.

“I’ll be leaving in the night,” he said. “I’ve got to go into the abyss.”

The Root Cellar Demons

There was a hole in the cellar from which all the nasty creatures came. No one had been down there in a long time. Brendan contemplated his descent into the shadow of the underworld where so many sickening creatures dwelled. There were hellhounds and zombies mostly, but the demons, the fire-breathing imps were what scared Brendan the most. As he walked along the cement desert in the heat of the night, he hummed to himself a tune and pushed on further towards the cellar door. It towered above him and he was no bigger than a mouse in comparison to this great, old door. While the moonlight from the window shone down onto the floor of the basement and gave Brendan enough light to see with, the cellar was frighteningly dark, pitch black even. Brendan’s fears became hallucinations, he thought he could see many pairs of eyes watching him from within the dark. Eyes that were red and yellow and green; evil eyes. But there was nothing in there. His imagination was playing games with him.

Brendan pulled out his gun. He pulled out a flashlight in his other hand. He pointed the light into the darkness of the cellar and as he did he imagined a cold cruel laughter. The laughter was directed towards him but he shook it off. It was just his imagination again. He was now in the cellar. Suddenly a man came from out of the darkness and into the light that shone from the flashlight. It was Roger’s father, Steve Henson.

“Brendan!” he said. “It’s you!”

“Steve! What are you doing here? We should get the fire going. This darkness is giving me the creeps and we have a lot to talk about,” said Brendan.

“A few hours ago the Lawkeepers were all here. We barricaded the entrance to the abyss. We won’t have to worry about any demons for a while. But something worries me, Brendan. What if these creatures come in greater numbers? Roger, do we have the men we need to fight them off?

The two men talked around the firepit in the early hours of the morning. Then they slept and woke only when the lights were turned on outside the cellar. Loud noises were coming from the underworld. Steven did not like the sound of it. This sounded big, he thought.

“Thomas, wake up!” cried Steven. “The men are on their way.” In his hand, Steven clutched a walkie-talkie. He started to talk into it. “Limbo! Ted! They’re making moves toward us and I can hear them below me.”

In a few minutes, the Lawkeepers arrived at the foot of the cellar door. The sounds started growing louder and louder. The demons had been growing in number during the night and were slowly but surely making moves to get out of the cellar and make an attack.

“Can we turn on the cellar light?” suggested one of the lawkeepers, Mitchell Lyon. “Their eyes don’t function well under regular light bulbs.”

“The only way I could see us turning on the cellar light is if we got in touch with Harold the Giant,” said Brendan Northwood who was awakened by the fire, puffing a cigarette.

“Well then why don’t we do it?” said Kirk.

“Right now my watch reads 8:04 AM. His mother gets up to turn on the lights every morning at 7:00 AM,” said Sandy Dawson. “But Harold usually sleeps till afternoon.”

“Well, then why don’t we get his mother?” suggested Andy Zanardi.

“Sure. She usually watches TV in the morning,” said Sandy.

“But where in the house would she be?” asked Ted.

“I don’t know. There are many TV Rooms in Octavia’s Halls. Let’s call Roger and Adam to see if they can reach her.”

The Giantess

The beetle pulled into the parking lot of the floor hockey gym. There was a junior floor hockey match being played on the wooden surface of the playing area. The whistle blew on a stoppage of play and the teams lined up for a face-off to the right-hand side of the goalie. Lisa was in the crowd. Though she did not consider herself a giant, she knew that some, namely the Octavian Shrinks or the Evo Blanket Dwellers would consider her a giant. This was because there were many variable sizes of people in The Adventure Zones, as well as shrink rays and shrinking cars among other things. There were even people whom Lisa considered giant, though she hadn’t the faintest idea why someone would want to be any bigger than that.

Roger and Adam approached her from the doors of the arena’s concession area.

“Lisa, we found you just in time!” said Roger. “We need your help!”

 So Lisa drove back down to Octavia Hall and descended by foot down to the basement with Roger and Adam who were now of equal size with her. She turned on the lights and took a peep down into the cellar’s dark hole.

                “Lisa, we were attacked last night by a couple of monsters. We think they came from down there.”

                “That’s not good. I’ll help you then,” she said. “I’m sorry I can’t be around all the time.”

Wanted in Evo

Tony Bradshaw was a killer. It happened in the heat of the moment and now he was on the run from Brendan. However, he would soon be free from his pursuers. He had heard that catastrophe was about to come to the basement and The Keepers would be over their heads with problems. There was a rumor that Bradshaw, 28, was an agent of the Octavian Empire and was the ruthless killer of a family of four who lived in Blanket Village. Truth be told, he had only ever murdered one person, and this person he knew to be possessed by the devil. Charlie knew she had been beyond saving. Death would be preferable to what the possessed endured in their tormented hearts and souls.

Fort Hole

As the day came upon them, at about 11:30 in the morning or so, the exterminator came to get rid of the pests in the basement. When all was clean the Lawkeepers went back to their lodgings. A few of them stayed behind, however. Brendan wasn’t satisfied.

                “I figured that hole goes to places that are deeper than that, places only little fellows like themselves can fit through. I figure the issue is resolved for a few days and then we can send guards to the hole. Until then we can get Lisa to block this area off, even fortify it to protect our people.”

                “That’s a good idea,” said Steve Henson over his morning coffee. Steve and Brendan were talking around a small circle of Lawkeepers, which included Ted Moss, Andy Zanardi, Mitchell Lyon, and Ian Rhodes. These Lawmakers lived higher up in the Evo Zone, in their all-wooden houses. Mitchell himself told stories of swinging through windows on a rope slider. There were

                By mid-afternoon, the Keepers had covered the hole with a wooden platform and had begun to fortify the surrounding area. Guns were handed out to the many guards who would soon be taking duty on what was now called “Fort Hole.” The doorway to the basement cellar was locked closed by Lisa the Giant and when her husband, Angia came home later that evening he wondered what it was for. The men had gone back to Fort Blanket, another Fort to the east of the Cellar which had been there for around fifty years. It was much larger than Blanket Village which was southwest of the Cellar. It was a fortified castle which had blankets laid out on the inside. The roof of the fort was also a blanket and underneath the inner roof, the men all dined around a long table. They drank and celebrated the victory and the erection of Fort Hole. While they were gone they had sent Anderson with a camcorder and a loaded revolver to watch the hole, but they were sure they’d have no trouble again for a while at least. Indeed they had no attacks for the next remaining weeks until a straggling imp crawled in from out of nowhere. Fortunately, it had been picked off by Brendan doing his midday patrol.

                “You're sure it didn’t come from the cellar?” Asked Brendan.

                “We were watching it this whole time and the cellar door was locked,” said Ted who indeed had been watching the hole the entire morning. Brendan concluded it must have gotten in from another part of the basement.

                “Send a Keeper to each inhabited area of the zone,” he said. “As long as our people are safe, I can look for this opening and not have to worry about anyone getting hurt.

Back to Octavia Hall

Hazel drove Roger and Kirk up to the secret passageway out of the basement. Hazel pulled an iron lever and the secret way out of the basement opened up. The van pulls into the opening and Roger and Kirk see the Cabinet of Many Squares for the first time. An old woman was watching a soccer game in the third up, third across the room.

“I can upsize you guys if you want,” she said.

“Yep,” called Roger. The woman grabbed the TV remote, turned on her smart box, and changed the input to HDMI2. She selected the corresponding app and immediately the room’s upsize ray turned on coming from directly above them from the roof pointing down.

“Alright, stand under the blue light,” she said. The boys did.

With the click of a button from the woman, the boys became their normal height calculated imperially.

                Roger and Adam walked into the room, also at full height and Roger called down to the woman sitting in the TV room on the cabinet of many squares.

                “Thanks!” he said. The woman nodded and turned back to her soccer game. The boys shook hands in greeting. “We’re going to Octavia, man,” he said. The four young men all looked excited.

Time to Jam

Kirk, Roger, Zach, and Adam formed the band Mind Distractions and jammed in the room for the next four hours. They practiced Spread the Love for an hour with Roger’s keyboards and Adam’s Drums. Roger and Kirk argued about who would play bass at live sets, but in the end, they had to settle for a session bassist because the two of them were most familiar with guitar. They recorded the bass tracks and then called Anderson from Evo.  The guitar duo of Kirk and Roger with Roger on keys and Adam on drums was very amusing to Hazel who had come along to see the band. After Spread the Love they played Going to a Party and a couple of UB40 tunes after that. The band produced their recordings on a PC hooked up to a Genie Sphere. To help them with their timing they used an Octavian metronome. It was essentially a spherical clock that adjusted by beats per minute.

At the end of the day’s work, the CD single for Spread the Love was being pressed. There were also plans to make a vinyl record release of the song for the hardcore music enthusiasts of The Zones. Kirk, Roger, Zach, and Adam went out to The VCR for food and drinks afterward to celebrate.

“Looks like we’re gonna be a hit,” said Adam. “I’m an Extract fan, but this supergroup, man is it good!

“Osric Ninfelden, head of the Octavian Embassy has been taken into custody by Royal Octavian Police on charges of theft of the Master Sphere and conspiracy to murder. Later that day he escaped and fled to where police say may be out of Octavian Jurisdiction. Bodies of demons are being piled up in Evo Zone today after an attempted assault on Lawkeepers of Evo. Police and Octavian intelligence suspect that this attack is Osric’s doing as well.

 The boys couldn’t believe it. All this time Osric had been in the basement, or otherwise he had been connecting with basement dwellers, rounding up savage demons to murder innocent Evonians. The boys had never guessed this when they were at Hazel’s House. The room grew quiet. One moment they were all cheerful and laughing and the next there was this grim silence. The food arrived and the band ate in silence.

Despite having this bad news delivered to them, the food was delicious. After they ate, they played old first-person shooter games against each other in online combat mode.

“Do you think Osric is going to come back?” said Kirk.

“I’m sorry to say this, but yeah I think so,” replied Roger. “It may be some time before he does it but when he comes back, he will be sure to have an army.”

Kirk  dropped the controller and walked into a far corner of the bar, turned back to the other three guys, and said, “What about our tour?”

“I’m going to have to think about this. We might have to have a meeting tomorrow morning with the record exec.” It was agreed.  Kirk was worried about what would happen if the threat of Osric ruined their plans for the tour.

The band got into the beetle which was parked in the middle of a gigantic room. The VCR sat atop a cupboard and on top of the VCR sat the TV. Kirk was still mesmerized by the massive size of the rooms of Octavia. Like he usually did, he stared out the window from the back seat of the beetle just wondering about all there was to see in The Adventure Zones. As happy as he was to see it, it came with a sense of dismay. His heart dropped into his stomach.

When the boys got back to their lodgings Roger suggested they call Brendan on the wired telephone that sat in the lobby of the motel. They dialed Fort Blanket and found he was not there. Anderson said he might be in Blanket Village so they called in and asked for Brendan Northwood.

“Hello?” said Brendan.

“Hey Brendan, it's me, Roger. I hope you're doing okay. We just got the news.”

“Yeah the news doesn’t travel as fast as where I come from,” he said, sounding grim. “We piled about 200 bodies in the cement desert and burned them all.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” said Roger, who switched the phone from his left ear to his right.

“And that’s not all,” continued Brendan. “Sandy Dawson is missing. We’ve scoured the entire basement and there’s no sign of her.”

Minolta

A blue old beater of a car made its way through the muddy paths of the forest of Senneth. It was raining hard on Minolta’s Car. She was on her way to Evo Zone, also known as The Basement of Octavia Hall. She was an assassin of great skill. She carried guns and swords and grappling hooks. She knew she’d need one of those for the adventure. Brendan had called her in the night when it had started to pour rain all over the region of Senneth. Minolta came from Kentwood City, a wooden fortress that stood as high as the tallest trees of the forest. She was apprehensive about her next mission. She had been on missions in Evo before, usually on business against the Moonshine Bandits, but she had never been into the depths of the underworld. She heard it was a scary place. Brendan and the Lawkeepers of Evo had to stay in the basement to protect the people who lived there. Her job was to find Sandy Dawson. They highly suspected that she had been taken into the belly of the beast by a rogue demon.

She pulled up to the massive building of Octavia Hall, which was essentially the embassy of Octavia Zone. This building was just enormous. It towered thousands of feet in the air, maybe even tens of thousands of feet. In her car, Minolta approached a gargantuan window that towered about two hundred feet above her and cast a yellow light in her direction. She hid in the car, got out, and jumped feet first into the gutter where the window was. She went to the corner of the gutter where the far left side of the window loomed overhead. There was a keypad. She dialed a code into the keypad and a voice came from a speaker above her.

“Minolta?!” called a voice.

“Yeah it’s me,” she replied. Thunder started to roar above and lightning flashed overhead. The window started to slide to the right, opening up. A warm dry air came from inside. Minolta hopped in. She was now in the basement. Brendan was on the shelf below. The window closed behind Minolta.

Finding The Pool Room

The boys had to find a pool somewhere within the first level of Octavia. That was where their first show would be. The red car pulled into a massive room that towered hundreds of feet above them. The walls were a greyish color. Within this room was a building, and somewhere inside was the pool venue.

“It shouldn’t be too hard to find,” said Adam, who was navigating the virtual map. Roger, who was on the wheel, pulled up towards the large building within the room. As the car got to the base of the building a ramp came down from atop a ledge which was how the car was supposed to enter the building. The car pulled up the ramp and into the halls of the building they went. Adam looked through the paperback Octavia manual, which he felt was easier to use than its digital counterpart. The Adventuremobile had only one monitor, which was right where the CD player or Radio could be found in a car, so the paperback manual allowed Adam to look at the instructions for finding the venue while at the Kirk time, he was able to look at the map on the monitor. “It says we have to find a switch somewhere in these halls that opens up the room where the pool is,” he said as he flipped through the pages of the manual.

The car went down the first hallway that was visible and sure enough, there was a red button at the end of the first hallway. The car moved over the button, as was the design of the contraption, and on the wall above the button appeared a screen with instructions.

The manual and the adventure monitor read: Turn Left. The button you have just activated opens up a doorway.

Roger followed the instructions by turning down the left corridor. As they moved forward, they could see a corner piece in which a doorway for the car was opened. A large crowd of people welcomed the car into the venue with a cheer. This venue was pretty special in that people could swim and listen to the reggae band at the same time. It was set up far above the pool so they couldn’t be splashed so their guitars and mics and amps wouldn’t be ruined.

The Great Flood of Evo

Brendan and the Keepers enlist the Octavian Navy to rescue the people of this forlorn zone. Brendan and the Keepers move the Evones to Octavia where the plastic war is in the works.

The Band Calls it Quits.

The Playground Planet

An elevator with netted walls took them up two stories and the gate pulled up automatically when they arrived at the next level. They were now at the foot of a netted walkway.

The walkway curled around the wall at right angles. A deep abyss lay below the walkway on the left side. They couldn’t see anything but darkness and this chilled Kirk and Roger, who were walking through the walkway. Kirk wondered what would happen if he broke the netting, and dived down into it. His intuition told him, and from what he had heard from Zee, that he wouldn’t be in pain, or that there would be a bottom to the pit at all. Most likely he would respawn at an earlier point in the playground, and this would only sacrifice time. Of course, the Playground Planet was some kind of challenge course, but the mellow or the faint of heart could make it through, had the course not been infected with the demons and that was why the band carried their rifles close at hand. Aside from Osric’s intentions for the world, The Playground Planet is a safe place; almost completely benign. That’s why I have sent you on this journey. Because I had some hope you could make it through, Zee had told him through the use of the green Cybersphere.

After a few hours of walking through the netted causeway, they reached a pulley-operated gate made of netted material. Roger had been quiet on the walk and without words, he pulled the rope to open the gate and what they saw was another wonder. One wonder after another, that’s what this zone had been.

                They could see a series of interconnected tubes below the causeway, past the gate. They were no longer in a netted hall but on a balcony that overlooked the tube way below. A gate opened up on their right past the gate that led them out of the netted hall onto the balcony and a set of stairs led them down into the green opening tube. The tubes were not child-sized like the playgrounds that were built by other people in The Adventure Zones. They were adult-sized, so that you weren’t crawling through them, you could stand upright. Kirk had a faint idea why no one had imagined something like this, though he suspected that adult playgrounds were not yet built in Evo or even Zolvex because, though there were other things like that (the mazes and highways took up most of the imagination of the worldbuilders of The Zones).

Both Kirk and Roger were reminded of the McDonald’s Playplace when they had first seen pictures of Pageon. It was all immersive sound color and lights, a beauty of modern creation. If there was anything more interesting than a playground that carried on throughout an entire planetary body, they had yet to imagine it.

                The tubes took a while to walk through and the electronic symphonies rang through the sound system, but they knew some of this was mental. You could put in headphones to hear more clearly, but the boys didn’t do that yet.

                The interconnected tubes were a maze of some sort. From the balcony, the valley of the tubes had glowed from the outside but the lights were subdued on the inside, lit up by the light through the windows and a series of glowing lanterns above their heads. These cylindrical tubes had a diameter of about eight feet. Sometimes there would be an ascending tube that brought them up to the next altitude. Sometimes there would be divergent paths in which neither Kirk nor Roger could tell which way was best, though they had been instructed to just trust the playground, as Zee had got to know them.

                They reached a blue plastic spherical room with circular plexiglass windows under which sat a table and two chairs made of plastic that jutted out on the left side. There was also seating on the other side of the sphere room in the form of a bench that ran along the wall in a half-circle. At the far end of the room, they could see the entrance to the rest of the tube maze, but that opening was blocked by thick glass. The room was a game room and also had a rest area with seats. They sat down and took a break from their journey for fifteen minutes. While they were waiting, Roger noticed a die symbol on the table, which was a sign that it was time to take out their dice. The dice were a way to win cyber Lego candy, food, supplies, and ammunition for their weapons. Kirk and Roger took out their dice. They had two each. The symbol was also a button and when they pressed it, out came the sensory-activated playing field for the dice game. It resembled an air hockey table it was an air hockey table in that it had a smooth low friction area for them to roll the die. In the center of the room, on the floor opened up a transparent glass cubby hole. It, like the rest of the room, was circular, and you could see the prize items exhibited below the glass floor. The items you received were based on a roll of the dice. Kirk rolled a five and a two, which made seven. Seven points for the vendor.

Roger rolled two sixes! Suddenly the playing field elevated up two inches and revealed a slot machine for the bonus prize.

                “I rolled a double so I get the bonus chance,” said Roger. The machine stopped on two points and one X. He cursed his luck. Still, he had gotten two extra points from that bonus slot.

Kirk and Roger chose their prizes. Two points for a batch of Lego Candy and two points for 100 cells of plasma. Kirk had one point left. He got himself a package of peanut butter cups.  

                When they collected their prizes the circular glass door at the end of the room slid upwards and they could advance into the next tunnel. Kirk and Roger walked out of the dice room with a combined 21 playground points. An Octavian Snowglobe was the item.

The Not-So-Lazy River

After they had finished in the tubes they came to an indoor river. Of course, you may have been to a water park before and been on the Lazy River in an inflatable tube. This was much the same idea, as the playground planet is much the same idea of a world as the one we live in. Except everything in The Playground Planet was assigned a much larger scale. The entire planet was roughly the size of Jupiter and that is saying a lot. One could spend their whole life traveling through this great work of art and never come to the same thing twice. Kirk and Roger eventually lived out this dream as their troubles with the armies of Osric were now over. It was a special place and while they rarely encountered people, the people who shared their love of the playground were right at home sharing time with these two beloved characters. They also were in touch with old friends from Mind Distractions. While Roger and Adam preferred their music life in Octavia, they also visited Pageon occasionally. The planet had many coloured roads and highways that had netted barriers from which when you looked through them could see the various platforms and walking parts of the playground. There were stages to play Mind Distractions reunion shows and many fans came from all parts of The Adventure Zones to feel the music of the good old days.

So now Roger and Kirk came to a boat in the river, whose bottom was tiled like a swimming pool. They traveled across The Playground Planet Ocean, and their map told them that this river would take them there. They’d hop on a cruise ship and venture to the other side of the ocean where new and interesting playground configurations now stood.

The Playground Planet Ocean 

The cruise line to cross the playground planet ocean cost 750 points.