Spoiler! :
Hi everyone! This is my first story posted here. It's for the 18+ contest. I have not played Portal 2 or Braid but I know a bit more about Braid than I do Portal 2 so please correct me if I got the game worlds/weapons/abilities wrong.
Also Open Office says it's 236 words over the limit so I need to cut words, but I know O.Office counts hyphenated words wierd! Thanks in advance for reading!
edit: Changed some stuff, cut some words!
System Push
It was chilly. Faint, moist mist enveloped him, clouds floating by his shoes, what it looks like from the inside when a skyscraper is stuck in a cloud. The wide concrete floor of the roof, with its industrial-sized pipes, vents, antennas, and fans, was actually boring to look at. The most interesting part of the roof was an HDTV set up with a Bose surround sound system, PS3, Nintendo Wii, XBox360, and Nintendo DS, in front of a black leather and powder-coated steel couch.
Finally, the mountain climber thought.
His name was Roque. It rhymed with "Joke", "Coke", and "Bloke". In fact, it was one of the reasons the school kids had made fun of him.
Roque was now a legal adult, having been homeschooled since the first grade. He was okay with it—unlike many of his peers at college, he discovered, he actually retained a desire to learn.
But there was a problem. Roque didn't know what he liked. Roque was okay with a lot of things. Woodworking, biking, studying new languages, creating art. He'd hop from one to the other, trying to find—what? A feeling of passion? Of happy, total absorption into the activity?
That boring little problem had led him to the top of Hancock Tower in Boston.
Roque unclasped his climbing harness, wiping the back of his gloved hand over sweaty, parched lips. Was it sweat, or had the mist beaded on his skin? He took a few steps toward the entertainment system, and something that looked like a webcam, poised on top of the TV, buzzed to life.
Roque would be on TV himself tomorrow, in a new ad for PlayTree, a game store in Prudential Center. He and his dad had seen the contest posting while shopping, and his dad had signed him up. It was Roque's dad who'd taught him mountain climbing, one of the few pastimes he'd kept over the years. Roque was good at it. A magazine or two had profiled him as a homeschooled prodigy with a passion for climbing, with the ambition normal kids lacked.
It was funny, because Roque wasn't passionate about climbing. It just represented how he felt, always looking for something, something immaterial, something he could devote himself to completely. Climbers devote themselves to the summit, but when they reach it, they only care about it for a few minutes before starting back down.
Roque picked up the pink DS, and settled his achy, adrenaline-filled body on the couch. That was the point, right? He'd been interviewed pre-climb, filmed by aerial cameras going up, amassing a crowd of surprised Bostonians around the windy perimeter of the financial building whose mirror-like facade reflected Trinity Church, and after the tricky climb (temporary climbing holds had been affixed for the advertisement) here he sat on the roof of the tallest building New England knew.
If the clouds cleared, he'd be able to see Charles River slithering between Boston and Cambridge; the Citgo sign, Fenway Park, the TD Garden, North End, South End, in one 360° super-scenic panorama. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, as Dad had explained. So clearly the objective was to play the crap out of the games.
Rune Factory 3's anime opening sequence made him smile. Roque had very limited gaming experience, so the next 20 minutes of fighting monsters and planting turnips blew his mind. Roque's vest pocket was vibrating for 30 seconds before he realized Dad had sent him a text.
"Roque they want you to play one of the bigger consoles now". Dad was watching the live feed from ground level with the ad crew.
"But I like this game. Whatever," Roque found a save point and switched off the DS, turning on the Xbox, the PS3, and the Wii. He'd play them all in turn.
Something shivered next to Roque. He jumped, gasping, dropping the DS from his lap. On the black couch beside him was something between a lamb and a bunny...a Wooly, he realized.
From the game.
"Huh?!" he said, staring at the Wooly. It stared back. Then it hopped off the couch and padded away, exploring the roof.
"Oh...kay...?" Roque muttered, picking up the Xbox controller.
There was already a game on: Braid. Roque frowned, trying to work his way past the puzzling levels, armed with the ability to warp time. After a while, he switched it off.
"Hey!" he called out, standing up from the couch. From behind a huge steel fan peered a round, wool-wrapped head.
"Come over here!" Roque said, crouching down. "Are you from the game? C'mon, I won't hurt you."
The Wooly paused, then slowly padded over on two legs, just as it had at the entrance of Primeva Forest. It looked up at Roque with big, black, round eyes, and he patted its head. It had two floppy black ears.
Roque smiled at it. In the game, monsters befriended you if you gave them food, so he unwrapped a Kind bar from his vest pocket and handed it to the Wooly. It sniffed it, crunched up the almond and dried apricot bar, and hopped up and down, bleating like a lamb.
"Kind." Roque said. "I'll name you that."
Roque picked up Kind and held it in his left arm, picking up the Nintendo DS and slipping it in his pocket with the free hand. The deal was that he'd get to keep one game and one console, whichever appealed most to him.
Then, he frowned. If the Wooly had come out of Rune Factory 3 after he finished playing, what could have come out of Braid?
BOOM.
The explosion startled Kind, but Roque seemed to have expected it. Even as the atomic explosion annihilated everything around them, it all turned a tinted gray and froze. And then it played backward like a tape on reverse, the dust and fire receding back to a point in the distance. Then it froze there.
Roque knew what he had to do; go back to before he'd played Braid. But that was impossible. He couldn't give up his friendship with Kind.
Wait...did that mean he'd found out what he liked? Befriending monsters?
No time to worry about that now. He scanned the PS3 games available on the shelf beneath the TV. Call of Duty, Duke Nukem Forever—did these war-centric games contain a way to disarm an atom bomb?
Then he saw it: Portal 2.
Kind curled beside him, Roque played through Portal 2's first level, and then shut the game off. He turned to the frozen explosion, and with a deep breath, let normal time resume as the gray time field dissipated. He aimed his Portal gun at the bomb's epicenter, hoping for the best.
Gender:
Points: 1600
Reviews: 34