Chapter 5
Children of Hypnos Online is a big download for my poor little laptop. It takes all night, so I leave my laptop plugged in and stop it from going to sleep. In the morning, I check the screen and find the install has completed.
But it’s Friday, and I have school.
I do take the second CoH book with me. I won’t wait any longer to find out what happens.
Emery’s doppelg?nger, the homicidal manifestation of her subconscious, is definitely coming back, but how, and when?
Will her little brother, Edgar, be okay?
Will she repair her relationship with her grandfather? What about Wes, who has his own issues?
Only one of my teachers scolds me for reading in class.
Mr. Cox is a history teacher, but only because he had to teach something so that he could coach football.
He’s known for being an absolute shithead to girls and the non-athlete boys, so much so that there’s a running tally of how many students have left his class crying.
The only students who like him are the athlete boys.
“That book must be pretty interesting, Evie,” he says, voice flat and annoyed as usual. It’s like he wants everyone to know he’d rather be on the field than in the classroom. The only students he talks to like people are his football boys. “Want to tell us what it’s about?”
“Mental illness,” I say. I’m already closing the book and putting it away, because I know that’s where he’s headed and I’d rather not suffer through the whole conversation.
Someone scoffs. Probably one of the football players, because Mr. Cox smirks.
His voice gets a little life to it. He has someone to show off for now.
“This is history, not psych,” he says. “You’ll have to go down the hallway for that.”
“Are you giving me permission to leave?” I ask. A few eyes turn to me, and Mr. Cox’s smirk fades. Even I’m surprised by my willingness to talk back to a teacher. This is not something I do. Ever.
“Watch your tone.” Mr. Cox has his Big Scary Man voice on now, and I’m stunned again by how funny I find it. It would have been terrifying a week ago. Now it just seems like what it is: performative. Defensive. But even I know when to stop poking the bear.
“Sorry,” I say. “I won’t get it out again.”
He’s got his chest puffed up. “No, you won’t. Put it on my desk.”
I stare at him. “What?”
“Put it on my desk, it’s being confiscated.”
The whole room looks at me. I am still bent over, my hand on the book inside my backpack.
My heartbeat pounds in my ears. Everyone here knows me as Evie Leigh, rule follower, who wouldn’t ever read a book in class, much less talk back to a teacher.
Who would never in a million years disobey a teacher’s commands.
I know myself as that too, but I am not doing those things now, I am not giving in to my teacher’s demands, I am not doing what an adult tells me just because society has given them the authority.
My heartbeat steadies. Nothing that happens in this classroom matters. He does not matter.
“No,” I say.
An invisible force runs through the classroom, a charge that has every single student sitting up in their seat, looking back and forth between us.
Mr. Cox’s face has drained of color. His jaw tightens.
He moves through the desks, to stand before me.
I shove the book deep into my backpack, zip it closed, and get up, slinging my backpack over my shoulder so he’ll have to go through me if he wants to get to it.
I only reach his chin, but he’s not going to intimidate me today.
“Give me the book, Evie,” he says.
“No.” Anger floods through me, followed by a strange, sharp twist of giddiness. He has no right to take Alissa’s book. She gave it to me. What’s he going to do, manhandle a teenage girl? In front of other teenagers?
“You’ll be written up for this,” Mr. Cox says, his voice low. He’s trying to get his control back, trying to make me cave in front of the rest of the class so he doesn’t look so impotent. This isn’t about a book, this is about his pride. “I’ll send you to the principal.”
The giddiness overwhelms me. I laugh in his face and say, loud enough for everyone to hear, “I’ll go myself. Maybe there I’ll actually learn something.”
I grab my folder and pencil off my desk and slide past Mr. Cox.
I know everyone is watching as I leave. I walk fast and hard, wanting to drain away as much of this anger as I can before I reach the main office.
I’ve never liked Mr. Cox, but I’ve never acted this way toward him, and I don’t want to do the same thing with the principal.
One two three four five six seven—
One hundred eighty-one steps later, I am explaining the situation to the assistant principal, Ms. Maddox.
I tell her exactly what happened, what we both said.
In the end, she just sighs sharply through her nose and rolls her eyes in a way I don’t think I was meant to see.
She pulls a pad out of her desk drawer and scribbles on it.
“You can keep your book, and you won’t be written up.
I’ll talk to Mr. Cox.” Ms. Maddox tears the top sheet off the pad and hands it to me.
It’s an excused absence slip. “Go home for the day. We’ll mark you as excused for the rest of your classes.
If any of your teachers ask on Monday, show them this. ”
I take my slip and leave.
I think about going to the park or the gas station to look for Ash’s car, since he said he was scanning the far side of the river today, but he could be done by the time I find him, or I may not find him at all.
Tomorrow I’ll go and search again, but today I’ll leave it to him. I need something else to calm me down.
The house is quiet when I get home. I close myself in my room, put on leggings and a sweatshirt, and sink into bed with my laptop.
I have an old wireless mouse Mom doesn’t use anymore, and a mouse pad from when she had a little office set up at home here during the pandemic.
The pandemic is the only reason I have my own laptop.
I had school and she had to work, so she bought me a used one from a neighbor three doors down.
Despite being several years old and slow as hell, it’s still better than the junk Chromebooks they hand out for school, and it’s got the specs to run CoH.
The CoH installer is still up on the screen.
When I close it, another window comes up.
This one asks for a login. I type in the account name and password I made yesterday on the game website when I downloaded, and it thinks for a minute before my screen flashes black, then is filled by the game window.
Children of Hypnos Online begins with a lobby screen.
The background shows a twilight campus: a large fountain in the middle of a cobblestone quad, surrounded by stone and brick buildings and haloed by wrought-iron lampposts.
The sky is overcast, and the sound of rain accompanies a haunting string melody.
At the top right of the screen is the Children of Hypnos: Nightmare Queen logo, the gold and silver script wreathed by red poppies. Nightmare Queen was the last expansion. Alissa had said it was great. Beneath the logo are a few buttons.
Add-Ons, Credits, Help
On the left side of the screen is a long box labeled
Character Selection
There are no characters listed here, only a button that says
Create New
I click it.
I’m taken to another screen with all kinds of options.
To the right, a default character model waits for me to mold it.
Right now, it’s a masculine character with some funky combinations of hair, eye, and skin colors, along with hairstyles, piercings, tattoos, and scars.
To the left is a list of attributes I can change, with a big button at the top.
Randomize
I flip back and forth for a minute between the body options, my first decision to make.
I had assumed, going in, that I would play a feminine character, but I also like the way the stereotypically male body looks, and I wouldn’t mind playing that.
There are even options to make the body more androgynous.
I can be someone else.
In this game I can be whoever I want to be, look however I want to look.
I do finally settle on the female-presenting body, because I like the way she shifts her weight and stares down out at me, like she’s daring me to pick her.
I change the skin tone to tan, the tone Alissa and I would be in the summer after hours playing softball, and give her freckles across her face and arms. I give her long black hair tied up with a spiky purple bow and black rings laddering up her right ear, a bit of punk femininity.
Her eyes are antifreeze green. The character model looks at me and gives that daring smile, and even though she’s done that at least fifteen times now, this time, because she looks the way she does, it feels like it means something. The way I have made her is correct.
The last two things to decide are her class and her name.
There are three classes to choose from, and the game gives me a short description of each when I hover over it.
Guardian
Tank Role
Primary Stats: Strength | Resilience
Defend your party and deal heavy blows. Each point of damage you take can be converted into armor, more powerful attacks, or self-healing.
Medic
Healer Role
Primary Stats: Intellect | Recovery
Heal yourself and your allies while providing crowd control support and strong area effects.
Hunter
DPS Role
Primary Stats: Stamina | Agility
Max out your damage on either single targets or groups of enemies. Perform big finishers to recover ability points and keep fighting.
As I select each one, my character’s armor changes.
As the guardian, her black armor is bulky and thick.
When I switch to medic, her armor becomes a long jacket over an ordinary shirt and pants.
The hunter class is the one that looks the way I imagine most of the dreamhunters in the book: black armor sleek and tight to her body, her collar up to her chin.
Hunter also seems like the class I’d enjoy the most. I like the idea of maximizing my damage and hitting enemies hard. My hunter looks quick and deadly. I want her to be that way in the game too.
Finally, I just need her name. Alissa’s character’s name was Briory. I want to pick something similar, not a real name but not some stupid handle with a bunch of numbers and references, either. I hit the
Randomize
button under the name field. The game generates a new name for me each time I hit it.
Gantail
Miriantha
Lilora
Nenon
They’re all either weird or not quite right. I go through ten, twenty of them. She’s too real for her name to be silly. She’s too sharp and dangerous for it to be pretty.
I hit the button again.
Ravenweal
I stop. It is, by all measures, a silly name.
Ravenweal? The most emo bird possible and an obscure word for an injury?
But it’s a little sharp, and a little painful, and a little angry, like a swollen dark bruise.
If I were in school and picking a name in front of all my classmates, I would never take this one.
But here, in the safety of my room, where I will be interacting with strangers in a game, there is freedom.
I can pick the name and the image I want. No one is here to judge me.
Raven—I am already thinking of her as Raven, shortened—shifts her weight and smiles. She’s ready to go.
I hit the big button at the bottom of the screen.
ENTER WORLD