CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Gabe.”
“Yes?”
He waited. Chloe said nothing.
This was kind of torture.
They sat parked in front of what described itself as an ‘events center’, in a parking lot packed with cars. The breakfast had gone well, but he hadn’t been worried about the breakfast. Mostly he’d been worried about what came after breakfast.
The competition.
This might actually be the riskiest thing he was going to do during this stretch of dates.
He had spoken with Chloe off and on over the past few weeks about how she felt about gaming competitions.
She had said she liked them, despite her generally antisocial behavior, and she used to go to them.
But she hadn’t for almost three years now, and missed it.
And he had done his research, discovered there was a gaming competition with a horror theme going on in the next town over.
It felt like fate.
Gabe had gone back and forth with himself for days.
Sometimes he was sure just asking her was a better choice, because this was kind of a lot to surprise someone with.
But sometimes he felt like no, it was safe enough, and their relationship was sturdy enough, that he could surprise her with this and it would probably go right.
Ultimately, he’d decided to surprise her. It felt right. To hedge his bet, he’d enrolled her in the tournament under a generic pseudonym. If she, for whatever reason, decided she didn’t want to do it, she could just back out.
“What is this?”
“This is a horror game tournament.”
Chloe was staring through the windshield, leaning forward, and now she slowly turned her face towards him.
“You’re shitting me,” she whispered.
“Nope. And you’re enrolled.”
“Holy shit! This is fucking awesome!” she cried, and Gabe relaxed, breathing a small sigh of relief. “Which games?! Did you sign me up for any or…?”
“I signed you up for two. Ataxia and Descent.”
She gasped in excitement. “Okay, I don’t know Descent, but I’ve been fucking dominating in Ataxia lately! Gabe! This is amazing! You are so getting fucked into a coma tonight!”
He laughed. “Very much looking forward to it.”
Chloe looked forward again and giggled, then got out of her seatbelt and threw open the door. “Come on!”
Gabe got out and followed her. “The site said that the competition was kind of loose. Each game would have their initial run to determine the actual victor, but after people could just play if they wanted. And I think they said they even have enough funding and people bringing stuff in that they had smaller side competitions going on, so if you saw a game you really want to play, you could likely get in.”
“How long does it last?”
“For the next seven hours.”
“If you’re cool with it, I want to stay for all seven hours,” she replied, her voice becoming a growl of excitement.
He laughed. “Yes, babe. We absolutely can.”
“Oh my God, I fucking love you. Come on!”
They hurried into the building through the glass double doors.
It reminded him of a convention hall. One big, open room, populated by islands of TVs and game consoles and tables and chairs.
They walked up to a desk being staffed by a pair of people who looked like old school gamers.
They were probably around when gaming was really getting fired up in the `80s.
Gabe and Chloe checked in, and Chloe got her name badge, and Gabe got his visitor’s badge.
“Mira Pryce?” Chloe asked with a raised eyebrow.
“I thought you’d appreciate it,” he replied.
“You think I’m like her?”
“Yeah. I know you are.”
Chloe no doubt reflected on that for a moment as she looked around the large room.
Mira Pryce was a main character in Recovery.
She was a tall, lean, hardass combat medic who was generally grouchy and grumpy, but did not hesitate to throw herself at something dangerous and figure out a solution.
She was a divisive character, mostly because she was kind of difficult to get along with.
Unless you did all the right things in the game.
“I’ll unpack that later,” she said finally, turning back to him. “Remind me about Descent?”
“It’s one of the games I recommended for you last month. It’s like...a haunted stairwell? It keeps going and going and sometimes there’s rooms and monsters, and you have to get down as many floors as possible.”
“Oh! Right! Sorry, so much has been going on recently...why’d you sign me up for a game I haven’t played?”
“You seemed to be really into it, and I figured you’d want a game you were good at and a game where you were almost going in blind? For the fun of it. But you can back out if you want.”
She had begun to look away but her head snapped back. He almost managed to keep the smile off of his face.
“The fuck did you just say to me, Gabe?” she growled.
“Just, you know, if you weren’t feeling up to the challenge,” he replied with a casual shrug. “It’s gonna start in about five minutes.”
She grabbed his hand and looked around, spotted the Descent setup, and began dragging him off towards it. “I am going to fucking win this. You fucking prick.”
Gabe chuckled and let himself be dragged along.
…
It was silent now, save for the haunting, eerie ambient track Descent came with.
Chloe had been at it for two hours.
How the contest worked was: you got five tries.
Each try ended when you died. However deep you managed to get on your best run was your final score.
Gabe had been watching her the whole time, sitting next to her in a beanbag now.
There had been ten people in total besides Chloe. Gabe had been paying attention to them.
Most of them seemed to peter out somewhere around level seventy. About an hour and a half in, all that was left were Chloe and one other girl. Both were clearly good at the game, and the other girl had finally lost her last life ten minutes ago, having made it all the way to level two twenty five.
Chloe was on level two twenty right now.
The game itself was simple, yet very well done.
It had graphics that would have belonged in the late nineties, though they were much sharper.
He found that such an interesting aesthetic, not unlike some of the creepier places in Recovery.
The stairwell itself was made mostly of bland gray brick.
It was poorly lit, stained, and ominous.
The sound design was excellent. A lot of the game was tension and foreboding, built up by quiet sounds heard behind you or above you or in particularly dark shadows.
And the things that got you, the entities that lurked among the stairs were curious, bent shapes covered in writhing shadows.
They made horrifying sounds, deep and low and utterly menacing.
Chloe had proven herself by learning the ins and outs of the game quickly.
She hit level two twenty three.
Gabe kept still and silent, staring at the screen.
He didn’t want to distract her in the slightest. She was so close.
He was aware of other people around them, but they were keeping just as quiet.
Chloe was leaned forward, controller gripped tightly, eyes wide and mostly unblinking.
He was still kind of surprised that she had this ability to just lock in.
She hadn’t actually stopped playing ever since she’d sat down and begun.
Two twenty four now.
The tension was ratcheting up.
Chloe hit the bottom of the next stairwell, coming into a shadowed room.
Something rumbled ominously to her right.
She ignored it, knowing from the specific sound it would stay put, she had to go to it for it to be dangerous.
She passed through a door at the other side and walked down the brickwork passageway beyond.
The next set of stairs awaited her. And now she was tied.
Just one more.
She moved down another corridor that the randomly generated level started off with.
Came to a T-junction and looked left, then right.
Neither hallway looked any more appealing than the other.
Finally, she broke right and passed into another room.
This one was larger, half of it taken up by rusted machinery that looked like it belonged in a nineteen twenties’ alternate version of Earth.
Something else groaned threateningly from behind the machinery.
Chloe froze and whipped to face it, flashlight flicking on. She hardly had any battery left now and the flashlight was the only way to defeat the creature. Gabe tensed as he saw her do the same thing. The question now was: did she had enough left to make the monster fuck off?
It shifted silently into the light, making for her, long arms extended, and she adjusted the flashlight while backing away.
The creature let out a louder, more menacing growl and slowed, but still came for her.
She kept shining the light directly onto it, kept backing up, until she backed into a wall.
It was still coming for her, still coming for her…
At the last second, right as the flashlight flickered and died, the beast turned and drifted back to its hiding place.
Chloe let out a long, soft sigh and quickly made for the exit.
This was another moment of truth: either some new threat was behind the door, and she might be fucked because she was completely tapped for resources now, (apparently, supplies stopped respawning past level two hundred), or she would find the exit.
She found the exit.
Everyone let out long sighs as she moved down the stairs, officially hit the bottom, and set the controller aside.
A general cheer went up and that was when Gabe realized they didn’t have ten people around them but closer to thirty.
Apparently a lot of people had wandered over to investigate.
Though he had to imagine at least some of that had to do with just how fucking hot Chloe was.
There were several attractive women here (God did he love that they’d moved out of the gaming dark ages when there’d be no women here), but Chloe seemed a step above.