I stared in dismay at the screen, glancing back and forth from the regression test results to the clock display. 5:10 pm, and I wasn't getting out of here anytime soon. I took out my phone and texted Gerald:
Sorry dude. Got to work late. Run Liero as an NPC tonight, and I'll join you guys later if I can get out of here by eight.
He texted back:
Bummer, you'll miss the big prison raid. I'll try not to get Liero killed. :)
I put the phone away, studied the test results, then went back to the code to figure out where it was going wrong. My boss wanted the fix for this defect checked in before I left tonight. So I wasn't there when it happened, and wasn't listening to news or watching Twitter or anything when it all started.
The first I knew of it was when I arrived at Gerald and Karen's house, a few minutes after eight. I'd checked in my fix and walked out the door at 7:37, and I'd texted Gerald to let him know I was on my way. On the way over, I was listening to a three day old podcast on my MP3 player, not to the radio. My phone chirped a few minutes later, probably Gerald texting me back, but I didn't want to look at it while I was driving, and their house wasn't far from my office.
So I didn't find out until I walked up and knocked on the door. Karen opened it, looking drawn and pale.
"Are you okay?" I asked, glancing around. The guys weren't sitting around the dining room table as usual this time of night; the game session should have still been going.
"You haven't heard anything?" she asked.
"No...?" I started to pull out my phone to look at the last couple of texts and tweets, but instead I just asked her: "What's going on?"
"Come on in." She led me to the den, where Gerald was watching TV; a car commercial was on.
"Where is everybody?"
Gerald gave a hollow laugh. "My guess? The Kantheria Center for Correction and Amendment."
"Yeah, but --" That was the official name of the prison we'd been going to raid and rescue prisoners from, leaders of the resistance movement our characters were members of. Most people called it the Ant-Lion Pit. (It sounded better in the language Gerald had made up for his game setting; *serrezikh* sounds cooler than "ant-lion," anyway.)
"They got past the first checkpoint okay," he said, "and the second, and they'd killed or knocked out the guards and clerks in the records office so they could look up where the prisoners they wanted were being held. But then they all vanished. Go take a look at the dining room, we haven't touched anything..."
I walked into the dining room, disbelieving. It had to be a bad joke; I wondered where they were hiding and whether they really expected to take me in. I looked around the dining room table, the chairs pulled out just as far as you'd expect if someone were sitting in them, dice and character sheets at each place, a box of pizza and half-eaten slices on several paper plates...
...and three empty suits of clothes, lying slumped in the chairs and on the floor under the table. There on Bill's seat was the Maxwell's equations "Let there be light" T-shirt he wore more often than most, lying crumpled on a pair of khaki slacks, and crumpled grey socks trailing out of his sneakers... and there in Kim's chair, I could see a corner of a maxi-pad where her camisole had fallen off the seat and left the inside of her panties and capri pants exposed. Sandor worked in an office with a hard-ass dress code, and usually came here straight from work like me, so I wasn't surprised (after seeing Kim and Bill's clothes) to find the button-up shirt with the loosened tie crumpled in his usual chair, a napkin tucked into the shirt collar to protect it from pizza sauce.
"So they've vanished into Omruthia," I said sarcastically, half playing along. "And you had absolutely nothing to do with it?" Gerald had followed me into the dining room. But he looked too distraught to be playing a joke, and I started to feel really worried.
"No," he said, "And it's not just them. It's --"
Just then Karen called out from the den, "The news is back on."
I followed Gerald to the den. Karen was sitting on the edge of the sofa, leaning toward the TV, where a reporter was apparently in the lobby of a fancy hotel or -- no, it was a theater. Some Broadway theater in New York, from the caption at the bottom of the screen.
"-- and they all just disappeared," a young lady was saying into the microphone, "right in the middle of the song. You could see their empty clothes hanging there for just a moment and then they fell down, and people were screaming, but you could barely hear it until the music stopped... Then somebody dropped the curtain and a minute later the band started playing something else, and the manager came out and said 'keep calm', but I've seen _Wicked_ three times and I know that's not supposed to happen."
The scene changed to a news studio, with a couple of anchors at a desk and the reporter from the theater lobby on the screen beside them. They were talking about how most of the actors had vanished from theater stages at 7:34 pm all over, wherever there were plays being performed.
"And movie and TV actors, too; a few minutes ago they were interviewing a cameraman from the set of _Days of Our Lives_," Karen said.
"Bill and Kim and Sandor aren't the only roleplayers this happened to either," Gerald said. "I just got confirmation. I posted about it to a couple of gaming forums, and just before you got here, I saw some replies -- other GMs talking about the same thing happening to their players."
"Damn," I said quietly. "That could have been me."
"There but for the hardassness of your boss," Gerald said.
"And the children," Karen said, her voice breaking off in a sob.
"What?"
"Some kids have disappeared too," Gerald said. "The news didn't say, but I'll bet a first-edition Monster Manual that they were playing 'pretend.' Same as we were, only without dice."
"Or those method actors," I said, light dawning. "All pretending to be somebody else, somewhere else..."
I was interrupted by a scream from the dining room. We all jumped up and ran, hearing a crash and clatter before we got there.
Bill looked up at us, a terrified look on his face and no clothes on his body. He was lying on the floor next to his toppled chair, half atop his own clothes.
"Where were you?" Gerald asked.
"What did you do to us?" Bill shouted, scrambling and backing away, apparently unconcerned for his nudity.
"Chill," I said, stepping between them. "It wasn't his fault. Get some clothes on and tell us what happened."
-----
After Bill had gotten dressed, and Karen had gotten him some coffee, we turned off the sound and turned on closed-captioning on the TV and sat down to listen to Bill's story.
"I'd just started looking through the N filing cabinet -- I mean I'd told you Irrush was going to look through it -- when suddenly I was there. We all were, standing around the records office, looking in filing cabinets or standing guard. Themia and Khonu and I all suddenly stopped what we were doing and looked around, and I think Khonu gave a yelp before Liero put a hand over his mouth. I asked Themia 'Is that you, Kim?' and she said yes, and when Liero let go of Khonu he said he was Sandor... but Liero didn't know what the hell we were talking about; he wasn't Edward, I guess cause you weren't there playing with us."
"You were running him as an NPC?" I asked Gerald.
"Yeah, they couldn't do the raid without his technomancy. -- Go on, Bill."
"So Themia, I mean Kim, she said we shouldn't talk about it until we were alone, away from Liero. Till then we just needed to get the job done and get out.
"Khonu thought we should abort the mission. 'It's not a game anymore, and we don't know what happens if we get killed here,' he was saying, and Liero was saying in a loud whisper: 'Is that all this is to you, just a game? What kind of idiots have I gotten myself mixed up with?'
"Sorry," I said automatically. That was the kind of thing Liero would say, and it was partly my fault for making him that kind of character even if I hadn't been playing him at the time.
Bill shook his head and went on. "So we argued about it for a minute and Liero said if we wanted out, we should stay where we were for five minutes, give him time to get away, and then sneak out as best we could. *He* was going to rescue at least one prisoner tonight, and he didn't trust us to have his back after we'd gone crazy like that. So I said he should go ahead, and we'd wait.
"We let him go, and then a few minutes later the three of us started trying to get out the way we'd come. We didn't get far before it all went wrong. We ran into the commandant of the prison, who wanted to know why he didn't recognize any of us, and wanted to see our IDs. We told him we were new hires, and showed him our IDs. They'd held up fine at the front gate, but something made him suspicious and he ordered us to come with him to the personnel office.
"So we started to play along, and we made a break for it the moment he and the guards with him seemed to relax. I don't know exactly what happened after that, it's all kind of hazy -- I got shot, I'm pretty sure, and I was bleeding a lot but I was still trying to walk, and somebody was screaming and I think I was one of them. And then I was back here."
We looked at each other somberly. "So," I said, "you went there. And a bunch of other gamers and actors -- and little kids playing pretend, God help us -- went wherever they went... and then you came back when you got killed there?"
"Apparently so," Gerald said.
Karen looked back at the TV. "Bill's not the only one." She turned the sound back on.
A reporter was interviewing an actor I vaguely recognized, who was wearing a bathrobe. "I was *there*, I was him -- I could remember being me but I remembered being Ace Riley too, I knew I was in Dr. Artifex's laboratory and I had to find the formula and get out before he figured out the fire in the greenhouse was just a distraction. And being both me and Ace Riley was enough to throw me off my game, I guess, because I dithered over whether to keep looking for the formula -- Ace Riley cared about it but I didn't -- or just to get the hell out of there. I finally decided to clear out, but I wasn't fast enough. Dr. Artifex came back and we both drew and fired -- I shot him but he got me, too, with some weird gun that didn't seem to do anything at first. I thought I was okay until the flesh started to slough off my bones when I was nearly out of there.
"It hurt like a million devils for a minute or so, but then I was back on sound stage three, alive but naked."
Gerald muted the sound when the talking heads in the studio started analyzing the actor's story. We could figure it out as well as they could or better.
"So," I said, "has anybody *else* tried to start roleplaying or acting since this thing happened? Any plays that were supposed to start at eight, for instance?"
"I don't know," Gerald said.
Karen added: "I think the TV said they were canceling performances of all plays until further notice, and stopping filming on whatever other scenes they had scheduled for today." (It was only only about five-forty on the west coast, I realized.) "And they said it was just fictional films and TV shows; they'd checked with the crews of several reality shows and documentaries and everyone was fine."
"Well," I said, "if Sandor and Kim get killed like Bill here, they'll be okay. It will hurt for a little while but they'll be safe back here. But if they get captured?"
"They've got hollow teeth, I think," Gerald said. "I have to check their character sheets to be sure."
"I know Liero's got a poison tooth, but those guys have ways of stopping you from breaking a tooth when you're captured. They aren't here, which means they haven't died -- and if they got captured and were able to use the hollow teeth, they'd probably use it."
"If they knew they'd come back here, they would," Bill said. "I had no idea what would happen."
Karen added: "They might find it's easier to plan to kill yourself if you get captured than to actually do it. They weren't really hardened secret agents, just playing them in a game."
"I don't know," Bill said. "It's like that actor said, I could remember being Irrush too. I didn't exactly have the time or leisure to introspect about how much I was Irrush and how much I was Bill, but I think under some circumstances I'd have reacted like Irrush."
"It could vary from one person to another," I said, "depending on the actor or player's attitude to their character. We don't have enough data yet. But if Sandor and Kim got captured, and weren't able to use their poison teeth... we need to consider the possibility that they'll never get out of Omruthia without help."
"The brain boxes," Gerald said. "Oh, God. What was I thinking?"
We -- our characters, I mean, -- had heard rumors in earlier game sessions about how the technomancers at the Ant-Lion Pit were extracting the brains of condemned prisoners and putting them into machines -- printing presses, elevators, radio transmitters -- as controllers. Some people said they were stringing multiple brains together to make a big thinking machine. If that happened to Kim or Sandor, they'd be stuck there for years, decades, until something went wrong with the life support keeping their brain alive.
For that matter, if they managed to escape from the prison and keep their heads down, avoiding the notice of the secret police, they might still be stuck living out the rest of their characters' natural lives in Gerald's dystopian world. They wouldn't know that dying would bring them back home safely.
"We've got to go in after them," I said.
"How?" Karen asked.
"Me and Bill roll up a couple of new characters and Gerald starts a new session with us."
"Do you think that will work?" Gerald asked.
"I have no idea. But we've got to try. You can give us inside information, show us all your maps and notes on the prison, and the secret police and anything else we might need to know. And I figure our new characters can be prison guards who are secretly members of the resistance -- we'd be ideally placed to rescue them, or to put them out of their misery if the technomancers have already started vivisecting them."
Bill reluctantly agreed. "I'm terrified of facing those guys again, even if I know I'll just come back here if they kill me. But I can't just leave Kim there."
"All right, if you're willing I'll help. Let me go get my notes."
By unspoken consent, we left Kim and Sandor's chairs and clothing alone. Bill and I sat at the far end of the dining table and spread out Gerald's notes and maps; both of us read every word, and I tried to memorize as much as I could of it, especially the maps. Karen kept watching the news, and the gaming forums where people were talking about the vanished gamers; now and then she'd relay important information to us.
"Listen!" she said, about fifteen minutes after we'd started studying the maps. "Some guy just posted this to RPGnet: 'Me and several friends were gaming tonight, and we'd taken a break to let everybody go pee and get snacks and stuff around six-thirty.' (I think he's on Central Time.) 'My character had just gotten killed, and it was going to be a little while before the GM got a chance to introduce the other players to my new character; I was still tweaking the new character I'd had in reserve, sitting it out, when they got started again. And they'd just gotten started when everybody vanished, including Hal, the GM. That was six forty-five or so, at least ten minutes after everybody else is reporting people vanishing. I freaked out, and I turned on the news once I calmed down a little bit, but it wasn't until a few minutes ago that I checked here to see if it affected other gamers. I think it might have gotten Hal because he was really getting into character as this NPC who was our party's guide...' Okay, there's more, but that's the important part."
"So we know it wasn't just a one-time thing," Bill said.
"But it might not last indefinitely, so let's get our characters ready and go in while we can," I added.
Oh this is an extremely interesting idea!!
I can't help but wonder what would happen if you roleplayed as something specifically in our world at the present moment