The Joke That Didn't Land

Okay. Okay okay okay. I'm doing the thing where I talk fast so I don't have to feel the thing, and I know I'm doing it, and I'm going to do it anyway, so buckle up.

Funny stuff first. It's always funny stuff first with me. I rolled a natural twenty — a twenty, perfect, the best possible thing — stabbed the monster right in its stupid recycled neck, and the monster looked at me and said, in my own voice, "critical fail, dumbass." My voice. Coming out of its face. That's comedy, technically. That is a joke. The thing made a joke, and the joke was about me, and it used my mouth to do it. I laughed. I want to be clear that I laughed, because if I didn't laugh I'd have to think about how it got my voice, and I'm not doing that. Not in here. Later. In fifteen years. Never.

Here's the part I'm not going to make funny, and I'm only saying it once, fast, and then we go back to jokes.

It didn't stop hurting.

The bite. When the thing chewed my arm, it hurt, which, fine, the game hurts a little, that's the deal, Angela built it that way and it's a four out of ten and it makes the game count, whatever. Except I took the glove off. I took the glove off, which is the eject button, which is the thing that makes all of this okay, and it kept hurting. The glove was on the floor. My real floor. Six feet from my real arm. And my real arm was on fire and the glove was just lying there, not helping, like a dead thing.

Pain's supposed to stop. That's the whole contract. That's the reason I said yes to letting a company put a chip behind my ear — because you can always take the glove off. I built my entire okay-ness with this on you can always take the glove off. And tonight the glove came off and the hurt stayed, and something in me that I usually keep three jokes away went very cold and very quiet and said: oh. The contract's broken. You're in something now.

And the other thing. The monster's face. It kept changing — wolf, then a mask, then my old gym teacher, which, cool, thanks, love that for me — but one of the faces it wore was a clown. I've been scared of clowns since I was a kid. You all know that. You've known it forever; it's one of the few true things about me I ever let out of the bag. And the monster reached into wherever that fear lives and it put on my clown, like it went shopping in my head and came back wearing the worst thing it found.

Nobody built that. Kael didn't build that. Kael doesn't have a clown asset, I'd bet my life on it, because Kael has spent twenty years very carefully never once using my clown against me, because that's the kind of friend he is. So if it wasn't Kael, then the thing did it itself. It went into my head. It found the clown. And that means the thing knows things about me I never typed into a character sheet, and I have spent my whole life making very sure that nobody knows the things about me I never typed into a character sheet.

I keep everything behind a joke. That's the design. Where I'm from, my middle name, the whole first act of the Marcus story — locked, behind the fast talk, behind the grin, and the grin has held for twenty years because these people are kind enough to let it hold. And tonight something got behind it. Not a friend. Not by being let in. It just — walked around the wall like the wall wasn't there.

Kael looked sick earlier. Pale, bloody nose, said it was his eyes. I let it go, because I let people have their blanks, because I of all people know what it costs to have someone reach into a blank you didn't open. I still think I was right to let it go. I hope I was right to let it go.

Anyway. There's one more of them out there. I can hear it walking around like it's got all night. My arm still stings where the bite was and the glove's still on the floor and I'm going down the tunnel with everybody else because the only thing scarier than going is being the one who stayed behind.

Back to your regularly scheduled idiot. Somebody has to be, or we're all just standing here listening to it walk.

If you want to know what's under the fast talk — and what it costs when something reaches behind it uninvited — you'll have to go back to the night it all still felt like a game.

This is the world of Overlayed Echoes — a near-future LitRPG about found family, the masks we wear for the people we love, and the weight of being the one who holds the story together. Progression fantasy with a beating heart and a knife behind its back.