Couch Potato Chaos- Gamebound Read online

  Couch Potato Chaos: Gamebound by Erik Rounds

  ISBN: 9781718049277

  © 2018 Erik Rounds

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact:

  [email protected]

  Edited by Crystal Watanabe

  Cover by David Debaene.

  Couch Potato Chaos

  Book 1: Gamebound

  Written by Erik Rounds

  Edited by Crystal Watanabe

  Cover by David Debaen

  CONTENTS

  World Map

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue

  Characters

  Tasha’s Status

  Author’s Note

  World Map

  Chapter 1

  Catalyst

  Consider the couch potato. Sedentary creatures, they spend their days transfixed by the warm, iridescent glow of their screens for hours at a time, passively consuming entertainment while producing little of value or merit. They avoid most forms of physical exertion while subsisting primarily on a diet of cupcakes, microwave lasagna, and caffeine.

  Tasha was the embodiment of the couch-potato archetype. She had spent the better part of her childhood sitting on the floor in front of her TV, either enjoying the campy serialized science fiction of the day or watching her father play poorly translated Japanese role-playing games on their 16-bit gaming console. Back then, she would sometimes read the character’s dialogue aloud, using funny voices while watching him play.

  Those were some of the best years of her life. By the time her father died, she’d inherited his taste in both video games and cringeworthy television.

  It was her love of gaming which led her to pursue a career in the video game industry. Her studies led her to be a decent enough programmer, but after college she quickly learned that landing her first job in the industry was easier said than done. Most game companies ignored her resume entirely, and those few who did respond turned her away, suggesting that she get more industry experience before bothering them with an application.

  When she was finally called in for an interview, she was over the moon. They had asked her some simple questions in vector math and programming, as well as some math-based logic puzzles that wouldn’t have felt out of place in a Professor Layton game. When they offered her a job with an insultingly low annual salary, she had thought herself lucky. It was way below the industry average but not entirely unreasonable for someone just starting out.

  For the first few years, the job meant something to her. The company put actual effort into making their games entertaining. Times had been better then. The first game they developed was a mid-core action platformer. Sure, it was a tad derivative, but the game had character, and she enjoyed working on it.

  She was used to working long hours of unpaid overtime, but at the beginning she didn’t mind as much. It was a labor of love, and the office was filled with laughter and the occasional impromptu Nerf-gun fight. But things had changed since then. The job no longer had a sense of purpose, and the comradery was no longer there.

  In an attempt to increase short-term profit, the company had switched to flooding the market with minimal-effort pay-to-win mobile games. Most of their projects were just re-skins of the same game with small cosmetic changes.

  Most of her colleagues had the presence of mind to move on to other companies, but not her. Tasha hated change. She sometimes daydreamed about quitting, but it never went farther than that.

  One fateful Friday evening, Tasha was riding home on the metro after a day of especially pointless and mind-numbing work. The company was always crunching these days. The hours had grown longer and the weekends had grown shorter.

  As the bus came to a stop, she made her way to the front and stepped onto the sidewalk. The driver closed the door behind her without a word, and the bus pulled away.

  She was about to start walking toward her apartment complex when her smartphone began to vibrate in the pocket of her jeans. She took it out and glanced at it. It was her boss.

  Why is that horrible little man calling me now? This was supposed to be my weekend off.

  She let the call go to voicemail, thinking if she ignored him, he’d leave her alone. She’d worked weekends for three weeks without rest. Enough was enough.

  The sky was already growing darker as the sun made its daily descent into the western horizon. A single drop of rainwater touched her cheek, followed by another. Thick storm clouds had gathered in the distance and were approaching rapidly.

  She picked up her pace, planting one foot after another in rapid succession. She’d need to move quickly to reach her apartment before the storm hit.

  She neared a familiar fork in the road, which split off to the left and right. Having walked this path on a daily basis, she knew that both paths would converge at her apartment. To the left were rows of shops and restaurants, including a pizza place that she rather enjoyed, and the right touched upon a residential area filled with houses and apartment complexes. Experience had taught her that neither path would get her home more swiftly than the other.

  Today, however, she saw something out of the ordinary: a dimly glowing blue rectangle hovering in the air. She approached it slowly, tilting her head in curiosity.

  The box floated unsupported. It just sort of hung there in stubborn defiance of the laws of gravity. It was a bit like a partially visible TV screen, but it didn’t appear to be connected to anything.

  Naturally, Tasha did the first thing that any halfway reasonable human being does when confronted with the unknown—she poked at it with a stick. There was a nice pointy one on the ground beside her, so she picked it up and jabbed at the screen a few times. The small twig made contact with the rectangle but continued through it without resistance as though the screen wasn’t there.

  She extended her arm and found that it went straight through the ghostly projection. It was like one of those holograms from any number of science fiction shows… or maybe a UI element from a video game.

  Circling around the strange apparition, she found that it looked nearly the same from the back. Observing it from the back revealed that the text was inverted, as if being seen through a mirror.

  She regarded two lines of text written on the screen. The first line was an arrow pointing to the left accompanied by the word “Adventure.” Below that was an arrow pointing to the right with the word “Safety.”

  Tasha took a step away from the glowing blue box. The arrows were pointing in the two directions that the road branched into. There was nothing notable down either path,
save for the rapidly increasing rainfall.

  It was like a signpost. One way for adventure and the other for safety.

  What a convenient gamelike mechanic, she thought. If this were a game, taking the path to the left would trigger some sort of scripted event.

  As a professional game developer, she was used to thinking about things in terms of video games. But there was a world of difference between video games and reality.

  On reflection, she didn’t consider herself an adventuresome lady. She would often dream about going on adventures, but those were just fantasies. Real-life adventures were scary, involved the risk of bodily harm, and made one late for work the following day.

  For several long minutes, she just stared at the glowing screen as it floated unmoving in the air. One way for adventure and the other for safety. Perhaps this was the universe’s idea of a practical joke. Or, more likely, this was nothing more than a stress-induced hallucination.

  After a moment of contemplation, she mentally chided herself and took the path to the right, the direction indicated by the word “Safety.” The rain was picking up, and she didn’t have time to indulge in this sort of meaningless nonsense. Not if she wanted to avoid the bulk of the storm and remain marginally dry.

  As she stepped up the pace, lightning arced across in the horizon before her. The flash momentarily highlighted the shape of the oncoming storm clouds followed by a report of thunder. As she passed rows of houses on the street to her left, several of their outdoor lights switched on, providing modest illumination to the darkening street. The storm was very nearly upon her.

  Her right foot splashed into a newly formed puddle as she walked. She had tarried for too long at the crossroads, and the trickle of rain had turned into a downpour. Some of the water from the puddle entered her shoes and filled her socks so that every time she took a step, they made a sloshing sound.

  She continued for nearly five minutes before she reached the door to her apartment complex. It was a large twelve-story brick building lined with balconies. This apartment building featured a security box at the front entrance to deter the uninvited. Upon typing in the four-digit code, she heard a click indicating that the door was unlocked and that she could enter.

  She reached out her hand to turn the handle and open the door but didn’t actually touch it. Some inner doubt caused her to hesitate, and her hand remained suspended in the air right before the handle. It was as though there was a finality to the act of opening the door.

  Why had she chosen safety over adventure?

  Hesitating, she considered her earlier actions. Surely the floating screen thing was just a figment of her imagination brought on by stress, but even if that were the case, she still could have indulged the fantasy and chosen adventure. She had made a deliberate choice, and it was one that she had repeated many times throughout her life.

  Her refusal to leave her job was only the most recent example of this. She hated her job and remained only because she was used to being there and it supported her couch-potato lifestyle. She lived her entire life in the path of least resistance.

  Her hand stubbornly refused to touch the door handle, and she remained there, transfixed. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. Why hadn’t she chosen adventure?

  A low click sounded. The electronic lock had grown bored of waiting for her to get on and do something and had relocked itself. If she wanted to enter the building, she would need to reenter the code to assure the lock that she really did want in.

  As she turned around, she looked back the way she had come. She stood sheltered under the apartment building’s entrance as a curtain of rainwater rushed inches from her. The rainfall had grown into a mighty torrent.

  “This is stupid,” she said aloud. “Just open the damn door.”

  Instead, she turned away from the potential warmth of her home and ran back into the storm. Seconds after she passed through the curtain of water, she was soaked from head to toe. The cold wetness of her clothes pressed against her, and her denim jacket became heavier in the deluge. Water dripped from her hair and into her eyes, forcing her to blink away the rainwater.

  She took off running down the street beneath the dim glow of the streetlights. Minutes later, she reached the place where the two roads diverged.

  The glowing screen was a beacon in the storm. It was still there. She could make out its shape and dim glow between the lines of rainfall.

  She picked up the pace, but this time she took the road to the left, following the path marked “Adventure.” A flood of cold rainwater enveloped her body, sending fresh shivers through her body.

  The rain-filled night was illuminated by a brilliant flash of light. At the same time, there was a thunderclap as a lightning bolt struck a nearby deciduous tree. A tree branch struck her as it fell, knocking her to the asphalt and earning her scratches to the face and knee.

  Fear and pain overtook her for a moment. As she got back to her feet, she found that the large tree had fallen into the road, blocking her path. There didn’t seem to be a way around it, so she pulled out her smartphone and turned on the flashlight app to light her way. The only way around it was through a large pool of water, so she found the best point to climb over the tree.

  Although she was out of shape and shunned any form of physical exertion that didn’t involve a remote control, she nevertheless climbed over the tree and stood on the other side. She returned her phone to the pocket of her jeans.

  Pellets of water beat against her as she made her way along the path. It was as though the wind was alive and trying to force her back the way she had come. Gritting her teeth, she pushed against it, her feet sloshing the rainwater one step at a time.

  Finally her apartment building was once again in sight, and what a sight it was. Lightning struck the top of the apartment building once, only to strike the same location a moment later. Seconds passed, and a third bolt struck the same place. Each time she heard and felt the thunderous sound of the impact.

  Although she was understandably hesitant to approach the building after such a phenomenon, she did so. Fighting against the wind, she forced her way step by step to the door. Finally, she was standing under the safety and relative dryness of the apartment’s awning once again. Exhausted, she collapsed onto the ground, leaning against the brick wall.

  After a moment, she got to her feet and entered the code into the security box. This time she didn’t hesitate and grabbed the handle, opening the door. Stepping inside, she let the door shut behind her. She stood upon the base of the stairwell as water dripped from her hair and clothes, forming a small puddle on the thinly carpeted floor.

  Her jeans were torn at the knee where she had hit the pavement. She was wet, frozen, and bleeding from the knee and elbow as she began her ascent. Each step sent a small shudder of pain to her leg. When she finally reached the third floor, she unlocked the apartment door and stepped inside. She closed the door behind her and fastened the door guard. She desperately wanted to take a hot bath.

  At first it appeared that nothing had changed. Her home was a small-budget single-bedroom apartment. It wasn’t much, but she didn’t need much space. With her work schedule, she barely spent any time at home anyway.

  There was a small kitchenette that doubled as a dining room and tripled as the foyer. It opened up into a modest living room. The living room had a balcony, but Tasha rarely used it, not being the outdoorsy type. A raggedy old couch took up the bulk of the living room while a ten-year-old plasma TV occupied a small table in the corner.

  Her exercise bicycle sat in the far, unused side of the living room. Lately it had been accumulating cobwebs. She’d been meaning to give it a good dusting and clean off the cobwebs, but she could never seem to find the time.

  There was a narrow hallway which led to her bedroom and a utilitarian bathroom. She proceeded past the bathroom and entered the bedroom.

  The bedroom sported a twin bed and her desk, where she kept her computer—a pink anime cat-themed Win
dows 98 netbook. Her infrequent visitors and even more infrequent boyfriends would try to get her to upgrade to a more modern PC, and maybe one just a bit less pink, but she’d resisted the temptation thus far.

  She would prefer to spend the money on video games rather than an updated laptop, but that was only a small part of the reason. The netbook had been a gift from her father, and it had become a keepsake—something to remember him by. Her father had died nearly ten years ago, and the netbook was one of the last things that he gave her.

  She was about to get undressed in preparation for a bath when she noticed a light emanating from the pocket of her jeans. She pulled out her smartphone. She had neglected to turn off the flashlight app from earlier. As she was about to switch it off, she spied something amiss.

  On the cell phone face, where it normally showed the current time of day, the numbers 99:53:05 appeared. Now it read 99:53:04. 99:53:03. For some reason beyond her understanding, her cell phone’s clock had been replaced by a countdown. She shut down her phone’s flashlight app and set it face up on the computer desk.

  She looked up at the round analog clock that hung on her bedroom wall. It had also undergone a change. Where there used to be twelve numbers there were now ten, ranging from 0 to 90 in increments of ten. The hour and minute hands were pointed up, and the second hand was ticking down in a counterclockwise rotation. Her netbook indicated that the current time was 99:52.

  She took a moment and considered her options. In the last half hour, she had witnessed floating translucent dialogue boxes, had a transformative moment of self-discovery, been nearly killed by two lightning bolts and a falling tree, and now all of the clocks in her apartment seemed to be ticking backward. Upon further analysis, panic seemed to be the most reasonable option available to her.

  The clock’s second hand continued its counterclockwise journey. When it reached the 00 number at the top, the minute hand ticked backward ever so slightly. It had to be some sort of countdown, but a countdown to what? Was she expected to do something before it reached zero? If that were the case, there was just under one hundred hours left.