Young Writers Society

"Thanks," Nikolai said gratefully. He took the fabric pieces from Raptor and kneeled down next to the sled rails. Everything about his idea just seemed even crazier the more they worked on it. He wondered what kind of crazy solutions they'd be coming up with later on if it kept going.

Raptor was acting weird, he noticed as he started wrapping the first rail. Maybe it was embarrassment, but it seemed like a little more than that. Shame? It was hard to read him by watching him, for obvious reasons, but he'd seen him look away and there might have been a hint of something in his voice.

It was a little hard to be sure, but once he was satisfied with the first rail, Nikolai decided to check with him before he moved on to the second. He glanced up at Raptor, the other piece of blanket fabric still in his hands. "Are you alright?"

Raptor faltered.

"I'm fine," he said a little too late. It would be stupid to share his concern that he wasn't acting enough like a magician. Even more so, he wasn't supposed to share things like that. Sharing feelings was a sign of weakness.

...And yet...

...May would berate him if she was here. Even though he usually wore his helmet and his face wasn't as expressive now, she would just know how he was feeling. She'd call him out on his lie.

May wasn't here, but Nikolai was. And Nikolai had asked him to trust him earlier, hadn't he? Couldn't he make an exception for him?

Would anyone besides the two of them ever really know?

"...I was just thinking of two...acquaintances of mine," Raptor carefully said. He had already talked about elemental spheres and demons earlier, so Nikolai knew he wasn't exactly normal. But he wasn't sure how he felt about Bartimaeus, and his interactions with Dresden were out of shared interests.

(He wasn't sure he could even get rid of Dresden.)

"And I was thinking of how those two acquaintances would be viewing me right now," he admitted. "One of them would probably be mocking me for getting so flustered, and the other would probably be laughing at me. Even though he was the one who was jumping on the bed and singing Minecraft parodies..."

The last comment was more him thinking out loud, but Nikolai would have easily been able to hear it.

Nikolai hadn't heard of Minecraft and he didn't know what it was, but if you could sing a parody of it, he confidently guessed that it had to be some famous English opera. But he couldn't ask Raptor if that was correct without showing that he had no understanding of pop culture, and he didn't feel like embarrassing himself, so he kept his guess to himself. He'd have to listen to Minecraft if they ever got out of here. Nikolai made a mental note to add it to the post-escape bucket list.

"Oh, they sound a little harsh," he said sympathetically. "Why are they like that? That's not very nice of them."

There was something a little strange about the way Raptor had said "acquaintances", like he'd been having trouble choosing a word. Maybe he just wasn't sure if they qualified as friends and had to figure out where they fell on the scale. They didn't sound much like real friends if they were picking on Raptor.

Or maybe that was normal and Nikolai had forgotten about what friendship had been like along with everything else. That thought scared him, so he pushed it to the back of his mind, glancing down at the sleigh quickly before looking back up at Raptor.

Why were Bartimaeus and Dresden the way that they were? Raptor hadn't ever given it much thought. He had always thought it was just their personalities. But Mist's comment haunted him like it had been ever since their first meeting: Bartimaeus might have been a demon, but he was a person. There had to be reasons for what he did, didn't there?

Now was a terrible time to be having a morality crisis, but Raptor realized he couldn't keep ignoring Mist's retort from that day.

"They're both harsh," Raptor agreed. "...But one of them might do it because he doesn't like how I'm treating him, and the other might act that way because..."

He hesitated. He wasn't really sure about Dresden.

He sighed.

"...I think he's just like that," he finally decided.

Nikolai nodded slowly, but he wasn’t all that sure he understood. Did Raptor just hang out with strange people? Why would he? What did they do together?

Maybe Raptor couldn’t become friends or form bonds with most people because of what he’d been hiding. Nikolai’s heart sank a bit at the realization. He hadn’t thought of that until now, and now he felt bad for being a little judgy.

“What do you know each other from?” he asked, getting back to work on the second rail. There were lots of questions he could’ve asked, but that was the one he went with. He wasn’t sure why.

Raptor took a deep breath.

He technically didn't need to, seeing that he was a skeleton. But just the act of it felt calming and confidence-boosting. Nikolai had done nothing but trust him and care for him. Nikolai wasn't going to call his story impossible.

Still, his story wasn't exactly a normal one. He hadn't even been sure how he would have explained it to May if they hadn't been in the same situation, and she had regularly interacted with demigods. It was a strange, unusual story, and Raptor wasn't entirely sure where to begin. He also had to remind himself that Nikolai had amnesia. Even if some of the story would have made more sense with his memories, Raptor didn't have that to work with right now.

He sat down on the other side of the sled, watching as Nikolai worked on wrapping the second rail.

"The first one is named Bartimaeus," he said. "I know his name from a book I read in a library. He's the one who probably has a good reason for how he acts. Dresden is the one who likes laughing at others."

He stared down at his lap and fiddled with his armored hands.

"The best place to start is probably why I look like this right now. I...I don't know if you remember what a video game was or what Minecraft is, but I was playing that game and wanted a cool skin—avatar. If you were playing a board game, it'd be like the little piece you'd play with. Like your queen piece when playing chess, or the little shoe on a Monopoly board. It's not ever supposed to be you. It's just a tool for playing the game. So I picked a grim reaper one."

His face burned underneath his helmet, but he did his best to ignore how silly the reasoning sounded in retrospect. The grim reaper had looked cool, but it really wasn't the kind of skin someone like him was supposed to pick.

He looked up at Nikolai.

"...Then I found myself in the game one day," Raptor said. He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. "My voice doesn't even sound like this. And since Minecraft is arguably more dangerous than my usual life, I wanted to get back home as soon as possible. Luckily, I have something...special about me. I'm not supposed to share it, but you already know I'm not normal. I'm not sure I can really hide it anymore."

He folded his hands in his lap.

"I'm a magician," he said. A magician-in-training, technically, but he was close enough to being a magician now that he had actually summoned a demon. "We summon demons. Bartimaeus is the demon I summoned to help me get out of the game. He's been absolutely useless with that so far, but his company is...nice. And then there's Dresden. He's another magician. Magicians aren't supposed to trust other people, and we're especially not supposed to trust each other. It's one of the first things you learn. It can be dangerous. If you trust them too much, they'll probably backstab you."

He fiddled with his hands again.

"But Dresden keeps sticking with me, and I'm not sure he's planning on leaving before he finds the man he's looking for," he admitted.

Oh. So Minecraft wasn't an opera?

Nikolai had no idea what a "video game" was. Games, he was familiar with, but what did the word "video" even mean? Maybe it was a word he didn't know in English. "Avatar" and "Monopoly" weren't familiar to him either, even though he was pretty sure he might have played chess before. Well, he was pretty embarrassed that he had absolutely no clue what Raptor was talking about throughout his whole explanation.

"How do you even get trapped in a game? What do you mean it's dangerous?" Nikolai was vaguely aware of a risky game called Russian Roulette, but that was more of an easy way to get hospitalized than a game and it didn't seem like Raptor's thing anyway. "And I thought demons were evil, and that magicians were people who went from town to town and did card tricks, and--"

Nikolai realized he had to slow down and admit that he had no idea what Raptor meant.

He took a deep breath to interrupt himself before he asked another million questions. "Sorry, I got confused about a lot. I'm really not familiar with all the stuff you were saying, but I do believe you. I just think I've never been introduced to a lot of it."

Nikolai was realizing that Raptor was being a lot more open now than before-- but Nikolai didn't have anything to share and return the favor with. At least he had nothing to hide, not that he knew of.

"I went into the bloody lake because there was a chest at the center!" Elias crossed his arms. "The miner's obviously insane; who knows how long he's been down here? I'm sure he smells my cigarettes, that's all."

Raptor let out a breath he hadn't realized he had been holding.

His guess had been right. Nikolai wasn't judging him for what he had just said; he was just confused. If Raptor had been in his shoes, he probably would have been confused, too—even without Nikolai's amnesia.

"It's okay," Raptor reassured him. "Magicians and demons are supposed to be kept secret. I wouldn't have expected you to know what they are."

He thought back to Nikolai's first question about getting trapped in a video game. He had his suspicions on how it had happened, but it just felt...wrong. It hurt his head when he tried to think about it too much, so he had been pushing it to the corner of his mind and focusing on finding Herobrine instead.

"I'm not sure how I got trapped in the game," he admitted. "I woke up like this after I tried updating the game. Updating is when the game's creators automatically improve it. It would make sense that the new version of the game had something to do with it, but I've only found two other people in a similar situation to me. There's more players than that..."

"Oh yeah, doc, that's why you went to the water," Mel said with a smirk, finding it funny that everyone was dogpiling on Elias. "Didn't you just splash in there while Aumrauth did everything, including killing the serpent?"

She just turned to Morrick even though she knew that the man was blind and wouldn't notice the movement.

"Didja know there was a serpent, Morrick? That's mainly why the doc smells bad since the icky blood got everywhere," she said with a teasing smile.

"I knew," Morrick said gravely. "I found out fast."
Elias huffed and turned away from the group, electing to fix his gaze on the walls as if studying them. Let them be petty children, then.

Did Raptor have an entirely different understanding of magicians and demons compared to Nikolai? He’d heard of them, somewhere before forgetting everything, so they couldn’t have been entirely secret. Maybe they kept secrets, but Nikolai couldn’t think of what else a magician would need to hide besides how he pulled rabbits out of a hat.

“Why would you update a game?” Nikolai asked. “Most games don’t change all that much over time. Would it be like the people who create chess sets changing the style of the pieces and then the day you buy your new chess set, you realize you’ve become a knight? Because if so, that happens. Well, the new chess sets part happens, not so much the other.”

This was confusing. Raptor was probably making sense, but Nikolai just wasn’t able to understand it for some reason.

He cleared his throat. “Sorry, this type of game is… really confusing to me.”

"It's okay," Raptor said. He reached into his bag and started digging around for the chalk. He didn't need it right now, but it felt comforting and familiar when he finally found it. "Bartimaeus didn't get it, either. The world he was last summoned on didn't have video games, so it was...interesting trying to explain it to him."

He pulled a piece of chalk and absentmindedly rolled it around in his hand as he spoke.

"I think that's a good way of describing it," he added. "But instead of just becoming the knight, you wake up on our new chess board as the knight. It also doesn't entirely look like a chess board anymore—it seems like it's a new but familiar world. And some of the world still follows the rules of chess, even though it doesn't really feel like you're in chess anymore."

"Okay. That's it. I'm picking a direction and walking," Aumrauth announced in annoyance. "I don't care who follows. I'm going... this way."

He didn't want to go back the way they came, so there really was only one way forward at the moment. He marched ahead, not looking back.

Nikolai pondered this for a moment. He was pretty sure the subject of other worlds had come up at some point before, and he was also fairly certain this world wasn’t his, so that topic didn’t surprise him all that much.

It still wasn't familiar to him, of course, but Nikolai had decided it wasn't worth freaking out over. There was already plenty to worry about.

“Okay,” he said thoughtfully. “So… how can I be here with you if I’m not in the game?” He then pointed at the chalk. “Also, I noticed you’ve been playing around with that. Is it for street art or something?”