The night passed without incident; no alien abductions, no awakening in another world, and the only unusual dream Jon had was an obviously meaningless bit of utter nonsense involving a talking shoe and Carmen Sandiego stealing the collected works of Art Frahm. Jon awoke refreshed the next morning, feeling confident that his errant wish had passed him by.
The day went by as uneventfully as the night had, and before long it was mid-afternoon, and Jon and Karyn were on their way back from school. They had decided to spend the afternoon at the mini-mall downtown, and a bit of a walk later, they were standing at the entrance.
"Well," Karyn said, "any place in particular you want to hit?"
Jon shrugged. "I'd like to do a little time-wasting at the arcade," he said, "but other than that, I'm open to suggestions."
Karyn nodded, a look of mild discomfort on her face. "Okay," she said. "Look, I've got to hit the bathroom. Why don't you go on ahead, and I'll catch up in a couple minutes?"
"Sure thing," Jon replied, striking off towards the arcade, while Karyn dashed to the ladies' room.
The familiar digital hubbub greeted him as he approached the arcade. It was a favorite place of his, because the owner actually cared more about running an enjoyable establishment than maximizing profits; the walls were lined with games that were actually interesting, rather than the indistinguishable sports sims, banks of potboiler racing games, and crappy ticket games that infested a lot of arcades. And there was no folderol with "tokens" that came three to the dollar, either; everything took plain old quarters.
Jon strolled inside and walked towards the back. Further in, past the newer games, were his favorites, the machines from the early days of video gaming. There was even an old Asteroids cabinet, kept lovingly in perfect working order. By now it had to be a valuable collector's item, but it was still open for play, although it was placed directly across from the owner's counter, so that he could keep an eye on it.
Jon killed a little time on Asteroids, waiting for Karyn, but by the time he'd gotten a game over, she still hadn't shown up. He was looking around for her when he caught sight of something further towards the back, a cabinet he'd never seen before. He walked over to it, wondering what it was.
The text on the intricately-painted cabinet identified it as MYSTIC QUEST, a game he'd never heard of. The cabinet art was unusually realistic for a game as old as this looked to be; it looked more like a less cheesecakey Boris Vallejo painting than the brightly-colored surrealism typical of the early '80s. As for the game itself, from the demo it seemed to be an action-RPG not unlike Gauntlet, but much more sophisticated.
"I just got that in the other day." Jon jumped a bit at the sound of the voice and turned to see old mister Cooper, the proprietor. He smiled a wizened smile. "It's a prototype,actually. Made it most of the way through development before the company went under because of some loony cult scandal the CEO got involved in. It's supposed to be pretty much functional, but be warned that there's probably a bug or twelve in there somewhere."
Jon nodded. "Thanks. I think I'll give it a try."
"You do that," Mr. Cooper said. "Let me know what you think. But if you'll excuse me, I think I've got some concessions I need to sell." He walked back towards the counter.
Jon stepped up to the machine and plunked a quarter in the slot. The game responded with a little fanfare jingle, and he pressed the start button. Much to his surprise, Jon was greeted with a character-creation screen. He was provided with a selection of races and classes and an option for male or female, as well as a variety of positive and negative traits and a selector for starting equipment. The whole thing looked like someone had tried to graft the mechanics of a pencil-and-paper RPG to a classic hack-and-slash.
It all struck Jon as needlessly complicated, but at the same time he had to admire the attempt. Still, he was eager to get straight into the gameplay... He spied an option for "random" in one corner of the screen, and selected it without hesitation. He was going to be blowing a few quarters on this anyway, so it wasn't too big a deal if he got stuck with a crappy character the first time. He spotted the first bug, as well; the screen started fading out as soon as he pressed the "random" button, so he only had a brief glimpse of what the game had picked for him, as the screen went black.
Scratch that, as everything went black.
