Frank hadn’t seen Siena since she had entered Malcolm’s Debug Room, let alone been in contact with her. Despite trying to message her over the DS messenger or on social media, she hadn’t replied, and Frank didn’t know if she couldn’t reply or had just been unwilling to. Either way, Frank was concerned.
With no idea of where she lived IRL, the Dream State was the only place she could find her. She had resorted to roaming the Dream State, visiting each dungeon Siena had taken her to in the hope that she would run into her. The Snake Den, Dragon’s Nest, Lantis—she went to and completed each dungeon with Tessa. Tessa was happy to tag along, but she was just as baffled by Siena’s absence as she was.
The longer Frank was in the game, the more annoyed she was getting with Fenrir. He actually made some of the dungeons more difficult, Lantis more so than the Snake Den considering most of it was underwater. After they had defeated the Leviathan, they were flushed down the slip-and-slide-like whirlpool and washed up on the shore of Jossi Island’s waterfall.
Having seen how easily Ray had controlled his pet, Frank was considering switching hers up for a ghost monster herself. Considering it can possess other monsters, there’s no telling what monsters I could command . . . maybe even NPCs.
As she came to her feet, her wolfhound padded out from the lagoon and shook its damp fur with a spray of water. Seeing the wet dog made her feel a little underwhelmed. After all, Ray had shown her that there was so much more potential to using the Tamer Niche.
What other feats can pets achieve?
The one thing she had liked about being a Heavy was the anonymity of being covered under heavy plate armor. If she could somehow combine the possession of monsters or NPCs with her hiding among other armored forms, she could gain an advantage that few Dream State players could claim. Being able to fool players into fighting the wrong avatar would be like having the game equivalent of another life.
“Yet in order to achieve this, I’ll first need to know if it can be done,” Frank had pondered while talking with Tessa over the community chat. “And the person most likely to know that was the Screamer, Ray.”
Tessa gave her a mischievous grin. “You say you want to learn how to do what he can do, but you really just want an excuse to talk to such a pretty boy.”
Frank shrugged. “Chloe’s brother’s a Screamer, Siena’s old buddy’s a Screamer, and Brock was friends with most of them. Why don’t you just accuse me of trying to include myself in that list by creating my own connection with one of the bad guys? That might be a little more believable.”
“More believable than you going after a cute guy?” Tessa scoffed as they walked to the steaming blue Gateway. “Why don’t you just admit that you’re interested in him and do some Internet stalking instead of wasting your time trying to convince me?”
Frank nodded. “Alright then. Nothing wrong with doing a bit of research, right?”
“Keep telling yourself that,” Tessa remarked.
She selected the log out function and awoke slowly on her bed, a whine filling her ears. Being a clean freak, her room was as tidy as always, her bed made although creased and covered in several pillows and plush toys. Her desk was clean, with her monitor glowing through the dim light that pervaded her rainbow-colored curtains.
She sat up, straightened her duvet, and sat down at her desk. She pulled up her social media contacts and typed in ‘Brock’ before messaging him: “Can you give me the full name of the Screamer who called himself Ray?”
Ever since they had agreed to team up to fight Malcolm, Frank had all the contact details of Siena’s friends, but she hadn’t yet contacted Brock himself. Up until now, she’d had no need to. She didn’t know why, but she didn’t get a reply from him, so she decided to take a different approach. Looking up Brock’s in-game alias, Brockodile, she found his old blog, one he hadn’t updated since releasing the news of Malcolm’s Ghost. However, she found herself fortunate that his second to last blog post had a list of the names of the surviving beta testers.
So his full name is Raymond L. Cranel.
Turned out a name was all Frank needed. Putting on some music over headphones to drown out the ringing in her ears from her recurrent tinnitus, she looked up Raymond’s past social media accounts and read through his interests. She then scrolled down and read his most recent posts.
One read: I’m hyped for this opportunity to join Wona’s design team. So many of the gamers I met at the Wona conference are going to be in on it as well!
Frank assumed most of the beta players had been as naively optimistic.
It only makes sense that he talked about it often, but there looks to be more above . . . Wouldn’t Wona have made him keep this in check?
She continued to scroll up, becoming more and more confused as she read further. Why he had posted so much after being recruited by Wona didn’t make any sense. After all, she had heard they all had to sign confidentiality agreements. At first she thought the rest of his posts would have been about his personal life, but then she saw the gap in dates before and after Wona’s experiments.
She frowned when reading updates concerning his time in the asylum, baffled that he was lucid enough to complain about its food and staff. None of this made sense to her. Raymond had been in the first set of tests concerning the DSD, yet from what she had heard, everyone from those tests had been killed from an overdose of the chemical. If that was true, not only was he the only who had survived the first round of beta tests, but less than a year after, he was writing like he hadn’t been affected to the same degree as the second round, either.
What’s going on? Does this guy have some kind of immunity that allowed him to survive what others couldn’t?
She continued reading about Raymond’s time in the Wona asylum, noting his complaints about the drugs they were giving him, the dark humor in his words making her giggle all the while. What surprised her was how his symptoms didn’t coincide with how clearly he wrote. She got to the post with the largest gap in dates.
“It seems Wona isn’t done with me yet, after all. Guess who just got offered another job?”
Another job? Was this him being approached by Malcolm? And yet he continued to post, even after he was kidnapped.
Why Malcolm allowed Raymond to do this, or even how he could communicate so freely when the others couldn’t, only increased the air of mystery around Raymond Cranel. From his social media posts just a month after, Raymond seemed unaffected by the aftereffects of the beta trials and, according to his later posts, he was now freely and willingly working for Malcolm.
How did Brock not know about this? Did he block him after he was taken? What on earth is going on?
She read his latest post, once again utterly baffled that date of the post was dated only a month ago:
“Looks like my team has been given the green light. If you’re a fan of the Dream State and want to see some chaos go down, keep an eye on Heaven during its grand opening because things are about to go crazy!”
Frank noticed the post was dated the day before Heaven’s opening, meaning that he had voluntarily caused the trouble that occurred that day with the other Screamers. Raymond wasn’t a hostage, he was an accomplice. Rather than frighten her away, it only made her more interested.
Heart beating in her chest, she decided to try reaching out and see what came of it. She pulled up his user ID in her messenger, hands tingling as she typed out:
“I want to try and possess an NPC or another avatar. Is this possible? Can you teach me?”
She sent the message and let out a breath she didn’t know she had been holding. Although she knew the trouble this could cause for her, when Raymond didn’t reply she still felt a little disappointed.