Temperance made another run at the machine, earning 3 more points. Harper went next. She couldn’t match Temp’s score, but she still outpaced me by a country mile, earning 2 points without breaking a sweat. I wasn’t surprised. Even with the suppression field in place, her wings worked just fine, letting her fly straight up the wall and skip the rubber handholds altogether.

  “Cheater,” I muttered under my breath.

  “It’s not cheating,” she prodded with a grin, “just natural selection. Telekinetic flight is pretty cool, but it doesn’t beat good old-fashion wings.”

  There were plenty of other games that offered other rewards, though, including one that was right up my alley.

  “Finally,” I said, cracking my knuckles. “A game that doesn’t discriminate against magic users.”

  Down the Clown was a classic arcade game that usually required the player to hurl rubber balls at pop-up clown heads. But in this version, instead of rubber balls, you had to cast ranged spells to hit the clowns, while they hurled counterspells of their own.

  Some shot retaliatory fireballs, others vomited exploding pom-pom balls or hurled razor-sharp metal shurikens. A veritable circus of whacky powers and unhinged spells. But between Hydro Fracking Blast, Psychic Sovereignty, and a host of floating ice barricades, I managed to get a near perfect score, earning 5 extra points to Resonance.

  “Not bad,” Temp admitted, folding her arms.

  I grinned. “Damn right not bad. Pretty sure I just set the world record for clownicide.”

  I played twice more, earning another 10 points, which pushed my total Resonance up to 147—and that didn’t even account for all the extra stat points I still had to distribute for all of my recent level gains.

  As fun as the games were, it didn’t take long to realize they were also a double-edged sword. An arcade like this one could massively skew power levels. Someone might look mid-tier on paper, but actually be juiced to the eyeballs from spending all their free time grinding Skee Ball of Doom.

  There was a point of diminishing returns, though.

  When I tried Down the Clown a fourth time, my Resonance gain dropped to 3 points, even though my overall score was even higher than the first three playthroughs. Still, it was something to keep in the back of my mind.

  There were also a number of games that rewarded experience points and tickets, which confirmed the existence of a prize counter.

  Laser Tag was exactly like it sounded—except, as a team, we fought against Loot Goblins, wielding all too-real laser guns that dealt both piercing and radiation damage. Jakob tanked half the shots, Harper played combat medic, and Temp abandoned her gun altogether, gleefully hacking apart goblins with her sword until they were piles of twitching limbs. Once they were dead, she simply stood over them and blasted their gory remains with the laser pistol.

  “Is it still considered Laser Tag if you use a sword?” Harper asked between heals.

  “Semantics. This is what Dan would call ‘out of the box’ thinking,” Temp replied before going on the offensive once again.

  We also tried our hand at another game called The Floor is Lava.

  It took place in a self-contained room with a giant interactive floor laid out with pressure sensitive tiles that would light up beneath your feet. A light box on the wall would display the “safe” color and you had seconds to dart across the room and get to a safe zone, before the rest of the tiles turned into burning magma. To make things even more interesting, there was an Aerial Suppression Field, which made flight and gravity-based Relics, like Temp’s Prancer’s Blitz, all but useless.

  One of the tougher challenges, simply called Hide, was a stealth-based game that involved giant floating eyeballs that would blink open and closed based on a countdown timer. Players had to race around the room, hitting numbered panels in the correct sequence, before the eyes opened again. When they did, the only hope was to duck behind the pillars scattered around the chamber. If one of the eyes caught you, they launched plasma bolts that dealt a devastating amount of raw elemental damage.

  By the time we finally found the prize booth, tucked away in the back of the arcade, Jakob and Harper had gained another level apiece, and we’d pocketed 6,500 tickets between us.

  The booth itself was an unmanned, glass-fronted cabinet glowing with white light like an otherworldly shrine. Compact, touchscreen kiosks and ticket eaters sat at evenly spaced intervals, ready to help prospective winners claim their rewards.

  Just like in most arcades I’d visited, the cabinet itself was stuffed with the smaller, less valuable trinkets—Elixirs, Artifacts, Temporary Tattoos, or Uncommon Relics—while the real prizes hung on the back wall like museum pieces. None of it was cheap, but holy shit was it good. Even the worst items on display outclassed anything the Jungle Gym Jamboree had to offer.

  I whistled as I eyed the display. “Fuck me, but that’s some serious hardware.”

  Jakob’s eyes lit up. “Is that a Fabled-grade runic breastplate?”

  Harper pressed her nose to the case, breath fogging the glass. “Those gauntlets boost healing output. I need them.”

  I pointed to a Relic labeled Internal Microwave Cannon. “Tell me you don’t want that? It cooks people. From the inside.”

  “That seems quiet disturbing,” Pooh said.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “More like disturbingly awesome,” I corrected.

  The Artifacts and Relics on display started at Rare-grade and moved all the way up to Fabled.

  I mentally added Microwave Cannon to my wish list, but there were several others I had my eye on as well, including Rebar Javelin, Tooth Fairy—which forcefully ripped all the teeth from someone’s mouth—and one of my personal favorites, Trash Panda Takedown, which summoned a swarm of gloriously fat raccoons, completely impervious to damage, that clamped onto a target’s arms and legs, locking them in place.

  There was also a Fabled-grade Sigil Stone that practically had my name written on it.

  Arcane Exoskeleton

  Fabled Sigil

  Type: Cloth Armor Sigil

  Forget about clunky riot gear or ass-ugly plate armor that makes you look like a dork heading for Comic Con. Pulled from the vaults of the Variant R&D Department, Eldritch Exoskeleton is top-of-the-line magi-tech for those wielding the vast, primordial powers of the multiverse who also happen to have the upper body strength of a seven-year-old.

  Just slap this baby on, and voilà!

  Eldritch Exoskeleton generates a Secondary Mana Reservoir, equal to 25% of your primary Mana Pool. This secondary reservoir serves as an ultra-dense, skintight Mana barrier, soaking up all incoming damage like a sponge until it’s depleted. Only then will additional damage bleed over to your regular Health Pool. For the secondary reservoir to replenish, your health must already be topped off, and your primary Mana Pool must be at 100% capacity.

  It was basically a passive, Backrooms version of Mage Armor—and, considering how large my Mana Reservoir was, equipping it would effectively increase my total Health Pool by 84 points. I still wouldn’t be close to as tanky as Jakob, but it would make me a helluva lot less squishy than I was now.

  There was also a summoning-based Relic called Army of One, which boosted the user’s Athleticism and Toughness by 2% for every creature they brought onto the battlefield, stacking up to a maximum of 100%. Something like that might go well in the Tome of the Swarm Herald Emblem, and it was possible I could also forge it with Swarm Tactics, which had a similar effect.

  The only problem was the price tag…

  12,500 for all three items.

  We were going to need a metric assload of tickets and a few more rounds of Laser Tag just wasn’t going to cut it. No, we needed to play some of the more dangerous games. And the one right at the top of the list was Hungry, Hungry Hippos—the single most expensive game in the arcade, but also the one with the highest payout.

  It took us a few minutes to make our way over there, stopping just long enough for Jakob to take a stab at the Splatterball Table—a nightmare version of Foosball, which involved deflecting and blocking enormous stone balls, kicked at truly disorienting speeds by a small army of ’roided out Soccer Hooligan Hobgoblins.

  Jakob was a natural and earned +5 to Toughness for his efforts.

  The cabinet for Hungry, Hungry Hippos looked deceptively innocent, tucked away in a corner like any other game, and not much larger than a shopping mall photo booth. I had no idea how the game worked but suspected that spatial tomfuckery was involved in one way or another. Neon hippos smiled from the side panels, all cartoon eyes and goofy grins. It radiated pure ’80s nostalgia, right down to the peeling laminate and the blinking lights.

  Despite how unassuming it looked, I knew this wasn’t some kid’s game. It required gemstone-grade Loot Tokens to play, and those were in rare supply even for me.

  My stomach sank when I saw the price. “That’s highway robbery,” I muttered.

  “Yeah,” Croc said, nodding in agreement, “but look at the payout.” The dog gestured toward a digital display board located on the side of the cabinet. “The current high score is only twenty-one points and if we beat it, we’ll get 20,000 tickets. That’s a lot of tickets, Dan. And even if we place in the top five, we’re still guaranteed at least 5,000 tickets.” The dog frowned. “I’m not sure how hard it is to get eight points, but that doesn’t seem like a lot.”

  I didn’t say so, but if it only took eight points to make it into the top five, then getting eight points was probably a task of Herculean proportions. There was something that jumped out at me as I studied the board and weighed our options. The high score had the initials CRM beside it. Although I wasn’t a Winnie-the-Pooh scholar by any stretch of imagination, I was willing to bet my left nut that CRM stood for Christopher Robin Milne.

  I turned a quizzical look at Pooh. “Have you been here before?” I asked. “With Christopher?”

  His brow furrowed in thought.

  “I’m sure I’ve been here before,” the little bear replied. “I remember all the lights and the squish of carpet beneath my paws. And, if I was here, it must’ve been with Christopher Robin. This”—he padded over the cabinet and ran a paw across the cheaply laminated surface—“this seems oddly familiar. I can’t seem to recall what’s inside, but I remember it being no fun at all.”

  That was all the confirmation I needed.

  I knew Christopher Robin—or rather CPT James Graham—had been trying to dethrone the Franchisor, and if he’d stopped here, then so would I.

  The payout promised enough tickets to catapult us closer to the prize counter’s heavy hitters, so even though I didn’t really want to, I pulled a Ruby Slayer Token from storage and fed it into the slot.

  “Pooh,” I said, turning to the diminutive bear, “it might be best if you sit this one out. Think you can stay here and hold down the fort while we’re inside?”

  “Well of course,” Pooh replied happily, plopping down onto the floor, then pulling out a clay pot of “Hunny.” “I’ll just busy myself with this,” he said with a friendly giggle, before dipping a paw into the opening. “Snack breaks are important, you know, and I have been feeling rather peckish ever since the Gluttonarium.”

  The door to the Hungry, Hungry Hippo booth whooshed opened and we stepped inside, leaving the bear behind to stand watch.

  Through the bullshit power of spatial magic, we stepped into an enclosed arena the size of a football field, though the walls were made of ancient stone and covered in Mayan glyphs with wild tangles of greenery. I’d been to Chichén Itzá once, down in Mexico, and the resemblance wasn’t subtle. Although, to be fair, this place looked like it had been swallowed by a swamp and reeked of churned earth and stagnant water.

  A foot of dark water stretched across the arena floor, rippling with unseen currents. Jakob took a cautious step forward and nearly dropped into a pit. Turned out, the water concealed cavernous sinkholes that plunged into blackness below. He scrambled back before the pit could claim him, but was soaked up to the waist.

  A PA system, buried somewhere beneath the curling foliage, crackled to life.

  “Welcome to Hungry, Hungry Hippos!” a chipper voice said, the words reverberating off the stone walls, every syllable echoing with a metallic distortion. “The objective is simple—collect the sacred pearls, then shoot them through the two hoops, located on either side of the arena.” I scanned the courtyard and immediately spotted the pair of stone hoops in question, each shaped into the grotesque head of a snarling beast. “But watch out for the opposition… The Hippos sure are hungry, and they aren’t the only nasty surprises waiting for you!”

  Jakob groaned. “Ich habe die Nase voll,” he said. “Always with the nasty surprises.”

  Positioned around the arena were twelve stone columns, each waist high, with a glowing pearl the size of a basketball perched on top. Getting to them wouldn’t be too difficult, especially since there wasn’t any sort of suppression field, but I had a feeling this wouldn’t be as easy or straightforward as it seemed.

  Nothing in the Backrooms ever was.

  “Now get ready,” the announcer called, “because the game starts in three… two… one…”