Are you yellow?

  A flurry of photo ive tracers shot by his head and he ducked behind some hexagonal prism of white non matter. He looked around hastily and saw he was surrounded by desaturated shapes, like a child’s block set covered in white out.

  He stepped up to the cover, a knocked rey der, and put it between him and whoever was shooting at him, then, out of habit, sed his surroundings. There en space behind him where he had spawned in and a spattering of blocks and shapes around that. Off to the side, he glimpsed the alternating light and shadow pattern of a staircase cut inte block, and he realized that many of the shapes were tall enough and close enough together that if he could get up to one, he could jump across to the others.

  He decided that sed to get up to higher ground before engaging whoever was in here with him, but the sed it didn’t matter.

  A solid white figure sailed over him and exploded and the white world washed out pletely.

  As he fell into a solid white void, a s appeared in front of him, simir to the ohat had appeared iwin’s craft before they had entered Gu was a bird’s eye view of the room he had just been in. He saw himself outlined in red, and anure outlined in purple across from him. The purple figure fired, the Gradie ducked down, the purple figure made a b line for a ramped block, like a giant simple triangur prism, leapt off the end of it and sailed through the air and bsted the Gradie with his shotgun midflight.

  Then the s vanished. It was immediately obvious that the uy had dohat before, and Gradie only had time to wonder if the makers had a way to randomize the blocks each round, before a rainbow light surrounded him and the sensation of falling ended.

  “You have died. Select a respawn,” the voice said, and two boxes with text floated in the air in front of him.

  [Random Spawn]

  [Red Room]

  “Uh..”

  “You still in the duel chamber?” Nova asked on the s.

  “No. I lost.” Gradie fought the urge to hold his hand to his ear, and imagined he was wearing his old PS3 headset. It helped, but he could still see EP ughing in his peripherals.

  “Ah, no big deal bro. I think it should let you respawn into the red room. That’s probably your best bet because we’re not that far from it.”

  “Ok, so what—”

  “Just be sure to get moving the moment you spawn in so you don’t get spaed,” Angel said. “Try ao an opening and shoot up a fre so we find you.”

  “A fre?”

  “It’s a sedary button on yun. Should be where your touch pad for a light would be.”

  Gradie looked his AR over and found it. He pressed the button and a red hued roman dle shot out of the barrel and vanished in the white distance.

  “Found it.”

  “All right bro, we’re gonna make a pit stop but we’ll be there soon. And be careful. Don’t fight unless you have too.”

  The e broke. Gradie shot the box that said [Red Room] and gravity returned with a vengeance, sug him down into the ball of prismatic light. There was a winding-up sound like a ser gun charging and then a “pew” sound as the world faded from white to red, and he was standing in what looked like a jail cell with no door. Muffled videogame-esqe sounds of battle raging somewhere in the distance floated in through the doorway.

  He sidered, for a moment, just sitting there and waiting the whole thing out. His earlier momentary feeling of eted excitement as he jumped onto the block had proven to be a temporary height from which to fall into disappointed dissatisfa, his momentary childlike gullible belief that anything could ever be as fun as he imagi to be was taken down swiftly by the two successive failures like a hot gss plunged ier.

  But a part of him bounced and writhed in anticipation, a stupid senseless desire to get back out there, to chase that temporary high again. Gradie tried to beat it down, to douse it in the cold water of icism he had been swimming in since Michael told him to fuck off out into the bck, but it didn’t work all the way. It wasn’t, as he had thought, his inner child. At least not all of it. It was a fresher him. It was the Gradie that had goo sleep st night, the one he had tried to imagine was now pletely separate, the one who could never even know this pce existed. It was that Gradie that still had some hope in him.

  The revetion shocked present Gradie. He would have thought that the discovery of another world, of shared dream shooters and near endless creation would have enlivened his hope, his mental wanderlust, but here he was standing in a fug jail cell by choice while his friends were out pying a game that Real Gradie would kill to even believe in.

  What happened? When had his seemingly healthy icism of the Other transted into a mopiism? Was it his training? Had Philips and to some extent Michaels dismissal of the Other been something he had just taken franted? Or had he just been that offended by his first day, by those people in the Allclub, by the grand promises they had shattered with their low, cheap pleasures.

  Maybe it was the Hardworlds, his obsession with crafting the perfect version of his own life, a life that by y, had to be of a real world to be satisfying, to resolve the disappoi of his own real existence. Of course they were never perfect, and standing here, so far away from them, their memory so distant, he wondered if he had not made them out to be more than they were. If they faded, vahe momeepped out of the dreamworlds a his Self behind forever, if they were just as unreal as anything here, were they really any more special than this pce, a pce of less realness but more permanence?

  But a deep longing came at the thought of the Hardworlds, ohat was exacerbated by his difficulty in remembering them, which was always a struggle outside the vault. He had once fessed this during a grilling Philip was giving him at the HQ, and Philip had ughed at him.

  “You don’t his fug mae to remember. You just o dive deep. Your memories are still in there,” (he had pointed a rigid fi Gradie’s skull) “Every fug one of them. Don’t ever let aell you otherwise.”

  But there was nothing he could do about any of that here, so he let the boung inner child or whatever the fuck it was guide him out of the cell and into the cavern outside.

  It was all solid red, its walls lined with other cells rung by catwalks, desding down to a dark point. Gradie saw across the way that the rows of cells were broken itently by dark doors leading bato dark hallways, so he moved across his own catwalk until he found one.

  The door led directly into a stairwell. He looked down, and the square spiral spun into dim darkness. He looked up, and the reversed spiral ended just a few floors up, where the ceiling glowed from a neon red something out of sight.

  He bounded up the stairs, learning quickly that he could take each set almost in a single jump, sliding across eading before taking another leap. It felt like some beaten down sibling to flying, and the excitement in his heart fluttered again. He clutched his rifle tight, and in his mind multicolored adversaries asded from below and waited on eading above.

  He got to the top without seeing anyone, and found a single doorway with a glowi sign above it. Inside, a small wide room with square chutes recessed into the walls, glowing pads below, like pstic arcade et start buttons, and dark squares above, the shadowed mouths of the chutes. Of course, there was one of each color. It didn’t take any dream knowledge to guess how they worked, but he had no way of telling whie he should take.

  He activated his s in his head.

  “I’m in a room with a bunch of tubes. Which color should I take?”

  “No fug idea,” Noval replied. “Just get somewhere you see sky and shoot a fre.”

  Si didn’t seem to matter, Gradie took the obvious choid stepped onto the red square. It was immediately apparent that there was a bit of finesse involved in using the jump pads correctly, unlike in a video game. The momeepped down with his right foot, the fug thi off like it had der it, ung him up by his right leg, whi a fra of a sed was shooting straight up with the rest of his body gging behind. He tried to rht side up but the roll kept going and he shot out of the chute into a red room tumbling in the air like a rag doll.

  He nded hard on his head, feeling nothing at all, and crumbled into an awkward sitting position. He rolled up onto his feet with his rifle raised, as distant echoes of Philips ughter chased him, and found himself alone in a bare cube with e square opening to a long hallway.

  The hallway ended about fifty feet away, though distance was hard to tell here, in a bright cavern that looked, from what he could tell, like the one he had gotten sniped in. Faint sounds of idealized gunfire echoed down at him. Great.

  He hugged the right wall and moved a bit faster than he knew he should have, but he felt the prickly fear of being seen crawling on the back of his neck, and the hallway was lined with dark parallelograms of shadow that could have led anywhere, and his ay of who might be in the cavern was worse than the idea of starting over from the jail again, so he resolved to get there as fast as possible.

  Why are you scared? Its just a game. The bullets don’t even hurt here. This is literal childs py, Hardworlder.

  His inner voice was less inspiring than derisive, aried to deflect it.

  I’m having fun. I don’t o be Hardworlding every moment for the rest of my fug life.

  Are you having fun?

  Before he could answer himself, two figures shot out of a shadowed sliver fiftee down the hall. In a reflex, he stepped forward in two long strides to reach the recess in the wall and shot himself inside. Luckily, it was one of the faux doorways that ewo feet ihe wall, but he could still see Philip’s eyes fshing at him for stepping into it without clearing it first.

  The two figures hadn’t noticed him. They moved down the hall, bunny hopping and boung left tht, then stopped and aimed out into the shaft. One of them shot a fre out of his sniper rifle, and the other talked into a radio pio his shoulder.

  “You see it? Here!” He shot aracer out of his shot gun and his voice echoed down the hall. It was like a sudden light in a dark room. Until then, Gradie had felt he was navigating a sterile world made out of a crayon box. Sure, the world had bitten him once, sent him tumbling down into a red invenience, but it had felt more like tripping over something on a hike than being attacked.

  Now, hearing the voice, its panicked excited, angry tone, like a scolding whine, Gradie realized these were real people, real spirits just like him, stuside these colored suits and shooting at each other.

  Now, finally, it was iing.

  He braced his rifle against the wall and fired.

  What would your dreamworld pvp look like? ime, some good ol fashioned explosions. episode, Dazzle.