Entry Three

  Quest Hub

  It was late, and I knew I should crash, but I was wired. Who knew Failure, capital F, could be so invigorating? I let out a long breath that turned into a frustrated growl that was most likely a curse word in Orcish. I’d lost two hours spectacularly failing another ATO quest, and now it was too late to continue working on my primary quest—the search for my mom and dad.

  I looked around my quest hub/bedroom. It wasn’t big. Good Ole Marge wasn’t exactly rolling in dough, but I had arranged everything to optimally support my mission. Next to my computer desk, I had two plastic fold-out tables that formed an “L” in the corner of the room. One table held my dad’s ancient Commodore 64 computer and a dozen boxes of his five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks. The other table had a small TV, a VHS-DVD combo player, and several white banker boxes full of tapes and DVDs. The contents of these boxes constituted my parents’ extensive home movie collection. There were hundreds of hours of footage, and I had watched and rewatched them all.

  The footage comprised nearly the entirety of my knowledge of my parents. Since I was only four years old when I lost them, my brain either could not or would not conjure up a direct memory of them. I had brief, hazy images of a big toy fire truck. I also had a memory of a lady standing in a kitchen. She was wearing a long, pastel-yellow dress, but she had her back to me, so I could only assume she was my mom. She had the same hair color anyway. And that was it—some lady with her back to me and a frickin’ fire truck.

  Above my desk, there was a big map of the Midwest United States that I had hung up several years earlier. I’d drawn an inch-thick arc across the bottom part of Wisconsin in yellow highlighter, which I had pretentiously labeled the “Quest Area.” Helpful.

  According to the police report, my parents had told our babysitter, Beth Angelio (Hair: Brown, Eyes: Brown, Age: 17), that they were going to a friend’s house in Wisconsin. Since, quote, they told me it was about an hour drive away, end quote, they had asked if she could spend the night since it would be late by the time they returned. Back then, we lived in Rockford, Illinois, only about fifteen miles south of the Wisconsin border, so it hadn’t been rocket science for me to plot the area of the state that my parents could have conceivably driven to in sixty-ish minutes. The faded orangey swath arced like an unhappy frown from Monroe, Wisconsin, on the left to the town of Twin Lakes on the right.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  My finger tapped Rockford, about thirty miles west of Chateau du Marge here in Huntley, Illinois, and then I traced the spiderweb of grey and black lines that extended north from there. Mom and Dad had traversed that web, moving from strand to strand, road to road, until… Well, until.

  Dad’s car, a Honda Civic, had never been found. Neither had anything else. The detective’s attempts to trace their cell phone locations and check their credit card and banking transactions had also come up with nada. Thus, the best, maybe the only, way back to my mom and dad was obvious—find “The Friend.”

  The cops had never discovered who he or she was. Beth Angelio said she didn’t know. Where had this friend lived? Elkhorn? Beloit? Lake Geneva? I have systematically strolled every street of every town in the Quest Area, courtesy of Google Streets and my VR goggles. I have called every comic book, gaming store, and craft store in the target zone, searching for “The Friend.” I have mailed home-made “Have You Seen My Parents?” postcards to over two thousand businesses and random residences in those towns, and this weekend, Jan and I are heading to Lake Geneva to canvass the town and post hundreds of Missing Person/Reward Offered posters with pics of my mom and dad.

  Why Lake Geneva, you ask?

  I have to start somewhere. Plus, Lake Geneva is the former home of TSR, Inc., the company that originally published Dungeons & Dragons and tons of other roleplaying games and supplements. It had also been the hometown of TSR’s beloved founder, Ernest Gary Gygax, creator of the roleplaying game that birthed not only a new genre of games but an entirely new subculture of gaming geeks. Dungeons & Dragons sparked the imaginative fires of countless millions of nerds across America and the rest of the world.

  So, what?

  So, my mom and dad were avid gamers. They loved roleplaying games. Seven of the boxes I had inherited had been filled with their game books, maps, and figurines—including a complete set of every novel, game book, and roleplaying aid Gary Gygax authored before his death in 2008. I would go so far as to say they were probably Gygax aficionados, and that was the clue the police never had. It pointed me straight to Lake Geneva, To Gary Gygax’s former seat of power, to the origin of roleplaying… to the birthplace of adventure itself.

  So yes, Saturday.