Entry Seven

  Florian’s Realm

  We entered Florian’s Realm to an electronic door sensor’s tinny, pre-recorded medieval trumpet salute—Baa! Da-da-bum, da-da-baaa!

  Thomas and I paused inside the doorway. Not to troll the place, but it was a complete, total, utter disaster zone. There were boxes all over the floor and the sales counter. Many of the metal gondola-style shelves were empty, and random pieces of bubble wrap and other shipping paraphernalia were strewn everywhere.

  “Umm…” Thomas said, for once at a loss for words. So was I. The store had supposedly been open for several weeks now, and yet it didn’t look like the owner had gotten fifty percent of his merchandise out yet.

  Before I could speak, a walking stack of boxes emerged from a back room. There was wispy white hair poking up above the topmost container as the man walked, holding so many boxes that they completely obscured him from waist to forehead.

  The guy couldn’t possibly see where he was going, and yet he somehow navigated a serpentine path between the disorganized piles. He reached the sales counter, bent at the knees, and bumped the smallest box off the top of the stack with his nose so that it landed next to his cash register with a soft thump. He then saw Thomas and me, gave a startled jerk, and immediately dropped the rest of his boxes onto the floor.

  “Oh!” he exclaimed.

  “Oh!” I parroted stupidly. “Sorry. Do you need a hand?” I asked, trying to recover from the strange, suddenly awkward moment. Making the scene even more awkward was the guy’s appearance. Picture Doc Brown from Back to the Future, but as a steampunk-inspired hippie. He rocked an Einsteinian shock of white hair that shot outward from his head in every direction and a long, pure white beard that would have filled Gandalf the Grey with a self-esteem-crushing case of beard envy. A pair of strange aviator goggles, their arms covered with weird bits of metal and tiny gears, rested above his forehead, and there was a bandolier strapped across his chest. Rather than storing bullets, the leather strap sported an assortment of pins and other metal do-dads, the likes of which I’d never seen before. Regardless of his extremely odd attire, I couldn’t help but recognize him.

  “Mr. Rodgers?” I blurted out. I had zero expectations as to who I would see in the store, but had I made a mental list beforehand, Florian Rodgers, my elementary school music teacher from Rockford, Illinois, would not have made it.

  “Nathan!” he said. He had a huge, goofy grin on his face. He started forward and then jerked to a stop as if changing his mind. Reaching up, he tugged down his aviator goggles and peered at Thomas and me through them. Nodding to himself, he whisked the glasses off his face again.

  “You, uh… you remember me?” I somehow got out. Clearly, I had crit-failed my initiative role for this very unexpected encounter.

  “I never forget a student,” he replied. His tone was matter-of-fact, but his cliché reply was maybe a little too quick.

  “Creeptastic,” Thomas muttered.

  “We can come back later, Mr. Rodgers,” I blurted in an attempt to drown out Thomas’s insult, “if this isn’t a good time.”

  “Florian. Florian,” he said, patting his chest. “You’re not my student anymore.”

  He was clearly thrilled to have customers, and it made me wonder if we were the first visitors to his “realm.” Florian seemed both nervous and giddy at the same time. He introduced himself to Thomas and shook both of our hands. Thomas shot me a crinkle-faced look of bemused worry, and I couldn’t blame him. Florian didn’t seem to be cut out for a career in game store ownership, and the strangeness of seeing him here in Huntley, dressed up like a steampunk librarian, kind of wigged me out. Video games had instilled in me a healthy mistrust of coincidences.

  “We got your fliers,” Thomas said. “So… yeah.”

  “Ah, excellent. Then it worked! Please come in. Look around,” he said happily as he stepped out of our way and waved a hand toward his store. “I apologize for the mess. I keep getting more and more items to put out. I’m honestly not sure where they’re all coming from anymore.”

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  “Thanks,” I said, pushing Thomas forward. “We’ll… look around some.”

  “Yeah, look for alternative exits,” Thomas added under his breath.

  “Shht!” I whispered. “Would it kill you to be nice just once?”

  Thomas, rarely one to forego the pleasure of getting the last word in, said, “Yeah, I’d hate to piss off the Level 47 pedo-stalker.” Luckily, Florian didn’t seem to hear him. He was still busily grabbing up bits of trash off the floor and shoving them into a large garbage bag. As we moved toward the first aisle, I caught him surreptitiously watching us. He was still smiling.

  “That was quite the ‘my, what big teeth you have’ moment, eh?” Thomas muttered.

  I kicked his chair. Seriously, the word “subtle” wasn’t in the kid’s vocab.

  “He’s happy to have customers, dude. He was a nice enough teacher back in the day.”

  “Was that before or after he fried his brain on LSD? And he’s lucky to have customers. Look at this junk,” Thomas declared, pointing at the contents of the aisle.

  My first inclination was to agree. Initially, I didn’t realize what I was seeing. The hodge-podge shelves looked like they’d been cobbled together from several different stores. Some were empty, and others had old, sun-bleached boxes that had already accumulated a thin layer of dust.

  “C64? Is that what I think it is?” Thomas asked.

  It was, indeed. On the side of a drab, tan case, I saw a logo that read “C64,” followed by a horizontal rainbow. It was a 1980s Commodore 64 home computer system.

  “Whoa,” I said, picking it up off the shelf. Even with its built-in keyboard, it wasn’t very heavy.

  “Don’t you have one of those?”

  “Yeah,” I said. In fact, I owned two of them—one was my dad’s, and I had purchased a second one at a pawn shop to cannibalize for spare parts to keep my dad’s Commodore working. The 64s were from before my dad’s time (he wasn’t that old), but he was into all the early 80s and 90s gaming systems. He had owned an Atari 2600, a Tandy, a Dreamcast, and even a Sega Genesis. Playing retro games on them was a passion I picked up from him after he went missing.

  When I loaded up a game on my dad’s old 64 or played a classic like Activision’s Pitfall! on his vintage Atari 2600, knowing that he and probably my mom had played the exact same game… it felt like I knew them, at least just a little. My parents were Grade A, certified super nerds. Thanks to them, I’m proud to say so am I.

  When I’m reunited with my parents, I intend to give all their vintage collectibles back to them. I’ll power up the Nintendo, play Duck Hunt with them, and spend long evenings crawling through paper and pencil dungeons using my mom’s original Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set rulebook.

  “Earth to Nate the Basket Case. Do you copy, Mr. Case? Yelllllo?”

  I glared at Thomas. “Yes. I have two Commodores. One was my dad’s.”

  “Neato. Or is it nifty? I always get my 80s slang confused.”

  I shoved his chair, perhaps a smidge harder than I needed to, and we continued down the aisle. There was a lot more of the same in that aisle and the next two. Vintage gaming systems and home computer systems, shelves filled with Nintendo cartridges, Atari cartridges, Commodore 64 five-and-a-quarter inch floppy disks, old Sony, XBOX, and Sega controllers, etc. I was in a retro dreamland. Thomas was griping the entire time. I knew that he was bitter about the lack of modern games and consoles, but honestly, those were so commonplace and so easily obtainable over the internet that I was thrilled not to see them.

  We rounded the corner of the last aisle and discovered an alcove off the back corner of the store that was lined to the ceiling with bookshelves. The shelves were stuffed to overflowing, literally, with vintage roleplaying game boxed sets, modules, magazines, dice, rule books, and figurines.

  In front of the shelves were several large wooden tables covered with heaping mounds of electronic scrap: computer cases, old VCR boxes, motherboards, gutted gaming systems, televisions, CPU chips, ribbons, memory sticks…. Obviously, Florian had a passion for tinkering with old electronics.

  He stepped up behind us, and I turned to him. “You do the repair work yourself?” I asked.

  “I do,” Florian replied, a proud grin on his face. “I’ve become quite adept at fixing these ancient portals into other worlds.”

  Thomas rolled his eyes. I was about to call him out for his rudeness when he said, “What’s that?”

  He was pointing at a small computer desk set up in the corner of the back room. There was a modern gaming PC on it. In front of its widescreen, curved monitor, next to the system’s illuminated keyboard, I saw a set of VR headgear. At least, that was what I thought they were. Strangely, they appeared both antiquated and extremely advanced. They weren’t the bulky VR headsets currently being kicked out by Oculus, Valve, and many other companies. The visor on this one was no bigger than old-school, wrap-around sunglasses. Instead of a plastic or elastic headband to keep the headset in place, this thing had an inch-wide metal band that reminded me of a crown. The band was mostly silver, with thin lines of golden embellishments forming swirling, interlocking patterns that reminded me of something out of a Tolkien book.

  Thomas was already moving toward the PC, and Florian and I followed him.

  “Ileria,” Florian said quickly, “isn’t quite ready.”

  Thomas rolled up to the desk, ramming Florian’s small office chair out of the way. He picked up the headset, and as he did, the desktop monitor blinked on. The image it displayed was the same as the scene painted on the two storefront windows.

  So, it was a video game.