Ville de la Vague Vapeur

I think for a second there, I'd thought I'd died. It must have been a trick of the light.

Geemaroh stood with Nachary, deep within the bowels of the arcade, in front of a table. A pinball table. Ghomorroah gazed lustfully at it. A double-wide vanilla-field, two tilted semi-gravity fields and a triple-layered holo-display field. He licked his, just thinking about pressing his crotch against the front of the machine and lightly wrapping his hands around the side, pressing his fingers gently against the firm, round butt- -

His breath caught hard in his throat as he read the words above the master-score heighth of records, “He who defeats the score of the ages shall receive the ultimate rewards, the highest release.”

“Zewell,” Jimarrow hissed, “I think if I beat the high score on this, I’ll get to die. It’ll take about 115 hours if I play well, so I think I’m just going to use my whole four-day down here.”

Qratti didn’t wait for a response, nor did he hear if one was given. Nachary wandered off shortly after Krodday got his game afoot. And the game... Well, it was fun. Seriously fun. Unbelievably fun, in fact literally unbelievably fun, in fact in order to even comprehend the amount of fun Ji’ma’row was having, you’d have to live in a shitty fictional vaporwave reality where all the main characters are depressed and the overarching story plotline makes no sense, but let’s not think too hard about it because that line of thinking was causing Craddui’s head to ache and his mind to reminisce some dumb name long forgotten.

He spent a long time in that basement, playing pinball. Everything going swimmingly, pinning, balling, bouncing, switching fields and laughing as the ball switched gravs and densities, up, up, ever rising as Gamerror brought his score increasingly closer to the high, to even the possibility of a permanence of nonexistence. He slapped the bumper and shot the ball straight u- - a pseudo thought from his long-travel extra-communicator blared across several cortices. BRING US THE DEATH MASTER. DEAD OR ALIVE. PAY WILL BE 2 PASSES TO AN ARCADE AND TWO HUNDRED FIFTY-EIGHT TOTAL EMBIGGENS. ALSO, HOW ARE YOU DOING? HAVE YOU HEARD FROM TUWILE, WE ARE WORRIED ABOUT HER. FIGURED YOU WOULD KNOW SINCE YOU’VE KNOWN HER THE LONGEST. ANYWAYS WE SHOULD HANG OUT SOMETIMES. ALSO, BRING US THE DEATH MASTER. PEACE OUT, HAVE A GOOD DAY JAEMARROE. When finally the correspondence ended, Jeu’mal’o realized his ball has drained. All of his balls had drained. The game had ended. He looked up at his score and realized that when his ball drained he was at the exact midway point to the high score. A giggle welled up from within and burst forth into a hysterical laughter, ended with hysterical laughter and the wiping of several real tears of despair. His pass expires in two days, so he won’t have time to try again. He walked away, pitying himself as he felt the tingle of the rage of the vengeful pinball gods, as they turned their eyes away from him. As he left, he muttered "Those bastards didn't even spell my name right."

@nacharyzewell leaves the discotheque.