I respawn in the arch only to be immediately ambushed by the little bastards, who are clearly waiting for me.
>>Hi guys! Will you be my friend? says Romper Stomp, one of the default pre-selects in case you’re too lazy to type or vocalise.
>>Die, newbie scum! yells the one called Fluffoki in a little girl’s voice brimming with malice.
I hit back, punching and kicking, but they’ve got more experience and there’re three of them. I’ve just got the hang of the Shaker-Quake, knocking Fluffoki off her feet and doing some serious damage when one of her little chums takes me out with a blow to the head, KO-ing me one time.
The screen blanks again.
>>So sorry! You have died. But at least you tried! Would you like to try again? You’ve still got nine lives out of ten.
This is Unathi’s revenge for the chicks dig.
When I call her for help, Lerato is the antithesis of sympathy, giggling so mega-hysterical, I’m sure she’s gonna pop a valve. Which would serve her right. ‘That’s a new record in lame, Toby,’ she says, when she manages to breathe again. But she cuts me some slack and saves my ass.
It takes genius girl a full minute and a half to circumvent the entrance portal where Fluffoki and Co. are waiting for me in ambush, rerouting home™’s IP address so it looks like I’m logging in from Melbourne with a whole new character. She’s done this before on my home™ sys back when we ordered those medical-grade biogen ‘shrooms from Thailand. It took three weeks to get the damn things with the bouncing around to fake addresses, but it was so worth it.
Anyway, thing is, spawning is random the first time you play, but once you touch down in the special hell that is Moxyland, whichever portal you emerge out of becomes your home base. You die, you go back there again and again and again, and if some psycho bratlings are waiting to maul you every time, it gets Sisyphean quick-quick.
I re-surface as an all-new character, a Popling Ludo, special move the Reverb Roar, in an allnew home base, this one pseudo-Halloween with creepy husks of trees and lumo moss that hangs off the branches like beards, miles away from that little bitch Fluffoki and her crew.
This time, I’m prepared for any juve delinquents who even think of jumping me. I ditch the greets and wade in bloody as soon as any new character makes an entrance, despite the shaky finger and more trite couplets from Moxy.
>>On your scorecard, here’s a blot, for playing mean; that sucks a lot.
Who writes this shit? And worse, gets financial remuneration for it? I need to get in on that game.
It takes four and a half hours to battle it out to level six, get to the sacred Maori hideout in the Waitomo caves and beat the pulp out of the guardian spirit, which resembles a giant cuddly platypus, until he surrenders the purple BlinkaStinka.
Trophy in paw, I invest another hour twenty backtracking to find my original spawn-in spot, and reduce Fluffoki and her little friendlings to so much dead flesh, although sorry to say, it being a kids’ game, they die in splatters of sparks rather than bloody gibs. Fluffoki does break out some very bad words, not entirely appropriate for an eight year-old girl.
And as a finishing touch, I put in a special request to Lerato to trace the little bastards’ user names and get them banned from the gamespace for violating protocol. The pretext for locking them out is killer.
Overage players.
Tendeka
We arrive at the Green Point market, to find that Emmie is AWOL. Ashraf tries to convince me we’ve got the wrong row, but I know exactly where her stall is supposed to be, wedged between the downloads booth and the over-pierced goth girl with her radical handmade fashion, all velvet, lace and PVC with complicated lacings, now also available in Pluslife, according to a sign in dayglo purple highlighting.
I know we’re in the right place, only instead of Emmie with her plastic chickens and wire jewellery, there is an aggro Kenyan punting kangas and cowrie bracelets, and for all I know dodgy defuser interference devices under the counter, who starts screaming at me when I ask why the fuck he’s working the stall registered to my wife, Emmie Chinyaka? Especially when Ash paid the full month’s rental in advance two days ago.
‘You should look better after your wife, hey?’ the Kenyan cracks smugly.
I drop Ashraf’s hand abruptly. I would wipe that smirk off his face if it didn’t mean I’d have to deal with the cops.
We cause enough of a fracas that the market manager, who introduces himself as Mr. Hartley, no first name provided, materialises and takes us to his office stadium-side.
It seems Emmie terminated her contract yesterday, and took a refund on the rent, no problem for management with so many clamouring to fill the space. Only 50% of the eight thousand though, due to last-minute notice clauses. She sold off her wares and her shadecloth to some of the other traders, packed up the scant remains, and left. No, unfortunately, terribly sorry, he doesn’t know where she went or why.
‘Have you tried the hospital?’ Mr. Hartley says with sugary concern, like we wouldn’t have thought of that already. She’s not due to pop for another month, unless it’s a miscarriage or a premature, both eventualities Ash obsesses about constantly. We don’t have a clue who the father is, whether it was some border guard demanding a toll, or a militia rape. Emmie won’t talk about it. But Ashraf and I have discussed it, and we believe the kid shouldn’t have to carry the karma. This is the chance to make something good out of the worst possible scenario. And soon he’ll have two dads. We’re going to name him for Ash’s father.
‘I’m sure she’s at home,’ Ash smoothes. ‘Thanks for all your help. I’m sorry if there was any misunderstanding.’ I hate it when he apologises for me.
It takes an hour to get to Delft by train with the strikes. Of course, these don’t affect the corporate lines.
It’s a 2k walk to the temporary residential hostel where Emmie’s been staying; a severe three-storey block, identical to the hundred other severe blocks surrounding it, a warren of concrete bunkers. We’ve given Emmie an open invitation to come and stay with us, at least until she has the baby, but she always refuses, which makes Ashraf crazy with worry.
‘Temporary’ residential is a hideous joke, of course. The two girls she shares a room with have been there for three and a half years, and still no word on when their assigned RDP housing is going to come through. It’s another perfect example of the system’s egregious failings. There’s a backlog of 1,190,000 or something, and that’s just counting the legal applicants, not the African refugees or the rurals coming in under the radar, the ones who can’t afford to wait around for the proper health clearances.
A man, scrawny and dark, not local, opens the door to the dank stairway. ‘What do you want?’
‘Is Emmie here? We were supposed to meet her at the market—’ Ashraf starts.
‘She’s not here.’ He tries to close the door on us, but I lean on it with my full weight, so he’s forced backwards.
‘Emmie! You here? You all right?’ I’m aware of Ashraf and the guy following in my wake as I pound up the stairs, three at a time. A kid with snot crusted down his lips peers down, blankly disinterested. A woman in the communal kitchen looks up startled from the Daily Voice with its screaming headline ‘DYING FOR A CURE? MUTI MURDERS MULTIPLY’.
‘Emmie?’
Her door is wide open, casting a rectangle of light into the corridor, but just before I get there, the security gate clangs hastily shut and a fumble of keys locks it tight.
‘Emmie. What are you doing? We spent hours looking for you. We had a meeting, remember? For Home Affairs?’