The Gaming Outpost

Noise from the alley, a tuneless whistling jerks you awake in your stolen cot in the basement where you had been driven by pursuing police mini-copters. Opening your eyes hopefully, you see by the pink floor through the doorway that this is no nightmare. Just two or was it three days ago, you were a respectable citizen with the worst thing on your record driving ninety on an interstate. Now you’re a hunted fugitive in Insane Land.

Your stomach growls reminding you that its used to regular sustenance. Sighing, you get up, use the facilities after crouching low enough to get to them, and then turn on the clothes washer to rinse your hands and then use the same hands to fill your face with water. Slightly squeamish, you try not to think about bacteria and fecal contaminants. You had heard somewhere, probably in a Times magazine that Arabs used their left hand for neccessaries, and their right for eating. Now you understand the logic, and wish you had thought of this five minutes ago.

Examining the mess of your left forehead with delicate fingers you decided its coming along nicely. Happily it does not seem infected. A bit of a scab seems to be forming, and you jerk your hand back from the instinctive urge to pick at your wound. It had bled a lot, and there was no need to see if your blood was still red you hoped. That was a crazy thought, but it comes back to you.

What if I’m not human any longer? Maybe Crazy Land changed me somehow, and in three days time, which might be tonight, I’ll rise a werewolf or something.

Probably a were-gerbil you decide with a laugh that echoes eerily through the two room space. It renders your loneliness apparent. Loneliness, plus fear, plus pain, plus lack of food, no wonder you feel a bit unhinged you decide.

Relaxing you prowl the basement further, looking for some little clue you may have missed before.

Before you can get really serious, the door at the top of the fake wood stairs opens. Darting swiftly before the outsider’s eyes can adjust you scamper into the second room, and look about for a hiding place as footsteps plod down the stairs.

There’s nothing for it, but to crawl under the cot. Its a pitiful hiding place, and you make ready to leap to your feet.

A clack, some rustling from the other room, and then the most divine scent sends your stomach rumbling and your saliva glands drooling. Corn on the cob, steak, and mashed potatoes wafts through the doorway to your seeking nose. Almost you get up, but you restrain yourself.

And a good thing you do because a pair of feet attached to some magnificently hair legs trods past you, enters the bathroom, and flushes. A sound of rushing water follows that, and then the feet make their reappearance on the way out. Shortly thereafter a slower step up and a lessening of the good smell lets you know what’s coming. Its not a surprise when the door opens and slams shut. Shortly thereafter, you hear that tuneless whistling noise again.

Deeply hungry, you untangle yourself from the cot in too much of a hurry, and only succeed in making it worse.

Calm down, you say, and force yourself not to move for ten seconds.

With that, you’re able to extricate yourself, and then right the cot before entering the stairway room.

The fading scent assures you it was not a dream.

But, with head aching you see no evidence of where it came from.

You look closely at the dwarf sinks, and realize they have bendable arms underneath them, almost parrallel to the ground and just touching the sink base. Perhaps if they straightened out, they might be of a right height for you.

But this brings food no closer.

Looking at the native art boxes, you spot something. In the swirl of the trees, between the monkeys and the velociraptor hunting them is a word in squirrelly text.

“Bridgestone.”

Was it a tire box? Or was it like the Ikea clothes washer, an almost normal weirdling?

Not getting anywhere, you think, and decide to check in on the bathroom again. There is merely a toilet with a ruffled fringe near the floor. A large basin tank is behind it.

Narrowing your eyes, you realize the top part of the tank has a nearly invisible white on white line in it.

Pushing on the line, you are surprised when it swings inward and up like a door flap at a fast food trash bin.

Inside, soapy water flows from the top, and drops down into a drain into the bottom part of the tank.

Ingenious to save water that way, although you’re not sure how sanitary a combined sink over a toilet is.

The water soaps up your hands, and then the water changes to fresh water and you rinse your hands.

Now clean, you head back to the other room, and attack the problem with determination. The problem is, without food, its hard to stay focused for long.

You search for latches, for hidden buttons, and nothing.

“You stupid box! Open up!” You pound the box with a pair of open hands.

It pops open.

Inside is a freezer full of large plastic bags with pictures of food. Ecstatic, not willing to trust your good fortune, you grab the first one before something weird happens and takes the bounty away.

Ripping the cold bag open, you look for a microwave you don’t have, and wonder how you’re going to eat this.

But then the smell of hot roast beef, and broccoli with Swiss cheese and pumpkin pie overwhelms your questions.

You look more closely at the bag.

“Self-heating.”

“Remove balloon tray and inflate.”

Wondering you pull out what looks like a wadded up bit of plastic with a blowhole. A few quick puffs,and you have a serviceable plastic bladder in the sshape and size of a dinner plate. A spork of plastic is next to it.

The food is good, spiced by hunger.

And looking the now empty bag over you see that it claims that it contains ten thousand forty-seven calories. And that its based on a recipe passed down from the grandmother of the wife of Bill.

A thumbnail size pic of Chairman Bill, in a straw hat with a straw between his teeth advises you to enjoy his food for its a Microsoft product.