Stories from the Maya

Treasure Quest

Gray's laughing because it is kind of funny but then it gets him too, another arm erupting from the silver soil and attaching itself to his right butt cheek. It pulls him into a sitting position and he starts screaming.

"Oh, FUCK, IT HURTS, OH FUCK MEEEE, MARSHALL, HEEEELP!"

I get the fuck out of the way, start running for the pods. Gray's on his own.

Molly gets pulled beneath the soil, Gray is getting his fluids drained and the arm is throwing him all around. I can hear his bones breaking. It throws him and he lands in front of me and he's all fucked up — peeled brown banana skin and all that, a living corpse. He tries to tell me something — I can see his lips move and he's murmuring something that I can't understand before he pulls out his side arm and blows his head off. I can hear Molly's muffled screaming but I don't see where she's at.

Then she gets thrown out of the soil again and she lands and gets pulled back under — the thing is playing with her like an orca with a seal, and for a second enough of the soil clears that I can see the its body. It looks like a cyborg octopus with a glass globe for a head with this weird yellow light in the center with all those vacuum arms coming off it. No eyes or mouth that I can see.

Three tentacles shoot out of the soil, all coming for me.

I run like hell, kind of bounding in my space suit. I get some decent speed going and make it to the pods where I dive in and strap myself down. All the vacuum tentacles are sliding over the glass dome like evil spaghetti.

The controls are really easy — one big green button on the console that says "Go." I punch it and blast off the lunar surface and into the void. I get away from the moon's gravity pull and velocity increases and I make it off the lunar surface, an atom transferring between dust specks.

The pod drives itself and it's a good thing too, because the g-forces make me pass out for a few minutes once I hit the planet's atmosphere. The whole trip feels like it takes five minutes.

When I wake up I'm sitting on my ass in the Game City, which looks like it's made out of Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs and Kinex and all sorts of kiddie-building shit. Remember that board game Mouse Trap with all those crazy colorful contraptions set up? The Game City looks kind of like that. This weird, futuristic, plastic paradise, a cross between a Chuck E. Cheese playplace and Blade Runner's version of Los Angeles.

I can't see it yet, though, because I'm underground. 

There's smoke coming out from under the pod. It's sitting on a launchpad at the bottom of a vertical tunnel.

They've got me in this little underground parking garage and there's all these toy cars parked in formation in the chamber in front of me. Just sitting there, quietly waiting.

I don't know what's coming for me next so I get out of the pod, shimmy out of my space suit and jump in the nearest car — this little plastic Indy 500 looking number — and get the fuck out of there.

I zoom out of the parking garage and into the streets of Game City. Game City is where all the video game characters of the Maya are congregated. They're all walking and bobbing and rolling and zooming along the sidewalks and the streets. Shit looks like a goddamn Disney movie. In fact, remember that Wreck-It Ralph movie where he goes to the Internet? It's exactly like that. There's all the characters and shit out about their business.

It takes me a minute before I realize I'm in one of the cars from Mario Kart. Haha. I never played video games before Immersion so I don't know anything about them. Waste of fucking time, if you ask me.

It's not comfortable in the Mario Kart indy car — my knees stick out and my ass barely fits and I feel like I'm going to tip over every time I make a turn. It's like I'm crammed into one of those plastic Cozie Coup cars I had when I was a toddler (I'm an Millennial, would be in my mid-40s if people still counted age), but the little go-kart tears ass and I race it from one street to the next, weaving in and out of traffic and through the pedestrians.