New Infinity

By E3kHatena

 

            Today was the day we left our old life, when my family left our rural home out in the middle of nowhere headed for a new town closer to my mother's new work. We had gotten a good deal on the home, and it was supposedly in the middle of one of the better school districts around. We were headed to some of the greatest, but also some of the strangest, days of our lives.

            We were headed to New Infinity.

 

Arc the First: Pretense

Chapter One:

Felix and the Book

            At first I was very resistant to going. I had friends that lived here that were not moving. “But what about James or Isaac or Tom?” I pleaded.

            “What about them? If they're not taking up this opportunity like us then we are the real winners! Besides, you have your phone and you'll make new friends!”

            It was a seven hour drive to New Infinity, and just arriving was different. Our old town Jefferson was a small, old town with a small downtown and sparse houses all around. New Infinity was surrounded by a red wall with gold trim, which required going through a long, dim tunnel to get into. All the houses were rather lavish and unique. The roads were smooth, the grass was green and plush, and the trees were bright and full of fruit. We pulled into a few streets, and stopped by a house with a red door and angled roof. As we unpacked the car, a *man with a maroon jacket and a red hat with a single button walked up to us. He was this tall, skinny man with light blond hair and white gloves. “Oh hello!” he cried as he approached my mother. “I am Felix, I help new people moving in to New Infinity. Here's your welcome basket” (and he gave us a plastic basket with a few bags) “and here's our rulebook! If you need anything else, just give us a call!”

            As Felix walked back up the road, I stared at the rulebook. It was actually quite heavy and thick, and I flipped through it. Every page was empty, save for the very first. “Life is an adventure! Make the most of it! Explore the world of New infinity!”

            The rest of that one lone page was filled with a number of signatures, all in the same handwriting. Felix, Marcus, Anthony, several names of all different types written in the exact same penmanship. I held onto the book as my older brother, Alex, opened the door to our house. To our surprise, it was actually furnished inside, albeit a bit modestly. A table surrounded by a pair of sofas sat in the front room. The dining room was across the main hall, with a rectangular table with four chairs. Connected to that was another hallway, with the living room on the right, bedrooms on the left. The living room contained another sofa, a low, glass coffee table, a fireplace and a flat screen TV. Across from this hall was the kitchen, complete with a number of modern (and quite pricy) appliances. There were three bedrooms, one decorated with green, one with red, and one with blue. I picked the blue one, and we began moving our stuff in. I set up my computer on the desk, mounted my framed and signed Fallout poster on the back wall, and began taping my other posters to the wall. The last thing I put up was my figure collection. When I was a kid, my father was a wonderful man who made little figures. Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Stephen King, he made dozens. Something happened to him when I was 5, and I have never seen him since.

             Alex had begun making space for his trading card collection and organizing his games. I walked outside to go get the last of the boxes, and that was when I noticed something... odd. I swear that, for just a split second, our driveway had disappeared. There was no hole or anything, just a blue abyss.  The car hadn't fallen in or anything, either. It was sitting there as if nothing had been happening. I wasn't even looking directly at it. The sudden flash of blacktop where there hadn't been blacktop when I walked out caught my attention. Felix had begun making his rounds to other arriving families, so I decided to ask him about it. “Felix, have you heard anything about things... not being where they should be?”

            “What, like fish in the trees or limes in the sky?” He said with a chuckle.

            “No, like... a driveway not being where it should be for just a second. Just being... gone?”

            Felix stared out at something for a second, then refocused. “N-no. I haven't. Is this a horror story you're writing?”

            “No, I just saw it happen.”

            Felix looked worried. He swallowed, took a deep breath... “Well, you certainly have quite the active imagination, miss! Have you ever written anything?”

            “Hate writing. Look, if you know anything, just tell me.”

            “Well, the firmware is-- Oops. Um, nothing. Say, kid, have you seen our arcade? We have lots of games!”

            “Firmware?”

            “The... f-firmware for our GPS. We really need to update. Half the town doesn't show up!”

            He even held out a little GPS to demonstrate. It showed where we are... then suddenly was cut off down east. “Right...” I said walking away.

            I headed back inside and sat down on the sofa. Mom had just set up the Smart TV, and I decided to watch some Game Grumps before we went to get dinner. We didn't have any food in the house, so we had no other choice but to head out. We decided on a burger place not too far from where we were living. The restaurant was bright red and circular, with a large statue of a man holding a burger atop its roof. As we walked inside, we could see quite the line. There had to be ten people trying to buy from here. As we got in line, the person in front of us turned around in a very forced motion, stopped, stared blankly for second and said “Hello” and turned back around in a very similar motion. That single moment just seemed off, but I couldn't explain why. Eventually the line died down and the person in front of us hot his order (a single, plain burger) and walked towards the door. He got stuck on a barricade, stopped for a second, turned around and walked out the door properly. I ignored that adventure and we stepped up to order. My mother got a regular cheeseburger, Alex got two Bacon Cheeseburgers, and I tried to order a salad. As soon as I said the word, the cashier froze, and then pressed the button for a cheeseburger on the register. Alright, something was definitely amiss, and Felix would have to explain it immediately. When we got home with the food, my mother was astonished that I didn't get my salad. “But that's what you ordered! Not some sandwich!”

            “Yes, and apparently the customer isn't always right. Hold on, where's Felix's phone number?”

            I called the number he had written on a card in our welcome basket, and he eventually picked up. “New Infinity, Felix speaking.”

            “Hello, Felix? I'd like to place a complaint.”

            “Is it the gas? I'm sorry, but we're waiting for someone to come fix the propane line. It's been out for... two, three hours now, I guess.”

            “What? No. When we were getting a meal from Burger Planet--”

            “Oh no,” he said in a small, frightened voice.

            “There was this old man who--”

            “Oh no...”

            “And when he ordered, he got stuck in the queue. Like a video game with bad AI.”

            “Um... well, here at- at New Infinity, we are home to many fine folks. Some are not as... mentally sufficient as you and I. Please be more courteous to our residents.”

            “Hey,” I said, “Why were you worried when I mentioned this guy?”

            “Oh dear. Well...”

            Felix was silent for a couple seconds, then said something distantly as to make it seem like someone wanted to ask him a question and he needed to step away from the phone. “Well, I know that man,” Felix said, “That's Jarvis. He's an old friend of my uncle's. Fell on some hard times, got all mixed up in the wrong crowd... He's not all 'there', you could say.”

            Right as I went to hang up the phone, Felix spoke up. “Oh, and Ash? Please get to bed early tonight. Moving has clearly taken a toll on you, hon, and it shows.”

            I set the phone back on its hook and headed to my room. The week before I left, I got Isaac into playing Team Fortress 2, and I wanted to play a game or two with him. I started up my computer, logged into Steam, and invited him to a game.

            A scout is seen running. He is wearing red, escaping from a blue base. He hurriedly climbs a flight of stairs, and leaps out of a window onto a covered bridge. He's done this dozens, if not hundreds of times, and is about to do it once more. He turns around and runs across the rest of the bridge backwards. He takes out  knife, and hurls it through the air back at the base he just left, hitting the enemy sniper and causing him to go run for a medic. The red scout seems victorious this time. He jumps down from off of the bridge and runs into the door of his base. There, he is met by a familiar and terrifying sight. A person in an asbestos suit carrying a battered, glowing flamethrower. The person makes a comment, muffled by their thick rubber mask, as they begin spewing flame throughout the room. The scout is sent ablaze, and falls to the ground, dropping the enemy intelligence as his life comes to an end.

AshLand97 has killed TheMaskedMan with Flamethrower.

AshLand97's Strange Specialized Killstreak Flamethrower has reached a new rank: Rage-Inducing!

            “How do you do this?” Isaac asks me over the in-game chat.

            “I just do. I've played over 100 hours of this game, and you just started.”

HippieTed has killed AshLand97 with The Soda Popper.

AshLand97's killstreak has ended.

            “But as you can see, I'm not perfect. You'll get used to it.”

TheMaskedMan has killed Benefit Cucumbers with Scattergun.

            “See? There you go!”

            “I think I'm getting the hang of this!”

AshLand97 has killed TheMaskedMan with Flare Gun.

TheMaskedMan has found: Mann Co. Supply Crate.

            “Oh dang it.”

            Isaac sends me a Steam message, asking how New Infinity is. “Not bad, though I think something odd is going on.”

            “Like what?”

            “Well, you know how Fallout is full of weird glitches?”

            “Yeah? You complained back in March when all your saves were wiped. You were at level 25?”

            “28, but that's not important. Well, today felt like a moment from Fallout.”

            “Bombs?!”

            “NO. Geez, Isaac. There were... glitches. Someone got stuck in a queue and my driveway vanished for a second.”

            “Do you have cell phone signal?”

            “Yes.”

            “Check your map for a second. You don't show up on the map.”

            “How would that help?”

            “Just want to test a hypothesis...”

            I opened the map application, and sure enough my location would not register. “Isaac, I don't even show up on the map.”

            “Where ARE you?”

            “New Infinity?”

            “That tiny little town?”

            “Tiny? This place is huge!”

            “Are we even talking about the same place?”

            “Isn't there only one New Infinity?”

            “Yes, but you're saying it's huge when the place I've read about is real small.”

            “I don't know. Say, want to play some Mann Vs. Machine?”

            “Sure. But I call Pyro,” Isaac quickly typed, stealing my favorite class as his own to fight robots with.