Revealing Project Green

A litrpg with mysterious mysteries and zombified zombies

CHAPTER 3- Mall Zombies

We talk it through over lunch: the silver goop is clearly a secret, since Ms. Gina had no idea what it was. If we tell anyone else about it, they’ll come take it from us, which is unacceptable. In fact, Ritchie talks about finding an even more secretive spot, so that if they come after us (no idea who ‘they’ were) they’ll have to torture us to get it. I see the logic in this, but think we also have a much better shot at keeping it away from them by ourselves. If they come after us, we can bike away through the neighborhood and get through people’s yards and stuff. They won’t be able to catch us.

Yeah, I’m just shy of ten years old, and clearly mensa material.

We decide to go ask Manny’s father, who found the goop in the first place. He’d probably also touched it, so if he’s still okay, then it’s okay to touch, but if he’d lost his arm or transformed into a werewolf or something, then we can pat each other on the back for being so cautious with the stuff.

Again, just shy of ten years old.

The fairgrounds are up in the northwest parts of the city, over past the mall and the poor man’s market, a spooky mostly dead part of town. Biking there will take us on the highway through the forest, which follows the town’s only river toward Green’s Falls.

In September, the forest and that drive are still just perfect. Okay, a little too hot for older me, but young me can shrug off things like sweating and dehydration somehow. I have basically superhuman endurance, being a kid. We make it in about a half hour of pedaling.

On a Sunday just prior to school starting back up, the fairgrounds are alive and well with the summer extravaganza! Rides, games, a petting zoo, and the concessions… since I have money, I always get an elephant ear and share it with Ritchie. I eat the best parts first, and give him the crunchier bits without the cinnamon sugar caked in there. I also buy each of us a slushee. None of this carrot stick and apple slice nonsense for us, no sir.

That done, we saunter over to the ticket booth, where we note Manny’s bike leaning up against. The line is pretty long at the other booth, and that’s because whoever is running this booth is dead asleep.

And yep, it’s Manny’s pops in there. Manny’s pops is known for his hideous set of chompers, and his bad breath. We have no idea what it is he eats all day, but clearly it has caked itself on his tongue and the roof of his mouth. His breath is the stuff of legends, and we know right away who is asleep at the counter, even if we can’t see his face buried in his arms.

“What do we do?” Ritchie asks.

“You’re asking me?”

“You’re the one who always makes the decisions,” he protests.

“Fair.”

We head around back. It isn’t so hot out Ritchie’s dad would die of heatstroke in there, and sure enough when I open the door, I spy a fan blowing directly on the man. Plus, Manny’s also here, curled up in the corner next to the door and also fast asleep.

What the heck.

We head inside and tap at him, then tap harder. Finally we shove him a bit and call his name loudly, and that does it. He rouses from his sleep and peers blearily at us.

“Huh?”

“It’s Manny’s friends,” I tell him. “I’m Donny and this is Ritchie.” We’d have to involve Maya in this adventure. It’s getting too weird not to. Maya will help for sure.

“Where’d you find the silver stuff?” Ritchie asks.

“I…” he yawns, then continues, “I saw it by the side of the road, in the forest.”

His eyes droop again.

“And then?”

“Huh?”

“What did you do after that?”

“Oh… after. It broke. Did I tell you that?”

“We figured that out.”

He yawns again. “It was broken but I didn’t… realize…” His eyes are drooping again, so I snap my fingers a couple of times. “Oh… some of it leaked in my car, some of it leaked in my… bedroom.”

“And that’s it?”

That is indeed it. He’d lost the container because he’d slept late and had to come to work in a hurry. From there who knows what had happened to that ooze stuff. Had Manny’s brother touched it? Had it fallen on the game and rolled under the bed? Maybe the game had been under the bed for whatever reason, and had gotten some silvery stuff on it. Which begged the question: how much was the silver goop involved in the appearance of the ogre? How much of them sleeping was due to the goop? Worst of all, how long were the two of them going to be sleeping, anyway? We didn’t have any answers… yet. However, there might be a good way to get another couple of answers.

First things first: we can’t just touch it, because there is a chance we will also fall asleep and not wake up. That won’t work. We can’t make any of our friends, parents or neighbors touch it. It seems dangerous, both because it clearly created an ogre and is putting people to sleep.

“The mall,” I say.

“What about Maya?”

Oh yeah. “Maya lives really far away. We’ll go see what we can figure out at Green Goblin Games and go link up with Maya later.”

He clearly likes the idea of having Maya around. Maya is… Maya. It’ll be important later, so I’ll just introduce her later. But Ritchie and I both have a not-quite acknowledged thing for Maya, mostly because we aren’t ready to have a real thing, being ten years old next week, and because we don’t want to ruin our friendship.

For now, mall.

We head down to the mall on bikes, past some of the Poor Man’s Market buildings. Now it’s just a few haunted looking people shuffling through the streets. One weird gray-haired lady has a shopping cart full of stuff and a full-body shawl that is both way too hot for the weather, and hasn’t been washed in forever.

Nobody likes Poor Man’s Market.

And for whatever reason, somebody has decided that just east of Poor Man’s Market is the best place for Greensville Mall, the only mall on our little island town. It’s 1988, so the birth of the mall happened only a year prior (here anyway) and it’s all fresh, new, and exciting. Here you can just walk around and smell cotton candy, pretzels, and makeup from any number of makeup shops. You can buy clothes, just hang out in the massive open area in the central hall area, and they have special events going on practically all the time.

Plus, they have a game shop.

Green Goblin Games was almost exactly what you’d imagine for the late eighties: full of neon, with a gorgeous gigantic Green Goblin flying towards you, throwing that classic pumpkin bomb right at you. It’s even really closer to you, and spun in lazy circles.

We don’t come out here often, because Ritchie is much more into the woodsy stuff, like noting down different species of mushrooms and comparing them to the local guidebook, and comparing different types of bugs. I’m more the type of kid that will arrange a little fighting ring and get two of those bugs to fight each other. They almost never do, but Ritchie made me stop after the third or fourth time. He really doesn’t like fighting or the idea of them killing each other for sport.

I never really thought about it.

Green Goblin Games is dominated by Nintendo and Sega, with a smaller section for things like Atari and the old Commodore 64 games. Both of those had kind of died out in the early 80’s, but games are coming back strong now. Really strong. The Nintendo wall is matched in size by the other video games wall, staring each other down with dozens of titles maybe twelve or fifteen feet up in the air.

There are also a couple of TVs with game consoles attached to them, where you can try out a few games that have just come out. Of course, the Commodores and Ataris are near the Sega wall, while the NES is next to the Nintendo wall.

It’s a beautiful place, worthy of adoration.

We marvel at it for a while, before heading into the shop and just taking in the whole experience. When you’re not a mall rat, it’s a little overwhelming for the first several hours. We dilly, we dally, and eventually converge on the desk where a teenaged guy with several pimples and a pretty terrible mullet works.

I use ‘terrible mullet’ in the sense that it was pretty socially acceptable at the time, and not the ‘glorious mullets’ which should be preserved in a museum for their sheer brutality. This one makes the guy look still pretty normal, which is a shame. He should have a rat tail down half his back with a leather cord braided through, and a pompadour in front kind of thing, but doesn’t.

We produce the game, still in the bag, and hold it up for him to inspect.

“You ever seen anything like this?”

He squints at it, then takes it from us and looked even closer at it. For a few minutes he says nothing, but alternates between looking at the cartridge and staring off into space.

“I… don’t remember this one. We’ve got so many titles. But it’s the kind of thing I think I’d like. Looks like a Castlevania almost. With a more Dungeons and Dragons vibe.”

I don’t know a lot about Dungeons and Dragons, and like all kids who don’t know much about a thing but still want to appear in the know, I say nothing, and instead nod sagely.

The employee walks over to the wall of games, and heads to the shelf marked B, but still can’t seem to find Battle at Black Cliff.

“Weird,” he says. “I thought we had all the new stuff. I guess this could be a limited run. Maybe the game company went out of business.”

And, you know, it being 1988, with the internet still in diapers and only learning how to crawl, he can’t just head to a terminal, type in a name, and find all the information ever regarding The Battle at Black Cliff.

It’s annoying but also kind of expected. In addition to being less informed back then, I feel like people were also a lot more patient with employees not having the answer you want immediately.

Back to the story.

We open the bag and wait for a couple of little kids to stop mucking around with Super Mario 3, then slot The Battle at Black Cliff into the machine and press Power.

And for a few minutes, we play in two player cooperative mode. It’s a lot like Castlevania, mixed with a bit of Final Fantasy. Even though FF won’t come to America for another two years, it’s already a thing in Japan and people are copying elements of turn-based RPG. This one is like that: a side scroller through several monster encounters, where each player picks one of several actions. Then after the battles, you go to an overhead map in the vein of Legend of Zelda and explore around. Sometimes you get prompts to roll your other skills during this phase. All in all a pretty cool game.

Except for it creating a batch of zombies in the mall.

One second we’re making our way through a graveyard in the game, with zombies popping out from in front of graves, and the next minute people are screaming and running away. From what, you didn’t ask? Why, from actual zombies further into the store, lurching towards us and moaning pathetically.

Now, it being 1988, we’re luckily spared zombies that could bite someone and turn them into a zombie in a couple of seconds, and zombies that could run around. These are pale gray-blue skinned corpses with gross everything, very little hair, and rags for clothes covering up any naughty bits. And they all have HP bars over their heads as well, luckily with fewer notches. These look to have about 3 HP each, which is much better than the ogre’s 5 or 6.

“Yeah that worked,” I say.

“I wish it hadn’t.”

They’re getting closer, so of course Ritchie drops to one knee and fishes around in his backpack for what turns out to be a hatchet.

“What the devil are you doing with that thing?”

“I thought it might come in handy if we had to fight, you know, zombies maybe?”

“Right.” I grab it up and pass him the lock blade knife, then wade into them with hatchet flying.

Again, the dice and the numbers are on their way, promise. They’re here, now in this battle, but I’m not aware of them at the time. So there’s no way for me to report (like I can later) how many HP I have at the time, how many dice are being rolled, whether we have Domain bonuses going on, or what Characteristics are definitely at play. I can tell you that Quick triggers again, which means that the big lunch and rest we’d had were worth an ability refill. I get to go first again, hack at the one zombie once, then twice, and cut it down completely with two hits. These are pretty easy enemies.

Then one of them grabs onto me and sinks its teeth into my shoulder. Now I know what you’re immediately thinking, but these were zombies like you’d see out of a Castlevania game, and not out of a Romero film. This was a being of necromantic energy and not a virus. So instead I take some HP worth of damage, probably get a wound penalty, but it hardly matters. Ritchie stabs forward and gets it in the head, which is its weak spot, necro-zombie or no. It folds to the floor and causes the one behind it to trip and fall. This is great, because I have the chance to axe it to death with Ritchie assisting with a little shabby-stabs.

The last one seems almost begging for death, because it shuffles slowly right into my hatchet blow. I don’t know about gear yet; right now it’s so satisfying to melt its HP track by three quarters with a single swing.

We're breathing pretty heavily in the empty game shop, but Ritchie gets up and nods to something behind me. “You got… numbers.”

I know now, but clearly at the time I am completely baffled. I just stare at him, then go: “Your… mom… has numbers.”

He’s waving back and forth like a snake being brought out of a basket, tilting his head this way and that.

“What’re you doing?” I ask. “What numbers? Did you get bitten?” Maybe a zombie bite made you see things.

“No, look, you’ve got numbers floating behind you.”