The only thing I knew for certain at the time was that I was confused. I went from standing inside of that dragon’s shack to falling through some sort of black void, and the only thing that I could make out was a floating window in front of me that read, “Welcome to I Don’t Know!”
It looked like one of those status windows that you would find inside of a game—a tooltip popping up to explain something to you. Only, it was a legitimate window floating in front of me. I could even poke it, grab it, and move it around.
|
Please don’t shake me so much! What if I break?! >_<
|
It was at that point that things made even less sense. The text on the window changed before my eyes as if it was some sort of living, breathing thing. It even got offended at me for thinking of it as a “thing.”
|
I’m not a thing! I’m a living, breathing window! Windows have feelings, too! He-hey, don’t stare at me like that!
|
“How does a window even breathe?” I asked, because that was obviously the most important question.
“You have gills?!”
“Right. That makes sense—wait, none of this makes any sense!”
“How am I supposed to not worry about it? I’m falling through some infinite void and there’s a window floating in front of me that’s texting me! Just because I never had sex before doesn’t mean I deserve this!”
| It’s fine, it’s fine! Being transported between dimensions takes time. |
“Am I seriously being brought into some sort of other dimension?”
“And how long is this going to take?”
| I don’t know. It’s the first time we’ve actually tried this. |
“We?”
“What’s your relation to her?”
“No, I’m a man who misses his garden and wants to know what’s going on.”
| You know you could have like a super huge garden full of whatever you want where you’re going, right? |
That was when things started looking up. “Seriously?”
| Would an informational status window ever lie? |
“I’m not sure, but now that I’m thinking about it, a game where the status windows lie to you would be pretty meta and interesting.”
| You’re right! I should start lying! |
“Feel free to not start that. I’m already confused enough.”
“So… what are you? Seriously.”
| I told you, an informational status window! The queen made me to help her out with this place. |
“So, you’re like some sort of computer program or something?”
| That’s windowist. Just because I’m a status window doesn’t mean I’m a bunch of lines of code! I told you I’m a living, breathing thing! |
“A living, breathing thing that doesn’t breathe and shows no signs of life other than being able to text.”
I immediately regretted saying that as soon as the window grew a pair of lips and took some dramatic breaths using them.
| Happy now? Was seeing a window with lips breathing good enough for you? |
“I… sure. I’m just going to stop trying to make sense of anything at this point.”
“So… do you have a name or something?”
| Window! Window, the informational status window! |
“Alright, Window. Do you… do anything other than this?”
To answer my question, Window grew several times in size and displayed more text than a license agreement that seemed to scroll forever. I wasn’t even going to bother trying to read any of that. Though, just from skimming it as it scrolled by, it looked like there were all sorts of things related to the world, everything on it, the universe, and… yeah. I already gave up trying to make sense of anything, and I wouldn’t try to again.
“Accept what?”
| The agreement! Did you read everything I just showed you? |
“Hell no!”
| Lol jk. You don’t have to agree to anything. I just put a bunch of random words in there basically, so I hope you weren’t trying to read it. |
“I’m going to go gray between that dragon and you.”
| That’s okay. Men with gray hair are kind of attractive. |
“So, you’re one of those windows that chase after older human men?”
| That’s a stereotype for us windows?! |
“Of course not.”
At least something made sense.
| Wow, this really takes a while, doesn’t it? |
“Yeah, aren’t pocket dimensions supposed to be small and instant usually? Or something?”
| I guess, but the queen wanted it to be a real dimension! You know, with galaxies and all that stuff. |
“What exactly about this is ‘pocket’ if it’s got an entire universe inside of it?!”
| It’s a pocket-sized universe! |
“Then what’s happening to me? Am I just being shrunken down to some impossibly tiny size so that the rest of the universe looks normal?”
| I thought you said you were done trying to make sense of things? |
“You’re right. So—wait, what’s that?”
Rather than falling infinitely through darkness, I could see what appeared to be billions of bright stars all around me and a planet that was steadily growing larger the closer I got to it.
“Why’d you say welcome before if I’m only just now reaching it?”
| I don’t know. Icebreaker? W-ah! Hey! Stop shaking me! |
“Windows like you deserve to be shaken!”
| I’m telling the queen that you were bullying me! You’re making me dizzy! |
I wanted to ask, “how does a window get dizzy?” but I remembered that the answer—or lack of an answer—would just make me confused again. Instead, I shook the window with both hands as I realized I was probably about to burn up in the planet’s atmosphere I was falling toward.
Only, as soon as I actually reached the planet’s atmosphere, I was teleported only to find myself standing on the world’s surface. At least, I assumed it was the world’s surface.
I wanted to shake the window some more, but it turned into a puff of smoke before I could do anything else to it. Never had I thought that I’d want to torment an informational status window. The closest I’ve ever been to that was seeing the sight of, “You Died,” in some video games.
Hopefully, this world wouldn’t be as difficult as those games were seeing as how the dragon kept on calling this entire universe a game earlier.
Seriously, who creates a universe for fun? How could a dragon even have that much power?
“That took longer than I thought it would,” Vala said, standing behind me. She was stretching and yawning by the time I turned around to look at her. “It made me sleepy.”
“How does falling through nothingness make you sleepy?”
“It was like listening to rain, you know?”
“You know, there was no noise to listen to.”
“It was like watching grass grow, you know?”
“You know, there was nothing to watch.”
“It was just relaxing, you know?”
“You—wait, this is really realistic.”
I stopped the back-and-forth to look around. Maybe it was because she kept on referring to the world as a game, but I didn’t know what to expect when it actually came to the world. I guess you could say I didn’t know what sort of “graphics” to expect. As it turned out, the graphics were even better than my home dimension’s.
The green blades of grass felt almost unbelievably soft. The breeze that blew through the grass was cooling and carried the scent of flowers. The sun above was—blue?!
“Why is the sun blue?!” I asked, staring up at it with a wide mouth.
“Because I thought it’d be cool if it was blue,” Vala answered.
“How—how is it blue but not making everything look blue? Isn’t that how it works?”
“I dunno. I just thought it’d be cool to have a blue sun, so I made it blue.”
“So… you can just change what color things are like that?”
“Yeah.”
“Make the sky pink.”
The sky turned pink with no visible effort from her.
“Make the sun rainbow colored.”
The sun shifted from being blue to featuring all the colors of the rainbow.
“Make that cloud look like an octopus!” I shouted, dramatically pointing up at the cloud as if I had just thought of something that I knew she wouldn’t be able to do.
Of course, the cloud turned into an octopus and even waved some tentacles at me.
I dropped to my knees and remembered what I kept on trying to tell myself about not making sense of things. “Just… just put them back how they were.”
“Oh! Is this what they call ‘roleplaying?’”
“What?”
“How dramatic you’re being, you know?”
“You know, I’m not faking this.”
“Oh, so you’re always this dramatic?”
“I’m only this dramatic when my entire hometown sacrifices me to some video-game-addicted dragon because I was too busy gardening to care about dating, after falling through a black void where a window was texting to me and whining about me bullying it, and—”
“Window is a girl.”
“That… window was a girl?”
“Yeah. Wasn’t it obvious?”
“Sure. Alright, the window was a girl. Why did you even make the window, and why did you make her a girl?”
“Because I wanted to.”
I looked back up at the blue sun. Despite staring straight at it, my eyes didn’t burn at all. It was kind of nice. I always thought that the sun was beautiful and always respected it for its importance to feeding my plants, but I only ever got to look at it through pictures. Inside of this pocket dimension, I could look at it directly with my own eyes with no pain.
“Can I look at the sun without it hurting because you wanted to be able to?”
“Yeah,” she answered. “It won’t even give you cancer anymore. Way better than the original, right? Maybe I won’t be so pale anymore!” She did a twirl in the sunlight, almost hitting me with that tail of hers as my oversized shirt came dangerously close to completely sliding off her.
“Don’t tell me you’re so pale and never left your mountain because you were afraid of getting cancer from the sun.”
“Cancer is serious, you know?”
“Dragons have to worry about cancer?”
“Not anymore,” she answered with her arms crossed over her chest and a proud smile on her face.
“You’re not just using cancer from the sun as an excuse for why you were a hermit with no job and no school, right?”
“I’ll have you know I went to school!”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. Is that surprising?” she asked with a tilted head.
“What did you go to school for? Where?”
“An online school for video game design, but it was boring and they were too focused on balance and catering to the players, and it was really boring, so I quit. Things are more fun when they’re unbalanced and not catering to anybody, don’t you think?”
“Don’t you think you were just too lazy to put the work in to properly balance things?”
“Making a game that the creator wants to make is more important than making a game that the players will enjoy, don’t you think?”
“Don’t you think that making sure players enjoy it is kind of important for companies to make money so that they can continue to make games?”
“Who needs money?”
“Normal, non-dragons who aren’t born into millions of dollars.”
“That sounds like a personal problem.”
I dropped that topic. Instead, I asked, “So, you have full control over everything in this… universe? Dimension?”
“Yeah.”
“So, you’re basically this dimension’s god?”
“Nope, just its dragon.”
“What’s the difference between a dragon and a god?”
“Dragons exist,” she said while pointing a pair of finger guns at me. “Pew pew. Just kidding. Uhh, I guess the difference is that—”
“Wait, you mean you were just kidding about the existing part? So, gods do exist?”
“I mean, I guess it depends on how you define a god, but that’s boring to talk about.”
I flopped backward onto the grass. There was still about one percent of my desire to hold on to logic before the whole dragons and gods things but, after that, I gave up. I officially surrendered to the dragon’s lack of logic. All that mattered from that point onward was that I was living in an illogical universe a dragon could manipulate at any second with no effort.
And then she said, “Oh, right. Window, you can block my powers now.”
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Blocking my powers. I have a really bad habit of cheating in games if I can. Like, if I don’t block my powers then I’ll probably poof some tanks and nukes into existence or something. Our game won’t be any fun if we’re overpowered.”
“But if you created… Window, and have full control over everything, then couldn’t you just force Window to obey you if you really wanted to?”
“Nope. I gave her enough of my powers so that Window is actually stronger than me now.”
| Mwahahaha! You thought it was my queen, but it was me, Window! I am the ultimate being of this universe now! |
I grabbed the window and shook her. She might have been the ultimate being of the universe or whatever, but that didn’t stop me from shaking her.
“I didn’t make Window a masochist, so I don’t know if she enjoys that,” the dragon said.
| I don’t! Please stop! Q_Q |
I gave the window a few more shakes before sighing and letting go, allowing the window to poof out of apparent existence again. “Even if you can’t cheat now, isn’t it going to be boring if you know how everything works—or… you created this world, so you know where all the secrets are and—”
“Oh, I don’t know any of that.”
“You don’t?”
“Nah. I only helped with a bit of this universe and then had Window do the rest for me. Making an entire universe on my own would have been boring.”
“Why’d you have to make an entire universe anyway?”
“What if we build spaceships and want to go to other planets? We can’t go to other planets if there aren’t any.”
“I don’t think we’re going to be building spaceships anytime soon.”
“But we might be. You never know what’s going to happen in games which is why they’re so great, and this one is even better since it doesn’t care about catering to normie players.”
“What do you mean by catering to normie players?”
“You know. Like, if you build this huge epic fantasy game then people are going to be expecting orcs and dwarves and monsters and—”
“Dragons?”
“Yeah, basically.”
“I guess so. That’s all normal fantasy stuff alongside swords, magic, castles, and so on.”
“See, you get it. Now, imagine if halfway through some giant epic battle against the evil demon lord to save the world, aliens invaded with no warning and no hints that they ever existed and then blew everybody up and took over the world on their own.”
“That sounds like a horrible story for any medium. Of course the players would be upset from having their expectations betrayed and the climax that they were working toward completely thrown out.”
“What if the aliens brought new species of flowers with them?”
I couldn’t resist sitting up and getting excited over the idea. “That justifies it.”
“Sweet, I chose the right dialogue option again.”
“There you go again with that. Anyway, so you’re saying that there’s nothing wrong with betraying the expectations of everybody playing a game just so long as you think it’d be fun to do something crazy?”
“Yeah. People are too boring and used to the same old formulas which is why they get upset. If betraying expectations was the norm, then people wouldn’t get so salty over it. Not betraying expectations would upset people instead.”
“I’m not sure that’s how it works.”
“Eh, it doesn’t matter anymore anyway. All that matters is what we want now! Anybody else who exists in this game is going to think that our way is the best way.”
“That’s kind of messed up. So, if anybody else exists, they’re all going to have the same opinions as you?”
“Nah, I don’t mean it like that. I just mean… I’m… gah! This is hard to explain and thinking about how to explain it is making me sleepy.”
Despite how frustrating and confusing she was, seeing her be the frustrated and confused one was kind of cute. Her expressions were extremely easy to read and rather diverse despite the eternally sleepy look that she had by default.
“Okay, let’s look at it this way: everybody has free will and nobody is getting their thoughts forcibly changed or anything like that, but—okay, I give up. All you need to know is that everybody will get along and be happy and that there won’t be any violence or sadness or stupid stuff because that all sucks and I want a happy game!” She took a deep breath before falling onto her back. “I’m sleepy. Night.”
“Nigh—wait, you’re going to sleep? It’s the middle of the day!”
“Shhhhh. I’m trying to sleep.”
“You’re just—”
She was already asleep.
At least she wasn’t planning on killing me. I mean, I knew it was still possible she might get bored with me and kill me, but… from the way she talked about how she just wanted the world to be full of happy friends, I doubted she was the type to switch and decide to kill somebody just because she’d gotten bored with them.
Though, there was something I was curious about.
How come she never tried this sooner? If she tried this sooner, what happened to any previous worlds—games of hers? I had no idea what the lazy dragon was really thinking inside of her head other than that she wanted to have some fun.
At least the world being so safe and fun and friendly meant that I’d be able to leave her alone to go explore by myself.
Yet, as soon as I turned around to check out those nearby woods, she leaned up to say, “By the way, the bad guys will attack at night, so we need to set up a base. Don’t worry, the first night’s wave should be easy unless Window upped the difficulty.”
Before I could turn around to ask her what she was talking about, she was already lying back down and snoring while scratching her stomach underneath my shirt.
I considered just lying down and going to sleep myself.