Stuck at the Galleria

Act 3: Tagged! (part 4)

I land on the ground with a thud, and Tre follows suit, still screaming his head off. Seriously, he could like go into voice acting or something, that's how loud it was, but he stops once he lands.

"We're... not dead?" he asks.

"I guess not." I say without any obvious emotion as I rub my eyes. The place was completely dark, no light at all.

"Nor... where are we?"

"If I'm not mistaken, exactly where I want us to be." A green glow appeared under the two of us and expanded outward to form a circle on the ground. "And it's on..." I say with a smile. Tre looks at me and groans.

"Will you ever tell me anything?"

"Nah, but hopefully that will." I say, pointing to a white sign in front of us just as lit up.

"Tagged! at Watty's Arcade," Tre reads. "I've never played it."

"Really?" I ask, and he nods with a shrug. "Wow, what kind of childhood did you have?"

"One that was just fine without laser tag, I tell ya what," Tre mutters. I roll my eyes as the black space under the sign opens itself up to reveal a glowing green hallway ahead.

I start going up to it, but Tre doesn't follow me at first. "You comin' or what?"

He sighs. "Nor, you know I'm that one dude--"

"That one dude that what? Never lives? C'mon, Tre, you've got to break out of that shell sometime."

"But... I..."

"But what? There's nothing stoppin' ya from doing it but you won't anyway. I know this place is scary, believe me, I've learned from experience, but you don't have to be afraid all the time." Tre doesn't say anything for a sec, but then he smiles a bit and nods. I take his hand and pull him into the hallway behind me. "Normally the game would be telling us safety info now, but it's pretty straightforward: don't bite it."

"Bite what?"

"The dust, genius." I roll my eyes as the walls open to show two fairly large laser guns, their gray paint jobs shining with a green finish as the trio of matching chartreuse lights on them ignite. I take one of the taggers and toss it to Tre, who fumbles with it for a bit before he finally gets a solid grip on it.

"Having trouble there, buddy?" I ask as I grab the other one.

"I think I'm okay, now," he replies. "Is it just us going out?"

"If I'm not mistaken, yeah. The game might pull the holograms out, but they're easy. It's me you'll have to be worried about."

Tre laughs nervously before going silent. The end of the hallway opens the entrance.

"I'll try to go easy on ya," I say as I go in. 

The edges of the neon buildings shine atop the black insides. I always liked how the "room" (though it was big enough that you could barely tell) looked. It seemed almost as if they'd taken the set of a sci-fi flick and built a shooting playground around it. Bold, black, green, blue. A pretty cool place to look at if you weren't too busy shooting up stuff.

A loud, booming alarm sounds itself off for a second, and the ceiling reveals a set of white numbers that read "00:33". The game was about to start. I look back to see where Tre'd gone. He wasn't behind me, so he probably ran somewhere to go off and hide.

Typical.

The blares stop. The countdown replaces itself with a new, green one, going down from "13:31".