Olympus: It's Not Just a Game

Chapter 5

Mr. Avery speared the next-to-last bite of his breakfast with his fork, popped it in his mouth and leaned back, satisfied, in his chair. His round face beamed. "Your waffles are delicious," he said to his wife. Sunlight streamed in the big bay window behind him. He gazed fondly at his family. Noah, his first-born, was working on his third stack. Where he put it all, no one knew for he never seemed to gain an ounce, even as he shot up toward six feet tall. April, his baby girl, still struggled some with cutting up her breakfast, and the tip of her little pink tongue stuck out a bit with concentration. And then there was Nancy, who, some days, seemed to demand four fathers' worth of attention but was worth every bit of the effort. He sighed, contentedly. "Don't you just love Saturday mornings?"

"Sure do," his wife responded. "Want to see your list for today?"

Mr. Avery's smile froze on his face. "Ahhh—the 'honey-do' list," he said. "Yep. Can't live without it. But the first thing I've got to do this morning is take the kids over to the mall."

"You want to what?" squawked Mrs. Avery.

"Go down to the mall to play Olympus," Mr. Avery repeated and popped the last bite of waffle into his mouth. It is rude to speak with one's mouth full, and he could tell from the tone of her voice that he needed to buy the time.

"The mall?" asked Mrs. Avery. "How come?"

He chewed earnestly and thought fast. "Well, they asked me for permission to go to the video arcade with the Huber boys."

Mrs. Avery goggled at him. "And you said, 'yes'? You know what I think about video games!"

"Yes, I do," he answered. "And I agree with you. They are a mind-rotting waste of quarters."

"You mean dollar coins," retorted his wife. "You can't play a video game at the arcade for a quarter any more!"

"Right," said Mr. Avery. "A mind-rotting waste of dollar coins. But what we're doing today is more of a sociology experiment than entertainment."

"What do you mean?" she asked. Her eyebrows were furrowed down to the danger zone.

"Well, Noah here got to try out Karl Huber's cybersuit. You know, the Hubers, where I was working yesterday. He was very impressed with the technology. Tell your Mom about it, Noah."

Noah looked back and forth between his mother and his father. He hated this. Usually, Dad and Mom were on the same wavelength, but every once in a while they got into one of their "discussions" (usually about history or technology), and Noah never knew which was the right side to be on. He felt like he was tiptoeing into a minefield. He gulped, trying to be as scrupulously honest as he could.

"I was really surprised," he said, "by the total experience. The graphics weren't all that great—sort of like Saturday morning cartoons—but I really felt like I was in a whole new world."

"And what was in that whole new world?" his mother asked critically.

"I was only there a minute. I just saw the dragon that Karl had killed. But the dragon had set the woods on fire, so I burned up before I got a chance to do anything."

"What do you mean, you burned up?" asked his mother.

"I was in the middle of a forest fire. I tried to run out of it, but the suit collapsed and everything went dark."