Maralyte High: The Window in The Office

CHAPTER EIGHT: EMMELINE

How can a bus be a movie theater? Emmeline thought as she looked at what was inside.

The machine was a small movie theater that houses only one person. On the walls were projectors, surveillance cams, and the wide screen was not showing a movie, but it showed this:

Obstaculus Coursus

Press Start

"Is this some kind of joke?" Emmeline asked the air.

She sat on the chair with a puzzled look on her face. She pressed the red start button on the chair's arm.

"Welcome to the Obstaculus Coursus." said a disembodied voice of a woman. "This will be a series of tests to determine your identity when using a raygun."

"Great." Emmeline said feeling completely unimpressed. "Just great."

"The gaming apparatus will be provided shortly. Please wait."

A few minutes later, a platform appeared beside the chair, rising slowly in a suspenseful motion. It was carrying a plastic pistol gun, a pair of green night-vision goggles, and a helmet.

"What am I supposed to do with this?" Emmeline asked.

"Simple." said the voice. "Just put it on."

I'm feeling so stupid right now. Emmeline thought as she grabbed the gear beside her.

As she put on the goggles, everything she saw was colored green. Numbers were at the sides, and they kept on changing and changing into different values as Emmeline tried to look around with green mechanical eyes (just the goggles).

"The test will begin. Rendering virtual environment. Please keep your goggles on."

The interior of the Obstaculus Coursus was suddenly covered in gray pixels. They kept on flipping and flipping until a pixelated image was shown. They kept on rotating and rotating until the image turned clear and lifelike.

Emmeline was now standing on an empty plaza. To her right, a wall was carved with different people doing battle with one another, and there was a stairway situated on the farthest part of the wall.

Trafalgar Square. She said in her mind. (Since when did elves do this?) Seems familiar to me. Many of our kind fought here before.

"Please get ready. Test starts now."

"This better be good." she said, readying her gun.

"Three..."

"Two..."

"One..."

Soldiers started coming in and they appeared in different places: above the Square, from the other side, or perched on the stairs. They wore their fatigues and had glowing red spots on their bodies. Some had it on their heads, legs, arms, chests, or anywhere else.

"Am I supposed to shoot now?" she said.

The goggles she wore started to place arrows on the red spots on the soldiers.

"What?" she asked the goggles. "What do you want me to do?"

But the goggles just kept shoving arrows on the red spots.

The soldiers fired on her, but she ran and hid under the stairway.

"Come on, come on, Emmy." she said to herself. "Think! Think!"

Bullets reached the stairway, and some bounced harmlessly off the concrete.

"Red spots... red spots..." she said. "If you're pointing on the red spots, then that means..."

She frantically got out and fired at a soldier on the head. The guy immediately fell down hard on the plaza floor and disappeared. She kept on firing at the red spots until all the soldiers died.

Come on. I can't be bothered. They're just software.

She ran to the stairs and shot more soldiers by the red spots. Streaks of red lasres shot from the gun as she fired and fired.

"One minute left on test." said the disembodied voice again.

She went to the middle of the Trafalgar Square, and many soldiers appeared at once that her goggles were almost filled with red spots.

"I hate seeing red!"

She shot and fired at the soldiers so much, she spun like a top and felt very dizzy.

One minute later, the smoke cleared, and only Emmeline stood shouldering the gun she was using. She was like a hero standing in the middle of virtual soldier corpses piled in an unartistic manner.

"Test completed."

The whole Trafalgar Square pixelated once again, and the tiny squares climbed upward and disappeared. The Coursus was now back to its normal appearance. Also, the apparatus that Emmeline wore during the test melted into pixels and all.

"Generating test results..."

From the pedestal where the controllers (the gun and goggles, duh!) were placed, a long piece of paper sprang out as if the pedestal was a printer.

Emmeline grabbed the slip and realized she could not read it. The paper was full of X's and numbers she could not understand:

X029313221X-224125111000011028424X328314515245826151'5'

325235023Xq3598q13512541351361424725737246246146ZXasf5

54358583Fghdiasfghsrhsfbsfbsfbsfsfb3635rt116adghadah57

xcfDgfdae783rfcasidvb$g7sfvbsdvbakdvbaidvbaidvb!!!2493

"That is it." Emmeline said. "I've had enough weirdoness for one day."

She headed towards the exit door with her thoughts befuddled at deciphering what the slip of paper meant.

∞дЪ†Ъд∞

"So, m'dear!" Iedalus Iero said, crouching to the Obstaculus Coursus. Apparently, she saw Emmeline's puzzled look on her face. "How'd it go?"

"Mr. Iero, how do you test someone's ability behind guns by sending them into a virtual simulation on some historical landmark?" she asked crossly.

"Easy." said the ten-foot tall salesman. "The slip of paper you have in your hand says it all."

Huh? Emmeline said in her mind.

She handed (or better yet, fingered) the slip of paper to Iedalus, and the man held it gingerly with his index and thumb finger, as if the paper was a tiny bit of nuclear chemical.

"You wait here for a moment, little girl. I'm getting something."

The salesman stood up to his full height again. He turned his back and walked over to the right, into a ten-foot tall door made of steel and covered with security wheels.

Dexter came over to her.

"You seem nervous." he said, looking at her ears.

"What?" Emmeline replied. "I ain't."

"Then why are your ears twitching?" Dexter asked again. "It seems that you're so uncomfortable, judging from that."

She looked at her ears and saw that it was moving rapidly, as if it was a cat's ears.

"Oh, sorry." Emmeline said. "I usually do this when I get nervous about something."