<pre>Time flew by. Three weeks have passed since I found myself stranded in the meadows and I took up the job as the young lady’s tutor. She’s an insufferable, spoiled little girl who bosses me around all the time and it seems that fulfilling her whims isn’t plot-advancing, so I’m stuck, too.
I have made up my mind. I’m going to explore the northern wing.
The area’s closed off, so there must be some clue as how to progress the story, even though I gave up on the idea of ever beating this stupid game. I still can’t recall how I ended up in this layer of reality but I’m guessing whoever made the game wasn’t really planning to release us.
I don’t know *why*, I just feel like that’s the whole point of implanting chips in our brains, tamper with our memories and strand us all here in this fake reality, tricking us into thinking the layer I was at before *is* reality.
Maybe they want just to — like use our brain as calculators or I don’t know, experimenting with mind-control or something.
I sent the young lady away on a shopping spree with Mrs. Churchill tomorrow, so I’ll have a couple hours to sneak into the northern wing.
As I was making my way to the Northern wing, passages from Burnett’s *The Secret Garden* kept popping in my mind.
> The house is six hundred years old and it’s on the edge of the moor, and there’s near a hundred rooms in it, though most of them’s shut up and locked.
> A house with a hundred rooms, nearly all shut up and with their doors locked—a house on the edge of a moor—whatsoever a moor was—sounded dreary.
> a great, big, desolate old house
> pictures and fine old furniture
> big park round it
> but there’s nothing else
It fit the manor to a T.
> He cares about nobody. He won’t see people. Most of the time he goes away, and when he is at Misselthwaite he shuts himself up in the West Wing and won’t let any one but Pitcher see him.
The Lord too wasn’t too different from the one described by Burnett.
Whoever designed that level of the game, took it straight from that book. So I wasn’t too surprised when in a room in the abandoned wing I found a girl tucked into a bed.
Apparently she couldn’t move, just like Colin in *The Secret Garden*.
After a moment’s hesitation I decided to approach her.
If she was an NPC she would react as Colin did in *The Secret Garden*, since I believe the game had been somehow adapted from that novel, with some tweaks here and there. Yet there was a chance she was like me. Not just an NPC but an actual person; trapped, like me, into this nightmare of a game.
“Who are you?”
Couldn’t really judge from that first reaction, now, could I?
“Your name, miss?”
“I’m Claire.”
“Alice.”
She was wary. But that could be from her role as a character.
“I can’t seem to be able to move around. Weird, isn’t it? I could move just fine before. I mean, on the other layer and as the — *real* me, too.”
She caught my quizzical glance.
“I’m not an NPC and I’m guessing you aren’t, either.”
YOU ARE READING
Codename: Angelus
Ciencia FicciónAt the end of the XXI century, a catastrophe happened, that brought the world to its demise. Wait! I'm living in the mid-XXI century and the world is fine! The Earth isn't scarred, we have adavanced technology, space colonies, underground cities on...
