cool and unusual punishment

Bad Break

So. First. I'm going to drop this on you. If you're out there, if you see this, you're going to want to read this with no context. Okay? Okay. 

Prologue

 I used to play Minesweeper with God.

We would sneak downstairs after ten, when both her parents were asleep, and she would click the buttons on the old desktop in the basement so quietly that her fingers were like the patter of mouse feet, the kind of thing you could only hear if you were trying to make them out. She had a mouse-y look to her back then, too, since she hadn't sprung up like a beanstalk yet, and she hadn't tamed her off-blonde hair back into a ponytail yet. She also had a tendency to make this chittering noise to herself when she was excited, like when she finished the board on Expert for the first time and whispered to me, "We're going Custom tonight."

She had good luck back then, because I was interfering, and when I whispered "top one" or "little to the left" I was usually right on the money. We were the best Minesweeper team ever to grace that basement. (We had all the high scores, which only we were keeping track of, although we also had our names up on the Windows Pinball under L + A, a dozen times over, and sometimes under more juvenile names when she got bored.) Even then, we never beat the largest Custom size she could set, even the time we stayed up until two in the morning and got down to thirty or so mines. I started yelling at her when she climbed the stairs, since I wasn't tired, and she put her finger over her lips and eventually rolled her eyes into her head.

"Never mind. You can be mad if you want. They can't hear you."

This was the first time it dawned on me, in total seriousness, that there were consequences to not being real.

It was also one of the last times we played Minesweeper together, after the catastrophe that was school the next day, and I took away something valuable from the experience: no matter what you do, how many boxes you flag, how cleverly you maneuver around the pitfalls, eventually in life things are bound to blow up in your face.

For Lauren, sure. I learned this the first thirty times I comforted her after some kid shoved her in the halls or stole her sketchbook. She would cry into the pillow because she couldn't put her head on my chest, and then she'd take one of her thousands of composition notebooks and start working furiously. At first, I'd coax her into this, struggle against the tethers of reality to try to pick up the book to deposit into her lap, and then later she would pick it up on her own without saying a word to me, at first because she was too angry to speak, and then because I wasn't there.

It happened slowly. I'll give her that much.

But our lives--her life and my shallow existence as a figment of hers--were a custom Minesweeper board, and I wasn't even the player. I was the game, a few minutes spent gazing into the randomized emptiness of the screen, clicking furiously, inevitable failure, and then the window closes.

It might as well have never existed.

---

So! I've had this idea for about two years (it's what I call one of my auxiliary stories) tenatively entitled Bad Break. It's about a fictional character and his creator. The only problem here is that said creator is in college and has outgrown imaginary friends while said imaginary friend, who is (shamelessly based off an anime character the creator liked) desperately in love with her and kind of linked to her given that she's the only reason he exists, is trying to contact her. He has the power to influence probability on a very minor level, that is, he can control dice outcomes, so ever since she forgot about him Lauren has had very good luck and then, suddenly, very bad luck. She's now a graphic arts designer in her second-choice school, trying to make friends through an off-the-rails DnD session while Abyss (edgy fictional character) keeps giving her 1s and making communication attempts.