The Wakeful Wanderer's Guide to Disillusionment

Level One

There was one window and one door, and the door was locked. The ugly bearded man in torn pink robes who might have been a warlock, or a wizard, or a king, had the only key. The window was built to fit only an archer's bow. Helen couldn't get her head through it to look down, much less think about climbing down.

"You will stay in here until you learn some respect for your elders," the ugly old man had said before locking her in.

The room was shaped like a half moon. The walls were all stone and mortar, and there was one shabby wooden bed. Helen checked her apparel and saw she was wearing a white silk gown. Her feet were bare, and she wore no jewelry. She moved her hands to her head and found straight hair, long, but not long enough to be Rapunzel. There were no hair pins or ribbons. She checked the bed, turning over the straw mattress. Still, nothing useful turned up. Under the frame, she found only dust and dirt.

["There must be a clue in here somewhere,"] she thexted to herself.

This game was for beginners, and Helen felt as if it must have been created for a considerably younger player. The elements reminded her of fairy tales, princes and princesses, evil stepparents and towers. So far, she wasn't finding it easy, or even any fun. She felt less than a beginner. She checked the room again and again to no avail.

Finally, she noticed a crack in the mortar of the wall behind the bed. She shoved the bed away from the wall and reached down to feel around the crack. Using her fingernails, she pulled out a small scroll of paper from the dirty crevice, uncurling it to stare at the writing. It was gibberish. She turned the paper over to see the other side. There was small writing in the corner of the tiny scroll that read:

"Peer deeply into what you cannot understand."

She flipped the page over again and looked at it more intensely. The mysterious letters started to wobble and shimmer. The room began to wiggle and fade. Her experience split. She still had the awareness of remaining in the half-moon prison cell, but the majority of her perception was elsewhere. She was skipping along a forest path, dancing along with a hoop she was guiding with a stick. A light, happy tune was running in her head. She tried to stop skipping, but she didn't have control of her body. This was a fixed event, she thought. Perhaps it was a memory of her life before her imprisonment.

Suddenly, she stopped. The tone of the music in her head changed from light to dark. A bear stood on its hind legs on the path before her. It roared at her, but she didn't run. It roared again. She roared back with the voice of a little girl. The bear began to change shape until it became a woman, dressed in a red robe, holding a staff in one hand.

"You have a warrior's spirit, my dear," the woman said. She was in her late 30s perhaps, had sharp chiseled features, dark skin, and straight jet-black hair reaching her waist. "Come," she said, beckoning.

The scenery changed. She was in a wooden hut with the woman. Time was passing quicker now, moments fading in and out as the woman turned beetles into mice, apples into cake, and herself into a man, an old woman, a child, and a bear again. The music changed as well to something more mysterious and energetic. Finally, time slowed down and Helen was peering into an old book describing the spell the woman used to effect her transformations. The game seemed to pause here, and Helen read the page carefully, memorizing the illustrations and incantations she read on the page. The woman said to her, "Do you understand now, my dear?"

Helen said, "I do," and the scene shimmered the same way it had before. She stood in her prison cell again and the paper vanished in a puff of smoke.

It took her an hour to get it right. She was testing the spell on the bed, replaying the memory of the old woman to perfect her technique. Eleven tries and nothing happened. On the twelfth, the bed transformed into a big brown dog, wagging its tail. A happy voice announced, "Level Two," with a flourish of music. ["Finally,"] Helen thexted back.