Play With Me: A Banana Bus Crew Fan Fiction

Chapter Seven

Satt, Max, and Ohm crowded around a sleeping Brian, dreading the moment when he woke up, sure that this sleep would bring him back to his normal self and he would be infuriated. He had been asleep for a few hours and his movements, more frequent, had indicated to the three that he would soon be awake.

"He's gonna murder you, Ohm." Max mentioned casually.

"Why me?"

"We didn't do anything!" Max reminded him. "All we did was beat him at a couple of rounds of Tricky Towers. No big deal. Nothing to kill a man over. You shot him in his face with... What? Can I assume red food coloring."

Ohm pulled out the red gun and, aiming it away from him and his friends, not holding the grip so he could see what had happened last time. As he pulled the trigger, the grip of the gun released a small tip of a syringe. With the trigger all the way down, nothing happened. The gun did not shoot. It was powered by the blood of the person that pulled the trigger, grip clenched tightly. The prick he had felt when he pulled the trigger before was the reason it did anything in the first place. 

"Did... Did you spray your blood in his eyes?" Max asked reluctantly.

"I-I think..."

"You're disgusting."

"I didn't know!"

"So you have to put your blood in people's eyes just to get them to play a game with you? Maybe you need a real job, Ohm."

"We don't know that!" Ohm cried. "Maybe it's just the sight of it, or the sound it makes? We need to test it."

"You want me to put an ad out in the paper?" Max asked sarcastically. "We're not exactly crawling with willing participants. BRIAN wasn't a willing participant."

"...Well, we don't need... a lot, right?"

"...What?"

"I mean, technically, if we had one person, we could just keep testing it on them, right?" Both Max and Ohm turned their attention back to Brian ho was beginning to toss and turn again. Without a word between them, Ohm, got a chair, Max got some rope, and Satt got some yogurt from the fridge and they tied up the Irishman, managing not to completely wake him. Several minutes after he had been tied up, Brian woke up.

"...Ohm," he began weakly, "...I'm... going to k-kill you."

"What about our games?" Ohm asked. "I thought you liked playing with me."

"...What?"

"Okay," Max said, "we should do three tests. First, we'll record you shooting him and show it to him, see if that doesn't do anything. Second, we try a long range shot. Third, sound test."

"How long is that gonna take?" Satt cried. "We don't even know how to get him back to normal."

"He just needs a nap." Max said. "Ohm, go any Nyquil? Sleeping pills?"

"A few."

"Is this healthy?" Satt asked.

"No." Max told him. "But a few hours ago, he was shot in the eyes with someone else's blood, so I don't think we can get much riskier than that."

"True."

So, they began their experiments. From them, they deduced four things. The first is that the noise is not enough to induce the transient state. The second is that distance mattered. The third was that color mattered. By giving Brian a pair of sunglasses laying around, he was not affected by the shot, even at a close range. The fourth, and most interesting, is that a recording did the trick. This was by far the most useful result. The three put Brian back to sleep with a combination of Nyquil and sleeping pills and came together to discuss tactics and a plan.

"Can I first just say that this sunglasses immunity thing is a design flaw?" Max shared. "Complete fuck up on their part."

"Agreed." Satt said as he stuffed yogurt into his mouth with a large spoon. 

"Great. So here's what we know, distance matters, noise means nothing, color matters, and recordings are good for a substitute as opposed to sucking your own blood out with a straw. Effects wear off in a few hours, or after a decent nap. That's about it."

There was a silence that followed the briefing. Both Max and Satt looked to Ohm to determine their next move and they found hi staring at the floor again. He sat for a few seconds, looked up, and said coldly, as if he had had some sort f epiphany or vision into the future, "We have to leave."