Argh, arg-arg-arg-arg!

Chapter 1: A Situation in the 'Fun Room'

    "Oh." Roland said, mildly perturbed.
    "What?" Jimmy asked over the mic.
    "OH." He said again, this time a more moderate perturbance in his voice. "We have a situation in the 'fun room'."
    "What?" Nick asked, now chiming into the discussion. Then with the ffffft of a firecracker being lit, Roland exploded into laughter, shredding the audio quality of the Xbox 360 Party Chat.
    Through the garbled audio, they were able to discern the phrase "That is a LOT of dead dolphins."
    I was trying to take a piss, an entire wall between my idle headset and controller but I could hear it all from the bathroom. Besides the occasional hiss of pipes, the basement was dead silent -- which reminded me, I should've emptied the dehumidifier.
    Cackling upon cackling was roaring through the headphones, unfortunately mine were of unbelievably shitty proportion so I couldn't adjust the volume; just had to subject myself to the ear rape that was a typical conversation with my droogs.
    "All right, what's this shit about a 'fun room'?" I asked, jumping back into a super-flat minecraft world in which we were trying to create a more-or-less scale model of the city of Lakewood, Ohio. That's where Jimmy and I lived, and it's where the most of my friends preferred to go meandering about.
    "Well... uh... Jamie, do you remember how you bombed out a bigass strip and then covered it in concrete to make Detroit like an hour ago?" Jimmy asked referring to the main street. So far attraction-wise, we'd built James Game & More, The McDonald's at the end of my street, this place called Erie Design, the foundation of the library, and apparently a 'fun room'.
    "Yeah, why?" I asked.
    "Well it would appear that Roland discovered that there's a fuck ton of empty space under the road..."
Jimmy wouldn't tell me anymore, he was laughing too hard.
    "Nick, what's going on?"
    Nick, too, yielded no answers; only obnoxious snickers.
    "All right, what the fuck's a-going-on under the road?" I said, placing and lighting a block of TNT. I could hear the muffled sounds of mobs shifting around under the concrete.
    And with the likes of Vesuvius, the street erupted and the frame rate went to hell -- gasping for air and flopping around, salmons, pufferfish, sea turtles, and dolphins came wriggling out of the street as Roland desperately flew around, trying to corral them with a wooden fence. I heard Jimmy drop his controller, I started choking on laughter myself.
    "I see that the Xbox version got the Ocean Update." I managed, still chuckling as Roland frantically chased aquatic life down my street.
    Then a squadron of ghasts -- these big ugly ghost fuckers who shoot explosive fireballs everywhere -- surfaced from the fun room.
    "...wayment." I remarked, uncertain.
    Sure enough, a single ghast took one look at the McDonald's I had just constructed, and WHOOSH!: It was napalm fodder.
    "Shit!" I exclaimed, "Roland, autosave is on!"
    "Don't worry, I got it!" Nick insisted, "Swallow the spider to kill the fly." He said, before spawning in this thing called 'The Wither', which laid siege to James Games and what remained of the library.
    Funny enough, the Wither didn't seem interested in attacking the ghast. The two blocky menaces joined forces, savoring the beauty of annihilation.
    "Guys, we just spent like the last fucking hour building this place!" I said, obviously taking the game too seriously -- too seriously was the only way you could take Minecraft.
    "Aww, come on, Uncle Scooby!" Jimmy said in his Scrappy-Doo impression, "What's the point in setting up dominoes if y'aint gonna knock 'em all down?"
    There was brief silence -- I was really looking forward to building Lakewood's hotspots in Minecraft just for the sake of being able to fuck around in a digital version of my hometown. But then again, what better way was there to fuck around than to destroy your creations in a glorious fashion?
    And it all comes back to why video games exist. People build towns all the time in this world, every town you've ever seen was once built -- but I don't think that anyone in this corporeal realm has ever obliterated a town with a bunch of flying hellish creatures aiding them with air support. Virtual reality exists to satisfy all our desires we can't achieve in the real world.
"...Ehhhh, I never liked McDonald's anyways,"
And Olympus fell.
Jimmy strafe-flew through the road with a creeper spawner in hand, trailing four legged camo-kamikazes behind him like the dust kicked up by his heels in a sprint. Then Nick did the same but with skeletons, and then Jimmy flew back scattering spiders all over the place, and then zombies.
I was contempt watching as it was when I noticed Roland had been walling off the one side of the street where the mobs were charging, before filling the cul-de-sac with as many villagers as the game would allow him to spawn.
They collided faster than Roland could shout 'RRRRRACE WAR!', which, of course, he did.
And I stood, watching this display of anarchy for maybe a second more before taking part in it myself. It's always so much more fun to tear things down than to build them, and that's exactly what minecraft offered.
If only the game had a better gravity mechanic, I thought, when everyone got a notification on the dashboard;
RAREPHOENIX12 has joined the Party
Obscenities spawned from under our breaths as we hushedly reminded each other to watch our tones and words. After some muffled shuffling, Hogan plugged in his mic and called out to us,
"Hello?"
"Heya, Hogan how's it going?" I asked him
"Oh, Jamie is that you?" He said surprised.
"Yeah, I'm hosting the party-chat, of course it's me." I
said.
"Dank." He responded. "Are you back at school yet?"
I bit my lips to the point where they nearly bled, my face  puckered so tightly that I couldn't speak.
"You there?"
"Yeah, sorry, I yawned." I lied, "Nah I go back tomorrow, you guys do too, right?" I asked, loving every syllable of what I said.
    "yeAhHh, Jamie, we dO Go baCk toMorrOw." Roland said with deliberately unbearable voice cracks, and everyone broke up chuckling -- Hogan did too, thinking we were laughing at Roland's surface comment.
    An intricate basis of irony laid beneath the surface.
"You get Mrs. Finnucan's class?" I asked Hogan, becoming more and more synchronized with my charade.
"Naw, you didn't hear?" He said, surprised. "Finnucan's activboard fell on her last year in the fourth quarter and kare-ah-TAY chopped her spine, she's had a replacement since then."
"...Wait, a replacement spine or a replacement teacher?" I asked, seemingly confused.
"Teacher..." He clarified. "...come to think of it, maybe both." 
"Ain't dat swell." Roland said in a smug tone, obviously having just taken a swig of imaginary coffee.
"Listen, Mom wants me to do the dishes real quick, you guys wanna set up a World-at-War lobby or something? I'll be back in like five minutes." He offered.
"Sure thing, log-dog." Roland said on our behalf.
"Cool, if Zach gets on the mic just be quiet and he'll go away."
And with that, Hogan was off to clean his family's cutlery while we set up our team for a WWII Team Deathmatch. Jimmy used a Thompson, Nick used a Mosin-Nagant, Roland used an MP-40, and I used an SVT-40, when Hogan joined our ranks he'd have probably used a trench gun or double barreled shotgun.
You know, while we're waiting for Hogan to finish his neglected chores I should explain why that was the most intensely ironic back-to-school conversation I'd ever have.
So just across the I-90 highway bridge the Lakewood border gives out to Westpark, this little town that's effectively Cleveland's upstaged little brother, if not cousin. There's this school there called St. Mark that does Kindergarten through Eighth Grade, that's where we all met. Technically speaking, Jimmy, Roland and I met first because our older siblings were all in school at the same time. We were probably like four or five -- actually, Hogan didn't even come to St. Mark until the first grade so he did have a bit of riff raff when it came to joining our little mafia.
Anyhow, from K-3, the teachers started to notice that we were kinda like a notorious clan of trouble makers so they had to stick their noses where they didn't belong and tried to break us up. At St. Mark there were only two classes per homeroom, so at a time they could only have one of the three ringleaders separated from the other two. Through some twist of fate, I was the one they quarantined so they'd have less classroom interruptions.
And it worked! It really worked so well that I decided there wasn't anything left for me at St. Mark when my report card informed me that I'd be spending a third year away from my friends. So, I decided to accept my parents' offer to transfer to another school with a fresh start and a clean record.
And it didn't work! 4th and 5th grade was just an unfun, lame era of my life and I only made like one or two good friends, twice as many enemies. This place I went to, LCA? It was a total horrorshow for me, just this massive institution where every kid seemed to think and act the same, it was so goddamn boring and such a waste of time. I hardly even bothered making new friends because I still had my old ones. They still considered me to be one of them, just as disappointed with my absence. I'm told that the shenanigans in those years were lackluster.
Anyhow, Hogan's a nice guy and all, we just sorta like to fuck with him cuz he's the new guy, and also because he's fat. But Hogan's got some perks too, one of which was his priceless reactions. Little stuff was fun with him, like telling him that you got permission to have him over for the night, or that you'd be able to take him to Kalahari as a guest.
We were on the brink of sending Hogan on an adrenaline rush to the moon, hell, nam, the moon again, and then back down to earth when he would walk into his homeroom and discovered that after two hopeless years, my appeal to come back to St. Mark had been heard and would be in a class with Jimmy, Roland, Nick, and Hogan.
All my friends knew -- even the few who didn't have an Xbox, otherwise they'd certainly be playing CoD and teasing Hogan with us. Everyone knew but Hogan, and everyone was doing their damnedest to make sure he didn't find out prematurely.
It'd been on the downlow for three weeks, but we couldn't help but tempt fate now by playing with him tonight.
When fumbling and other noises were heard in the chat, Jimmy instructed Hogan to
"Kindly move your ass, there are like five invites in your inbox."
"Right," He said, "gottem."
"Hogan, you got your classes set up?"
"Yessiree, Bob. DP-28 and a Tokarev."
    "Let's rock and roll then -- Roland, put us in a match." I instructed.
"On it."
    Only we didn't wind up in Team Deathmatch.
"Hey Roland," I inquired naively.
"...wWWwwhaAaTt is it?" He asked in such a verbally taunting way.
"Why are we playing Ground War?"
"Aww, what?" Nick said, now looking at the loading screen announcing Ground War on Seelo.
"Noo, do TDM, Ground War's gay." Jimmy insisted.
"But fellas," he argued, "Ground War has such a colorful demographic."
    He wasn't wrong. Ground War, an 18 player match, usually only had one lobby available. And that one lobby certainly was host to some of the most colorful players.
Upon selecting our classes, bright red and blue letters flashed on the screen: "FUCK YOU, AND YOUR GOD."
    Roland was cackling in maniacal laughter, "I fucking love modders."
    This particular modder, who was using xKovx's mods showcase, had given the game moon-gravity, unlimited ammo, insanely fast rate of fire, super speed, an infinite time limit, and access to every weapon in the game files -- including the WunderWaffe, the zombies gun which shot lightning.
    "Boys, it is time to kick gum and chew ass."
    Bazookas shot fully automatic and endlessly. Jimmy and Nick discovered this when they piled into a tank and headed for the enemy spawn when they were hit by a barrage of twelve missiles in the span of two seconds, obliterating them.
    Upon respawn, they selected classes with M9A1 Bazookas so they could do the same -- the game lagged terribly everytime a cluster of missiles fired.
    Hogan and I discovered that flares where unlimited as well, so we were hurling them all across the wide open fields of Seelow, leaving giant splotchy orbs of white light in all directions, giving headaches to both teams.
    Most horrific of all, Roland ducked into a shed and didn't come out, giggling maniacally. It was a refreshing experience to tear apart a serious game like WaW, to just be flying around WWII battlefields, casually raining death.