The Only Game In Town [Adventure]

Joy was pleasantly surprised by the serenity of the Dead Continent. The barren landscape should have evoked feelings of dread and uncertainty in Joy, but instead it instilled a great calm in his soul.

The world here was grey except for the sky. The powerful gift bestowed by Death had been unable to kill the beauty of the sky even if it had killed everything on the earth.

"It is certainly amazing, isn't it?" Sam spoke quietly as they marched forward in some indeterminable direction. Joy had just started following Sam and he was impressed by the assuredness in their step. Every direction Joy looked in was barren and looked the same as every other direction, but Sam moved as if they knew precisely where they were and where they were going.

"Have you been here before?"

"Haven't you heard? This was where I found my magical flute." With a flourish, Sam produced their wooden flute and grandly gestured around themselves with it.

"Huh… I never really thought about it. I just assumed your flute was your parents' or something." Joy picked his nose as he said this then flicked the booger off into the distance.

The pair lapsed into silence after this critical misalignment of knowledge.

The world was so empty without life. The constant hum of insects buzzing was nowhere to be heard. The lively green colors of grass and the pale golden hue of wheat were nowhere to be seen. It was all rocks, dirt, and dust.

"Where are we going?" Joy asked his intrepid guide.

"Somewhere exciting." Sam refused to give a straight answer, but Joy didn't want to press them for some reason. Joy knew that wherever they were going it was going to be exciting and that seemed to be enough to assuage his curiosity.

Soon the pair stumbled across a river. It was the first true landmark that Joy had seen so far on this continent. It ran purely and beautifully through a rocky plateau and smiled at the natural wonder.

"Is this what the world would look like without humanity?" Joy asked.

"No. There are places that look like this on the Hearted Continent. There are also places here where the rivers run brown with mud. Everything is different. Removing humanity wouldn't suddenly encourage the growth of nature, it would simply change it." Sam gave a much more thought out response than Joy had expected.

He chose his next words carefully.

"But don't people ruin things? Think of all the forests that have been burnt down. Think of all the beautiful deer hunted just to be hung in some man's hallway. Think of the bloated corpses we leave in the wake of war. Are these not perversions of the ideal world the gods created?"

Sam laughed at this one. Joy shrunk away; he suddenly felt very nervous about how foolish his thoughts sounded. Why was Sam laughing at him? What had he said that was so funny?

"That is a good point, Joy. However, you make one critical error in your reasoning. Your 'ideal world' simply does not exist. The gods made this world with the people in it; all their bloated corpses and greedy wants were part of the plan. Humanity was never meant to be perfect and so the world was never meant to be perfect."

Joy lapsed into thought as he followed Sam. He wondered why they seemed to have all the answers. The pain that plagued him was answered when Sam spoke. But they spoke of a futility that brought apathy to Joy's mind. When Sam spoke of the imperfection of the world, it did not fill Joy with hope that life could be better, it just made him wish for an end sooner.

"I just hate the way your words imply that humans have none of the responsibility. We are the ones living, are we not? Not just as things that the gods made, but as living breathing people." Joy felt spittle fly from his mouth as he spoke.

"But you don't. At the end of the day, you will die, and all your decisions would not have mattered because you will end."

"My decisions will have mattered, because other people will remember them, and they will feel good or bad because of my life and my power." Joy gestured emphatically as Sam looked on impassively.

"Well then, let's take a larger look at it then. You will die, then everyone who has ever known you will die, and then anyone who ever knew those people will die. And eventually, every single person will have died. None of the human ideas will exist past these people, it will all die there." Sam's words slapped Joy in the face. It took everything he believed in and made it seem meaningless.

Joy believed in the infinitesimal good. Each person could make good or bad choices in their life, and those choices would affect the people around them. And these choices mattered because the people that your actions touch will touch other people through their actions. And a small good caused by Joy could butterfly into a large good for the entire world.

But Sam crushed that dream under foot. They claimed that none of it mattered because humanity would end at some point.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"But we still lived, and we should be happy while we are alive." Quietly, Joy made his final assertion, and the pair drifted back into silence.

Joy realized something he had never noticed before about Sam. He did not like them one bit.

A breeze blew through his hair and Joy wished he could hear the flapping of wings or the buzzing of flies. He wished for anything except this silence that enveloped him and his new companion.

___

Theo had felt better, but he had certainly felt worse. Everyone in his life told him to focus on what made him feel better rather than what made him feel worse. They said he trapped himself in a depressive spiral where he thought only of pain and misery. He didn't believe it.

Joy's parents did not grate on Theo's nerves, but they were getting close. They were just too supportive. They constantly told him how proud they were of him for doing these menial things. His job working for Terry at the school was something they called a big achievement.

They didn't say anything, and Theo couldn't see it, but he could feel their proud eyes watching him as he walked around their house without bumping into furniture. They were proud of him when he did his own dishes. He felt like they would be proud of him for wiping his own ass.

Theo had not grown up with supportive parents. His parents had been in the new money generation of nobility. They were constantly trying to show that they were just as good as the old established families and yet they constantly failed at it. They were rich but had no respect.

The reason they had no respect was because they were manipulative fools who thought of everyone as being a piece on a chess board. This did not exclude their children.

Theo had grown up as an extension of his parents' desires and he imagined that every word that came out of Joy's parent's mouths dripped with sarcasm and was layered with deceitful intentions.

Despite his attempts to separate himself from Joy's parents, they still made attempts to connect with Theo.

One day, Joy's father asked Theo, "do you want to come join me in the fields?"

Theo had not really known that Joy's father was a farmer, but he assumed this was just another attempt to get under his skin. But these people were housing and feeding him for free, so he swallowed his annoyance and tried to be cordial. Theo joined Joy's father in the fields.

The fields smelled like manure and Theo's shoes squelched as he walked around in the fields following Joy's dad.

It was disgusting and felt demeaning. Theo couldn't see, so he could not dodge the low hanging pieces of corn that smacked him in the face.

But the sun felt so warm on Theo's face. Its gentle caress made him feel kinder rather than angrier, which is why he didn't flip out at Joy's father's question.

"Do you know my name or my wife's name?" There was no hint of cruelty in his words, Theo felt that the words weren't meant to injure, just measure.

"Of course I do, your names are…" Theo confidently started, but he realized as he was speaking that he didn't actually know. He had just always thought of them as Joy's parents.

"Me and my wife have been discussing what we can do to help you." Theo heard the man plucking corn from the stalk and considering it. Theo imagined his eyes carefully examined every inch of each cob of corn, making sure it was up to his standards. "Our mistake was thinking that you would be similar to Joy, that is our fault, and we do apologize for it."

This was weird. Theo didn't know what to make of this interaction. Was this emotional manipulation? Were Joy's parents sorry? What was happening and why did Theo have to listen to it? Instead of addressing these and the thousand other questions running through his head, Theo stayed quiet.

"You are stuck in the prison of your own mind. We hoped that working with Ms. Theresa would help this problem, that being exposed to children would help. But it has seemed to make the problem even worse."

Theo tried to hold it in. He tried to remember how thankful he was to these people for housing him and feeding him, how their ridiculous son had dragged him across the continent to help him. And how they took care of Lillian while he was incapable. But he had held in so much hate recently.

The children and their whining voices, Terry and her better than thou attitude, Joy's parents and their judging gazes. So, what if he didn't know their names, he was blind and that was hard. He was miserable and it seemed like everyone just wanted him to move on from it.

"I can feel your eyes judging me. How dare you criticize me? You are the worst. I can never see the beauty of the sun ever again and you dare to say I have a problem. Of course I have a problem, I am blind."

Theo didn't regret it, but he knew that he had just made his life tenfold more difficult. These people would throw him out now that they had seen his true hateful colors. He would be forced to take care of Lillian on the road, alone.

But maybe that was better. Theo wanted to hurt a little, he was tired of this coddling, he wanted to feel the pain of misery burning within himself.

Theo waited for the other shoe to drop, he waited to feel the large, callused hands grab and throw him.

But the moment never came. Instead, Joy's father said something odd.

"I think you're a real piece of work. You want to be hurt so badly. You want to keep hurting because it is easier to take that suffering if you're the one choosing it. You choose to be cruel and unkind to those around you in the hopes that they will hurt you so that the cycle can continue." Theo did not like those words.

"Screw you."

"Screw you, too."

The two men let the silence fill the air between them. Joy's father didn't make any demands of Theo, he just continued carefully picking corn off the stalks.

"Why? Why are you being so mean now?" Theo finally broke the silence once it became too much to bear. He struggled to fathom why these people who had done nothing but given to him were now being cruel.

"Because I thought you would feel some relief if you finally spoke your mind. You can't keep it all inside yourself and let it fester. Now we spoke how we feel and can move forward from it, rather than living in a limbo." There were no threats to Theo or Lillian's living conditions. There were no promises to extract.

It had been a moment of catharsis where two people who got on each other's nerves just said it outright rather than playing games in the dark.

Theo laughed a little at himself. Maybe this was better. The dark voices in his head were a little quieter now that he had expressed the hate in his system. Maybe it had never been hate, just annoyance and frustration built up over the months. Who was to say, but a small weight had come off Theo's shoulders.

"So, what's your name?"

A small snort escaped Joy's father's nose as Theo asked the question.

"I am Antony and Joy's mother is Cleopatra, you little shithead. Thank you for asking."

A new day, and a new step forward.