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data on a whole town in half a day. You couldn’t video our island, interiors or exteriors, without somebody walking into the shot, so when did they …
    Ray shouts, “What? What is this?” I turn to him for reassurance, the way you do, but something is off. I have to look again. Fully dressed as he is— khakis, nice shirt, starched explorer’s vest with many pockets, he would have showered and shaved when he got up just like he did every morning, but. Some time today, while I was distracted and crazy with dislocation, Ray’s freshly ironed clothes went to hell; my nails were white above the cuticles and we who shower every morning smell rank and unwashed, so the question isn’t, where are we?
    It’s:
    When?

 
    5
    Ned Poulnot
    â€™Od damn, ’od damn, ’od damndamndammit, I’m deep into Level 299 of Gaijin Samurai, we are close to the top when the unexpected awful comes, and it’s all been awful ever since. Like a shit bomb exploded my life, like, zot! No warning, no Take That, to let you know the looming nasty is coming, not even a threatening shadow or a flash of yellow eyes. It just smashes all over you in a great white wave, and what do I know? Zip.
    All I know is this. We were storming the Eternal Gates of Chinatsu Yo, the rest of the Koro Ishi and me. We were on a roll, fighting back to back to back all eight of us, and then. Wham! I got disconnected. Snatched up and yanked out of Gaijin Samurai just when I was this close to the top.
    Like, this ginormous Whatever yanked me out of the game and dumped me in this white brick oven with Father raving like an asshole and no way to tell my team why I left or where I went. My fucking phone is dead.
    Dammit, we were on a roll. We were at the top of the Eleven Bloody Steps, me and the killer seven, my Koro Ishi. We trained together in the dojo and man, we’re good. We slashed and burned our way to the Eternal Gates of the castle at Chinatsu Yo, we were this close when, shit! I, Hydra Destroyer, got sucked out of my avatar like a soul out of its skin without a second to explain. Now I’m marooned or whatever in white hell with a mess of townies I never liked, trapped in this freaking soup bowl with no way back.
    Before it came down, me and best friends that I never met were fighting back to back— the Koro Ishi: Zorn and Takeda and Hajii, Xaos33, Exx, Marble, Eleanor and me, which, son of a bitch! We’ve played together for so long and fought so hard that we’re, like, fused, me and them. It doesn’t matter where we lived in the world or how long it’s been since we did whatever we were supposed to be doing on what continent, we were connected in the game and we were winning . On the Eleventh Bloody Step, fixing to crash the Eternal Gates. We’d been playing all day and all night, it was intense. Once you’re inside Gaijin Samurai, that’s all there is. Players in the Koro Ishi know this: when you’re winning, you’ll blow off school or the day job, factory, office, wherever the other samurai from our dojo go in their pathetic shadow lives off-line.
    This is all that matters. This.
    I had the Dread Kobyashi backed up on the top step of the next-to-last level, one more blast and he fucking explodes. Hydra Destroyer, a.k.a. me, was fixing to flame Kobyashi and the Gaijinaut he rode in on into a thousand bloody bits, blazing fire from my seven mouths, I was magnificent. I had to kill him three times, and I was on number two. When I’m done and he vaporizes, I get to morph into Able Blacksmith with enough firepower to melt the lock on the Eternal Gates and we’ll be in! Then and, like, only then, the Koro Ishi enters the three hundreth level in Gaijin Samurai, and believe me, we’ll triumph in the Courtyard of Chinatsu Yo. Would have.
    We were all, like, fuck sleep, this is too big. We’re almost there.
    Man, we were this close . When I got disconnected, Hydra