Rising Shards

At hour four, we had made very little progress. Letoh called for a snack break.

“This is torture,” Kalei said, ready to crush her cookie and cream dipping stick into a sugary sludge. “We better get an actual physical badge for this. That I will in turn destroy for putting me through this.”

“Are you trying to write down the choices and which ones are right, Michi?” Oka asked. Michi was doodling.

“Ah, no,” Michi said. “I was just doodling the alien professor guy and Byval's mom dying violently at Byval’s hands.” Michi said, holding up their notebook to reveal a charming drawing of Byval with glowing evil eyes using his Cani powers to explode his mother and the alien professor.

“Ahh, that's sick!" Iris said. "Just once can we burn the mom? Please?”

“She deserves it for always chewing this guy out,” Maia said.

“Then we have to start over…” Oka said.

“At this point that feels worth it.” Maia said.

On our next run, we did end up trying the burning thing. It only resulted in a two second clip of the mom screaming, but her acting was so bad, as was the corny fire effect they used (basically throwing a bunch of red and orange blankets at her as Byval grunted) and an instant failure, but we all scream laughed at it. A few more failed runs had us back to despair.

“This sucks. Are we seriously gonna get expelled if we can’t beat this game?” Iris said.

“Not expelled, exactly,” Letoh said. “But if you don’t complete the game, you do have to retake today’s session.”

The next few runs were us purely enduring the experience. We began to speculate that the game was broken in more ways than one. Choices that previously registered as somewhat wrong gave us full wrong points in other runs. Sometimes choices would go through when only one of us had picked something. On one really good run, the game crashed completely, losing all our progress. Embarrassingly, the other groups finished before us one by one. We were eventually left alone, trapped with this game.

We reached a fight of sorts with the bully, who “transformed” into an Exa Cani, but the effect was done the same way as the alien and the main characters, with face paint and tin foil for some reason.

“Couldn’t they have gotten a real Exa Cani for this?” Maia asked. “And don’t get me started on that part about asking the Kanibari out, that actually bordered on offensive.”

“Don’t worry MaiMai, I’d never tell you to ‘lose the fuzzy’ like that guy said.” Iris said.

“Thanks…” Maia said.

Next, Byval used his fire power to light a candle and ended up burning his house down. This resulted in some scolding. The house was inexplicably repaired in the next scene.

“So did they just adopt this guy?” Kalei asked as Byval got told by his dad that if he invited friends over, he’d be grounded.

“My dad just adopted me,” Oka said. “That’s the one plot beat so far I don’t have any objections to.”

Eventually, we made it to a big climactic conclusion, where Byval made it to prom. Everyone at prom was doing drugs and drinking, which made me think this school being called ‘Make-Good-Decisions School’ was more than a bit of a misnomer. This ending sequence involved a lot of running away and crying.

“Damn, did Zeta make this game?” Kalei asked. “All the right choices are to cry.”

“I’m so defeated by this game I don’t even have a comeback to that,” I said.

“I’ll…remember that,” Oka said. “A snippy retort is coming your way eventually for making fun of my girlfriend, Kalei.”

“Can’t wait,” Kalei said.

Byval was confronted by a new crisis as he tried to get punch. The drug dealer guy from earlier had his bucket again and was about to dump Elka in the punch bowl. We had the option to shout at him, run away, or use our Cani powers to light him on fire.

“It should be morally right to burn this guy!” Iris said. “Burn, burn, burn!”

“I hope we can burn him and burn this whole school down,” Kalei said dreamily.

“As much as I want to…” Oka said. “I think it’s gonna be cry and run away again.”

“I think she’s right,” Maia said.

Michi nodded.

This felt like a big choice, and after a last-minute anxious debate, we selected run away.

“Knock it off, you JERK!” Byval screamed before running away and crying from the drug dealer, who froze in place, stopping his nefarious plan to pour Elka into the fruit punch. Our screens went black.

“Wait, that was shouting at the drug dealer,” I said. “Did it register the choice we made?”

“We didn’t lose, did we?” Oka asked.

“Please tell me I don’t have to play this game again—” Maia said as she buried her face in her hands. Iris gave her some supportive head pats, while she looked ready to cry like Byval just did.

Then the game just flashed ‘WINNER’ for a second with some stock images of people celebrating then closed out of itself.

“That’s…that’s it?” Kalei asked.

“We won?” I asked. “It’s really over?”

“We did it…” Oka said. “I feel so empty.”

“The professor guy didn’t even show up again.” I said. “What the heck is the moral supposed to be here? I feel like I know less about good morals after this. I feel like I know less about everything.”

Letoh came up to us and made sure we won before clapping excitedly for us.

“Ms. Letoh…” Kalei said, her sense to hold her tongue completely obliterated for the moment. “What the hell was that?”

“I’ll be honest with you,” Ms. Letoh said. “This isn’t a good lesson about Cani morals, as the morals in this game are pretty repugnant, it doesn’t have a good grasp on what Cani are or conveys our abilities well, each route has a bizarrely cruel decision like igniting your parent in flames with your Cani powers, and it is honestly disgusting it’s a required lesson to play this terrible, terrible video game.” She pushed her glasses up. “That said, I’m such a sucker for so bad it’s good content it’s not even funny. I mean, it is funny! It’s fascinating how badly they did everything here!” Letoh frantically and gleefully laughed, nearly drooling as she continued on. “Each practical effect is terrible. The acting is horrendous across the board. The director somehow included his midlife crisis dad band for five separate musical numbers. It’s beyond awful. It’s amazing. I love this game. I own three copies.”

“…huh.” Kalei said. “That’s actually kinda cool, Letoh. I thought you just liked this in a dorky way. Like that really was so bad it’s good.”

“Right?” Letoh said. “And now you’ve all earned your badges.”

Letoh printed off our successful badges, which were just certificates that said we beat the game.

“I can have these laminated if you’d like!” Letoh said.

“That’s….nah.” Maia said.

“Yeah we’re…we’re good.” Iris said.

“I’d like mine laminated, please,” Michi said.

I wasn’t sure what I’d accomplished. “At least we have the rest of the day off. And we got something done for the Benta scholarship, I guess?” I shrugged as we left the computer lab.

“That wasn’t for the Benta,” Oka said. “It was just required for regular classes.”

“Oh.” I said.

“Yeah…” Oka said.

It was a long walk out of the computer lab.