After his twelfth birthday, all this changed. Not because he became more mature, but because of the Ray-Chay suit he received as his main present. He still spent a lot of time at the hotel, but on his own, in the main function suite, gaming. The cleaners were very relieved.
In late February there weren’t many guests. One Sunday, Griff’s mum was away on a theatre trip with friends, and his dad needed to catch up on paperwork. Griff didn’t mind. As long as he could play Ray-Chay to his heart’s content, that was just fine.
He changed quickly, peeling the suit on over his T-shirt and pants. It looked a lot like a superhero suit. They came in all colours and styles but he’d asked for a black one. It had small silver wings on the ankles and headset, and the red Crunch Hut logo – a small cabin being hit by a thunderbolt – emblazoned across the chest. The suit was packed with loads of tech but it was also incredibly lightweight. The bulkiest bit was beneath the logo, which was OK because Griff thought it made him look like he had a six-pack. It even had a red-lined cape.
The headset, with its weird-looking bug eyes, plugged into the neck of the suit with a short cable. It was skull-crushingly tight with hundreds of little suckers covering the inside, but you soon got used to it. With the full kit on, he voice-activated the game with just two words: ‘Griff. Activate!’
His head felt fizzy, full of rushing clouds, as it always did at the start. As soon as this cleared, he did the three-minute calibration sequence to tune up the suit. A wise, old ghost-monkey character called Kyto appeared, sitting on a little cloud, and said in a calm, almost sleepy voice: ‘Let me take you to another world, a world filled with beauty and happiness, a world that can be whatever you want it to be…’
Griff zoned out, copying the monkey’s slow movements, stretching his arms and legs, reaching from side to side, wiggling his butt in a figure of eight.
He was really, really hoping that today he would get to see his first enteo. He had almost completed the first three levels of Ray-Chay, which was training, all led by Kyto. Surely he was more than ready? Until you finished the training, you couldn’t race, chase, collect or destroy the enteos. It was frustrating. Patience wasn’t one of Griff’s strengths.
Beginning Ray-Chay had been exciting and surprising. Secretly, Griff missed the adventure play centres he’d been taken to as a little kid: all the chutes and climbing nets and ball pits. He missed running around in the semi-darkness like a fool, chucking balls at his mates and collapsing breathless on the floor. The first time he’d activated his Ray-Chay suit, he’d been amazed to find himself in the best play centre he’d ever been to, full of big, 3D obstacles and tunnels which sucked you up and spat you out, until you learned how to control your movements. Slowly he got the hang of how to move. In the virtual world, you performed death-defying feats. In reality, all you were doing was making running, climbing and swinging movements on the spot.
The Ray-Chay suit meant you could sense everything. When Griff picked up a virtual ball, he could feel the weight of it in his hand. When he bounced on the virtual soft-play shapes, the sensation ran up his legs. The only difference was that in the virtual world, you never really got hurt. You could get whacked by some missile and it would feel like a puff of air, as though the blows were absorbed by the suit.
The main downside of the game was it could get kind of lonely. Griff had given his avatar a tough sounding name, YoBullit, but there was no one else in the amazing play centre to join in YoBullit’s fun (Kyto the irritating ghost monkey definitely didn’t count).Griff enjoyed being the only person he knew to own a Ray-Chay suit and he boasted about it all the time, but he sometimes wished Lyle or Boom were rich enough to afford one. Then they’d be able to play together. Even an enteo would have been some sort of company.
The enteos were ghostly, blobbish, constantly-moving creatures: dancing, wiggling and spinning on the spot. They wore large, shield-shaped masks in highly-decorated bronze, silver or gold. There were four basic enteo types and you could only be certain which type you’d found when it was unmasked. That was the game: when you saw one, you had to decide, was it a racer, a chaser, a collector or a destroyer? You had to study the stats floating around the enteo’s head and look for clues in its movements. This took a lot of practice.
If you called out a racer correctly, you raced it. If you called out a chaser, you chased it. You added collector enteos to your cache. Then there were the destroyers. These were the most difficult to identify. If you came across a destroyer enteo and guessed wrong it would ‘destroy’ you, which meant sending you back a level. Griff knew all this from Crunch Hut’s website but he hadn’t even sniffed an enteo yet.
He was swimming through sparkling bubbles down a red tunnel, like a single blood cell in an artery. Where the end of the tunnel divided, he shot down the left branch, out into a magnificent green chamber, like an emerald cathedral, containing the biggest ball pit in the universe far, far below. He stopped, levitating in the empty air. He was tempted to fall straight into the balls but he didn’t. Instead Griff floated
