“We talked about a cult,” I reminded the group. “There are a lot of private islands in the area. If I was a cult leader, I would think that a private island was a good place to set up camp.”
“Of course, the first group of boys lived in New Mexico. If they had made the meeting with Reaper, he wouldn’t have been on a boat,” Parker pointed out. She looked at Jemma. “When you chatted with Halo, was he willing to tell you anything about the game?”
She nodded. “Halo’s team hasn’t reached as high a level as the missing kids had, but basically, he told me that while the first fourteen levels are mostly a singular quest, once you reach level fifteen, you are assigned to a team. The point of the game from that point on is to work as a team. All three players need to be logged on for anyone to play, so he assumes the game has a way of knowing which players live near the others.”
“Okay,” I said. “So you’re put on a team, then what?”
“Then the team is dropped into a post-apocalyptic world with challenges to meet. There are mutants who want to kill you, acid rain, giant bugs, and man-eating reptiles. You are dropped into this world without food, water, or shelter, all of which you need to find quickly. If you don’t find water before the clock ticks down, you are dead. If you don’t find food or eat the wrong thing, you are dead. If you don’t have shelter and a giant bug or man-eating reptile eats you, you are dead. If one person on the team dies, the game restarts for the entire team, so you have to be as invested in watching everyone else’s back as you are in watching your own.”
“So the game teaches team building and cooperation,” I said.
“Yes, it seems to,” Jemma agreed. “It also teaches survival skills. If the team comes across a berry bush, they must decide if it’s edible or if it’s toxic. They don’t have Google in this world, so they have to find other ways of getting their answers. In a way, it sounds like a game that might teach some valuable skills.”
“I take it the higher you climb, the more difficult the obstacles,” Josie stated.
“That would seem to be the case. Halo said that if at any point it appears as if the team isn’t working together, there are penalties. This isn’t the sort of game you can win or even play on your own.”
“So what now?” Josie asked. “We have to assume the meet-up took place, so whatever was going to happen to the group has happened to them. How do we figure out what that was?”
“There is the team from California who also won the game,” I reminded the gang. “Maybe we can find out what happened to them.”
“I haven’t been able to find real or usernames for this group yet, but I’ll keep trying,” Jemma said.
I think at this point, we all felt sort of stuck, but we had made progress. Still, assuming we were on the right track with the game and the face-to-face meeting that could very well have led to a kidnapping, where were we to go from here? If this Reaper had kidnapped the boys, then chances are they were long gone by now.
It wasn’t until later that afternoon that Jemma was finally able to track down one of the three team members from the group in California.
“So, did this guy know anything?” I asked the minute Jemma ended the chat session.
“He did. He told me that like the group in New Mexico and the group in Gooseberry Bay, once his team beat the final level and had the final key, they were offered a face-to-face meeting with someone named Reaper. They were told they would receive a valuable prize for completing the game but that they had to show up in person. The kid I spoke to, who finally shared that he was a sixteen-year-old named Carl, told me that the two other guys on his team didn’t want to meet with this random guy no matter how cool the prize might be, so he went alone. When he arrived, he was told that the prize was only available to the team as a whole. The man who showed up told Carl that if he could get the other two members of the team on board, he’d give them a chance and set up a second meeting. Carl shared that he really wanted to find out what the prize was since he just knew it would be something awesome, so he agreed to talk to his friends, and a second meeting was set up for all three to meet with Reaper. Once Carl met with the others, they managed to convince him that the whole thing seemed creepy, so none of them showed up for the second meeting. Like the first group, all their games reset to the first level at this point.”
“So if this Carl met with Reaper, then he can describe him,” Josie pointed out.
“Sort of. Reaper wore a black mask that covered the lower portion of his face. Carl described the guy as tall, at least six foot five, with black eyes and black hair. He said he was thin, and his complexion appeared to be pale, although he could only see a strip of flesh between the mask and his hairline. He wore black clothing, black shoes, and a black cape. Carl said that Reaper reminded him of Zorro.”
“Doesn’t sound like a lot to go on,” I admitted.
“It doesn’t, but the man did have a distinctive ring.
