The manual’s cover showed colorful game characters surrounding a holographic logo. The foil shimmered brightly, even when no light hit it. It looked inviting, like a candy store sign promising a rush of novelty inside.

  Feeling his brain fog receding into the distance, Roy positioned himself under the bedside light, lying on his side so it cast enough light on the first pages as he opened them.

  He skimmed past copyright notices and legal disclaimers, flipped through vague concept art, until he arrived at the good stuff.

  Congratulations, city champion!

  Welcome to the second stage of the 2006 Virtua World Championships.

  As the winner of your city’s preliminary event, this golden disc is your entry ticket to the next round, if you can complete its challenges. It’s a special rewritable disc that can record its own completion, no memory card required. Just play the games and prove you are a master; from there, all shall be revealed.

  Now that sounded fun. You got to play the games for real-world rewards, and have what sounded like an exciting adventure on the way to getting them. This was his kind of contest.

  After the introduction, Roy found out why the booklet was so thick. It wasn’t the manual for a single game. Instead, it contained full copies of the manuals for all the games that would be used in the competition.

  Each section followed the same template: controller diagrams, character bios, and story summaries. For some reason, there was a large emphasis placed on how the in-game menu systems worked. From what Roy knew, this was the kind of thing you could learn in a few minutes just by trying out the buttons.

  When he’d had salvaged electronics before, there’d never been an instruction manual to consult, and the idea that someone would need one to understand something like a pause menu was honestly kind of baffling.

  Most of the game manuals were short. Some had only a handful of monochrome pages, a perfunctory exercise barely worth their ink. The two racing games were like this. So was a dull-looking movie tie-in. Roy assumed that one must have sponsored the competition in order to be included, because it looked truly terrible, with green fog filling up all of the screenshots instead of any background scenery.

  The better ones grabbed his attention with full color layouts and unique features.

  Leaper Bros explained its story through a comic book. Shoot-Stars catalogued dozens of bizarre unlockable characters. Killer Beats had control layouts for peripherals shaped like weapons and musical instruments.

  And then there was the RPG.

  Gold foil title. Fifteen pages of lore. Gameplay hints styled like newspaper clippings, and a folded map tucked into the binding.

  Roy traced the route with his finger.

  Cities, Ruins, treasure. It all felt very familiar.

  He let his mind wander, and he could see the locations. It was like he’d dropped down into the map and gone on that adventure for himself.

  After the game instructions, a phone number was provided for a helpline, which promised extra game hints.

  That took Roy a second to process. Like a soda can offering a free minidisc you could redeem with its ring pull, or an upcoming movie advertised on a bag of chips. He'd see something and get excited for a moment before he realized that those things weren’t actually available anymore, and that old sense of longing would surface.

  He pushed that feeling away by flipping through to the end of the booklet, which focused on the practical details of what came next once you completed all the disc’s challenges.

  The Festival of Champions will be held on Friday, December 15th, 2006, at Lighter World resort in Orlando, Florida.

  Roy frowned. December 15th 2006. That was after the Warp. That event never took place.

  Even as he thought that, it was already appearing in his imagination.

  He was there, walking that path in his mind, through lines of palm trees to an arch that marked the entrance to another world.

  Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  Triumphant music would play. He’d always thought that real life should come with a soundtrack.

  He’d move through Multiverse Market, drawn by the magnetic pull of Lightner Castle, passing by vibrant delights as he went.

  Banners more colorful than anything in the outside world.

  Streetlights that weren’t drab grey and rust red and lying broken against concrete, but instead looked the way streetlights were supposed to look, the way they did look, in your imagination.

  From there it was onward to cheering crowds, giant jumbotrons, parades and fireworks and pretzels in the shade of game controllers.

  A clean, colorful world that made you forget all about the wrong world outside of it. A world where everything was OK.

  This time, the memory hit him harder. There would be no crowds. No games. Just an empty park for over a century. Another cool thing that would never exist.

  Unless…maybe some version of it could.

  He read on.

  To participate, call 1-555-255-3700 and provide the unique code from your disc’s victory screen to arrange free transportation to the Great American Mall.

  From there, your disc will unlock access to the Adventure Express, which will bring you to Lightner World.

  Adventure Express! Lightner World! Roy would have thrown his hands up in the air if that didn’t mean looking away from the booklet.

  For our lucky winners, there will be two more stages following the Festival of Champions, in arenas that symbolize the best of old and new, yesterday and tomorrow. Where you’ll play a new unreleased mystery title for a grand prize of $10 million of tax-free cash.

  That pile of paper wouldn’t be worth tracking down anymore. But the venue where the competition took place? That was another matter.

  Roy flipped past pages of sponsors' logos and notes pages to make sure there wasn’t anything else important in there, then threw off the covers and jumped out of bed. He had to talk to Bastion immediately.

  He skipped down the hallway and banged on the door to Bastion’s room with his signature rhythmic knock. After about twenty seconds, the door opened.

  “Roy, what the fuck? I was just falling asleep then. I’m still not trading rooms with you, if that’s what this is about…”

  “It’s not,” Roy said hurriedly. “This is,” he brandished the manual like a holy artifact.

  Bastion looked unimpressed, squinting his sleepy eyes and raising a hand to catch a yawn. “You find a real-life money cheat in there or something?”

  “Well yeah, kinda.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “This says the gold disc was a prize in a competition, and finishing the game challenges on it is the way to enter the second round.”

  “Unless the second round was scheduled to take place hundreds of years after the first, I don’t see what that has to do with us.”

  Roy slapped the booklet in the air, as though gold dust would fall out of it. “It says that if you complete the challenges, this disc can open something called the Adventure Express in the Great American Mall, which I’m assuming is just the Great Mall’s old pre-Warp name, right?”

  “You’re telling me a dead mall is hiding a magic train?”

  “Yes.”

  “That sounds fake.”

  “It sounds awesome.”

  Bastion hesitated. “Okay, you’re right. Continue.”

  Roy smiled. “The train goes to Lightner World.”

  Bastion’s eyes widened.

  “Yeah, now you get it. Nobody can get into Lightner World because of the swamps, and the Rabbit, and the murderous automatons.”

  “But with the disc, we could open a back door,” said Bastion. “We could get first dibs on the greatest treasure trove of themed loot in the entire world.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You think the disc can still unlock the train? Hell, do you think the train will even be in working order?”

  “Yes,” said Roy. “Theme magic will make it work. This contest was a nationwide thing. There are too many wishes behind it for it not to work.”

  “And you have your thing about malls. You realize this plan means going to the biggest mall in the world, right? You’d have to confront your demons in a big way.”

  “I can do it,” said Roy. “I’ll have time to mentally prepare.”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Bastion with a wry smile. “We can stop at little malls along the way. Retail exposure therapy,”

  “I’m serious,” said Roy.

  “So was I. I think maybe I speak sarcastically so often that it’s become my default tone of voice and now no one can tell when I’m being sincere.”

  “OK. Thanks then,” said Roy. It felt good to be on the same page about this.

  “You know what? Now I’m even more pissed about that Top Hat guy stealing the disc.” Bastion clenched his fists. “We’re getting it back from him, whatever it takes.”

  “We’ll just have to hope the sheriff has some good leads on it in the morning, I guess. But you see why I couldn’t wait ‘til then to tell you about this, right? It’s too exciting. I mean, Lightner World, how cool is that going to be?”

  “Super cool.” Bastion grinned.

  With the plan set, Roy returned to his room. His racing thoughts made it hard to sleep as imagined images of Lightner World filled his mind's eye once more. Also, the dancing figurines just would not let up.

  For about fifteen minutes, Roy tried to ignore the endless tune, but after the fifth time it reset, he jammed his sword into the gears to stop it from playing again.

  Let’s see what tomorrow brings.