The poster of banana pudding was staring at him, through his possibly pixelated body into his coded soul. Any second Cameron expected it to laugh at him. That seemed the appropriate kind of dick move it would pull. It didn't move and he didn't move. Minutes ticked by on some distant clock.

"Fine," he muttered to himself, "then I'll just stay right here." He nestled in further to the thick blankets piled on the bed. They were bordering on uncomfortable in the heat. Still he stubbornly stayed put. If the world wanted him to move it could move his legs its damn self.

A sharp pull brought his legs over the side of the bed and onto the wooden floor. Another pull and he was upright stumbling towards the boots that he didn't remember taking off or setting down by the door. Cameron blinked and lifted a hand to shield his face from the morning sun as he was propelled through the door.

"Point made," he said under his breath.

"No use fighting the mechanics or the code," a voice said from beside him. Leaning against the wall by his front door was the strange green-eyed woman from yesterday. The baseball cap was tilted slightly up so he could see her full face. A dusting of freckles covered her cheeks and nose.

"You again," Cameron said, lowering his hand. The trees weren't doing much to keep the area shaded. Wide flat leaves moved lazily in a breeze.

The woman straightened up and crossed her arms over her chest. "Aleah," she said, extending a hand towards him. It was warm and real like every other person's hand he'd felt in the game so far.

"You seem weirdly aware for a video game character," Cameron said slowly. The realness of her felt wrong.

Aleah grinned wider at him, looking like a toddler who'd just gotten away with a second cookie. "Who said anything about being a character in the game?" Drying patches of grass crunched under her feet as she walked away. She paused just long enough to look back at him and gesture for him to follow.

What could he do but obey?

They walked south through the wooded area, past a large lake and towards a second body of water. Aleah's path was as straight and unfaltering as the coded walk patterns he'd seen in the other characters. The only thing she did that threw him off was the way she stepped over obstacles.

There had been enough moments when Brooke had trapped a character in place with an item only to have them move around or break through it. Aleah stepped over the rocks and nudged piles of weeds out of the way.

"If you're not a character from the game, what are you?" Cameron called ahead to her. A waterfall thundered to their left.

"I'm the mod script," Aleah answered. She turned to face him, arms back over her chest. "I am the reason you are here, why you have this amazing opportunity."

Something in Cameron's stomach twisted. "Excuse me?" The bones in his hands ached from the tight fist he'd curled his them into.

"It's not that hard to understand, Cam," Aleah said. "This way."

The little house to their right was run down at best and help together with tape at worst. It was empty as she led him inside and towards the back. Everything in there was slightly off. No furniture cluttered the space, no signs of living beings at all. At the back of the first room, Aleah tugged open a trap door and gestured towards the shadowed space below.

Cameron shook his head, locking the door behind him. "Explain it to me," he insisted. "How are you mod script? That's numbers and symbols."

"Are you seriously asking me how I'm real when you're the one in a video game?" Aleah jokes. The bare walls echo back her footsteps from all sides as she descends into the lower level.

After a moment of hesitation, Cameron races after her.

Underneath the abandoned house there was what Cameron could only describe as a computer nerd's dream haven. Computer screens lined three of the four walls. Thick cables trailed over the floor to a central computer at the center of the room on a narrow desk.

Aleah headed straight for the highbacked green desk chair. She tucked herself into the space and ran her fingers over the keyboard. "You might want to have a look around," she suggested.

"Are you going to explain anything?" Cameron grumbled.

"In a minute, there's a glitch in the code that needs to be fixed," she answered without looking away from the screens. They flashed between images of scenery and people as her cursor flickered between them.

A large screen up front settled on a close up of a woman's face and Cameron immediately recognized Brooke, the real Brooke. It was the view from her camera that she always shared on her streams. The line between her brows was deeper than normal.

"I didn't mean to leave it unpaused, I thought I heard my friend," she was saying to her chat. The friendlier higher pitch to her voice was noticeably absent. If Cameron was lucky he got to hear that version of her voice once a week when they met up for food. Brooke never forgot to have it on stream unless there was someone causing trouble in the chat.

The chat scrolled along the left hand side of the screen in rapid fire. A few larger text bubbles caught her eye and she shrugged. "No, there was no one out there, and he's not answering his phone either. He's probably sleeping and I am so tired I'm hallucinating," Brooke joked. "But no time for that, let's see what leaving my game unpaused cost me."

The screen dimmed and another to his right drew his attention. It was the game as he'd always known it from Brooke's playthroughs. The little Brooke stepped out of her bright yellow house and got to work harvesting crops and tilling fields.

"Fixed," Aleah called out, wheeling away from the desk to sit beside him. "Are you starting to understand yet, or do I need to spell it out?"

Cameron rolled his eyes but did give her his full attention. "I'm actually in the game in real time?" he asked hesitantly. "And it's because of one of the mods Brooke installed?"

"Precisely," she nodded. "And it's going to take a fun adventure to seek the truth if you want to be a real boy again." Her nose wrinkled with a snort of a laugh.

"Truth? How am I supposed to find the truth out here in a fictional digital world?" he asked. The hanging screens displayed images from around the valley. Every time Brooke walked on camera that screen brightened, drawing attention to itself. Occasionally he heard something from the screen displaying her full face.

Aleah shrugged and leaned back far in her chair. "There's always truth to be found, just look there." She directed his attention to a bright screen.

The little Brooke figure was walking through the woods following an extremely similar path to the one they'd just taken. Just before she could reach the house she paused and held her hand out to the side. Objects flashed in rapid succession until she held a rusty looking hoe. A single smack across the ground dug a neat little hole.

Brooke reached down and tugged free a slip of paper. It disappeared and then the streaming screen lit up brighter than it had since he'd been down there. It was clear enough to count her lashes. She cleared her throat and squinted at the screen. "Looks like two people passing notes back and forth. The first part says, he was never good enough for you anyway. Then the reply is, it sort of feels like no one is." She pauses suddenly, leaning back in her chair as far away from the screen as she could while still connected by her headphone wire.

"This is fucking insane," she whispered. "Guys I think we're going to have to pause." The screen went grey.

Beside him, Aleah nudged his foot with hers. "Well? What was the next part?"

Cameron's mouth felt impossibly dry as he thought back to the text he'd sent to Brooke months ago after a particularly rough break up. "Trust me, there's definitely someone out there wishing you'd walk into their life," he said breathlessly. "Why is that in the game?"

Aleah stood, the baseball cap pushed far back. Lights from the screens lit up her eyes like glowing pools of swirling green numbers and symbols. "Are you ready to hear how to get out of here?"