Level One

  The kilt was weird. First because it was so short that it only reached down to Cooper’s mid-thigh, so it made him feel like he was still naked. But at the same time, it itched and bunched and rubbed in like three different places, until finally he stopped in the middle of a hallway and took off his underwear. After that, the kilt felt fine. Not great. Just fine.

  It was one less thing to worry about, but Cooper was still tired, hungry, and lost with no compass, map, wallet, or gun. Also, there were at least two different groups of people trying to kill him, and he had a fucking wooden stick glued to his right hand, despite his increasingly desperate attempts to remove it, none of which had accomplished anything aside from hurting a lot. But on the bright side, he had his money back. So there was that.

  Another piece of good news was that Cooper was pretty sure he had finally figured out where he was. His theory was that he had somehow stumbled into a vacation Bible camp. And not some normal, boring potluck dinners-and-Kumbaya Oregon Bible camp. This was a backwoods, end-of-the-world, stockpile-shotguns-and-marry-your-cousin Idaho camp. That explained the old-timey clothes and the speaking in tongues. Maybe also the torture. Of course those types of people were usually poor as shit, but was it at least possible that some crazy millionaire had built a massive bunker under the Rockies and filled it with wild animals, booby traps, and the latest in military technology? Probably not in Oregon, but Idaho was a crazy state full of assholes, and you couldn’t put anything past them. Of course, simply realizing that he was in Idaho didn’t make escaping the maze any easier, but it did at least give him hope that once he made it back to Oregon, the world would start making sense.

  That hopeful feeling lasted about as long as it took for Cooper to find a nice, quiet room with a row of planters that blocked the view from the hallway. Cooper sat down behind those planters and began counting his money. The FBI had delivered the $200,000 in 20 sleeves of one hundred $100 bills each, all of them fresh from the mint. Cooper had counted the bills on the airplane, so it should all be there, but there was no way to know without checking. The first fiteen sleeves were all right, 100 bills exactly. But the sixteenth sleeve was exactly one bill short. He counted again, then a third time. Each time he counted 99 bills. The last four sleeves also came out to 100, which meant Cooper was exactly $100 short.

  It probably shouldn’t have pissed him off so much. After all, compared to all the other dumb bullshit he had been through the last few days, $100 was nothing. Yet for some reason the thought of the Bible Campers stealing from him filled Cooper with rage. If he’d had his pistol on him right then he honestly might have gone back to confront those assholes. Some of that was probably exhaustion, though, as by that point it was the middle of the night. Cooper decided he should try to nap for a bit behind the planters, but unfortunately he was too angry - and too hungry - to drift off. (Also, the invisibility ring on his finger was driving him crazy.) Still, he lay there for a while anyway, daydreaming about all the ways he might get revenge on the Bible Campers, plus also the restaurants he would visit once he got back to civilization, until finally, inevitably, he gave up.

  Making his way back into the maze, Cooper decided that actually food was more important than sleep. After all, it’s easy to fall asleep when your stomach’s full, and hard to stay pissed off. And it shouldn’t be that hard to find. After all, there was a literal bakery inside the maze somewhere, plus rooms full of grapes, trout, honey bees and who knew what else. Of course all that stuff would be easier to find if he had the slightest idea where he was (he didn’t) but Cooper figured that if he wandered around a little bit maybe something would jog his memory.

  That plan worked out exactly as he had hoped. First he was just walking in circles, passing down one identical hallway after another, with nothing changing except the type of animals that scattered in front of him every time he turned a corner. But after maybe fifteen minutes of wandering, and after having passed rats, lizards, parrots, turtles and at least two different types of weasel, Cooper found himself at a T-intersection in which a pair of beavers were grunting at each other. That actually rang a bell because Cooper had a vague memory of throwing flatbread at a beaver while also screaming insults at it. So when the beavers scurried off down one of the arms of the T, Cooper followed. That earned him a scolding from the bigger of the two beavers, but two hallways later Cooper saw a crack in the wall that looked vaguely familiar, then a little after that a sconce he had definitely seen before, and next thing he knew he was staring down at a floor tile with a bunch of grapes on it.

  Seeing the grape tile again made Cooper feel weird. And not just because the thing had tried to kill him the last time. It was also that everything in that hallway was good as new. The grape tile had popped back up so that it was now raised just a hair above the surrounding tiles again. The oversized arrows had disappeared, and whatever damage they had done to the floor seemed to have been repaired. Also, there was no blood, which was definitely a change since Cooper was 100% sure he had bled like fuck over everything. It was like whoever had come through behind him to reset the tile had also mopped, sanded and regrouted.

  But the worst was still to come. The last time Cooper had passed by the Grape Room the vines had been sagging under the weight of the most enormous, mouth-watering grapes he had ever seen. Tragically, that was no longer the case. Apparently whoever had regrouted the floor had also taken the time to harvest the grapes. The vines were now completely bare. Cooper spent some time scratching around in the dirt with the butt of the snake stick, and as a result he managed to find a grand total of three withered, dirt-covered grapes that the harvesters had missed.

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  Those three grapes did very little to settle his stomach, but Cooper decided he should try to sleep again anyway. There was a small statue in the corner of the Grape Room of a Greek-looking guy guzzling down an enormous jar of wine, so Cooper lay down behind it, trying to force himself to fall asleep. It was no use. He was still too hungry. Also, the itch in his right ring finger had now turned into a pins-and-needles sensation like when you sleep on your arm wrong. With a heavy sigh, Cooper sat up again, putting his back against the statue. He pulled off the naked chick ring, making himself instantly visible again.

  Since he wasn’t quite sure what to do next, Cooper decided to kill some time going through his duffel bag. After all, he had stolen a bunch of shit on his way out of the Bible Camper base, and while none of it seemed remotely useful (or edible) at the time, there was only one way to be sure. One by one, Cooper pulled the contents of the bag out and set them on the floor around him. As he had feared, it was mostly junk. In addition to the Swiss army knife, there was a ball of yarn, three little wooden boxes about the size of a pack of cigarettes, two of which containing brightly-colored dirt, a ball of blue yarn, a piece of ribbon with tassels at either end, two teacup-sized metal plates held together by a piece of string, and a leather bag full of what appeared to be human teeth. Again, complete junk. He was wasting his energy even lugging this stuff around. Still, the naked chick ring hadn’t seemed like much at first either, so Cooper decided he ought to at least examine all the junk in detail before tossing it.

  He started with the ribbon. It was about four feet long and maybe an inch wide, with little colored beads near the center that were probably meant to be decoration. It kind of looked like a cumberbund. Or maybe something some karate guy would wear. Cooper decided to try the cumberbund on and see if anything happened. That’s easier said than done when one of your hands is glued to a stick, but after wrestling with it for a minute, Cooper managed to cinch the cumberbund around his waist. Just then, Cooper heard an audible ‘thump’, and then pain exploded behind his eyes.

  What happened - and it took Cooper a moment to realize this - was that as soon as he put on the cumberbund, his body almost doubled in size. And while there are probably situations where being ten feet tall are convenient, when you are in a room with nine-foot ceilings, and sitting in a three-foot gap between a wall and a bronze statue, it’s actually kind of a drag. So the pain Cooper had felt in the instant after he put on the cumberbund had been his head cracking against the ceiling, and then his shoulders nearly dislocating as his newly-massive torso wedged itself between the wall and the statue.

  You might think that with all that size Cooper would gain some sort of super-strength or whatever, but jammed in the way he was, with his huge knees against his chin and his elbows locked together, there was no way he could do anything. In the end, it was a miracle that his left hand was still close enough to his belt line to get at the knot. It took several minutes, but as soon as he got the cumberbund untied, Cooper heard another ‘thump’, then fell backward, cracking his head yet again, this time on the floor.

  Once he finally got untangled from the cumberbund, Cooper discovered another problem: while he was enormous he had accidentally kicked the pile of junk on the floor, breaking one of the glass bottles and spilling the two little wooden boxes full of colored dirt. Cooper did his best to get all of the red dirt back into the red dirt box and all the blue dirt back into the blue dirt box, though where the two powders had mixed to make purple he wasn’t quite sure what to do with them. Meanwhile, the third box had also spilled, though inside that one there was only a single lump of what appeared to be coal. It was roughly square with rounded corners, and had a nice, even color to it, like those expensive charcoal briquettes they sell at the supermarket, though Cooper didn’t see anything special enough about this particular lump of coal that warranted its own box. He turned it over, examining both sides closely. And then all of a sudden the little lump of coal caught fire.

  Like a moron, Cooper immediately dropped the burning coal directly into his lap, which could have been a serious disaster if the coal didn’t extinguish itself just as quickly. Cooper stared at the coal on the ground for a minute. It wasn’t smoking. It wasn’t even hot to the touch. He picked it up again. This time nothing happened. And the craziest part is that Cooper was pretty sure he knew why.

  At the moment the coal ignited, Cooper had been randomly thinking about a Boy Scout trip to Mount Shasta he’d gone on almost 20 years ago. In particular, he had been thinking about the blue ribbon he’d won that year for Best Campfire. It was precisely as the mental image of his perfect, award-winning fire from two decades earlier appeared in Cooper’s head that the coal had burst into flame. He decided to try again, first picturing an enormous waterfall, then a blazing wildfire, then the waterfall again. Sure enough, the coal burst into flame again, then put itself out a moment later.

  Cooper practiced with the coal a few times more until he was sure he could control it.

  Basically, the thing was a cigarette lighter, only controlled by his mind. Which was impossible, obviously, but at that point who cared anymore? The bottom line was that Cooper had fire now, and that was a good thing.

  Also, his stomach was grumbling.

  * * * * *

  Name: Cooper of Vancouver

  Gender: Male

  Affiliation: None

  Age at Entry: 29

  Current Level: The Labyrinth (1)

  Jing: 10/10

  Qi: 4/14

  Shen: 0

  Status: Cursed (3)

  here.