Distressed by all of the bickering over holding a ReBoot convention (she'd like to see a con anywhere, anytime) our heroine decides to just ignore it for a while. Just ignore everything for a while.
Grabbing a box of action figures, a TV/VCR, a stack of tapes, her icon pin, and a 12-pack of cherry coke she retreats to her dank basement and slams the door behind her. Here she will spend the summer, alone in her subterranean lair. Here she will watch and rewatch every episode. Here she will rediscover the true beauty of ReBoot-- that indescribable essence that first called to her so long ago.
By the first evening, a sign appears on the basement door. She will call this place "BasementCon '99.
"I've seen 'Talent Night' at least 17 times now," she reminds herself while watching the credits roll. "I better run it through a couple more times before I move on, though." She presses the rewind button, then notices something. The light seeping through the crack at the bottom of the basement door flickers, and she can hear footsteps.
Someone's out there.
She quietly drops from the old lawnchair she's spent the last several hours in (the only furniture in the basement is what her family didn't bother to put on the patio this year) and crawls to the door. The concrete floor drains the heat from her hands as she maneuvers around the cardboard boxes full of junk from garage sales that never quite happened. Murmurs of speech are coming from outside now. There are at least two people, but they're talking too quietly for her to make out much. Pressing her ear against the basement door, she can distinguish a few words. "...down there for hours!" the voice says. "I don't think this sort of thing is healthy..."
That's all she needs to hear. With one swift motion, our heroine turns the deadbolt.
Late that night, she finally slips into REM sleep. The TV is still blaring out the sounds of battle as the "Web World Wars" explosions cause bursts of light to flash across her face. She tosses and turns as her mind generates horrible visions of game cubes and viruses and something... something she can't quite identify. Or maybe it's a someone, hiding back in the shadows where our heroine can't see their face. If only she could...
"NOOOOOOOOOO!"
Enzo's scream sends her jolting back to reality, or what's left of it. She sits up sweating, her eyes immediately drawn to the screen. And there, in the lower right corner, she sees it, blinking. "End Prog?" it asks.
This time she has to wonder if she should...It's too much. Just too much ReBoot for one person to handle. She has to get out. She leaps to the door, unlocks it, and flings it open. This is the first time she's seen the light of the outside world in so long, and it's nearly blinding.
Just as she is about to take the first step back into the real world, about to give up her noble quest to become one with ReBoot, a figure appears in her path. Their body is silhouetted against the glare.
"Is this the person from my dream?" our heroine wonders, and waits for her eyes to adjust. She squinted until the light didn't seem quite so bright, only to find herself face to face with a-- Matrix t-shirt?
"What in the Net?" she blinked twice, and looked up to find the owner of the shirt.
A friend!
A fellow ReBoot fan, here to support her! And more importantly, someone to keep her from going insane! BasementCon /would/ survive another night.
She sleeps peacefully that night, with no dreams of Mainframe terrors. Sleep was just what she needed to continue her marathoning. She will be ready to start watching the series all over again today! She has made it through once, and now that she has Sidekick to help her stay sane, there is no limit to how much ReBoot she can watch. Happy thoughts in her subconscious, our heroine has a smile on her face as she wakes up.
Stretching her arms up above her and opening her eyes, she found herself face to face with---
Mouse?!?!
Our heroine lets out an ear-splitting scream. "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!"
She tries to get up and run away, but forgets she's still in a sleeping bag and promplty tumbles to the ground with her legs in a tangle. With her cheek pressed against cement, she catches a sideways glance of her reflection in the base of an old storm window. Her face had an odd tint to it...
"AAAAHHH! I'm green! Why am I GREEN!?!!?
"Calm down! Stop screaming!"
Our heroine's eyes are still a little blurry with sleep, and the voice of her sidekick seems to be coming from the face of Mouse. She rubs her eyes. Once again, she finds that she isn't really psychotic after all. It isn't Mouse. It's Sidekick, with an orange wig and magenta facepaint. And she isn't really green. She was being facepainted while she slept. Our heroine had done that to at least 3 other people on different occasions, but somehow it didn't seem like much fun when it happened to her.
She rubs her face with an old towel, but she has the feeling that she hasn't gotten all of the green paint off of her face. She's right. "Why did you have to do that?" she asks Sidekick. "For a minute there, I could've sworn I was in a really bad self-insertion fic. You really shouldn't..." She trails off as she hears an odd noise.
The basement walls begin to shake and a tremor cracks the cement floor. Out of instinct, our heroine drops to the ground and covers her head with a book as she had been taught to do in elementary school tornado drills. There is one last tremor, a nano of silence, and then... the basement explodes.
Chunks of rubble fly in all directions, but our heroine remains miraculously unhurt. She waits for the dust to settle, then finally manages to squeak out, "What happened?"
"The basement blew up," replies Sidekick, picking a mangled piece of a Bob action figure out of the wreckage.
"Okaaay... But why did it blow up?"
Sidekick shrugs. "Author's whim? Like this sudden switch to dialogue?"
"Hmm... That's odd. Oh well. I've got an extra copy of season three upstairs somewhere. You want to go watch 'End Prog' again?"
Sidekick nods, and the pair begin picking their way up through the mess to the gaping hole where the ceiling used to be.
And so, BasementCon '99 comes to a close. It may not have been quite what anyone expected, but at least it's over.
Home ::
Baudway ::
Beverly Hills ::
Floating Point ::
G-Prime
Kits ::
Principle Office ::
Wall Street ::
E-mail Me