Chapter Text
It's a pretty normal day when they come, to be honest. Eret's sitting at the front desk, tapping a pen up and down while their foot bounces double-time, eyes unseeing as they stare at the POG Laser Tag logo bouncing around the computer in front of them. He sighs and pushes away from the desk, the chair's wheels squeaking as they roll over the tiled floor. Just another day, in an empty laser tag venue. That isn't to say they never get customers, just...not quite as often as he'd perhaps prefer.
Eret pulls out his phone and scrolls through his notifications, when a ding at the door grabs their attention. She snaps her head up to see three people — teenagers probably, but he's not too sure — walk in. Stuffing the phone away in one of their many pockets as they stand up to face the group, Eret smiles and says, "Hi! Welcome to Paramount Order Games Laser Tag!"
The tallest of the three steps forward, and Eret realizes they're wearing a mask over their face with a simple smiley face on it. A little bit strange, but it is almost Halloween, so Eret supposes it's really not that strange at all. He’s always wearing sunglasses, anyways, so who is he to judge?
"Hi," the kid says, pulling Eret out of their thoughts, "we'd like to play laser tag for a couple hours." He pauses awkwardly. "You guys take walk-ins, right?"
"Yep," Sam pops the p as he emerges from the backroom, evidently having heard the bell ring. "Just fill out a couple forms for us, ok? Then go through that door right there." He points at the door on the side wall, labeled EQUIPMENT. "I’ll be waiting for y'all."
The kid turns to look at his friends, then shrugs. "Sure," one of them says, the one with the headband. Eret plucks the necessary paperwork from a stack on the desk and slides three waivers towards the kids. They fill out all the blanks and Eret waves them through to the door Sam pointed out earlier.
"Can't believe we've never come here before," the masked kid says as they walk away. The headband kid laughs. "I know right? I've definitely passed by this place like, a million times, on my way to practice."
"Have fun," Eret calls after them. He turns his attention back to the monitor and nudges the mouse to get the blocky screensaver to disappear, opening up the cameras to watch the kids enter the arena. Sam did a good job setting up the arena this time , they think with a twinge of pride . Let's see how this goes.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Niki drums her fingers on her laptop keys, trying to get a coherent sentence — anything — out onto the document that she's been staring at for at least twenty minutes now, surely. She scratches her head, then blows out an exasperated breath. The blank screen is taunting, reminding her of the essay due in a week that she has decidedly not been working on.
"Why," she mutters to nobody in particular. "Why can't essays just write themselves? Would be great if words would just appear spontaneously." She glares at the screen.
She's about to switch to another tab to try and work on a different assignment when Eret slams the door open, eyes wide behind their ever-present sunglasses.
"Niki!" he shouts. She shoots to her feet, already crossing the room towards him before he can get another word out. "What's wrong?" she asks frantically. She's never seen Eret panicked like this, not even that one time the equipment broke during a particularly memorable birthday party. Eret opens and closes their mouth a few times, before just shaking his head and leading her towards the monitor he usually sits at. He points.
"That's — that can't be safe, right?" he says desperately. Niki gapes at the screen for a moment before hitting the intercom button.
"What are you doing?!" Her voice booms throughout the arena. The customers she'd heard come in earlier pause, two of them on top of a wall with the third one trying to snipe one of the others. "Why — how — why are you on top of the wall?"
Eret touches her lightly on the shoulder. "Niki — "
Niki takes a deep breath. "If you could — please get down from the wall," she says, and the two kids look around for a minute before scrambling down to the ground sheepishly. "Thank you."
She sets the mic down.
"Niki, they're crazy," Eret whispers. "I don't even know how they got up there, is that — are the walls sturdy enough to support people running and jumping on them?"
"They're running and jumping on them? " Niki pinches her nose. "To answer your question," she continues, "yes, they are technically sturdy enough. Sam got — I don't know, actually. But they're sturdy."
"That's good," Eret breathes. They sit down heavily in their chair. "What the hell."
"But that's definitely, definitely not safe," Niki frowns. "Or allowed. What if they fall? The floor isn’t nearly padded enough to save them."
She mulls it over for a bit, then decides to tell Sam about it later. He's probably in his little makeshift workshop, tinkering with whatever mysterious new accessory he wants to add to the games or designing a new arena or something. He'll know what to do.
She watches the kids run around shooting each other for a bit longer. At some point the headband kid tries to tackle the one wearing the mask, but fails and ends up faceplanting as the masked one steps easily to the side. Niki can't hold back a surprised giggle at that, and Eret cracks a smile even as he keeps a tight hold on the intercom. "At least they're not climbing stuff anymore," she says. Eret hums agreement. Hoping that the kids won't try to scale the walls while she's not looking, Niki goes back to the backroom, resigned to doing something about her endless homework. She shoots Sam a text once she sits down.
are u busy?
The door in the corner opens up two minutes later and Sam emerges, recently-dyed-green hair ruffled as light floods into the room. "You need me?" he asks.
Niki smiles at him and pulls out a chair by the table she's sitting at, but Sam shakes his head. She decides to cut straight to the point. "Sam, your walls for the arena are pretty sturdy, right?"
Sam squints at her. "Sturdy enough," he says slowly. "Why?"
Niki doesn't answer his question. "What about the floor?" she asks. "How...padded, is it?"
Now Sam just looks lost. "What? Niki, what are you talking about?"
"The floor," she repeats. "How padded is it?"
"Padded — it’s a floor , Niki, why would it be padded?"
Sam shuts the door behind him and comes to stand next to her, and Niki sighs. "You know those kids you were suiting up earlier?"
"Yeah...?"
"They were jumping all over your walls, apparently."
Sam blanches. "What? How?"
Niki throws up her hands as she stands. "I don't know! That's what Eret said. By the time I got there I just saw them fighting each other — shooting — I dunno, they were on a wall and Eret was freaking out and Sam , I have never seen people on the walls. Ever."
“Well, yeah…”
She opens the door to the lobby and Sam follows her out; Eret is still watching the cameras monitoring the current game, hand next to the intercom button. "Just — I told them to get down, and hopefully they'll stay down, but — what happens if..."
Sam's already standing behind Eret, staring at the screen, brow furrowed. Niki moves to stand by his side. "What's wrong?" she asks. Everything looks fine to her; she doesn't see anybody on walls or jumping and pulling dangerous stunts. All she sees is two sets of lights moving steadily through the arena, laser guns held loosely in their hands —
Wait, two?
"Where's the third kid?" Sam asks, leaning closer to the screen as if he'll be able to find them just by sheer proximity.
Oh. Niki pulls up the other cameras, searching, searching — there! A flash of a white mask against the dark, creeping along a good distance behind the other two, ducking behind walls and ledges every so often.
"Where's his vest?" There’s an edge in Sam’s voice. Niki startles and tabs through the various cameras again, looking for a heap of lights left somewhere on the ground, or perhaps stuffed into a hidden alcove, but comes up empty. She looks at the masked kid again — wasn't he wearing a bright green hoodie? Why can't she see it? —and catches a split-second glint off his silhouette. She zooms in.
"Oh my god," Sam breathes. Eret looks up at him, then back at the screen, then back at him — then does a double-take. "How — "
"He disabled the lights on his vest," Sam mumbles. "What? How did he even — what? "
Niki looks at the monitor again, and sure enough, she can just barely make out the black outline of the player vest on top of the masked kid's hoodie. None of the LEDs lining the vest are on, not even the ones in the target sensors. Niki tries to wrap her head around that.
"Is that even possible?" she asks Sam, who simply shakes his head. “It’s definitely not allowed…”
"I have no idea how he did it," he says, stunned.
"Hey guys!" The door jingles and Foolish walks in, holding two big paper bags up high. "I got us food!"
His arm lowers as he takes in his co-workers standing together behind the front desk in various states of having mental breakdowns.
"What's going on?" he asks. Did something happen to the arena while he was out? He didn't think he was gone that long…
Niki recovers first. "Foolish, come over here." She waves him over and he comes hesitantly, setting the bags down on the floor once he reaches the other three. "Something happened?" he says.
"Just look," Eret sobs. He gestures in the vague direction of the camera monitor, and Foolish looks. "Oh, wow, how'd they get on the ceiling?"
"The ceiling?! " Niki shoulders Foolish aside as she frantically scans the cameras, then swears as she slams the intercom button. Sam's already headed for the door to the equipment room, and Foolish can hear the door open and shut as Sam runs into the arena proper.
"GET DOWN FROM THE CEILING!" Niki bellows into the mic, and Foolish jumps. "PLEASE." She takes her hand off the button and takes a deep breath, then lets it out. Another inhale, and out. "I'm going insane," she informs him matter-of-factly. Foolish digs through one of the bags he’d just put down, pulls out a bottle of sparkling water, and offers it to her.
"Thank you." Niki takes the bottle, unscrews the cap, and downs half of it in one gulp.
She caps it again and places it on the desk counter, then drags a hand through her multi-colored hair. “Today’s been so weird," she mutters. Eret just shakes their head as they remain face-first on the table. Foolish pulls another bottle out of one of the bags, soda this time, and puts it by his ear. There's a muffled thank you as Eret's hand snakes up to grab the bottle and cradle it in his lap.
Foolish leans against the table and glances at the cameras. The kid — or so he assumes, they don't get many adult customers here — isn't climbing around the ceiling beams anymore, they're sitting on top of a wall ( with their vest's lights off, how did that happen? ) while the other two he can see stand below them. After a moment's hesitation, Foolish pulls out his phone and starts recording.
Sam isn't sure what to feel right now. He thinks he's probably somewhere between impressed that the masked kid managed to get onto the ceiling in the first place, concerned that he had the idea to go up there at all, having an aneurysm that the kids have been running and jumping on top of his walls, shocked at the absolute whiplash he's been through in the past thirty minutes, and trying to figure out what the hell's been going on while he was tinkering away in his workshop. Also, he has no idea how the kid turned off the lights on his vest. He should probably figure that out, shouldn't he.
But for now, he's gotta make sure the kids don't get themselves into trouble they can't get out of.
"What the heck," he asks, light spilling from the equipment room behind him as he faces the three. Typically Sam would cast a rather imposing figure, with his tall stature, but the kids aren't even that much shorter than him. The masked one is probably his height. He's kind of miffed, to be honest.
The headband kid scuffs his foot on the ground, eyes cast downwards, and the one with the white sunglasses sticking out of one pocket looks away awkwardly. "What are y'all even doing?" Sam looks at the masked one, sitting on the wall now. "How did you even get on the ceiling? You — you do realize you're not supposed to do that, right?"
The masked kid tilts his head back and forth for a moment. "Sorry?" he offers. "Sorry, I got carried away..."
Carried away —
Sam doesn't even want to think about the implications of that.
"Well, please don't try that again." He gestures at the floor. "A fall from that height would be really bad."
"I’ll be careful," the kid says. Not exactly reassuring.
"I'm serious," Sam warns, "if I see you on the ceiling again, all of you are out."
The kids look at each other.
"What about walls?" the headband one asks.
"That's a no, too."
The three of them heave a collective sigh, but agree. Sam watches them for a moment longer, before turning to head back to the lobby. "Oh, also." He stops. "I don't know how you turned off the lights on your vest, but please turn them back on. If you can. They're not designed to have the lights turned off like that, and it'd be great if, y'know, the vests stayed in working order."
It only takes a minute or so for the masked kid's vest to blink on again, and Sam shakes his head as he leaves the arena. He'll have to figure that out later. Maybe he should ask the kid?
Eret and Niki are munching on the food Foolish brought when Sam returns, while Foolish himself sips from his usual cup of coffee. All three of them are still crowded around the camera monitor.
"You talk them out of it?" Foolish asks.
"Hopefully. I told them that if they tried to get on the walls or ceiling again they'd be kicked out."
It sounds a little harsh, Sam thinks, but he can't risk them getting hurt by putting themselves in danger. If he has to drag the kids out and stop them from playing, so be it. Besides, people climbing on walls and especially ceilings is probably at least a little illegal, isn’t it?
Foolish hums and shrugs. "Gotta admit, it was sorta impressive. That they got on the ceiling, I mean."
Niki makes a noise of protest through her half-eaten sandwich.
"It was," Sam says, "but there's no way I'm risking him falling."
Eret takes a swig from her soda, much calmer than before. Sam leans over their shoulder to keep an eye on the kids running around the aren a— normally this time, thank god — and she glances up at him. "The lights-off thing was cool, honestly," they say. "Give you any ideas?"
Sam has been thinking about it. "Maybe," he says. "I could...hmm, I'd have to add a lot of stuff to the arena, it'd get complicated...but I could do something..."
The gears in his brain are turning faster now and Sam trails off, trying to think of a feasible way to incorporate a safe, controllable way to disable the lights on a vest. Almost like invisibility...
"Well, you have fun with that," Eret says. Sam's already wandering back to the backroom, typing away on his phone as ideas come pouring in.
"I will," he says as the closet-turned-workshop's door closes behind him. "Don't worry, I will."
It takes another hour for the kids to stop playing. Niki had gone back to doing homework (or trying to, judging by her frustrated face as she left for the backroom) so Eret's half-paying attention to the cameras, now that the kids aren't pulling crazy stunts, while the other half of their attention is focused on a particularly difficult level of Flappy Bird . He watches them finish their fifth round — the number they'd signed up for — and look at each other before knocking on the door. Eret's pretty sure Sam's still deep in his brainstorming zone, so she gets up to go meet them herself.
Eret opens the door just as the headband kid — Sapnap, according to the waiver — raises his hand to knock again. "Come on out," they say, and step aside to let the kids file past. He shows them where to put their equipment and lets them back into the lobby. He also grabs the vest that the masked kid — Dream, if they remember correctly — wore, planning to give it to Sam for the other to check over. The kids are waiting in the lobby by the time he follows them out, and Eret slides behind the counter to give them the receipt for their session.
"That was fun," Sapnap remarks as Dream pays for their game.
"Sure."
"Shut up, George," Dream laughs as they turn to leave. "You're just salty I beat you guys so bad."
"Yeah, yeah, keep thinking that," George grumbles.
“It’s true! ”
Eret has no idea how the kids were playing their game. It didn't seem to be the usual way, whatever that might be, although that could've been because of all their wall-climbing and ceiling-hanging.
"Kinda sucks we couldn't parkour on the walls at the end, though," Sapnap sighs. "That was more exciting." Dream shrugs. "Maybe not your ceiling thing, though. That was risky."
"I would've been fine."
"Maybe."
The door jingles behind the three of them as it shuts, and Eret rubs a hand over their face. The past few hours almost feel like a fever dream — no pun intended — and he can feel the last remnants of adrenaline ebbing now that the kids are gone.
They pull out their phone and open up the discord groupchat with all the other staff members of this POG Laser Tag location. There’s a little green icon on Ponk's profile picture that wasn’t there ten minutes ago, and Eret makes a mental note to ask how his visit to his mom went, when they all meet up for their weekly dinner later. But for now, he leaves a simple message.
u guys wont believe what just happened.