My brother and I are in a huge retail warehouse. We spend time looking around, trying to purchase a particular Super Nintendo game my brother wants. We manage to find several copies of the game–many of which are just being unloaded, still shrink-wrapped–but we cannot figure out how to purchase it; there are no check-out registers in this warehouse. This does not appear to be a place for shopping, yet no one seems to care that we are perusing the aisles.
My brother finally asks one of the people working: this man in a suit pulls out a laptop and offers to ring us up, with a small $0.20 fee to cover data transfer costs. My brother explores the warehouse to find what he wants and returns with a chocolate chip cookie! We decide to search for more cookies only to learn that most of the cookies come from a hidden cookie volcano deep beneath the warehouse, through a dangerous path. The workers try and dissuade us, but we decide to go for it.
As soon as I open the door, I hear a familiar voice as I see the red metallic image of Roberto–the knife-wielding robot from the cartoon Futurama–charging at me. I barely manage to keep the door shut on him, and eventually he goes away. Going down the stairs we meet and join Yoshi, the small dinosaur, who helps us navigate. The first several rooms we cross resemble two-dimensional side-scroller games, as we have to carefully jump over obstacles, climb barriers, and avoid enemies moving in predictable patterns.
We soon continue to a more dungeon-like journey through rooms, meeting more familiar people (including friends from Minnesota) and finding all sorts of interesting and potentially useful items. We journey deeper and deeper beneath the warehouse, never certain how far this elusive cookie volcano lay; nevertheless, though we cannot say when we will arrive or what lurks beyond, at least we are prepared for when the time finally comes.
Jacob Haqq-Misra
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