Nen turned on me like I’d done something to him.  “Why don’t we have this game?” he accused.

“Um,” I scratched my head.  “Because I’m about a year behind in video games?  And why…” I went with it, “Why would you care? Is there a secret fey Nintendo league or something?”

He gave me the look that said once again I had disappointed him.  “We have sought your dreamers, your poets and your singers, those who balance on the edge of madness, teetering on the precipice of that which might be. Your wizards, your explorers, and yet it is in games of make-believe that you visit us.  Every island of the Neverneverland is populated by the dreams and wishes of children.  Do you forget the crazy wars you had with your neighbors from the deck of your treehouse, and yet it was turned into a ship of tall sails, and you navigated by the depth of the golden sunlight and the whispering of waves given sound by wind-tossed leaves?  You do not understand the hope given to those who cross into the mortal realms by games such as Mass Effect, where human and alien can live in a negotiated harmony, and sometimes even things like love.  We are your monsters so often, the trolls and goblins you make into stumbling blocks, sharing the names of kith and brethen and yet even the noble elf of Arda is an elevated perversion of our true natures.”  He shook his head.  “And yet, in games, do you dream.  Your demigods, your heroes, touched by the flickering fingers of the other… how can those of us who are the other not feel the kindredness of spirit?”

I was moved, but I gathered up some of my concerns anyway.  “But the argument is that such games conquer and replace imagination, that they provide so much input that the potential for make-believe is railroaded into predestined paths where one’s stories are all the same.”

“But is that how you play?” he asked.  “Do you not make up the motivations, change the choices of your characters and give them limits so you are not playing in the same world as your friend?”

Ed chuckled.  “That’s true.  I might have defeated the great dragon the same way all my friends did because of the constraints of the story, but I made different choices up to that point.  Choices the game granted me, admittedly, but ones I justified in my own head, using my imagination.”

I made a non-committal noise.  “But you can’t make choices the game won’t let you make.”

Ed smiled.  “You could go running naked down the street, but you won’t.  How is that any different?”

“We’re closer to South Boulder Road than Colfax?” I offered, trying to make it a joke.

He gave me a similar look to Nen’s disappointed scowl.

“Honestly, the difference is that I could.  Not that I won’t.  There are unkillable NPCs, there are a lack of consequences if I go into peoples’ houses and steal their stuff while they sleep.  How many of the old games let you steal their stuff, should the programmers have put any thing in there, while they were awake and in the house talking with you?”

“You’re arguing realism,” he pointed out.  “The rules of our lives include things like thermodynamics and chemical reactions.  I think what Adam was saying is that when we throw out some of our rules, we’re closer to Faerie.”

Nen gave a partial shrug of agreement.  He was reserving something.

“Yeah, our lives have consequences,” I said.  I was surprised at how bitter it came out.

“They do,” Nen said.  He stood closer to me for a moment, looking into my eyes.  “There are always consequences with monsters.  You forget how many children we’ve led away, dazed by the glamour of the arcade.  The lights, the sounds, the confusion, they make for a fertile feeding ground.  It’s not so easy these days to have a child trip into a ring of toadstools, or stand at a crossroads in the moonlight, or even open the wrong door.”

Something about his last few words echoed in my head, and I moved away and grabbed for the arm of the awful blue couch to steady myself.  “But what about those Beyond?  You guys have no such rules.  We fake them in games and fiction, like that you can’t break your masquerade, or otherwise show yourselves to the general public, or that you bend reality to…” I stopped.  “You do that.  That part’s real enough.”

“Bend it.  Even your most puissant wizards will not break it.  Have you ever wondered why?”  He took a step away from me.

I thought it was because they couldn’t, but… maybe I was wrong.

Ed seemed to be thinking about it.  “Doc here, he closes doors.  I’ve asked him probably a dozen times if not more why he does it.  Sometimes when he’s in his cups he says because they hurt him, and I think that’s true, and sometimes he has explained that such things leak or bleed into our reality, and really, I’ve seen that.  It’s weird and I don’t like it.  It’s uncomfortable.  But basically, he’s said that it’s wrong.  I don’t mean like in a moral judgment sort of way, but in a whole cycle sort of thing, like it disrupts a natural process.”

“A virus has a natural process,” Nen said.

“As do parasites,” Ed countered.  “But we’ve given a denigration to that word for a reason.  It’s an unbalancing of the forces.  It’s a relationship that is taking advantage of someone, and that’s a violation of what is right.”  He shrugs.  “Maybe I make it too simple for your wizards and your magical creatures, but that’s kind of where I am.”

He sat on the couch. “I have to think of these things.  I’m an exterminator.  I work with the way bugs think.  I have to know that this kind likes warm, dark places, and where the warm dark places of the house might be.  It’s not unnatural for mice to get into your walls; it’s safer for them.  Better place to raise their young.  Same thing with all sorts of creepy-crawlies.”  He shrugged.  “But we’ve drawn lines in the sand.  We’ve said, ‘This is our territory and we don’t want you here because what’s good for you is not good for our kind.’  And that’s where I leave it.  I eradicate flies and mosquitoes where I can.  They bring disease.  On the other hand, I relocate bees, not spray them.  I have a friend who does the same thing for critters who haven’t gone too far into a comfort zone with humanity.  It’s like the coyote problem; they’re not scared of us, so they won’t obey the rules we expect.  What’s it they say in India?  A tiger who has gotten a taste of human won’t stop.  Not that we’re super-delicious, just that our rules are being broken – we live on the top of the food chain and anything that tries to take us down is a danger.  E, here, he draws the line in the sand.  He closes the door because we’ve got our territory and magical creatures have theirs. Maybe I’m not paying attention to the bedbugs’ feelings, but sometimes you have to decide who you’re going to put first.”

I almost clapped — that was quite the speech — but it would have sounded super patronizing.  “I think… Wizards respect rules more than other people,” I said, slowly.  “They have to work within them, integrate themselves with the limits and become really intimate with the boundaries.  If they don’t,” I had a sudden idea, “if they don’t,” I repeated, “they find themselves out of it.  They slip Between.  Could that be some of what makes other worlds?”

Nen just smiled.  He seemed less upset with me.  “Good,” he said.  “You’re starting to think.”

“I’m always thinking,” I complained.

“Yes, even when we should be drinking,” Ed said.  He opened the bags up to look at our selections.  “Hmmm,” he pondered.  He got some glasses out from the little shelf area we called our bar since, well, forever.  “Movies or, well, now I hesitate to offer them, but games?”

“First,” Nen said, “a toast.”  He pulled a small flask out of a pocket of his coat, and poured about a finger’s worth into each of our cups.  “To the interstices,” he said, passing us each a cup.  It smelled like a spiced mead.  “Where friends meet and lovers linger, to the weaver and the spinner, the wizard and the wise man, the maiden and those lovely women less than,” he waggled his eyebrows dramatically and then drank.

Ed grinned, “Lovely women and men less than,” he corrected and drank.

I just raised my cup and then drank my share.

If you have never tasted faerie wine it makes no difference how I describe it.  It wouldn’t be the same for you that it is to me.  There was no elderberry, clove, or ginger, and it burned and cooled the throat at the same time.  It lasted on the tongue, a bouquet of spice and soothe, a place of intersection and a place of too many doorways.  You could get drunk on a drop and stay sober on a gallon, but the amount Nen poured was just right.  It did not taste of alcohol at all, yet just sniffing it made me feel like I was on the philosophical drink of the night.  It seemed almost a waste to drink anything after it.

Ed damned Nen most whole-heartedly after the moment of silence that accompanied the drink.  “And furthermore, sir,” he used a set of epithets that surprised me with their vehemence.  “Now anything we taste is going to be terrible in comparison.  You pull that kind of stuff at the end of the night when you’re ready to think and then pass out.”

Nen just smiled.  “Games, then?” he asked, reaching for a controller.

After a while I couldn’t say the taste faded, but it did impact what else we had, even the glasses of water Ed’s mom brought with her (and the snack; she makes a mean queso-bean dip.)  She shared a few drinks with us before excusing herself and asking that we try not to tromp around upstairs after 3am.  What can I say?  She’s a mom.

Nen trounced me at the battle games.  As a matter of fact, I think I broadly if still vaguely accused him of cheating until I went up against Ed and he trounced me, too.  On the other hand, I’m a bit of a button masher when I don’t know the system.  (Although I’ve learned to try multiple hits of the same button and facing unusual directions to try to find power moves.)  Ed and Nen were pretty well matched, but Nen won most of the time.  We changed games about fifteen minutes before Zach was expected to make it over.

“So he’s here most of the time?” I asked Ed.

Ed nodded.  “Yeah, we’ve been talking about getting a place.”

“Sounds serious.  Moving out from mom’s and all?”

“Mum’s actually the reason I’ve stayed.  She’s been really good about Zach and I, but I know the house would be very big and very lonely.  She’s… she doesn’t need my help exactly, but she needs someone around.  Someone to cook for,” he grinned.  “Which is probably one of the reasons she likes Zach.  He may be tiny, but he can put away food like he was…”

“Don’t reach for a metaphor.  We were young men once.”

“Hey, I’m not that much older than him.”

“Wiser in the ways of the world,” I pontificated.  “Master of many secrets, conqueror of things creepy and crawling,” I began.  “Hey, did you know I have a song?”

“Doc, if someone wrote a dirty limerick for you and you set it to music, that does not qualify.”

“No, it was sung by a spriggan.  That’s got to be worth something.”

“Can you sell it on eBay?”

I didn’t look at Nen.  “Nope.”

“Then it’s not worth anything.  Greatest Spriggan Hits, volume 4, Songs of the Door Doctor.”

“Hey, I’m not making fun of you for living at home with your mom.  This was a real thing.  Like a poem.”

“I wouldn’t make fun of his mother,” Nen piped up from where he was crafting armor.  “Not a powerful witch like her.”

“A what?” I hit my head against the side of the couch.  “Oh no.  Not another one.”