The Quillan Games by D.J. MacHale Read Free Book Online

way more sophisticated than anything from Second Earth. All the games had some version of flashing colored lights to get the customers’ attention and entice themto play. The weird electronic music added a feeling of excitement and fantasy. The arcade was on three levels. I was on the bottom and could look up to see two more balconies full of games.
    Sorry for sounding like a kid here, but this was the most awesome arcade I had ever seen. No, that I could ever imagine. If this existed on Second Earth, it would clean up. It was gaming nirvana.
    Oddly though, it wasn’t very crowded. Most of the excitement and noise came from the games themselves, and the music. A quick guesstimate told me that there might have been about thirty people hanging around. That wasn’t a lot for such a huge arcade. On Second Earth this place would be packed. Only a few people were actually playing. Others watched. Once I got used to the environment, I could take a closer look at the people. I wandered through the games, observing the people. First, I’m happy to say that they weren’t spiders. Check that one off the list of scary possibilities. They looked every bit as human as I did, which meant they probably weren’t robots, either. Things were looking up. There looked to be a mix of different races, too. Some had dark skin with blond hair, others were fairly pale with darker hair. I saw heavyset people, and older guys, and . . . I guess there’s no need to keep describing the specifics. Bottom line was that the people of Quillan looked every bit as normal and diverse as the people of Second Earth.
    As normal as this appeared, I did notice some things that struck me as odd. For one thing, there were no kids. You’d think the place would be a kid magnet. There were women and men, some old, some older. But no kids. I noticed the clothing they wore was kind of, I don’t know, boring. There wasn’t a whole lot of style going on. Not that I’m the best judge of that, but when you see a bunch of people together inthe same place, you’d expect to see a big range of clothing styles. Not there. Everyone wore some kind of variation of pants and plain shirts. Some wore jackets. Some tucked their shirts in, others didn’t. There wasn’t much difference in style between the men and women, either. I didn’t see any dresses or skirts. I don’t mean to say they all wore the exact same thing. They didn’t. There was some variation in color, but the clothing all tended to edge toward the darker side, with muted shades of green and blue. There was lots of gray, too. But nothing bright or lively or patterned. And many of the pants were just plain black. Their shoes didn’t jump out at me either. They mostly appeared to be plain and black. I wasn’t sure what conclusion to draw from this, other than that the people of Quillan had absolutely no sense of style or fashion. I suppose there are worse things to say. They could have been mutant spider robots.
    I wasn’t worried about being the youngest person there, but I was self-conscious about my clothes. The long-sleeved, bright red shirt with the diagonal black stripes was kind of radical for this dull crowd. But there was nothing I could do about it. I had to trust that whoever put the clothes at the flume knew what they were doing.
    As I made my way through the arcade, there was something else that I started to realize. This was a bright and colorful place full of games. I’d been to plenty of arcades before, and I always felt that there was as much energy coming from the people as from the loud games. But here on Quillan, nobody seemed to be having any fun. Just the opposite. The people playing the games were focused. Seriously focused. There was no laughter, no screams of surprise or disappointment, no victory cries. These people were playing with serious intensity. They may have been running through an electronic maze, or