The TV’s on, as usual, though there’s no sitcoms or talk shows or Saturday morning cartoons. It may as well have be a cartoon for how much Reginald cares about the medium- but even the pistol knows better. The images on the screen are blocky and simple, in bright colors. Things tend to repeat- the screen is always centered upon the character in the middle no matter how much it moves, as stiffly as it moves.
“Grunkle Rej! Come on!” Heath calls from the couch, just as the center character wanders into a lawnmower with teeth, keels over, and explodes. “Great, now I lost a life,” Heath mutters.
“Video games certainly do make people talk about mortality weirdly,” Reginald says, floating next to the boy. He’s sitting cross-legged on the rug rather than taking the empty couch.
Heath is long faced, with brown eyes that fill with excitement when he’s possessed of it. At the moment, he just looks annoyed. “I wanted to make it to level five without losing any lives,” he mutters.
Heath presses a button and his character goes from standing in a void next to the lives count to standing in front of a shadow-drenched Cathedral under a purple sky. The character starts to move, and creatures fly down from the rafters to attack them. Heath’s ready though, puppeting the poor slave to fire at the creatures with his automatic sword. Or is it a lightsaber? The character moves deeper into the level, leaving the church and stepping into a graveyard where he’s attacked by even more creatures. They looks like crawling chairs, flying pitchforks, bouncing tires.
“I haven’t seen this game, yet,” Reginald says.
“It’s a rental. It’s called Exorcizer.”
“So the man in the game- he’s working out?”
“She’s. And not exerciser. Exorcizer. Uh- it’s a translation, from Japanese. See, you play as a Resurgam priest, going around exorcising uninanimates.”
“Uninanimates? So, you’re playing a game about killing people?”
Heath snorted, “They’re already dead, Grunkle! Or didn’t you know that?” A new tone played on the screen.
“What was that?” Reginald asked.
“I just picked up a key. I can go back to the tomb and pick up an upgrade for my killer-cross.”
“Cross? That’s not a lightsaber?”
“Haha, no, Grunkle. It’s a cross. It emits holy light when I press A.”
Reginald just watches the lady priest send more uninanimates to hell with her sword, silent. He’s seen the process done- heard the sobbing and pleading and crosses were put against uninanimates and the words spoken to make them no longer. Saw the burns, too, left on the sides of some of their vessels after.
“So, this is a game about burning the very souls out of people.”
Reginald turns his muzzle on Heath, disappointed.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that, Grunkle! It’s just a game. And it’s fun! Besides, the uninanimates in this game aren’t like you.”
“They’re evil. They’re trying to kill me.”
“They’re probably trying to kill you because you’re trying to kill them.”
Heath doesn’t answer. His character has entered a small room and is now slashing through a rush of flying knives and self-shutting wardrobes. Finally she dispatches them all and a small podium appears in the middle of the room. She picks up the item from it. “Look at this, Grunkle,” Heath says, and presses A. The lightsaber comes back on, but this time red, and snaps like a fiery whip.
Heath moves his character back to the door and says, “Nah, Grunkle. It explains it all in the opening text crawl. These uninanimates have taken over a town and now they’re killing all the people in it with knives and stuff to try to make new uninanimates.”
“Video games are moronic,” Reginald says.
“Pfft. Whatever. OK fine- they’re not really evil- they’ve just been brainwashed by the big bad, U2.”
“So you’re killing innocents?”
“Jeeeeez,” Heath presses one of the center buttons and turns on Reginald, “why are you being like this, Grunkle Rej? It’s a game. The motivations don’t matter- all that matters is that you have fun with it.”
“Well, excuse me, guns don’t have hands to play games, to we like media with proper narratives.”
“You mean like the Epic of Gilgamesh? Oh wait, you were there for that, weren’t you?”
Reginald cocks his trigger, “Watch it, kid,” but it’s a literal empty threat. He hasn’t been loaded for centuries.
Heath sticks his tongue out, “Just a few days ago I was playing Contra. I was killing brainwashed people then, too, and you didn’t say anything.”
“Oh, that was ridiculous, though! They were just-”
Just what, really, Reginald thinks to himself? What makes the act of killing an uninanimate more heinous than killing a muscle bound living man? Is it only that he’s himself uninanimate? Is it some bias on his part?
As Heath said, Uninanimates are already dead. Reginald’s never been exorcised, but he is aware every day that he’s only lucky. It was a reality that cools his steel. He may have died before, but he doesn’t want to go through it again.
Is his discomfort at some unjust thing- taking someone, who’d had a terrible experience already, and boiling their whole existence down to a joke, or a violent act? Even a fictional one.
“They’re just- not as attractive as me,” he angles his muzzle to the ceiling in a cocksure matter, “you understand.”
“Oh crimany,” Heath mutters, and unpauses the game.
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