Leo hopped down from the slide. He walked through the wet sand with a swagger that was three parts bravado and one part toddler needing a nap. He stopped a foot from me, tilted his head, and grinned. “Everything.”
“Report,” I whispered into my wrist-comm.
“What are your demands?” I asked.
Maya tugged Leo’s sleeve. “Leo? I don’t wanna press it. I like my sandbox.”
I smiled. “Now, Captain, you learn the hardest pirate skill of all. Negotiation.” LS-Land.issue.06.Little.Pirates.lsp-007
My blood chilled. The Big Red Button. It wasn’t a real button. It was a metaphor—a dormant subroutine in LS-Land’s core code that, if activated by a sufficiently strong imaginative will, would reset the entire simulation to zero. All worlds, all progress, all memories. A blank slate.
The sky cleared. The pudding sea evaporated into a gentle, normal pond. The ship creaked back into a playground fixture. Leo hopped down from the slide
Subject: Post-Incident Psychological Evaluation (P.I.P.E.) Evaluator: Dr. Aris Thorne, LS-Land Child Psychodynamics Division Incident Code: Little Pirates (LS-Land.issue.06)