"Okay," Donovan said after his character respawned, "let's try this again."

Dylan glanced over at their table and found him, Kolya, and Lorkis still trying to regain their composure. Dylan turned back to his screen as Grish caught up with him and Nishara.

"At least we all respawned in our own choppers," Kolya said, pausing to wipe tears from her good eye.

"Without clowns, too." Donovan tossed her a lopsided grin. "That thing with the clowns is too fucked-up for me."

"Clown phobia?"

"Eh, I dunno if it's a full-on phobia, but clowns have always made my skin crawl." Donovan sucked in another breath and cringed as he flicked the joysticks on his controller. "Augh, I almost flew into an electrical tower!"

"I think I'm getting the hang of this. I'm catching up with 'em."

"Better split up, then, so she doesn't take us all out with one shot." Grishnag blushed and laughed softly. "I think one embarrassing moment per game is enough for me."

"Hah!" Dylan tried not to laugh himself sick as he remembered the sight of Grish's character bouncing off one vehicle after another. "For me, life in general is one embarrassing moment after another. Well, it was, before we all met, anyway."

"Hopefully you're having fewer of those, these days, and have replaced them with frequent orgasms." Grish winked and aimed an air-smooch at him.

"Oh, definitely." He flicked his right hand down to quickly adjust the front of his pants in case his teenage hormones combined with the boosters and the image her comment put in his mind triggered an insta-boner.

Nishara glanced at him, fired off a smoldering smirk, and uncoiled just enough to slide the end of her tail slowly up his leg.

Uh-oh.

Nish eased her tail onto his lap and rubbed the tip over his zipper.

Oh, boy. He grinned and tugged on his collar. Probably should sneak away for a quick hump, anyway, before dinner. Thanks to the boosters, he needed to blast off at least a half-dozen times every day to avoid unpleasant side-effects, and the last time had been before the passengers boarded this morning. He began making plans to slip away with Nishara and Grishnag at the first opportunity.

He stroked Nish's tail and glanced back up to his screen -- just in time to find a crowd of NPC pedestrians directly in front of him. He gasped as his bike slammed into them, knocking them aside like bowling pins, and then plowed into the building behind them. His character shot off the bike, slammed face-first into the wall, and crumpled to the sidewalk. The motorcycle bounced off the wall, flew over the pedestrians as the survivors picked themselves up, landed in the street, and scraped along the pavement.

The whoosh of a rocket firing nearby caught his attention and he sighed.

"Well … goodbye, cruel world."

The rocket zipped down from the top of his screen and drilled a truck as it swerved around Dylan's bike. The blast launched the bike straight back to him, and it exploded in his face. Nearby NPCs screamed in terror and ran for cover as his corpse spun into the air and tumbled back down.

"Gotcha!" Kolya giggled.

At the left edge of his screen, an NPC wearing overalls and no shirt bolted in front of an old truck, yelling in a thick hillbilly accent, "Fuuuuuuuck me!" The truck thumped the hillbilly into an intersection, where Nishara's character ran over him as she tried to escape Kolya's chopper.

Everyone howled with laughter. Lorkis slumped over, propped his forehead on one hand, and tried to take a breath.

"This is the most -- hoooooaaaaaap!"

Dylan respawned just in time to watch Lorkis's helicopter plow into a clump of cars and trucks. Its rotor shredded several bystanders before the chopper exploded and set off a chain-reaction of detonating vehicles.

Nishara's eyes nearly popped out of their sockets. "Eeeeeeep!"

The blast from an exploding septic truck knocked her sideways and set her character on fire.

"Oh, no, I'm burning!" She stared at the screen and giggled. "Please tell me there's a river nearby."

Her character died and flopped off the motorcycle.

"Never mind."

"Whoa!" Grish snort-laughed. "I got hit by a flaming tire from one of the cars that just blew up."

"You'll need to double back and pick up the package," Nishara said once she'd caught her breath. "I dropped it when I died so anticlimactically, and I reappeared too far away to grab it."

"And it's right in the middle of all those burning cars."

Another whoosh came from the speakers, followed by another explosion. She shrugged as Kolya's chopper soared over her character's charred corpse.

"Well, I guess that's not a problem anymore."

"Wooooo!" Kolya let out another burst of laughter. "Where has this game been all my life?"