Author's note: All sexual acts portrayed in this story are between characters aged 18 or older. Any resemblance to non-fictional people and events is neither intended by the author nor inferred by the text.
Thank you for reading. Please enjoy.
A Girl Under Glass
It's March of 2005, my senior year of high school. The savory scent of fresh-baked pizza is hovering in the air, beneath the cigarette smoke and the cheap beer. It's just another night at the Cornerstone Pub -- everyone comes to the Cornerstone Pub. In this podunk Florida town, there's nowhere else to go for a good time.
The bar is packed and the lighting is dim -- nobody ever bothers looking too closely at the fake IDs. All that matters is having fun, spending money on pool and booze. And pinball, of course. The owner loves his pinball machines.
It's October of 2019. I'm three years into managing the Olympus Pizza joint in Jacksonville. It's my first time making it out to Chicago for the annual PinballCon. The air is thick with all manner of bells and whistles and flashing lights. Every space is packed with bodies, all leaning and rocking over the tables lined up and down every wall.
The convention hall is crowded with booths and exhibits. Some tables are restored museum pieces, decades old and still playable. Some are homebrew machines, hand-built by enthusiasts for fun and/or profit. Some are used tables looking for buyers, and some are fresh off the assembly line.
I told my staff I was coming here to check out new tables for the restaurant. But honestly, I only came here to see one.
"Theatre of Magic" is a decade old by now, and it still works perfectly. The rotating Magic Trunk, the magnets, the hidden passages and gimmicks... there was always something in this game to discover. And over it all, there's the Lady Magician looking down from the backglass, her movements animated on the dot-matrix screen and her voice piped in through the speakers.
The Lady Magician felt like a partner, or perhaps a mentor. The game and I weren't playing to beat each other; we were working together to levitate the woman, to escape from the death trap.
"Concentrate!" she'd tell me. "You have the magic!" Only this time, she's not talking to me -- she's talking to the girl who's racking up her 8X bonus multiplier while the guy next to her looks like his wallet just exploded.
I bought that exact same "Theatre of Magic" table. It's in my restaurant right now, and it still plays like a charm.
Modern cell phones, computers, and video game consoles are all built to fall apart within five or ten years at most. Video games nowadays are shipped out with game-ending glitches on day one. But pinball machines -- even the most modern ones -- were built to last for decades. Midway, Bally, Williams, Data East, Gottlieb, and so many other pinball titans are all either gone or folded into other companies, and their games have outlived them all.
Yet the last few surviving companies need drastic measures to survive. Which brought me to the booth at Howard Brothers Pinball, and the grand debut of their newest game.
I first met Agatha Mars when she moved to town in November of my freshman year. Her dad traveled a lot for work, so Aggie and her mom traveled all around the world. Finally, after 9/11, Aggie's mom decided she'd had enough of travel, so she took Aggie to live with family in town while her dad moved on.
Aggie's always the center of attention everywhere she goes. She's beautiful, she's confident, she's got stories from all over the world. (How many of them are true? Who cares?!) Whatever she wants -- lead role in the school play, captain of the debate team, whatever guy she had a thing for -- she can charm her way into getting it.
And tonight, she's at the Cornerstone Pub. She comes here at least once a week to hustle at pinball. Everyone expects a pretty girl to hustle them at pool. Nobody expects to get hustled at pinball.
Pinball companies make licensed games all the time, but the latest from HB Pinball was so insane that its announcement shook the industry: A licensed game with X+O Media, the online porn empire. Company spokesmen argued that adult-themed pinball tables were not unprecedented -- there were at least two Playboy-themed pinball tables on record, and numerous obscure EM games with softcore gimmicks.
But this would be something different. The team at HB Pinball said that they were going to take the experience of having sex with an award-winning porn star and adapt it into a pinball game. Everyone said they were crazy. Then came the announcement that none of the inserts or pictures would be explicit, so a "family" version of the table could be sold simply by swapping out the code and the video clips. Now everyone
knew
they were crazy.
Yet everyone in the expo came here to the booth. Everyone showed their IDs to the doorman, passed the beaded curtain with the "21+ ONLY" sign out front, to come try out "X+O Media with Ramona Lauder". This booth has at least a dozen tables ready for play, all of them set with the "Hardcore" code and videos, like we all knew it was meant to be played. I see at least two or three people hunched around each table, but I'm looking up at the backglass.
Ramona Lauder.
Agatha Mars.
Every lunch break, I'd hope to look into those smiling brown eyes, even for just a split-second.
Those exact same chocolate brown eyes were looking down at me from every angle. Her sweet heart-shaped face hadn't aged a wrinkle.
I sat behind her in Social Studies, her dark brown hair right in front of my face.
There's not a single grey hair to be seen.
Aggie always wears her most skintight clothes to the Cornerstone Pub, so everyone's too focused on those killer curves and that perfect tan.
She's wearing a bright pink bra and matching panties. She's gained a few pounds in the past few years, and they all went right to her curves.
I go to the table with the shortest line. While I'm waiting, I read the instructions and carefully watch the gameplay. This is standard practice for any new game. It's important to know how to score, which shots do what, and which shots tend to miss. I try not to focus on the flatscreen built directly into the playfield, under the clear coating. I try to tune out the euphoric moans coming from the speakers of every table around me.
Everyone knew Aggie was the local slut. If all the rumors are true, she's slept with everyone in the school. Her latest fling is Jimmy Andrews, getting impatient and jealous while Aggie runs up the score on "Theatre of Magic." By the time she's won her bet and taken her money, Jimmy's already gone. My hand-me-down '95 Accord isn't much, but it's a car.
I offer to drive Aggie home, but that's not where we're going. She directs me to a street of identical houses, all stuck in construction for months.