Trial of Rust: Ibis

[all arabic can be hovered over for a translation]
[also, trigger warning for the rest of this thread for a shitty parent]

He knew, obviously, that is was a video game. It wasn't his real mother stood there, really staring him down with fire in her eyes. It was am amalgamation of textures and polygons that looked like her. But, admittedly, she wasn't what was frightening him. It was the fact that she was here at all, and not some pre-planned frightening thing, some zombie or dracula, some pokemon, even, a gengar or otherwise. He knew that this was deep dive VR, the real shit, not for babies or people of sensitive dispositions and all the other stuff they put on the box, but... how did it know her? How did it know what she was to him - moreso than his mother - and how had it made her so perfectly? Everything she was wearing, even, the way she styled her hijab, the shoes, the cardigan... it was too real for comfort.

"What the hell..." He starts, and she takes a silent step forward, then another. Alongside her crept that ever-growing rot along the floor, taking whole chunks of the iron stairs in front of him with it. "Stop, mom, help me with this" He looks up at her, but her eyes don't show anything. Ibis isn't sure of her face - is she frowning, or is she even anything at all? It shifts in the haze of the darkness around them, that infinite nothingness that surrounds the falling staircase.

She'd always said, too many times, over and over - if you must speak, speak like an Egyptian. Even though, Pace had once noted, she had married a white Christian guy who point-blank refused to learn any Arabic, not even enough to say he loved her at the wedding, and Pace had received a smack for it. Could she really just be being obstinate, even in a situation like this? He wouldn't put it past her.

"ماما من أرجوك" He held his hands up, feeling his leg tremble slightly as another chunk of heavy iron fell from the staircase, yet closer. "Please" He takes a shaky step, backwards and up. "يجب أن أذهب. ساعدني أرجوك" . Like a child, fallen and knee open, bleeding, he holds his hands out to her and in her eyes, he can just about make out a memory.

Pace, maybe three or four, crying after falling off of a slide in the park. From the top, no less, the kind of fall that made surrounding parents collectively oh dear!. He'd ran to his mother, who had been talking on the phone and not seen.

"Mama!" Amongst wails, the words found their way out, and continued in the back-of-the-throat way that words did when covered in tears. "My arm!" And she'd finished her sentence, looked down at him and shook her head.
"In Arabic." She had replied, one word, heavy and hard like the playground floor, except the floor had been a sudden shock, and his mother's temper was constant, heavily predictable. Pace had wondered, years later, did the other parents there even notice her lack of care?

It had been his dad, that evening, coming home when Pace was supposed to be asleep, sneaking in to kiss him on the forehead while he slept. When Pace had stirred, only sleeping light from the ache in his arm, had spoken to him some about what had happened. When he'd taken him to the hospital, they'd found out it was a greenstick fracture.

His dad took him for pancakes the day after, with Pace towed along in the passenger seat of a crappy, rusty car that barely started, one arm in a thick cast.

When they got home, he'd overheard his mom chastising his dad for spending money on pancakes when they'd already spent enough on the damn hospital bills.

"Ah..." Ibis swallowed hard. In Arabic, in English, hell, if he'd learnt Ancient Egyptian somehow and asked her, it wouldn't have worked. It wasn't about the polygons or the programming, it was about the faulty material is was based on. She stepped forward again, ignoring him, or perhaps just entirely refusing to hear him.

If he was going to do this, he would have to do it alone, and fast, and facing the other way. Once again, just like in college, Ibis turns his back on his mother and runs as fast as he can up the stairs. He had to get the fuck out of here, and now.