"Hey, who's got the stuff?"
'The stuff', enough of it to fill a small ziploc bag with a shared pipe included, is hurled at the despondent youth's face. Seven children, most of them stoned off of their asses. All sitting on the bare ground to form a circle, somewhere in the woods on the outskirts of the summer camp they were attending.
"I don't get it," The saucy redhead wearing a bike helmet and a pair of skinny jeans says, fondling a stone she had plucked off of the ground in one hand. "Why can't everyone just get along, you know? And stop fighting and shouting all the time?"
"Yeah, I know what you mean." A boy in the group with messy brown hair and a pair of googles set crookedly on his forehead agrees, grabbing the girl by her waist with one arm. "Everybody gets a turn with the stuff. It's totally fair. Right, Izzy?"
'Izzy', short for his age and with a head of blood red color hair, is too occupied with rolling his most recently retrieved bundle of the 'stuff' inside of a small, thin piece of paper.
"Spliff man, huh?" A boy with spiky blonde hair wearing a dark green sleeveless turtleneck says, his eyes casting a confused look at him. "Since when were you so classy?" He laughs.
The sound of a stream babbling not too far away cut into the conversation. Yes, these kids were at a camp enjoying the splendor of nature alright, but not in a way at all advertised in any of the camp brochures.
"I hope this doesn't ruin my complexion." The taller of the two girls in the group, with long, light brown hair and wearing an outlandish pink cowboy hat and dress, worries aloud.
Izzy has his first puff of the makeshift spliff and and sighs deeply.
The youngest of the group; a little boy no more than nine years old with blonde hair wearing a green hat unlike any hat I've ever seen before, giggles until he breaks out into a coughing fit.
"T.K., what are you doing here?" Spiky blonde asks him, his voice lacking any kind of persuasion. Damn, this kid was high. "It isn't safe here!" He adds after a moment, as if he had just remembered.
The saucy redhead mentioned earlier crawls into the goggle boy's lap, and wraps her arms around him.
"Relax, Matt. It can't hurt him just to watch. He's fine." Goggle boy reassures him, then automatically continues to nuzzle the redhead's neck.
A tall, lanky blue-haired boy, wearing glasses, who had been quietly watching without participating at all in either the smoking of the stuff or the lousy excuse for a conversation, suddenly has something to say. "Actually, Tai. Have you never heard of second hand smoke? And besides, I don't think there's anything good about what you guys are doing." He stands up. "We should return to the camp, before a counselor finds us."
The redhead turns her head to the side to address, while goggles continues to make sweet fart noises with her neck. "Well then, prove it."
"Prove what?"
"That it's bad...that the stuff is ba- Tai!" She interrupts herself to slap at goggle's hand, when he was mere seconds away from copping a feel.
"Well, for starters, look at what it's doing to you guys." Blue haired boy exclaims, adjusting his glasses.
The girl with the pink cowboy hat nudges him in the side and hands him the bag of the stuff. "Don't be such a wet blanket, Joe. It's your turn."
Joe examines the bag and, feeling defeated, sits down again with a heavy moan.
"Hey guys, I have this idea. Hear me out." Tai announces from beyond the shoulder of the horny redhead. "What if there were like, creatures, made of data, who lived in a world that exists on the internet."
"You mean like Pokemon?" T.K. asks excitedly.
"Yeah. But more like..." He glances at a small plastic object peeking out of the redhead's pocket, its tiny screen shimmering in the limited sunlight. "Like Tamagotchi. This thing Sora's got in her pocket." He snatches it and holds it up for the others to see, as if it were some sacred and powerful object.
"That's just stupid." Matt comments quickly, then grabs the object from him. "You've had one too many puffs, I think."
"Well theoretically, such a place could very well exist." Izzy interjects, pointing his spliff at Matt like an incriminatory finger. "An artificial world, made entirely of computer data, arranged in an infinite amount of different strings to create a fully immersive, pseudo-organic environmen-"
"Cut it out, you're making my head hurt." Pink cowboy hat cries and tosses her head back and forth.
"Poor Mimi. I think you just caused her head to explode." The redhead says, still mounted atop Tai, smiling. "But I get what you're saying. Like, a except, the monsters are alive?"
"Precisely." Izzy says, then takes another puff.
"And they'd be cute, right Sora?" Mimi asks, gripping unto the girl's arm like a child.
"Sure."
"Not just cute, though. Some of them would be real tough, and nasty. Even ugly. Dinosaurs, wolves, giant birds...sea serpents..." Tai yawns, the true effects of the stuff finally taking hold of him.
"And there would be stop signs in the trees! And phone booths on the beach!" T.K. adds, smiling as though proud of an achievement he had made.
While this discussion goes on, the bag of stuff is still being passed around. It goes from Tai, to Sora, to Mimi, to Izzy, skips Joes, to Matt, skips T.K., then starts again back at Tai. This goes on until the last of the stuff is spent and by that point, the youngsters are far from conscious enough to notice, and their eyes have been boiled redder with each puff, as their shared words became more and more scarce. The children drift off to sleep in that cool, peaceful place, and will lay there until counselors discover them later that afternoon; overcome by joy at the prospect of children going off on expeditions to explore nature all by themselves.