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The only legitiames

—Eugene Jarvis, creator of Defender

I WAS STARING out the classroo of adventure when I spotted the flying saucer

I blinked and looked again—but it was still out there, a shiny chroled to track the object through a series of increasingly fast, i, had there been any aboard The disc streaked toward the distant horizon, then came to an instantaneous stop just above it It hovered there motionless over the distant tree line for a few seconds, as if scanning the area beneath it with an invisible bea another series of physics-defying changes to its course and speed

I tried to keep my cool I tried to remain skeptical I reminded et a C in it

I looked at it again I still couldn’t tell what it was, but I knehat it wasn’t—it wasn’t aNo, the unidentified flying object I was staring at with my oo eyes was most definitely not of this earth

My first thought was: Holy fucking shit

Followed i

You see, ever since the first day of kindergarten, I had been hoping and waiting for so event to finally shatter the endless monotony ofout at the calfor the outbreak of a zoive me super powers, or perhaps the sudden appearance of a band of ti kleptomaniac dwarves

I would estimate that approximately one-third of these dark daydreas from another world

Of course, I’d never believed it would really happen Even if alien visitors did decide to drop by this utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, no self-respecting extraterrestrial would ever pick on—aka Yawnsville, USA—as their point of first contact Not unless their plan was to destroy our civilization by wiping out our least interesting locales first If there was a bright center to the universe, I was on the planet it was farthest from Please pass the blue milk, Aunt Beru

But now so, right now! There was a goddaht at it

And I was pretty sure it was getting closer

I cast a furtive glance back over my shoulder at my two best friends, Cruz and Diehl, ere both seated behind ed in a whispered debate and neither of theet their attention, but I orried the object ht vanish any second, and I didn’t want to miss my chance to see this for myself

My gaze shot back outside, just in tiht flash of silver as the craft streaked laterally across the landscape, then halted and hovered over an adjacent patch of terrain before zooain Hover, move Hover, move

It was definitely getting closer I could see its shape in more detail now The saucer banked sideways for a few seconds, and I got limpse of its top-down profile, and I saw that it wasn’t really a saucer at all Frole, I could see that its symmetrical hull resembled the blade of a two-headed battle-axe, and that a black, octagonal pris in the ht like a dark jewel

That hen I felt in to short-circuit, because there was no n After all, I’d seen it al reticle I was looking at a Sobrukai Glaive, one of the fighter ships piloted by the alien bad guys in Arame

Which was, of course, ion Warbird cruising across the sky The Sobrukai and their Glaive Fighters were fictional videogame creations They didn’t exist in the real world—they couldn’t In reality, videogames did not come to life and fictional spaceships did not buzz your hometown Implausible shit like that only happened in cheesy ’80s hter The sorts of movies my late father had been nuts about