Side Quest

The smell hit Jamie first—not Mum's usual vanilla candles or the lavender fabric softener she used on his special shirts, but something metallic and wrong, like when he'd bitten his tongue during that seizure last year. He pressed his ear to the bathroom door, counting the gaps between her wheezes. Too long. Way too long.

"Jamie, love." Her voice sounded like paper tearing. "My inhaler... the blue one... it's empty."

No blue inhaler in her handbag. Just the usual chaos: seventeen Tesco receipts, three dead biro pens, and her oyster card with the chip half hanging off.

The landline sat silent on the kitchen counter, its cord severed where Dad had yanked it too hard during Tuesday's row about the electric bill. Jamie touched the frayed wires—exactly twelve copper strands, like tiny lightning bolts frozen mid-strike.

"It's like that stealth game you play," Mum had wheezed when the inhaler ran out yesterday. "Simple mission objective: get to the chemist, avoid detection, complete the task. You're good at those games, aren't you, love?"

She'd made it sound possible.

Now, standing in their tiny kitchen with its peeling magnolia paint and the boiler that clanked like a dying robot, Jamie understood this wasn't a game at all. This was Level Hell on Nightmare difficulty with no save points and no respawn.

He pulled on his grey hoodie—the soft one without scratchy labels, the one that made him feel invisible when the hood was up. Checked his pocket: £11.43 in exact change. He'd counted it nineteen times since breakfast.

The emergency prescription was waiting at Boots on the high street. Twelve minutes away if you were normal. For Jamie, it might as well have been on Mars.

New level loading. Objective: reach street level without triggering sensory overload.

The lift doors opened with a mechanical groan that felt like fingernails on a blackboard. Someone had been smoking in here despite the No Smoking signs. The smell of cheap tobacco mixed with cleaning chemicals and something organic and wrong.

The automatic doors whooshed open, and London crashed over him like a wave.

Traffic noise—cars, lorries, a motorcycle with a busted exhaust. Sirens overlapping and echoing off the tower blocks until they became a wall of sound that made his teeth ache. Someone's radio playing drill music with bass that thumped against his chest.

Sound maze level. Find the path through the chaos.

Jamie pulled his hood up and hunched his shoulders, trying to create a smaller target for the sensory bombardment. The first obstacle appeared almost immediately: teenagers loitering outside the off-licence, passing around a bottle in a paper bag.

Boss battle approaching. Multiple hostiles. No backup.

"Oi, where you going, little man?" called out the tallest one, a girl with bleached hair and track marks on her arms.

Jamie kept walking, eyes fixed on the pavement cracks. One shaped like lightning, one like a screaming mouth—

"Proper mental, innit?" observed another voice, younger, crueler.

Jamie's hands started their telltale tremor. The world was getting too bright, too loud. But there—a narrow alley between the off-licence and the curry house.

Stealth route identified. Initiating flanking maneuver.

He slipped into the alley before the group could react. Behind him, laughter and crude comments about "spastic kids," but the words were already fading.

Level completed. Proceeding to next objective.

The high street was sensory warfare—LED displays blazing, music leaking from every doorway, competing genres creating cacophony. The Boots was visible at the far end, its blue cross like a beacon. But halfway there, disaster: a construction site where they were digging up the pavement.

Pneumatic drills fragmenting concrete, jackhammers pulverizing stone, metal scraping against metal in harmonics that bypassed his ears and went straight to his pain centers.

Route blocked. Alternative path required.

A worker in a hi-vis vest noticed Jamie standing frozen. "Can't get through here, mate. Road's closed for another hour. You'll have to go round."

Risk assessment: unknown route preferable to sensory shutdown.

The detour took him through streets he'd only seen from bus windows—Victorian terraces converted into flats, some maintained, others showing decay. He passed a corner shop where an elderly Sikh man was arranging fruit displays with obsessive precision. Each apple positioned exactly three centimeters from its neighbor, oranges grouped by size with mathematical exactitude—the same methodical patterns Jamie used when organizing his game collection.

Their eyes met—two people who understood that the world was too chaotic without imposed order.

"You all right there, beta?" the shopkeeper called out, his voice carrying Punjab and forty years of London disappointment. "Look like you're carrying something heavy."

Jamie stopped, caught by the recognition in the man's eyes. "Getting medicine. For my mum."

The man—Raj, according to the faded sign—set down the apple he'd been repositioning for the third time. His expression shifted, and something flickered across his face that looked almost like relief.

"The chemist on the high street?" When Jamie nodded, Raj's shoulders sagged. "Construction's got the main road blocked. Been going on four weeks now."

He glanced back at his shop where a framed photo sat beside the till: a young boy with serious eyes and the same careful way of holding his hands that Jamie recognized.

"My grandson," Raj said quietly. "Haven't seen Arjun in months. Not since I made a mistake thinking I was helping."

The words came out flat, but Jamie could hear the guilt underneath.

"There's a back way," Raj continued, disappearing into his shop. He returned with a hand-drawn map on receipt paper, lines drawn with obsessive precision. "Through the estate, past the community center. I know because I've walked it myself, looking for someone."

Jamie studied the map, noting how Raj had marked potential hazards: "Teenagers usually gather here after 3pm," "Quiet path—usually empty."

"Why are you helping me?"

Raj's smile was complicated. "Maybe if I help someone else's grandson get where he needs to go, the universe will send someone to help mine find his way home. Superstitious nonsense, probably."

Map acquired. Quest guidance updated.

The alternative route was everything Raj had promised—quieter, manageable. Jamie moved through residential streets where the only sounds were distant televisions and occasional passing cars. His breathing settled, his hands stopped trembling.

Status: stable. Continuing toward objective.

The final approach required crossing the high street at its busiest point—a sensory gauntlet of traffic and urban chaos. But the quiet detour had recharged his systems enough to handle the assault.

Final level. Boss battle imminent.

Boots' automatic doors whooshed open into air-conditioned artificial calm. The pharmacy counter stood at the back like the final boss chamber. Behind it, a woman in her fifties with tired eyes was processing prescriptions with NHS-mandated efficiency.

"Next," she called out, not looking up.

Jamie approached, his prepared speech evaporating. "Emergency prescription. For Maria Santos. Asthma inhaler."

The pharmacist—Sandra, according to her name badge—looked up, taking in his hood, his obvious anxiety. There was a small photo tucked behind her badge: a young woman in graduation robes who shared Sandra's eyes but none of her exhaustion.

"ID?" she asked, professional but not unkind.

Jamie's stomach dropped. Of course there would be requirements.

"I don't have any. It's for my mum. She can't breathe properly. I'm all she's got today."

Sandra studied his face, her fingers drumming against the counter. Her hand moved unconsciously to the photo behind her badge.

"How old are you, love?"

"Fourteen."

"Maria Santos, Flat 7B, Millfield Gardens?"

"Yes."

Sandra glanced toward the back where her supervisor was dealing with a delivery, then back at Jamie. "My daughter Emma," she said quietly, nodding at the photo. "Finished her pharmacy degree last year. I was so proud."

She paused, her voice steady but her eyes bright. "She's getting help now. Third time. Makes you wonder if following all the rules actually protects anyone."

She turned to her computer, fingers flying over keys. "Blue Ventolin inhaler for Maria Santos. That'll be £9.20. Next time, tell your mum to call ahead—we can usually sort something out."

Transaction completed. Primary objective achieved.

Jamie counted out his money with shaking hands. £11.43 minus £9.20 left him with £2.23 for the bus home—enough to complete the return journey without walking through the urban battlefield again.

Mission accomplished. Initiating extraction protocol.

The journey home passed in controlled urgency. The bus was sensory chaos—teenagers playing music from phones, conversations in half a dozen languages—but Jamie held the inhaler like a talisman, proof he could survive outside his controlled environment when survival mattered.

"Mum?" he called out, unlocking the door to Flat 7B.

"Jamie?" Her voice came from the bedroom, still labored but stronger. "Where did you go, love? I was worried sick..."

He found her sitting up in bed, worry lines carved deep around her eyes. "Got your inhaler."

Mum stared at the paper bag, then at Jamie. "How did you... you went all that way by yourself?"

"I followed the game plan. Like you said—avoid detection, complete the objective."

"But the crowds, the noise, all those things that usually..."

"I managed."

Mum's eyes filled with tears as she used the inhaler, breathing deep for the first time in days. She pulled him close, and he could feel her heart beating against his chest.

"You did something today that most people couldn't manage," she said quietly, her voice thick with pride and something that looked like fear. "But Jamie, love, you can't just disappear like that. I woke up and you were gone, and I thought..."

She paused, breathing still labored despite the medication. "I thought I'd failed you so completely that you'd rather face the world alone than stay here with me."

"You didn't fail me."

"I'm supposed to protect you from all of this—the noise, the chaos, the people who don't understand. And today I couldn't even manage something as simple as keeping track of my medication."

Her self-recrimination was as methodical as everything else about their life together. Jamie recognized the pattern because he did the same thing when his systems failed.

"I did what needed doing," he said simply.

"But what if something had happened? What if I'd sent you into danger because I couldn't be the mother you needed?"

The questions hung between them, highlighting the fundamental contradiction: her need to protect him from a world that didn't accommodate his differences, his growing need to prove he could navigate that world despite them.

That night, as Mum's breathing settled into normal rhythm and the flat filled with peaceful sounds of crisis averted, Jamie lay in bed thinking about the day's journey. He thought about Raj's mathematical fruit displays, about Sandra's unconscious touch of her daughter's photo, about his own ability to navigate chaos when chaos became the only option.

Some people might call his success luck. Jamie called it proof that sometimes the worst person for a mission was exactly the right person—that sometimes surviving meant playing on the hardest difficulty until you developed skills you didn't know you possessed.

In his pocket, Raj's hand-drawn map felt like evidence of kindness existing in unexpected places. Tomorrow, maybe he'd walk that route again, not because he had to, but because he could.

But for now, he listened to Mum breathe, counted the steady rhythm of her recovery, and drifted toward sleep with the satisfied exhaustion of someone who had ventured into hostile territory and returned with exactly what he'd been sent to find.

Outside his window, London hummed its complex symphony—sirens and car horns, the endless pulse of eight million people trying to survive in an urban maze that demanded constant adaptation. And somewhere in that vast metropolitan orchestra, a fourteen-year-old boy had learned that courage wasn't the absence of fear—it was the decision to act despite it, to trust in his ability to navigate systems designed for neurotypical minds, and to believe that sometimes the universe provided exactly the right NPCs at exactly the right moments.

The inhaler sat on Mum's bedside table, catching streetlight through thin curtains, its blue plastic gleaming like a small victory. But whether Jamie's urban odyssey had permanently expanded his operational parameters, whether Mum's gratitude would translate into new freedoms or new protective restrictions, whether Raj would become a recurring ally or just a benevolent memory—these questions hung in the flat's familiar air like possibility, like the setup for adventures yet to be undertaken.

After all, some side quests don't end—they just unlock access to the next level.