When I was a kid, we had an Atari 2600. By today’s standards, of course, the games were incredibly crude. Frogger and the like.

One of the more complex games was called Adventure. Adventure actually had a plot, of sorts. Your job was to get a chalice from a castle. To get the chalice, you had to get a key. There was also a sword and a couple of dragons that you had to avoid. And a maze. You can play the game here.

There were three levels, though the story was the same. To make things more complicated, one of the rooms in Level 1 was a half-visible maze with another castle tucked away. The dragons were faster. There was another maze inside a castle. But the biggest thing was that there was a bat. The bat would fly around and steal stuff, placing whatever it previously had at the spot where it took its next item. So unlike with Level 1, you never knew exactly where things were on Level 2.

I was reminded a bit of the bat in Adventure recently because my real life has begun to emulate the game in a similar respect. Which is to say, I don’t know where a lot of things are because there is a little bat coming and going and picking things up and putting them down somewhere else. The bat’s name is, of course Lain.

So as with the sword and the chalice and the key, things sort of enter and exit the periphery at random. The other day, Lain produced the tape measure, which had been missing forever. Then, the next day, it was missing again. Batbaby had swooped in and taken it to parts unknown. As with Adventure, there is a limited range of places it could have gone. But in the main area, there are more things she could have hidden it behind and such. So it may be a while before it resurfaces again.

Thankfully, there are no dragons involved.