The Game: Chapter 4

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Chapter 4

"What?"

James stuck fingers in his ears to clear them out; they were still ringing. Maybe he had heard wrong.

"I only thought it," Kanade said again, looking the way a child might if a real tyrannosaurus came stomping out of the television during Barney and Friends.

James needed to sit down. The mossy carpet of the glade was cool. He crossed his legs, put his elbows on his knees, and rubbed his face into his hands.

"How can that be? Don't say magic."

Kanade sat down a few feet away. She drew her knees up and put her chin on them. "What should I say, then?"

"I don't know, but if you're telling me I read your thoughts, magic isn't a good enough explanation."

"Hmm," Kanade said, chin still resting on her knees. "Hmm."

"Don't hmm," James said. "Are you messing with me?"

"Why would I be?"

"The alternative is madness."

"This universe isn't built on normal rules, right?"

True. The game itself could read minds. James was on his couch at home, wearing a device that produced sensory inputs real enough to persuade him they were coming from his own body. Everything was indistinguishable from the real world, except for people flying on brooms and phosphorescent hexapedal amphibious lizard-mammals. But that was just a matter of belief systems; nothing was internally inconsistent.

"Even so," James said, slowly, "it can't be mind reading."

"It can't?" A slight smile twitched beneath the surface of Kanade's features.

"Not from a legal standpoint. Although the game is reading our thoughts, it can't act on that information. It's just a game. But if the information passed to a person, they could use it." James ran a hand through his hair at the enormity of the implication. "What if you were a stockbroker thinking insider information? Or a husband planning a visit to the girlfriend while the wife is in Mexico? Or a kid remembering where you hid your secret diary?"

"Kids can't play Shattered Land," Kanade said, smiling openly now. "You have to be eighteen."

James muttered under his breath for a few seconds before saying, "You get the point."

"I do, yes." Kanade started toying with the ends of her hair.

"It isn't mind reading."

"I never said it was."

"This is another test. Seeing whether I can figure out what it was."

"You wrong me," Kanade said, clutching her chest as if stabbed. "But you're right." She smiled. "It isn't mind reading, but it's still amazing. There aren't many mentalists around, so I'm limited in what I can tell you. The more you figure out for yourself, the better."

James was listening with one ear, but his brain was still grinding through explanations and lit upon one buried in a psychology textbook he had read before leaving university.

"Subvocalization," he said.

"Bingo!"

"My senses were so heightened that I could hear worms in the earth. It's not a stretch to imagine I was hearing subaudio cues you were projecting. Visualizing the words would probably cause precise enough subvocalizations to sound like speech with sensitive detection."

Kanade started clapping. "I have to admit it, I'm impressed. Part mentalist, part Sherlock Holmes. You're going to be a scary guy once you get the hang of it."

"I don't want to be a scary guy."

Kanade inched forward on her knees. "I know. That's probably why you have an ability like this." She put a hand on his shoulder and looked him gravely in the eye. "Remember! With great power comes great responsibility."

"Okay, Uncle Ben. Am I a superhero now?"

That small smile crept back over her face. "Do you want to be?"

"Vader was cooler than Luke."

"True." Kanade sat back on her heels. "Do you want to be strong, or do you want to be kind?"

In one tiny and perfectly clear fragment of time's crystal, James saw his life as a steel spiderweb, each strand a responsibility: some threads led to jobs, some to people, some to debts; many led to room 459 at Joseph Stenton; still others to things he had never been conscious of before. But all were weights, dragging him into the dark.

What would happen if he released all those strands? Was a spider without a web homeless and lost, or was it new and strange and alive?

"What if I just want to be free?" he said.

Kanade's smile blossomed again. "Then you've come to the right place."

***

James was still sitting in the moss when Kanade's phone started to ring. The ringtone was the frustratingly familiar tune she had been humming earlier.

"Hello?" The squawking reply made Kanade wince and hold the phone away from her ear. "Yes. I can hear you, stop shouting. Yes. The upper forest. What, really? Okay. Will do."

"Donald," James said, as she clicked her phone off.

"You could hear him?"

"They could probably hear him back in the city."

Her voice lowered several registers and took on a more pronounced accent. "You ain't screwin around listenin to birds and shit again, are you?"

"And you said yes."

"Well, it was mostly true." Kanade laughed. Then she sighed. "You're about get tossed in the deep end before you learn to swim."

"That makes you my life jacket."

"You might be more right than you know." Kanade clapped her hands. "Wigglewaggle, come boy!"

The creature zoomed out of the brush and over to James, was up his pant leg in a flash, and came to roost on top of his head.

James crossed his eyes to peer upward at the blue snout looming over. "Does he like me, or does he just like making fun of me?"

Kanade shrugged. "He and I feel the same."

"And that would be..."

"Both." She smiled and set off into the underbrush.

While they walked, Kanade had James bring out his phone and exchange IDs. As soon as that was complete, the phone beeped.

You have been invited to join an operational unit. Accept / Decline?

When James accepted, a list of names appeared. "These are the people in the unit?"

"Yes," Kanade said, pushing through a stand of ferns.

James followed behind, watching for whiplashing undergrowth. "Joining a unit does what exactly?"

"It keeps us together when we pass into the instance."

"I don't get it."

"It'll be easier to just see it," Kanade said, shoving aside a final screen of branches and bursting into the open. "Ah, here we go."

The forest ended abruptly. Soil gave way to a rocky outcropping that thrust into open sky. James squinted into the sun, but it was his nose he wanted to shut. Even from this distance and atop a cliff, the wafting stench of things that were dying was so strong it had a taste.

Nearer the cliff's edge, groups of people were chatting or poking at their phones. Bottomless magical containers and terrifying weaponry to fill them with were standard issue, as were bizarre outfits straight out of a fantasy epic. The number of people wearing relatively normal clothes—such as Kanade, and James himself—was dwarfed by the number sporting full suits of plate armor, robes of wizardry, leather one-pieces, comic book tights and anything else imaginable. One man in a business suit looked like a Secret Service agent that had wandered into an SCA convention; another was clad in a Tarzan thong, and the girls at his side wore matching bikinis, for all the world as if they were going to the beach.

The basically normal looking people at the city gate must have been NPCs. This gaggle of eccentrics apparently represented the actual human player base.

"Where do they get these outfits?"

"There are clothiers that do custom tailoring."

"They make things this outrageous?"

Kanade laughed. "And worse. It's also possible to log in wearing whatever you want. Just fix it in your mind while you're loading the game up."

"And if you don't, you end up wearing whatever you subconsciously associate with yourself?"

"Right." Kanade looked him up and down. "You must be a jeans-and-t-shirt kinda guy."

"That's what my closet is full of." James scanned the crowd as they completed their approach. "I don't see Donald."

"They went in already," Kanade said.

James watched with a sinking feeling as three men and a woman in matching chainmail marched to the cliff and descended over the side.

"In?" he said. "Or down?"

Kanade stepped right up to the cliff, one foot disturbing a pebble that clattered over the edge. For the five seconds that she spent staring matter-of-factly after it, James listened and did not hear anything hit the ground. Wigglewaggle leapt from atop his head, moved to the cliff's edge, and then ran right over, face downward, like a squirrel descending a tree.

"Have I mentioned," James began, barely resisting the urge to grab Kanade by the hem of her dress and pull her away from the edge, "that I don't like heights?"

Kanade turned back, eyebrows high and dress flapping in the breeze; even bare inches from the edge, there was no hint of discomfort in her grace. He was probably about to be laughed at.

"Don't worry," she said, expression softening as she held out a hand. "I'll help you."

For an uncountable number of too-fast, too-anxious heartbeats, James could only stare. But Kanade's hand looked soft and warm.As he grasped it, a mellowing sensation flowed into him, beyond the bounds of simple reassurance; some tangible thing, like the boost in the park. He felt incredible. Almost weightless.

Then he looked down, and saw that both he and Kanade were floating several inches off the ground.

"Are you kidding me?"

Kanade laughed in delight. "Trust me?" she asked.

"Yes," James said. It just came out.

"Close your eyes."

Reluctantly, he did.

Kanade pulled his hand, gently, and he took a step forward. She pulled again, and he stepped again. Their feet weren't touching the ground; what was he stepping on?

Kanade kept tugging. By the time she stopped they had taken five steps, but he had been two small steps from the cliff when they began.

James couldn't possibly open his eyes. But he did, and saw the world from a bird's-eye view.

Far out on the horizon, a great expanse of desert began. The faded yellow-brown of a grandfather's easy chair, it covered the world, dunes rising like an ocean in still life. Closer, but still many miles away, the sand washed up on a beach of arid earth, out of which clawed anemic scrub in ugly clumps. Closer still, the scrub and grass gave way to trees, dense and imposing, but with none of the vibrance that shone in every fern and mossy growth in the forest at his back; these trees were black with death, a barely living graveyard that groped all the way to the cliff face.

His gaze reached the line where the trees met the cliff, and that was how James noticed they were standing on two hundred feet of nothing but air. His eyes slammed shut.

Breathe in peace, breathe out everything. Breathe in peace, breathe out everything.

"Don't worry, I won't let you fall." A soothing presence softly squeezed his hand.

"I'm okay," James said, mostly to convince himself, then opened his eyes again.

They were already descending.Halfway down, James thought to wonder about the foursome in chainmail. They were nowhere in evidence.

"Those people that climbed over before us," he said. "They're in a different instance of this area."

Kanade looked at him. "I thought you didn't know about instances."

"I figured it out from context."

"I shouldn't be surprised."

James ordered his thoughts. "Most of Shattered Land is one universe. A virtual version of some alternate Earth. But some areas are sectioned off. When you enter one of those areas, only the people in your unit will be there."

"And why is that?"

"Plains and forests and deserts are for geographic flavor. To give the world a sense of scale. But legends don't need a thousand heroes all crammed into one story."

"Your ability to analyze never ceases to amaze," Kanade said, tapping her lip with a finger again.

"Is that bad?"

"No," Kanade said, and smiled behind her finger. "It's cute."

Suddenly they were on the ground.

"Oh Christ," said a familiar voice. "Cute?"

"They're like ... holdin hands..."

"Definitely holding hands."

"Ohhhh," chorused several voices simultaneously.

"It's not quite what it ... um." Kanade pulled her hand away just a bit faster than necessary.

James turned to the voices.

Approaching was a party of what could only be called adventurers.

Wigglewaggle was the vanguard, leaping into the air, catching Kanade's dress and hauling up to her shoulder. He licked her cheek, possibly interested in the flush of crimson creeping along it.

"Blushin too," Donald said, clanking to a stop with the delicacy of a train wreck. A longsword of folded steel hung at his hip and layered plate covered his body. Only his face was bare—too vain to hide. "You guys ever seen Kana blush?"

"Like, not ever," said a lanky young blonde in a gray tank top and cutoff jean shorts. Her only adornments were a brilliant grin and a pair of steel gauntlets inset with a rainbow's worth of gems. "Super cute, huh? Dang." A mild southern lilt accompanied her high-school-hallway phrasing.

"I also recall no such occasion," said a woman nearly as tall as James, and possessing the unusual combination of mocha skin, emerald eyes, and curly brown hair that fell in rolls to the shoulder. She stood too straight and stared too intently, intimidating even without the dark battle scythe rising over one leather-clad shoulder.

A third woman stepped forward. Her black hair fell straight nearly to the waist, tied with a ribbon at the bottom, and her bodysuit was right out of Charlie's Angels. "At least allow an introduction before we torment the poor fellow," she said, smiling slightly. "James, what a pleasure to finally meet you. I'm Julia Bannigan. I work in Quality Control for UCC." James shook her offered hand. "And the one just now, with the rather impressive scythe, is Sara the Scythe. Appropriate, no?"

"Agreed."James held his hand in Sara's direction. She stared as if to it touch might cause their mutual annihilation, then took it in a crushing grip, shook twice, and released.

"Casey Lynn Carter here!" said the shaggy blonde avec Texas twang. She flashed a military salute. "Future college dropout. Pleased'a meetcha, Prez!" She reached for his hand, hesitated, and then wrestled her gauntlet off first with a sheepish grin.

"And that's Daisy," Donald said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. "My secretary and right hand man. Woman. Whatever the fuck."

"Greetings," Daisy said, pushing her glasses up her nose. Her light hair was tied in a severe ponytail, over an equally severe glacier-blue business suit that exactly matched her eyes and aura.

"You all seem to know who I am," James noted. Casey had even called him by the hated nickname; there was no doubting who had put her up to that.

"We've heard a great deal about you," Julia said, smiling. "Mr. Marsh does go on."

"Don't call me Mr. Marsh," Donald said. "I hate that shit."

"Mr. Marsh should do his best not to be taken for a poor sport," James said.

"Perhaps now we'll be hearing all about you from two sources instead of one," Julia said, eyeing Kanade, causing the blush to resurge.

"Fear of heights." James rubbed the back of his head. "Only way she could get me over the cliff was to grab and pull."

"Aw, man," Casey said. "But y'know, she still never blushed like that, even on stage. There's hope, Prez!"

"Is there?"

"Wait a m—"

"And to commemorate this occasion," Julia said, bulldozing Kanade's weak protest, "since it's time to form teams, there's no choice but to send Kana off with James while the rest of us do whatever it is that supporting roles do in these situations. Objections?"

"Nope," Casey said.

"None," Donald said.

"I do not object," Sara the Scythe intoned.

"And as we all know, Daisy couldn't possibly care less," Julia said.

"But—"

"I'll be the second team with Daisy," Donald said, cutting Kanade off again. "We'll take the left fork. Julia and Sara go right. James and Kana down the center. Jaleet will do whatever the fuck Jaleet does. Where the hell is he, anyway?"

"Scouting?" someone wondered.

"Whatever." Donald waved off the response in annoyance, even though he had asked. "Casey, which team you want?"

"She has to come with us," Kanade said firmly, managing an entire sentence for the first time since reaching cliff bottom.

"Ehhh, dontcha want him to yourself?"

"Neither of us can fight. We need a fighter."

"Forgot he's new," Casey said, crestfallen, then instantly brightened as an idea took hold. "But with Kana, he should be able to whoop some butt anyway?"

"Inexperience isn't the thing," Kanade said. "James has some amazing potential, but he won't ever be a combat specialist."

"Not a combat specialist?" Donald squinted at James as if James was the carrier of some dangerous genetic mutation. "What the hell is he then?"

"A mentalist."

There was an uncomfortably scrutinizing silence.

"That's rather ... unexpected," Julia said, fingers trailing through the bottom half of her hair.

"A mentalist for real?" Casey said, looking as amazed as if James Franklin Kirkpatrick had been revealed as the true identity of Santa Claus.

"Well, shit." Donald paced in a circle. "Casey, go with 'em."

"Right on!" Casey raised a gauntleted fist in a heroic flex. "Fightin's my specialty."

"Everyone good now?" Donald asked.

"Great," James said, scratching his eyebrow, "but just before we begin. What is a mentalist, exactly? It's starting to sound like a venereal disease."

"Gaha, nah man," Donald said. "A mentalist is ... a guy who ... you know, does..." He trailed off in puzzlement. "What the fuck is a mentalist, anyway?"

"Well," Kanade began.

"They are the ultimate supporting class," Daisy said. Everyone turned to look at her. "Team coordinator, strategist, tactician; human alarm system and radar array; conduit of pure sensation. There are so few true mentalists that their abilities are poorly understood." Daisy took a few steps forward and examined James closely, adjusting her glasses.

The urge to shrink from the scrutiny was strong. "But the drawback is..."

"Like earlier when you were in that trance," Kanade said, finally getting a word in. "I could barely bring you back."

"Yes," Daisy said. "A mentalist can expand their consciousness until it melds with the world and loses itself. To be precise, the self becomes an infinitesimal part of the all." Daisy nodded at nobody, leaning in to get a closer look at his retinas. He couldn't blink. "While fused, the mentalist can see as the world sees. The ultimate support ability, but often useless unless there is someone to act on what the mentalist knows. The strongest and the weakest."

Daisy had leaned in so far that their noses were almost touching. James felt like a cicada under a kid's magnifying glass, about to be lit on fire.

Kanade stepped in, separating them with one hand on James and one on Daisy. "Don't treat him like a specimen."

It would have been absolutely unsurprising if the next words out of Daisy's mouth had been why not, but

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