Sound check was a breeze.
The club in the Sana Kingdom had the biggest stage we had played on yet, much larger than the Midnight Library. The crowd was rowdier too, filled with ogres, beastkins and goblins, which made me question for a moment why Dalton had chosen this bar in the first place.
But until we had a manager, it was up to us to book our gigs, and since Iris and I didn’t really know anyone aside from the people in our dojo, that role fell to Dalton. We were in the green room now, which was actually a white room, an elven attendant standing in the corner of the room and waiting on us when need be.
As usual, Dalton was smoking on something, each inhale visible as the smoke filled his body.
He had already offered some to us, but after the last time, both Iris and I declined. Spew Gorge got down on some of it, the fashionable goblin coughing after his first hit.
“Boy fick! That’s the real deal right there. Fick, fick! I’m tripping balls over here. Kidding. Whew! But we do need some fickin’ food in here. Where’s the food?” he called over to the elven attendant.
“Food isn’t normally provided, but I can provide potions and other assorted healing beverages.”
“These fickers in Sana,” Spew Gorge said under his breath, his eyes dilated. “It’s no wonder my uncle is staying in Kingdom Ignis. He’s a fickin’ sucker for healing potions. That’s why he’s so fat. And where do you think those potions come from? Right the fick here. They sure pack a lot of processed sugars, carbs, saturated fat, and all sorts of shit that leads to various diabetes and other ficked up heart-related illnesses. It’s a fickin’ tragedy how much these Kingdom Sana potion manufacturers got Tritanian goblins by the balls. They bought up Cherry Apollos and Hopkins years ago. Shit’s a fickin’ monopoly, and it should be illegal.”
“Enough, goblin,” said Aya. “Goblins have free will in Tritania, do they not? It is their choice to consume these beverages.”
“Spoken like a true fickin’ lizard who is out of touch with a fickin’ health crisis,” Spew Gorge said under his breath. He took another hit of Dalton’s hookah. “But whatever. And fick, if my uncle could see me right now… He never liked ink shadows, and here I am getting high with one!”
“Times they are a-changin’,” Dalton said with a chuckle. “What did an ink shadow ever do to your uncle?”
Spew Gorge snorted. “For one, a shadow fickin’ took his arm. That’s why my uncle has a brass arm now. Another one, or maybe the same one, fick if I know, also turned his hair pink. He’s tried to dye it. Nope. It’s pink for good. And if he shaves it, it grows back in like two days. Still pink. Fick.”
“Humorous,” Dalton said as his body filled with smoke. “I’m guessing he was betting against one, wasn’t he?”
“Yep.”
“Ink shadows can be very very competitive when it comes to placing bets.”
“Fickin’ tell me about it,” Spew Gorge said as he took another puff of the hookah. “Fick. That’s why I only make bets with the skin-walker.”
Dalton nodded. “Not a bad decision.”
Aya and Altsoba wore matching black dresses. They looked incredible, Aya’s hair up in a topknot, Altsoba adjusting her already dark skin tone to the same color as her dress, which wasn’t quite vantablack, but wasn’t far off, only the whites of her eyes visible at the moment.
Lady C. also wore a dress, hers showing off her bosom in a way that was definitely going to catch some eyes. She was seated on the armrest next to me, occasionally dropping her hand on my shoulder.
“Remember,” Dalton said, “just keep the groove going, and we should be fine.”
“You know, we really could benefit from a drummer…” I suggested.
“Maybe one day,” said the ink shadow. “I like percussion, but I like the flexibility with having no drums, no one telling us what to do. Step in time, boy, keep to the beat, boy, but let that beat go, boy, let it find its own rhythm…” He trailed off, exhaling a huge plume of smoke.
A short halfling with a neck beard stepped into the room to let us know we were on in five minutes. He did so without saying a word, simply flashing the number five at us with his fingers.
“We’ll see you out there. Do not disappoint us,” Aya said as she shuffled out, holding hands with Altsoba. Lady C. and Spew Gorge followed them, the goblin telling the Metican warrior that he could definitely play drums, just in case anyone was asking.
“It should be a pretty wild show,” said Dalton, “and an even better after-party.”
“An after-party?” Iris asked. She had been stretching the new strings on her ukulele for the last few minutes, checking the tuning, quietly going through a few riffs.
“We are on a mini tour,” Dalton told her as he floated up to a standing position. “It’s our first time out of our own kingdom, so we’re going to make a thing of it. And we’ve got a gig in Ignis tomorrow night as well. So a party is inevitable. After that, who knows? But once we start getting the following, once we press a record. The sky is the limit.”
“You want to record a record?” I asked, exchanging shrugs with Iris.
“Why the hell not, rich man?” Dalton chuckled. “You got the money now, let’s get some productions going. Good tax write off too, but I’ve just heard that, can’t confirm it. All we would have to do is add a little studio to that practice room of ours. You’ve got the cash to fund some promotion too; we could get on some pretty big gigs, maybe even a few of those holoconcerts your world puts on in here.”
I looked to Iris, trying to see what was going through her mind as she listened to Dalton’s pitch. She seemed interested, evident in the way that she smiled at me and nodded.
“Sure,” I said. “Let’s look into recording a record.”
“Fantastic, okay, this energy going around the room now, these positive good vibes, let’s get out there and wow these people.”
My bass now flung over my shoulder, and Iris carrying her ukulele, we followed Dalton to the side of the stage, where we peeked out to see that the place was packed. It was loud too, raucous, the place reeking of booze, the combination of all these different creatures and their voices much louder than anything I had heard from the crowd before.
Regardless, and feeling just a few butterflies starting to flutter around in my stomach, I took the stage, Iris following me out.
We bowed, a few people clapped, and then we started up.
I adjusted some settings on my dashboard, while I continue to play a low, rumbling note, eventually hitting the crowd with a subsonic boom that got some real attention. Seeing what I was up to, Iris started tweaking with her settings as well, even as she strummed her ukulele.
This was one of the benefits of playing a concert in the Proxima Galaxy.
I could literally be playing a run while I was simultaneously adjusting its sound, bringing up the bass, or the mids, adding some reverb, slapping some delay on that last note, looping a four-bar pattern.
And it was about that time, as Iris and I were getting the crowd’s attention, that Dalton waltzed out onto the stage, now wearing a crown, which made no sense, because I didn’t think his body was tangible.
Still, he looked cool, and he looked even cooler when he turned his back to the crowd, the ink shadow dancing to the music as he threw his arms out. A wave of smoke hit the stage and spread out to the back of the venue.
“We’re Dalton and the Alpha Duo,” he sang into a mic also made of smoke, “and we’re here to rock your socks off… rock your socks off… rock your socks off…”
“I don’t wear bloody socks!” an angry voice shouted from the crowd.
And as light as a fall breeze, Dalton danced over to the corner of the stage to see who had shouted this. Once he spotted the ogre, he brought the mic back to his lips and sang, “This poor young fool, missed out on school, he lost his vibe and he lost his tribe. A sockless puppet, a buck-toothed fool, too bad this cat won’t never be cool.”
A few in the crowd laughed; Iris lo
oked over at me and cringed at the rhyme that was so bad that it was kind of… Well, cool. The ogre grew angry and threw his drink at Dalton, the liquid simply going through him.
“Easy everyone… easy everyone… easy everyone… ” Dalton sang as he danced back a bit, still entertaining the crowd, definitely in his element.
While the intro had been a little shaky, the rest of the concert, or at least most of it, went pretty smoothly.
It didn’t take more than a few seconds for Iris and me to find our groove, considering how much time we had practiced together in the past. There was a keyboard on stage as well, and Iris played this occasionally, especially on some of the slower improvised pieces that we had cooked up.
Everything was going well until the same ogre from earlier, the one that had shouted about socks, leapt onto the stage.
Out of the blue, too.
One moment, we were jamming along, coming back to what was essentially the improvised chorus of a smooth ballad, and the next moment, the ogre was on the stage with his big club, spikes jutting out of it.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Dalton said, growing three times in size, a darkness spreading across his form that I’d never seen before.
But this only riled up the crowd even more, other ogres and goblins now jumping onto the stage.
My first instinct was to exit stage left; but then I remembered that my instrument was also a weapon, so I aimed it at an approaching troll, mentally adjusted the reverb, and fired off a shot, the staggered blast sending the troll back into the crowd below, and cutting a path through it.
All hell broke loose.
Iris and I started firing on the crowd with our instruments, Dalton doing some of his ink shadow attacks, from zipping into people’s minds to casting smoky spells.
It took me a few blasts to see what Aya and Lady C. were up to, but eventually I saw a swath of ice cut through part of the crowd, exploding on contact.
My eyes fell upon Lady C., both blades drawn, Aya next to her, her big buster sword parked on her shoulder. As soon as the two huntresses made their presence known, the fight turned toward them.
And that’s when another Aya appeared at the other end of the crowd, this one also wielding a buster sword, in the same black dress…
Yes, one of them was definitely the skin-walker known as Altsoba, and if I’d had more time to watch them, I would have likely been able to figure out which was which, but a small goblin had jumped onto me and was biting at my leg. Unclipping the strap, I brought the body of my guitar onto his head.
Wham!
“Fick!” the little goblin yelled out, his voice two octaves lower than it should have been. “Fick! Yoooooooy! Fick!”
Spew Gorge slipped onto the stage, saw an ogre crawling toward Iris and jumped on him, knifing the ogre in the back of his head, blood spritzing the air.
I saw a burst of musical light come from Iris’ side of the stage.
The beam of energy took out the largest ogre in the room, slicing his arm right off as he charged the stage. Iris lowered her weapon, her ukulele, and made her way over to me.
“Did you see that last one?” she asked, a crazed yet ironic look in her eyes.
“It was awesome!” I told her.
“Chorus plus flange plus full distortion,” she said. “Crank it to eleven!”
“Duly noted. We should probably get out of here, though. I’m going to go ahead and say that this is definitely not a good look for us…”
“Yeah, let’s go,” she said, grabbing my arm and pulling me toward the side stage. We circled around a dead ogre and made it to relative safety behind a curtain.
Spew Gorge eventually joined us, blood all over his clothing, a grin on his face. “Fick yeah! I haven’t been at a concert this ficktacular since the last Jatlapalooza. Fick! These Kingdom Sana crowds are ficked. No need for an after-party when you can play gigs like this,” he said, wiping blood from his eyes.
“Yeah,” I said, giving the goblin a funny look. “Let’s just hope that we don’t get arrested or something.”
“Get arrested?” Dalton asked, the ink shadow now standing behind us.
He startled me, and I nearly turned around and hit him with my bass before stopping just in time.
“Easy, Chase,” he said. “Concerts in this neck of the woods can get a little out of hand. You knew that, right?”
“How would I know that?”
“There are so many healing potions available in Sana that people take risks they wouldn’t take in other places,” Spew Gorge explained. “Fick, half the people we have already cut down are probably healed up by now, or on their way to being healed up. That’s just how fickin’ events go here.”
“I wish you would have told us that before the concert started,” Iris said.
“And spoil the fun?” Dalton laughed. “You would have known it was coming, and then it wouldn’t have been spontaneous. No, I’m all vibes, you know that about me by now. And if you know the vibes that are coming, and you can’t react to them naturally, it’s forced. And I don’t like music that’s forced, and I don’t like vibes that are controlled.”
“It’s a bloodbath out there,” Lady C. said as she stormed through the side curtain. Both her blades were held at her sides, the Metican warrior ready to launch back into the fray if need be.
“Definitely is,” said Iris. “But the gig is over now, so let’s get to the hotel. Who wants to go get Aya?”
“Which fickin’ one?” Spew Gorge asked. “Last I saw, there were two lizards out there skewering concert-goers.”
“Both, and since you volunteered,” Iris said, smiling at the goblin, “why don’t you go. Besides, you can blend in the best with the crowd.”
“Fickin’ fick,” Spew Gorge said as he threw his hands in the air, and turned back to the stage. “I’ll do my fickin’ best, but if the real Thulean is down, I’m leaving her fickered green tush behind. And watch it with the racism, Alpha. Just because I’m a goblin doesn’t mean I ‘blend in’ with those ficktards out there. Fick!”
Chapter Three: On Top of the World
We logged out laughing.
It had been quite a night in EverLife. After getting kicked out of the club, we found a hotel in the center of Kingdom Sana, a place that kind of looked like a sandcastle. It even had textured turrets, which was where the huntresses and the three mythcrea with us ended up staying.
While I offered each of them their own room, Lady C. chose to share her space with Spew Gorge, and Aya said she would share with Altsoba. Dalton got his own suite, which he gladly retired to alongside two orc chippies (as Spew Gorge called them).
I had no idea how an ink shadow would have sex with a female orc, but we didn’t stick around to find out. We did, however, hit up the hotel bar, which was why Iris and I were laughing now.
Even though we hadn’t drunk anything in the real world, in our world, both of us still felt a buzz. That was the strange thing about the Proxima Galaxy: situations that happen there, however fake, could leave a person reeling once they returned to their natural home.
And was this my natural home?
Even laughing, I had to look around, Iris and I in such a beautiful hotel room, Midtown all around us, apartment buildings twenty, thirty, forty stories tall, each of the units well out of my price range even if I had hit it rich.
Cash ruled everything around me.
With money, I was starting to understand this more, even if it hadn’t been twenty-four hours since I got lucky.
“Damn,” Iris said as she took in the view. “Damn, damn, damn.”
She carefully got out of her bed and made her way to the window. She sat before it, legs crossed, looking out as a police aeros blazed by, as people moved in the streets below, as UberLyfts landed and took off—what a fucking city.
“Crazy view, huh?” I asked her.
“A crazy view to finish a crazy day.”
“I don’t think I will ever have another day like today,”
I told her. “I woke up broke and happy, and I’m going to sleep rich and happier.”
“Money is really on your mind now, isn’t it?” she asked me as I joined her in front of the window.
“Should it not be?”
She considered this for a moment as she looked out at the city, the lights from the apartment buildings reflecting onto her glasses. “I guess it is pretty jarring.”
“I went from, I mean, a thousand dollars at the most to my name, maybe just a little bit more, to fifteen million and ownership of a highly sought-after property in a digital world. This is some type of joke. Someone’s going to pull the carpet out from beneath me. I keep waiting for that to happen.”
“Possibly,” Iris said with a chuckle. “But I’m sure you’ll get used to it. And then you will never remember the times when you were broke.”
“How could I forget those times?”
“It happens,” said Iris. “You know much about my family, do you?”
“The Snouts?”
“Uhhh… I hate my last name. Yes, the Snouts. My great grandparents bought a bunch of property in Bridgeport, Connecticut, back in the 2020s. It’s all high-rises now, and it has brought quite a bit of money to my parents. Didn’t you ever wonder how I lived alone in Brooklyn?”
“I just thought that you had student loans, or something.”
“No, and those don’t exist anymore anyway, at least not in the way that they used to,” she said. “I really try not to ask my parents for any money. And I never talk about this stuff. Which is why I haven’t gotten any of my gear repaired. They would give it to me, I’m sure, but I’m just not the type to ask.”
“Are you telling me we could have had all new gear this entire time and some corporate sponsors?”
Iris rolled her eyes. “Please, all the money is locked up in real estate and investments. They live well, but I don’t know, it’s not what you would think. Maybe we should go to Connecticut sometime and you can see. It’s sort of a façade. But it’s there.”
“Well, I can tell you it beats being broke.”
“All I’m saying is, don’t let it go to your head. You are a great guy,” she told me, smiling. “And this is quite a large sum just to be handed.”
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