Lizard Girl & Ghost

by Olga Werby

  “Down there!” Pixie calls out. I don’t understand how she saw the rubble before me—I am the one with x-ray vision and dozens of eyes on the ground. But she spots it first. Perhaps I am paying too much attention to the details rather than what we are actually looking for? Whatever. I swoop down for a closer look.

  The glass boulders on the forest floor obviously used to be part of a glass castle in some distant past. Now, they look yellowish-brown, more like amber than glass. They are barely translucent and no longer have any spark to them. I can see vague shapes that resemble the geometric patterns of the cornices and columns. But it’s impossible to even imagine the shape of that castle now. At least, I can’t do it. Some of them look hollow—were they snail incubators, abandoned now?

  You do not see any more of those snails, do you? I ask Ghost.

  “It seems completely clear,” he says. “No snails that I can see. Pixie?”

  “Jude has more eyes,” she replies, but she examines the site closely. She isn’t interested in having any more of her body turn to glass. “I don’t see a one,” she finally says.

  I bray in agreement. I can’t see anything moving down there, not even with my x-ray vision. It’s just a heap of rocks now. But it’s a heap of rocks in dense vegetation; I can’t land there. There’s no room. And I don’t want to leave Ghost and Pixie exploring alone—that worked out oh so well last time. There is a lot of life in this forest. The fact that nothing is around now doesn’t guarantee something won’t slither in later. I consider my options. I am a big, powerful green lizard dragon… Fireballs! I can use Fireballs on this flora. I have always wanted to blow something up.

  I circle my way higher—no reason to get burned myself—and switch my eyeballs. I keep my main eyes tightly closed until my snakes get me over the target. I’ve learned my lesson.

  “Jude? What are you doing?” Pixie asks. I can feel her squeeze the skin between my left wing and back—she is using it as a handle.

  Hang on! I scream to Ghost. He claws at Pixie’s belt. That gets her attention and she tightens her grip.

  I open my Fireballs eyes and let the trees have it. After the initial glee at my own power, I systematically burn away a nice radius of vegetation around the collapsed castle. Trees grow fast around here. In a few hours, the whole thing will be covered up again. No guilt.

  There. Now we can land, I say casually, like it’s no big deal. But I am impressed with myself and so are Pixie and Ghost.

  “Good girl, Jude,” Pixie approves. It sounds a bit like she is talking to a dog, but I let it go. I’m too jazzed by my awesomeness to mind.

  We land, and Pixie and Ghost get down off my back to explore. I have to observe from a short distance—my dragon body is too big to move among the old castle boulders—but I can get my heads in for a closer look-see. The rocks look ancient. But this is virtual reality. What does ancient mean here? Nothing. It’s just an illusion…or a clue.

  “Did you notice that the glass rocks at the castle we destroyed had a slight yellow tint?” Ghost asks. He is stepping carefully, trying to find anything of value that survived the decay and my little fire demonstration.

  “I was too flipped out to notice color variations,” Pixie says. She found a way of sliding her glass hand under her chainmail. She is using the two good fingers to hold it in place. Now her glass arm is protected, but even more useless.

  “Well, trust me. It was yellowing,” Ghost says.

  Pixie shrugs whatever.

  I continue to scan systematically. I move my necks up and down and side to side in a grid pattern. I notice that my main neck is still a bit stiff—all that clawing by my passengers have not been doing it any favors.

  “This is a burnt orange, almost brown in color,” Ghost goes on. “How long would it take for the rocks to age so much?”

  This is a game, remember?

  He looks at me and lectures: “There’s an internal logic to adventures. They tend to stay within a theme and they don’t combine magic systems from multiple storylines—”

  “Unless that’s the point of the adventure,” Pixie interrupts him.

  “Yes. Unless it’s on purpose. But I think we are safely within the bounds of the Sleeping Beauty narrative here. I haven’t seen anything that wouldn’t fit. Have you?”

  Pixie shakes her head. But I don’t know—what fits? Are antelopes with roses coming out of their heads fit? Could be. But I don’t argue. Let Ghost make his conclusions; I’ll make my own.

  “The young princess is asleep until the prince saves her,” he continues. I wonder who the prince is. Doc? Slick? God, I hope it’s not Sleazy! “I guess the snails are here to guard her until the prince shows up. So, let’s go find the prince. Judging by these remnants and our own experience, just breaking into her sarcophagus isn’t going to work. We need to do this right.”

  “But wait,” Pixie pipes up. “I’m the prince, right? Why didn’t it work with me?”

  Yeah. She’s the prince!

  “Hmm.” Ghost is stumped. “Perhaps we need to get something to neutralize the snails first?”

  “There were no glass snails in the original Sleeping Beauty,” Pixie protests.

  What she said. Someone is just screwing with us. We should have just been able to get that dead beauty out and move on with it. What gives, Ghost? I don’t like this game.

  “I don’t like this game,” Pixie unwittingly echoes.

  My neck really hurts now. I shake my head and try to ease the tension in my shoulders—seven heads is a lot of weight to support. And I feel like I should be anxious about something…something I don’t really remember anymore. Why are we in this game? It’s just for fun, right? It feels too stupid to ask Ghost. I just want to get the clues, wake the princess, and get out of this adventure. It feels like we’ve been here forever. I whine so much inside my head…heads, that I miss most of what Ghost and Pixie are arguing about. I make my eel heads stop their grousing.

  “Are you okay, Jude?” Pixie asks.

  I’m not sure if it’s the first time she’s done so. I bray something, but it comes out snivelly. I didn’t even know it was possible for dragons to bellyache so eloquently in their vocalizations. I roar loudly just to prove that I can.

  “Are you ready to go?” Pixie asks me.

  I nod my many heads and utter another pathetic moan. My neck is bad.

  “Let me see what’s wrong,” Ghost says and jumps on. He’s as gentle as…well, as a cat. He walks up my spine to the place where my shoulders split into seven necks and examines closely. He seems to be taking his time, and I make some bleating noises in protest. Who knew that my dragon complaint vocabulary was so large?

  “Pixie?” Ghost calls to her, and she climbs up my back to join him. I turn my heads to look. What’s up? What are they looking at? “Stop fidgeting, Jude,” Ghost tells me. As if… He smacks an eel head with his paw, claws pulled in. But I still don’t like it. I can’t use my main head to look, because it hurts to twist so.

  “Hmm.” I hear Pixie mumbling something to Ghost.

  What? What? It’s my neck; I have the right to know.

  “Okay.” I don’t like the way Ghost says it. “Please don’t strain your neck too much.” Which naturally makes me want to whip it around. “I think there’s a tiny snail stuck underneath a few of your scales there—”

  I bray so loudly that he almost falls off. Snails? Snails! How much of my neck has turned into glass? How fragile am I? Damn. Damn. Damn. And I was so careful. I stomped on all of them…

  “It’ll be okay, Jude,” Pixie tries to calm me down. Wasn’t she the one flipping out a few minutes ago? “It’s not much. A foot—”

  “Grrrrrr.” Foot?!

  “We’re trying to get it out,” Ghost says in a fake-o calm voice.

  “Ahhhhrrrrgahhhh!” It’s still in there? Get it out! Now! Now! Now! I am not calm. There’s an evil glass snail slithering under my scales and turning me into brittle glass. Have you ever se
en an uncalm dragon? Ghost and Pixie hold on tight, trying not to fall off, but Ghost doesn’t make it. Still, he flips in the air and nails a perfect four-point landing.

  “Stop it, Jude!” he screams at me. “You’ll break Pixie.” That does it. I stop and actually hold my breath. I don’t want to break Pixie. I don’t want to break me, either.

  Is it off? I ask.

  “Thank you for stopping that bucking,” Pixie says. She understands my distress. “The snail is deep inside. It’s not obvious how to get it out. I can shave some of your scales off—”

  “Aaaauuuu,” I whimper some more.

  “It shouldn’t hurt—they’re already glass,” she says. That makes me want to cry more. “Do you want me to try?”

  I don’t know. Do I? It’s my main neck—the one that attaches to my main head, to me—that we are talking about. It’s not like a hand. One can live without a hand. But without a brain? On the other hand, I can’t have this snail slithering under my scales until it reaches my brain. Can glass brains think? I don’t think so.

  Tell her to do it, I call to Ghost.

  He eyes me and jumps back up. I can feel him pussyfooting up my neck…until I can’t—that part of my virtual flesh must have already turned to glass. How fast is it spreading? I want to look and I don’t want to look. I hear soft clinking sounds. Ghost is doing something. Then I can feel Pixie maneuvering on my neck. Several greenish iridescent glass scales drop to the ground. They look lovely—they would make cool sunglasses for a giant or a supermodel. I can’t help thinking this way. My mind wanders randomly, making strange connections. Thankfully, it’s distracting me from what’s going on so close to my brain. More glass scales patter down. I notice a few breaking on the ground. So, they are—I am—fragile. Damn.

  Jude? How are you doing? Ghost speaks directly into my head.

  How am I doing? I’m turning into glass! What a damn question. But I answer, Fine.

  “Good, good,” he speaks out loud now. “We’ve almost got it. But…”

  “Aooorh?” What? But what? I don’t like “buts.”

  “The good news is that we crushed the snail,” Pixie says. “It’s definitely dead.” The way she says it warns me there’s more. What’s the bad news? Give it to me. “There might be some snail eggs in there,” she says. There it is. “They don’t seem dangerous.” Like hell!

  Ghost? Get them out. You hear? Out! Out! Out!

  “So, like Pixie said,” he says. “The snail is very dead. But when we squished it, some small round things came out of it. They might be eggs or not. We don’t really know. We have nothing to wash them out with. We picked out what we could, but it’s hard to be sure if we got everything. But we tried, Jude, we tried.”

  Tried? That’s really not good enough. I turn toward the distant lake. There is plenty of water there, but it is all infested with the stupid snails. No help. Okay, I want out. We’ve played long enough!

  “Do you want me to gather those?” Pixie asks. It takes me a moment to figure out what she’s saying, but Ghost jumps down to the ground and goes to inspect the glass scales. My dragon scales. It takes Pixie longer to get down, she is being careful. She saw how easily my scales broke. Ghost takes too long, in my opinion, to study the scales.

  Ghost? I prod him.

  Pixie walks over and bends down to take a closer look. She has fingers to manipulate with. Technically, Ghost does too, but he doesn’t seem to be too eager to change into a werecat. Pixie shows him a particular one.

  What? What is it? They are blocking me from looking too closely.

  Finally, a decision is made and Pixie brings one of the scales—the unbroken one—up to my human dragon head to see. It is big, covering most of her palm. It’s mostly transparent too, very much like Pixie’s glass fingers, only slightly greenish. Pixie’s glass turned a very light shade of pink: I only realize it when I see my own scales. Apparently, the transformation into glass takes into account the original material, at least its color.

  “See it?” she asks.

  “Aooorh?” See what?

  “Look at the corner here.” She wiggled it. I am sure she would point, but her other hand is useless.

  I move one of my eyes closer. Sure enough, right there, on the corner of the scale where it would have connected to my dragon flesh, there is a tiny Daedal logo. The logo for the digital molecule. What does that mean? I feel like I should know—I should remember something important—but nothing comes to mind.

  Pixie pulls out her glass hand and examines it. Then shows the glass fingers to me and then to Ghost. On each of her pink glass fingernails, the same Daedal logo.

  Ghost, I call him. Does this mean the Daedal people made this adventure? I’m confused. What is it?

  Ghost speaks aloud for Pixie’s benefit. “I guess Claudia Elisabeth von Reichenstein owns this adventure.” The name sounds familiar, but I can’t place it.

  Who is that? I ask.

  “Claudia is your stepmother,” Ghost tells me gently. What? Ms. Evil?

  23. Dead Beauty

  My memory shatters like crystal glass. I remember now. I’m in a coma somewhere, waiting for Dad to make me better. Things seem to click into place on my mental map. I remember who I am, although it is still strange, confused, vaguely removed. Why am I doing this adventure? Why Sleeping Beauty? Then I remember the small prick on my finger—that’s how I got infected in real life—Ms. Evil. She’d tried to kill me, I think. There is a mirroring between my reality and my cyber self.

  Ghost? Why did you want to go to the Alice in Wonderland adventure? I ask. I have a strange hunch about this.

  “When Doc found me,” he speaks aloud to include Pixie in our conversation.

  She is looking back and forth at us. I think she has figured out that I can do more than just grunt at Ghost. I knew it was stupid to keep our telepathic communication secret. What is the point of that?

  “I was not as I am now.” Ghost is still talking. “My memories of Roman Chernovsky, the boy I used to be, were very fragmented. I would get an image of eating ice cream in a park in Paris with my mom, or trudging through the snow back in Russia on the way to the doctor’s office yet again, or eating some chocolate cake my grandfather made just for me. Little snippets of memories. Nothing that I could organize into the person I used to be but without which I could never be a person again. A person is as much a life tree of memories as he is its leaves and its branches. Without those tiny memories of my previous life, I would just be a dead tree.” He stops to let that sink in. I am not sure what he means. It’s a strange metaphor. He continues, “Early on, I just assumed that the impressions were ads I had noticed during my wanderings in The Far Cinct. There’s so much going on here, it is easy to get lost between what’s real and what’s not.”

  I want to tell him that nothing is really real, but I stop myself. Ghost is telling me something profound, I think, something about me as much as about him.

  “You weren’t that bad,” Pixie says. She leans down to scratch between Ghost’s ears. That’s so wrong. Ghost pulls away from her and grows a bit, assuming a more humanoid form. Pixie realizes her mistake and sits on an old glass boulder. She is still holding my dragon scales, at least the ones that aren’t too broken to hold without cutting skin. The broken edges of my scales are sharp; they would make good weapons.

  “Jude?”

  My attention drifts a lot out here. It’s like I have lost all my multitasking capability and now can only do one thing at a time, can think only one thought before starting another. Thoughts in a serial network. Strange…

  “Jude?” I look at Ghost—what did I miss? “As I was saying.” He keeps his eyes locked on mine to focus my attention on what he is saying. “Because my mind was such a wreck, Doc needed to find an organizational framework that would help bind these snippets of memories into something that was more human, more me. Doing it by hand, so to speak, was impossible. How can an organizational structure for a lifetime’s worth of
memories be created from scratch? It just can’t. It wouldn’t work.”

  So, what did Doc do? I ask. I note that Pixie is paying close attention to my dragon face, trying to decipher how Ghost is reading my mind. How can she not know about cyber telepathy?

  “One day, Doc came in and told me that he had an idea,” Ghost says, but Pixie shakes her head.

  “Nope. That’s not how it happened,” she says. “You weren’t ready for that. Doc said that he was going to use an archetypal story adventure to help with memory reconstruction, to grow it like crystal. I don’t know where he got the idea or the resources to pull it off. But at the time, you, Ghost, weren’t actually agreeing to anything. Not at first. After a few turns at the Alice in Wonderland adventure, you started to participate as a…a person.” I can see that she feels bad undermining what Ghost thought he was back then. “Get it, Jude? It took time. He was scrambled, but we were able to put him back together again by playing a game. A very complicated game.”

  Like Humpty-Dumpty? I ask, but of course, Pixie can’t understand me.

  “Like a Cheshire Cat, I guess,” Ghost says. I can see he has trouble remembering those first encounters with Doc and the gang.

  “Yes,” Pixie agrees. “You had a cat avatar, so we went with a Cheshire Cat perspective for you. It worked.”

  “It worked,” Ghost echoes.

  “And now we’re hoping it will work again,” Pixie adds, almost in a whisper.

  Again? Does Ghost need more memory restructuring? I look from Ghost’s half-human face to Pixie’s. They are willing me to understand. Sleeping Beauty. Pricked finger. A poisonous app. The Daedal molecule logo. Ms. Evil. Dead beauty… Me? Am I the one in need of restructuring? But my memories are just fine, thank you very much! I don’t need the kind of help that Ghost needed. I am Jude. I am a great green lizard dragon. I am powerful and smart. And I have a cool menagerie of snakes and eels. Why do I need help?