* * *
They made a pact to keep what they called, ‘the wet shoe incident’ to themselves. “I might be crazy about Feyland, but I don’t need people thinking I could benefit from medication,” Agatha said, and Jane was quick to agree.
When she started playing again, Agatha eventually did find her way to the Bard’s Quest, but she never again found hills of heather, the bird statues, or fountain in the forest. The instrumental accompaniment reward she received from Sir Nye’s horn remained. Sir Nye seemed gone, but Agatha took zero chances, and never said his name again.
Zack had taken Agatha’s suggestion of making his appearance as prime as he was to heart. The days he was noticeably prime also correspond to days he encountered Lindsey from 204. Jane saw Zack’s change too, and after catching Agatha looking fondly at Zack she teased, “Lindsey’s not the girl he’s looking prime for.”
Embarrassed, Agatha blushed.
“She’s nice,” Jane said, “but I told him, you’re a better fit for him.”
Zack never confided that Agatha’s advice prompted the change, but she never mentioned taking his advice either. She practiced, focused on her own performance, and began to actually enjoy it.
To Agatha’s surprise the highlight of her junior year was prom. She joined Jane and a few other friends, and they all attended prom as one big group of single girls. There was a group photo, and a funny moment where someone fished some feather boas out of a bag, and draped them around the necks of everyone in their group. It was an act Agatha called “feathered fashion sin.”
Agatha inspected the scarf of green fluff around her neck, and Jane teased her, “It really is a sin to wear lime with your aubergine dress.”
Agatha laughed and twirled one end of the green boa. “You’re mistaken, this really isn’t lime, it’s chartreuse.”
The absolute best part of prom was when Zack blindsided her, tapping his finger to a hidden microphone by his ear, and looking into the prom crowd with an impish grin.
“I need you all to help me find my sister’s best friend, and my favorite songbird. Agatha, where are you? Come on up here.”
A gymnasium full of eyes found her, and the students clapped and cheered for her to get up on stage. For a moment Agatha felt overwhelmed. Zack offered her a hand up and placed the clear tubes and wires of a hidden microphone in her hand. Her cheeks ached from smiling, and she did her best to control her laughter as she fit the hidden microphone to her ear.
“We’re going to sing a duet,” Zack said. “It’s a song I wrote, and Agatha here helped me out on the melody. I hope you like it.”
Zack counted off and strummed through the intro chords on his guitar. Agatha’s voice harmonized with Zack’s and they bobbed with the lively tune. She was able to get everyone in the gymnasium clapping. Soon the audience sang along with the chorus, about a red haired knight and what his beloved should do if he proposes too soon. “Run away, run away, run away.”
There was a wave of applause and cheering when their duet ended. Zack gave her a hug, and she waved before exiting the stage. Jane and their friends circled Agatha in excited mayhem as they showed her the dozens of images they had taken. She was looking at a vid of her performance when Ms. Raider approached.
“That was outstanding, Agatha, just outstanding.”
“Ms. Raider, thanks. Zack worked hard on it, but he totally ambushed me tonight.”
“Agatha, that was your best performance,” Ms. Raider said. “The next time you audition, you need to do that again.”
Agatha’s smile faded some. Ms. Raider wanted her to audition with that song? She and Zack had put it together in a few hours, when they were just hanging out, having fun. “Ms. Raider, if you don’t mind my asking, what did I do differently? What did I do tonight that’s been missing from my other auditions?”
Ms. Raider leaned forward, looked Agatha in the eye, and smiled. “You were having fun. That’s what makes a musical piece go from being just another work to an inspired performance.”
Jane grabbed Agatha when Ms. Raider walked away and began jumping up and down. “You’re going to do it! Your going to audition with the song you and Zack wrote, and you’re going to get the spring solo.”
For the first time in three years Agatha actually believed she could get her solo. She pictured how she would perform for the audition, and imagined the moment she was announced the lead soloist. And best of all, she knew she’d have fun.
“I’m going to do it this time,” Agatha said, before gripping Jane to join her, bouncing with a squeal of excitement.
* * *
Zack and his band recorded an accompaniment for Agatha’s audition and helped her rehearse. Jane, Zack, and the other band members sat through the entire spring concert choir auditions. After Agatha’s audition, the band gave their own mini performance, standing up with loud whistling cheers.
The auditorium sat silent when Ms. Raider strode center stage to announce the parts for the spring concert. Zack took Agatha’s hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. If life had a pause button, she wanted to hit it. The warmth in his green eyes was something she needed to study. Somehow it was transmitting to her and she could feel it all the way down into her toes. She found it hard to look away from him or hear anything over the gleeful voice screaming in her head, he’s holding my hand!
“The lead soloist for the spring concert will be…Agatha McKnight.”
Tears of joy sprang to Agatha’s eyes as Jane crushed her in an excited hug. The band shouted in triumph, and Zack joined the hug, saying, “You showed them! That was so sparked. You won your real life Bard’s Challenge.”
Brushing tears from her eyes she laughed and tried to think of any other moment in her life where she experienced this much bliss. The jostling bear hug from her two most cherished friends felt like the only thing keeping her from floating out of her seat. A little fun was all it took to get here, but it took real friends to help her realize it.
It’s hard to tell a person something they don’t want to hear, especially a friend. But when you really care about someone you do it anyway. You take the risk, speak the truth, point out what’s missing, or push them to do better. She looked at Jane and Zack, and felt tremendous gratitude; they helped her find what she was missing.
She did it. She finally did it. This was a real world achievement. She loved performing on stage, and pretending in a game was fun, but neither one could replicate true friendship or the beauty in the real world experience of now.
A Word from Andrea Luhman
After reading the novella and first Feyland novel, I was really grabbed by the well-crafted connection the Feyland world had with folklore and folk songs. I love the sincere struggle and growth of the teenage characters in each of the original Feyland novels. I worked hard to try and maintain this same teen life authenticity in Agatha, Jane, and Zack. A great deal of my inspiration came from the real folksongs Agatha sings. After Anthea Sharp granted me permission to write characters with bard avatars, “An Artist’s Instinct” quickly came together.
I wanted to feature some of the life lessons I gained growing up and participating in competitions. Especially the import lesson of learning what kind of meaningful motivation helps me work to pursue long-term goals. It’s a lesson that’s helped me stay grounded when the roadblocks of self-doubt and fear of failure rise up.
Fear almost made me shy away from the opportunity to be a Future Chronicles author and write in Anthea Sharp’s Feyland series. As an unknown writer competing for publication in a highly successful series, I leaned hard on my motivation and reminded myself that the worst thing Anthea Sharp or Samuel Peralta could say to my story was no thank you. The fun of writing down the story circling around in my head brought me well past the fear. I enjoyed writing “An Artist’s Instinct”, and I am humbled and thrilled that Anthea and Samuel said “Yes.” It’s a privilege to join the alumni of Chronicles authors.
The first novel in the series I’ve spent the last
three years writing should go to publication sometime near the end of 2016. You can contact me and find out more about my work at my website: www.andrealuhman.com.
Tech Support
by James T. Wood
RANJEET NAGAR HURRIED to his job, one of the better available in Kochi on the coast of India, in the call center for VirtuMax. The global company had just launched its most ambitious game, Feyland, and needed all the tech support help they could get.
Ranjeet dodged a pack of street kids and broke into a jog. He darted over a drawbridge, ignoring the lowered pikes, and just jumped the gap before it became too wide. The smell of the fish on the waiting boat mixed with the pregnant humidity to remind Ranjeet of meen vevichathu, a fish curry that his mother would make. His family had moved to the coastal city in Kerala State when his father had been promoted to the head of a large bank. Ranjeet missed the slower pace of the rural town where he’d been born. Where the sound of the waves crashing on the shore wasn’t drowned out by the rush of grav-cars on the streets, and the faint smell of coconuts wasn’t lost in the aroma of hundreds of thousands of bodies vying for the same air.
But he didn’t have time for reverie. His boss, Mr. Narang, was not forgiving, and Ranjeet had been late too often. He’d stayed up far into the night working to fix the ailing network in his parents’ apartment building and had only finished a few hours before. He should have left the work for later, but once he started a puzzle he was compelled to finish it. That was part of what made Ranjeet good at tech support, and most of what made him hate it.
He crept into the office and glanced over at his coworker Amit. Amit gave him a nod and motioned for him to hurry. Ranjeet gave him a quick smile and moved quickly to his cubicle. He had just gotten logged into the system when Mr. Narang arrived.
“Good to see you’ve found your computer, Ranjeet,” Mr. Narang said. “Did you stop for chai on the way in?”
It was the closest Yamal Narang ever came to having a sense of humor. Ranjeet knew better than to engage. “No, sir,” he said. “I have a call coming in; if you’ll excuse me.”
Ranjeet tapped the button on his phone and opened the ticketing app on his system.
“Thank you for calling VirtuMax support, my name is Roger. How can I help you today?”
Mr. Narang walked away as Ranjeet stepped someone with an almost indecipherable southern accent through the creation of a character in Feyland. After a few more moments of ensuring that he had answered all of the questions, Ranjeet finished the call.
“You’d better be careful,” Amit said to him without looking away from his screen. “Mr. Narang is looking for someone to fire.”
“Why?”
“His son lost his scholarship and has to leave school. He wants to give him a job, but we’re already at capacity.”
An email came into Ranjeet’s queue at that moment. He looked at it briefly before leaning over to look at Amit’s screen.
“What?” he asked.
“Did you get this email too?”
“You’re going to have to be more specific than that,” he said.
Ranjeet opened the message.
System: Full-D
Program: Feyland
User: 2uluW@rrior
Issue: Whenever I enter the game it does not take my character profile and has an error where dwarf-monsters appear and disappear. They’re like evil teddy bears with holes in their heads. I can never get to the fairy courts.
“Have you seen this?” Ranjeet asked.
His co-worker leaned over and read the email. “Send it to tier-two.”
“But this is the seventh email—”
Amit cut him off, “We’re tier-one. We don’t deal with stuff like that. Especially if we want to keep working here.” He gave Ranjeet a meaningful look.
Ranjeet read over the email a few more times and escalated it to tier-two, but he also sent a blind copy to his personal email. He knew that if he was ever caught he’d be fired, but the compulsion to solve the puzzle was too great.
Puzzles had always been both a joy and a curse to him. When he was young, and his father still affluent, he would spend all his time working on puzzles. Every time he solved one, he had a need to pick up another, the more difficult, the better. He quickly mastered simple logic puzzles, number games, and every size and shape of a Rubik’s Cube physically possible—and through his old sim-system, even some that were beyond physical possibility.
When his father had lost his job at the bank, Ranjeet had to leave boarding school and get a job to help make money for the family. Tech support was a natural fit. He could work on a problem for hours or days, until he solved it. He helped around the apartment complex keeping the aging hardware running as best he could, but it didn’t earn enough money to make a difference. So when VirtuMax opened a call center, he knew he had to apply.
What he didn’t know was how far away from actually solving puzzles his job would be. He read off of a script or sent the people to tier-two. They didn’t even provide a test-rig where he could verify issues. Ranjeet hated not being allowed to solve the puzzles, but what was even worse were the puzzles that no one was solving. He couldn’t sleep at night for thinking about them. He would go home and look at the emails he’d copied and search for clues. But without his own Full-D sim-unit, he wasn’t making much progress.
At his assigned chai break, Ranjeet went to Mr. Narang’s office and sat down and waited until the boss finished whatever he was working on. When he looked up, Ranjeet set a cup of chai on his boss’s desk as a sort of peace offering; it was ignored
“Mr. Narang, I’m sorry to bother you. I wanted to check on what appears to be a glitch.”
“Send it up to—”
“Yes, sir. But the glitch appears to be in our email server. I keep getting emails that no one else is getting.”
“Regarding…”
“Support issues.”
“And…”
“Well, sir, the other workers aren’t getting them.”
“And…”
Ranjeet looked at his chai for a moment. He thought of his mother’s asthma. She couldn’t work and his father’s severance package was given on the condition that he never took another banking job or spoke about his work. Ranjeet was all that kept his family out of poverty.
He knew he should be silent. He knew that he should ignore it. He knew all of those things, but the itch had started. It always felt this way when a puzzle took hold of him. It started small. He could dismiss it for a while. But it built and built, like a sneeze. The longer he resisted, the bigger the explosion would be. He wanted to stop. He knew he needed to stop, but trying to stop was like trying not to sneeze.
“Sir,” Ranjeet looked up, “all the emails describe the same type of issue and they’re all coming to me. There has to be a reason for it.”
Mr. Narang sat back in his chair. “Ranjeet, you’re good at your job, and that’s what I need you to do. Your job.”
“Yes, sir, but—”
Mr. Narang held up his hand. “No, Ranjeet. Just do your job. Let tier-two do their jobs. If you can’t do your job, then we’ll have to find someone who can. Do you understand?”
Ranjeet nodded furiously, gulped down the last of his chai, and got up to leave. In the doorway he turned and said, “Yes, sir. I understand. Thank you for your time.”
* * *
On his way home from work, Ranjeet walked through a park. The promised rain had fallen and cleaned the air of smog. The still-damp flowers sparkled as the sun warmed them with its reddening light. He always felt more peace at the park, even though the bustle of Kochi was just outside the fence.
Ranjeet swiped away most of the water still clinging to one of the benches and sat. The puzzle had not released him, but he could see no way forward. If he pushed Mr. Narang, Ranjeet would lose his job and without it there was no way he would be able to work on the puzzle. He stared at the passing people, some going to late shifts at their own call centers, others leaving th
eir jobs for the day and heading home. But the people faded into background noise as his brain worried at the puzzle.
Seven emails. They only came to him, and all described similar issues. The users would create a character, define its features, and then take their first foray into Feyland. They expected to see a digital representation of the mythical land of faeries, but none of them did. They saw a different place, the Full-D sim unit transported them with complete sensory input, but it wasn’t the place described in the game’s manual nor by the tech support scripts. More than that, the players’ characters did not look like the ones assigned in the system, but like the players themselves.
Ranjeet had scoured the forums for any posts that might relate, but if there ever was one, Ranjeet couldn’t find it. He considered contacting tier-two directly, but all support tickets had to come from a verified Feyland account and accounts were tied to Full-D units.
As night fell, Ranjeet started home. Before he got very far he heard his name. Ranjeet turned to see Amit waving at him from across the gardens. He waved back and Amit motioned for him to wait, rushing around the walkway to meet him.
“Hi, ” Ranjeet said, “I was just going home.”
“Would you like to join me for dinner?” Amit asked.
“I’m sorry,” Ranjeet said, “I can’t. My parents need my help tonight.
“Oh.”
Ranjeet offered a weak smile by way of making amends. “Maybe next time.”
Ranjeet still had trouble making friends. He’d lived in a different world for so much of his life, he didn’t know how to act or how to talk around people like Amit. He was always afraid that he’d unintentionally say something rude or offensive. But at the same time, he desperately wanted a friend.
Chronicle Worlds: Feyland Page 24