“Something like that. Well, it's off to bed, see you.”
“See you.”
Rather than stand from the couch and join me at my door, Aya used her ghost limbs to pull her up and over, a gymnast move if I’d ever seen one.
The Thulean slipped past me. “Men are so weird, at least American men. And what is with this ‘see you’? Why does everyone here say ‘see you’? Of course they will see you, and of course you will see them, unless they die, or you kill them, and if you kill them you will still see them until you do something with their body. Why don't you just say ‘goodbye,’ or ‘we will meet at a later date’?” Aya asked as she went straight to the pipe that cut across my room.
I ducked under the pipe. Aya, rather than duck under it, latched onto the pipe with her legs and start doing some sit-ups.
“No idea,” I told her, not in the mood to engage.
The urge to dive came to me and I went with it. If I could uncover something about the Steeple, it would make Iris happy and give us a leg up.
I sat on my bed next to Lady C. and placed my NV Visor over my head. As I waited for the visor to power on, I felt Lady C. curl up next to me.
Taking me off guard, Aya also got onto the bed, on my other side, and also lay down next to me, her head in the crook of my arm.
“See you,” I told Aya as everything fizzled around me.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
My avatar formed on the field before our Dojo.
I turned to the meadow, watching as Yaksha lay down to sleep. Gobi and his mother, Rose, weren't far from me, nor was Joe Camel, who lazily ate some grass.
You seem happy, Rose thought to me.
I am happy, Rose. Are you happy?
This is a fine place to live, she told me.
I smiled at the bearadillo just as I felt someone slap me on the back of the head.
“See you?” Aya said as she approached me. “You think you're a very clever musician man, don't you, Chase?”
“I wouldn't say that I think I’m clever, but I'm not an idiot,” I told her with a grin.
“You seem very smart to me,” Lady C. chimed in. She stood in her sleepwear: a long camisole, a pair of matching panties, and her hair pulled into a tight ponytail. “I never see you reading books though, and I'm pretty sure smart people read books.”
“Why are you in sleep clothes? We have plans.”
“We do?” the Metican warrior asked, exchanging glances with Aya.
“I logged in to get a head start on Steeple research.”
“We’ll need to go to town to really understand EverLife,” Lady C. said as an idea formulated. “There’s a place called Midnight Library. I saw the advertisement at the bookstore.”
“That sounds awesome.”
“Oh, it'll be such a bore,” Aya said, faking a yawn.
“You don't have to come with us.”
Magnus and Ophelia appeared almost instantly, an eager look on Magnus’ face. They wore matching clothes now, his cravat and vest the same emerald color as Ophelia’s dress.
“Are you going to town?” Magnus asked.
“Sure are,” Lady C. said as her armor formed on her body.
“We would love to come and help you discover more about the Steeple,” Ophelia said. She swept some long white strands of hair from her face and offered us a creepy smile.
“Cool, let’s do this.” I lifted my fingers to my mouth and whistled for the horses. Lightning cracked in the sky and they came riding down, the first horse to touch down whinnying as it lifted its two front hooves into the air and settled.
I climbed up, and rather than get her own horse, Lady C. climbed up with me.
“I'm going to show you how to really ride a horse,” she told me.
“But I’m the one sitting in front.”
“Then get down so I can sit in front,” she said, to Aya’s laughter.
I did as instructed, and after I remounted, I saw Altsoba appear near Aya’s cabin.
“Have fun at the library.” Aya turned toward the Skin-Walker and strutted away.
“You were staring at Lady Aya’s ass for a long time, Chase,” Lady C. said.
“What? I wasn’t … I was wondering what’s going on with her and Altsoba.”
“Why don’t you ask her yourself? Now, hold on tight.”
Our horses rose into the air, Ophelia and Magnus on one horse, and Lady C. and I on the other.
Damn could Lady C. ride.
Even though I didn't quite understand the mechanics of how these horses travelled in the air, and even with the experience that I had from earlier, it was very clear to me that Lady C. knew exactly what she was doing.
Our horse took off, leaving Magnus and Ophelia behind.
As we rode, she started to shift to the right, and soon, we were actually riding upside down, my legs clamped tightly around the horse’s electric body and my arms hooked around her waist.
She laughed, righted the horse, and got back on an invisible track, making a beeline toward the center of Kingdom Lume.
“Heeya!” Lady C. cried out, and the horse responded by bursting forward, faster than I’d ever traveled before.
We were there in a flash, and we had to actually wait for Ophelia and Magnus to join us. Eventually, they touched down, and we took our lightning horses to a field with other horses. I realized that this was only for show, that the horses didn't really need to go here because whistling would bring them, but I went along with it.
When in digital Rome, do as digital Romans do.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
It was pretty easy to spot the Midnight Library, considering it was lit by a giant sign made of multifarious bolts of electricity zipping back and forth in the space between the letters.
To be honest I expected a library once we entered; what I saw instead was a nightclub with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. People stood around high tables drinking cocktails, leafing through books and sharing passages.
A pair of elves played dueling piano on the establishment’s circular stage. I’d been to a dueling piano concert before, and they weren't playing anything that intense, sort of a seedy Arabic music, something that sounded like it’d be better in a canteen on the outskirts of Tatooine.
I was just about to say something to Lady C. about possibly performing at the venue when we were greeted by a heavyset elf, a pear-shaped man with oval glasses and a leather vest that barely covered his belly.
“Ever been here before?” he asked as he led us to a table.
“Nope.”
“I'll just give you the lowdown then. You order both drinks and books here. You don't peruse. This isn't a library where you can just go pick out whatever you want then sit down and read it. No, these books are exclusive, and they cost money to read. So you order drinks, and you order books.”
The elf waited for Ophelia to sit down, and once she did, he pulled out a pad and looked to Lady C.
“Well? What will it be?”
“We definitely know what books we want,” the Metican warrior said, not feeling at all rushed by the waiter’s annoyance. “But for drinks, we'll have to see the menu.”
“The menus are on the table,” he said. “And what about the books?”
“Anything you have on the Steeple of Litur and Industria,” she said with a smile. “Thanks!”
The waiter grumbled off as each of us took a look at the menu.
This place was costlier than I’d thought it would be, and two rounds of cocktails and an hour of book reading would set us back five thousand Proxima dollars. But at least it was a fixed set, so I chose it, and transferred the money over while my party decided on their drinks.
Proxima Dollars: $15,250
Spent: $76,500
Loan: 0
As it turned out, the drinks were named after famous people that had had books written about them in the Proxima Galaxy.
I chose the Quantum Hughes’ Giggle Juice; a fan of his biography, Lady C. chose Oric Rune’s Brok
en Sword and Wolf Tale; Magnus went for something called Ray Steampunk’s Golden Rust; and Ophelia chose a cocktail called FeeTwix Fajer’s Twonicorn Tonic.
The books came before the drinks, and Lady C. sorted through them and handed them out. She chose the largest one for herself, the medium-sized ones for Magnus and his undead lover, and the smallest book, which looked like a children's book and was written by someone named Marlon Bundo, for me.
“Why do I get the children's book?”
“I don't know how well you can read,” she said with no hint of sarcasm in her voice.
“Me neither,” said the fat elf as he scuttled away.
I had already started looking through the picture book when the cocktails came.
The giggle juice was strong, but it wasn't like alcohol in the sense that it fogged my brain; rather, it made me focus better. Each sip I took clarified smaller details in the text, words coming out to me, the pictures becoming more vibrant.
The book I was looking through was about a drunk governor of Kingdom Ignis known as Gregarious Groucher the IV, who tried to burn down the Steeple.
Groucher was a terrible king, a greedy, weak-minded, selfish fool with yellow hair and an orange complexion. He’d grown up rich, and had never really struggled in his life, which was why he was seeking the secrets of the Steeple.
It was the only thing he couldn't have.
Money, women, power: he was born into those things and had them at his disposal.
But the Steeple…
Predictably, King Groucher lost his marbles after blowing through the kingdom’s resources, his life ending with him personally trying to torch the Steeple and catching himself on fire instead.
“Some children's book.”
“It's a cautionary tale,” the waiter commented as he came by to drop off small glasses of water. “But the art is nice, and you should appreciate the art.”
As soon as he was gone, Ophelia closed her book and began talking about what she’d learned from it.
“Basically, high level Alphas from Kingdom Fumus tried to have their mythcrea seep into the Steeple, but found it to be airtight. They then banded together with Kingdom Terra to try to burrow under the Steeple, also a failure, because the base of the Steeple goes down to the core of EverLife.”
“The core?” I asked.
“EverLife has a core as its center, which in technical terms could be considered an OMIB, as the strange thing about EverLife is that it grows from the inside out as more Alphas are allowed to have Dojos here, at least that’s what this book is about.”
“Check this out.” Lady C. turned the page to yet another diagram of the Steeple. The artist had tried to show that there might be some color combination in the Kingdoms that related to the change in color of the sun and the top of the structure.
“There are so many theories,” she finally said.
Magnus agreed. His book, Theories of the Steeple, listed every theory that had been proved wrong. “Rather than go over all the details here, one thing that anyone should be able to concur, yet no one readily admits, is that it isn't related to magic,” said Magnus. “Example: if the sun's red, and the bottom door is red, Fire magic will not work. Nor will any other type of magic.”
“Okay, so no magic.”
“Necromancers in Kingdom Mortem even had a theory that the Steeple was actually dead and that they could raise it from the dead. They gathered up their strongest mythcrea and took them to the Steeple, had them surround the Steeple and all cast magic at it simultaneously. It simply bounced off.”
“Interesting,” I told him as the waiter brought over another round of books. “Let’s keep looking through them. At least we’ll have a good idea of what doesn’t work.”
Chapter Eight: Beach Bums
I waited for the NV Visor to power down, listening yet again to that famous Brian Eno tone.
We’d studied at the Midnight Library for a few hours, at least it felt like a few hours had passed. And actually, it may have been less than an hour, but I had no idea of the time as I never really kept track while I was in the Proxima Galaxy.
I did know that several hours had passed in New York, and that it was getting late. Once I could feel my legs again, because one of them had gone a little numb due to the way I'd been resting on my bed, I stood and went to the bathroom to clean up a little bit before bed.
Even though my shower wasn't that great, I was lucky to have an actual shower in my room. I knew a lot of people that lived in New York that had to share a bathroom with four or five people, but this place had come with two bathrooms.
A definite plus.
I brushed my teeth, and just about that time, I activated my Monster Hunt app to call Lady C. to New York.
And just like she’d promised, Aya didn't come this time.
“What do you think?” Lady C. wore a lacy negligee, which she had apparently picked up in our brief shopping experience in downtown Kingdom Lume. Or was it called the city center? No matter, it served the purpose of a downtown.
“I like it,” I said as she came into my arms.
Before moving in to kiss her, I stood back a little bit, my hands still on her waist.
Lady C.’s hair was now in a Dutch braid, a little glitter splashed across the front of her face. She wore a tight golden necklace with a single strand that dipped into the top of her ample bosom, accenting the split between her breasts.
She was naked beneath the negligee, her nipples and pubic hair visible under the diaphanous fabric.
After a quick kiss, we practically launched onto my bed, where I quickly discovered that having sex in the real world was not what I thought it would be – in fact, like she suggested, it wasn't going to work.
My brain could only trick my senses so much, and I realized then as we tried to go at it: I was essentially humping the mattress.
“We can go to EverLife,” she said when she noticed the disappointment on my face.
“It's fine,” I told her as I rolled onto my side. “I wanted to see what it would be like, and it is not at all what I thought it would be. Not your fault, not anyone's fault.”
“We can just do this in there,” she said, referring to the Proxima Galaxy.
“Yeah, but I think there's another way that we can try.”
Just thinking about it opened a search bar on my iNet screen.
Yep, just as I had figured, there was a way for an NPC, or something known as an RPC, a reborn player character, to take a humandroid’s body.
Apparently, the first time this had been attempted was in the 2050s, in an experiment led by a researcher named Dr. Sophia Wang.
I even found a place in New York that set up sessions.
It wasn't cheap; a single session started at a grand, but you were able to spend the entire day and night with the person if you so chose. A little more research and I found that there was a way to purchase a humandroid who was made with specs identical to the person you were trying to replicate, something people who’d lost their spouses or children had done.
The cost of this was way out of our ballpark.
“I can tell you're researching something,” she said as she laid her head against my chest, looking up at the ceiling.
“It's possible,” I told her.
“What's possible?”
“For you to come here, or should I say, for you to come here in a way that I could experience it here. Through a humandroid.”
“Is it expensive?”
“It's a little pricey, but I think it's something that we could look into in the future. You would actually take the humandroid’s body, similar to the way that I take my avatar’s body in the Proxima Galaxy.”
“And we could have sex?”
“Yes.”
“And I could feel it?”
“I think? Like I said, it's a little unorthodox, but it would be something different for us.” I swallowed hard and reached my hand over to her face. It felt so real, but I knew it wasn't, and just mome
nts ago I could definitely tell that it wasn't.
But for simple actions like this, the interaction was spot-on.
“Let's do it then, someday.”
“Yeah,” I told her. “Someday.”
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
The next morning came quickly, and as soon as I got up, I was ready to go. We had a full day of hunting planned, and even though Lady C. was still asleep in my bed, I called Aya to New York City.
The Thulean appeared in her new armor, smirking at me when she saw Lady C. sleeping in the bed.
“She really is a lazy thing,” she said as she approached me, draping both hands around my neck.
“What are you doing?”
“I already told you, you're not strong enough for me, but I do like it when you don't wear your glasses,” she said as she moved just a few inches closer to my face.
Aya really was beautiful, her complexion completely exotic, her orange eyes, the sharp way her face was shaped and the fact that if you looked at it closely, you could see just the slightest hint of texture, different from that of a normal human.
She wore her hat, as always, cocked to the side. “Did you have a good rest?”
“I don't know, did you? Last I saw you were with Altsoba.”
Aya took one step closer to me, if that was even possible, and started to size me up. “And?”
“I don't know, you were asking me so I was asking you. What's going on there?”
“Wouldn't you like to know,” she said as she turned to the bed, brushing past me with her shoulder. “Wake up, Lady Cassandra. We have hunting to do, and your Alpha is asking questions that he shouldn't ask.”
“What?” Lady C. said, pushing herself off the pillow. She took one look at both of us and flopped back down. She was adorable, there was no other way to describe the Metican warrior.
“You heard me. We’re leaving. Right, Chase?”
“That's right, but first, a quick breakfast.”
“Wake me up after,” Lady C. groaned.
My coffee and ham and cheese croissant from Krunkin’ Kronuts arrived a few minutes later.
I got a notification that the drone was at the door, and I quickly went and found the delivery package at my front door step. “You could get very fat this way,” Aya said as I returned to my room.
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