Artie, Kay, and Kynder lived in a yellow clapboard house on Castleman Street in Shadyside, Pennsylvania, about four miles east of downtown Pittsburgh. Both Kay and Artie had been calling their dad by his first name since they were around eight years old. That’s when Artie learned he was adopted, and while Kynder was the only father he’d ever known, he stopped calling him Pop and started calling him Kynder. Within a few months Kay was doing it too. Kynder thought it was a funny quirk and liked it, so he never insisted on being called Pop, or Dad, or anything else.
Kay’s mom had left them when Kay was three and Artie two, and Artie had lived with them since he was exactly one year and three days old. Kynder rarely spoke about Kay’s mom, and never talked about why she left. Artie didn’t even know her name, and Kay never bothered to share it with him. When it came to her mom, Kay never shared anything with Artie. Hey, all kids have secrets, right? Even sisters like Kay?
That night after dinner Artie logged onto Otherworld’s game forums to share a little secret of his own. He started a new thread called “killed Caladirth w/o walkthrough” and waited. Within minutes there were over a dozen posts patting Artie on the back. He read all of them proudly. Artie thought that this was what it must feel like to be Kay.
Most of the posts were from registered members, but some were anonymous, and some of these were trolling. One of the trolls called Artie a wimp on account of him choosing to play the mage-warrior class. Apparently that guy had it in for mage-warriors. Artie could not have cared less. The heck with trolls.
Artie was about to log off and go to his room when the board live-updated with a post titled “Arthur’s Easter Egg.” Curious, he double-clicked it. It read:
Arthur, you need to find your Easter egg tonight. Look in the most obvious place. —MrT
Everyone who’s really played video games knows what an a joke, that’s hidden in the game, kind of like, well, an Easter egg. As hard as Easter eggs could be to find—usually you had to look them up on the internet to have any chance of uncovering them—they were there for everyone. How could it be that Arthur had his own Easter egg in Otherworld?
Also strange was that MrT’s post was private—only Artie could read it.
Artie clicked the reply button on MrT’s entry and simply wrote, “Huh?!” and clicked Post.
Within twenty seconds came the reply:
Arthur, it has begun. Find your egg. It is with Caladirth. You must do this. I have already said more than I should. Go to your egg, and to your destiny. —MrT
What the heck was this guy talking about? Artie had a destiny? In a video game? This was too weird to ignore.
Artie logged off and ran down to the game room. He turned on the TV and picked up the controller and unpaused the game. The soundtrack played over the stereo system as he moved Nitwit the Gray from one end of Caladirth’s lair to the other, looking for something out of the ordinary. He didn’t see anything. He sifted through the pile of treasure. It was a good haul, and it got him excited to continue playing, but nothing about it stood out.
“Look in the most obvious place,” the post had said. The most obvious place … the most obvious place…
The eggs!
Artie guided Nitwit to the dragon’s three large, stone-black eggs. Nitwit picked one up—nothing strange—and put it back. He picked another one up and turned it over. On the bottom it said, “Break me.”
Artie shook his head and made Nitwit throw the egg to the floor. It exploded in a sparkling orange haze. There was no dead dragoling or gooey egg white—only dust.
But then the dust settled, and there, cradled along the inside curve of a large piece of shell, was a note.
Nitwit picked it up and went into the Inspect Item mode.
Artie was overcome with nervousness.
The note read, “Arthur. In one week’s time you will come to me at the IT. You are special, Arthur, and I have need of your service and power. I have been waiting so long for you. Your humble servant, M.”
Wait. He was special? And he had a servant? A humble one?
What?
Artie stood rooted to the rug for two minutes. He felt a little woozy. The controller slipped from his grip and when it hit the floor, Artie came to. He read the note again. What was going on? Artie was suddenly scared, like Finkelstein was bearing down on him with a baseball bat and no lunch money.
He shut down the system, ran to his room, and dived under the covers, where he concluded that, yes, he’d just had his leg pulled and it was just coincidence that his name was Arthur, and there was an Easter egg in Otherworld that was addressed to somebody also named Arthur. Yes, that’s what it was. A coincidence.
Eventually Artie fell into an uneasy sleep.
Six days after Artie’s Easter egg hunt, about which he had decided to never tell a soul, as Artie was reading the latest X-Men on his bed, the telephone rang. He didn’t move to answer because he knew Kynder, who was in his room packing for their trip to the tournament in Cincinnati, would get it.
After a pause Artie heard a muffled but insistent “Who?” through the wall but didn’t pay it much mind. Then he heard something in Kynder’s voice he’d never heard before: fear. It was sudden and undeniable.
“My ex-wife? Oh my. It is you.” Artie sat bolt upright and dropped his comic book. A call from her was about as likely as a call from a giant saber-toothed tiger.
Artie crept to the wall and pressed his ear to it. Kynder said, “Why on earth are you calling me now? And why do you sound so far away? No one sounds far away anymore.” Kynder’s fear was gone. It had been replaced with anger. Artie felt proud of his dad.
“Really, I don’t care. What do you want?”
Pause.
“What? How do you know about that? What do you mean?”
Pause.
Kynder sounded extra flabbergasted when he asked, “Why on earth not?”
Short pause.
“What do you mean, it’s not safe? It’s Ohio, not Afghanistan.”
Pause.
“What? Since when do you care about the children? Since when do you care about anyone but yourself?”
Artie remembered that there was an old corded phone with a busted ringer in the hall. He left his room and tiptoed to it and carefully picked up the receiver. A weak voice finished saying, “not safe for me—or you, either.”
For a moment Kynder said nothing. Then, very forcefully, he said, “Listen. You’re loony. I’m hanging up now. For the last time, good-bye! Don’t ever call here again!” And he hung up. Kynder had cut her off so abruptly that Artie was sure she’d call back. But she didn’t. The phone didn’t ring again at all.