RABBLE GAMES SIM PREMIERE
VRTP:RABBLEVSRISTO.PLAY/BASTILLE/PROLOGUE.VR
Bastille opened with a salon, a glittering array of intellectuals gathered in a grand Parisian home on the edge of Montmartre. Active Risto players and retired glitterati mixed and mingled, cosplaying high-profile historical figures. Players who unlocked the house would have opps to chat with famous painters, game architects, and musical virtuosi.
The aristocrats had winter fairy features, ethereal design touches like cobalt-blue flesh and snowflakes for hair. Bells chimed, faintly, as they passed.
Rubi recognized one of Drow’s musician friends, playing the painter Jacques-Louis David. In a corner, holding court, was a Shanghai sim star cast as the painter Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. Jean-Paul Marat was around. A young Robespierre sneered at people from a corner.
Sugar Valkyrie was the opening A-lister, cast as the duchess hosting the salon.
Sugar had transitioned from out-and-out athletic superstardom into playing matriarchs: military leaders, queens, presidents, and goddesses. She had owned the action circuit until five years before, when she’d had a bad fall and broken her femur. She’d taken life extension and, lacking a backup career, now specialized in stunt-doubled speaking parts.
Unranked beginners had to play several low-level quests just to get into the house, but Rubi was already inside. She was clad in a prim black dress that fell to the toes of her shabby shoes, with a little cap that curved around her trademark hexagon of beads.
She had taken a light dose of Conviction, and the drug heightened the augmentation: she caught a whiff of perfume, of face powder and just a trace of pipe tobacco above the wine and the food. Balanced on her hand was a tray of red wine, the illusion given weight by her baton.
Rubi wafted through the crowd, curtseying and eavesdropping as partygoers socialized and inhaled canapés. In the past, on the surface, a maid would have been no more than a flesh-and-blood support app, anonymous as a food-delivery bot. Here, player eyes tracked her through the room.
If she’d taken MethodAct with the Conviction, she probably wouldn’t notice the attention.
The number of guests was massive.
Coach highlighted a quest opp: a court illusionist asked her to pass a note to his lover. She managed the transfer, receiving, as her reward, three tiny pearls with flickering flames within.
Drow was starving himself and chasing paranoid fantasies. Luce was locked up. And the worst of it was she didn’t want to go, back to them and her obligations. Now she was here, she wanted to stay and play.
A doorway opened before her, revealing the ballroom … and Gimlet. Tall and regal, they swept a six-foot royal officer out onto the dance floor.
Gimlet was clad in a floor-length tunic of pristine white and a mountainous bleached wig. The teardrop pupils of their eyes had been enlarged by the Risto toon artists. If it was difficult for them to throw themselves into this scenario, body and soul, it didn’t show. The sight sent a jolt out to all Rubi’s extremities.
Light of foot, wholly immersed in the dance …
This was why she’d clawed her way up the amateur leaderboards, measuring herself against Gimlet’s wins. That capacity of the scenarists to catch her off guard: to scare, to plunge her into a world long gone. Sighting Gimlet, like a stag in the forest, knowing the chase had begun.
Ah, but who’s chasing who?
Games were a taste of something wilder than greenwalls and rations, the endless row, row, row as the Bounceback generation patched up Earth’s damaged foundation for life.
“Downstairs, girl! Find another tray!”
The wine had run out. Rubi went down to the kitchen and accepted another quest: slipping cakes to a handful of the Rabble beggars at the kitchen door.
“Win conditions,” Coach murmured. “Dispense ten cakes and get back upstairs within ninety seconds.”
Eight cakes, nine, ten. The last grubby hand passed her a tattered soldier’s communique: the Dauphine has disappeared from Versailles.
Pocketing it, Rubi seized a tray of brimming wineglasses.
Had any of the wineglasses been tampered with? None showed any fingerprints or residue. One glass was slightly out of alignment; she poured its contents into a potted fig and left it there.
“Seventeen seconds.”
Back to the ballroom, double-time but without spilling a drop. The dance was wrapping up.
“Give a glass to the individual in white,” prompted Coach.
“To Gimlet?”
“Stay in character. You are a servant, Barnes a stranger.”
Gimlet was holding court among a circle of enraptured young things now, engaging in competitive wordplay with an earnest-looking poet, no doubt racking up points as they dueled verbally.
The crowd parted as she approached. Gimlet looked surprised to see her so soon.
A noblewoman, one of the snow-haired fairies, saw the empty space on Rubi’s tray left by the discarded wineglass. She growled. Rubi’s scorecard racked up a bonus. It had been tampered with.
“Good catch,” Coach murmured.
The fairy spun, her bearing haughty. Twinkling ice crystals flew, frosting all the glasses.
Then something—a foot?—snagged Rubi’s ankle.
She fought for balance, but an elbow in the back put paid to that. Fairy-dusted red wine arced upward, swirling crimson in candlelight … and spraying Gimlet from the crown of the wig to their belt buckle. The dripping slash of color left a suggestively bloody stain on the pristine tunic.
Cries of shock from the crowd.
Rubi had landed at Gimlet’s feet. Hot candlewax pattered on the nape of her neck. Clinging to her tray, she scuttled back. Legs caught her—the crowd preventing her escape. Powdered faces and cruel eyes stared, from behind fans and gloved hands.
“Désolée,” she cried, reading from the prompter. “Mer, I am so, so sorry!”
Sugar Valkryie grabbed her by the scruff of her neck.
“Insolence! This child must be whipped!” Gimlet demanded.
Was Gimlet growling? The wine was soaking into their throat. Their breath turned to fog, despite the hot air of the salon. The graphics team was playing it to the hilt.
“It’s not fair! Someone tripped me!”
Sugar tossed Rubi into the arms of a soldier. She screeched and kicked, playing the exit for all she was worth as they dragged her to a locked cellar.
As the door slammed shut—blackout!—Coach put up a timer in her peripheral. “Prologue concluded. Ten-minute break.”
Rubi scooped a handful of hydrogels, popping them between her teeth like grapes, enjoying the cool sensation of fluid and protein slipping down her throat. “Has it already been two hours?”
Stats scrolled across her field of vision: she had completed four quests and done meet-greets with eighty-one satisfied players.
“All for SeaJuve,” she muttered. “It’s not slacking; it’s prosocial.”
Upstairs, audience-facing content would have shifted to Gimlet and the effects of the magic wine.
“Periscope to the surface.”
Rubi’s prison dimmed to line drawings, a wine cellar overlaid on a high-end playroom. Gimlet, thirty feet away, was spinning within a pair of steady gymnastics rings.
She admired their form, feeling weirdly hungry.
“Newscycle?”
Crane displayed a live feed from the drones aboard the SeaJuve lead ship, Sable Hare, as it chugged off to tackle reviving an oceanic dead zone in the North Sea’s briny depths.
“Funding and followers?”
“Lower than hoped, Miss Cherub. But it’s early yet.”
No sex in SeaJuve. Rubi shivered. You could filter carbon from the air into bamboo or algae or fungus. You could harvest it, throw it on a scale. Weigh the tonnage, make a stack, put the tonnage on view in Sensorium.
SeaJuve, by contrast, had a huge “You’ll have to take our word for it” factor. Could making oxygen really compete with rewilding? When Gimlet’s mad scientists were promising an actual tiger cub …
Her fists clenched. Ridiculous, that she’d had to play ragamuffin just to get backing for air.
Ridiculous squared, when she was supposedly busy with something as big as first contact with aliens.
And yet …
“Fuel and hydration,” Coach reminded her.
Despite what she’d said to Happ, she already felt calmer.
She chased the hydrogels with a Conviction gel and a small pack of hot soup: chicken noodle. The gym had a tray of printed snacks; she pocketed three of her favorite cherry cubes.
“Curtain up in five,” Coach said.
“Win conditions?”
“Risto has imprisoned a spy, Monique Goyette, in this cellar. They suspect she’s tied to the Dauphine’s disappearance. Your mission: help her escape.”
“What’s my geographical comfort zone?” Rubi asked.
Fifteen feet away, here on the surface, Gimlet swung into a handstand, holding their body steady on the rings, toes pointed skyward. Eighteenth-century Paris neighborhood superimposed itself between them, maps showing the narrow scope of ragamuffin Rubi’s life. Tags filled in her character’s backstory. Dead ma, of course, as in any good fairy tale. Pa and seven hungry siblings jammed within her childhood home, a mile away. There was an older brother apprenticed to a blacksmith.
She had extensive familiarity with the neighborhood church, the butcher (ye quaintey shoppie, Drow would call it, sponsored by a beef printer), the baker (likewise sponsored), and a candlestick maker.
“Is there a church? How’s the local priest?”
“He has given you no obvious grounds for mistrust,” Coach said.
“Not a ringing endorsement.”
“Time remaining in break: three and a half minutes.”
“Highlight empty buildings and accessible rooftops?” Squares on the mat lit up.
Gimlet executed a twisting dismount, then handsprung to their feet, extending their baton to full length. Then they froze—with Rubi’s break ending, theirs could begin.
If SeaJuve fails …
If Luce is for real …
Forget it for now and just play.
“Periscope down,” she said, treating herself to one last good look at Gimlet, on display and breathing hard, as her blackboard and the graphic overlays faded.
The wine cellar was dark. Outlines of stacked oak barrels rose to the ceiling.
Okay. If this ran to spec, there’d be a monster in the cellar, pursuing her as she tried to rescue Goyette. She’d need to make light, fight off the beast, and escape.
“Sixty seconds.” Coach breadcrumbed an X onto the floor next to the gym’s climbing wall. Rubi put out her hands, counting through the last minute, four seconds to each breath.
Step one—get to high ground.
If SeaJuve fails and we’re choking on stale air when that space fleet arrives …
Can there really be a space fleet?
Concentrate, stupid.
There. Conviction supplied the feel of wood barrels under her palms. She rapped quietly, three times.
She leaped, catching the upper lip of a barrel, and scrambled up. So far, so good.
Ears peeled for monsters, she crawled in the dark, inching over the top tier of stored wine, giving each a little push to feel the slosh of liquid within.
Whiff of fresh air.
She found a casement window, big enough to allow her escape, secured with rusty bars. On the sill she found a single copper coin stamped with the Dauphine’s face.
Outside, moonlight illuminated the bare feet of the beggars she’d fed. Should she call out? No, not yet.
There was no sign of soldiers, zombies, or any other approaching opposition. Rubi put the damp concrete wall of the cellar to her back.
I want to believe Luce, she realized. Wanted to believe that these Pale were coming, and they had their own laws and social cap, within a greater intergalactic community, to look to. That public pressure might allow humanity to put on a good show and avoid hostile takeover.
Rubi’s eyes had adjusted to the moonlight trickling in, etching the edges of the barrels and an outline of the cellar. Above the wine casks she could see a spectral form, frost and fog with icicles for fingernails, drifting in through the window.
Monsters, finally.
Grinning, she crabbed down between the barrels and the back wall. She found the floor, scavenged an old torch, and used one of her quest-won beads to set it alight.
The frosty specter made straight for an alcove full of oak staves, concealed by an old fireplace screen.
Rubi gave chase. The specter had found a pretty young thing in a tight corset, with orange blossoms for hair, a deep scratch on her shoulder, and a trembly air. She was curled up, crying on the staves.
“Where isssss the Dauphine?” the specter hissed.
Rubi attacked it, driving the torch into its body. There was a fizzle, a hiss, and it was gone.
“Monique Goyette?” she whispered. “C’est vous?”
A wink from one teary eye confirmed her suspicions: Manitoule liked to show-run for Rabble from within the ingenue.
Monique was haloed by golden pollen. She was a beautifully rendered summer fairy, high contrast with the Risto ice motif. But Rubi’s sense of distance, that need to analyze the wallpaper, was ebbing.
“You poor lamb!” She used her skirt to dab at the tears. Manitoule—Monique—sniffled gratefully as she helped her up.
“I know nothing!” the girl stammered.
“I’m not going to hurt you.” Another specter rushed them: Rubi burned it back, scanning the windows. She took an oak stave, trying to lever the bars out of the frame. When that failed, she called out to the beggars outside.
“Help, I beg you! Get us out of here!”
This feels more like MethodAct than Conviction.
I didn’t take MethodAct.
Never mind. All that mattered was getting away from this house before the ghosts closed in or her mistress had them beaten.
The beggars tied a chain to a harnessed horse, using it to rip the bars off the window. They lifted Monique out. Rubi took a running jump, launching herself through the exit and rolling to her feet in the snow.
The stunt, minor though it was, raised a general cheer.
“We need to find somewhere to hide!”
A musket popped, sobering the crowd. Hooves—lots of hooves—clamored on the cobblestones.
“Soldiers!” said Monique, and Rubi grabbed for a rolling pin …
… no, a baton …
… no, a rolling pin, and caught her by the hand.