VRTP:RABBLEVSRISTO.PLAY/BASTILLE/EPISODE-THREE.VR
@Bastille: Rubi Whiting remains in play.
The canal approach to the Bastille prison was a trench of sucking mud and fast-moving skeletal bears with sharp claws. Defeating them was a grind of constant melee. The Rabble fought in squads as they made for the castle wall. Mages blasted fire at the front; archers targeted ice-breathers from a safe distance. Everyone else took the skeletons hand to bony claw.
Game Control had published a list of aliases, the two hundred or so players who’d begun the prologue within ten minutes, on either side, of Rubi’s reboot. @UsualSuspects, they’d tagged them.
The casino would be raking in bets on which of the suspected toons was her.
The last of the skeletons went down with a wail, and a boss monster, Duchess Ursuline, rose from the chips of bone, barring the way to a rusted staircase exit. In keeping with Risto aesthetics, the apparition was tall and powdered in snow, with thick fur and long teeth. Matted braids of hair, terminating in fur-lined, snapping mouths, grew out of its back.
Rubi caught a first blow on the flat of her scavenged shield. It was a good hit, enough to make her stagger. Or maybe she was just getting weak after three hours of continuous play.
She had picked up a sturdy short sword on a quest in Episode Two. Now, with a quick swipe, she sliced the neck of the hydra head and stomped it for good measure.
A new one took its place, snapping viciously, almost catching her hand.
The cry went up: “Deploy doppelgangers!”
Several players who’d challenged a mirror house earlier launched crystal flasks. False versions of the players, dozens strong, boiled up at their feet. The boss obligingly began decapitating the fakes, wasting turns.
“Coach,” Rubi said. “Inventory my mystery items?”
“Objects in your pack whose purpose remains undetermined: sealed envelope, rusty badge, red amulet, blue amulet, ash ointment, eternal flame, bone key.”
She grabbed the ointment, losing a turn as she poured it on her shield. It covered the surface with a layer of glimmering coals.
A hit: hard bite, into the flesh of her arm. Blood reddened the ropy neck attached to the puppet head, soaking into the coarse, braided pseudopod of hair. Her health bar jagged up and down.
Rubi slapped the burning flat of the shield against it. A shriek: the fur wisped and burned away.
“Ointment to shield,” she shouted. The cry propagated.
Rubi’s health stabilized. She let out a sound that was half a laugh, half a victory shout.
“You are among the top fifty @UsualSuspects,” Coach said.
Every time she rose on the leaderboard, it increased her odds of being, well, herself.
She was in no rush to get unmasked.
The group pushed Duchess Ursuline back, cutting and cauterizing until she died, spilling blood into the canal. Behind them, the passage closed, locking out new players until the scenario reset.
Rubi bolted a healing potion and rushed the iron staircase with the rest.
A ribbon stretched across its top. UNPLAYED TERRAIN! was emblazoned across the silk.
The crowd whooped. A Suspect cut the ribbon with their dagger, claiming extra points. Whooshes of flame marked several others’ ascent to the next level. Player rankings shuffled.
They sprinted, in a pack, to the base of the castle wall. Someone conjured a poll of moji: a spider, a mole, and a rhinoceros.
“@CanalParty: Over, under, or through?”
Rubi added a spider to the mix, voting for a wall climb. Most of her peers went for the rhino.
The pop-up poll reminded her of the vote going on, out on the surface.
“Check BallotBox,” she subbed.
Summary overlaid a puddle of blood. The flash vote on sovereignty was ongoing. Participation numbers were below the number required to ratify a global plebiscite. NorthAm voter turnout was up to 62 percent.
“Through, through, through!” bellowed the mob, and she added her voice to the shout.
Hammer-wielding fighters took up positions beside a crack in the castle wall, smashing out fortifications in time to the chant.
“Not too big!” someone warned as they made a crack.
“Who’s got beanstalks?”
Everyone, Rubi included, hurled incandescent lima beans into the gap in the stone. Sprouts furled, digging into mortar, spreading leaves around the perimeter. The wall crumbled, creating an entrance wide enough for two players.
A thief peered inside. “Optional time-out!”
“Accept!”
Rainbow shimmers swirled through the air. The scene froze. Rubi scanned the bloody canal at their backs. They were hemmed in.
“Win conditions, Coach?”
“It’s a gauntlet. The goal on this level is simply to survive and make it to the second level of the castle.”
Rubi dropped to a resting crouch, cataloging her various aches. She’d had one slightly stale fruit cube on her when she started play. That was long gone, and there’d been no water at all.
Food opps had come her way a couple times as she played, but she was afraid of getting drugged again.
Despite the fatigue, she felt good. Clear-headed, tired, and strangely at peace. She was manning her oar, keeping her word; the vote was out of her hands.
“I see the Regent’s Blade!”
She looked up.
Gimlet stood astride the battlements, dressed as an officer of the royal guard, surveying the crowd. Their skin was frosted in shimmering ice crystals. The heart-shaped amulet throbbed slightly, no doubt beating in time with their pulse. A bit of punitive grotesquerie, that. Villains could never be wholly beautiful.
Held the castle till I got here, she thought. Knew you’d do it.
Eyes aglitter, blood on their long lace cuffs, Gimlet sneered at the gathered assault team.
Their gaze paused on Rubi. Could they know?
A slow smile broke over Gimlet’s face, revealing long canines in glacier-blue gums.
Oh. She was resting in that crouch Gimlet had imitated, back in London. She sent gestural moji, again, crossing her heart to remind them of their wager.
Competing for points and prizes made me think Gimlet was …
What? Different? Opposed? Disinterested?
She remembered long-fingered hands around her waist, pulling her closer. The heat between them—
Gimlet broke gaze abruptly, preserving her anonymity.
@CanalParty: Come on, then. The challenge purred out over the courtyard in velvety baritone. Nobody’s bested me so far.
Rubi sprang to her feet.
Here on the ground, the player topping their party leaderboard raised his war hammer. “Corridor’s a kill box. We’ll draw straws to go first.”
“Fifteen seconds remaining in time-out, Mer Cherub,” Coach said.
“Yep,” she replied. “Periscope to the surface.”
The battlefield faded to ghostly overlay. Her party’s tactical discussion converted to chat window. She was on an empty street in the remnants of Manhattan, shadowed by myriad drones. Looming columns of shrink-wrapped skyscrapers cast intermittent shadows, bars of sun and shade. The air was thick and strangely dry. Her baton felt heavy in her injured right hand. In her left was a handful of gravel.
She dropped the stones, swiping grit on her thigh.
Her sunscreen was gone. Her scalp felt delicate, burnt. Her mouth was parched.
“Where am I?” Rasping.
Maps spun … she was nearing the southwest corner of Central Park.
“Is Gimlet close? In the flesh, I mean?”
“Two kilometers and closing. Time-out is over.”
Time to play. She blinked away the Surface, checked the straw she’d drawn. Nine. She’d go in ninth.
@AllBastille: Rubi Whiting remains in play.
“Coach,” she subbed. “You saw those rocks in my hand?”
“Incidental reality confusion within improvised playing environments does not register as a penalty.”
“Screw my score. Any time I capitalize on a found-weapons opp, I need an automatic two-second scope to the Surface. I need to know I’m not actually holding anything.”
“Surfacing during combat decreases victory probability—”
“Override. Code in reality checks.”
“Done.”
She rejoined the @CanalParty, watching as fighters one through eight vanished into the castle, each leading a thief and a healer. Mages who couldn’t hope to make it through the kill box were buffing armor and weapons. Fiery spell effects brightened the shadows.
A jester appeared, shouting, “Zut alors! @CanalParty has cleared five percent of the route to the parapet.”
The first team died. Number two, an established trio led by a popular player named Shecky, carved a path to 12 percent before they too got swarmed. Three more stalled at fifteen, dying at the hands of some monster wielding a guillotine. The next didn’t get even that far.
A respawn set the whole surge back.
They were holding less than a third of the route to the parapet when Rubi’s slot came up.
No guts, no glory. She ducked into the narrow corridor, taking in the basics of the set design: torch-lit catacombs, cells filled with burnt skeletoons, broken machines suggestive of torturetech.
The corridor widened before her, nicely inviting. Too easy. She caught a low bar, swinging over. Sure enough, a skeletoon came boiling out of its broken stonework.
Twisting, she booted its head off its shoulders—getting her lower leg iced in the process. She managed to land on the good foot.
Her healer thawed the injury.
@CanalParty: No touching the skeletoons directly, she subbed.
Staying low, she sprinted to the halfway point in a suddenly wider corridor, then stopped dead and whirled, ready to spring in any direction.
Down! A barrage of icicles at chest height. Scream from the healer. Her thief managed to dodge. As Rubi rolled to her feet, she came face-to-face with a massive marionette with a guillotine for a mouth.
Rubi threw her decoy flask, charging in as copies of her generic Goldilocks toon burst from the floor. The guillotine snapped shut over one of the decoys and she slashed with the sword, knocking the marionette into a pit.
She sprinted to a new door, putting her back to the wall, catching her breath. Mid-level fighters poured in behind her, holding the newly cleared terrain.
The door opened; there was a ribbon ahead. Pleased, she sliced it, sharing XP with the thief, Espi. After three grueling hours of playing catch-up, she was breaking new trail.
“@UsualSuspects Leaderboard Update: You are twenty-fourth.”
Beyond the door was a vast stone chamber with a curving corkscrew ramp, carved stone ascending thirty feet, to the parapet that marked the end of the level. Its wall bore a massive tapestry depicting a knight in armor. This, inevitably, would be enchanted. Rubi saw the likely trigger—a shaft of sunlight cutting a line across the stone floor.
“Can I do a vertical ascent here, Coach?”
“It would accord nicely with the realworld terrain.”
A grin skinned her lips back. “Do or die, right?”
Espi nodded, uncoiling a rope. Sheathing her sword, Rubi found a handhold in the wall, opposite the tapestry, and began scaling.
Up the wall, pause for breath, up a little farther. The stone felt like metal under her fingertips. At ten feet up, she turned to assess. Rabble fighters were beginning to win their way into the room.
Someone broke the sunbeam. The knight in the tapestry shivered, shimmered, and turned into the real thing, charging @CanalParty.
Espi, her thief, was panting but keeping pace as they reached the top. Rubi crabbed her way over to a castle window, leading to the parapet atop the stairwell.
She found a narrow landing leading to a cell block and another unlock ribbon. Rather than hog the glory, she took up a position atop the ramp, guarding their position so someone else could have the bonus.
“Gauntlet level complete!”
“Well done, Randomized Player!” Coach enthused. “Here are your victory conditions. Free the prisoners. Defeat the Regent’s Blade. Rescue the Dauphine.”
@Bastille: The Endgame has begun.
Rubi leaned against the wall, taking long breaths as the ground troops caught up.
Another @UsualSuspect, Szpara, led two dozen gauntlet survivors up the steps. “What’s the play? Goldie?”
Rubi peered through the iron bars. “At least one of the prison cells will be full of ringers. We free who we can, send ’em down the ramp. Then—” She gestured at a razor blade, twenty feet tall. It was anchored in an archway, set like a guillotine, blocking the path to the final confrontation. “Then that.”
“That,” agreed Szpara.
The rest of the group, reduced to about half its number, joined the convo.
“Twelve cells, twelve locks. Do we play Russian roulette? Open them one at a time? Or go All or Nothing?”
“Let’s roulette the first two cells,” Rubi proposed. “Hope to get lucky, free some prisoners, station our healers in the cells to provide a bit of cover. Then we hit the locks on all the rest at once and go at it hammer and tongs.”
“Row row row!”
“All we got is us!”
“Espi, what’s your lockpick?”
“Level ninety.” He pointed at the cell closest to the door, the emptiest. “That one?”
“Agreed.”
“Is that another time-out?”
“Accept it,” Szpara said, and everything paused again. @CanalParty: Big push ahead! Catch your breath!
Rubi said, “Coach, periscope the surface.”
Quick flash to Manhattan. She had climbed over a stockade of container cars, over a stone wall and into Old Central Park. Her baton was covered in scrapes and nicks. She’d lost more primer and her knee wore a beaut of a bruise. Heat throbbed in her cheeks and shoulders. Across a wild expanse of crushed grass and muck, a figure shadow danced, swordfighting.
Gimlet.
A grab-and-go drone approached Rubi, dangling a chugger.
Should she take it? Risk getting drugged?
“You can’t play if you’re dehydrated,” Coach murmured.
“Any word on my father?”
“He’s nearby. Young Mer Barnes believes he is in the hands of the @ChamberofHorrors.”
Her breath caught. “But Crane’s with him?”
“There’s a firewall.” Crane ghosted in beside the Coach app. “He’s beyond my reach, Miss Cherub.”
One recidivist #troll.
“I’m just supposed to take that on, am I, and then go on with what I’m doing?”
“Should I protect you by lying?”
“Yeah, yeah. Up with personal sovereignty, and all the other kind, too.” Rubi toasted the app with her chugger, biting off the lid.
Drink half. Take it slow.
She was too thirsty, too hungry. The fluid was gone before she could help herself. Lemon ricotta flavor exploded, wetting the dried fibers of her tongue.
A weird tower, incandescent and haloed from behind by drone-mounted lights, was rolling up behind Gimlet. A set piece? She squinted, but there was no making it out. And no time.
Drow would have to fend for himself until this was over. Fatigue, at this point, was like a razor: if she pushed it by trying to multitask, she’d bleed out all her remaining energy.
@AllPlayers: Endgame in five, four, three …
“Toon me back in, Coach.”
Rabble had deployed around the prison cell, guarding Epsi the lockpick, not to mention the escape route for a first group of prisoners.
The lock clicked; the cell opened. Barefoot scarecrows in threadbare rags, smelling of filth—that would be the Conviction she’d just drunk, kicking in—began to flee. As the prisoners fled, the enormous guillotine at the far end of the cell block began to rise and fall, chopping at the floor.
“Rubi!” someone shouted.
She didn’t take the bait. They’d been trying that all night, to see if she’d answer and thereby collapse the betting pool.
Just play. Her cheeks hurt. From smiling, she realized.
Gimlet was up ahead.
Epsi popped the second cell.
The lock was trapped. The prisoners turned into soldiers, and the soldiers turned into wights.
Rubi piled in with her best bloodcurdling shriek. No sense in taking it slow now. The guillotine blade blocking the way forward continued to chop, hacking a furrow in the floor, necessitating an ever-longer jump across to the parapet where Gimlet waited.
That wickedly sharp blade, chopping up and down. Time the jump wrong, that would be it.
Szpara lost their bid, getting cleaved, falling with a scream.
“Goldie! Go go go!”
Rubi jumped to the edge, catching her breath. She threw herself across the chasm as the blade flashed up.
Don’t fall short don’t fall short …
She stuck the landing, barely. Caught the ribbon marking the final episode trigger. Rolled and rose, arms upraised in triumph, amid a whoosh of fire.
@Bastille: Rubi Whiting has leveled.
“Congratulations! You are atop the leaderboard!” Coach began.
“Thanks.” Betting pools converged: the automated leveling announcement had unmasked her.
Someone—Coach, Manitoule, the casino, Rabble’s art team—hit her with a slow dissolve. They/them pronoun tags in her profile reverted to she. Generic Provençal milkmaid skin darkened, and her dreads became dreads again. Her beaded braids grew in, complete with her trademarked hexagon of golden beads.
A scream. She whirled.
A hundred feet away, Gimlet Barnes drove their sword right through the heart of Monique Goyette.