I wanted to reward myself after my first week at Jenning & Reece with a Sparkle Dungeon marathon. However, I logged in to discover a disturbing notification in my in-box: a silent alarm had been triggered at my spawn point. I had my own private sanctum as the Queen where I could safely emerge into the game when I was in between major quests. It was called the Iridescent Warehouse, and you couldn’t find it unless you knew the phone number to call for directions.
But according to my silent alarm (the extended remix version of the classic tech house track “I Got Ya Booty, But Ya Can Have It Back”), someone was inside the warehouse. Even assuming someone could find it, no one should have been able to actually break in. The outside of the building was covered in thick layers of meteorite.
I materialized in the Warehouse in full battle regalia, resplendent in my glittersteel jumpsuit with fiber-optic trim, Blades Per Minute hanging proudly at my side, standing up on stage behind my enchanted DJ decks. It was dark, so I activated some stage lighting and focused it out on the floor.
A figure appeared from the darkness and dropped to one knee in a pool of light, bowing deeply so that I couldn’t see a face.
“My deepest apologies for this intrusion, my Queen,” the figure said, and the feminine voice was instantly familiar. “But I dared not hope that you would come visit me again, and I have urgent need to speak with you.”
“Rise,” I said impulsively. Players never bowed to other players.
The figure stood and faced me. Skin of pure silver—that was the giveaway.
One of the most tragic NPCs in the game had escaped its routine.
The Sparkle Dungeon series was renowned for its panoply of side quests. Some revealed hidden aspects of the story that were technically unnecessary but aesthetically gorgeous; some were elaborate puzzles that players raced to complete, in the hope of attaining some unique treasure or power; some delivered nothing more than a bad pun or a tiny Easter egg; and some were death traps, reminding players they must always keep up their guard (and make sure they’re wearing a good set of diamond armor).
Sparkle Dungeon 3: Mirrorball and Chain introduced the Shimmer Lands. They appeared as a distant glow on the horizon across a vast desert in the southern region of the Sparkle Realm, in the foothills of the Halogen Mountains. This glow lit up the night sky, composed of a multitude of bright lasers, flashing spotlights, and pulsing LED washes that seemed to illuminate a hopping little resort town. It’s what I imagined Burning Man looked like when you viewed it from far away across the desert.
The Shimmer Lands were definitely a far cry from the main storyline of the game, which was focused on inner blingdom intrigue surrounding control of the glitter trade. But some players always wanted to be the first to experience a given side quest, considering this more important than climbing up the leaderboard in a rapid, linear way. Good on them—the game supported many styles of play.
Then word started to slowly trickle out that the Shimmer Lands were actually a magical mirage. If you wandered out across the desert and weren’t careful about keeping landmarks in sight behind you, you could lose all sense of direction and wind up stranded in the middle of nowhere, with the gleaming mirage of the resort town just as far away now as it ever was. You couldn’t retrace your steps, and you’d never reach your destination.
Word spread very slowly about this because people were highly embarrassed to find themselves trapped in this predicament. Some people were just flat out in denial; they would log in every day and just start marching again, absolutely sure that they were getting closer. Some people just quietly gave up, abandoning their characters and starting over with new ones. That wasn’t a big deal if you’d just rolled somebody up the other day, but for people who were playing characters they’d been using since the original Sparkle Dungeon, this meant losing all the tricked-outery they’d accumulated along the way. You had epic-level characters getting suckered in there for a while, and when it all blew up on the forums, it was not pretty.
Because essentially, these poor souls protested, the Shimmer Lands weren’t a “fair” addition to the game. I waded in to remind people about the original Sparkle Dungeon training quest. The first time you ever saw a beautiful glitterfalls along the path, there was a sign that said DO NOT STICK HEAD IN GLITTERFALLS. And by god the single most common thing people did in response was stick their heads in the glitterfalls, at which point they were decapitated.
Point being, the game had been dangerous since day one. People were like, “Then they should have at least put up a sign saying DON’T GO TO THE SHIMMER LANDS!” And I was like, “Aha, but this is not a training quest, so suck it up!”
The Queen was not always generous toward the rabble.
So then Sparkle Dungeon 3.5 came out, the highly anticipated main expansion to SD3, and tucked away in the release notes, after a list of every new feature, config option, bug fix, and performance optimization that they’d released as downloadable content, was this little line:
Bonus feature: the Sparkle King sends his emissary to rescue those lost souls who wander alone in the Shimmer Lands.
And soon a trickle of new reports started to hit the forums: players who met the emissary out in the wild were rescued, shown the true path back to the main quest. A few screenshots of the emissary circulated: a feminine avatar whose skin was pure silver; she wore a gorgeous gown which shimmered with color and light to mesmerizing effect; she was unusually tall, with an elaborate headpiece bedecked with blinking stars; and long locks of curly white hair fell down her shoulders, akin to a beautiful wig you might find on an opera performer.
She would say, “Weary traveler, I am the Dauphine of the Shimmer Lands, and I have come to set you free,” and then she’d open a portal back to some random spot in the game where you were free to rejoin the main quest.
The sudden introduction of this new side quest started to nag at me. The sample size of people reporting back was small, but what if there was a deeper story hook than simply “The Sparkle King sends his emissary to rescue those lost souls who wander alone in the Shimmer Lands” and these people missed it?
So I did eventually roll up a new character and send her out there. She was Lady Luminescent, a first-level kaleidoscope keeper—one of the five original character classes. They were literally made of glass, so their natural enemies were basically anything that could pick up a rock. Their starting weapon was the seemingly lowly one-handed kaleidoscope—an inscription on the surface of each one in the game said BE CAREFUL THIS IS NOT A TOY and despite that warning, the first thing most beginning kaleidoscope keepers did is look down the barrel, at which point they usually blew their own faces off. Yeah, it’s a beam weapon, not a toy.
I didn’t even stop to pick up diamond armor after rolling this character up because I knew I could outmaneuver trouble if I simply made a direct sprint to the Shimmer Lands right after spawning for the first time. And so, in due time, it was Lady Luminescent’s turn for a rescue, and thus did I meet the Dauphine of the Shimmer Lands. The screenshots I’d seen hadn’t made it clear how absolutely dazzling she was. I almost had to turn down the brightness in my headset.
In my usual fashion, I poked and prodded the situation to see if I could find something others had missed. Naturally some hack had already tried attacking her, which had no effect on her, so I had that data point to guide me. Instead I tried to find out how many dialogue branches her AI might have available. You had her opening line, addressing weary travelers. If you dallied longer than she expected before jumping through the portal, she’d say, “Fear not, Elite Adventurer of the Diamond Brigade, for the Sparkle King promises you safe passage.” And then if you hung around for another ten minutes or so, she’d say, “Very well, I will keep you company here until your courage returns.”
After several hours, I discovered several more lines no one else had heard by doggedly throwing out a bunch of random conversational prompts. For instance, I asked her, “Do you get to return home after you’ve rescued everyone there is to be rescued?”
“My home is the Shimmer Lands,” she said sadly, “and as you well know, the Shimmer Lands are a mirage.”
I didn’t go through the portal. I left Lady Luminescent there, because I didn’t need a spare character right now, and the portal didn’t seem to be closing. I updated the official SparkleWiki entry on the Dauphine of the Shimmer Lands, and never expected to see her again. I did keep an eye out for any other story hook about her out in the larger world, thinking there should be a way to rescue the Dauphine herself from the Shimmer Lands. I mean, do you know how easy it was to anthropomorphize an immaculately rendered AI whose sole sad purpose in existence was to hang around in a desert and rescue losers? And these losers probably didn’t even stop to say thank you before jumping through that portal. Probably broke her heart each time she found someone in the desert, and then watched them immediately abandon her.
Some nights I wondered what the Dauphine must have done to deserve being sent into this dismal exile by the Sparkle King.