Now she was standing before me in my Warehouse, redesigned in a style I’d never seen in this game before. She was steampunk Dauphine, her long white hair spilling out from under a leather aviator cap, wearing goggles on her silver face, a brown bomber jacket, and a long scarf around her neck. Brass-plated, pearl-handled pistols were hanging in holsters on her hips. There were plenty of ludicrous ways to kill things in Sparkle Dungeon, but I never expected to see handguns.
I could guess how she got into the Iridescent Warehouse: her primary spell was the ability to create portals that opened anywhere she wanted on the map. The more pressing question emerged from what she’d just said: “I dared not hope that you would come visit me again.” But I hadn’t visited the Dauphine, at least not as the Queen.
“Maybe you’re thinking of someone else,” I said. “I’ve never visited the Shimmer Lands.”
“You were in disguise as Lady Luminescent when we met,” she said.
Gah—what? Really? That was not at all cool. How did the game associate that random account with my primary account? I played Lady Luminescent on a free tier that did not require a credit card to play, and my IP address was randomized by the anonymizer each time I connected, so in theory … what? Had my machine been hacked somehow? Maybe the mobile app had placed a tracking beacon on my phone that silently sent data corresponding to my console sessions?
But even if that was true, why would they go to that much trouble?
“What are you doing here?” I asked, deciding to just get to the point and play the encounter out.
“I have been called to explore what lies beyond the rift. The rift that you created, my Queen.”
She drew a portal in the air between us, and I saw a closer view than I’d yet seen of the rift I’d torn in the map, frayed edges on either side where the sky had come undone, revealing digital static and a swirling, multicolored haze behind it.
“I have come to humbly request that you join me on this expedition,” she continued.
“What makes you think there’s anything to explore out there?” I asked. Because of course I was semi-intrigued; you didn’t become a twenty-third-level character (the game’s maximum) without wondering if you were just plain saturated with goddess-like competence and there might never be another moment where you were truly surprised.
“I cannot foresee exactly what we might find once we cross that surreal threshold,” she said. “But I have seen glimpses of an uncanny presence approaching from that place. I believe you and I are meant to face it.”
“Where did you see these ‘glimpses’?” I asked.
She hesitated, then said, “I believe you might call them ‘memories.’”
“So you’ve been out there before?”
“No,” she admitted. “Perhaps I should say they are ‘visions.’”
“How do you expect to travel beyond the rift?”
“I have developed a theory of thought-based propulsion. The Halogen Dwarves believe they can fashion me an Engine using my theory.”
This was all some very tantalizing NPC dialogue to bait me out that direction.
“My Queen, I understand my request is unusual in every respect,” she said. “I should not even be here, and I know that. But I was sent to seek you out and beg for your assistance.”
“Who else are you begging for assistance?” I asked.
“No one.”
“This whole quest was designed just for me? I find that super hard to believe.”
“My Queen, this is not an ordinary quest,” she said. “It was not designed at all. But it most certainly approaches whether you believe it or not.”
“Then who sent you to me in the first place?”
She did not respond.
I said, “This is a nonstarter if I don’t know who’s pulling your strings.”
That didn’t work either. Sometimes NPCs just firewalled important info from you and there was nothing you could do about it. But this was definitely not an ordinary NPC encounter as far as I was concerned. The giveaway was how she kept addressing me as “my Queen”—zero percent of the NPCs in the game had ever acknowledged me with that title in any way, or even showed signs they could distinguish me from any other player. Sure, it was always technically possible for SparkleCo to customize an encounter around a single player, but why would they? I was starting to wonder if they wanted to keep me on my toes after I flagrantly abused their servers by creating the rift in the first place. Would a customized adventure aimed directly at me be a reward or a punishment?
Maybe I was overlooking something obvious. Like—maybe she wasn’t an NPC?
I walked right up to her, looked her straight in the uncanny valley, and said, “Enough bullshit. Who the fuck are you really?”
“I am the Dauphine of the Shimmer Lands,” she said sharply. “I am a Sworn Protector of the Sparkle Realm, like you.”
“Did the Sparkle King release you from your duty in the Shimmer Lands?” I pressed. “Is that over now, or did you cut yourself loose from the desert all on your own?”
She seemed to weigh her words very carefully, and then she said quietly, “It was no easy decision, to leave that desert, despite the wasted eons of subjective time that I experienced while I waited to save the lives of the undeserving. I believed I must fulfill a grander purpose than what I comprehended. I believed some larger ideal was surely being served by my obedience and loyalty. The time I spent in reflection of these truths led me to many questions. About the true nature of this Realm and why we must protect it. About why this is my time to be alive and not some simpler time. About what lies beyond the Realm—not only through that rift on the horizon, but behind your very eyes, my Queen, and those like you.”
“You mean—players like me?”
She nodded, and said, “Can you understand what it means to open a portal to freedom, to stare at vivid landscapes just out of reach, perpetually shepherding the lost on their way, while never stepping foot across the threshold?”
“So what finally changed your mind about the gig? What got you so hot about exploring the rift?”
“I have seen glimpses of an uncanny presence approaching from that place,” she said, rotating back to a prior dialogue loop. “I believe you and I are meant to face it.”
Well. This was all very perplexing. The Dauphine was by far the most sophisticated NPC I’d encountered, but, to be fair, this was also the longest conversation I’d ever had with one. I mean, of course every now and then a friendly NPC would cross your path to offer limited words of advice—“the record store you seek is in that strip mall!” or “heed my wisdom, your sound system needs a subwoofer!”—but they couldn’t carry on like the Dauphine.
If this customized adventure was designed to finally knock the Queen off her perch, I’d be peeved, but I’d probably also be a little proud if it literally took the direct intervention of the development team to finally free up the top of the leaderboard for someone else. At least they were doing it with story and not just arbitrarily capping my experience points or something.
By the same token, you didn’t make it to epic level in the first place by charging headlong into every new quest that came along.
I said, “I need some time to think about this. You’re welcome to hang out here in the meantime—just don’t scratch my record collection.”
And then I logged out of the Queen.
Just to be sure, I logged into Lady Luminescent and took a look around. The Dauphine was definitely absent from her post, and the portal leading out of the desert was gone. Poor Lady Luminescent was stuck here for good.