Bradford sent me home with strict instructions not to come back to the office until I’d had four consecutive hours of sleep in my own bed. I wasn’t ready to go because I could tell there was more to the story. But it seems I was not the boss of the entire company, so I went home. Naturally, sleep was entirely out of the question once I got back to my apartment.
If life was proceeding according to any rational, normal cadence, I’d log directly into Sparkle Dungeon and bathe in the blood of a rampaging horde of feral baby rainbows, slicing the freakishly happy monsters to confetti with my black light kaleidoscope until I was satisfied that I’d done my duty to the Realm; then I’d be able to sleep. That was sounding very appealing right about now.
And as time had passed, I’d begun to think that letting the Dauphine of the Shimmer Lands intimidate me was a bit silly. Sure it was weird to have an NPC in my Iridescent Warehouse pressuring me to join her on a quest beyond the map itself. But if my answer was “I’m not going on your quest,” what could she do? It’d be like the start of some tabletop D&D game, where the villagers come to you for help fighting the lich king and you just go, “Nope, that shit sounds dangerous” and the dungeon master says “welp” and shoves eight rule books in a backpack and goes home and you watch TV instead. How hard could that be to communicate to her?
Admittedly I was very tired.
I logged in, arriving onstage behind my enchanted DJ decks, and made a quick visual survey of the Warehouse. I expected her to be out on the dance floor, right where I’d left her, patiently waiting for me to come back. Instead I saw her portal floating there, and she was standing on the other side of it, out in the Realm, near the rift. I couldn’t tell from my perspective if the rift had gotten much bigger or if she was simply much closer to it.
A swarm of random NPCs—neutral characters like deep-house divas and breakbeat repairmen, as well as deadly foes like country music remixers and Spotify royalty accountants—had collected nearby and were periodically throwing themselves mindlessly at the rift, vanishing instantly. Mass NPC self-destruction was certainly new behavior. Why were all these NPCs off their routines?
The Dauphine noticed me standing on the stage, and stepped back through her portal to face me.
“My Queen, your return is most welcome,” she said. “The Sparkle Realm has seen much turmoil since we last spoke.”
“What’s going on out there?” I said. “Don’t these—citizens—have better things to do than dive into a mystery hole in the sky?”
“I cannot say,” she replied. “The rift is unaccounted for in stories and legends. There is no precedent for its appearance or its effects. If I may beg your indulgence, have you considered my plea? Will you embark on this critical voyage with me?”
“We’re just supposed to get in line and throw ourselves at the rift like all the other riffraff? Because that sounds anti-appealing to me.”
“No, we shall fly.” A highly polished, chrome-plated jetpack ignited at her back and she rose up off the ground. “The Halogen Dwarves are making one for you as well. Outfitted with my thought-based propulsion Engine.” In an instant, she was suddenly standing next to me on the stage. She quickly took a step back and dropped to one knee. “My apologies, my Queen.”
“I’m still thinking about it,” I said. The look of disappointment on her face was rendered pretty exquisitely. “Hang on, I’ll be right back.”
I paused my session and pulled up a browser window, intending to spot check the forums again. Since last I looked, the rift was now openly described as a “glitch” that the dev team was working on, but not considered highest priority because it wasn’t affecting players at all—players still couldn’t reach it. The rift was certainly distorting NPC routines a bit, but NPCs who wandered into the rift just respawned back in their original locations.
Nobody was talking about the Dauphine, though.
I clicked on a support link for 24/7 chat. I was expecting a chatbot, but perhaps my account history flagged me as the Most Important Customer, because I was immediately connected to a live human with a Tier 2 support badge.
“Hello, Isobel, this is Chad. How may I assist you?” Chad’s profile pic was a headshot of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan, grafted onto the body of John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever posing on a brightly lit dance floor, and I understood this to mean that Chad considered himself to be a Disco Barbarian.
“Well, Chad, I just have a question. How do I get the Dauphine of the Shimmer Lands to stop loitering at my spawn point?”
Nice long pause there, no big deal, I could wait.
“I’m sorry,” said Chad, “you’re having trouble launching the game?”
Oh, Chad, was this going to be a long, tedious conversation?
“Do you know who the Dauphine of the Shimmer Lands is?” I asked.
“Emissary of the Sparkle King,” he instantly replied. My opinion of Chad stabilized. “Are you trying to find her or something?”
“No, I definitely found her,” I said. “She’s in my Warehouse. Look.”
I sent him some screen captures of the Dauphine on my dance floor.
“The Dauphine doesn’t wear a bomber jacket or goggles,” he said. “That must be another player maybe?”
“With silver skin like that? When did that become a player option?”
Pause. He was pondering.
“Plus,” I said, “she keeps telling me she’s the Dauphine of the Shimmer Lands, and she sounds like the Dauphine, too.”
He continued pondering.
“I was wondering if the big ‘glitch’ had anything to do with this,” I pressed.
“Well, if they know what the big ‘glitch’ is, they haven’t told the support team yet,” he confessed. “Let me try something, hold on for a sec.” A minute later, he got back on the chat and said, “Super weird. The Dauphine is not in the Shimmer Lands.”
Aha! I triumphantly bellowed in my mind.
“So, let’s do this. We have a support avatar that runs around in god mode, but it’ll save me some time if you invite me to your spawn point instead of me hunting for it. I’ll DM you the avatar name—would you mind letting me come gather some firsthand video capture for an incident report?”
This was top-tier service. A live person! In god mode! Assisting the Queen! The natural order of things, if you asked me.
The Dauphine did not acknowledge Chad, perhaps because the support avatar was little more than a floating blur, an apparition near the ceiling who didn’t speak or get close enough to trigger a reaction from her. Chad and I maintained an open chat window, though, so I was sure he saw the conversation I started with her upon my return to the Warehouse. I wanted to stall her so that he could capture as much video as he wanted.
“So, I’ve really been taking your offer seriously,” I said to the Dauphine, which was in the vicinity of being true. “And I just don’t think now’s a good time.”
“The situation is clearly degrading,” she protested. “When do you imagine will be a better time?”
“Look, unlike you, I actually have to work for a living,” I said, breaking character because I was tired, so very tired. “I have a fundraiser to plan, a release party to coordinate … I can’t invest in a quest right now because I know myself, and I get obsessive about these things.”
“I would think the integrity and well-being of the Realm would be of greater interest to the Queen than a ‘fundraiser’ or a ‘release party,’” she said bitterly.
Chad was impressed, saying in the chat window, “She ad libs like someone’s playing her.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but how do you think I pay for my season pass?” I snapped back. “SparkleCo wants American money for that. They don’t barter for shiny baubles or funk remixes like we do in the Realm.”
“Your ‘season pass’ will be worthless if you do not act,” she said.
“How do you know? The rift out there is just a glitch. They’re going to fix it. Developers are going to fix it, not players, understand? The question is—who is playing you?”
“No one’s actually playing her,” Chad said. “Confirmed that much at least.”
“I see my faith in you has been misplaced,” the Dauphine said.
“I kill baby rainbows for fun,” I replied. “That’s about how far your faith in me should go.”
She quickly stepped back through her portal, which snapped shut behind her.
“That was some wild shit,” Chad said. “I don’t see anything about this in the internal release notes. According to this, the Dauphine hasn’t been touched since she was originally released. I’m going to escalate over here. Just keep this chat window open and I’ll drop updates in here while you’re at work or whatever.”
I was unsettled. The Dauphine didn’t bat an eye at concepts that were out of context to the game, like American money or me having to work for a living. True, she didn’t appear to understand these concepts, either, but still. “Ad libs like a player” was a neat trick regardless. I always thought they hired performers to do all the possible NPC dialogue variations in a game like this; apparently they had some pretty top-notch speech synthesis to facilitate ad libbing with a recognizable voice.
I’d been enthusiastic to roam the land looking for trouble. Now something seemed hollow about that prospect.