Mohawk let out a freakish, guttural shriek—much louder than I would have guessed possible, and I realized he wasn’t attacking, he was summoning help.
Cameron pushed me toward the door and I didn’t need convincing to run. I figured he’d be right behind me, but he slammed the office door behind me and locked himself in with Mohawk. Locked doors seemed irrelevant in a scenario where people could appear and disappear at will, but maybe I was missing something.
My goal now was to become invisible. My mask was hanging around my neck, and I slapped it on. In the hallway outside Cameron’s office, I saw an intruder, prowling my direction. The revelers in the vicinity provided a wide berth. I can’t imagine how people rationalized the sudden appearance of these people out of thin air in the first place. Were they like, “Oh, people just appeared out of thin air, are Penn and Teller filming a special here tonight?” or “Oh, people just appeared out of thin air, who invited those talented and/or annoying Improv Everywhere kids?” or “Oh, people just appeared out of thin air, did I take all the designer pharma from China or is it just cut with mycotoxins like last time?” People were so blasé these days, I mean, fuck.
We had ten trained security professionals stationed throughout the party. We had one at the door checking invitations, one keeping an eye on the locked door to Cameron’s bedroom suite, and the others wandering in patterns that enabled unobtrusive coverage of the major areas of the condo—balconies, dining room and kitchen, dance floor, loft.
And Phyllis and Max were lurking on the periphery of the action somewhere. I assumed they’d seen me going into and out of Cameron’s office. I could only hope they’d also noticed our new friends.
I slipped out onto the raised dance floor, which was jammed full of revelers at the moment. I wasn’t sure how anyone outside of Cameron’s office could’ve heard Mohawk’s shriek over the music blasting out of the powerful sound system, but maybe Maddy’s squad was especially attuned to that noise. You couldn’t rule out any goddamn thing as being more or less possible anymore, which was absurdly frustrating.
Mohawk knew what my costume looked like, though, so that could be a problem if he got away from Cameron. Oh and also—hiding in a crowd full of innocent people was a rotten tactic anyway, turning them all into human shields or whatever. This was going to go south fast, I could feel it.
Cameron stepped out of his office. His crown was missing, he’d shed his golden cape, and he carried the plastic scepter with its shattered end high in the air. It didn’t light up anymore, but he was still a striking figure. He was making himself a target, I realized—they’d certainly be on the lookout for him, after all. I imagined he was going to try to buy time for me to escape, but I had to believe anyone actually trying to leave the party right now would also become a target.
The doorway to Cameron’s office was situated in a hallway that opened onto the dance floor on one end, and went down the other direction and around a corner into the dining room. An intruder prowling in that hallway spotted Cameron emerging, and I think Cameron spotted the intruder at the same time. Some kind of verbal exchange seemed to happen, and the intruder dropped to the ground. Moments later, two more intruders started slowly closing in on him from the far side of the dance floor from me. Seemed like as long as he was one on one, Cameron could avoid harming anyone but his opponent, but if he needed to attack more than one person at a time, he’d have to shout his power morphemes loud enough that bystanders might be in the area of effect. Suboptimal—I wanted to help.
But I was distracted by a commotion up in the loft. DJ Luscious was surrounded by several intruders, arguing about something. A member of security intervened; suddenly both security and DJ Luscious were on the floor. The intruders waved to someone at the bottom of the stairs—Maddy, now ascending toward the loft. One of the intruders found the microphone that Cameron had used earlier. If Maddy got on the microphone, with her ability to broadcast power morpheme sequences, we’d be looking at a lot of collateral damage.
Cameron could fend for himself. I had to stop Maddy somehow. I wasn’t a paladin in the game per se, a bit too greedy for artifacts and treasure most of the time, but I also didn’t let people bully first-level characters if I could help it, and the people at this party were zero-level characters in this situation, with no way to resist a loud psychological assault.
I knew something they didn’t know, though, which was the location of the fuse box for the condo, in a walk-in storage closet directly underneath the loft. We’d supervised an upgrade to the electrical in the condo to support the requirements DJ Luscious gave us for his sound system. I made a beeline for the storage closet in question, which was hidden behind a fiber-optic curtain meant to distract people from snooping, since the closet had no lock.
Inside I pushed past stacks of crates, bins, and boxes of crap he’d stored here after making several trips to Burning Man, releasing clouds of suddenly disturbed dust into the air, and made it to the fuse box. I flipped the switches marked “loft” and was rewarded with loud cries of disappointment from out on the dance floor as the phat beats vanished.
The sound system was dead, for now at least.
I turned and realized someone had seen me come in. An intruder ripped down the LED curtain and stood in the doorway, dramatically backlit by stage lights in the air above the dance floor, which now swung lazily back and forth for no apparent reason without a beat to synchronize with. We made eye contact, and this time, I decided not to freeze in the face of an opponent.
A blazing whisper came out of my mouth, searing and caustic, like a paper cut with a jagged acid edge, and the intruder recoiled away from me, but only for a moment. Then we were both hurling sequences at each other simultaneously.
My eyesight got very dim and I realized I was plummeting down a long dark well, with just a pinpoint of light above me to give any sense of perspective. No, I realized quickly—that was just my consciousness refusing to participate in whatever experience my attacker was attempting to foist on me. I almost blacked out, then a painful crash hit me full on—it was my attacker, collapsing forward and losing consciousness, landing hard on me on the way to the floor.
I resisted the urge to shout “first!”
I’d used a quick three-part sequence on him: number eighty-two, the massive regret of a life wasted in pursuit of vapor; followed by number eighty-nine, the colossal embarrassment of realizing your foolishness was entirely on display; and then concluded with number fifty-five, the sadness of your every loss, compacted into a fist against you. As I suspected, this combination was a severe psychic blow.
As my mind clambered back from the brink of shutting down, I heard confusion out on the dance floor. I peered out the closet doorway just in time to see Cameron landing hard in the center of the floor, on the receiving end of some kind of shove from multiple intruders. The revelers splayed aside in every direction, leaving Cameron in the center of his own pool of light. He looked up, spotted me in his closet, and winked at me, before bellowing at whoever shoved him onto the floor. The sound was an astonishing combination of every vowel sound plus fifteen vowels that didn’t actually exist, which created a shock wave that probably knocked people over purely via its concussive effect, let alone whatever psychological effect the sequence also had.
Moments later, Cameron scrambled to his knees and aimed a similar effect up into the loft. Behind him, some asshole intruder was literally on the verge of clubbing Cameron with a baton. I screamed, partially in anger—poor showing, to bring melee weapons into a mage battle—and the intruder stumbled, giving Cameron an opening to throw an elbow that connected hard with the intruder’s nose.
This was all happening both incredibly fast and much too slowly.
Cameron took a run toward me and slid through the doorway into the storage closet. I slammed the door shut, and we stacked a few boxes in front of it. Thing was, they could all just materialize inside the closet, right? Except they’d all be momentarily disoriented as they arrived, one by one, and we’d be able to systematically clock them. I hoped, anyway. Then I heard a fucking gunshot, and then people were screaming.
The thing was—security didn’t have firearms. Cameron refused to allow it.
Another shot rang out, and I understood it better this time—it was a vocal approximation of a gunshot, a high-fidelity impersonation, an effect designed to frighten people into believing they were hearing shots without requiring firearms at all. You could get people to scatter out of your way, and more importantly, you could get people to listen to you if they thought you had firearms.
Maddy was screaming orders at her people from the loft, orders at the party guests to shut the fuck up and lie down on the floor, orders to Cameron and me to show ourselves.
Fact was, now we were trapped.
“Okay, somewhere in here, I have a flamethrower,” he muttered.
“Not helpful!” I exclaimed.
“Says you!” he shouted back. “Wait, c’mere.”
He led me through a maze of his scattered stuff to a small door I hadn’t noticed on the far side of the closet. This one had a built-in combo lock, which he swiftly unlocked, and then he opened the door to reveal a tiny hallway that probably led to the dining room if I understood the layout of the condo as well as I thought I did. We raced down the hallway, but then it turned unexpectedly and we arrived at a ladder.
“What the fuck?” I said.
“Doesn’t everyone have secret passageways?” he replied, irritated at the question.
I followed him up the ladder and we emerged into a big sitting room, with a large TV on the wall, a few couches, a recliner.
“My chambers,” he explained as he slammed the hatch shut behind me. He went ahead and shoved the recliner over the top of the hatch. I was starting to understand the value of putting impediments in their way. If they were disoriented after they teleported somewhere, they wouldn’t want to do it very often, and they wouldn’t be thrilled about doing it into locations with unknown conditions. Mohawk landing right in Cameron’s office was a prime example of the risk they took by coming here that way.
He led me through the sitting room into his actual bedroom, which was enormous and unkempt, with its own VR platform in one corner, and a laptop on a nightstand near the bed. He dashed into his walk-in closet, and I followed him to the doorway. He pulled a small gun safe down from a shelf and began unlocking it.
“You ever fired a gun before?” he asked.
“Used to go shooting with my dad,” I said.
“I hate guns,” he said.
He flipped open the case. Atop the red velvet lining inside was a small silver horn, the size of a bicycle horn but without the squeeze pump, like a tiny bugle with a handle. Next to it was a magician’s wand: a gnarled wooden rod, tapered to a point, and lacquered it seemed.
He handed me the horn.
“What’s this?” I asked. “Tell me it summons deus ex machinas.”
“Hardly,” he said. “This is the Horn of Magnification.”
“What about that?” I said, pointing at the wand.
“That’s a ninety-dollar remote control I haven’t figured out how to use yet,” he said, snapping the case shut and dropping it on the floor behind him. He took the horn back.
We were momentarily distracted by the sudden appearance of one of Maddy’s squad, materializing in a standing crouch on the bed nearby. Cameron and I both launched into our own respective combat sequences while the intruder was still disoriented, and we hit them so hard they instantly lost consciousness. Then we resumed our conversation.
“So what’s this do exactly?” I asked. “Is it—a magic item?”
“No, Isobel, because this is reality and we don’t have magic items in reality,” he said. “For hundreds of years people used megaphones like this to amplify their voices. Like bullhorns, before we enhanced them with electronics. They used to call them ‘speaking-trumpets.’
“I don’t know how to broadcast power morphemes,” he continued, “or transmit them digitally. I don’t know how to amplify them with electronics. But I have proven with this megaphone that I can definitely make them fucking louder.”
Cameron’s bedroom suite opened out directly into the loft space. He grabbed his laptop and pulled up the security cameras: Maddy and three of her squad were still in the loft, arguing about something. Opening the bedroom door would put us directly behind Maddy and her crew. A couple party guests sat on a love seat nearby; if I was not mistaken, they were dressed as members of the Glowstick Guard. The security footage was supposedly in color but the lighting was muddy, so I couldn’t tell if they were friendly blue Glowstick Guards or evil red Glowstick Guards. Sometimes you’d even see a green Glowstick Guard in the wild and you’d have to test their beatmatching skills to determine if you should kill them. I digress.
Carefully I opened the door, as slowly as I could manage it, and somehow, they didn’t seem to notice us. I dropped to my knees as Cameron positioned himself behind me.
“Oh wow,” said one of the Glowstick Guards, giving us away as they spotted the Sparkle King himself in their midst.
Fucking evil red Glowstick Guards, I swear.
Maddy and her comrades turned toward us, almost in comical slow motion.
Cameron began to deliver an amazingly potent sequence via the Horn of Magnification, producing a cone attack that bypassed the two Glowstick Guards entirely, and only seemed to clip me a bit for a few points of ouch. Instead the full force of the blast was directed at the surprised attackers. The sequence seemed to burn itself into my brain as I heard it, worming its way directly into my own arsenal. But the Horn cranked the amplitude of the sequence up so loud that it was painful to hear as a general sound in the environment, even if you weren’t caught up in the actual psychological effect.
Maddy vanished almost instantly. She’d abandoned her squad mates, whose reflexes were not as keen. One of the three intruders was lifted off his feet and flung backward down the stairs to the dance floor. Another was flipped up end over end and tossed like a doll onto the DJ decks. The third was punched down onto his back on the floor with a painful-sounding crack.
I froze with horror. Hell of a thing I’d just seen.
The Glowstick Guards shrieked and one of them dropped their wineglass. I watched it fall in slow motion out of the corner of my eye, realizing I was in the flow state, observing events just slightly ahead of their literal timing, waiting for my own opening.
A shriek came from the dance floor, similar to the shriek we’d heard from Mohawk in Cameron’s office. Maddy was summoning her people to her. Cameron and I slowly made our way to the railing of the loft and surveyed the scene below. There was Maddy, standing resolute, as her squad came out of the woodwork and appeared around the periphery of the raised dance floor, forming a protective ring around Maddy.
A couple of fights broke out—members of security appearing with batons or just using fists, trying to take down some of the intruders, finding themselves thoroughly rebuffed solely by the sound of power morphemes, dropping like flies. The crowd of revelers gave Maddy’s crew a very wide berth, practically pooling at the other end of the condo, in the dining room and kitchen.
The irritation in Maddy’s eyes burned into me. I glared some raging aggravation right back at her. What in the name of sweet merciful fuck had I ever done to warrant this bullshit?
But Cameron and I were definitely outnumbered. Now she had maybe fourteen people down there, and she was giving them orders, getting them ready for something. Shit—Mohawk wandered into view, looking no worse for wear and steady on his feet. Okay, so now there were fifteen people down there, versus one admittedly incredible Horn wielded by Cameron Kelly, and the significantly less impressive skill set of a certain Isobel Bailie.
“Use the Horn,” I said quietly.
He shook his head and offered it to me.
“Blew out my voice,” he whispered.
I took it from him. If I’d known the Horn was essentially a single-shot weapon, I wouldn’t have let him use it in the loft. He could design a good combat game, but that didn’t make him good at combat tactics. We should have saved the Horn for a moment like, oh, right now, when our foes were conveniently assembling below us into a large clumped target. I could try to take them all out with the Horn myself, but I was drastically less skilled than Cameron, and if I failed, I wouldn’t be able to defend myself with blown vocal cords.
“I shouldn’t have come here,” I muttered sadly.
“At least here you had a fighting chance,” Cameron whispered. “You still do.”
Cameron had noticed something, which took me a few seconds longer to recognize. On the other side of the room from us, far beyond the dance floor, behind Maddy and her crew who were completely focused on us and consequently facing the opposite direction, I saw Phyllis and Max, holding the door open to the hallway outside the condo.
They were waving in a stream of new combatants, who wore orange hazard suits and faceless, reflective silver masks, chanting softly in a manner that phased gently in and out of unison, to unsettling effect.
Gorvod’s Frenzy had arrived.
“Oh look, it’s the deus ex machina you requested,” Cameron whispered.
“No,” I said, “this is pretty much the exact opposite.”
Their chanting was muffled by their masks, but I recognized the steadily building wall of sound they were developing. In the game, they used this wall of sound to cast spells in unison, but here, they were delivering sequences of legitimate, honest to Gorvod power morphemes.
I watched a swarm pour through the door and slowly move to surround the dance floor without engaging any of Maddy’s crew. Indeed they were extremely careful not to nudge or bump or get within close reach of anyone standing up on the dance floor proper. Their collective volume increased as their swarm grew, and Maddy’s bewildered crew took in the scene without interfering, waiting for Maddy to give a signal. Yes, they were surrounded now, but they could teleport out whenever they felt like it, and meanwhile, Maddy was curious (like me) about what the hell these people were up to.
By the time about thirty people had collected in a broad ring around the lip of the dance floor, Maddy deputized Mohawk to take action. He tested a few sequences at the hazard suits nearest him, nothing that seemed particularly loud or aggressive, but somehow, the collective response from the swarm seemed to cancel out the frequencies Mohawk had utilized. It was like he’d punched the surface of a swimming pool, causing a rippling sonic effect in response from the swarm that displaced and dispersed his attack.
Meanwhile, they were getting louder, in a pattern I recognized from the game. Right now, they were still just warming up. I always wondered if this was just intimidation or if it really played some role in synchronizing their spellcasting. I still wondered. I wondered about all kinds of unnatural shit lately and yet somehow this got bumped back up to the top of my list.
Mohawk stepped up to one of the hazard suits and smacked the mask off; it clattered to the floor, a plastic trifle of no particular consequence. The person behind the mask was just some rando, as you’d say online, just some easily ignored person in a hazard suit who could be mistaken for any of these other randos in a crowd, probably. Didn’t even bother making eye contact with Mohawk, just kept chanting, and Mohawk couldn’t decide if he was pissed or amused, but either way, he spat a sequence directly into the face of the rando, who fell backward and was gracefully caught by the other randos in hazard suits swarming right there. Their numbers steadily grew and their chanting got steadily louder.
Suddenly a louder voice made its presence known and a series of quick call-and-response chants followed. This was new to me. The leader’s voice was tuning the others somehow, ratcheting up the drama in their chants, choosing more complex sequences than the chants they’d used to lull Maddy and her people into thinking this was just some quaint little stunt. No indeed, Gorvod’s Frenzy didn’t fuck around, not one bit. I felt jittery, like I’d smoked eight cigarettes at once, and realized I’d been lulled, too; I hadn’t moved, just stood there, gripping the railing, almost in a trance.
A loud crackling hum suddenly snapped me back to alertness. The sound was emanating from some indistinct point above the dance floor. If you could imagine generating an overtone inside your mouth, this felt like they were generating an overtone inside the room, manipulating environmental acoustics to their advantage. They could maybe use that overtone as a component in multiple interlocking sequences, and just like in the game, they couldn’t really direct it straight at a single target, but I bet they could set off burst effects all over the damn place. A super loud popping sound came from seemingly nowhere and Mohawk recoiled back several steps, like he’d been shocked by a nine-volt battery on his tongue, only the battery was higher voltage and also invisible and also he was deeply fucked.
Maddy shouted an order like a drill sergeant under fire, and her crew cut loose with a devastating series of vocal attacks. I was clear up in the loft and it was so painful my eyes watered and my face felt suddenly sunburned in the worst way. Hazard suits started dropping like flies, but for a time at least, anytime one fell, two stepped up to plug the gap. Maddy’s people were striking individual blows, but the seemingly ambient attacks from Gorvod’s Frenzy as a collective increased as well, smacking Maddy’s people around like they were pinballs.
Maddy herself kept her eyes on me, well aware she was in a bad spot. I was holding the Horn, which she didn’t know was a one-shot, and Cameron Kelly was standing right next to me, apparently unfazed by what he saw unfolding. If she tried teleporting up here to attack, she’d be disoriented long enough for us to act. And she was vulnerable to us anyway as long as her people were distracted by the hazard suits. Sadly I didn’t have an attack that I could project above the increasing din, and I didn’t believe Maddy had one either. We were in perilously close quarters, but just out of reach of each other.
The air above the dance floor suddenly seemed to ripple. One of the stage lights sparked brightly and then its bulb blew out. This was next-level Gorvod’s Frenzy, for sure. I thought I heard a chorus of children somewhere, chanting and taunting at the same time. Another lightbulb blew out above them, then to make matters worse, a steel safety cable snapped and a stage light plummeted to the dance floor, landing with an immense crash and exploding into pieces mere feet from where Maddy stood.
Maddy lost her temper and barked several new commands. Her crew suddenly took on a new demeanor.
See, that was the thing about Gorvod’s Frenzy: they were arguably innovative spellcasters, but they were shit for melee combat.
Mohawk threw the first punch, smashing someone’s mask into little plastic pieces and presumably smashing the face behind the mask a bit as well. Maddy’s people were skilled at both power morphemes and physical weapons—expandable batons, billy clubs, stun guns, fists. A sudden flurry of violence drove hazard suits hard to the ground in a sickening wave. I’d never seen anything so intensely brutal, and instinctively I turned away.
And then let out an involuntary shriek, because the intruder we’d immobilized in the bedroom was now quite actively mobile (the major drawback of a sleep spell, of course, is the fucking thing wears off), and about to bring a club down on the back of Cameron’s head. Without thinking, I leapt to intercept, crashing into the attacker’s midsection and taking us both down in a heap.
Naturally I’d tackled someone approximately twice my size, which I realized as I was lifted up one-handed and daintily hurled through the air. I landed hard on a glass coffee table, which contrary to the movies did not shatter into a zillion pieces; but that meant my head was free to bounce off the glass before I slid to the floor, dazed, nearly in the laps of the two Glowstick Guards who remained frozen on the love seat, the sick red glow of the EL wire in their costumes a perfectly disturbing accent to the shit situation I found myself in.
My attacker was on their feet almost instantly. Cameron was caught defenseless without his voice, and he went down hard at the wrong end of a bad kidney punch and a shove that toppled him over. Satisfied their prey was in hand, they turned to me. I spat my best combat sequences at them (“best” meaning “all of them delivered in a major fucking hurry”), but the riotous cacophony downstairs was drowning me out. They pulled out a stun gun from a belt pouch as they swiftly advanced.
Joke was on them, however, because I still had the Horn in my hand. I brought it to my lips and I screamed into that thing, and I don’t know where that sequence came from—it wasn’t Cameron’s, which I suddenly couldn’t remember—and it wasn’t one of the combat sequences I’d managed to prepare earlier that day. It was like a pure stream of glitter lava piped directly from the molten glitter core at the center of the Sparkle Realm, unleashed by command of the Goddess of Glamour & Groove herself, who alone took interest in the affairs of those devoted ravers who always chased the dawn to squeeze one last deep house track out of each and every night; it was like she’d given me a flamethrower but then loaded it with glitter lava, except the flamethrower was the Horn and the glitter lava was my voice, and it all just came together even though the existence of the Goddess of Glamour & Groove wasn’t actually canon in the first place.
Under these conditions did I convince my attacker to take that stun gun and place it directly upon their own exposed throat, which caused a very satisfying spasm, and a windmilling backward onto the floor for further spasms. They’d survive, but they probably wouldn’t enjoy it a whole lot for the next several minutes.
I clambered to my feet and stumbled toward Cameron, glimpsing the dance floor in the process. As a full-scale riot unfolded behind her, Maddy marched up the stairs to the loft with Mohawk right behind her. We needed to run, but two more intruders emerged from the bedroom, blocking that door. They might have seen my attack with the Horn, and were quite wary of me, but they weren’t about to just move out of my way. My voice was on fire, so much so that I could barely catch a breath without exploding in pain that rippled all up and down my nervous system. I wouldn’t be using the Horn again tonight.
Maddy and Mohawk arrived in the loft, took in the scene—Cameron and I breathless on our knees, several people unconscious or incapacitated on the floor around us—and Maddy seemed impressed despite herself. Mohawk grabbed my arms and hauled me to my feet, and Maddy growled something at me that I didn’t understand or hear.
Then, to my absolute and utter delight and surprise, I heard singing.
It was a crystal-clear tenor voice, ringing throughout the room, cutting through the violence and the riots and the screaming and the pain, suppressing all of it, enveloping the entirety of the environment with sweet, pure tones.
The hands gripping me let go of my arms, and like in a dream, Maddy and I locked eyes, but for once, we were comrades in wonder, amazement coursing through our veins, a warm glow infusing all of us here in the loft with a sense that reality was literally healing itself from the damage we’d just inflicted upon it. I wanted to cry, just out of sheer relief. The moment unfolded into several and then a minute had passed and no one said anything, no one fought, we could finally catch a breath. All our attention turned to the calming yet powerful voice that now inspired us to be better people, stitched us together on a journey we hardly understood, dropped barriers and showed glimpses of true and honest magic in a universe that was otherwise so perilously dark.
Bradford Jenning stood in the center of the dance floor, singing a stream of power morpheme sequences, masked within lyrics I didn’t understand, in a romance language I didn’t recognize.
His voice was rich and commanding, and yet gentle and soothing at the same time. I watched Maddy struggling to find any way to resist, and steadily losing the fight, even as Mohawk and her other comrades readily succumbed to the welcoming pool of loveliness that Bradford’s voice produced.
A second voice joined him then—a beautiful soprano, who knew the same exact sequences, adding unexpected and beautiful tight harmony to an already astounding experience. Devin walked across the dance floor toward Bradford, the two of them smiling and radiating sheer enthusiasm for the experience they were having together and generating for others. They were interconnected via this song, and their hope was contagious.
For the first time since I’d walked into Olivia’s lab for the original usability tests all those months ago, the nagging sense that I wasn’t good enough at my life or at any of this just dissipated, the fear that I was going to disappoint Olivia or really anyone I’d ever known just vanished, and I felt relaxed, and tranquil, and at peace.
Cameron, of course, was immune.
“Blah blah deus ex machina,” he muttered at no one in particular.