I expected some resistance to my devious scheming when I returned to the gymnasium, or some grief about my unilateral commitment to working with the cabal. But people were legitimately freaked out about the notion of heralds above Los Angeles, unclear how we could possibly survive if more than one invaded next time, and as a result, everyone was quite on board with my plan.
We got Bradford connected via video conference, and he proceeded to orchestrate a series of singing auditions among the crew. Including Devin, we had seven solid candidates. He wanted eight to make a proper double choir, but we just didn’t have the voices. We lined up headsets for all seven of them, so that Bradford could install his movements in their minds without affecting the rest of us.
Jordon was initially upset that I wouldn’t let her join the choir.
“Do you not understand how many choirs I sang in growing up?” she said. “All of them. Every single choir in existence. I had solos in every single one, too.”
“Cameron wants you to pilot the arkship,” I told her.
“I’m sorry—what?”
“I’m sure it’s just like piloting skyships, except a zillion times bigger and if you fuck up all of humanity dies.”
“Look, don’t mess with me here. Cameron Kelly wants me to fly his ship? Sign me all the way up. How do I get training on that bad boy?”
“I don’t think there’s a training level for this. I think you’re going to be experiencing some on-the-job training, to be honest. Guns will probably be going off all over the surface of it while you’re trying to fly it, and if you’re really unlucky, heralds will be attacking it up close, too.”
“Sounds like good clean family fun.”
“It really does.”
When Bradford’s operation was complete, seven dazed individuals took their headsets off, and their expressions all featured a uniformly enthusiastic “thumbs-up!” smile. I took that to mean the battle choir was fully armed with a complement of movements to suit weddings, atrocities, or any occasion, and we commenced preparation to leave the gymnasium—potentially for good.
Maddy pulled me aside before we left and said, “What about Olivia?”
“She’s coming with us,” I said, as though that was the most obvious thing in the world.
“Really? You want her in our midst when the shit goes down?”
“I don’t trust her, you don’t trust her, I get that. But you know who does trust her? Alexander Reece. If we show up without her, he’s just going to ask what happened to her. And if our answer is we ditched her in LA for Violet’s people to track down and murder, he will be unamused.”
“Well, this is all very hilarious, Isobel. Up is down, inside is outside! What will happen next in our wacky bizarro world of singing soldiers and genocidal weather patterns?”
The Dauphine gathered us together and created a large portal in the floor of the gymnasium, through which people could drop into the logosphere, undergoing instant transmutation on the way through, landing on the dance floor of the Iridescent Warehouse. It was a familiar sight to everyone but Olivia, who had never played Sparkle Dungeon before, and had also probably never set foot in a modern nightclub either. Good, I thought, a little culture shock should help remind her she was playing on my turf now.
I had one of my semi-regular brilliant ideas just then, and I summoned up a massive audio equipment bag out of storage from underneath the stage. Inside were a full complement of enchanted in-ear monitors, which would enable us to hear and talk to each other during the battle just like in the movies, except I had to assure absolutely everyone that you did not need to press your finger to your ear to get it to work, and people were like, “Come on, how does it know when I’m trying to talk to people then?” And I said, “Perhaps you are acquainted with the concept of spells that use magic,” and we got through this crisis together, as a family.
The Dauphine then opened a portal to SD5, to the Chairman of the Realm’s office, so that Jordon could go to meet Cameron.
Jordon gave me a hug, as we both realized this could very well be the last time we saw each other. We didn’t say anything, really, just held each other for a few minutes. Then she stepped through the portal, which closed rapidly behind her.
I opened my loot cabinet to let people raid it for weapons. Power morpheme sequences were all well and good, but if the heralds got close, classic medieval weaponry would also be helpful. Plus, much of this weaponry was Bluetooth enabled, so you could play tunes while you fought.
Olivia came to me, bewildered, and asked, “What do you expect me to do here?”
“We don’t know how to contact Alexander,” I said. “But Maddy and I have an idea for a telepathy sequence that might be able to reach him. Maybe you can help us design it?”
Maddy was livid. “You’re just going to give the cabal our telepathy sequence?”
“The one we don’t actually have yet, you mean?”
“We have the intellectual property for its underlying concept, Isobel. Copyright means something.”
“Gimme a break, I saw how many pirated MP3s were on the servers back at the gym.”
“That was all Gridstation! I personally maintain fully paid accounts on multiple streaming services! Granted they’re paid for with stolen credit card numbers I got off a darknet, but my point stands!”
“Would you two shut up please and tell me your idea?” Olivia said.
“Listen, you,” Maddy said, getting in her face, “if our telepathy sequence leaks out into the wild because of you, and some tech bro figures out how to monetize telepathy by tethering it to an ad server, I will personally deliver a series of copyright strikes. To your face. With my fists. Playing on the double meaning of ‘strike’ if you missed that.” Her vicious glare seemed to actually intimidate Olivia for a split second, which satisfied her for the time being. She stormed off.
“Sorry about that,” I said. “She frequently gets ‘copyrights’ and ‘patents’ mixed up.”
“I said, shut up and tell me your idea,” Olivia repeated.
Olivia used me as a guinea pig receiver when she was testing the sequence, which resulted in a barrage of audio hallucinations until she finally managed to “tune in” to the exact location of my brain to plant a message. And then I jumped ten feet in the air when I heard her voice, powerfully announcing my name inside my mind. She was thoroughly exhausted by the effort. Maddy had been right: you didn’t casually rely on telepathy as an open chat line. It was a high-level effect with a commensurate high-level cost to your psyche.
I buffed her up a bit, but I really wanted to save my heals for some indeterminate near future in which I’d need them more acutely. Spell replenishment when playing the game was a predictable function of time and achievement feeding a pool of spellcasting points; but here, in the Realm itself, I couldn’t predict when I’d get any of my spells back after using them. This hadn’t been an issue so far because I hadn’t been in any truly extended encounters in the logosphere; even killing that first herald had only taken an elapsed time of perhaps sixty seconds. I had a feeling I would see a longer combat soon enough.
Olivia asked everyone to be quiet so she could concentrate.
She said, “First I’m going to try to establish reliable contact with him. Then, if he’s in a receptive position, I’m going to try to install the telepathy sequence in his mind, so that he can respond. If that doesn’t work, I’m at least going to try to signal our location.”
“He won’t be able to find us here,” I said. “Tell him to meet us at the rift in the map.”
She closed her eyes and began the sequence. For several minutes, her expression didn’t change, then it suddenly lit up with a smile, which we presumed meant Alexander had answered the phone, so to speak.
Several more minutes of apparent data transfer occurred, then she opened her eyes at last, and said, “He will meet us at the rift momentarily.”
The Dauphine opened a portal to the rift in the map. She, Maddy, Olivia, and I stepped through and stood on the field in front of the rift, the portal closing behind us. From here, as before, the rift looked dazzling, and the logosphere beyond it looked equally alluring. You almost felt like this was one of the natural wonders of an unnatural place—Niagara Falls except for reality distortion effects instead of rushing water.
I said, “Why didn’t you also install teleport in his mind when you installed telepathy?”
Olivia said, “I installed every sequence I know in Alexander’s mind. But he’s unable to teleport his companions as well, and he’s unwilling to abandon them.”
“Companions?”
“He’s tamed several heralds,” she said, “and he’s bringing them with him to the Sparkle Realm.” She paused and said, “If we’re lucky, he’ll outrun the heralds that are hunting them.”