The Starfighter Invitation

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There was no real need to visit the party finder to add a last member to our group. A constantly changing mass of players had been forming, dissolving and reforming just opposite the mosaic, and I simply strolled over and said: "Group of four ranked 6, 7 and 8 looking for one more."

This didn’t run so smoothly as last time, since five people immediately stepped hopefully toward me. In a less personal environment, picking one and moving wordlessly on would be simple, but the mere presence of the others in the same space as me made it instantly awkward. I hesitated, then added:

"We’re likely to try and take the Challenge run in two to three sessions, with big breaks in the middle to work on zero-G in prep for the System Challenge. Looking for someone ideally to come all the way through to attempting the System Challenge."

Three of the five hesitated, then shrugged and turned back to the main group. I was left with two girls. One looked like a teen, with fantastic dark blue and snow white hair done up in a long pair of high ponytails, and a great matching skirt and jacket outfit that was right out of a magical girl anime. The second was tall and willowy and had rose tattoos everywhere visible: some of the most beautiful skin art I’d ever seen. Both of them were fully anon.

Roses glanced at Ponytails and spoke in Russian, obligingly translated by the game as: "Flip a coin?"

"Sure. Not that money exists here." Ponytails had spoken English, with a mild accent. I’d guess her to be Japanese.

"Pick a number between one and ten," I suggested. "Closest to the one I’m thinking of joins."

"One," Roses said.

"Ten."

"And I picked six," I said, with a wry smile at Roses. "Good luck with the Challenge."

"See you on The Wreck," she replied, waved, and turned back to the crowd.

"Welcome aboard," I said, sending an invite. "This is Silent, Imoenne, and Arlen. I’m Leveret."

"Nova Mori," the girl responded, as we started toward the entrance to the next stage.

I wondered if the tendency to run around anon would die away after the initial new game zerg, or if names and ranks and guilds would always be semi-secret. Well, if Nova was the same rank as me, I’d at least not feel like I was holding the group back. But I’d been giving plenty of thought to how to get through this Challenge series without having to go and gain levels—and without losing my bet with Dio.

"We need a strategy, do we not?" Arlen said.

I nodded. "If it keeps increasing in strength, broken shields seem almost guaranteed. I think we’re going to have to permanently double-layer the shields, and combine that with the swapping regime we established." I explained to Nova and Silent what we’d done in the third Challenge, and what I wanted now.

"Anticipate failure by putting one person on the inner layer, and another for the outer layer?" Nova asked.

"If the outer drops, do we just sit another outer on it?" Silent asked. "Or try to expand the inner layer to be the outer?"

"Expanding a shield once you’ve set it, that is not so easy," Arlen said, shaking his head. He was speaking English this session, with occasional hesitations on less common words.

"I suspect it’s a skill we might want to develop, though. Shall we do a practice round before we go in, to see if it’ll work?"

"Practice is a good idea," Nova agreed. "But why complicate matters trying to expand the shields? We can just lift them a little higher."

"Better still, if an outer shield is hit or dropped, put up a new outer shield, and then drop and replace the inner shield," Silent said. "Then next round, the person who did the inner shield is responsible for the outer shield, and vice versa."

It proved to be a workable suggestion, and after a quick round of practice, we activated the next Challenge stage.

"Behind the Shadows is a little more dramatic than the first couple of Challenge descriptions," I noted.

"Why is it quests never send us to look behind sunbeams?" Arlen hummed a snatch of melody, the silver helmet form of his active focus not seeming to impede the sound.

Nova shrugged. "Even though it’s clearly training in the guise of a quest, giving us tunnels and lasers without any kind of plot is a weak effort."

"Looks like we’re leaving the narrow path behind, at least," Silent said, as we entered an actual cavern, walls and floor uneven, with numerous obstructions dramatically lit by incongruous lampposts that made me think vaguely of Narnia.

"No sign of laser ports, but no obvious path, either." I hesitated, trying to decide where to head in the wide, boulder-studded space.

"Straight across?" Nova suggested. "And change course if we discover any reason to."

We agreed, but didn’t exactly hurry into the echoing space. The atmosphere was outright creepy, and it didn’t help when, into the pause, came a flutter of sound. Too low for any kind of clarity, it could have been a sigh, or a moan.

"Zombies of Mars?" Silent said, but with a thin quality to his usual drawl.

"Did anyone mention zombies in the discussions about the Challenge series? I thought these lan Challenges were supposed to be watchable."

"Yes, if you know who to watch and when. Those Challenge-views don’t repeat, and most people reporting on this stage and the next are being very vague, outside of warning of harder hitting lasers. Most everyone doing a gateway series wants to be first to qualify for the System Challenge."

"Zombies are not likely to hit as hard as lasers," I said.

"They could crawl under the shield," Arlen said, bouncing lightly on his feet.

I was on inner shield duty, and part of my attention was locked into lan, but I still found myself looking for the Renba I’d been studiously ignoring since waking. Five of them, clustered near the ceiling, waiting for something to cut us down. We hadn’t spent enough time talking about what to do if we were injured, not killed—whether to retreat or run on—but now didn’t seem a good moment to broach the subject.

"Let’s get moving," Nova said, and we shuffled forward, then broke into a slow trot, picking a path over the uneven ground.

No laser bolts struck, no zombies clutched at ankles, no exits presented themselves at the far side of the cavern.

"What now?" Silent asked, surveying the protrusions and hollows to each side.

"Work our way around and hope we stumble across it?" I said.

"They are very literal with their behind the shadows, it seems," Nova said, sounding more amused than worried.

As we turned right, I caught that whisper of sound again, but this time I hadn’t even time to turn my head before the now-familiar buzzing of laser bolts. Arlen had the outer shield, and let out his breath as a volley of multiple bolts struck.

"Not good," he said, as we turned trot into dash. "Barely—"

Another volley took down his shield, two of the bolts hitting mine.

"Behind this boulder!" I said, thankful I’d managed to keep my shield up, and sure I wouldn’t be able to sustain another hit.

Trying to maintain a shield over a group hurling itself into cover wasn’t the easiest thing I’d done, but we were fortunate I kept mine more-or-less in position, because the source of the blasts followed us around the curve of stone and fired again, sending chips of rock flying, and hitting my shield once again before Silent, next in the rotation, managed to get a fresh shield over the top as mine dropped.

"What now?" Silent gasped, as a floating, silvery drone came into clear view, and his shield took a full barrage.

"Keep circling," I said, as Imoenne managed to form her shield beneath Silent’s. "Find exit. Run into it."

"Nova Smash," said Nova, in a firm little voice.

This was spectacularly accompanied by the drone being pounded into the ground, and then exploding.

"What the hell?" Silent said it, but the rest of us surely thought it.

"We’re supposed to be able to lan duel, so I figured we could hit things with our shields," Nova said.

"Nice," I said, appreciatively.

"The genius move," Arlen added. "Now it is paste, instead of us."

"And we should keep moving," Nova said. "There might be others."

I turned again to survey the uneven outer walls, looking for something that might be an exit passage, but Arlen was still focused on the smashed drone.

"There is something odd there" he said. "Can we move near?"

We obediently shifted toward the still-smoking slag. The drone had exploded violently enough to pit the rock around it.

"Moving under a shield umbrella cuts down on our mobility," Silent noted. "We should practice splitting into groups in the next safe zone."

"If we—" I paused, because I caught what Arlen was pointing to, well hidden in the gloom between two boulders behind the drone. "A stair?"

"It was, perhaps, guarding," Arlen said. "Just to think of the hours spent if we avoided the machine and searched the outer wall."

"Let’s get going before something else comes along," Silent said.

"Anyone bring a torch?" I asked, but it wasn’t too bad getting down—there was a hint of light once we were looking directly down the stairwell, and the only real difficulty was not hitting shield edges against things when descending. After that was a straight, blast-free corridor out to another staging area.

"Break and snacks?" I suggested.

"Why is it I feel so tired, for such a short walk?" Arlen asked. "We have hardly come any way at all."

"Adrenaline." Nova led the way to the nearest Soup outlet. "Along with maintaining the shields. Fortunately these sessions seem designed to be short—win or lose."

I was finding Nova a very interesting person. With a Core Unit that looked mid-teens, the magical girl styling, and a very self-assured attitude, I couldn’t help but speculate over what she was like out in the world. For all I’d told myself a few times that out-of-game couldn’t really matter in Dream Speed, the whole concept of a Core image, of a self that matched who you felt you were, drew me into questions of what of a person was really like. Was I more truly myself inside Dream Speed or out of it?

The game did tell me one thing about our two French-speaking group members: they were both under eighteen, though I thought not much younger than that. Other than a greeting in guild chat, and some soft murmurs to her brother, I hadn’t heard Imoenne speak at all, and I could not decide if it was ruder to push her to talk, or seem to ignore her.

In the end I compromised by addressing a space between the two siblings and saying: "So, Arlen, Imoenne, do you both sing?"

"Oh, yes," Arlen answered, while Imoenne made a duck of the head that might be a nod. "Our family, it is the most musical, so it is fortunate that the path was to our liking. Voice is my primary instrument, while Imoenne is more versatile."

"Are you planning performance careers?"

Arlen raised an equivocal hand. "There are certain practicalities. It is one thing to perform, another to live and perform."

"I would like to know if there are stages on the Drowned Earth," Imoenne said, in barely audible voice, her French effortlessly translated by the system.

"Putting one before that big curve of Vessa Major would be spectacular," I said, trying not to look too surprised that she’d finally spoken.

"Does being on Mars affect your voice?" Silent asked.

"I hear a change, but I am told that it is caused by a slight difference in air pressure, rather than the gravity," Arlen said.

As the conversation ranged through gravity and performance, I explored a newly discovered group calendaring function, where we could schedule sessions while factoring in mandatory lock-outs.

"Anyone coming up on lock-out?" I asked.

"I am," Nova said. "I’ll easily manage one more stage, maybe two, but not more."

"Let’s schedule a big break after this run, then. Try to synchronise our logins so we hit a time where everyone’s free."

We worked on the calendar for a while, blocking out times with real-world commitments, and good breaks between lan sessions. I’d worried that we would hit some long unavailable patches, but Silent was the only one with inflexible appointments in the next few real-world hours, and they were short. Teleconferences, he explained.

Silent was an engineering consultant, always busy with multiple projects, and I was used to him fitting his work around guild events, knowing he could be trusted to show up when he said he would. Planning on trying the System Challenge with three strangers was something of a gamble, but I liked what I’d seen of Nova, Arlen and Imoenne. Focused on the task but relaxed. Nice people. Of course, we hadn’t hit any situations that might inspire a barrage of yelling.

The player who’d stabbed me in the back had seemed nice too.