“Uh-huh,” I said, trying to avoid her as she shoved the glasses toward my face, but it was useless. A few seconds later I was wearing the VR glasses. “I can’t see anything.”
“They’re not turned on. Here, let me do it. Okay, you’re set. Gotta go do the rest of my homework before we lose the lights,” Tara called over her shoulder as she hurried out of the room. “It’s all set up for you to log on with a new name, and I told Bart to watch out for you. Oh, and I put you on the list of workers at my weavery, so you can look around there. Have fun!”
“Hey! Don’t think I don’t see through your hit-and-run tactics! I know full well what you’re doing!” I sighed as her laughter spilled down the stairs after her.
“Manipulative little so-and-so,” I muttered as I turned my attention to the colorful screen that seemed to float in the air before me.
A game client screen that read “Welcome to Buckling Swashes. Please log in or create a new pirate to enter the game” blinked slowly at me.
“Right. Let’s get this over with.” I reached out somewhat blindly for the keyboard, able to see only dark, vague shapes of the computer and desk behind the virtual images that danced before my eyes. “Name… Amy Stewart.”
“That’s supposed to be your pirate name, not your real name,” came a slightly tinny, ethereal voice drifting from the heating duct in the wall.
“Do your homework and stop listening at the heater,” I yelled, backspacing over my name. “Pirate name. I don’t have a pirate name. Um…” I tipped the glasses down my nose and looked around the room for inspiration, my eyes lighting on a Van Gogh print! “Earless… er… Erika. That sounds very piratical.”
I typed in the pirate name, picked a few character traits (female, blond, with a short bob, and a Rubenesque, curvy body type that most closely matched my own). As I was about to click the CREATE PIRATE button, a tremendous crash of thunder hit simultaneously with a blinding flash of lightning. Upstairs, Tara shrieked as a second crash rocked the house. The lights flickered into a brownout. Mindful of the cost of her laptop, I leaned across the computer and grabbed the power cord at the same time another flash of lightning struck. As I pulled the plug free, a blue arc of electricity shot from the outlet, connecting with me at the same time another deafening roar of thunder shook the house.
I must have hit the RETURN button as I jerked with the flow of electricity through my body, because the last thing I remember seeing before I sank into an abyss of darkness was a little spinning sign on the game screen saying
“Entering Buckling Swashes…”
Chapter 2
Here we live and reign alone
In a world that’s all our own.
—Ibid, Act I
It was the sheep snuffling my face that woke me up. I didn’t realize it was a sheep at first, not being in the habit of keeping sheep in my house, where my last conscious moment was, but when something moistly warm blew on my face, followed by a horrible stinky scent of wet wool, my eyes popped open and I beheld the unlovely face of a sheep staring down at me.
“T’hell?” I said groggily, pushing the sheep face out of mine as I sat up, immediately regretting the latter action when the world spun around dizzily for a few seconds. As it settled into place I blinked at the hand I’d used to shove away the sheep—it tingled faintly, as if I had whacked my funny bone. I shook it a couple of times, the pins-and-needles feeling quickly fading… but that’s when my wits returned.
“What the hell?” I said again, a growing sense of disbelief and horror welling within me until I thought my head was going to explode.
I used the rough wood wall behind me to help me get to my feet, my head still spinning a little as I looked around. I was in a short alley between two buildings, half-hidden behind a stack of what looked like whiskey barrels, the sheep who’d been snuffling me now engaged in rooting around through some garbage that slopped over from a wooden box. Sunlight filtered down through the overhang of the two buildings, spilling onto a lumpy cobblestone street behind the alley. Vague blurs resolved themselves into the images of people passing back and forth past the opening of the alley.
The game… the virtual reality game. I was seeing images from the game. I put my hand up to my face to pull off the VR glasses, but all my fingers found were my glasses-less face. Had they gotten knocked off when I got the shock from the computer? If so, why was I still seeing the virtual world? I lurched my way forward down the alley, stumbling once or twice as my legs seemed to relearn how to walk.
“What the…hell?” As I burst out into the open, I staggered to a stop.
Two men in what I though of as typical pirate outfits— breeches, jerkins, swords strapped to their hips, and bandanas on their heads—walked by, one giving me a leer as I clutched the corner of the nearest building.
Beyond them, a wooden well served as a gathering place for several women in long skirts and leather bodices, each armed with a wooden bucket or two. Pigs, sheep, chickens, dogs… they all wandered around the square, adding to the general sense of confusion and (at least on my part) disbelief.
A couple of children clad in what could only be described as rags ran past me, each clutching an armful of apples. A shout at the far end of the square pierced the general babble, what appeared to be a greengrocer in breeches and a long apron evidently just noticing the theft of some apples.
It was like something out of a movie. A period movie.
One of those big MGM costume movies of the 1950s where everything was brightly colored and quasi-authentic. I expected Gene Kelly to burst singing from a building at any minute.
Instead of Gene, two men emerged from a one-story building across the square, both staggering and yelling slurred curses. One man shoved the other one. The second man shoved the first one back. Both pulled out swords and commenced fighting. The first man lunged. The second screamed, clutched his chest, and fell over backward into a stack of grain sacks. The first man yanked his sword out, spit on his downed opponent, and staggered away around the back of the building, wiping his bloody sword on the hem of his filthy open-necked shirt.
A wooden sign hanging over the door he passed waved gently in the wind—a sign depicting a couple of mugs being knocked together beneath the words INN COGNITO printed in blocky letters.
No one bustling around the square gave the dead man so much as a second look.
“What the hell?” I shouted, goose bumps of sheer, unadulterated horror rippling along my arms and legs as I ran toward the body lying sprawled on the dirty grain sacks. I was about to go into serious freak-out mode when I remembered that none of this was real—it might look real and sound real, but it was just a game. No one had actually been murdered in front of me. It was just a bunch of computer sprites and sprockets and all those other techno-geeky things that I didn’t understand. “Okay, stay calm, Amy. This is not a real emergency.
