Keystone (Gatewalkers) (3 page)

Training grounds! “Come! Come!” the pink pixie cried. She chased after the boys and tucked herself into the pocket on the side of the freckled boy’s pack.

The turquoise pixie vanished to reappear on the green haired boy’s shoe, clinging to the laces for all he was worth.

The boys trooped down the center aisle to plunk into a pair of hard, bright orange chairs that almost matched the freckled boy’s hair. They compared the strengths and weaknesses of knights versus mages, the pink pixie listening in delight.
 

If even the children of this world trained to fight dragons, orcs, vampires and even the forces of Ard Ri himself, then surely there would be a hero among them who would be willing to return with them to Seinne Sonne to rescue the princess and restore the Keystone. The pink pixie hummed contentedly.

***

It was one of
those
days.

Charlie knew it from the start. First it was Saturday, and Saturday was always the Virtual Reality Arcade’s busiest day. Second, she had worked evening shift the day before, which meant that she hadn’t gotten back to her little corner room at her sister’s place until midnight. That meant she could only get five hours of sleep before she had to be up and out the door. Six if she pushed it.

She had gotten seven.

Charlie managed to rush in and get her pre-opening duties finished in record time, only to open the doors and find Mr. Patchett and his great-grandson Jared “Frodo” Patchett already waiting.

“Dragon Lady!” Mr. Patchett exclaimed as Charlie slid up the grating across the cade’s entrance.

Charlie smiled at him and inwardly sighed. She’d been hoping for a quiet moment to breathe before business started. “Good morning, Mr. Patchett.” His granddaughter, Jared’s mother, worked at mall security, and when she couldn’t find a sitter for her “boys” she dropped them off at the cade.

For the entire year and a half since Charlie started working the cade, Mr. Patchett hadn’t remembered her name once. For him, Charlie was now and forever “Dragon Lady.”
 

Charlie wore a pewter dragon pendant she’d had since high school. When Mr. Patchett first saw it, he had pointed to it and tried to ask if it was a particular dragon, like “something from dragons and something.” She had politely told him no, it was just a dragon. But the association stuck.

At the cade, the rules didn’t allow employees to personalize their name tag or lariats. No pins, no stickers, no nothing. They hadn’t even let her use “Charlie” instead of “Charlotte.” Wearing her dragon pendant had become her small rebellion against becoming one of the faceless uniformed masses of the world. Like she had been in high school. Like she had been in college. Like she was determined
not
to be for the rest of her life.

But her grades hadn’t been stellar, and her college wasn’t prestigious, so here she was. Working the cade a year and a half after graduation, and beginning to wonder if she’d ever manage to move on.
 

Life had turned into a holding pattern. The same story day in and day out, with no relief in sight. The trouble was, Charlie had nowhere else to go.

It felt like she’d always been the epitome of average: average height, average build, not skinny, not chubby, with brown eyes and naturally brown hair that she dyed dark magenta and kept shoulder length so she could manage it. Charlie liked to think she wasn’t ugly, but she couldn’t really be called pretty either, with a wide forehead and narrow chin. She had good cheekbones, but her nose was too small.
 

Pretty enough to get her hit on by the cade’s regular creeps who had nothing better to do with their time, but apparently not enough to catch the attention of someone decent. Ah, well; she had resigned herself to singleness after a few failed relationships in college anyway. More or less.

Charlie wore the cade’s khaki pants/white t-shirt/sneakers uniform with the cade’s name splashed across the back of the shirt in colors that could make eyes bleed under the black lights, and that was virtually guaranteed to make people overlook her face.

“Age of Destiny today, Frodo?” Charlie ruffled Jared’s hair as he led his great-grandfather to a chair in front of one of the game screens rigged up to look like jukeboxes. Mr. Patchett gleefully swiped his ID card through the reader and pulled up solitaire. Kendra, Jared’s mother, paid the cade’s monthly rate to let him play as much as he wanted.

The game screens (jukeboxes, spaceships, and Dracula castles) took up one wall of the cade. The opposite wall held the glass cases with the home edition games for sale, while the counter/desk with the monitor for the cade’s master computer sat parallel to the back wall. Behind the desk, out of general view, was the bank of monitors that showed the running games in the VR rooms, all of them blank for the moment. A little hall at the back led to the actual VR rooms, its wall space covered with flashing ads and splashed with black light paint that glowed in neon colors.
 

“Maybe.” Jared shrugged. He was the cutest kid, slightly chubby with sandy blond hair and brown eyes like Charlie’s. Kendra didn’t let him get his hair colored. He’d confessed once that he’d been teased about it in school, so Charlie started calling it his “magic” hair because no one could resist ruffling it. And who would want to color magic hair?
 

“Anything new this week?” Jared asked hopefully.

Charlie rattled off the week’s newest games: a standard alien shoot ‘em up, two new puzzle games, and a fashion game geared for preteen girls.

Jared wrinkled his nose, as Charlie knew he would. “Age of Destiny.” It was his favorite game, a sword and sorcery. It was one of those games that could last forever because there was a quest behind every corner and a dungeon in every hill. Every so often the game designers added another expansion with splashy new graphics, exotic locales, and new super powered weapons and abilities.

Charlie ruffled his hair again. “Age of Destiny it is.” She went behind the back counter and swiped his ID card to log him into the system. Being the first customer in the cade meant he had his choice of the single player VR rooms and no waiting period.
 

Age of Destiny was popular enough she didn’t need to run a search for it on the computer; it was one of those on the sidebar shortcut menu. Charlie loaded it onto a data key.

Charlie saw Jared into the VR room and popped the data key in the reader. “Two hours,” she reminded him. After two hours, officially Jared had to get back in line and wait until a new room opened up. Larger groups could schedule ahead for more time. If it wasn’t a busy day Charlie usually let Jared have a little extra time, since they were on the monthly rate. Perks of being a regular. Magic hair never hurt.
 

Jared nodded and Charlie closed the door. Moments later she could faintly hear the Age of Destiny intro music as the VR projectors started up.
 

It marked her last quiet moment.

As more customers – mainly teens and preteens with parents grateful to be rid of them for the day – poured into the shop, it kept Charlie busy swiping IDs, setting up VR sessions, selling the home edition games, monitoring the screens to make sure no one was using inappropriate cheat codes, kicking out of the VR rooms those whose time was up, chewing out those that brought in food and drink without sealed containers, cleaning up spills when said food and drink items spilled, and not giving in to the old “but my mom/dad said I am
allowed
to play it” despite the rating that clearly said they were too young.
 

Yeah. It was one of
those
days.

 
“Dragon Lady,” Mr. Patchett called plaintively.

Charlie looked up from sopping up a sticky soda mess in the back hall. “Just a moment,” she called out. Eliza was due to arrive to back her up any moment, and it would not be a moment too soon.

Charlie gathered up the sodden paper towels on the floor and threw them in the trash bin, taking a fresh sheet to get the worst of it off her fingers. “What’s the problem, Mr. Patchett?” Charlie said, coming to peer over his shoulder at the game screen. He probably just forgot how to open a new game. He did that every once in a while.

“Look,” he said, and clicked to open a new game. A notice appeared.

Time allowance exceeded.
 

To purchase more time
 

Charlie didn’t read the rest of the message; she didn’t need to. Frowning at the screen, Charlie held out her hand. “May I see your card, Mr. Patchett?”

The old man handed it to her and she swiped it again to ensure he hadn’t accidentally logged out. He had done that before, too. But no, trying to open a new game met with the same results.
 

Charlie pulled up the account history. It should have been working fine; Kendra had already paid in full for the month, but…. Charlie scowled. Since when did the monthly cade fee have a time limit?

Charlie considered quickly, fiddling with her dragon pendant. She cleared the screen and logged him out. Just this once…. Charlie dug her ID card out of her pocket and swiped it. She pulled up a new game. “There you go,” she said, handing Mr. Patchett back his own ID. “That should fix it for now. I’ll see if I can find out what went wrong, ok?”

Beaming, the old man went back to his solitaire.

Charlie went back and finished mopping up the sticky soda mess, reluctantly coming to the conclusion that there was a call she needed to make.

Going to the main desk, Charlie first checked to make sure no one’s time in the VR rooms would be up soon, then called the general manager. The blue “connecting” wheel spun for several long moments before the blank screen was replaced by her boss’s pointy face. Jason Snyder’s black and white striped hair was gathered back into a slick ponytail.
 

“What’s up, Magenta?” Snyder said, his face projecting boredom.

Every time he called her ‘Magenta,’ she was sooooo tempted to call him ‘Skunk.’ “I think there’s been a computer glitch. I have a customer here who opted for the monthly rates, but it’s saying he’s run out of playing time.”

As she spoke, his expression dropped from boredom to irritation. “So? What’s the glitch?”

“So, it is saying he ran out of playing time,” Charlie reiterated. “On the monthly plan.”

“If he’s expended his time, he’s expended his time. He’s got to buy more just like everyone else. Hard times, economy, all that. Didn’t you read the dailies?”

The dailies were the daily updates. Usually Charlie read them even when she didn’t need to, though they were boring as dirt; it never hurt to stay up to date. But not this morning, she hadn’t.

“I’ll go look them over again,” Charlie said, her face flushing.

“You do that,”
 
Snyder said, and clicked off.

Charlie looked back over to Mr. Patchett, gleefully playing his solitaire. This was worse than when they stopped doing senior and veteran discounts.
 

Charlie’s hand balled into a fist behind the counter. She did
not
want to be the one who broke the news to Kendra. She wished she didn’t have to break the news at all. This meant she would be seeing less of Mr. Patchett and Jared, whether Kendra could find a sitter for them or no.
 

***

“Look, Momma,” a young voice called out on the bus. “Fairies!” A young girl with curly purple hair pointed a finger at the pixies.

The girl’s mother, who had matching purple hair, gently captured the girl’s finger and returned it to her lap. “Don’t point, Lallia. It’s rude.”

The girl Lallia looked up at her mother plaintively. “But I
see
them, Momma. Fairies!”

The pink pixie pulled herself out of the boy’s pocket and fluttered over to the girl. Since this girl was the first in this world to See them, her name would do nicely. The pink pixie leaned in and kissed the child on the nose.

On the girl’s nose, a red starburst fairy mark blossomed. The girl’s face formed in miniature on the pixie, her long hair candy pink but her eyes taking on the purple hue of the girl’s hair.
 

Lallia felt her new Name settle around her like her comfortable new skin. She fluttered in circles for a moment with her pink and purple splashed wings, admiring her new shape, then with a wink to the human Lallia she returned to the boy’s pocket.

The turquoise pixie buzzed in irritation.

“Sorry,” Lallia said airily. “Not speaking to you until you join me.”

The turquoise pixie turned a sulky shade of green for a few moments, then started to reshape. He copied the lanky form of the blue haired boy, but with facial features of his own designing. He now had long, hollow cheeks, dark, pouting lips, and large midnight black eyes with no whites. With all that and his paper white skin, he had the look of a gloomy skull. His jaw-length turquoise hair was the only thing that cheered him up a bit.

“Girls,” he said, his irritation still evident. “Never happy unless they change Names every other decade.”

“So what did you pick?” Lallia prodded.

“Tom,” he said proudly, indicating the lettering on the freckled boy’s pack. “It has many good resonances for a pixie.”

“Tom,” Lallia said, trying it out. She agreed. She could almost taste the mischief buzzing on her tongue.

“Lallia,” he said in return, and she felt a tingling sparkle of Rightness. The pixies grinned.

It made her feel like dancing. Lallia popped out of the pocket again and started spinning and twirling her way up and down the aisle. Around her, the humans began unconsciously reacting to her unbridled joy in her new Name. Moods lightened and laughter broke out, accompanied by excited chattering. By the time the big blue bus pulled up to a building labeled “Apple Blossom City Mall,” the passengers emerged in a much more cheerful mood than when they had gotten on board.

Soon afterwards, mall patrons attempting to enter or exit through the revolving doors found that they ended back where they had started, much to their confusion. As the pixies giggled over their new toy, they completely lost track of the two boys.