“There are valves,” Iris pointed out. “A valve slide too.”
“Well, should we try something?”
“We might as well…”
I placed my hand on the first valve and spoke into the bell. Nothing happened. I then tried the same with the second, and the third, still no results.
“Try pressing all three of them,” Iris said, and as I did, both of us heard a clicking sound behind the wall.
Suddenly, a cranky voice emerged from the end of the bell. “And who, pray tell, would speak into my bell so early in the morn?”
“I think he’s talking to us,” Iris said when I didn’t say anything.
“How do you think I should reply?” I asked her.
“Ah, a novice of sorts, the type that forgets to press the mute button when he speaks. I can hear you, my boy, and my lady, so please, let’s get this over with. What would you like to know?”
“What would we like to know?” I asked.
“Answering questions with questions, my favorite thing to do in the morning,” the voice said, sarcasm evident. “You have called me, I have not called you, so what would you like to know?”
“We want to speak to Ray Steampunk,” I said.
“To confirm, you, a person of no standings aside from a petty badge from Kingdom Lume, would like to speak to the most esteemed avatar ever to exist in the Proxima Galaxy? Wait a minute, what’s that, Bobby? Are you serious? Did you ask Scott? Okay, ask James-Andrew. Really? What about Dave? What did he say? I see. I see. And Kay? Surely, she has something to say about this, if not her, then Holly. Or perhaps Blanche? I see. Okay, it appears that I did not recognize who I was speaking to. My apologies, Chase Knowles and Iris Snout! Ray Steampunk will be with you momentarily.”
We heard footsteps behind us. Iris and I turned to see the man himself in golden armor, a flowing red cape and his dark hair up in a man-bun.
“Ray Steampunk?” Iris asked, her eyes going all fangirl, which she quickly tried to cover by clearing her throat.
A pleasure to meet you, Iris Snout, the man said, or at least I heard his voice. His mouth didn’t move when he spoke. Chase Knowles, it is also a pleasure to meet you. And congratulations for solving the riddle of the Steeple.
“The pleasure is all mine,” I told him, not quite knowing what else to say.
When I first designed this place, I never imagined it would be so hard for someone to solve. I argued with a friend of mine about it for quite some time. Well I wouldn’t call him a friend, but a reluctant acquaintance. But anyways, I can tell you more about Mr. Quantum Hughes another day. The point is, he thought this would be too easy. And it turns out, it was not too easy.
“I can’t believe a bard or something didn’t try music on it,” Iris said.
Bards are usually too drunk or too busy trying to make ends meet to sit down and solve a riddle like this. Curiously, that was also Mr. Hughes’ concern, that a bard would figure it out. Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. You have solved the puzzle and the Steeple is now yours, both of yours, apparently. You may do with it what you want.
“So you won’t be mad if we sell it?” I asked.
“Chase…” Iris said under her breath.
Why would I be mad if you sold it? It is worth a considerable sum, and in the right hands, it could do some good for the kingdoms. In the wrong hands, it would send the kingdoms on a dark path where there would be rebellions and everything else that makes fantasy worlds great. Either way, the people are satisfied either in their oppression or complacency.
“Could you clarify more: if we sell it, how would it actually affect the kingdoms? I’m sorry if this is a dumb question,” I said.
The right buyer, a noble man or woman, one who cares about Proxima society as a whole, may live in it, or perhaps open portions of it as a museum. That could be one way it affects the kingdoms. An iniquitous man or woman could use it as a castle, putting walls around it, building up an army, and taking all the kingdoms for their own, boosted by the power of the Steeple.
“The owner gets a power boost?” Iris asked.
That’s right.
“If the owner of the Steeple is boosted by its power, then why haven’t we been boosted yet?” I asked.
Because of the way it changed hands. The first person, or persons, to get the steeple from me receives no power from it. This keeps it neutral. But once they bequeath it to someone else, that person’s natural alignment will be amplified by the Steeple to all twelve kingdoms. It would be quite an interesting situation, to be honest with you, regardless of the next person taking ownership.
“I don’t want to give it to the wrong person,” Iris said.
“No one does,” I told her, “I mean, I don’t. I like EverLife; I don’t want to ruin it for others.”
You have a good heart, both of you do, and I’m sure you’ll do the right thing in the end. Now that the information is out there, expect a lot of offers going forward. I don’t believe anyone will go to war with you over it, because it would not transfer ownership if they killed your avatar, or even erased your Digital Neuronal Autoconstruct System, or D-NAS. It would just be transferred back to me. And no one will be able to get it from me.
“But if we sell it, that’s not the case, right?” Iris asked.
Correct. I will not intervene from that point forward, unless someone is trying to completely destroy the world in an algorithmic way. But no one has done that for quite some time, not in over fifteen years. EverLife could, however, dip into a spell of darkness, which would fundamentally change the game, both in this world, and how it is played in your world. But like I said, I don’t see this as a problem. Eventually, the right hero would emerge and correct its course. Well, hopefully. Anyway, the decision is yours. You have my blessings, and if you ever want to speak with me again, you know how to reach me now.
Chapter Fourteen: All My Fault
Iris and I had a very quick breakfast delivered to us by an EBAYmazon droid, both of us springing for non-GMO local artisan croissant breakfast sandwiches with almond milk lattes.
And it was when we were on our way over to my apartment to, “grab something,” that I finally told Iris what was going on.
“Say that again,” she said as our UberLyft zipped toward my apartment. From there, we would travel to Grand Central, where we would take the monorail to Providence, and get to Newport from there.
“I went ahead and got a humandroid body for Lady C.”
“That’s what I thought you said.”
“Why are you looking at me like that?” I asked after a long pause.
“You really are wasting your money, aren’t you?” she asked, her eyes narrowing.
“No, it’s something that… I just…”
“You’re having a relationship with her, then?” Iris asked, hesitating for a moment before looking out the window, looking back to me, and looking away again.
“Yes,” I confessed. “And trust me, I have been meaning to tell you about it. I just, well, we got caught up with the tournament, and then we got caught up with other things. It’s just, I wanted to see what it was like, and so did Lady C.”
“Are you sure she did?” Iris asked.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Are you sure this wasn’t just completely your idea?”
“If I said it was, would you let it go?”
“You know…” Iris crossed her arms over her chest. “Never mind. But speaking of ideas, maybe going to Newport isn’t such a good idea.”
“Iris, I would have told you last night, or the day before, but other things have been happening,” I told her. “We just got caught up with things, and it’s just… Please…”
“I think this is the first time I’ve been a little annoyed with you, upset even,” she finally said.
“Then I must be doing something right, right?”
“Don’t push it, Chase.”
“It’s something different. And I don’t know if she wants to
keep the humandroid body or not.”
“I hope this vehicle hasn’t been recording audio. Turn off all audio recording devices,” Iris told the aeros.
“Turning off all audio recording devices. Would you like me to delete what I have already recorded, Iris Snout?”
“Yes.”
“Deleting. Deletion successful.”
“Why does she need to come?” Iris asked. “I mean, we are going there to hunt, right?”
“We are, but I thought she would want to experience it firsthand. You know, the ocean, all of it.”
Iris took a deep breath in. “I’m definitely not staying in a room with you two.”
“I hadn’t even thought about that, to be honest.”
“Of course you haven’t. Since you got this money, you really haven’t been thinking things through. But you know what? It’s fine. Let’s just see how this goes. It’s fine. I mean, it’s not fine, because we are friends and you should have told me something, but what can I do now? This is where we are,” she said as the vehicle lowered in front of my apartment.
“I’ll be right back,” I told her.
“Fine.”
I ran to the door and opened it up to find Alex asleep on the couch.
As usual.
He had a manga opened on his chest, and he snored loudly, his tongue hanging out of his mouth. I entered my room, immediately going through the instructions to summon an NPC into their humandroid body.
Lady C. knew that this was the plan; it wasn’t long before the sleeping humandroid started to wake up. She sat and stretched her arms overhead, as if she were yawning.
“I feel like it’s been forever since I was in this body,” she said.
“Iris is waiting outside, and she knows about you, just FYI.”
“Really? Why are you saying it like that?” she asked.
“Like what?”
“Like it’s a bad thing.”
“That’s not my intention. It just took her off guard a bit.”
“Okay,” Lady C. said, once she was on her feet.
I grabbed one of my backpacks and started shoving clothes inside. Lady C.’s clothing, the stuff she had bought the other day, was still in its bag, so we took some of that out as well, the Metican folding it before letting me put it in my backpack.
As she had done after first taking her body, Lady C. wore her maroon dress, a cardigan as well. I figured it may be colder on the coast, so it was best to bring something a little warm.
Once we were packed up, we stepped out of my bedroom, just as Alex was waking up.
“Chase?” he asked in his low voice. “I didn’t know you had company over.”
Lady C. started to snicker. “Hi, my name is Lady… I mean, Cassandra. My name is Cassandra.”
“Hey, Cassandra, Alex,” he said, removing the manga from his chest. “Sorry, I fell asleep out here. I do that sometimes.”
“It’s cool,” I told him, nodding to the door. “We were on our way out.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Newport, Rhode Island,” I told the bearded man. “With Iris.”
“Damn, that sounds like a great trip. I haven’t had a good lobster roll in… Weeks? No, months. Yeah, months.”
“We will be sure to bring you a lobster roll then,” Lady C. said with a smile.
“All the way from Newport?” He gave her a funny look as he scratched his belly.
“She’s just joking with you,” I told him, taking her hand. “Come on, Cassandra, let’s go.”
“Are you sure you don’t want a lobster roll? I wasn’t joking. We can bring one back, right?”
“Nah, it’s fine, I can get one here in the city.” Alex yawned. “Well, have fun in Newport. And send me some pictures if you take any. It’s been a while since I’ve been out to the beach. Maybe I could go to one of the beaches along Long Island. That would be nice. A beach trip. Yeah. With a six pack.” He nodded at his own idea. “Anyway, have fun.”
“He seems nice,” Lady C. said as soon as we stepped out of my apartment, my eyes immediately jumping to the waiting aeros, where I saw Iris now sitting in the front seat, not looking over in our direction.
“Yeah, definitely,” I said as I opened the door for Lady C. She got in, Iris finally turning around to look at her.
“Look at you,” Iris said with a cracked smile. “Don’t you just look… Beautiful. Lady C., you look great, but it’s kind of strange seeing you in normal clothing, ha! Well not normal, but you know what I mean,” she said with another awkward laugh. “Sorry, Chase is just now telling me that you two decided to do this.”
“Well, we did,” Lady C. said, instantly coming to my defense as our vehicle started to rise into the air.
“I can see that,” Iris said.
“It has been a little bit of an adjustment,” I said, just trying to speak over the awkwardness, feeling like an idiot for putting myself in this situation. But what was done was done, and now I needed to roll with it. To make things work.
Or at least try.
“I have to get used to food names here,” the Metican warrior said. “What’s a lobster roll, anyway?”
“It is like a lobster hoagie,” I told her.
“A hoagie?”
“A grinder,” said Iris. “A sandwich.”
“Oh, it’s a sandwich. I see. That’s why Alex didn’t want me to bring him one from Newport, especially because it has seafood in it.”
Iris chuckled. “You offered to bring him one from Newport?”
“Of course I did,” she said. “It’s the right thing to do.”
“Yes, I suppose it is,” Iris said, looking in the rearview mirror directly at me. “I suppose it is.”
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I was glad as hell that we hadn’t brought Aya into the situation. At points, the tension between Iris and Lady C. felt palpable, at other points there was no tension, things were just as they normally were. Regardless, it was all my fault, I knew that, and it was up to me to try to do what I could to smooth the situation over.
And sitting on the monorail that connected Grand Central Station to New Haven, Connecticut, and from New Haven to Providence, Rhode Island, I figured now would be as good of a time as any to see if I couldn’t relax the situation some.
The three of us shared one of the booths at the end of the cabin, with the chairs facing each other, Lady C. and Iris next to each other and across from me.
Looking at both of them, I still couldn’t believe that I’d been stupid enough to think that this wouldn’t be a bit of an issue. But I had to salvage this in some way, so I tried to start up a conversation.
“Let’s talk about where we should go first,” I suggested.
“Wherever you want to go,” Iris said, looking out the window.
“Do you want to switch seats with me, Lady Iris?”
“In public, when you are in that form, call me Iris,” she said sternly to the Metican.
“Sorry, Iris. Do you want to switch seats so you can look out the window?”
“No, I figured you would like to look out the window.”
“That’s really sweet of you.”
And then silence.
“We will be there about noon,” I told Iris, just trying to move past the awkwardness, “so we should figure out where we need to go first. Doing some iNet research now…” The information appeared before me, telling me exactly where we needed to go and the cost. “Okay, so I thought that we could just go to any of the mansions, but apparently, we need to go to one called the Breakers first.”
This caught Iris’ attention. “The Breakers? I think that’s the one I went to. There are several, like seven or eight mansions, more than that now. They are all managed by a historical society, like you said. But the Breakers was where the Vanderbilts lived.”
“The Vanderbilts, the Vanderbilts,” Lady C. said, information appearing before her eyes, or at least that’s what I figured was happening as she shook her head, reading
through the articles.
Iris smirked at her.
Neither of us had ever seen something like this before, at least not in real life.
Movies that came out around the time that iNet was invented usually had people checking things over the Internet, their heads wagging a bit as they read information, but I didn’t think it was something that actually happened.
Yet here Lady C. was, reading up on everything the Vanderbilts had to offer, moving her head left and right. And since she was basically a supercomputer, I knew that Lady C. wasn’t only reading up on it, but was researching every single bit, at a speed that Iris and I would never be able to replicate.
“Interesting,” she said after about ten seconds, maybe twenty. “I want to see what American royalty looks like. I can only imagine.”
“The Breakers is what you are after then,” Iris told her. “That and the Marble House, which is down the street.”
“I’m looking at pictures of the Marble House right now,” said Lady C. “Why would anyone want that much stone inside their home unless it is a castle? But you guys don’t have invaders here, so you don’t really need protection like someone who owns a castle.”
“It was a thing at the time,” I told her. “Remember, these homes were built like two hundred years ago. Things were different then. Americans viewed wealth differently.”
“Different than today?” Iris asked me. “Or was it all the same, just slightly different?”
“You would know better than I,” I told her, not at all trying to make a snide remark. But she took it that way, looking away from me for a moment.
“I don’t think he was trying to offend you,” Lady C. said.
“He knows what he’s trying to do,” said Iris.
I decided that rather than doing this verbally, I would do it over iNet.
Me: Seriously, I wasn’t trying to insinuate anything.
Iris: Okay, maybe not. I’m sorry, this has just thrown me off guard a bit.
Me: I get it. This is totally my fault, so let’s just unpack it later. I didn’t expect this to be such an issue. I should have known; I should have thought about these things. I’m sorry. I actually mean that.
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