“MeadowRue?” Kandess points her sword at the Lance, and then at the Knight. “Uhm, I can’t log out of the game. Something’s wrong with the system. Help!”
Damn! She needs to get back to the mushroom ring, but she can’t get back there, not on her own, and I can’t help her now… Can anyone help her? I blink. Of course!
“The Feyguard… Kandess, call the Feyguard!” I call out. “You must scream for them to come so they know you are in terrible peril. Do it now!”
“Call the what? Who are you talking about?”
I roll my eyes. Of course she doesn’t know who the Feyguard are, not if she still thinks she’s just playing her sim game. I suppose I was hoping for too much, thinking that she might understand where she really is by now. So I plunge into the water and race forward, shooting like an emerald arrow and feeling the cool river flowing over my skin like a living caress. Then I put my feet beneath me and kick upwards, flying up from the bog toward the mound where I grab Kandess’s wrist and yank her down toward the swamp.
“I beg your pardon, sweet Kandess, but you must scream!” And I sink my teeth into the warm brown skin of her hand.
The sound of her scream is ear-piercing and sets my skin to crawling, just as I hear the wooden groans of two willow trees breaking at their spines and crashing down across the bog. Two sets of armored boots clang across the makeshift bridges, but still I bite and still she screams.
BOOM!
The young man appears from nowhere, perhaps from a flash of light, perhaps from the twilight sky itself. I only catch a glimpse of him through my thick wet locks, a youth in silver armor with fine brown hair falling across his bright green eyes. As he grabs Kandess’s arm, he whispers softly into her ear, “…and let’s get you out of here before…” I see the steel in his eyes, and I see a calm come over Kandess, just for an instant, and then the warm hand is wrenched from my mouth, a flash of light dazzles my eyes, and the Lance and the Knight dash onto the little mound, face to face, all alone.
Kandess, and her rescuer, are gone.
I push back from the little island with only the top of my head and my eyes above the surface. The water tastes cool and sweet and rich, and I smile to myself. I should have done this ages ago.
The Bright Lance turns his terrible, beautiful visage on me one last time, shakes his blinding spear, and vanishes. The Black Knight sheathes his sword, and the dark mist takes him away. And finally, finally, the Gray Bog looks like itself once more. No more smoke, no more sun, no more shouting, no more crashing about. It’s dim and quiet, and still, and after a few moments I hear a toad croak and a heron cry.
Smiling, I slip below the surface and float, weightless, hovering in my new world humming with strange new life and strange new friends. I wonder if I really can knit a sweater from moss, and whether I can brew a cup of tea from orchids and lilies. I can’t wait to find out...
* * *
Kandess awoke in the dark, in her sim chair. With her mind still wrapped in sleepy cobwebs, she pushed off the gloves and the headset of her gaming rig and sat up with a yawn. Squinting at the clock, she wondered where she had left off in the game. She couldn’t remember logging out from Feyland.
No matter. She’d figure it out when she logged back in tomorrow.
As she paced over to her desk, she felt her hand throbbing and she rubbed it absently. Must have slept on it funny, she mused.
Outside her door, she could hear her parents talking over the TV. Something about planning a party for someone at work. Whatever.
Kandess plunked down in her chair and picked up her screen. Without thinking, she pulled the box of tissues closer and opened the drawer beside her right knee. The individually wrapped candies crinkled and rolled inside it.
She woke up her screen and opened her vlog channel. The new video that she uploaded yesterday was pretty good, she thought. Lots of good advice about how to document and report harassment. Who to tell. What to do if they didn’t listen. Websites. Phone numbers. Then she looked down below the video and swallowed.
Three hundred new comments.
“…shut up, you fat piece of…
“…back in the kitchen and make me a…”
“…die in a fire.”
She exhaled slowly and bit her lip. Just like the last six videos.
“…face like a tumor, a fat tumor…”
“…harass this, you blubbery bitch…”
“…another morbidly obese feminist idiot who can’t get a date.”
She tried to just breathe as she tried to think of something powerful and intelligent to say to the first commenter. Something that would show them that she wasn’t scared of them, that she wasn’t going away, that they couldn’t break her, or silence her, and that she was going to keep on fighting until she beat them.
“…stupid cow…”
“…couldn’t even bang you if I put a bag on your head…”
“…just kill yourself already.”
Kandess wiped her eyes and started to type, but the throbbing in her hand made her stop. She paused for a long moment, massaging her hand as she stared at the vicious words, and then her finger slowly traveled up the screen to the Admin Settings. She scrolled down.
Delete account?
She paused, trying to breathe with her eyes full of hot tears and her skin pricking with gooseflesh.
No.
Not delete. Not run away. Never that. The videos were good. They helped people. That was important. Making things was important. Protecting things was important. Big or small. It all mattered. This mattered.
She scrolled back up a little.
Disable comments?
Tap.
Comments disabled.
She looked back at her video and now the three hundred little knives in her chest were gone. There was only her video, her face, her message. Just her. She didn’t have to see them or hear them, and neither did anyone else. She blinked and wondered, why didn’t I do that ages ago?
Kandess exhaled again, and this time some of the heat and shivering seemed to flow out with it. She pushed the tissues back into the corner and nudged the drawer shut with her knee. Drumming her fingers on her desk, she stared at the wall, wondering what to do with the rest of her evening. More gaming?
No. Not tonight.
She picked up her messager and sent a text to Jabari: You free?
Jabari: Yeah.
Kandess: Nachos and Trek marathon?
Jabari: Hell yeah!
Kandess: Cool. I’ll get the nachos. Be over in twenty!
And then she got up and strode out of her room with a smile.
A Word from Joseph Robert Lewis
I’ve been reading stories about people getting sucked into fantasy worlds through computers and video games for years, and I’ve always wanted to write one myself. Especially after seeing more recent anime series like Sword Art Online and .hack//Sign. So I was very excited to be invited to write for this Chronicle Worlds anthology, more so after I started reading Anthea Sharp’s Feyland stories and learned more about the world she had created.
Portal fantasies have a long and glorious tradition, including such classic works as the Chronicles of Narnia and John Carter of Mars. An ordinary person magically steps into a fantastical world! The very idea tugs at that desire in all of us to escape from our mundane lives into some Other place, to be some Other person. The computer-as-portal is simply the modern version of the Wardrobe, and I really enjoyed playing in this genre.
When I read the first Feyland book, I discovered so many prominent characters in both the human world and the Fey world, scientists and warriors, teenagers and royalty. And yet my attention kept wandering to the supporting cast, all the strange people and creatures hovering at the edges of the Dark Court. Who were they? Where did they come from? And when I learned the name of the fairy who helped to deceive Jennet, I knew I had found my own heroine: MeadowRue.
The story of MeadowRue is full of the things I like best: a stran
ge new world, lots of fun dialogue, complicated characters who still manage to be really heroic or really villainous (no brooding anti-heroes for me!), a few heart-felt moments that I hope will resonate with my daughters, and plenty of jokes about fantasy tropes. Because if it’s not fun, then why would anyone read it?
You can find all of my own fantasy series like Elf Saga and Aetherium on my website at www.josephrobertlewis.com, where you can also join my mailing list to hear about upcoming books and free offers, as well as follow my blog, my Facebook page, my Twitter, my Tumblr, and my 1998 Geocities homepage covered in blinking “Under Construction” graphics (just kidding… probably).
The Skeptic
by Lindsay Edmunds
ONE TRUE THING ABOUT SAM SAMMISH: he knew what he didn’t like. He made an excellent living from a niche vid show and a well-monetized website, both called Things That Are Wrong. These attracted armies of followers who enjoyed the way he slaughtered, eviscerated, and roasted his targets. These targets included airy-fairy ideas, meaning anything Sam Sammish didn’t believe, and useless people, meaning anyone who failed to live up to Sam Sammish’s standards for worthiness.
He debunked folk tales, tall tales, urban myths, rural myths, and ancient myths. He debunked magic and the charlatans who claimed to practice it, and magical thinking in general. He debunked extra-sensory perception, psychic communication, ghosts, witches, devils, angels, spirit guides, alien abductions, and little green men. He turned the long knives of his sharp mind on literature, art, and music. (“Ninety-nine percent of it is fantasy,” he said with a superior smile he encouraged his fans to emulate.) He loathed spirituality in all its manifestations, although he was careful not to attack the mainstream religions. He went after only smaller sects such as Wicca and paganism, whose anger did not matter to him or to his advertisers.
He disliked poor people unless they were willing to work hard all the time. Then they were all right.
He disliked young women who failed to meet his standards for beauty and old people because he could not see the point of them existing at all. Overweight people of either sex and any age were objects of particular scorn because Sam Sammish himself was lean and buff, and ate a carefully controlled diet, which he never tired of telling his audience about in detail.
Things That Are Wrong interspersed its debunking segments with video of things such as an elderly couple dancing in public where people had to look at them, or a teenage girl singing a heartfelt ballad she had written herself. A howler was video of a pudgy young woman giving art lessons to flabby, badly dressed old people with spotted skin and wrinkles. None of them could draw or paint at all. That was a trifecta for Things That Are Wrong: extra pounds, old age, and art.
The segments on wrong people were more popular than the segments on wrong ideas. This made sense. A finite number of airhead ideas were useful for Things That Are Wrong, but there were an infinite number of stupid people. What a gold mine they were!
Of course, Sam Sammish had enemies, people who hated his guts, but as long as his advertisers did not care, neither did he. Every morning he looked in the mirror and saw a handsome, dark-haired devil with fire in his eyes. He walked out his door with a spring in his step: another day, another dump truck full of people failing to do things right, and another boxcar full of money for him. Life was good.
In his palatial and extremely well-guarded office high above the city, he pondered requests from viewers. His fans were so good at coming up with topics for Things That Are Wrong that he had fired his entire research department. Why pay people to do something that others would do for free?
The request from Bradley and Chakonine Wright got his attention right away. Their video showed a handsome couple, neither of them carrying an extra pound. Bradley had blonde hair in a brush cut and wore an expensive dark blue suit with a red tie. Chakonine was lithe and beautiful with short black hair. She wore a cropped black top over white jeans. They both looked great.
“Our daughter Lenna is addicted to a Full-D game called Feyland,” Bradley Wright said. “It’s the one that puts gamers into a fairyland.”
“Lenna claims it’s not a game,” Chakonine Wright said. “She says she’s been to the Faerie Realm, it’s realer than the life she has with us, and she wants to go there and never come back.”
Sam Sammish snorted with disgust. He’d heard of Feyland. The whole world had heard of Feyland. The developer, VirtuMax, was cleaning up with that one. Its stock had gone through the roof because some people always fell for airy-fairy ideas. What suckers.
Chakonine held up a photo of Lenna. She looked to be thirteen or fourteen. Her hair was neither blonde nor black, but a weird muddy shade as if the two colors had been mixed together. Sam noted that unlike her parents, she was overweight.
He requested and got a video conference with the Wrights that same morning.
“We want you to debunk Feyland,” Bradley said. “Really go after it. Tear it to pieces.”
“Feyland is stupid, of course,” Sam said to the Wrights. “But why would what I say on my show have any influence on your daughter? Unless she’s a fan of mine,” he added.
The Wrights paused for an uncomfortable second. Bradley spoke with a little hesitation in his voice. “When you debunk Feyland, we want you to feature Lenna, too. We have video of her playing the game. We have recordings of what she said. She does not know this.”
Sam was a bit surprised. He had no compunction about humiliating children, but he had never had parents request him to do so.
“We’re afraid for her!” Chakonine cried. “We’ve taken away her sim equipment, but she just sneaks out to a sim cafe or goes to her friend Bree’s house and plays there. When we got a doctor to prescribe an antidepressant, she flushed all the pills down the toilet.”
“We can’t keep her locked up,” Bradley said. “It’s illegal.”
“My opinion of Feyland and the delusionals who play it is even lower than yours,” Sam said. “If you are willing to sign a contract saying that you agree to my featuring Lenna on my show and on my website, I agree, too.”
The Wrights spoke together: “Yes.” Five seconds after they received the contract, they returned it, signed.
Sam decided that the most effective way to debunk Feyland was to enter it himself. He would show the video of Lenna while talking over it about his experience with the game. They would edit the audio so that every time Lenna spoke, he would cut her off and cut her down.
The first step was to get Feyland thoroughly researched. He needed to have a detailed map of the terrain and to know in advance the answer to every riddle. He was about to bark out a command to his researchers when he remembered that he had fired all of them. This was a problem, but not an insurmountable one. His secretary, a pretty young woman named Robin, made the requisite contacts. By the end of the day, people working for freelancers’ pay and no benefits, which was pretty funny to Sam, had compiled extensive background material on the game levels, the characters and their possible quests, and how to win every challenge.
He ordered a Full-D sim system, charging it to Things That Are Wrong, Inc., and had it set up in his home office. Robin provided login instructions, character notes, and answers. A hack by Enrico, his staff geek, enabled Sam to switch views between the background material and the simming system, so he did not have to go to the trouble of memorizing anything.
This was going to be easy.
At seven o’clock on a Friday evening, Sam Sammish got suited up in the Full-D paraphernalia. How could anyone believe that Feyland was real? “Reality” was obviously being simulated by expensive technology.
Moody music began to play in his helmet. “Yeah, yeah,” he said to the game. “Bring on the golden glowing words of welcome.”
WELCOME TO FEYLAND
A VirtuMax Production
Version 1.1
A wondrous place where adventure awaits.
Sam laughed into his helmet. Take only screen shots, leave only money, he th
ought. Although he knew that a player’s thoughts could influence game activity, nothing happened at all. This made him laugh again.
A list of character classes appeared, but Sam paid no attention to it. He had already made his choice: the Knight. Noble, courageous, and true, wearing armor and wielding a sword, the Knight could kill anything.
Sam made his avatar the image of himself and took the onscreen name of Sam the Man.
More golden light, a blat of pretentious music, a blip of nausea, and he was in. He stood in a clearing in the middle of a circle of mushrooms with white-spotted red caps. Amanita mushrooms, which were poisonous. Sam considered that they were probably the only honest element in Feyland: this game was poison for the mind, and the mushrooms symbolized that.
“Oooh, into the mystic,” Sam said. He swiped his sword around the circle, decapitating every mushroom. Squinting in the bright sun, he spied a narrow path and stomped out of the clearing. The air was sweet with the scent of flowers, and rolling green meadows lay under a pure blue sky. However, Sam was not impressed. He switched views to review the first challenge. Got it, he thought. I find an ugly little Non-Player-Character and bring him milk.
On the doorstep of the airiest-fairiest cottage Sam had ever seen or wanted to sat a hideous creature that seemed to be male. He was covered with brown hair, his large ears were misshapen, and his nose was a triangular deformity hanging off the center of his face. Sam had to bring free milk to a loser. Just the way to start a game.
“I want milk,” the thing said, holding out a wooden bowl.
“Right,” Sam said, grabbing the bowl and running as fast as a suit of silver armor would permit over the rise behind the cottage. He knew he had to sing to a damn cow. Spotting her, he bawled out a little ditty he sang on his show now and then. Not coincidentally, he wrote it himself:
Chronicle Worlds: Feyland Page 4
