Big Chick slid his sunglasses down the length of his nose and gave Aech the evil eye.
“What’s the password?” he asked in a surprisingly kind voice.
Aech cupped her right ear, turned it toward him, and said, “What?”
Big Chick nodded, gave us all a friendly grin, and then stepped out of our way. Shoto and I exchanged a perplexed glance and followed Aech inside.
I felt like we were walking into the hippest night spot on the ninth level of Dante’s Inferno. All the lighting was reddish in hue, and there were flames everywhere you looked—lit candles on every table, torches mounted on the walls and balcony railings, and dozens of burning fireplaces, upstairs and down. But the club didn’t even feel warm. And it was filled with happy, chattering NPCs—beautiful people in colorful attire, who were all busy drinking, smoking, dancing, and trying to seduce one another.
“Gentlemen, please remember—you can’t stop the revolution if you don’t have the time,” Aech said, pointing across the club toward the empty stage, which was located inside a ring of fire, and said, “Dogs travel in packs of seven!”
The stage was currently empty, except for a large drum kit. The bass drum had a familiar symbol on it—a large number 7, positioned off-center inside a large circle, with a much smaller circle set into its orbit, like an electron diagram….
I took out the Fourth Shard and had another look at it. The symbol on the bass drum matched the eighth and final symbol etched into its surface—the one that came after the V.
“Aech!” I said. “The symbols match!”
She nodded.
“It’s the logo of a band called the Original 7ven,” she told me. “But they changed their name to that, later in their career, for the same reason Prince changed his—contract bullshit. They’re still much better known by their original name—”
The crowd around us suddenly erupted into applause, drowning out her voice. We looked over and saw seven men running up onto the stage single-file. All seven of them were dressed in stylish suits. Four of them were carrying instruments. One of them was carrying a large mirror.
They seemed familiar to me, but I couldn’t place them right away. Then the club DJ—who also looked very familiar—jumped on the PA to introduce them.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Please welcome…the original seven members of the greatest band in the world…Morris Day and the Time!”
That was when I realized how I knew them—from their cameo at the end of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. And the DJ who had just introduced them was an NPC of Jason Mewes, probably cut and pasted here from Askewniverse in Sector Sixteen.
The lead singer, Morris Day, waited a moment for the crowd to quiet down, then he grabbed the microphone.
“Welcome to Pandemonium, y’all!” he said. “Tonight’s the night. We’re holding auditions, people! To fill out our roster with some new dancers for an upcoming tour. So anyone out there who thinks they got what it takes, this is your one and only chance to dance!”
“All right,” Aech said. “Get ready! And try not to blow this, OK?”
“Try not to blow what?” I asked. “Are you gonna tell us what we need to do? Aech?”
Aech shook her head and began dancing backward, away from me. Then a huge grin spread across her face as the Time launched into “The Bird,” their hit dance single from 1984.
“Y’all ready?” Morris asked from the stage. “OK! Anyone who wants to audition, I’m counting off ten seconds to get to the dance floor! Ten! Nine! Eight! Seven—”
Aech continued to dance backward, out onto the dance floor, motioning for us to follow her. A second later, Morris Day let out an earsplitting “Whawk!” and the song kicked into high gear.
That was when I began to see falling directional arrows on my HUD that matched the arrows lighting up on the dance floor directly beneath my feet, like a giant game of Dance Dance Revolution. Shoto saw them, too, and we both let out a jubilant roar.
“DDR!” we shouted, as we both began to dance in sync to the arrows.
Aech joined us, and the three of us danced side by side, hitting our marks on the floor in perfect sync.
We managed to keep it up until the very end of the song.
When it was over, Morris called us up onstage and announced that we had passed the audition with flying colors.
“Say, ‘I pledge allegiance to the Time’!” Morris shouted. “Can y’all say that?”
We each raised our right hand and pledged allegiance. Then Aech leaned over and whispered something in Morris’s ear. It sounded like “the kid.” Whatever it was, his expression changed and he stormed offstage, motioning for the rest of the band to follow him—including the three of us.
“It worked!” Aech said. “They’ve agreed to come battle with us. Let’s go!”
We got back in the Little Red Corvette and sped south on Alphabet Street. Morris Day and the Time followed behind us in their tour bus, which had their logo for the Original 7ven painted across the side.
Once we were a few miles outside the city limits, the landscape around us abruptly changed, and the road led us into a desert that appeared to stretch to the horizon in all directions.
Every seven seconds, long tines of purple lightning descended from the sky to strike the desert sand, burning and melting it into strange pillared formations of purple fulgurite that dotted the barren landscape like sentinels.
Eventually a small lone pyramid emerged in the distance ahead of us, just off the highway, like some sort of strange roadside attraction.
When we reached it, Aech told me to me pull over, and motioned for the tour bus behind us to do the same thing. She told us all to wait while she ran inside to get something, and I watched from inside the Corvette as she ran across the barren sand, over to one corner of the pyramid, which appeared to have no entrance. I used my HUD to zoom in with maximum magnification and saw that she was running her fingertips across the surface of one of the large stones that made up the pyramid’s base. Then she leaned forward and blew a layer of sand and dust away from one tiny section of it, revealing several rows of hieroglyphs. She began to press them in a specific sequence, like buttons. I heard a loud grinding sound as a massive stone at the base of the pyramid slid aside, revealing a secret entrance. Aech ran through it.
A minute later, she emerged again, now wearing a huge smile on her face. As she jumped back in the car beside me, I saw that she was clutching three gold chains, each with a gold pendant shaped like a different element of the Love Symbol. The first pendant was a golden circle, which Aech gave to me. The second was a golden horn, which she gave to Shoto. The last was a golden androgyne symbol, which Aech placed around her own neck.
“All right,” she said, letting out a heavy sigh. “Now we’ve got the Three Chains of Gold too. I think we’re as ready as we’re ever going to be.” She pointed to the road ahead. “Let’s go face the music, fellas.”
I pulled the Corvette back out onto the road, the tour bus behind me, and gunned the engine again, hurtling us forward toward the dark, luminous, purple horizon ahead.
A moment later, the desert was behind us and we were in a strange, otherworldly purple landscape, with purple mountain ranges in the distance, and a dark-purple sky over our heads that was filled with dark-purple thunderstorm clouds with bright-purple tines of lightning crackling across and between them. We put the top up on our Little Red Corvette convertible just in time—right before big fat droplets of purple rain began to fall, creating a strange syncopated rhythm as they drummed against the car’s roof and hood and on the asphalt road ahead as we continued to speed down it.