This always used to make me chuckle, but now it hit too close to home.
“See ya on the other side, Ray,” I recited, clutching the neck of the Cloud Guitar like it was a particle-thrower.
As we spoke, seven large glass cylinders began to rise up out of the billowing red fog, forming a wide circle around us. Each of these glass cylinders had a metal cap at the top and the bottom, like a giant fuse. And standing motionless inside each of them was a different incarnation of His Royal Badness. Each one had a different hairstyle and outfit, apparently representing different stylistic phases of Prince’s career.
Before I could get a good look at any of them through the fog, all seven chambers opened and the Seven Princes emerged in unison, stepping forward into the arena. As they did so, the menacing opening guitar riff of the song “When Doves Cry” began to echo through the arena at earsplitting volume. When the drums kicked in a few seconds later, all seven incarnations of Prince stretched out their arms as one and began to rise slowly from the ground. I craned my neck upward to see them all hovering directly above us, glaring down at us like seven angry Kryptonian gods intent on giving us a Smallville-style smackdown.
They were a terrifying sight to behold.
“Don’t look directly in their eyes!” I heard Aech shout at us. “Never look in any of their eyes, OK?”
I immediately averted my eyes and saw Shoto do the same thing. Aech caught us both staring at the ground.
“I didn’t tell you to avoid looking at them!” Aech shouted. “Just avoid looking any of them in the eye for longer than a second or two, or they’ll go berserk, OK?”
I nodded and glanced back up at them, still levitating above and around us, in what was now a slowly rotating circle.
The most imposing to me, by far, was Purple Rain Prince. He wore a pair of gleaming mirror shades, a shirt with a white ruffled collar, red pants, and a shiny purple trench coat with studs on the left shoulder. For some reason, he looked like the most pissed-off one of the bunch. He was also the first one to speak. He pointed down at us with one accusing finger.
“There they are!” he shouted in a voice that reverberated throughout the arena. “Those are the heretics who broke into our house, trashed our bike, and stole our spaceship! And now they dare to defile our temple grounds!”
In unison, the other six incarnations of Prince all gasped and then grimaced, while exchanging deeply offended looks with one another. Then, as if by telepathic agreement, the attack began.
Purple Rain Prince took the lead, and as he fell upon us, his glittering purple trench coat flapped out behind him like a pair of angel wings while he fired deafening blasts of sonic funk down at us from the head of his glowing H. S. Anderson Mad Cat guitar. They transformed into cracking balls of purple energy that exploded on impact. I took several direct hits from these to my avatar’s torso. Luckily my Chain of Gold did its job and kept me from sustaining damage.
Then, with a sonic boom, Purple Rain Prince was hovering high above us again. He raised his hands and shouted in that booming voice: “Majesty! Divinity!”
Two doves rose up from behind him and hovered above his head. They both opened their beaks and fired shriek attacks down at us.
After Purple Rain Prince and his two attack doves finished their bombing run, Cloud Suit Prince descended. This incarnation wore a sky-blue suit covered in white clouds. And he apparently had the ability to turn his suit invisible and phase-shift, rendering him immune to our attacks.
Cloud Suit Prince seemed especially pissed-off at me, and focused all his vocal attacks on my avatar. It took me a few minutes to figure out why: it was his Cloud Guitar that I was holding, and he wanted it back.
Cloud Suit Prince was singing a song from 1984 called “I Would Die 4 U.” But he altered the lyrics of its chorus slightly, so what I heard was, “You will. Die for. Me. Yeah! That is how it’s gonna be!” Each rapid-fire chord he strummed on his Mad Cat fired another sonic blast down at me, like a gunfighter fanning the barrel of his six-shooter.
Aech referred to the next Prince in the attack conga line as Gett Off Prince. This one was dressed in a tight-fitting yellow lace suit with two circles cut out in the rear to expose his bare ass cheeks. Thankfully he didn’t fire any sonic attacks from them. Those came from his yellow guitar, which looked identical to mine, aside from the color.
I thought I was hallucinating when the next Prince descended on us. Aech referred to him as “Gemini.” Shoto called him “Partyman.” My image-recognition software’s best guess was “Batdance Prince.” To me, he looked like the villain Two-Face, except that he was Batman on the left half and the green-haired Joker on his right half. He hurled joke bombs from one hand and batarangs from the other, then swooped back up and away, to dodge our counterattacks.
I’m not sure of the correct name for the next incarnation to attack, but I mentally nicknamed him Microphone Gun Prince. He wore an all-black suit, a black head wrap, and an oversize pair of black sunglasses. He also wielded a pair of gold microphone guns that he wore in black leather holsters on each hip. They looked like pistols, except that their barrels had old-school microphones at the end, which hurled a rapid-fire hail of sonic funk waves down at us. After he unleashed his salvo, he blew away the smoke rising from each microphone-gun barrel, then turned and holstered them both as he flew back up into the sky.
The next incarnation scared the living crap out of me. Third Eye Prince had a giant round Afro and a pair of sunglasses with three lenses. The third lens was centered above the bottom two, and it fired a devastating beam of sonic enlightenment from his concealed third eye, which incinerated everything in its path.
After Third Eye Prince finished his bombing run, Purple Rain Prince swooped down to make his second attack, even though he’d only completed his first run about six seconds earlier. Meanwhile, I hadn’t managed to get off even a single attack of my own—and my Chain of Gold wouldn’t hold out forever. It was a terrifying wake-up call, and made me realize how outmatched we really were.
The seventh and final incarnation, Mesh-Mask Prince, was the only one who didn’t swoop down to attack. Apparently unarmed, he continued to hover up above us, silent and motionless, watching the battle below unfold with an impassive expression on his face (at least, from what I could see of it through his mask).
I finally pulled it together and started to return fire with my Cloud Guitar, landing two direct hits on Cloud Suit Prince. This appeared to weaken him considerably, and he pulled out of the attack run rotation and remained hovering up above, alongside Mesh-Mask Prince.
Meanwhile, Aech had pulled up the henchman-activation incantation for the Original 7ven on her HUD. Facing Morris and his band, she read it aloud, prefacing each line of the incantation with a snap of her fingers:
Snap!
“Yo, Stella! If you think I’m afraid of you…”
Snap!
“Grace, if you so much as think I can’t do the do…”
Snap!
“Girl, if you dream I came to jerk around, you better wake up—”
Snap!
“—and release it!”
As soon as Aech finished reciting the final two words of the incantation, Morris Day and the Time sprang into action, launching into a song from the Graffiti Bridge film soundtrack called “Release It.”
Our front man, Morris Day, stepped forward, and a microphone appeared in his hand. He raised it to his lips, tilted his head up at his seven opponents, and spoke.