Wayne looked back. The guy’s name was Roger something. An NPC, he thought, wearing a white sailor uniform that would have seemed in place on a British frigate.
Roger stood about four inches shorter than Wayne, and had the kind of loose skin around his neck that suggested recent weight loss. The guy was bright-eyed and carrot-topped, radiated “gaming” from every pore. He sighed in exasperated joy as they locked eyes.
“Can you believe this? Everything automated and slick for the last two weeks, but the last two minutes just goes all to hell.”
“Way of the world, old boy.” Wayne grinned at himself. Unbidden, a creaky British accent had crept into his voice.
British Empire. Nineteenth century. Pay attention to the clues.
To his credit, Roger adjusted almost as quickly. “Never better,” he said.
The corridor was lined with costumed well-wishers. Some played their roles impeccably, but others seemed vaguely uncomfortable. He suspected this last group had little gaming experience. They’d be Lunies recruited as extras, playing their parts as best they could for unseen cameras.
Angelique was keeping her smile bright, but she whispered out of the side of her mouth. “Damn. I’d hoped we’d have a little time before the”-a swift shift in tones as a brightly lipsticked woman of middle years materialized-“Junie Bug! How are you?”
The two women exchanged bobble-headed air kisses. Even Wayne recognized June Simmons, the publisher and head reporter for the Web’s largest gaming zine, Fan-Tasm. So Earth was sending up the A-team, not just leaving it to the local stringers to file workable stories.
Oddly, that thought pepped Wayne up. He found himself strutting through the doorway into the main hall, where they were hustled into elevators as guides chattered greeting.
A woman who looked as if she might have been Samoan, with beautiful strong curves and a good smile, greeted them in the foyer. “My name is Kendra Griffin, Chief of Operations of Heinlein base,” she said. “It is my honor to welcome you to our home.” She wore a lovely lace-frilled gown that reminded him of a water lily. It offset her golden skin beautifully, and would have been right in place on the lady accompanying a British officer to a regimental ball. “You are on the surface level, only one of seven floors, each disk-shaped and sunk into the lunar regolith to a total depth of four hundred feet. We’re going down to the third level. Your gear is going down to level five, and you’ll rejoin it later. Right now, we want to invite you to look at the chart right here-”
As they proceeded down the corridor, wisps of chamber music rose up to meet them.
The folks lining the hall seemed more… comfortable in their roles, and he suspected that more of these were genuine actors, Non-Player Characters, a few of them even imported up from Earth itself for the event.
Mickey and Maud Abernathy wore vaguely Middle Eastern garb. Did the British Empire have holdings in the Arabian peninsula in the nineteenth century? Their Aladdin-esque pantaloons and flaring blouses certainly suggested as much.
“Excuse me,” he asked. “I’m not certain we’ve been introduced.”
Mickey smiled graciously. “The Abernathys,” she said. “We’ve just returned from a research expedition in Egypt, uncovering the lost temple of Solomon.”
Ah. Backstory right there. So, Xavier was letting them keep their names, but changing their histories. The Abernathys were an academic couple from Brighton (Mickey taught history, and Maud was a published fantasy novelist) who usually played as paired psychic sensitives. Saying they were recently returned from Egypt on a dig suggested that their IFGS points would manifest as a combination of human psi-ability and Oriental mysticism.
Marching at Wayne’s side was a plump woman in… what was that? The female version of a nineteenth-century British Raj military uniform? The actual insignias had been removed, but the style was right. He guessed a female soldier of fortune. The woman’s name was Sharmela Tamil, a Gold Ticket winner from Sri Lanka. Not an IFGS kingpin, but a loyal fan who had dropped her hundred bucks-or the local equivilent-in the lottery.
They entered a bank of elevators (oops! lifts) in which he was polite enough not to notice the anachronisms. There was a limit to what the IFGS could modify on the moon without infringing upon safety or utility.
The door slid shut. The elevator fell with a recorded rattle.
The most interesting personage packed in the little room with him traveled not on her feet, but in a capsule with twin five-inch treads. This would be Asako Tabata, the TechWitch herself, the girl who was probably the best pure gamer in the world. Five years ago she would have dominated the entire proceedings. In the intervening time, muscular dystrophy had finally caught up with Asako. It was a miracle she was there at all.
She couldn’t walk. Most certainly she could no longer climb, and that was a real pity, because Asako had been one of the IFGS’ finest wall crawlers. But by fan request and special dispensation, she was attending the first lunar game as an actual player, not merely an NPC. He wondered at the negotiations for that, and guessed that many of them had been commercial in nature. But how in the world did they justify such technology in a nineteenth-century game?
Time to find out.
“Excuse me,” he asked. “Do I know you?”
Her answering voice was partially synthesized, but you would have to listen very carefully to detect it. She played behind the shield of her isolation bubble. No longer able to breathe without mechanical assistance, she had invested over a million dollars of her lifetime winnings into the damnedest gaming costume imaginable. It was her life support unit, but the gleaming silver and gold capsule had both arms and wheels.
“Asako Tabata,” the speaker said. Behind her shield, she smiled as her lips moved. He had never met her, but had seen her in interviews and gaming vids, and the computer voice matched her own very closely. “Step-niece to the esteemed Prince Dakkar Nemo,” she said. “He himself fashioned my capsule, that I might join him exploring beneath the waves, despite my physical infirmities.”
Captain Nemo. Of course. A man of sufficient genius to develop an electrical submarine by the time of America’s civil war. Who could doubt that, if he had survived, he might not create something along the line of Asako’s life-support bubble? In all likelihood, she had only been given a bare outline. It would be her job to improvise in the days ahead, creating all the backstory she wished.
Asako was in her late fifties now, her face sharp-edged and pale. The wrinkles of time and woe had stolen much of her appealing waifishness, but when she smiled, he felt an almost absurd urge to bow.
And did so. “M’lady Tabata,” he said.
She couldn’t raise a hand-the disease had progressed too far for that. With a barely audible hum, the machine nodded her head for her. As the lecture progressed he scanned her treaded cocoon.
“You may not know me, but I know you,” she said.
“Do you?”
“Yes.” Her lips moved, but her voice sounded a bit augmented. “You are Lieutenant Wayne Gibson.” A pause for breath. “They say that in India, you saved an entire regiment during the late unpleasantness.”
She was feeding him. Late unpleasantness. He wondered what that referred to? So… he was British, and a war hero? “People exaggerate,” he murmured.
The elevator doors opened, and his claustrophobia vanished in a single sigh.
The room yawned, surely the most cavernous on the Moon. Its domed ceiling stretched high above them.
The walls were draped with gigantic red-white-and-blue Union Jack starbursts. A standing-room only crowd burst into applause as they entered. If he’d been nonplussed by the NPC-lined halls up top, what happened next was an absolute assault.
A banner stretching from one side of the room to another read: The Adventurer’s Club Welcomes Our Daring Crew!