Chapter 61: Gremlin Energy

We all knew what was coming.

On one end of the screen, Miguel’s golden Ryu. On the other, the same character, but colored even more obnoxiously yellow. A true mirror match. A fair fight. The parameters had been established, the characters had identical abilities. Winning or losing would come down purely to the players’ skill.

Lena would’ve loved it.

Miguel –

Let go of the stick.

“This is stupid,” he said.

Both golden Ryus turned to stare out at us, frowning their little pixelated faces off. (Literally, since, like their manic grins, their frowns extended beyond the bounds of their sprites and looked like they were sawing their jaws off.)

The mechanical voice repeated its spiel about tokens, wins, and prizes. The tone hadn’t changed, but the timing made it sound whiny.

“Both characters have a move that kills in one hit and even wins both rounds? I’m sure that entertains someone, but it isn’t me. And I already know I won’t get anything out of this.” Miguel shook his head. “This entire adventure has been nothing but a glitch.”

Frowns deepened. On and off the screen.

“Go ahead and attack,” Miguel said. “I inserted my token, and I’m not going to win, so you don’t need to figure out how to process my prize and discover that it won’t work. Really, I’m doing you a favor.”

“At least try,” Lena snapped.

“If you wish to make the attempt, be my guest,” he said. “You could actually get something out of it.”

“What if you could get back in the beta?” I asked.

Miguel scoffed, but he stopped backing away from the Street Fighter cabinet. “Has anyone gotten back in?”

“A couple of people claimed to,” I said. “They didn’t offer any proof, so most people dismissed it as bullshit.”

“Like the ones who claimed the game can do real magic,” Zhizhi said quietly.

The filter of Miguel’s cigarette crumpled as he gnashed his teeth.

He stalked forward and grabbed the stick. He bit out, “Fine.”

A super fireball rippled across the screen.

Miguel’s golden Ryu collapsed and mechanical laughter filled the arcade. It seemed to spill from every cabinet, every machine.

Miguel’s character remained prone. The mirrored version threw his head back, cackled, danced. His victory “pose” seemed to stretch on and on.

Miguel stared at the screen. My and Zhizhi’s shoulders slumped. Bernie grumbled.

Lena almost managed to stifle her snort.

When Zhizhi and I scowled at her, she mushed her chin against Bernie’s head, trying to look as small as possible. She couldn’t banish her smile, though. “Come on, guys. You have to admit that was kinda funny.”

“Do we?” Zhizhi asked.

“We’ve got a whole pile of tokens,” Lena said. “It’s just playing around. Besides. You can’t even really call it unfair. It waited for Miguel to come back before it attacked.”

“I get why you like it,” I said, “but seriously, not the time.”

Lena’s eyes flashed. “Oh, my bad. I wasn’t taking the literal game within a game seriously enough?”

“You’re the one who made Realms out to be this huge deal,” Zhizhi said. She’d half turned before, but now she faced Lena and pushed past me, into her space. Zhizhi wasn’t a tall woman, no Erin or even Donica, but like just about everybody, she had half a head on Lena.

That was initially exaggerated by Lena scrunching in on herself, but not for long. As soon as Zhizhi got in her face, she straightened up. Fight or flight cranked all the way to fight.

“I do think it’s a big deal,” Lena said. “Maybe the big deal is telling Miguel to lighten up about it!”

“Can’t you just admit you liked the little joke but that it was kind of a shit thing to pull?” Zhizhi asked.

Lena pushed back, squishing Bernie between them. She tilted her head back, grinned like a maniac, and said, “Nope.”

Bernie’s hiss seemed to back her up.

Lena handed him to me. “Hold him for a sec, okay?”

I took him, but I caught her hand in the process. “Why?”

“We’re in an arcade,” Lena said. “We’re standing in front of a Street Fighter cabinet. If two people have an argument, there’s only one way to solve it.”

“Yeah, no.” Zhizhi backed up, bumping into another cabinet. She kicked at it. “I’m happy to document your gamer rituals, but they don’t settle anything for me.”

I thought she did a great job of not saying “weird” or “little” rituals, even if her barely constrained eyeroll spoke volumes.

“Concession accepted,” Lena said.

Zhizhi stared for a moment, then sighed and shook her head. “Jesus Christ.”

I rubbed Lena’s arm. “Maybe take it down about ten notches.”

She hunched her shoulders. “So you think I’m wrong?”

“I think,” I said, “I don’t care.”

I hoped she’d recognize the callback to when Benji and I were arguing. Maybe even appreciate it. Instead, she just slumped.

I patted her arm, kissed the back of her head, and turned to Miguel. “You okay, man?”

He waved a hand in the air. “Of course. I only played to indulge you.”

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“What do you want to do with the rest of the tokens?”

“Whatever you like.” His brow furrowed. “I’d like to keep one. A souvenir, yeah?”

“You can keep them all if you want,” I said.

“They’re meant to be used for play, I think. One is an indulgence; the whole pile?” Instead of declaring what the whole pile would be, he shook his head. He swept past Lena and I, toward the counter. To pluck his “indulgence” off it? But he paused as he passed Zhizhi and leaned close to whisper something to her. She cracked a smile.

I rubbed the bridge of my nose.

I turned to the Street Fighter cabinet. The round two timer hadn’t actually run out yet, probably because the CPU’s golden Ryu had gone through such an elaborate “win pose.” Right now, Miguel’s was lying there, and the CPUs was shuffling back and forth. In fighting games, they call that kind of in-and-out movement “footsies,” but I thought this was just the digital equivalent of pacing. Frustration.

I remembered what Lena had called the Third Eye entity we were dealing with: mischievous. It had wanted to troll Miguel, not drive him off.

Sorry, pal, I thought. He’s not somebody who would enjoy that kind of thing.

I propped Bernie on the edge of the cabinet and one of his legs brushed the stick.

Miguel’s golden Ryu hopped to his feet. I realized that unlike the CPU characters Miguel had beaten, his character’s health bar wasn’t actually empty to start the second round.

I said, “Oh shit!” Instinctively, I gripped the stick.

The CPU stopped its footsies, or its pacing. It froze for a second, indecisive. I kept calling it the CPU, but it was painfully obvious that there was some kind of controlling intelligence here. It might be artificial, but it was far more sophisticated than anything from a game that came out in the early nineties. It acted like another player.

Maybe it intentionally gave me enough time to jump, or maybe my hand just drifted upwards on the stick; either way, I vaulted over the super fireball it tossed my way. I landed and hit the dragon punch input. Rather, I tried, but I was actually kind of shit at Street Fighter and I got a fireball instead. It chunked a significant portion of my opponent’s health bar but didn’t one-shot it the way a super would have.

“What’s the super input?” I called.

“Double fireball, then punch,” Miguel said.

Since I had his attention, I said, “Take over.”

He shook his head sharply. “Win if you can.”

I sucked air through my teeth. It felt wrong to finish the match, even more wrong than if I’d started a new run with a token of my own. There’s something about standing in front of an arcade cabinet, though. About knowing your coin is on the line if you lose. I couldn’t bring myself to throw the match.

I blocked a super dragon punch and watched all but a sliver of my health bar vanish just to the chip damage that went through my block. Because it didn’t kill my character or send him flying, though, it left my opponent pathetically overextended. I had all the time in the world to input a super of my own and blast him out of the air.

The other golden Ryu crumpled into his defeat pose in mid-air and drifted to the glitched ground like a deflating balloon. Mine landed and flashed a V for victory and a huge grin.

“Come back and see if it gets up for round three,” I said to Miguel.

“I already gave up,” he said.

“This is your Realm, man. I’m pretty sure it’s your –”

“Cameron.”

I risked flicking a glance his way.

He shook his head.

I bit my lip.

When the third round started, I immediately launched another fireball super. The opponent sprang up and countered with one of his own. The projectiles canceled each other out, but what the hell. I had unlimited meter. I kept firing.

Now, if I’d been fighting the real CPU, and if it’d had all the advantages I did, this would not have mattered. We could’ve kept mashing fireball super inputs at each other for the whole match, and the only possible outcomes would be time running out and the match ending in a draw, or me missing an input or doing it too slowly and one of my opponent’s fireballs sneaking through.

That’s not what my opponent did. He turtled up, trying to block, and lost almost his entire health bar to chip damage. He countered my third super fireball, but for the fourth, I did a single motion for the regular version. Way less visually impressive, but it traveled across the screen faster.

More chip damage, and more than enough.

The mechanical voice proclaimed, “Congratulations! Approach the counter to collect your prize!”

I wanted to linger at the Street Fighter cabinet to see if it would do anything else revelatory, but the screen glitched out and went right back to character select – with only eight options.

“Nice job.” Lena squeezed against me and looked up at me out of the corner of her eye.

“Thanks.” I gave her a quick kiss, mostly to let her know I wasn’t mad at her, and was rewarded with a sigh of relief.

From my other side, Bernie meeped happily. Lena scooped him up. “To the counter!”

“There’s something we can agree on,” Zhizhi said. She re-centered her camera and led the way.

Because the only light came from the cabinets and the counter was at the farthest point from them, it was one of the hardest places in the arcade to see. As we approached it, Miguel shone his phone light into its shadows.

Everyone but him froze. His light reflected off the contours of a humanoid figure.

But it was just one of those fortune-telling automatons they have at carnivals. The sort of thing the mechanical voice should have gone with, quite unlike the arcade cabinets it had been attached to.

Gears whirred, and a line of tickets printed out from the figure’s outstretched hand. Quirky, but not completely bizarre for an arcade. Most didn’t give tickets out for winning electronic games, but if you got stuck on the more primitive physical ones, you might win enough of these to exchange for a prize.

Nonetheless, my eyes widened. I elbowed Lena’s arm and she nudged me back. We were both practically vibrating. We mouthed, “Tickets!” to each other.

Here was a Third Eye resource that, as far as we knew, nobody had been able to collect yet. At one point, I’d theorized that what seemed to be the game’s cash shop would actually run on Tickets rather than real money.

How did I square that with the fact we only knew about Tickets because, like so many otherwise undiscovered resources, they appeared in said shop? Easily. Most mobile games had multiple currencies that exchanged at arcane rates to suck players into spending more; once the game left beta and the shop opened, we might be able to exchange Tickets for Gold and Gold for Tickets, or something even less intuitive.

Cautiously, Miguel leaned over the counter. His hand hovered over the tickets.

Lena’s body shook even more against mine, and I probably reciprocated. Even Zhizhi tilted forward, her camera fixed on the intersection of his hand and the automatons.

Would the automaton come to life and grab his wrist? Would he snatch the Tickets and absorb them and regain beta access?

Or, as actually happened, would he tear the tickets loose and hold a chain of them up?

All of us deflated.

Miguel turned around and held the tickets out. “Go on, Cam. Try them.”

I sighed, nodded, and did so.

As soon as my fingers touched the chain of tickets, they flashed white. When my vision cleared, they were gone.

I checked my phone. “I’ve got an achievement.”

Third Eye displayed achievements on a tacky looking clipart scroll that occupied the entire screen. This one had the header Refined Palate, so I had a pretty good idea which category I’d unlocked. Like every other achievement I’d gotten, it was worth a thousand XP, which had once seemed huge, but now paled in comparison to the haul Lena and I could get just by scouting outside of town.

On the other hand, I had a new tab. Refinements, the same category other players had found Gold and Crystal sorted into. I tapped it and found I was now the proud owner of six Tickets, the same number Miguel had handed me.

“What can you do with them?” Lena asked.

“No clue,” I said. “We’re either the first people to get them, or we’re going to be the first to post about it.”

Technically, I didn’t know that was true. I’d been way too busy to stay up-to-date on the wiki today.

“I know one thing we can do,” Lena said.

I raised an eyebrow.

She scooped a handful of tokens off the counter. “Win more!”

“I wonder,” Miguel said. “Is there a pile of tickets inside that automaton? I have a pocket knife on me. We could unscrew the back panel and take them all.”

“Or,” Lena said, “we could find out the reason Cam could absorb those and you couldn’t is because he won, not because you’re out of the beta, and if we cheat we don’t get any.”

Miguel inclined his head. He took the knife from his pocket anyway.

When he held it up, a burst of static assaulted our ears. The automaton tipped onto the counter, cracking glass, scattering coins.

Its back panel swung open, and from it, a golden figure unfolded.