Chapter 62: Outreach Program
The panel on the back of the automaton was maybe a foot tall and nine inches across. The creature that unfolded from it was at least three feet tall, just enough that when its ungainly feet were planted on the floor, its sloping head and pointy ears and the tops of its luminous yellow eyes poked over the countertop. Don’t ask me how the geometry of that worked. Presumably, in more than three dimensions.
None of the four of us moved in any dimensions.
Miguel was the closest to the creature, standing with his pocket knife. He had the screwdriver/nail file flipped out, but, lit by the flickering arcade cabinets, it looked indistinguishable from a blade.
It’s sure where those huge yellow eyes focused. The creature hunched lower behind the counter.
Miguel closed the pocketknife and slowly eased it back into its namesake receptacle. He spread his hands and backed away from the counter.
The creature inched its head back over, showing off the same wide mouth we’d seen on the golden Ryu sprite. Its eyes tracked back and forth, but it didn’t move any further.
Neither did we.
To be clear, I don’t think any of us were scared of this thing. I know I wasn’t, and I’m sure the same went for Lena. Scared people, as a rule, do not sheathe the weapons they already have out, so that ruled out Miguel.
The creature was weird, but it was an ugly-cute kind of weird, and despite the multidimensional shenanigans associated with it unfolding from the back of the automaton, it seemed much more normal than the creature at the construction site. I guess it might not have been a Daimon, but get real. We knew it was.
The reason nobody moved is because we had no idea what to do.
I realized that unlike Reactants and Refinements and even Materials, there hadn’t been a definite moment when Lena went from not having Bernie to having him. She’d recognized him as the living embodiment of her old stuffed toy and accepted him, and the next time we checked her status, there he was. He hadn’t been accompanied by a flash from our phones, though, and the spectacular special effects in the apartment had seemed more associated with her acquiring Fire.
I hadn’t gotten a dramatic scene to go with my new Tickets, either. Refinements seemed much rarer than Reactants. Intuitively, I expected them to come with more impressive effects. Nope.
What about Daimons?
Third Eye usually worked on touch. Maybe Lena had “acquired” Bernie when he leaped into her arms.
This new Daimon seemed a lot less affectionate. It watched us from behind the counter.
I put a hand on Miguel’s shoulder. “Maybe try offering a token?”
He shot me a glance. “You want me to approach it? Why?”
“Whether you can collect resources or not, this is your Realm,” I said. “You can interact with a Daimon in most of the ways we do with Bernie, so why not try to bond with one?”
He pressed his lips together. “That would be a waste.”
“The waste would be to not try.”
I thought it was a pretty good line, the kind he usually gave me.
I got no response.
After a moment, though, he stepped forward and scooped a token off the counter. He held it on his outstretched palm and eased it across.
Zhizhi’s hands tightened on her camera. Lena held her breath. I tensed up.
The Daimon didn’t move and neither did Miguel.
Bernie grumbled.
The yellow Daimon’s eyes shifted to him. It stretched a hand up over the counter, toward Miguel’s. Unlike its feet, its hands were long and deft, almost delicate. One of its fingers poked at the edge of Miguel’s hand.
His back tightened up, but he kept the token outstretched.
The Daimon cocked its head. Its eyes narrowed and its mouth widened in a frown. Its teeth looked extremely sharp.
It smooshed a long finger into Miguel’s hand again, harder this time.
“I’m not sure what you’re expecting, little one,” Miguel said, “but I seriously doubt I can offer you whatever it is you want. Unless it’s this token.”
The Daimon seemed to consider this. Its head kept tilting further and further until it was at a ninety degree angle.
Suddenly, it reached past Miguel and snatched the whole pile of tokens, then took off running. Mechanical laughter echoed from every cabinet, drowning out the sound of its feet.
“Dammit!” Miguel slapped the counter.
“What a little brat,” Zhizhi said.
I glanced at Lena. Unsurprisingly, she was grinning. I suspected I was, too.
“This one definitely seems like a handful,” she said.
“More than I care to handle,” Miguel said. “If this is what Third Eye Productions thinks I need in my life, I’m better off without my beta participation.”
“Aw, don’t say that,” Lena said. “It just wants to play a game with you.”
“Hide and seek?” he asked. “The only winning move is not to play.”
“If you think I won’t get mad at you just because you quote a great movie...” Lena chuckled. “Okay, you’re probably right. Still. Don’t be mean to Daimons.”
“If you seriously don’t want to try and connect with it,” I said, “I’m sure Lena will. Shall we poke around?”
Miguel tossed the last token we had. I snatched it out of the air. “Be my guest.”
It felt wrong, the antithesis of accepting Third Eye’s invitation to come down here in the first place. But if Miguel wasn’t going to engage, I couldn’t force him.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
The same was true for the Daimon. If it would only bond with Miguel, and him dropping from the beta meant he couldn’t make the connection, then not only did we have no idea how to force it to come with us, I wouldn’t feel right trying. The creatures didn’t seem to need to eat, and I supposed if this one liked games it could keep playing the CPU, so it wouldn’t be too bored.
Although, would this Realm even continue to exist? Lena’s flames had burned away the replica of her old apartment. It had seemed like her Realm was just a temporary holding area for a power and a Daimon she was supposed to gain access to.
Pointless to speculate. We had no idea how any of this worked, or why.
“I suppose I should film your attempt,” Zhizhi said.
Miguel waved her on. He put out his burned-down cigarette and lit another. “I’m sure I’ll enjoy the show.”
Lena and I split and fanned out through the arcade machines.
After a moment, Lena said, “You want down, little guy?”
I watched her set Bernie on the floor. Considering the smell of the tiles under our feet, and the occasional stickiness, I wouldn’t have made the same decision. But as soon as I looked away, Bernie was on the move.
I took out my phone so it would be easier to follow him. I sprinted down the aisle on his right. Lena took the far side.
When we’d first entered, I’d perceived the arcade as fitting in its slot in Cinder Alley, but as we pressed on, it became increasingly obvious that the space must be distorted. I passed row after row of cabinets.
Some of them looked too new to have been present beneath Cinderella City. An arcade owner in a doomed mall wouldn’t have sprung for a brand-new Virtua Fighter in ‘94, right? And House of the Dead 2, had that even come out when the place closed?
It seemed like the deeper I went, the less authentic the machines became.
Bernie stopped in front of one. He hissed, wiggled his backend, and bumped his snout against the cabinet.
I circled around to the back of it while Lena approached the front. Zhizhi hung back far enough to film us both. I could only tell where Miguel lounged from the pinprick light of his cigarette.
The whole vibe felt off. Askew. I kept expecting him to charge forward, hold out his hand for the remaining token, boss whatever game the cabinet contained, and make a heroic display to claim his Daimon.
He didn’t.
I slapped the token on the cabinet and gave it a good look. I snorted. “Now I know this doesn’t belong.”
It was an Ikaruga machine. A game that never released in arcades outside Japan, and didn’t come out even there until years after this entire mall got demolished. A great game, by all accounts, but sure as hell nothing I could beat.
“If we have to play this, Lena, you better give it a shot,” I said.
“You sure? As far as I’m concerned, those Tickets aren’t enough to make up for me taking the Air this morning.”
“Positive,” I said. “If I play Ikaruga, we’re just going to lose our last token.”
Lena narrowed her eyes. “I’m decent at shmups, but it’s not like I know this game well enough to 1CC it.”
A 1CC playthrough was what fans of scrolling shoot-’em-up games called it when you beat them with one credit. Single credit clear. As gaming challenges go, it’s probably about the hardest you’ll find without dipping into PVP or speedrunning.
“For the fighting game, you got an overpowered character, right?” Zhizhi said. “You seem to think this little monster wants to play with you. It probably wants you to win.”
Lena shrugged. “I’ll give it a shot.”
I started to round the cabinet, but she shook her head.
“You don’t want me to watch?” I asked.
“I don’t want you distracting me, being all supportive and boyfriendly.” She tossed her hair. “Also, if the Daimon scrambles out the back, you can catch it.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Do you think we should?”
“Part of the game, isn’t it? I think Zhizhi’s right. It wants to play, wants to be caught. We just have to want to play, too.”
Play, she did. She inserted the token and hit player one start, and the game’s bombastic soundtrack – its best quality, if you asked me, a person basically incapable of playing the genre, which you shouldn’t – poured from its decidedly post-’90s speakers.
Almost immediately, Lena laughed. “Okay, like this, I can 1CC the game.”
“What’s different?” Zhizhi asked.
I leaned around the cabinet and recognized it immediately, but I let Lena explain.
“You’re supposed to have two polarities, light and dark. As long as your ship is in the right mode, you absorb enemy fire of the same color.” She demonstrated the technique, but the visual change in her golden vehicle was way subtler than it should have been. She plowed through a cloud of bullets of both colors. “It’s supposed to be all about switching back and forth at the right times. But my ship is yellow, and it absorbs everything.”
“Stay on your toes,” I said. “You’ll probably run into something you have to try against soon.”
Lena nodded. I retreated to my side of the cabinet, Zhizhi braced herself against another, and Bernie curled at Lena’s feet.
It only took a couple of minutes for my prediction to come true.
“Check it out,” Lena said. “Third Eye text.”
Once again, I stretched to see the screen. It flashed a warning, golden text with a red outline. Parts of it looked Japanese, parts English, and parts Third Eye runes. The text I could read was a garbled mess, but I thought it had been in the original.
The boss appeared, a mech with golden armor. Its projectiles were a mix of the original light and dark, with some fluorescent yellow interspersed that clearly didn’t fit the game’s aesthetic.
Lena ducked and wove around the yellow bullets. Her hand tapped rhythmically on the fire button. “Watch the back,” she reminded me.
“Watch yours,” Zhizhi said as one of the dangerous projectiles almost clipped Lena’s ship.
Lena grunted and tapped the stick.
I retreated to my side of the cabinet as much because watching her play with our last token frayed my nerves as to prevent an escape attempt by the Daimon.
I knew she’d cleared the boss because the music cut out and the mechanical voice announced, “Congratulations!” Which was not something Ikaruga did after each stage.
The music resumed. The game, it seemed, continued.
I wanted to scramble around to look at the screen. I wanted to cover my eyes, and maybe my ears while I was at it. My hands sweated. If I’d been at the controls I’d have fucked up for sure.
Lena tilted closer and closer to the screen. Zhizhi drifted nearer with each boss cleared. Eventually, even Miguel picked his way through the cabinets to stand beside her. He’d put his cigarette out at some point and had his hands clasped behind his back.
Shmups are short games, typically, and Ikaruga was no exception, but still, the minutes ticked by. I measured the passage of time not by checking my phone’s clock, but by listening for the announcements of Lena’s victory over each boss in turn. How many were in the game? I didn’t remember, had never beat it, even on an emulator with save states.
Finally, though, Lena said, “Oh shit. I think this is it!”
I resisted the urge to look, gave into the urge not to. I told myself I had to stay alert, which I hadn’t been.
The sound cut out entirely. All I heard was the clack of buttons and the stick slamming against its housing as Lena dodged and fired.
And then, one more time, “Congratulations!”
Lena slumped over the controls. She breathed, “Hell yes.”
The back panel of the cabinet swung open.
The Daimon squeezed out. I tensed, but it made no effort to run. Instead, with its shoulders hunched and its head bowed, it held up a chain of Tickets. It shuffled around the cabinet, past a grumbling Bernie, and presented them to Lena.
She knelt and held out her hands. The tickets flashed; in their wake, Lena offered a radiant smile. “So cool! You know, I’d love to play with you some more. Will you let us have our tokens back?”
Head bob. Long yellow fingers pointed in my direction.
I crouched and saw the pile of tokens dumped in the maintenance area of the Ikaruga cabinet. I scooped them out and held one up so the others could see it.
“Thanks!” Lena beamed. “Have you got a name?”
No response.
“Do you want to come with us?” Lena asked.
Tilted head. A glance in Miguel’s direction.
We all looked the same way. He frowned and shook his head.
Hesitation. Shoulder slump. Head bob.
The yellow Daimon reached out, and Lena clasped its hand.
Nothing happened.
Lena kept up her bright smile and her welcoming body language, but I saw her wings droop on my phone.
When the Daimon let go, she took her own out. To check her status, I supposed.
She didn’t get the chance.
The moment Lena raised her phone, the Daimon lunged for it.