Double barrel rainbow
Gradie’s flight up toward the rail gave him a view of the battle spreading out from the far corner of the bounce house. Multi-colored figures bounced in every direction off the lower ring of bounce pads, which were much closer together due to the spaces step-well like shape. It took some effort and a little bit of fear to claw his focus away from the skirmish and set it towards the black rail above. As he sailed upwards, a rocket shot out of the chaos and exploded with a muffled echoing bang that gave a hair-raising depth to his surroundings.
The black ring which the crystal cannon structure traveled on was only about a foot and a half wide, and Gradie barely caught onto it with one outstretched flailing hand as he fell out of the end of his flight.
“All right, were coming down,” Nova said on the comms once Gradie had scrambled up onto the rail. Two figures descended from the edge of the skylight, where he now saw a suspended ring of rooms lining the opening like bat houses, and landed gracefully on the blocky structure.
“Ok, coming up.” Angel said, and got up from his sitting position ten yards or so from where Gradie squatted on the rail. Gradie was trying desperately not to look down, surprised that his fear of heights had manifested itself in the game. Luckily, Angel provided a distraction by sprinting down the rail and slashing it with his sword at the last second, launching himself up onto the blocky crystal-cannon housing.
Gradie tried to stand but his stomach floated out from under him and he ended up in a half crouch.
“Shit, one sec,” he said stupidly.
“We don’t have one sec bro,” Luke said. “They’re figuring it out.”
Gradie saw colored forms bouncing towards one of the higher bounce pads where one figure was shooting the block the pad rested on. Others on the other side moved across the bounce house toward the bounce pad right below him.
“Shit!” He sprinted along the rail without looking down to ensure he wouldn’t have time to worry about his steps slipping, and jumped at the face of the oncoming cannon structure. His foot caught a hold and he scampered up, discovering something amazing.
Due to the suggestive nature of gravity, he could run up the side like a wushu star without stopping. By the time he cleared the front and flipped over onto the top, he had a big smile on his face.
“Watch the sides!” Angel said to them, motioning at the edges of the craft. He was at some kind of monitor station next to one end of the glowing prism, which looked like the stereotypical ideal of a hippie crystal, a five-sided prism with two pyramidal points.
Gradie aimed at one section of the blocky half wall that surrounded their platform, and Nova stood in front of him but off to one side and aimed behind him. Luke bounced over to the edge just in Gradie’s peripherals and aimed down.
“If they get near the platform, I’ll blast em,” Luke said.
The crystal moved in its housing with a whirring sound as Angel worked the controls. Eventually, it stopped moving and its glow intensified with a sound like a weapon charging up in a game. Of course.
“Ok we have to go now,” Angel said.
“It’s got a reflector, right?” Nova said in a reminding tone. Angel responded like he was being nagged.
“Yes, bro, God damn. Ok yall, watch me real fast.”
He swiveled his head around to make sure Luke and Gradie were watching him, then looked back to the screen and pointed at it.
“Just pick your color on the orbital using the targeting screen and press this launch button.”
He hovered his hand over a palm sized red button in the dash.
“So I’m picking a green spot as close to the reflector as I can find. Ok, I’m out. Good luck.”
He plunged the button with his hand and turned a brilliant solid white, then a beam of solid laser light shot through the crystal and out into the black sky, and he was gone.
“Ok, Gradie you next,” Nova waved him over.
“Get fucked,” Luke said, and started launching grenades off the side as fast as his trigger finger and the action would allow.
“Dammit. Hurry bro!” Nova waved some more and Gradie, despite a ghostly Philip toned voice scolding him for leaving Luke to engage by himself even here, bounced over to the control station.
“All right, I picked you a red spot closest to where Angel dropped on.” He pointed to the screen which showed the orbital, a nearly circular floating chunk of blocks, and had a small reticle pointed at a sliver of red. Nova’s finger was pointing at an oval lake of green, about a quarter inch from the reticle on the screen.
“When you drop in, head for the reflector.” Here Nova moved his finger to point at a dark octagon near the “top” of the orbital.
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“Got it?”
Gradie nodded, guessing that asking questions about distance and terrain and anything else was probably a waste of time, not to mention the fact that Luke’s firing and swearing had suddenly increased in intensity.
“All right, go go!” Nova stepped back and pointed at the big red button that said “launch” in white letters.
Gradie pressed it and everything froze in a kind of black and white freeze frame, textured like one of those old eighties music videos where they had tried to make live footage look like animation. Then, with a “Wheeeerrrrroooooo” sound straight out of an old cartoon, the image stretched until everything snapped and shattered like glass, and he was standing in the center of a fresh crater on a section of red sand, with nothing but black sky and distant colored blocks in sight.
There was a moment of stillness, of sudden silence that made him realize just how loud and constantly moving everything had been back in the bounce room. He had no landmarks to go on, no direction to head, besides the vague memory of the map Nova had been pointing at, which made him think the prism, whatever that was, was somewhere beyond the bare, steeply curving horizon ahead of him. But for the first time since the game had started, he had a chance to look around and really see where he was.
The ”orbital” was obviously spherical, and he was stuck to it with a gravity even weaker than on the main mass, which floated below him, or more like above him, and which he could now see had a definite structure to it, with pits and shafts cut into it at regular intervals. There were other orbitals floating in the black, their varied shapes obviously a result of their creator trying to ensure variety.
It all felt like that. The entire place felt like something made, and the thick black surrounding it didn’t feel like the endless void of boundless possibility that enveloped the Allworld, it felt like a blanket, a felt wall, a formed barrier with a definite purpose, solid and close.
It was like being in someone’s mind, nestled in one of their thoughts, their imagination wrapped around you like a diorama. Though the entire Otherworld was crafted of thoughts, of the vision of its makers, textured by the projections of its thinking spirits, he had never really felt a singular expression of will so clearly. The closest had been Celeste’s beach house, but perhaps because she had had help constructing it, or maybe because he had been kept in the peripheral of her home, the entrance area and hallway designed for guests, he hadn’t felt it as strongly there. This was a new and eye-opening sensation.
What would my mind look like, projected outward? What would I make?
The question was intoxicating, but he wasn’t given time to really drink it in.
“Gradie! Shoot up a flare!” Angel hissed in his ears. At about the same time, as if the world had been inhaling while he stood there reflecting, or giving him time to rest before battering him again, a white beam flashed over his head and impacted the orbital somewhere beyond the curve. It sounded, of course, like every other fictional laser weapon blended together.
“There’s Luke,” Nova said. “I’m heading out. Meet yall at the prism. Wish I could blow up this fucking control pad!”
Another flash across the sky, like a spotlight with a high-powered laser at its core, and another thud somewhere out of sight. Gradie found the button on the bottom of his gun and shot a glittering flare out into the black.
“Ok, I see you,” Angel said. “Run towards my flare.”
A green sparkler shot into the sky ahead and to the left over the horizon and Gradie sprinted towards it. The light gravity let him clear about five feet per stride and soon he had a rhythm going. The orbital revealed itself to him by rolling smoothly out from the horizon, like he was running on some kind of inverted hamster wheel the size of a small town.
A familiar synthesized chainsaw sound bounced over the horizon at him, at a rate of about once every few seconds, and got louder until Angel shot over the curve right at him, clearly at the end of one of his sword jumps.
“Up here!” He swung his sword like a flag and motioned for Gradie to adjust his trajectory a little to the left. Soon Gradie was following him across the rippled rolling landscape as a black structure rose out of the horizon.
Another white flash cracked across the sky, landing somewhere behind him.
“Oh shit,” Nova said on the comms. “Hurry up!”
The black base of the structure was now in sight, and Luke was already standing atop the high machicolated walls, as Angel moved up the side, stabbing his sword into the wall and throwing himself up ten feet at a time.
Gradie repeated his maneuver from a few minutes ago and ran up the wall, which felt for a moment like sprinting in liquid darkness, as the sleek black surface gave way to velvet black sky at the top, until another beam flashed across the sky and divided it from the wall in a definite, threatening way.
“Shit, they’re really dropping in now!” Nova said.
“Get to the prism first!” Angel said, and waved them into a doorway. The first level that Gradie had dropped on was a circular path around the central structure, which had tall arched doorways in its face. There were more protruding machicolations atop this structure and something glowed softly just out of sight, its radiance extending across the black sky.
Gradie followed the three of them into the doorway, and a rush of nostalgic excitement washed over him. His brain rifled through late night game sessions and childhood outdoor bouts of pure imagination, the Texas woodlands becoming Tolkienesque forests or other places scraped from movies and games and smeared across the dry dead grayness for he and his friends to tear across, and the memories glittered anew as if this present experience was lighting them from afar.
Inside, a giant vertical crystal hung suspended from the conical roof, four ramps projecting out of the high ringing walkway and stopping a yard of dead air away from it, the walls were riddled with balconies and walkways. Angel somehow knew a direct route, through a door to the left, bounding up a steep stairwell, across to a hidden bounce pad, and up through a single stairwell shaft, to the top of the structure. Here the top of the crystal was clamped in a metal housing faced with another control station.
Angel put his hand on the pad, and the crystal glowed green as his own body glittered for a moment. Then he stepped back and Nova repeated the process, this time with an orange glow and glitter.
“If you die, you can select it as a respawn,” Angel explained. “You’ll pop out of the crystal down there, but you’ll have about five seconds of light aura, which will keep you from taking damage but also makes your attacks do nothing.”
In the sky, another white beam flashed, and muffled laser sounds and grenade booms bounced back at them off the velvet darkness. On the other side of the crystal, on another raised platform, was another crystal person-launcher. The roof was shaped like a big octagon with circular platforms at the corners that were the tops of towers. It was an odd place for a shootout, feeling more like a place to observe a meteor shower or firework show than shoot at anyone.
Gradie’s turn at the prism came and went and more sounds bounced up at them, this time coming from the stairwells breaking up through the floor.
“All right,” Angel said, bouncing his sword blade on his off hand.
“Let’s get some fucking kills.”