In the lift on the way back up to the bridge, it was clear that something troubled Elthera. Her blue eyes were strangely bright as though tears shone in them, and her dark green lips were compressed. She wasn’t talking, and that was out of character... She sniffed, breaking the silence. Was she going to cry? He cautiously touched her arm. She took his hand in hers.
Jace wanted to try and break the awkward silence, but what could he say that was interesting enough? “So, you have to do a report for the Admiral about the Spider-bot lurking on the Station? And decide what we do next for my testing?”
Elthera bit her dark green bottom lip. “I can’t do it.” Her voice was a little husky.
“Sorry?” Jace was puzzled. “Why would the report be difficult?”
She shook her head, her ponytail jiggling. “Not the report, Jace. I mean your testing.”
His heart sank into his boots. “What? You want to flunk me? Why would you do that to me?”
She glared at him. “Can’t you see you were almost killed? I – I thought you were…” She choked.
Jace didn’t know what to say on the spur of the moment to change her mind. He thought hard. “Ermm… the Spider messed about, spouting her awful catchphrases, long enough for you to get there. ‘Greetings, freckled plough-boy!’ Did she think she was a Victorian?”
Elthera clutched at her green forehead with her free hand and closed her eyes. “I’m not in the mood to talk about her, Jace.”
Well if Elthera wasn’t going to make an effort to talk, Jace was thrown.
The lift doors slid open. The admiral was no longer on the bridge, but Penelope was still there.
She glanced at Elthera and smirked. “So how did it go, Elthera? Been having fun?”
Elthera compressed her dark green lips. “There was a rogue avatar down below, Penny.”
Penny pursed her lips and drew a sharp intake of breath. “That’s some serious stuff. We’ll have to get the admiral. Right now. Just us lieutenants.” She made a dismissive gesture at Jace.
“That can wait,” said Elthera coolly. She took Jace by the hand again and led him from the bridge and into the lift, which took them down to sickbay. Nestor was there.
“Jace needs checking over, doc,” said Elthera. “We had some trouble with a rogue avatar on the lower decks.”
“I’m fine,” protested Jace. “I don’t need checking over.”
“Please…” said Elthera and placed a gloved finger over her dark green lips.
Nestor raised his eyebrows. “A rogue avatar you say? That’s rotten luck, that it showed up during Jace’s application.”
“Terrible luck,” said Elthera. Her green face was still grave. It seemed that she was serious about flunking Jace…
“Wait, you can’t leave it like this,” Jace began.
Elthera turned her blue eyed gaze on him. “I am very sorry to disappoint you, Jace. I hope you will come to understand.”
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00O00
After his check-up, Jace went down to Stumpy’s place. Elthera was seeing the Admiral to give her report. Jace sat at the bar and ordered a bright blue Saphil’d drink which he swallowed quickly, even though it seemed to burn his throat and made his eyes water.
“Another?” said Stumpy, holding up the glass jug of bright blue liquid.
“Just keep pouring them ‘til I drown.”
Stumpy whistled. “Sounds serious.”
“Serious? No.” Jace shook his head. “I just threw my life out of a porthole. Gone. Just like that.”
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Stumpy poured him another bright blue drink. “Listen, son. When I was your age, I had an apprentice position to the Asteroid Adminstrator on Ceres. He loved me. I was his golden boy. I fawned over him like you wouldn’t believe. I was going to be the biggest star in all the Asteroid field. But then I lost it all.”
Jace stared at him. “How?”
“The golden rule… never have a one night stand with the boss’s wife.”
“Um… wow…”
“I was fired. Broke. My ambitions out of the porthole.”
“So… how did you recover, Stumpy?”
“I never did. Look at me now. At a bar, out here in the perpetual darkness! You only get one shot at the golden stairway, my boy. If you miss it… you miss it. Welcome to the club.”
“Well thanks,” said Jace.
Stumpy chose not to hear the sarcasm. “Glad I could help. Look.” He pointed at the 3D TV. “It’s Elthera’s old tester, or whatever his role was called. Master Ghostal. The Ghost himself. He has night realm talk show now. He put Elthera through her paces once. He’s no metahuman, but he has his fancy gadgets – gauntlets which create energy blasts - so he was the next best thing for fighting avatars. He made two Rogue Avatars his slaves and forces them to help with the show. The Scorpion and the Bat.”
Curious, Jace turned his chair towards the screen. The image was that of some planetoid far from the sun, but it zoomed in on an ugly concrete building and then the scene shifted to a dimly lit studio. There was some old guy with a heavy jaw, dressed in a set of gleaming white armour complete with a flowing cape. With a swish of his cape, he swept across the studio to the desk.
“Time!” he rapped, his voice an acid bark.
“Five seconds,” came a reedy voice from the ceiling. A bat bot hung there.
“Bravo, Sir!” A reedy voice boy was standing in a corner.
The Ghost growled and raised a white gauntleted hand. The gauntlet shimmered and fired some kind of energy blast in the direction of the boy who had already fled.
“You were supposed to revoke that dratted intern’s security pass. I have no time to waste on no-hopers like him,” sneered the Ghost. “Unpaid interns are a dime a dozen, so there’s no need to treat them kindly. Bat! Are you listening?”
“I’m not your slave,” retorted the Bat from the ceiling.
“Yes, you are,” said the Ghost.
“Oh.” The Bat paused. “What was I supposed to do again?”
“Never mind,” said the Ghost. “The first guest is here.”
Jace did not recognise the celebrity guest or catch his name. The Ghost asked the guest whether he watched the show.
“Oh yes. Every week.” The guest replied quite casually.
“You’re kidding!”
“Of course I’m kidding,” said the guest laughing. “I’ve never seen this show.”
But the Ghost did not seem to hear that confession. “What part do you like best? The interview or the backstory?”
“You’re not listening, Ghost. I just said I’ve never seen the show.”
“I’ve seen your stuff too.”
“Such as?” The guest was sceptical and rightly so. “Give an example.”
“Do I have to?” The Ghost was stumped. He had obviously been lying.
Jace turned to Stumpy. “How did that stupid oaf get to be the one putting Elthera to the test?”
“Not impressed with the talkshow, son? It’s pretty standard for night realm shows. Only washed up has-beens host them.”
Jace turned back to the show. The Ghost was showing off how he could force the Scorpion bot to dance by firing at his segmented legs with energy blasts. “Aren’t you impressed by my power over my lowly subordinates?”
“Oh come on, he’s helping you do the show,” said the guest, his expression showing some distaste for the Ghost’s callousness.
“The Scorpion and the Bat aren’t worth the paper I line their filthy cages with,” sneered the Ghost.
“You make me sleep in my own debris,” grated the Scorpion, flexing his sting.
The Ghost caught him by the stinger and hurled him into a corner of the room. “He flexes his sting with petty and malicious cruelty. He’d sting you, soon as look at you.”
Jace rolled his eyes. “This is what passes for night realm entertainment?”
“Mm.” Stumpy was putting some bottles in a row, but he looked up. “Pluto is the twilight zone, because the brightest it gets there is like Earth dusk. Stands to reason the night realm would be more far out.”
“Right,” said Jace shrugging. Stumpy’s reasoning seemed to rely heavily on making puns.
Stumpy went away to serve someone else, so Jace turned back to the TV.
The guest was speaking again. “I’ve found some pretty awful footage of how you treated kids on the metahuman program, Ghost. Let’s play it.”
Abruptly the scene shifted as the new footage played and Jace’s heart leapt. There on the screen was Elthera! But as she was when she had been just a human girl. She was easily recognisable. So beautiful then as well, with porcelain skin, sculpted face and wide, blue eyes, but she was not quite perfect in those days. Her nose was a tiny bit crooked for one thing. When she became a plastic metahuman, her face became as perfect as that of any green mannequin.
She was on a wind blasted plain and the Ghost was standing nearby and there was a red headed boy there as well. Dark storm clouds lowered overhead.
Elthera had placed her hands to her hips in defiance. “Ghost, stop this! Jack cannot fight the Eagle avatar. His lungs haven’t healed and you know it.”
“You wimps make me sick,” sneered the Ghost. “Do you want to both flunk? Then go and get the Eagle robot! I’m just going off to get some smuggled liquor on the cheap.” The Ghost sidled off with a swish of his cape.
A terrible scream resounded across the plain. “The Eagle!” cried Elthera. “Don’t worry Jack, I’m here. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
Jace had researched the Eagle Avatars. In the game world, they had started out as Jackals, but had proven more brutal than cunning, so their icons morphed into Eagles instead. Their descriptions said they were ruthless hunters who only lowered themselves to kill.
Now the Eagle hovered above the plain, casting a shadow over the young Elthera and the red headed boy. She had a rust coloured cape that spread out behind her, like wings. She was wearing gauntlets with wickedly curved talons fitted to them.
She screamed again. “You! You! How such as youuu defy me, scruffy urchins! I’ll tear you to doll rags!”
Elthera was slipping something into her mouth, but then the Eagle plunged…
Suddenly, the Eagle plummeted. But then screamed again and leapt back, stumbling and falling over the rocky plain. It looked like Elthera now had a bloody mouth. What had she put in it?
“Nooo!” screamed the Eagle. “I’m not in gamespace. How do you haunt me?”
Elthera did not reply, but opened her bloody mouth and slowly advanced. Amazingly it seemed to work. The Eagle scrambled back…
“Watching something good?”
Jace turned away from the screen. The present day Elthera, the one with the shiny green face had seated herself behind him at the bar. She smiled.
“How did you get the Eagle to back off like that, when the horrible Ghost left you in the lurch?”
Elthera tapped her shiny green nose. “In the game, the evil player characters had the option when infiltrating the Mountain Fortress to cut out a guardswoman’s tongue to ensure her silence. If they did so, the result was that she would keep showing up every time they tried to sleep, to show off her bloody mouth with no tongue and try to kill them.”
Jace shuddered. “The stuff of nightmares.”
Elthera nodded. “The game architects must have based it on the real phenomena of sleep paralysis. Anyhow, the Eagle robots are not as bright as Jackals. On the plain, I was banking on a synthetic blood pack in my mouth being enough to fool her. It fitted in with her dreadful backstory.”
“Listen, Elthera…” Jace wasn’t sure how to say this. “I forgot to thank you for saving my life. Sorry. It’s just I didn’t quite understand…”
She touched his cheek. “Oh Jace, it’s quite alright.”
“I just wanted to be brave like you… and like my dad wanted.”
She gazed at him steadily. “The path of a metahuman is not something you can do because someone else ordered you to, Jace. The all important question is, what does Jace want from the program?”
He gazed into her bright, blue eyes. What answer would he give?