“Do demons celebrate Christmas?” I asked Lydia, a few days before the holiday. “Celebrate is the wrong word, but is it a special day for you? Is it scary for you?”
“Heaven gets closer around the end of December just like Hell gets closer around Halloween,” Lydia said. “It becomes very easy for angels to travel to Earth this time of year, and then there’s the Christmas Truce.”
“Like in World War I?”
“Similar,” she said. “God and Lucifer were friends for thousands of years before the rebellion, and Lucifer was deeply impressed when God announced that he had a son.
“Lucifer had spent centuries begging God to incarnate and spend a few years as a mortal man, to better understand his creatures and maybe develop some compassion for them, so when God finally did it, Lucifer said no demon would raise a hand to any human soul on that day, to honor the birth of this child.
“The new Overlord has continued the tradition, and it’s become a kind of demon day off. The torturers put their whips down, the Lake cools to ease the suffering of the damned, and rain falls on the Suicide Wood.”
“Did you just tell me demons celebrate Christmas and Hell literally freezes over on December 25th?”
Lydia took the question literally. “It doesn’t get cold enough to freeze, and it wouldn’t be a celebration by your standards, but we love it, because it’s the only day Hell is quiet.”
“That’s pretty funny,” I said. “My demon has the day off, but I don’t. I’m scheduled for Christmas Eve and Christmas night, but we’ll do something the next day.”
“It’s not necessary,” Lydia said. “All the modern rituals are wasted on me.”
“No,” I said firmly. “You’re talking to a man who didn’t even have a lame company party to attend last year. We’ll do something cool.”
* * *
Of all the things I have to thank Minerva for, I am particularly grateful for the way she helped me get through Thanksgiving and Christmas that first year.
I always try to work major holidays, partly because you can get a lot of credit with your co-workers if you can cover for them and help them be with their families during the holiday season.
Working holidays is also the best way to avoid pity invites; those incredibly kind and deeply uncomfortable invitations you get from happy families who would like you to join them and see what a healthy well-adjusted unit they are.
Some families actually are as good as they pretend to be at Christmas dinner. But when you don’t have a happy family, when the best you ever had was a mother trying desperately to keep your father away from you, well - every holiday meal with a happy family ends with you back home alone, eating a plate full of leftovers over the sink, trying not to be jealous of people who have something you can’t even understand.
It’s way, way better to work and have everybody thank you as if you had something better to do.
And if you’re going to blow off a series of Christian holidays, it really helps to do it with an Olympian goddess, a goddess who had spent so many holidays fighting monsters and pulling people out of house fires, she didn’t just ignore Christmas, she had no real concept of Christmas at all.
I caught Minerva at the end of our Thanksgiving shift and said, “Hey, I’m not going to buy you a present, and I want you to know, you really shouldn’t buy me one.”
“Why would I buy you a present?” Minerva said.
“Christmas is coming.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”
You may wonder why a post-Christian society honors Christmas at all, but I was one of the very few people on Earth who would still call it Christmas in 2058, because my father insisted on it, as tribute to the brutal evangelical protestants who raised him.
Ninety percent of the world thought the New Testament was bullshit since before I was born, but that never stopped Dad, who made a point of having me watch old movies all day after Christmas dinner. That was actually kind of nice, because Mom would be back in the bedroom by then and Dad would be out of the house entirely, celebrating “real Christmas” with one of his girlfriends.
Dad didn’t really believe in Jesus, of course, and could lecture for hours about religious nuts and biblical contradictions, but Christmas was a tradition, and traditions are sacred, even if the whole thing was just a playlist of movies now.
My parents always got me educational gifts, or gifts that were designed to force me into hobbies I didn’t like, like woodworking, photography, and playing the guitar.
We would each open one gift as a family on Christmas Eve, then we would gather the next morning to open gifts that were obviously selected by Mom, carefully labeled as being “From Mom & Dad.”
The funniest part was how often Dad would be completely surprised by the presents, like when I would get a gift card for a video game and he would say, “That’s it? All you wanted was a little card? When I was a kid, I wished for real stuff like toy cars and a train set and…”
And then he would go on for twenty minutes about the vastly superior Christmas gifts he got when he was young, completely ignoring the actual Christmas gifts in front of him, carefully chosen by Mom to appeal to his prejudices and his sense of humor.
New AI upscales of his favorite movies, vintage car memorabilia, and rare recordings of performances by comedians who were “edgy” and “subversive” fifty years ago but were almost incomprehensible now.
Mom spent hours agonizing over things like this, trying to get perfect gifts for everyone in her life. No idea where she got the money, since Dad wouldn’t intentionally pay for anything like that.
I don’t remember much from early Christmas holidays, and I didn’t understand a lot of what happened until I reviewed all the family videos after Mom died.
I just remember a kind of countdown that started as soon as I came down on Christmas morning, to see how long we would all make it before Mom had to run off and cry.
Dad would needle her and laugh at her, and give her gag gifts like sponges and dustpans, forcing her to stick around and take it all with good humor, determined to keep her smile going until I was done opening all my gifts.
Dad would really get going during Christmas dinner, belittling Mom at every opportunity, finding some little complaint to make about each individual item.
He thought his table jokes were very funny, of course. “No, that’s fine,” he would say. “I hear potatoes are good cold.”
It was really brutal one year when Dad invited one of his cronies to eat with us, a barely functional drug addict who had burned through his family, with self-esteem so low, he was willing to ride around in a truck with Dad and get called an idiot all day, just so he could keep his job.
“Here you go, Nate, you want some cold potatoes?” Dad said, making hard eye contact until Nate was forced to laugh.
Mom left the table early that year and we left the dishes sitting there until morning.
I didn’t understand any of this at the time. All I had was a vague sense of impending doom, strongly associated with lights, music, and large men in red velvet suits.
But how the hell do you explain this when somebody says, “Happy Holidays!” unironically and asks what you do for the 25th? That’s what normal people called it now. The 25th.
You want to look them in the eye and say, “Every time I hear a Christmas song, I am transported back to some of the worst moments of my life. But hey, I hope you guys have fun skiing, or whatever.”
I know this sounds horrible, but holidays actually got a lot easier for me after Mom died, because I didn’t have to watch her get abused and humiliated in front of me all day. Dad would put on that big playlist of old Christmas TV and set me down in front of it while he went to a variety of holiday parties.
Dad was not particularly good at remembering birthdays, but he loved to take his employees out drinking and play the big man for his crew.
I remember one year Dad hosted a big party in a rented barn and gave me eggnog and cookies when he got home, forgetting that there was a lot of rum in that eggnog. Slept really well that year.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
I’ll just say one more thing about Christmas, as a public service announcement.
In a world like mine, a lot of people with powers dress up like Santa Claus. Most of these people will rob you. Some of them will kill you, and none of them should be allowed anywhere near children.
Phil says in low magic worlds a lot of fat men dress up like Santa and everybody knows it’s a joke, but in my world, if you see a fat man with a white beard and a red suit coming at you with a bell, cross the street, keep one hand on your wallet, and do not accept any of his candy.
* * *
I was prepared to work Christmas Eve, but when I got to the tower, Minerva met me in the breakroom and said, “I’m covering your shift tonight. Go up to the roof.”
“What’s on the roof?”
“Your Christmas present is almost here.”
“Minerva, dammit! We said we wouldn’t—”
“The way I figure it, you got me my present early, so now you get yours. Get up there before it lands.”
I watched a private shuttle land on the roof and was surprised to see Denise Hardy get out, dressed in glorious red and green. She even made a Santa hat look hot.
Denise had gone back to New York the next morning after the cyclops fight, after a long night searching for missing children and healing dozens of people from that hospital.
My first impulse was to run out and hug her again, but there was a weird distance between us now, and it somehow felt wrong.
“Aww! Minerva got me a witch for Christmas!” I teased her. “And she looks just like the ad!”
Denise punched me in the arm and said, “I missed you, too.”
I was ready to follow her downstairs, but Denise wasn’t going downstairs. She opened the door of her cab and looked me up and down. “You look scrubbed, and you smell okay. Get in the car.”
“Where are we going?”
“We’re meeting Mom somewhere. You’re going to put a lot of heavy shit in a truck. Then we’re going somewhere else and you’re going to take the heavy shit out of the truck.”
I shrugged and got in the car. “Denise, is this a Christmas thing? I’m really not good with Christmas things.”
“Did you ever spend Christmas trapped in an Egyptian tomb, waiting to starve to death?”
“Uh, no.”
“Then I’m one up on you.” She turned to face me. “Tim, you’re a grown man. Christmas isn’t about you anymore. Christmas is for children and old people. Everybody in the middle is supposed to bust their ass to make the day special for them, and that’s what you’re gonna do.”
Our first stop was a giant self-storage in the middle of nowhere. Cecilia Hardy met us at the door to a storage unit, also looking damn good in a Santa hat, and had me lift the door up, revealing a ten-by-ten room packed floor to ceiling with crates, boxes, and refrigerated containers kept below freezing by long-life power crystals.
Cecilia told me I had thirty minutes to move everything from this room into the giant hovering freight hauler that was backing up to the door.
I started levitating boxes four, five at a time; then realized how light they were and tried to do eight. The problem, as always, was bulk, not weight, as the stack threatened to tip over if I got ahead of myself.
“Don’t be rough with these, but you don’t have to be gentle,” Denise said. “Most of this isn’t fragile.”
I finished off the light boxes and got to the heavy ones; boxes that seemed to be mostly food, way too much to just be for one party.
I kept loading boxes into the truck while Denise and her mom made sure everything was secure inside. We were loaded and ready to go in twenty minutes.
“Well done,” Cecilia said, giving me a rare nod of approval. “You just replaced ten robots and saved my sponsors a couple thousand dollars.”
Cecilia rode in the truck’s tiny passenger module while Denise and I moved our cab into the priority lane and zoomed across the city, landing on the roof of a historic location called The Home for Little Wanderers.
The location had started as an orphanage back in 1799, been replaced by a series of offices for nonprofits and government agencies and was now an orphanage again.
An orphan would have an education, and a job guaranteed if one of their parents had been a corporate employee. That was one of the primary reasons people signed up with companies like HDI, to make sure their children would be cared for, even if something catastrophic happened to them.
I was allowed in an “Executive Training Program for Young Leaders” and got my fancy college scholarship as part of the HDI program for bereaved children.
Dad liked to say I really “hit the jackpot” when Mom died and assured me the benefits were way better for me since they weren’t married.
But this was not a corporate facility. This school was for orphans who had been abandoned or given up by unaffiliated people - the children of criminals and drug addicts and people who had died in work camps.
They couldn’t get corporate support without following corporate rules, so they depended on under the table donations from corporate employees and businesses that had somehow managed to survive outside the system.
“Hang your jacket up before we see the kids,” Denise said. “We can’t represent Bluestar in here.”
I unloaded the truck with levitation and passed the work on to a small squad of human volunteers. Then I walked into the big common room and saw maybe fifty kids assembled, sitting cross-legged in neat rows, each with a child-sized virtual reality headset on, talking, mumbling, shouting, or singing in some shared virtual world that we couldn’t see.
I leaned over to Denise and whispered, although there was no need to whisper. “Denise, what the hell is this? We’re turning these kids into zombies!” I said, blithely repeating the exact phrase my father said, every time he caught me using VR.
There were a few teachers tending to tables, chairs, and holiday trees around the room, and there seemed to be a teacher at the end of each row, some standing, some sitting in folding chairs, all wearing headsets of their own.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Denise said. “All these kids are doing EduQuest.”
“What the fuck is EduQuest?”
“Wow, you really don’t spend much time with kids,” Denise said. “EduQuest is a virtual reality education game, designed to gamify the learning process for kids. They look like zombies now because they’re seated for the assembly, but when the party starts all those headsets will go dead, and they’ll turn back into normal kids.
“I promise they don’t just sit around all day. They play physical games and fight virtual bad guys and run around doing AR exercises outside. Look up some videos, it’s really cute to watch.”
I pulled up a video in our shared space, and she was right, it was unbearably cute. Kids in headsets in little groups at the park, pretending to be adventuring parties while the virtual overlay kept the simulation within the bounds of physical space.
“Big kids stand up front swinging foam swords around,” Denise said, “while kids in back pretend to be wizards and cast spells at everything.”
“So, the wizard kids just get to make hand gestures while fighters do all the work? I really am doing wizard wrong.”
“You’re actually doing paladin without a sword, but whatever. I don’t understand all the game stuff, but you would love it. Go ahead and look it up while we’re waiting for Santa.”
Turns out those kids playing casters didn’t get anything for free. Their power in the game was directly correlated with their test scores, so their lightning bolts and fireballs hit monsters in proportion to how good their grades were.
The system even encouraged them to jump ahead and learn more advanced subjects or read books for grownups, to advance beyond their age group and get cool new powers early.
Some kinds of learning made it easier to buy certain kinds of powers, so kids who were good at chemistry could buy fire powers really cheap, while kids who were good at programming could buy golems.
Strong kids who were physically fit but bad at academics could specialize in archery or melee combat that correlated their damage output with how strong they were in real life. Most fighters became hybrids, mixing in a few spells here and there, or manifesting them as magic items.
A strong kid who developed a talent for chemistry could turn their weapon into a flaming sword or get a horn that would conjure a blizzard over the bad guys.
Something about it made my skin crawl, but it was working. These kids were only allowed to use recreational VR in the context of this game, and the school could cut power to them individually or all at once.
Turns out a lot of lazy kids will start studying really hard, to avoid letting their party down.
Each kid was assigned a Battle Buddy who was like a virtual friend or avatar, a neutered AI who coached them through the game system and served as a tutor when they got stuck on something.
AI Buddies would routinely help with homework and offer cool magic items as rewards for kids who were willing to study subjects they didn’t usually like. A front-line fighter might take a few extra math levels to earn a ring that shot magic missiles or something.
And yes, there was dueling. And yes, there was bullying. And yes, some kids got addicted to it. They were kind of supposed to get addicted to it.
But the game also served as a safe place to help kids who were having problems. A Battle Buddy who heard their kid say certain keywords or exhibit certain physical signs of distress could flag a counselor, and that counselor could take over and tell the Buddy what to say.
I was deeply skeptical of all this, but the statistics were… astounding. Kids who plugged into this system could get their own customized lesson plans, with different human teachers dropping in from all over the world.
This group of orphaned kids had become a collection of guilds and adventuring parties, all competing with each other to see who could jump ahead faster and unlock the game power locked behind more advanced subjects. In one case, a whole group of players collected materials so one kid would be allowed to learn calculus early and get access to a mystic area attack ahead of schedule.
Smart kids could become rock stars. Strong kids could become anchors and protectors, and kids who hated the whole thing could drop into other leagues or change to an entirely different kind of virtual school, until they found something they liked.
It was creepy, but it was working. It even worked on me.
“Denise, I think I had a prototype Battle Buddy, back in middle school. That fancy HDI training program. They hadn’t turned it into a video game yet, but I had a virtual teacher who talked to all of us on earbuds and helped us with homework.
“I can’t criticize this because… fuck. That was the only time I ever did well in school. That AI teacher was the first adult to give me any kind of personal attention after Mom died and I loved her the way a kid would love a human teacher. When I got pulled out and had to give her up, it was like losing Mom all over again.”
* * *
“Denise, the whole language we use to train heroes, the names for the jobs and the formations we use to fight in groups - did all that come from this game?”
“Hard to say if the game is copying tactics from the DMA,” Denise said, “or if heroes are using game terms in real life. Chicken and egg.”
Denise shrugged. “You want me to really blow your mind?” She leaned close and whispered. “Gifted kids who get powers after playing this game, a lot of them, a scary percentage of them, end up developing their video game powers in real life.”
My eyes went wide, and I got a cold chill down my spine. “Denise, that may be the real purpose of this program. You can never predict when a kid is going to get powers, or what might trigger it. But if you’ve conditioned a kid to fight with a certain kind of superpower since he was in grade school, and they get a KMP surge in puberty…
“Anonymous donations,” she said.
“Anonymous, my ass.”
“Oh, and fair warning as you’re handing stuff out. Some of these kids play rogues. Watch out for those little fuckers. I don’t even know why they allow that class,” Denise said.
“I think I do.”
* * *
And here’s a statistic even scarier than the ones Denise showed me. Kids with dead parents are ten percent more likely to get powers, and when they lose both parents, that percentage jumps to thirty.