We were interrupted by the arrival of Santa Claus, who had been patiently waiting for me and Denise and a bunch of volunteers to get the gifts arrayed on tables.
The kids groaned in unison as all their interface gear went dead, and I watched, fascinated, as each kid took off their headset and kept it on their body in some unique way. Most of them just kept them around their necks. Some of them folded them up completely and put them in protective cases. Some of them hooked the devices to loops on their belts, but no child left their VR visor behind.
I was very glad to see Santa because I am not good with kids, and I was afraid I might be expected to give an inspirational speech or something. But the kids swarming those tables were not interested in me. They weren’t even that interested in Santa.
They had finished their Christmas dinner hours ago, and now they were charging toward the cookies, like they weren’t usually allowed to eat sugar - an impressive array of holiday cookies in all shapes and sizes, probably from a distro, but mixed in with a few lumpy homemade batches that had clearly been made by moms, including a few trays made by Cecilia that morning. Denise confessed to being a little sad that she couldn’t get back to Boston early enough to help.
The children were allowed to have punch and juice and little cartons of milk, including chocolate and strawberry milk that had clearly been lifted from the GAC distro.
I was worried that the kids would be zombies or savages after a childhood growing up with VR, but they seemed happy and normal as far as I could tell.
They were clearly sticking together in small gangs, presumably tight-knit adventuring parties, and a few parties seemed to be rivals. Nobody was fighting in real life, but I did catch a few kids taunting other groups and talking shit.
A few of the younger kids ran forward to hug Santa when they saw him, and I ran a background check and scanned his aura by reflex.
Santa was a blank slate. No aura, no ID, like a complete mundane who wasn’t even in the system. That was impossible, of course, so the fact that he didn’t show up at all was deeply suspicious.
“Look at Tim,” Cecilia cackled at Denise. “Your partner’s ready to jump Santa.”
“Sorry,” I shrugged. “But you guys are sure he’s cool?”
“Of course,” Cecilia said.
“Are you going to try and tell me this is the real Santa?”
“There is no real Santa,” she said. “Santa Claus was a marketing gimmick for the Coca-Cola company. But this is not Saint Nicholas or Kris Kringle or Sinterklaas or Weihnachtsmann or any of the hundred other names we’ve given to the concept. This is a good friend who has been doing this for years, and he’s perfectly harmless… today.”
“So, he’s doing you a favor?”
“Technically he’s doing Arthur a favor. Arthur grew up here and spent every Christmas asking for building blocks and train sets and chemistry stuff until he grew up and found out who his Christmas buddy really was.”
“You’re not gonna tell me, are you?”
“You’re smart enough to figure it out, but don’t worry, and don’t try to ask him any questions. He’s here for the kids, and only for the kids.”
Santa took his place on a giant red throne and began calling each child by name, as volunteers handed him boxes. Each one had been carefully wrapped and adorned with a ribbon, and each one was labeled with the name of a specific child. I learned later that the ribbons were color-coded to each kid’s character class. These kids weren’t just grabbing plastic toys from a giant bucket, these gifts had been personalized.
Most of these boxes were absurdly light because modern toys don’t weigh anything at all. I inspected one and realized most of these kids were getting an array of gift cards: two or three big ones, with half a dozen little ones that were physically smaller and in different colors.
I leaned over to peer in one box and saw nine plastic cards and what looked like a pair of sunglasses. The cards were all covered in gorgeous artwork, although the three large ones seemed much thicker, meant to be collectibles. Some of them were even metal instead of plastic.
Most of the little cards had pictures of bottles on them, filled with different-colored liquid. The red ones were obviously health potions, and the blue ones were mana, but I couldn’t even guess what the others did.
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The big cards were magic items, and the kids had apparently been given a choice of how many they wanted. A kid could get three blue ones, two purple ones, or one orange one, and I was surprised by how many got three.
I walked around until I found one kid dancing around with a metal card for an artifact-level wizard staff. The kid looked a lot like me at that age, about the age I was when I went to the compound.
“Are you good at playing wizards?” I asked.
“Yeah,” the kid said, not quite making eye contact.
“I play a wizard sometimes,” I said. “Do you have any advice for me?”
“Good wizards don’t specialize,” the kid said. “Each monster is vulnerable to a different kind of thing, so you can’t just spam fireball over and over. You have to get good at a lot of different subjects so you can handle lots of different kinds of opponents. I’m good at fire and cold, but my lightning is weak, so I’ve got to get my physics grades up before the raid.”
“What does the staff do?”
“Staff of Defense. Bad wizards always forget defense. They put all their points in flashy attack stuff and go down to trash mobs. A good wizard has to keep his health up, and you can’t solo stuff if you rely on your party for everything.”
“What’s your favorite monster to fight?”
“Demons,” the kid said, as I struggled to keep a straight face. “They’re dumb, but they give a lot of experience.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. I’ve had to fight a lot of demons lately; any more advice?”
“The first thing they say is always a lie,” the kid said. “Don’t even let them talk. Just start blasting.”
The last item in his box was a pair of gorgeous black sunglasses, with lenses just a bit too big to look right on a child’s head. He let me examine them and I realized these had been custom made. Each box had a new set of VR glasses in it, and each one had been fitted to the individual child they were for.
“Denise, those glasses are cool as shit. Somebody is spending big money on these kids.”
“Mom doesn’t tell me who her donors are. My first guess would be Vanderhoff, but he doesn’t seem to be the type who would approve of a virtual school. Could be anybody.”
The teachers gave the kids a little time to eat cookies and show off their gifts, while Cecilia pulled up a stool and got ready to read.
The teachers had them all sit down in rows again and had to yell at them to be quiet four or five times as Cecilia tried to read. She was telling a sanitized version of the Krampus story.
Krampus is described as a half-goat half-demon figure who walks around on two legs, whipping bad children and dragging them off to Hell.
Cecilia was leaving out the really gross stuff, but I had to lean over and ask Denise, “Did this really happen? Did you guys really fight Krampus?”
“Might have been an impersonator, but yeah. He usually sticks to Scandinavian countries, but one year we got a Krampus in Boston, and we had to fight him. The original Krampus is dead, but they kept his skin, so now it’s like a costume demons can wear. Every year on December 5th, they pick a demon to be Krampus and send him out to torture kids.”
“How did you guys beat him?”
“In the book, we surround him with a circle of good children and have them sing Christmas carols until he’s forced back to Hell.”
“And how did you defeat him in real life?”
“We surrounded him with a circle of good children and had them sing Christmas carols until he was forced back to Hell. Magic gets weird around the holidays.”
* * *
Cecilia finished her story and one of the teachers pointed to a giant box, taking up most of the floor now that Santa was gone.
“It’s time to give up your old visors and switch to your new glasses.”
The children cheered, eagerly putting on VR sunglasses that didn’t actually work yet.
“But you all have a choice to make. You can hang on to your headsets if you want, or you can put them in this box, and we’ll donate them to children across town. If you want to donate them, pick up your old visors now and record a quick message. You can just say Happy Holidays to whoever gets it next.”
I’d say ninety percent of these kids donated their old visors, but I bet all the rogues kept theirs.
Everybody donated or put their old visors away and switched to their cool new shades. And I have to say, the sight of fifty kids sitting in perfect rows, all staring at me with super dark shades that were too big for their faces was the cutest thing I ever saw. I clipped my POV and used it as my wake-up screen for months.
And I have to give the EduQuest people credit. They brought in Cecilia Hardy to read the Krampus story, then they took the kids into their game and made him a raid boss.
The boss was overpowered so they would have to circle around him and sing Christmas carols to send him back, but the kids brute-forced the encounter and burned that little bitch down.
* * *
All the adults stayed late to clean up. Not a bad deal since we were paid in milk and cookies. I was dragging one last load of trash to the alley when a large figure dressed in white and red velvet appeared behind me.
And while Santa was fat and jolly and totally traditional for the kids, he had switched into a much more stylish modern version of his usual colors now, a baroque red suit with a white shirt, with his beard and hair freshly trimmed. And he wasn’t wearing his hat, indicating that he was off work? No reindeer, no bag of presents; even his belly was gone.
“And what would you like for Christmas, Kovach?”
I ignored his question and said, “Are you what I think you are?”
“Are you what you think you are?” he said, not smiling.
Something about his tone pissed me off. “I thought I made it pretty clear that I decide what I am from now on.”
Not Santa shrugged. “There are things you can change and things you must accept, and I don’t think you understand that yet.”
“Thank you for visiting the children.”
“It is my distinct pleasure, in a job that becomes a little more dismal each year.”
“You got any divine wisdom for me?”
“Quite a bit, but you’re not ready for it. Perhaps if I see you next year. Merry Christmas, Timothy.”
This guy was so committed to the bit, he made his exit portal look like a door to the North Pole.