“The Game Techs must be wary of setting precedents. They will inevitably be cited by other players making similar requests.” Kwame said the same words he’d said earlier. I guessed that he was quoting from the Game Tech regulations.
“In this case, we would hope there could be no similar requests. Or,” asked Cassandra acidly, “do you expect Celestius to face destruction on a daily basis?”
“Point,” said Kwame. “It’s just that I have to pin this down exactly. You know what happened when we allowed you to bring partners to Celestius, and giving someone Founder Player status is far more drastic.”
I noticed that Kwame had stopped using formal Game Tech speech patterns. He was losing his grip on this situation too.
“So,” he continued carefully, “you’re speaking on behalf of the Founder Players of Celestius? They’re requesting that Jex be given Founder Player status in recognition of her key role in preventing the bombing of the Celestius server?”
“I speak on behalf of the Sisterhood of Celestius,” said Cassandra, “however I’m sure the entire family will agree that it’s unfair that Jex should be forced to leave Game when she saved our lives. She may not be safe anywhere else in Game, but she would be safe on Celestius.”
“This isn’t a temporary measure?” asked Kwame. “You don’t want Jex’s Founder Player status to be removed when the situation becomes safer?”
“Founder Player status has always been permanent,” said Cassandra. “We didn’t want to set a precedent for removing it when our brothers became ... ill, and we don’t want to set one now.”
She gestured around the Amphitheatre. “All of us were given Founder Player status as a reward for risking our lives by joining the Game for the ten year trial. Without us, there would be no Game today. Jex would be given Founder Player status as a reward for risking her life to stop the bombing. Without her, there would be no Celestius today.”
Kwame brightened up and went into formal Game Tech mode again. “That is correct. We do have an existing precedent for this. May I withdraw and confer with other Game Techs while you take a formal vote of all the Founder Players?”
“The Sisterhood have already voted on this matter, and are unanimously in favour,” said Cassandra, in a meaningful voice, “but I will take a formal vote of the rest of the family as well. Does anyone have any questions to ask before that formal vote is taken?”
Kwame vanished into thin air. There seemed to be a lot of urgent conversations going on in the audience. I wasn’t sure if that meant the male Founder Players were against me being given Founder Player status, or just startled by the suggestion.
Hawk shook his head. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
I frowned at him. “You don’t seem very happy at the idea of me becoming a Founder Player.”
“Of course I’m happy. It means you can stay in Game and be safe on Celestius. It’s just that on other worlds people see what we choose to let them see, and the Founder Players are glittering legends. Here on Celestius, all the masks that we hide behind are gone, and we’re our real selves.”
He groaned. “I’ve plenty of friends here, but I’ve got enemies too, particularly among the single men. They’ll be eager to cause trouble between us, by telling you all my faults and describing every mistake I’ve made in the last four centuries. I can see Hercules is starting his attack already.”
I turned my attention back to the Amphitheatre, and saw Hercules was standing up in the audience.
“We’ve never had anyone join us before, so can you clarify the rules regarding Jex?” he asked.
Cassandra nodded. “Jex would naturally be a member of the Sisterhood, and have our full support against any attempts to disrupt her chosen relationships. As always, the sole condition applies that her chosen relationships should not impinge on a prior, publicly declared relationship of any other sister.”
“Jex has told me she’s a free agent,” said Hercules, “so I’d like to make it clear I’m interested in a relationship with her.”
I heard Hawk muttering at my side. “I’ll kill him. Very slowly and painfully. Over, and over, and over again.”
Cassandra sighed. “This isn’t the time or place for making relationship offers, Hercules. Does anyone else have questions, or are we ready to vote?”
There was silence.
“Very well,” Cassandra said. “Please stand if in favour of the invitation to Jex.”
There was a ripple of silver around the area as male Founder Players stood. Hawk sighed and stood up with them. After a moment, they all sat down again.
“Against?” asked Cassandra.
They all remained seated.
I gripped the cool marble arms of my seat. “This can’t be happening,” I murmured. “This really can’t be happening.”
“The Founder Players of Celestius have voted unanimously in favour,” said Cassandra. “Player Jex Thorpe Leigh Grantham, resident of Ganymede, is to be given Founder Player status as a reward for risking her life in the real world to stop the bombing of the Celestius server complex. Without her actions, there would be no Celestius today.”
She turned to smile at me. “Welcome player Jex, resident of Celestius.”
I glanced hesitantly at Hawk. “What do I do now?” I whispered. “Ask for a Game Tech to ...”
“You don’t need to do anything.” He pointed at my left arm.
I looked down and saw the bracelet on my forearm was sparkling diamond.
Chapter Thirty
I’d been a Founder Player living on Celestius for nearly two weeks now. Hawk had been away for most of that time, wandering hopefully round other Game worlds, braced ready for the Reaper to attack him. In fact, Hawk was supposed to be away right now, but instead he was standing opposite me on the balcony of the highest tower of my castle.
He gave me an anxious look. “I don’t understand why you aren’t shouting at me.”
A pair of winged horses flew by the balcony, and started playing hide and seek in the drifting white clouds below us. I made the mistake of looking down at them, and caught a glimpse of an emerald green coastline a dizzying distance below the clouds. I’d always thought that Celestius having castles in the air was a charming idea, but castles on the ground seemed far more appealing at the moment.
I forced my attention back to Hawk. “Do you want me to be shouting at you?”
“It would make a lot more sense to me. I can see it was unreasonable of me to come dashing back to Celestius to interrogate you about why you’d been visiting Merlin’s castle, and I’ve seen you lose your temper before. Like when you were telling me about having your Game future wrecked by Unilaw questioning.”
“I shouldn’t have screamed at you about the Unilaw questioning,” I said. “It wasn’t just unfair when I knew you weren’t the one who’d decided to bring all the kids from the body stacks in for questioning, but incredibly dangerous as well. You could have reacted by sending me and Nathan back to the body stacks. Instead, you got both our records cleared, and those of all the other kids as well. I was so grateful for that. I’m still grateful for that. I admire the way that your own experiences of bullying have made you try to help others.”
Hawk was still looking worried. “And you lost your temper again when I tried to force you to defrost from Game.”
I stabbed a forefinger at him. “You deserved to get yelled at that time. You don’t make my decisions for me.”
Hawk lifted both hands in surrender. “I knew I’d no right to force you out of Game. I was just terrified that the Reaper would delete you from existence.”
He paused. “Anyway, what’s worrying me is that both those times you lost your temper over things you really cared about. If you’re staying so calm about me doing something that could totally mess up our relationship, then maybe that means it isn’t important to you.”
“It’s not that I don’t care about our relationship,” I said. “It’s that I understand why you behaved that way. Before
I became a Founder Player, I was feeling horribly insecure about our relationship. Now you’re feeling just as insecure.”
“I didn’t believe the message from Hercules,” said Hawk. “I guessed he was just saying you were dumping me for Merlin to cause trouble between us, but then Lancelot called me and he said that ...”
I lifted a hand to stop him. “Let’s forget all about what Hercules, Lancelot, or anyone else told you. I hope that if you hear any more gossip about me, then you’ll try to trust me rather than panicking.”
“I’ll do my best.”
The two winged horses stopped playing hide and seek, and came skimming across to hover, feathered wings beating like those of hummingbirds, next to our balcony. Hawk moved to sit on the parapet and leaned out to stroke them.
“Would you please stop doing that?” I said, in a tense voice.
Hawk pulled his hand back and gave me a confused look. “I thought you liked the winged horses.”
“I love the winged horses. I’m just worried about you sitting on the parapet and leaning out over a sheer drop.”
He was obviously even more confused now. “You were sitting on this parapet with me a few days ago.”
“Yes, but two hours ago I nearly plummeted to my death, and I’m still feeling a bit nervous about heights.”
Hawk frowned. “You fell off this balcony?”
“I didn’t fall off this balcony. I went for a ride on a winged horse, so I could admire the sight of my castle floating above the clouds. I was having a wonderful time until I reached out to try to stroke a passing bird and fell off my horse.”
I shuddered as I remembered that dreadful moment. “The ground was rushing towards me, and I was panicking too much to think. I was about to be hit in the face by a mountain, and achieve fame as the first person foolish enough to suffer a Game death by falling off a winged horse on Celestius, when I finally had the sense to scream a Game command and teleport home to my castle.”
“You wouldn’t have been the first,” said Hawk. “Caesar killed himself falling off a winged horse the day after the Game Techs introduced them to Celestius. No one would have thought you especially foolish anyway. We’ve all made glorious fools of ourselves many times in the last four centuries. Hercules killed Fleur with that booby trap, Uther sank his own castle, even Cassandra has had her embarrassing moments.”
“How do you sink a castle?” I asked.
Hawk gave me a joyous grin. “Uther overloaded it. He wanted his towers to be bigger than anyone else’s towers. When the Game Techs made the requested changes, the castle plummeted from the sky, landed in mid-ocean, and sank underwater. I’ll show you the replay of it later. It’s hilarious.”
I laughed. “Didn’t the Game Techs realize that would happen?”
“Well, they claimed they didn’t, but we had our suspicions they sank the castle deliberately. Uther had been annoying them for years, constantly asking them to make adjustments to his castle. They’re quite happy to make occasional changes, and they’re expecting you to want quite a lot done to this place because it’s new, but Uther was hassling them every few hours.”
“I think my castle is perfect the way it is.” I made a sweeping gesture to indicate the delicate towers around us. “I love all the flowering creepers growing up the walls, and the way the roofs of the spires are woven in spider silk like the houses on Ganymede.”
Hawk stood up. “If you’re feeling uncomfortably high up here, why don’t we ride a winged horse down to the surface of Celestius? We could visit a private beach of mine.”
I shuddered again. “I’m not ready to get back on a winged horse yet.”
“I was thinking that we could both ride on the same horse. I could hold on to you very tightly so you couldn’t possibly fall off.”
There was something odd about his voice when he made the suggestion. I looked at him suspiciously. “That sounds like it could get a bit intimate.”
“Not really.”
I narrowed my eyes. “So if Hercules suggests taking me for a horse ride, I can happily accept?”
“All right,” Hawk admitted. “Celestius is the only place with winged horses. I’ve never been on the right terms with any of the women here to try it myself, but I gather that sharing a horse is regarded as one of the erm ... fringe benefits of having a relationship with another Founder Player rather than an outsider. Apparently, the wing movements ... Don’t laugh like that.”
It was at least two minutes before I finally managed to stop giggling.
“So,” said Hawk, “you can fulfil my wildest erotic fantasies by flying on a winged horse with me, or we could just ask for a Game teleport to the beach.”
I grinned. “Difficult decision. Very difficult.”
He sighed. “Game command. Request group teleport to Hawk private beach.”
A minute later, I was standing on a beach. This was very different from the beaches on Ganymede. There were grey and white pebbles worn smooth by the sea. There were gulls circling over the blue-green of the ocean, their high-pitched cries cutting through the background sound of wind and waves. The sea breeze was chilly and held a strong tang of salt mixed with a faintly unpleasant smell of seaweed.
After two weeks of the ornate loveliness of the scenery in Game, this place seemed remarkably ordinary to be Hawk’s private beach. When we started walking along, the pebbles bruised my toes through my dainty shoes.
That reminded me of something. It took me a moment to track down the memory. “We sat on a beach like this in the real world, when we were talking about ... about children. This place isn’t based on that beach, but one from further along the same coastline, isn’t it? It’s the beach from your childhood.”
Hawk smiled. “Yes, this is where I played as a child. I asked for it to be copied, so I could come here, forget about Hawk, and remember who I really was. The beach just ends in grassland though, there’s no road and no house. I felt that copying the house, the furniture, and my old room, would be where sentimentality crossed the line into being morbid.”
I nodded, and looked across at the grassland. “Can we walk over there for a bit? I need tougher shoes to cope with these pebbles, and I don’t want to teleport back to my castle just to change my shoes.”
Hawk took my arm as we walked across to the long, wiry grass. There were just a few scattered flowers in pink and blue, instead of the mass of colours you’d expect in Game. They seemed all the prettier for being scarce.
“So what have you been doing since I last saw you?” Hawk asked.
“I’ve mostly been adjusting to living in Game instead of real life. That’s been much harder than I expected. It isn’t one big thing, but a whole host of little differences. Like the way the days are so long and the nights are so short.”
“Celestius has the standard Game day and night length,” said Hawk. “There’s no need for nights to be more than a couple of hours long when people don’t sleep in Game. If someone particularly enjoys night skies, they can go somewhere like Starlight or Harvest Moon.”
“That’s another thing,” I said. “Why does Celestius have three identical moons in different colours?”
Hawk grinned. “Because of a programming error.”
“What?”
“It was a mistake that crept in when the Game Techs revamped the original Game world and made it into Celestius. It was a while before they had time to fix the error, and by then we’d got fond of our moons and wanted to keep them. Celestius has had a triple moon ever since.”
I laughed. “As Hercules helpfully told you, I visited Merlin’s castle. The poor man had been messaging me every day to ask for updates on the hunt for the Reaper. He’s terrified that he’s going to lose his last chance of salvaging his relationship with Stella. He’s been calling her every few hours, but that isn’t the same as visiting in person. Anyway, I ended up going over to Merlin’s castle and talking to both of them. I told them that they just have to wait patiently.”
“They co
uld have a very long wait,” said Hawk gloomily. “I’ve done everything I can to tempt the Reaper to attack me. I even agreed to let the Game Techs release that surveillance footage of the awful Michael.”
I shook my head. “There’s nothing awful about Michael, and anyway the Game Techs enhanced those images beautifully, so we look almost like our Game selves.”
“I still look like Michael to me, and I hate everyone in Game watching replays of me murdering you. I thought it would make the Reaper so furious to have the whole population of Game watching us trick him, that he’d be bound to attack me, but it’s achieved nothing. I’m starting to worry that the Reaper will never attack me.”
Hawk looked deeply frustrated at this idea, but I secretly hoped it was true. These days, I was only too well aware that behind Hawk the Unvanquished was a very vulnerable Michael, and that every incredible victory over one of the challenges of Game had been hard earned by many failures and a lot of temporary Game deaths. If the Reaper attacked Hawk, then there would be no second chances, because death would be real and permanent.
“I visited Cassandra’s castle as well,” I said, “and I’ve been calling a lot of people including Nathan and my old friends from my medical cadet days.”
“How did your old friends react to you becoming a Founder Player?” asked Hawk.
“Diane, Bevan, and Chen were a bit tongue tied. Gina seemed to cope a lot better. We did a lot of talking about what happened when I was thrown off the medical course. The instructor told the rest of my class that I’d been lying to them about my grades for years. Gina didn’t believe that, but she couldn’t do anything about it.”
Hawk slapped himself on the side of the head. “I forgot to contact my expert. If there’s any evidence of your instructor changing the records, she should have found it by now.”
“It doesn’t matter any longer. Gina told me that when the news broke about me becoming a Founder Player, the instructor instantly quit her job. Silly of her. Even if we’d found enough evidence to get her fired from her post, she’d have been paid a proportion of the cost of her lifetime Game subscription. Quitting means she’s broken her contract, so she gets nothing at all.”