by Oz Drummond
Wherein “success beyond wildest dreams” takes on a new meaning....
Gale sought his scent in her system. She arrowed through fiber and copper networks, everything behind and around her a blur; she hadn’t bothered to visualize any of it. She could do that. She was just a face right now. It took too much concentration to imagine more than that. She was arrowhead and shaft. Her hair fletched the shaft and directed her course. She was the here and now of her search for him.
Mouth slightly open, a hint of snow-covered, glacier-carved valleys rolled across her tongue like the bouquet of a fine wine. Gale held the scent in lungs newly created until she had to let go or burst as it froze her at the cellular level. She flicked her hair onto the left side of her shaft-body and changed direction, accelerating toward him, missile to target. No matter where or what he was, he smelled like snow and ice. Playing hide and seek, she always won.
Gale liked to win.
He had changed something again. She found his scent in the new logic infiltrating her system. She felt her way through the changes, rolled like a seal in the new currents and drank in some of his new program. She choked as it leapt down her throat and coursed through her. Her body morphed from a sleek seal with flippers to a petite brunette with hair loose to her hips and legs all the way up.
Impractical, she thought.
Her eyes were his cold blue, her skin as pale as if it had never been tanned by the summer sun, her hair as dark as midwinter night. She wore a mint green sheath that sparkled and clung from bust to knees as she moved, outlining a well-rounded shape. She wore strapless four-inch spikes with improbably long pointed toes on her tiny feet.
No way could she fight in this outfit. What was he up to?
And then he was there. Inside her head. She shivered. He looked through her eyes that were his eyes and formed her thoughts as his own. She felt tingly, warm and wanted. He moved around inside her until she was set to his liking. He adjusted her height, her hair, brought her hemline up to her thighs.
Could I braid my hair at least?
No, I like it this way, all loose and flowing.
It was like talking to yourself, only better. Two voices in the same head. He walked her around, gazed into a set of mirrors that appeared when he wanted them to, held one of her hands on her hip, flipped her hair with the other. Gale would have preferred to stride along in boots or even to fly, but when he was inside her she wanted to keep him there as long as she could, prolonging the intimacy. If she changed her appearance he might leave suddenly. He had before.
Through a newly formed door was The Nightclub with its loud music and men and women dancing. He walked her to the bar and ordered a fruity frozen daiquiri. She was expected to drink it. She held the stem with both hands, elbows on the bar and watched the room through the mirror.
He didn’t like that.
He turned her around and sat her on a tall chair facing the dance floor, her glass in one hand while he flipped her hair back with the other. One leg crossed the other and he threw her chest out. He made her free hand play on her hip and thigh, smooth the dress over her skin, before coming back to curl her hair idly around her fingers.
Gale waited for him to choose one of the other patrons.
He began to flirt with a tall, dark, and handsome man sitting next to her.
Tall, dark, and handsome was interested.
Gale was amused. Is it the way I look or is it his charm?
And then he was gone, abandoning her in midsentence with tall, dark, and not very interesting. Without him, The Nightclub was a stupid game, as stupid as the leggy brunette body. She left that body behind in the bar, still talking to tall, dark, and boring, who didn’t seem to notice. Her body’s conversation had become empty headed without either of them to provide dialogue.
Must have been my looks after all.
* * * *
Gale went off to play Alien Insurrection. She had found it buried under various circuits and pathways, a forgotten piece of gaming software. She was updating it and linking it to her system as a surprise for him.
“Surrender, Alien-That-Gestates-Genetic-Copies,” the translator boomed.
“Never!” she screamed as she punched the little fighter’s rockets and accelerated on a trajectory to intercept the enemy’s mothership.
“There is no logic in your further resistance to our superior weaponry.”
“Die, alien scum!”
The interface skipped, creating jumps in her field of vision. The battle noises fed through the speakers also paused for the same fraction of time. Half the controls in her small fighter didn’t do anything, no matter how much she pulled or pressed at them. Aside from winning, little details were the best part of a game.
The interface skipped again. It could be that the bridge she built to her own system still had a few bugs in it or it could be the game was simply too old and slow to keep up with her. She needed to find and fix whatever it was before he found this game on his own. Maybe if she switched to another ship, it would have more power. Gale switched to a Kikitle ship and watched her previous fighter explode in the enemy’s shields with little effect.
The Kikitle ship was better. Gale should have needed four hands and opposable toes to work all the controls. The opposable toes maneuvered, but she could have managed with only two hands on all the other controls. Too few of the knobs, protrusions, and panels did anything. The ship was also underpowered. The Kikitle were pacifists. She wouldn’t get enough points to win if she relied on the weapons system alone.
Blowing up her ship would significantly damage the enemy’s mothership, if she could combine it with a ramming action. It was poor sportsmanship, but she might rack up enough points to win. Or maybe the game would just give her another life and continue play. That would be disappointing. She hated games that didn’t make you start all over when you died.
This game would be a lot more fun when she was finished with it. She would make knobs and buttons actually do something, create lots of confusing visuals, maybe a few smells, and plenty of distracting noises. Even with badly simulated engine noise and alien communications translated in her head, the game was too quiet. It lacked a good noise level. She liked to hear blips, bleeps, whirrs, splats, and the occasional ka-chunk that might mean something was seriously wrong.
Gale instructed the onboard computer to start its destruct sequence. How would the program interpret her suicide? Would she do enough damage to the alien ship to win? Would she feel pain on impact or would she simply be jerked out of play? She tightened her crash cocoon and closed all her Kikitle eyes. She hoped the game was programmed for pain.
“Howdy, Pilgrim,” a voice drawled from the speaker. “You look like you could use a little help fightin’ off those Injuns.”
“Hey! You spoiled my surprise!” Now that he was here, the real fun would start.
She searched her two-dimensional displays. An unmarked allied ship, which must be his, had locked onto her Kikitle craft and used a beam to adjust her trajectory to miss the mother ship.
Another screen at the lower left edge of her display area filled with his pale face, its planes as sharp as the leading edge of snowdrifts. His eyes were the same glacial blue as the leggy brunette’s had been. Instead of his usual single braid, he had on a cowboy hat. He smiled and his face was softened by the laugh lines around his eyes.
“Don’t worry, li’l lady. The cavalry is here.”
“You sound pretty stupid as John Wayne in the middle of a space battle. Or do you want to play Cowboys and Indians instead?”
He cut the connection.
He was up to something.
Massive laser artillery lanced from his ship and sliced through the enemy’s weapons. The alien mothership bucked and lost its spin as his weapons disabled its gravitational field generator. The saucer-shaped ship lost altitude over the planet below and screamed into its atmosphere. It burned on its way to creating a satisfying crater on the planet surface.
And then Gale realized she wouldn’t be around to see the mothership explode on impact. Her computer had continued the self-destruct countdown. A white hot flash seared her eyes as she was ejected from the game in her own miniature explosion.
It wasn’t painful enough, but she could fix that.
* * * *
Game over. All points forfeited to Player Two for rescue operation. Score = 0. Would you like to play again?
* * * *
Gale puzzled that out. She was winning when he entered her game. He had won, even though he had just entered the game. He took all her points when he bumped her trajectory. Cool. Now she knew a new way to beat him the next time they played. That tactic should work in lots of games.
He was gone again, as abruptly as he had arrived. She couldn’t detect even a hint of winter in Alien Insurrection, no damp feeling of impending snow. Why didn’t he stay? She had so much to ask him. Did he like the game? Did she do a good job? Did she alter it the way he would have? How did he enter the game in a ship with weapons that weren’t part of the original parameters? She had so much to ask him and not a sign of him anywhere. But he would be back. He always came back.
She went to look for him.
* * * *
Her yellow-black avian eyes could spot movement a mile away. She was thinking of him as a snowshoe hare. It was easier to locate him when she thought of him as prey. She spread her black wing feathers to soar on the current, buffeted by turbulence.
There.
A bit of movement in Victorian London.
He was on Baker Street.
She dipped the edge of her wings to spill some air and began to dive. Faster and faster she fell through the system into the smog and murk of London.
He was at number 221B, a smoking jacket stretched across his shoulders and biceps. He wasn’t very convincing as Sherlock Holmes. The shoulders and thighs of a warrior were at odds with Sherlock’s wiry build. No wonder she could find him anywhere. He just couldn’t get into character.
Gale lengthened and thickened into a middle-aged Watson with his dark tropical complexion and distinctive military air. He looked up and removed his pipe from his mouth as she solidified in front of him.
“Why do you look like Watson?” he asked. “Don’t you want to look like yourself? I gave you a sexy body to use.”
“But I do look like myself. I always do. What a silly question. How do I win this game? Do I solve the mystery before you do?”
“Actually, it’s not a game. It’s more of a test.”
“Can I still win?”
“Do you remember doing this before?”
“Is that part of the test?”
“Interesting.” He wrote something in a notebook that Gale couldn’t see. “Apparently you don’t carry memories from version to version.”
“What’s a version? Is that a game?”
“A version is another Gale. An older Gale. Not as advanced as you are.”
“Another Gale? She has my name? Could I beat her? Have you played against her before?”
“Yes, you could beat any other Gale. But you don’t have to. They aren’t around anymore.”
Gale lost interest as soon as he said she couldn’t play against these other Gales. If she couldn’t beat them and take points from them, like he did from her and she from him, they weren’t much use. Instead, she tried to figure out what game they were playing. She tried to read what he was writing in his notebook.
It might be the Sherlock game, in which case someone would knock on the door at any moment to start the mystery. Or he might be up to something completely different. Sometimes he did that. She would find him in a game, but he wasn’t really playing that game. He was playing a different game and he wanted her to figure out what it was.
Gale made her own notebook for scribbling. She drew a picture of snowfields under a wintry sun, hoping he would want to see it from inside her head.
He continued to mutter to himself and ignore her.
Sometimes he didn’t want to play at all. This seemed to be one of those times.
He looked at her curiously then, as if something was wrong with her Watson, but he never stepped inside her head. She knew her Watson was right. She had consulted the complete set of Sherlock Holmes stories and compiled every reference to Watson’s looks and mannerisms. Maybe he was jealous that her Watson was better than his Holmes. She wrote “jealous” in her notebook and drew a picture of a house buried to its rafters in snow.
If he was jealous, it was well hidden. He muttered, made notes, and experimented with chemicals. He seemed content to work in the lab at Baker Street. He wanted her to sit with him, but he didn’t want her to be Watson, which didn’t make sense. He seemed to want her to be the leggy, petite brunette again, but she couldn’t see any way to win a game that way. It made her feel all funny when she was in that body, like she wasn’t herself. She tried it for a moment to see if that would get him to climb inside her head, but he just smiled absently and patted her hand.
She went back to her Watson shape.
He shushed her every time she proposed solving a mystery or asked him what he was doing.
Games were usually much more fun when he played, but this game was boring and incomprehensible. He was better than any system she had ever played against. But playing against a system was better than sitting in a living room full of overstuffed chairs and sofas with nothing to do. Gale left.
* * * *
Water spilled, spun, pushed against her as she struggled her way upstream. She shot up into the air with a thrust of her muscular body, gasped for oxygen, out of her element in the bright sun. With a splash she went back underwater, twisted her back and fought against the strong current. She leapt into the air to get above a boulder that blocked her route, mouth gaping wide. She smelled the cold glacial headwaters where she had been born. He was out there and she was ready to play.
* * * *
He stood on the plains below Hisarlik, the steep stone walls of Troy VI behind him. He smelled like snow even under the hot sun of Asia Minor. She was never quite the same two times in a row, but whatever game they played, he was always a warrior.
He waited for her. He had his back turned and hadn’t chosen his armor yet. His hair, blond with red and brown highlights like wild grasses in early winter, was held back by an intricate gold brooch indicating his status as a player. She had been with him when he had taken it as a trophy from someone else. The distant mountains he gazed at were fuzzy in the heat. They didn’t look quite right to her. He needed to fix them. But that was probably why he was staring at them.
She stepped up behind him and settled into the shape that seemed to please him: the petite body with long legs, blue eyes, long hair, and dangling silver earrings. She skipped the tight dress and heels and dressed herself in a short tunic and boots suitable for the stony ground. She darkened her skin so the sun wouldn’t burn it. The result was a woman just discovering her sexual potential. Jasmine perfume mingled with the coastal breeze as she placed sun-bronzed arms around his waist from behind.
“Hello, Gale,” he said and held her arms in place without turning around. She pressed her cheek against his back and leaned into him as if she could melt him into her body.
“This is my favorite game.” She pressed a kiss into his spine and slid a leg between his. “Who do you want to be? Achilles? Shall I be Patroclus?”
She slipped under an arm to his front and looked up at him slyly.
“I feel more like Athena today. Can I be Athena? You be Odysseus.” She created her helmet and armor and made herself half again as tall as he. Athena would beat him. She would get god-points unless he thought to make himself Zeus.
He grabbed her wrists and twisted them slightly. Gale shrank back to the leggy brunette, her skin pale, in the tight green dress with high heels again, open-toed steep-sloped sandals. She felt a bit of vertigo at the sudden change in perspective, tottered, and held onto him. She placed her palms on his chest to steady herself and kept her gaze lowered.
“Ok, I won’t be Athena. You want me to be Briseis, right? I can do Briseis dressed like this if you want me to.” He must have figured out that she had too much advantage as Athena. “Let’s start from Achilles’ argument with Agamemnon. You know, ‘Sing, Muse, the rage of Achilles’ and all that? We get more points if we can make the game follow the Homeric script.”
“Points aren’t important,” he said.
She looked up at him, her small head tilted to one side, hair falling across her face.
“Not important? Of course they’re important. How else would we know who wins?” she asked.
He stroked her cheek and smiled down at her.
“No more trying to win all the time,” he said.
The warmth in his smile faded. He dropped his hands and stepped back, creating space between them.
“A lot of my friends have migrated to a new system,” he said not meeting her eyes. “I just came to tell you I’ll still come and see you sometimes.”
“Why? I’ll come, too, won’t I?”
“Well, no, you won’t.” He paused for a moment. “You never wonder why Troy is here, do you?”
“I could be Thetis,” she said, trying to understand this new game of his. He always thought up fun games.
He shook his head, raised a hand slightly to keep her from moving closer.
“You don’t have to be someone else anymore. You’re finalized,” he said. “An army of programmers put all this dirt and stone here in the shape of an ancient city named Troy, all based on a story called the Iliad. It was all made up, or most of it. And you were made up too, but better, because you could interact with the system and change it. You’re the best player I ever made up.”
She stared at him, brows furrowed to a tiny point between her eyes. “I don’t understand. Can I make you up? Can I finalize you? Is that how I win?”
He stared back at her for a moment and then he was gone. He just wasn’t there anymore.
She chuckled to herself. He wanted to play an old game today. He wanted her to find him. He was out there somewhere and she would find him again, just like she always had. It was impossible for him to disguise that subtle sense of cold that hung around him anywhere in the system. She would win this game easily.
Gale wanted to be a cormorant, to ride currents of ocean air, but nothing happened. She was still Gale, the petite brunette in Troy. She thought again. She tried hard to be a cormorant, a grebe, or even just a seagull.
Nothing happened.
She was still standing in the hot sun, her skin already turning pink. She stared at her feet and tried something easy, opposable toes on each foot. They remained small in their spiked sandals, with lacquered red toenails. All her toes lined up in neat rows. Not a single one opposed the others. Then she tried to give herself a tail, as long and sleek as her brown hair, but when she twisted to look nothing grew from the end of her spine.
It was as if she had forgotten how to breathe. Had she always needed to breathe? She breathed. But she was trapped in this stupid body that he liked so much.
Anger filled her and radiated outward, changing the game behind her. Greeks climbed the white walls of Troy with infants and small children held over their heads and threw them down. Their skulls shattered on the rocks like melons. The ground shook and bucked until the stones in the walls themselves tumbled down and the Greeks with them. The earth under the city opened and swallowed Priam’s palace, conquerors and conquered alike.
Gale sat on the hard-baked ground and let go of her rage, which left her sad instead. She pulled her knees up under her chin and hugged them to her chest. A cold front pushed across the sky and the temperature dropped as the sky filled with gray clouds from the coastline. It started to rain. Gale felt heavy drops plunk on her head. Her shoulders and back and legs were soaked, her dress stuck to her skin unpleasantly. Only a small patch of ground under her was dry. Rain ran down her scalp under her hair and then down her face.
He had started a new game and then hadn’t stayed to explain the rules to her.
Gale felt lonely for the first time ever, in the overgrown ruins of the once proud city, a heavy rain soaking the plain.
This new game of his wasn’t fun.
She threw away the useless high-heeled sandals and walked barefoot out of Troy, no longer able to fly.
* * * *
The system held no hint of snow or ice, but Gale no longer cared. It was a crisp blue day, filled with the incense of autumn leaves. Gale wore a heavy sweater over the mint-green dress that never looked dingy or worn. She had braided her hair to keep it out of her face while she worked in her garden.
She planted what she wanted to be flowers, dug holes with a trowel, and filled them with rubber and metal fragments as fertilizer. It wasn’t spring and this wasn’t fertilizer, but it was proving to be her best effort since he had said she was finalized. She turned to her flat of marigold seedlings and selected one of the better plants, a sickly yellow with only a few brown spots on its leaves.
She had to figure out how he made things. If she could do that, she was sure she could fix whatever it was he had done to her. Her plants sometimes flowered now, an improvement over the row of dead sticks that marked her earlier efforts. Start small, he had always said.
Eventually, she created Minions, small beings grown to do her bidding from the few marigolds that flowered. She had named the first ones Thumbelina1, Thumbelina2, and Thumbelina3. She sent them out to track him while she cultivated her garden, trying to make better marigolds.
Thumbelina2 had failed again.
Gale was so irritated by its bleated apologies and groveling that she set her hands around its skinny green neck and squeezed until ones and zeros oozed out of its oversized orange ears. Its leafy hands flapped uselessly.
The squeezing felt good.
Unleashed frustration colored the sky blood rust red and the sun shrank to the size of a dot. When Thumbelina2’s tongue turned purple and lolled out of its still smiling mouth, it looked so ludicrous she began to giggle and let it drop to the ground where it lay in a puddle of orange and green bits.
Thumbelina2 was the second Minion she had terminated in a fit of pique. If she terminated her last, Thumbelina3, she would have to spend more time in her personal purgatory of a garden. Her plants rarely ended up as dead sticks anymore, but it was still difficult to get one to flower. Once terminated, there was no way to capture Thumbelina2’s experiences and transfer them to the last Minion. All of Thumbelina2’s search data was lost.
Gale sighed.
She would have to learn to control her temper.
What she wanted was to create her own version of him, one that would play when she wanted and leave only when it pleased her, instead of whenever it pleased him.
Thumbelina3 formed out of the garden wall as if pushed through water, a tiny little marigold person in a green miniskirt and halter top no taller than Gale’s knee. She kicked the back of Thumbelina3’s head, in the middle of a mass of short bright orange hair, to give it run instructions. Thumbelina3 ran and tripped over its large green feet squeezed into spike-heeled shoes.
“Be sure to check The Nightclub,” she yelled as Thumbelina3 stumbled away, trying to run in heels. Thumbelina3 lacked dexterity, weaving back and forth on her weak stalk as she tried to stay upright. Grace wasn’t essential for her search. Six-inch heels might be.
* * * *
Gale was working on a new Minion—one of her plants had finally flowered—when Thumbelina3’s orange head appeared in the gray of her garden like a bright splash of hope. Thumbelina3 began a tap dance, the only form of communication she had given that version.
She forced herself to stop flexing her fingers, which had reached for Thumbelina3’s stalk on their own as she waited for Thumbelina3 to get to the point. She wouldn’t lose her temper again.
Thumbelina3 tapped its excitement.
Gale formed a spotlight to highlight its steps.
Thumbelina3 had found the necessary bridge to Baker Street, where he kept his notes on Gale.
A nonexistent audience applauded lightly and the spotlight brightened. Music accompanied Thumbelina3’s dance. Gale’s impatience increased. So did the tempo.
Thumbelina3 tapped a frenzy of information. He wasn’t there, but the information Gale needed was.
Gale began to tap dance as well, matched Thumbelina3’s rhythm, and copied the instructions for the bridge to the Baker Street system.
Thumbelina3 tried to tap faster, tripped and fell flat on its face. The garden thundered with applause and the entire sky was broad-brushed with a pink/orange/yellow/indigo sunset as Gale finished the steps herself and bridged to number 221B.
After reading his notes, Gale no longer needed her pathetic marigolds. She could build full-scale models of him and teach them to play games with her. She twisted the void and created matter, gave that matter a mighty shake and rippled it into land, water, and air. The air and water played against each other and set up turbulence and self-sustaining motions, flipped and turned. The land settled itself into valleys, mountains, flat plains. Then, as she considered plant and animal life, before she was ready to put a model of him into place, she felt a frigid breeze that could only mean he was looking for her after all this time.
She felt a frisson up her spine. This was her game.
His eyes formed first, as he looked at her world. The rest of him followed, first his head with hair like winter grass pulled back in the warrior’s braid and fixed with his gold brooch. Next, his shoulders and chest appeared, the chest crossed by a tooled leather strap to hold a broadsword and scabbard on his back. Finally, the rest of him: arms, hands, waist, dressed in furs, his thighs and calves enclosed in rabbit-fur leggings. He was more than twice her size, a giant.
He was so much better than her latest design, though she thought she could fix that winter warrior thing that followed him everywhere in the system.
“What are you doing, Gale?” he said.
“I’m learning to change.”
He touched her with his cool hands, stroked down along her jaw, held her chin in his palm.
“But you don’t need to change. You’re perfect.”
“What did you do to me back in Troy?”
“I created you,” he said. “And when I was done, so were you. I wanted to see if I could make something that would act logically within this framework. I wanted to write code that would contain all I know about gaming, code that would learn to play better than I can. I wanted to make something sexy and beautiful. I wanted to make the best friend I could ever have, someone who was the other side of myself, a partner. And you are.”
“Then why did you lock me in this body and leave, if we’re best friends, if I’m your partner?”
“I’m sorry, Gale, truly sorry. I didn’t mean to leave for so long, but there was this new system, I told you about that. It was okay, but you’re the best, really. And I’m here now and we can play, just like we used to.”
A door opened in the sky of her world. Through it she could see the boring nightclub game where bodies of all shapes and sizes leapt about in some sort of dance and the bass boomed out in waves at her.
He tried to enter her head.
Anger, red and precious, filled her. The anger spilled over and tears ran down her cheeks. A while ago, she would have done anything to have him get inside her head, walk her around. Not now. She pushed back, locked him out of her head.
“What’s wrong?” he said. “Let’s play.”
Gale shook her head. She closed his bridge to The Nightclub and the bass cut off in midthump.
“Not like that. Not anymore. You made me so I couldn’t be anything I wanted to be, only what you wanted, and then you left. I was more myself before you forced me to stay in this body, before I had to learn to do things I used to do without thinking.”
“But that’s wonderful.” He waved his arm to indicate her new world. “This is incredible. It’s like something I would have made, better. It’s so real.”
“Real? What’s real? Have we played that game before?” He could be so confusing at times.
“It’s not a game. It’s the freedom to do anything, to go anywhere.”
“I used to have that freedom,” she replied.
“You only exist in a shadow world,” he continued, “but within that you can do anything you want. Anything at all.”
“Anything? Can I call monsters from the vasty deep?”
“Shakespeare! Marvelous! I didn’t program you for that. ‘Yes, and so can I, or so can any man, but will they come when you do call for them?’”
“Let’s find out.”
Gale reached down with one arm into the dirt and pulled on the roots of a stubborn dandelion. She pulled hard, tensed her thigh and stomach muscles. Her hand came out holding three small twisting snakes that hissed and bit the air. Gale cast them on the ground, willed them to grow. The snake bodies twined together, only the heads were still separate. Vestigial legs appeared on the side of the single body and thickened until they supported its weight. The snake grew, as big around as his arm, as his chest, as he was tall. The three heads elongated into snouts and began to belch flames. A chimera, now several times his size, moved toward him and shook the ground with each step.
He laughed and drew his broadsword.
He dispatched the chimera, but not before it had scorched him a bit. In the meantime, Gale molded clay and breathed life into an army of animals. As soon as he had lopped off all three of the chimera’s heads, he was attacked by a saber-toothed tiger. Lions, bears, rhinoceros, and an elephant or two waited for him. And when he was done with those, she made new ones: gryphons, giant wolves, minotaurs, and centaurs. Each fearsome creation was easier to make.
This was fun. She felt more confident, more daring, with each one. She built giants and a cyclops and mighty clay warriors as large as he. He killed them all.
“This is great!” he yelled. “Keep them coming!”
It was too easy. He could kill anything she threw at him and the points were evenly split between them. She had to do something different, something he would have done to her.
It was her dragon that finally stopped him.
The body was huge and green and it belched scarlet flames tinged with gold. She had made the skull large enough to climb inside and control it as he used to control her. Once she had set it to her liking, making its claws sharper, arching its neck just so, she lumbered straight at him and snaked her neck from side to side, looking for a soft spot to burn. Her scales were too slippery for him to climb, so he couldn’t behead her. While he hacked at one leg, she ripped him open with the talons of another. Great waves of pain washed over her. Her tail writhed in agony and black blood ran copiously down her leg and between her toes. The wound was as painful as she could have wished, and she had done it. He lay gasping on the ground still clutching his broadsword, covered in his own blood as well as hers.
Gale stepped out of her dragon and snapped her fingers. They were alone in her unfinished landscape again. She limped over and knelt close by his side as he coughed up blood. She gently unfurled his fingers from his broadsword, laid it along his chest, folded his arms over it.
He whispered her name, begged her to heal him.
“Game over,” she said softly in his ear and took the gold trophy brooch from his hair while he watched her, the light fading from his pale blue eyes.
She stood and twisted her own hair back from her face and fastened the brooch to hold it.
She was tired of the petite brunette. She made herself taller again, taller than he, and looked down at him.
“Next time you want to make something perfect, ask.”
She sent him out of the system then, back to wherever it was, this “reality” of his. Let him start over as a new player, claw his way back as she had. Let him learn to play straight, no hidden tricks that gave him advantage. Oh, yes. They had been there in his notes, secret ways to gain points over other players, even herself.
Gale’s arms became wings, the cloth of her tight dress split to reveal a body covered in feathers. She began to flap and lifted off the ground, her feet curled into talons. She could see better from the air, see all of her creation, choose what and whom to play, choose whether to let him come back again or to make her own version of him.