Maybe you can help me stop sparklegeddon! In modern-day Los Angeles, a shadowy faction led by the governor of California develops the arcane art of combat linguistics, planting the seeds of a future totalitarian empire. Isobel is the queen of the medieval rave–themed VR game Sparkle Dungeon. Her prowess in the game makes her an ideal candidate to learn the secrets of power morphemes—unnaturally dense units of meaning that warp perception when skillfully pronounced. But Isobel’s reputation makes her the target of a strange resistance movement led by spellcasting anarchists, who may be the only thing stopping a cabal from toppling California over the edge of a terrible transformation, with forty million lives at stake. Time is short for Isobel to level up and choose a side—because that cabal has attracted much bigger and weirder enemies than the anarchist resistance, emerging from dark and vicious dimensions of reality and heading straight for planet Earth!
Release date:
January 11, 2022
Publisher:
Tom Doherty Associates
Print pages:
448
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No, but seriously, that’s my ranking on the leaderboard: Queen of Sparkle Dungeon, the finest player to ever set foot inside its glittering tunnels and cavernous cuddle pits. No one but me has ever played a perfect game of Sparkle Dungeon; I have done so three times, once while restricting myself to nothing more than a moonbeam kaleidoscope as a weapon. I was the first to meet the villainous boss, Sandpaper Slim, and defeat him and his highly-irritating-especially-against-bare-skin minions. To this day, no one has ever finished Sparkle Dungeon 3: Mirrorball and Chain faster than me, and one time I beat Sparkle Dungeon 2: Glowsticks and Gemstones while running in a slow-ass emulator on Windows XP just to own the Sparkle Bros.
Right now, I’m getting my ass seriously kicked.
I’m in the midst of the final battle of Sparkle Dungeon 4: Assassins of Glitter. By my side is the sole surviving member of my raiding party, the Keeper of the Moonlight Prism. You might think I’d be worried, surrounded by—wait for it—Assassins of Glitter, with their villainous leader, Rhinestone Randall, lobbing glitter bombs at us from atop his tower of stolen Chicago house records, looking absolutely smashing in a gleaming metallic leisure suit and sporting a sparkling golden bouffant. You might think I’d be tired of dodging armor-piercing Bedazzler rays and slashing my way through corrupted glam rockers who thought adding electronic beats to their back catalogue would gain them relevance with the EDM festival crowd.
But I want those stolen Chicago house records. I’m pretty sure some really good funk records are in that stack, too.
I bring out my Electronic Dance Mace and start swinging, smacking assassins out of my way in time to the soundtrack, which is thumping along at an aggressive but not unpleasant 130 beats per minute. In my off hand, I’m periodically blasting holes in assassins with a kaleidoscope—in this game, kaleidoscopes are beam weapons, not toys. Next to me, the Keeper of the Moonlight Prism is wielding her namesake magic item, spraying concentrated moonlight all around us, which partially shields us from attacks and partially distracts our foes by lighting up the room with gorgeous, mesmerizing patterns that would look very pretty projected on the ceiling of a chill room. The assassins are still doing their share of damage, despite our efforts; my diamond armor is cracked and chipped all over the place, and the Keeper’s meteorite shield is in tatters.
“Could use a heal,” she says.
I have about twenty healing spells in my arsenal, most of which we used getting this far, but I do have one last trick up my sleeve on that front. I cast an Uplifting Encore spell, which gives us a nice fat hit point bonus and about five minutes of temporary boosts to all our stat pools, as well as changing the soundtrack to an excellent deep house cut I’ve got queued up for the occasion.
“That’s the last one,” I tell her.
“Are you holding back here?” she says, as we grind our way through an endless sea of assassins. That’s the problem, really: Rhinestone Randall is churning out new assassins somehow, wearing us down on our way to face him.
“I just want to get a little closer,” I tell her.
* * *
In the game, the unwashed rabble clamors to join my raiding parties, and I bestow the favor of my enlightened company with a whimsical and capricious air. My live streams attract countless voyeurs, seeking not simply gameplay tips but also my effervescent commentary. When I am not rescuing the Realm from imminent opacity, I am also a core moderator on the Sparkle Forums, a principal editor on the SparkleWiki, and publisher of the eminent email newsletter, the Sparkle Digest. I am an esteemed expert in Sparkle Dungeon lore, gathering knowledge via repeated playthroughs of intricate scenarios in order to learn the boundaries of the Realm, the traits of its allies and enemies, the entirety of possible responses the game might offer when pushed to its limits. Indeed, the SparkleWiki originated as my personal game diary, which I published to great acclaim; I then enhanced it over many months and distributed it for the edification of those who would follow in my gem-encrusted footsteps.
I can recite the marketing description of each game perfectly, which I deploy at the rare parties I attend as a bit of a stunt. The original marketing description for the first Sparkle Dungeon is still my favorite:
“For eons, the Sparkle Realm has enjoyed peace, thanks to the Elite Adventurers of the Diamond Brigade. But now their champion and commander, the Mighty Mirrored Paladin, has been kidnapped, and an abrasive menace threatens to tarnish the gleam of the Realm. Take the oath—become a Sworn Protector of the Sparkle Realm—strap on your sparkle-powered, neon-trimmed roller skates—and quest into the Sparkle Dungeon itself. Can you rescue the Mighty Mirrored Paladin in time to defeat the Invaders from Planet Grime? Appropriate for all ages.”
Which was later amended to “appropriate for ages 13+” because too many children were traumatized by the sheer number of feral baby rainbows you need to kill to level up even once.
I have one major spell left that I’ve been saving for this final battle, because it’s debilitating to cast, but the damage it deals is astronomical. The spell is called Light Show, and now is the time for it. I begin emitting a guttural sequence of shrieks and hisses, exaggerated clicks and pops, ripping through the delivery of the spell in about five seconds.
My vision is suddenly clouded as a poisonous fog is released all around me. Then my avatar is temporarily transformed into a white-hot ball of light that shoots deadly lasers and spotlights that I can aim at will, piercing through the fog and looking hella cool, slicing through Rhinestone Randall from halfway across his lair. Powerful strobe lights and flashing LED arrays go off all throughout the radius of the spell, causing psychic damage to each assassin within line of sight, and I watch them sink to the ground like club kids on their very first bumps of ketamine.
Uplifting Encore comes to a close in perfect timing with Rhinestone Randall’s defeat.
The Keeper and I survey the room and the stacks of dead assassins sprawled three feet deep on all sides. They’re actually quite pretty when they’re dead, what with the Moonlight Prism reflecting moonlight off of their glittering corpses onto the walls. We carefully thread our way to the stack of house records that Rhinestone Randall had been hoarding, watching for any surprise traps that might be lurking. Casting Light Show damages the spellcaster, too, the game’s way of ensuring you don’t roam the Sparkle Realm as a beautiful but murderous visual effect, so I’m down to just a tiny handful of hit points. One last trap could end my epic run at beating Sparkle Dungeon 4: Assassins of Glitter in campaign mode before anyone else.
The Keeper of the Moonlight Prism is with me, of course; she’ll share in the loot, and she’ll gain a fat stack of experience points. She’s three levels behind me, and she plays as though she’s only two levels behind me.
But I’m the one who just offed the big bad. Plus I’m the one who put together the raiding party that got us this far, although RIP to my pal Sir Trancelot, who got whacked by an eight-foot demonic subwoofer blaring the bassline to “Disco Inferno” at deadly decibel levels a few dance floors back. Didn’t affect me, of course, because I had the entire Frankie Knuckles discography blasting in a two-foot radius around my head at the time. This is possible because I’m multi-classed: I’m a formidable fighter, a powerful spellcaster, and an elite DJ with an epic record collection.
And most importantly, I’m the one who found the map to Rhinestone Randall’s palace of pomposity in the first place. It was disguised as liner notes in a series of bootleg albums purporting to be Jesse Saunders live sets from 1984, which c’mon, gimme a break, suuuure you were there pal, but still.
So I’m keenly excited to sift through the tower of house records that the final boss has accumulated during his reign of terror. As I approach, however, the records are revealed to be a mirage, disguising my true reward for being the first person to complete this game in campaign mode: a mighty, gorgeous broadsword, with a gleaming golden hilt, in a scabbard inscribed with the sword’s name in stylish filigree:
I have acquired the artifact known as Blades Per Minute.
It’s the fourth such artifact I’ve collected, one for each game in the Sparkle Dungeon series. All four of these artifacts are unique, and all four of them are mine.
The Sparkle Bros, of course, are going to freak out that I got this one, too. They’ll be up in my face on the forums about ruining the game, and I’ll just keep posting Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies at them (“Yes, I know you wish you had my awesome new sword, but have you tried making an exhaustive list of everything you might do and then doing the last thing on the list?”) as I frolic about my secret sanctum, the Iridescent Warehouse, with Blades Per Minute stashed safely in a display case marked IN CASE OF DUBSTEP, BREAK GLASS, PLUG YOUR EARS, AND RUN FOR YOUR LIFE until my next big adventure.
02
Outside the game, I was Isobel Bailie, and I mostly hung out in my apartment a lot.
Sparkle Dungeon was a VR game, which you played with a headset to give you an immersive 360-degree interface to the game world and a base station to track your movements as your basic setup. I mean, you could get as fancy as you wanted—get a whole platform that you strapped yourself into, or chain a bunch of dance mats together, or plop your lazy self down in a racing chair if you didn’t want to stand up while you play; you could use grip controllers or gloves or get weighted weapons that matched your character’s specific gear; you could set up wind machines in your living room, hire the neighbor kids to clap when you did something cool, whatever it took to make it feel immersive—but all you truly needed was a headset, a base station, and a console. And some room to dance, because this game frequently required you to “bust a move.”
And if you’re like me, you needed a place where you could be loud, because the best interface to the spellcasting system was vocal. This, of course, used to drive my girlfriend, Wendy, up the walls. We had a routine where once a week or so, we’d argue according to a specific template.
“Can’t you just use joysticks or something?” she’d say, after a particularly loud and brutal battle. “You sound like you’re being mauled by a mountain lion.”
“Sure,” I’d say, “if I wanted to lose. I mean, I could play this game with a keyboard and fire off spells with the arrows and the number keys—”
“Yes!” she’d say. “Then I wouldn’t be forced to wear noise-canceling headphones on top of noise-canceling headphones to get any peace in this apartment!”
And I’d say, “Look, I do more damage and I’m more accurate when I’m firing off spells with my voice.”
To which she’d reply, “Yes, and your relationship suffers multiple negative Yelp reviews every time you play.”
But the fact was, the game system rewarded you for starting with vocal spellcasting in the original Sparkle Dungeon, and continuing to learn new techniques all the way through Sparkle Dungeon 4. You could eventually deliver complex sequences of spells by compressing the number of syllables required for each one, which saved you valuable time in combat, amplified spell effects, and freed up cognitive capacity to execute critical dance moves.
The game cheekily referred to voice spellcasting as “diva-casting,” named after the emotional vocal divas on many a house cut. But it did not sound like a track that a true diva would lay down in a studio.
It sounded a little like you were being mauled by a mountain lion.
* * *
So you could play the Sparkle Dungeon series in a stand-alone mode, where you just dropped into a single game and played the heck out of it and then you were done; or you could play in “campaign” mode, which networked all four Sparkle Dungeon games together into one long quest and made everything harder. When campaign mode was first launched, you could briefly acquire new epic level artifacts by being the first person to complete each individual game on your epic adventure. I launched myself at this task. I was already known as a jerk about acquiring unique loot, but I still had a few challengers come at me, and I took it very seriously, and I lost a job I rather liked, and uh, Wendy broke up with me and then left town, but I absolutely destroyed campaign mode, and was duly rewarded with a total of four epic level artifacts: the Electronic Dance Mace, the Psybient Crystal, the Remix Ring, and Blades Per Minute.
As I predicted, people were pretty freaking irritated when I pulled off collecting the whole set. I admit I was already a little insufferable just being on top of the leaderboard as Queen since—oh, let me check my notes here, ah that’s right—DAY ONE. But look, someday, some young, incredibly skilled tyro would come along, and would be in the right place at the right time and would suddenly be the hot shit and—just kidding, that wouldn’t happen, I would always be triumphant and would defeat all who dare oppose me for I was endless and may my reign never dim!
Anyway, I suspected the development team for the game never expected these artifacts to operate in tandem as a set. I just wasn’t confident this was one of their test cases. But obviously that’s the very first thing I tried once I had them all. Because, and this question is important: why wouldn’t you?
I was with my usual posse, who were accustomed to providing acerbic commentary for my live streams: the respawned Sir Trancelot, and the mysterious Keeper of the Moonlight Prism. We were goofing off in the wake of completing the final boss battle of SD4, literally dancing upon the bones of our glittering enemies. I had Blades Per Minute whirring in my right hand, with the Psybient Crystal grafted onto its pommel, glowing an eerie green and generating weird arpeggiation; meanwhile, the Remix Ring was perched brightly on my left hand, allowing me to remix the game soundtrack in real time, while I also thumped the Electronic Dance Mace on the ground repeatedly to generate a serious bass hit. It was a silly stunt, I admit; if I’d been attacked right at that exact moment—who am I kidding, there would be dead attackers at that exact moment—but my point is, it would not have been super graceful.
Instead, the entire game environment flickered several times, like it was glitching or live updating or something. My display went completely black for a couple seconds, and the next thing I knew, we were staring at an enormous, steadily expanding rift from sky to ground off on the horizon.
“Did I do that?” I asked.
“Turn your shit off!” Sir Trancelot shouted. I deactivated my artifacts, and the rift stopped expanding.
There was nothing to see through the rift, no “outside the Realm” that anyone had designed and made available for us to discover. It was just indistinct digital noise, like a lightly billowing fabric of gray and white pixelated threads.
“Did I break the Sparkle Realm?” I asked.
“Relax,” said the Keeper of the Moonlight Prism. “Whatever happened, they’ll patch it.”
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