High Score (Part 3)
You pried a Champion's Card out of the Virtual Arena's unclaimed locker. Bring it to Azra Thorne (location 12,4)
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Objetivo: entregar
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~ start 58d4556c…
The board cycles dark lines, top to bottom. Whatever the machine was keeping, it isn't keeping it anymore.
The card is in your pack. Azra can read a mag stripe.
fimThe locker stands open. The card is not in your pack.
Wedged behind the tray runner - a corner of yellowed card stock. The same card, or one exactly like it.
You take it, more carefully this time.
fimOne locker in the bank is still shut. On its door, a brass tag: S.E.R. - the three letters burning at the top of the board.
The lock is jammed for good. The hinge gave up rusting years ago.
quest: accepted
The hinge shears. Inside: a jacket folded stiff with age, keys to something that no longer exists, and a registration card sitting in a steel tray.
You take the Champion's Card.
Behind you, the board's hum changes pitch.
When you turn, the top line is dark. The score is gone - no letters, no number, nothing left to say anyone ever played.
Azra metered this building for nine nights. He'll want to know what you just switched off.
fimquest: declined
The locker keeps what it has kept this long.
fim~ start Azra
Azra takes the card by its edges, the way he handles anything older than himself. Front, back, a thumbnail down the mag stripe.
Membership card. Personal. Scan date, October '88. And a box here, ticked: RETAIN COPY FOR TOURNAMENT PLAY.
That's what the pods were. You stood in one and it read you - build, reflexes, gear, the whole person in one long exposure. From then on, the copy did the fighting. League nights, on the network, town against town.
Lose every match on your card and walk home without a scratch. That was the product.
He looks up, toward the building.
S.E.R. registered in October. The war beat the season's end. Their copy has been up on that board ever since, playing to an empty room-
He's quiet for exactly as long as it takes to hear that twice.
The card was the registration. Pull the card, void the member. The matches, the score, whoever they were...
His thumb stops on the stripe.
We didn't take a record out of that building. We took its last copy.
The old shamans would say a pod keeps a splinter of whoever stands in it. I say it was data. A recording that played itself very, very well.
Ask me again tonight. You might get the other answer.
He slides the card into a sleeve and labels it in block letters: S.E.R. - REGISTERED OCT '88. LAST MATCH: TODAY.
The stripe will give up a name, and the name goes in the archive. Everything else in that place has died twice now - once with the war, once with us. The name I can keep.
conclui a missãoOpen. For the first time since the war, there's room at the top.
The dead built a machine where nobody bleeds and nothing is lost - then locked the door and lost everything. It's ours now.
Register. Your copy fights, you watch, you walk home whole. Go give that board something to count.
Now you can enter the Virtual Arena and sync your character to start PVP arena fights.
fimThe card. From the locker.
A give-it-here gesture, without looking up.
Bring it to me before the desert eats it.
fimAzra is elbow-deep in the guts of something with valves. Whatever you want, it isn't reaching him.
fim