“Man up, Loopy—’cause I’m taking you down!” Chad barked. “That’s right, I said it.” Suddenly aware that he was on camera, he mugged for the crowd. The gasps turned to cheers. He chewed hard on his gum, blew a bubble, then let loose an Olympic-sized fart. The crowd loved it. “I got my swagger back!” he boomed.
Dylan scrambled to his feet. The cheap shot returned him to reality. As he stumbled into his spotlight, his left nostril was leaking blood. He couldn’t play Xamaica like this; he thought maybe his nose was broken.
“Shhhhh. Lean forward, not back. You have to give the blood a place to go.”
Emma had come up behind him. She put her pirate doll against his nose; he hadn’t even noticed that she had brought it with her, but the darn thing made an excellent sponge. Emma pinched Dylan’s nose bridge, then rolled up the doll’s tiny felt hat and slipped it into his left nostril, stopping the bleeding.
“I-I-I didn’t know you knew how to do that,” Dylan stammered.
“There are a lot of things about me you don’t know,” Emma smiled.
“Gracias por tu ayuda!” Eli said. “That’s a good woman!”
“She’s a nine-year-old girl,” Dylan fired back. “And she carries around a pirate doll.”
Emma crossed her arms. The doll was a sore spot—Chad and his boys had stolen it once, and the whole episode was kind of a disaster. “This isn’t about me. If we lose the apartment, do you really think social services will let the Professor keep us? You have to win that prize.”
“No pressure, huh?” Dylan muttered, as Emma returned to the stands.
A countdown appeared on the big screen: 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1!
Naturally, Dylan and Eli chose each other as teammates. To start the game, a player had to say two and a half simple words:
“It’s on!” Dylan yelled.
* * *
The game had begun. Xamaica’s technology was a trade secret: users normally signed up online, and without a controller or any visible hardware, the game was transmitted into the field of vision of each of the players. Users were only faintly visible beneath their avatars. One time, Dylan remembered, Emma had tried the game out and she only had one comment afterward: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C. Clarke.” He hated to admit it, but she was so right. Now, playing the game, Dylan looked out onto a tropical land shrouded by a low mist. Of course, he was only viewing a video image, but it seemed totally real. Images of what the players were seeing were projected on the big screens for the crowd.
An orange sun and two pale moons glowed in the blue sky. This is what he loved about Xamaica: it was fantastical and yet so real. It was a world so welcoming it made him want to leave his own.
A player couldn’t choose his or her avatar. Dylan had filled out an online form that had asked all sorts of weird questions, including, Was your great-great-grandaunt left-handed? and, Have you ever eaten a plantain tart under a full moon? and, What’s life all about anyway? Dylan had no idea why they needed to know those things, and he’d left half the answers blank. But soon after, an avatar was assigned to him that was supposed to reflect what he was about. Since Dylan’s avatar was a duppy, it looked like him, only a little transparent. But it had many powers. As a spirit-creature, he was a shape-shifter and a mimic—for brief bursts, he could take on the powers of any magical beast in Xamaica. He could shoot fire like a Rolling Calf, even fly like an Iron Lion—a creature with a lion body, a human face, and huge metallic butterfly wings.
In Xamaica, thanks to the special powers he had, people called Dylan the Duppy Defender. It had a better ring than Loopy.
Dylan looked around to get his bearings. Right beside him was Eli—his avatar was a Rolling Calf, kind of like a Minotaur that’s on fire but never gets burned. When Rolling Calves stampeded they were an unstoppable force. Eli scraped the ground with his hoofs, throwing off sparks. His tail lashed back and forth, trailing flames and smoke. Fire blew from his nostrils. Dylan liked Eli this way.
There were forty-two other avatars in the contest, including a Steel Donkey, half-shark half-vulture Luscas, and a couple slinky Dlos (part-snake, part-human, mostly trouble). They were gathered in the field of combat, a large grassy plain fenced in by palm trees. Dylan had never seen so many magical beasts—it was a fire-breathing, shape-shifting, wind-walking, magical mystery melee.
“Okay, I have a plan.” Eli’s voice sounded bigger, more bullish, when he was playing the game.
“Not again,” groaned Dylan, whose own game voice was distant and echoey, like something rattling around in an attic. “Is this new plan anything like what you pulled in the JV football locker room?”
“Dude—it’s not like the super glue didn’t come out eventually.”
“So what do you have this time?”
“Teamwork.”
“Teamwork? That’s the plan?”
“It’s the Fellowship of the Ring. Harry Potter doesn’t get anything done without his amigos. The Narnia kids have each other’s back. If you want to survive a fantasy situation, you have to roll with a crew. We’re the real Game Changers, man! These other brothers are just playing!”
“So we do everything together? Coordinate every attack?”
“Exactly. Most of these clowns are working together for the first time, or they’re in it for themselves. We work together, we got a shot.”
Dylan figured they had more than a shot, because he had a secret, a way to game the game that nobody else knew. He cupped his hand over his mouth to cover his lips. Many video games had cheat codes—secret ways of gaining access to new levels that were known only to a few. Dylan had stumbled onto the ultimate cheat code for Xamaica—a secret word he only had to say once out loud to unlock and multiply the powers of his avatar. He whispered it now, to himself, and his avatar became supercharged.
About half the competitors went down in the first few seconds. The Luscas were pretty vicious. There was a pair of them and they worked well as a team. They circled the air like flying sharks and swooped down on their victims, seizing them with squidlike tentacles. They were merciless—a couple kids whose avatars were Wata Mamas, seal-like creatures as bulky and as useless as waterlogged mattresses, never had a chance. The last things they saw were six rows of teeth diving down on them from the air. Dylan thought that was a pretty grim way to get offed, even if it was just a video game.
Eli was good at this combat stuff. As a Rolling Calf, he was one of the most powerful creatures. He burned like a forest fire without the forest, and after he took out a couple zombies, nobody else wanted to come near him. His attacks were a one-two punch: he’d throw flames first and trample over anything that was left, which was usually just ashes. Dylan was his advance man, snooping out opponents hiding behind ferns or in the branches of banana trees. With his enhanced powers, nobody could stop him.
“Sweet!” Eli said to Dylan. “You’re a beast!”
Meanwhile, two Seven-Tailed Lizards were doing some damage. Each of their tails could cause an earthquake—and they had fourteen tails between them, each one covered, naturally, in Richter scales. Other avatars were getting crushed by the tremors the two creatures were setting off. Eli couldn’t even get close to them because the ground kept giving way. For a while it looked like the lizards were going to win the battle in a rout.
But, as it turned out, the lizards weren’t much of a team. They kept squabbling with each other about which avatars to go after next. Eventually they began to chase after each other’s tails. That was the end of the tale of the Seven-Tailed Lizards.
There was one other Loopy in the fight.