Et in Arcadia Alter Egos, Chapter Three

Mini-Flash Juniper wasn’t treated to much of a prelude. It consisted of a huge green head with pointy ears, dominating a telescreen and laughing once.

“Says you,” Maureen retorted.

Then level one began, and Pat had been correct. Even for the likes of Juniper, who picked up new skills more or less instantaneously, it presented an arduous challenge. Secret Agent Calvin might have been able to throw glittering darts from his hands, but the entire interior of the warehouse which he was compelled to traverse fairly swarmed with hooded hordes, gaunt to a man and no doubt hardened mercenaries all beneath their conical cowls. Mini-Flash Juniper hung in, serving out left and right, for a single hit melted the foes to slurry which seeped floorwards and was gone. Yet for each she evaporated thus there were more, and some shot shards of their own, such that each time Calvin reeled back, Juniper felt as though the same sting had been inflicted on her thighs or body. Other assailants clung to Calvin, whereat it became a matter of wildly waggling the joystick to free him from their unwanted advances. Juniper gritted her teeth, but these last trespasses had an especial way of sapping Calvin’s life-bar to the red, and no end yet to the war-zone lay in sight.

Enough! Wrestling her hapless charge free once more, Mini-Flash Juniper had him leap, grasping for the balcony rail above and so swinging himself to the higher plane. That was a little breathing-space, at least, while the faceless thugs scaled piles of packing-crates to vault after her. Juniper slipped Calvin in through a door behind which a med-kit was magically suspended, and he emerged again with all his gauges back to full.

“That’s the way, Jen!” Maureen cheered.

Three assailants in a line were crossing the balcony at pace. Mini-Flash Juniper, to conserve darts, had Calvin crouch and trip them over the edge one after the other.

“Looks as if it’s going well!” pronounced Flashsatsumas approvingly.

No sooner had he spoken than the ledge ended in a precipice, below which on the shopfloor awaited a figure Juniper knew at a glance for the guardian. His raiment was too ostentatious for him to be one of the rank and file, although no secondary energy-bar manifested itself onscreen. One hit would do it, as with any of his cronies, but Mini-Flash Juniper rapidly learned the difficulty lay in landing that hit.

For this boss loosed his own spinning shuriken in patterns of the widest dispersal, some to shield him from Juniper’s forays, the rest to cut Calvin down.

Within sparse instants it was a very different contest.

Try as she might, Juniper couldn’t get through. Her every dart tinged uselessly from the wall of wheeling steel tips. In desperation she carried Calvin down to the scanty shelter of a crate, all the while sustaining slashes that whittled his precious life-reserves. Volleys of ninja-stars then proceeded to chip away at the slats.

“You had to open your big mouth!” Maureen flung at Flashsatsumas.

Mini-Flash Juniper’s mind was racing. Had her alternate self made an accurate assessment of these machines? Were they designed to leave even girls feeling as Flashsatsumas had?

No. There was a way. There had to be. There always was. And Mini-Flash Juniper thought perhaps she saw it at last, though it was going to call on everything she’d learned from Auntie Green’s close-combat lessons, and just a little hint of somebody else’s Special Program cheesy-crackers self besides.

Timing. Juniper was good at that. She commanded Calvin to stand.

Then she watched, as did her goggling companions, the headlong dive back to action which she herself orchestrated through jump-button and joystick. Secret Agent Calvin, stripped of all vitality but for one lone blood-hued notch, bounded as if suicidal at the deadly hail.

Stripped of all hope were the lamentations which rose from Flashsatsumas and Maureen.

Mini-Flash Juniper let go the controls, and turned herself intangible.

There’d been nothing for it but to go for broke. She still had no way of knowing for sure that what she did out here held any bearing on what happened in there. And she wouldn’t, until –

Calvin mimicked her and passed unhurt through the throwing-stars.

Even the guardian seemed agog, though Juniper was delighted to put him out of his misery. By her next heartbeat Calvin was bound for Pat’s driving game.

Then they were off there themselves at a run, Flashsatsumas flabbergasted while Maureen regaled the whole arcade with news there was an invulnerability cheat for Distant Rumblings and her friend here had only gone and found it. Joining the others at the mock-up car, they beheld on its wide display-monitor a bright red convertible kicking up road-dust, viewed from behind its tailpipe so that only the reverse of Calvin from the shoulders up could be seen. Next to him in the passenger-seat sat a fair-haired girl, the back of whose head looked a little like that of Mini-Flash Juniper.

Pat shifted gears.

Maybe it was part of the blending effect between software and corporeal world which had already been observed, but five spectators summarily felt an urge to catch hold of the plastic shell around which they were gathered, or be left behind in its wake. The sensation truly was that they were moving, digital roadsides flitting by, as sixteen-bit Indianapolis outspread its vista of mountain and sea. Mini-Flash Juniper skirt-smoothed and slid in alongside Pat, while Calvin lifted one hand from the steering-wheel and put it around the girl.

There was a tunnel. They plunged upon its staccato span of concrete and artificial light, then burst out anew into beachside sun.

Pat was putting his rivals behind him, muscling the wheel and the gearstick, yet every motion he made was strong and sure.

Travelling at this imaginary rate seemed to be leaving Juniper a little short of breath.

A tall grey shape was towering from the landscape, and it might have been that every voyager drew a sudden intake on perceiving what it was. Scrolling parallax gradually parted what had seemed a sky-scraping block, that at first it appeared two perpendiculars instead, azure firmament swelling between. Then just as steadily it transpired this interstice was of circular shape, framed by dual elevations in the road, the one farther off leading heavenwards and the nearer describing a plunging descent from the very roof of the sky.

They couldn’t. It wasn’t possible. Surely they weren’t expected to…?

Pat hit the bottom of the slope.

Everyone gaped and gripped the streamlined bodywork tighter still.

Stomachs lurched as the land span below.

Mini-Flash Juniper reached for Pat’s leg and squeezed.

They were upside-down. It still didn’t seem possible, and yet –

Now the track was in front of them again. All of a sudden it was no different to coasting down a very steep hill. A second later it was hard to believe the gradient had ever been frightening. And a second after that, they were on level ground once more.

The company remembered they were able to breathe out.

Somehow they’d made it, though no-one knew how, and Pat blasted past the finish-line in a graphical kaleidoscope of laurel-wreaths and champagne bottles and billowing chequered flags. Even the likes of Mini-Flash Juniper and Flashsatsumas were able to deduce the signification of these joyous Earth-images. Pat was in first place, and Calvin had outrun his peril.

The arrows appeared, and Mini-Flash Juniper selected the glass-sided grab-a-prize machine which stood on the arcade’s rim.

Extracting a six-inch-tall Calvin from atop a mound of cuddly toys was a veritable rest-cure after everything else that had happened that day. Nor did it come as a surprise to anyone when Mini-Flash Juniper on her first attempt was the one to deftly snag Calvin’s singlet and deposit him in the receptacle below, which act seemed to snap the malfunctioning games back to optimal status. Over the course of the afternoon Calvin reverted to his ordinary dimensions, such that by the time he was setting off for the cartoons that evening, he was as lofty as he’d thus far in his life been.

“I’ve heard of growing up fast at my age!” was his remark to the others.

“Sometimes I think you’re too grown-up, Calvin,” said Mini-Flash Juniper, and they all laughed.

END OF CHAPTER THREE