A silken laugh suddenly erupted from the amused girl. “Fine then, you don’t look so bad either, I suppose, for a-” Her voice had been confident and smooth, but then she stopped suddenly like a sprinter at his finest hour rushing full into a stone wall. Just then her smile, a byproduct of laughter, vanished, and her nose crinkled. Her eyes flashed.
A moment passed, and then it was D_Light who was puzzled. “For a what?” D_Light leaned in inquisitively. He saw what could be a look of disgust on her face. He repeated the question. “Don’t leave me hanging. Not bad for a what?”
“Well, for a male, I meant to say. Your kind is not exactly what anyone would call beautiful.” She shook her head as if in mock sadness.
D_Light smiled. “Yes, we men are all angles and boxiness with little to interest the eye.” He gestured over the length of his body as though to say, “Have a good look.”
The girl nodded and puckered her lips with mock admiration. “Aesthetics aside, might I ask what you are doing out here? I saw you leaning against that tree and it inspired me. I thought, why not just stand here and take in the new sun?”
“Oh, I’m just waiting for some friends,” he replied.
“I’m here as much for the sounds as the view,” the girl said, looking into the horizon. “There was a storm a few mornings back. There’s nothing like the wind in your face and the rush of the leaves and the branches and the grass.” The poplar tree leaves rustled with a hiss as though in agreement.
Damn, D_Light thought. K_Slice was right. She’s gotta be a hippie sideliner.
Although not happy with the prospect of giving K_Slice the pot, it thrilled him to think that he was speaking to a sideliner. He had only met a few in his life.
“Yes, it’s nice-for a ghetto,” returned D_Light. Oh Soul, I’m being stupid again. She might live here, D_Light thought at the very moment the words left his mouth.
The girl seemed oblivious to his faux pas. “The flowers are especially appealing,” she said. “I hate it when those clods go off the paths, stomping about without a thought in their heads, crushing them underfoot like they’re nothing.”
D_Light nodded with feigned sympathy. “ Those clods, huh? So I take it you don’t play spank games?” D_Light grinned at her. He decided it was time to start fishing for clues regarding this girl’s identity. There was a game on, and he needed to keep up the players’ interest.
She shook her head.
“Um, you do know when those clods are jacked in they can’t actually see the flowers, right?”
She nodded, but D_Light detected a note of surprise crossing her face. “These guys can’t see you, me, or anything the way it actually is,” D_Light said offhandedly so as not to sound like a know-it-all.
The woman seemed to hesitate as she toed the dirt. “No, I don’t…um, I don’t do them. What are they like?”
Although muted, D_Light could see in the periphery a text from K_Slice. It read, She doesn’t “do” them? Is that some kind of throwback hipster-speak?
D_Light cleared his throat. “Well, a spank game works basically like any SkinWare app works. The game software keeps track of what is in the game and how everything behaves and, just as importantly, where everything is. So, like if I was jacked in, that tree would look different. Maybe it’d be a pillar from an ancient ruin or, I don’t know, a big ol’ lamppost. The tree’s still there, it’d just have a different skin.”
“And the flowers?” she asked. “What do they see those as?”
Since D_Light had been playing in NeverWorld among these very mounds for the last eight hours, he actually knew the answer. “Oh, they don’t see the flowers at all. The game is only obligated to show you stuff that can hurt you if you run into it.”
“So the flowers don’t make the cut,” she remarked with disappointment. “They don’t make the cut, so they don’t even exist.”
“You have the idea, yeah,” replied D_Light with a tone of encouragement. “Spankers can feel them a little bit, maybe even be tripped up when they’re running hard, but in general, they don’t pay them any mind. Spankers really are oblivious to this world.”
Enough lecturing the nOOb. When you gonna ask her how much? TermaMix texted.
The girl crossed her arms, drawing her cloak around her. She adopted a pensive look, as though seeing spankers with a whole new level of understanding.
“Allow me to demonstrate,” D_Light said. He enthusiastically started down the mound while waving for her to follow. She crinkled her brow suspiciously, but smiled faintly as she tentatively trailed behind.
D_Light got on his haunches not two feet from the crouching spanker he had pointed out earlier. He then spoke loudly at the crouching man, using a strange, unidentifiable accent. “I say, dear sir, do you have a fresh bowl of porridge?” The spanker did not move, but continued staring straight ahead. His body, however, tensed up.
D_Light stood up. “You see? They can barely hear you. That probably sounded to him like a faint echo.”
The girl chuckled softly. “Interesting,” she said quietly. She then walked over to D_Light and the crouching man, somewhat hesitantly as though approaching a beast caught in a trap. She waved her hands in front of his face. The man followed the movement and scowled, but he did not get out of his crouching position. Her eyes widened with surprise. “I thought they were blind to the outside world.”
“Not exactly blind,” D_Light whispered. “They see you as something, probably a ghost, um, but not a nasty or dangerous sort of ghost. If the game could cut you out completely it would, but-” D_Light interrupted himself with a chuckle. “I mean, just because you and he are in different audio and visual worlds does not change the hard fact that you share the same physical world. The game has to take that into account.”
The girl seemed intrigued, having the curiosity of a young child. “What about touch?” she asked.
“Oh, certainly. I don’t recommend-” D_Light was going to discourage any physical contact, but it was too late. The woman stuck her index finger into the ribs of the spanker. The man let out a grunt, and then his lips curled into a snarl as he swung his arm around hard. The young woman leaned back just outside of his swing. Nice reflexes, D_Light thought.
The man boomed, “Don’t make me come out there and beat you senseless, you bloody clod!” His eyes were fixed on the woman, and he crouched low, as though to pounce. The girl had already assumed a position, D_Light supposed a defensive one. Her knees were bent slightly, and her body was turned askew so that she did not face him head-on. Instead, her left flank was turned half toward him while her left arm bent up like a shield. He stepped forward and threw a punch hard and straight. She moved swiftly to one side while her left arm swept away his blow. He hit nothing. Although his punch left him wide open, she did not counterstrike; rather, she stepped back a pace and resumed her defensive position. She did not appear afraid or angry, merely curious.
The spanker looked like he was about to yell at her again when he stopped cold. He looked over his shoulder for an instant and then ran off-sprinted, as though the devil himself was chasing him.
D_Light’s eyes met those of the confused girl, and he grinned while biting his lip. “As I was trying to tell you, yes, they can feel just the same when in the spanker game as when outside of it. Oh, and as I imagine you now know, they don’t much like being messed with. It’s considered very impolite.”
The woman relaxed her posture as she watched the spanker go. “Crazy, all this!” She let out a short, nervous laugh. She paused, her bottom lip transforming into a pout. “I feel bad for him. I am sorry I bothered him. Still, how interesting, how sad.”
“Sad? How do you mean?” D_Light inquired.
“I mean, why would someone choose to blind himself to this world? To move around like someone-I don’t know, like someone who is…”
“Perfectly insane?” D_Light interrupted with a laugh.
“Don’t pity them. Spanker games are designed to be fantastic! I play them myself. However, unlike the plebs who haunt this place, I try to control my appetite.”
She looked over at him. D_Light hoped that it would be a look of affection, trust, warmth, or some other positive sentiment, but her expression did not contain any of those things. Rather, she appeared as she had while observing the spanker. She looked like an adult who was discovering something with new, childlike eyes, or perhaps like a young scientist who was hot on the trail of a new and exciting discovery.
D_Light lowered his gaze and kicked at a rock near his shoe. “Well,” he muttered self-consciously, “if you’re
