Ready Player One - Ernest Cline [42]
“Of course you do,” Acererak said, motioning for me to rise. “And you’ve come to the right place.” He stood, and his mummified skin cracked like old leather as he moved. I clutched my sword more tightly, still anticipating an attack.
“How can I know that you are worthy of possessing the Copper Key?” he asked.
Holy shit! How the hell was I supposed to answer that? And what if I gave the wrong answer? Would he suck out my soul and incinerate me?
I racked my brain for a suitable reply. The best I could come up with was, “Allow me to prove my worth, noble Acererak.”
The lich let out a long, disturbing cackle that echoed off the chamber’s stone walls. “Very well!” he said. “You shall prove your worth by facing me in a joust!”
I’d never heard of an undead lich king challenging someone to a joust. Especially not in a subterranean burial chamber. “All right,” I said uncertainly. “But won’t we be needing horses for that?”
“Not horses,” he replied, stepping away from his throne. “Birds.”
He waved a skeletal hand at his throne. There was a brief flash of light, accompanied by a transformation sound effect (which I was pretty sure had been lifted from the old Super Friends cartoon). The throne melted and morphed into an old coin-operated videogame cabinet. Two joysticks protruded from its control panel, one yellow and one blue. I couldn’t help but grin as I read the name on the game’s backlit marquee: JOUST. Williams Electronics, 1982.
“Best two out of three games,” Acererak rasped. “If you win, I shall grant you what you seek.”
“What if you win?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“If I am victorious,” the lich said, the rubies in his eye sockets blazing even brighter, “then you shall die!” A ball of swirling orange flame appeared in his right hand. He raised it threateningly.
“Of course,” I said. “That was my first guess. Just wanted to double-check.”
The fireball in Acererak’s hand vanished. He stretched out his leathery palm, which now held two shiny quarters. “The games are on me,” he said. He stepped up to the Joust machine and dropped both quarters into the left coin slot. The game emitted two low electronic chimes and the credit counter jumped from zero to two.
Acererak took hold of the yellow joystick on the left side of the control panel and closed his bony fingers around it. “Art thou ready?” he croaked.
“Yeah,” I said, taking a deep breath. I cracked my knuckles and grabbed the Player Two joystick with my left hand, poising my right hand over the Flap button.
Acererak rocked his head from left to right, cracking his neck. It sounded like a snapping tree branch. Then he slapped the Two Player button and the joust began.
Joust was a classic ’80s arcade game with a strange premise. Each player controls a knight armed with a lance. Player One is mounted on an ostrich, while Player Two is mounted on a stork. You flap your wings to fly around the screen and “joust” with the other player, and also against several computer-controlled enemy knights (who are all mounted on buzzards). When you crash into an opponent, whoever’s lance is higher on the screen wins the joust. The loser is killed and loses a life. Whenever you kill one of the enemy knights, his buzzard craps out a green egg that quickly hatches into another enemy knight if you don’t scoop it up in time. There’s also a winged pterodactyl that appears once in a while to wreak havoc.
I hadn’t played Joust in over a year. It was one of Aech’s favorite games, and for a while he’d had a Joust cabinet in his chat room. He used to challenge me to a game whenever he wanted to settle an argument or some asinine pop-culture dispute. For a few months, we played almost every day. In the beginning, Aech was slightly better than I was, and he had a habit of gloating over his victories. This had really irked me, so I started practicing Joust on my own, playing a few games a night against an AI opponent. I honed my skills until I finally got good enough to beat Aech, repeatedly and consistently. Then I began to gloat over him, savoring my revenge. The