Ready Player One - Ernest Cline [46]
It was Art3mis.
She wore a suit of scaled gunmetal-blue armor that looked more sci-fi than fantasy. Twin blaster pistols were slung low on her hips in quickdraw holsters, and there was a long, curved elvish sword in a scabbard across her back. She wore fingerless Road Warrior–style racing gloves and a pair of classic Ray-Ban shades. Overall, she seemed to be going for a sort of mid-’80s postapocalyptic cyberpunk girl-next-door look. And it was working for me, in a big way. In a word: hot.
As she walked toward me, the heels of her studded combat boots clicked on the stone floor. She halted just out of my sword’s reach but did not draw her own blade. Instead, she slid her shades up onto her avatar’s forehead—a blatant affectation, since sunglasses didn’t actually affect a player’s vision—and looked me up and down, making a show of sizing me up.
For a moment I was too star-struck to speak. To break my paralysis, I reminded myself that the person operating the avatar in front of me might not be a woman at all. This “girl,” whom I’d been cyber-crushing on for the past three years, might very well be an obese, hairy-knuckled guy named Chuck. Once I’d conjured up that sobering image, I was able to focus on my situation, and the question at hand: What was she doing here? After five years of searching, I thought it was highly improbable that we’d both discovered the Copper Key’s hiding place on the same night. Too big of a coincidence.
“Cat got your tongue?” she asked. “I said: Who. The hell. Are you?”
Like her, I had my avatar’s nametag switched off. Clearly, I wanted to remain anonymous, especially under the circumstances. Couldn’t she take the hint?
“Greetings,” I said, bowing slightly. “I am Juan Sánchez Villa-Lobos Ramírez.”
She smirked. “Chief metallurgist to King Charles the Fifth of Spain?”
“At your service,” I replied, grinning. She’d caught my obscure Highlander quote and thrown another right back at me. It was Art3mis, all right.
“Cute.” She glanced over my shoulder, up at the empty dais, then back at me. “So, spill it. How did you do?”
“Do at what?”
“Jousting against Acererak?” she said, as if it were obvious.
Suddenly, I understood. This wasn’t the first time she’d been here. I wasn’t the first gunter to decipher the Limerick and find the Tomb of Horrors. Art3mis had beaten me to it. And since she knew about the Joust game, she’d obviously already faced the lich herself. But if she already had the Copper Key, there wouldn’t be any reason for her to come back here. So she clearly didn’t have the key yet. She’d faced the lich at Joust and he’d beaten her. So she’d come back to try again. For all I knew, this could be her eighth or ninth attempt. And she obviously assumed the lich had beaten me, too.
“Hello?” she said, tapping her right foot impatiently. “I’m waiting?”
I considered making a break for it. Just running right past her, back out through the labyrinth and up to the surface. But if I ran, she might suspect that I had the key and decide to try to kill me to get it. The surface of Ludus was clearly marked as a safe zone on the OASIS map, so no player-versus-player combat was allowed. But I had no way of knowing if the same was true of this tomb, because it was underground, and it didn’t even appear on the planet map.
Art3mis looked like a formidable opponent. Body armor. Blaster pistols. And that elvish sword she was carrying might be vorpal. If even half of the exploits she’d mentioned on her blog were true, her avatar was probably at least fiftieth level. Or higher. If PvP combat was permitted down here, she’d kick my tenth-level ass.
So I had to play this cool. I decided to lie.
“I got creamed,” I said. “Joust isn’t really my game.”
She relaxed her posture slightly. That seemed to be the answer she wanted to hear. “Yeah, same here,” she said in a commiserating tone. “Halliday programmed old King Acererak with some pretty wicked AI, didn’t he? He’s insanely hard to beat.” She glanced down at my sword, which I was still brandishing defensively. “You can