Entry Six

  The Hook

  We reached the strip mall five blocks later. I turned Thomas’s chair into the nearly empty parking lot and decelerated to normal cruising speed again so I could catch my breath. The mall had only four storefronts. One was a laundromat, of course, which was next to a greasy-spoon Chinese restaurant. After ordering take-out from them a couple of times, we speculated that the same people owned both establishments and routinely used laundry soap in their recipes whenever they ran low on ingredients. Yep, that bad. The third store was like a mom-and-pop version of a Dollar Store but with an excessive number of pull-string pi?atas.

  We angled past them all toward the far end of the building, cutting through the parking lot until I brought us to a dead stop in front of the new store.

  “Wow,” Thomas whispered.

  Two large picture windows flanked the shop’s glass door, and both had been painted top-to-bottom with incredible, photo-realistic, fantasy art scenes. They were so stunning, so intricately detailed that for a while, I forgot we were still in the middle of the parking lot. The scene to the left of the door portrayed a quartet of elven warriors posing with their weapons at the ready. They were formed up in front of a gorgeous, pearlescent-walled city. Their weapons were awesome, but it was their armor that took my breath away.

  Coming from someone who’d played almost every fantasy-themed RPG from the last twenty years or so, that was saying something. These guys—and one girl, I noticed—were dressed up in stuff that made even the high-paid 3D modelers for cutting-edge games like Ancient Tomes, Baldur’s Gate, and Elder Scrolls look like unimaginative, peasant-rank amateurs. Gold and silver scrollwork covered every inch of every piece they wore. There were no flat surfaces—every pauldron, cuirass, greave, sabaton, and vambrace was covered in stylized patterns layered with curves and embedded symbols wrought in soft hues of muted yellows, dusty roses, baby blues, and even pale pinks.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  And the elves themselves weren’t what I would call normal either. Elves in most games were fair-skinned and blond or silver-haired, whereas these elves were somewhat darker-skinned. Two of the males had bronzed, dark-tanned skin tones. All three guys sported the coolest hairstyles I’d ever seen in a fantasy game, with shaved patterns in their otherwise long hair that gave them a cyberpunkish flare.

  The girl elf was quite a bit younger than the guys, maybe the equivalent of a human twelve or thirteen-year-old. She had a mix of free-flowing and intricately braided hair that started white and gradually turned into shades of purple and violet as it cascaded over one shoulder and flowed down to her hip. The girl was also trope-tastically cute, although her eyes were a striking raspberry red.

  As amazing as the scene on the left was, it was the scene on the right that soon caught and held my full attention. There, standing before a continuation of the same pearl-toned city wall, was a massive, twenty-foot-tall, robot-looking thing. It wasn’t futuristic, though. It was constructed of the same scroll-worked, fantasy-genre armor as that of the elves, and it held aloft a huge, translucent, emerald greatsword. If I had to guess, it was a suit of elvish combat armor or perhaps an animated golem.

  Standing atop the mech/golem thing’s right shoulder was a tall, regal elf. He was decked out in breathtaking ivory armor and held a pennant displaying an ivory shield centered on a pale violet field. The man wore a half-helm that covered the upper half of his face and rose into a jewel-encrusted, seven-pointed crown. Below the crown-helm combo, his right cheek was cleft with a jagged, red scar that cut a path through his close-cropped beard. Behind his helm, I could just make out eyes the color of blue, glacial ice.

  “Dude,” Thomas whispered. At first, I couldn’t answer. The man, obviously the monarch of the fantastic city that dominated the background behind him, had stolen my thoughts away. He exuded power, both royal authority and battle prowess. “Whatever game that is, I call first dibs on the play-through.”

  I nodded. “Cool, but do you think it’s a game or just artwork? There’s no title or release date or anything.” The only wording on the outside of the store was found above the doorway itself, where a plain, wooden sign read, “Florian’s Realm.”

  “One way to find out.”

  I took a slow breath, feeling oddly nervous. My anticipation to visit the store had been swapped for sudden anxiety. “Alright then, let’s go.” I grabbed the handles of Thomas’s chair and started us toward the door.

  “Mush!” Thomas exclaimed, pantomiming the cracking of a whip.

  “Watch it.”

  “Engage thrusters,” he said, settling back in his chair like some high and mighty starship captain.

  “Screw you.”