Lo removed the notebook from her inventory and held it up. It was a battered blue Trapper Keeper. Kira had sliced open the edge of its clear plastic covering so that she could slide a hand-drawn title page underneath it, with The Quest for the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul written on it in her distinctive cursive handwriting. She had also drawn six blue crystal shards in a circle, with a seventh in the center. And below that, at the bottom of the page, she had written: by Kira Underwood.
“It’s for an adventure module that Kira created, all by herself,” L0hengrin said. “After she left Middletown and returned home to London to finish her final year of high school.”
Aech, Art3mis, and Shoto all exchanged looks of surprise.
Lo held out the notebook, offering it to me, and I accepted it with both hands. I stared down at it in amazement, then back up at her.
“Lo, this is amazing!” I said. “It may end up saving all of our lives. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Z,” she said, beaming with pride.
I tore open the Trapper Keeper’s Velcro cover flap. Inside was a plastic three-ring binder filled with over 150 pages of Kira’s handwritten notes, along with dozens of detailed maps and illustrations.
“What’s interesting is that Kira set her Quest for the Seven Shards in Halliday’s D&D campaign setting—Chthonia.”
Chthonia was the name of the fantasy world Halliday had created for his high school Dungeons & Dragons campaign—the same campaign that Kira joined when Og invited her to play D&D with them. Halliday also used Chthonia as the setting for all of his early Anorak’s Quest adventure games. Then, years later, when Halliday created the OASIS, he built a full-scale replica of Chthonia inside the simulation. That was the planet where Castle Anorak was located.
“Kira’s adventure is comprised of seven different quests,” Lo continued. “One to retrieve each of the Seven Shards. Kira created all of the different quests, drew maps for all seven dungeons, and she also included a bunch of awesome illustrations at the back, depicting different monsters and locations that appear in the story. It’s pretty incredible.” She pointed at the Trapper Keeper. “From what I can gather, Kira gave that binder to Halliday just before she went back to England in June of ’89. There’s a brief note to him on the first page. In it, Kira asks Halliday to run her module for Og and the rest of the Middletown Adventurers’ Guild after she leaves, to explain why her character disappeared from their D&D campaign. She told him she created this adventure so that her friends would feel like she was still there with them in spirit. She said she hoped it would make all of them miss her a little less.”
“Does Kira’s character Leucosia appear in the module?” Aech asked.
Lo nodded.
“Right at the beginning,” she replied. “Leucosia is abducted by an evil wizard named Hagmar, who places her in suspended animation and imprisons her inside a powerful magic jewel called the Siren’s Soul. Then he shatters the jewel into seven pieces and hides them in seven different treacherous, trap-filled dungeons, which are each located on seven different continents. The players have to collect all seven of the shards and reassemble them into the Siren’s Soul to resurrect Leucosia. Then, once they bring her back, she gives them the power to resurrect other people too. Here, you have to check this out…”
L0hengrin flipped Kira’s notebook to a page near the back, which contained a drawing of Leucosia’s character symbol—a capital letter L formed by the intersection of a bejeweled longsword and an ornately carved magic wand, to symbolize Leucosia’s Magic User/Fighter dual character class.
I had seen this symbol before, in collections of Kira’s artwork and in several of the Anorak’s Quest games.
Kira was the first and only artist ever to join the Middletown Adventurers’ Guild, and as a gift to her new friends, Kira had taken it upon herself to design cool character symbols for everyone in the group—symbols that would all later be made famous, thanks to their inclusion in various RPGs released by Gregarious Games. Kira was the one who had designed Anorak’s famous character symbol—the calligraphic letter A that appeared on Anorak’s robes and above the entrance to Castle Anorak.
For Og, she designed a symbol of a capital letter O with a small letter g at its center, to represent his high-level Magic User character, the Great and Powerful Og. And for her own character, Leucosia, Kira had designed the sword-and-wand L symbol. In all the drawings and paintings she did of Leucosia, that L always appeared somewhere on the character’s clothing or armor. This had eventually earned her character the nickname “Laverne”—a reference that initially made no sense to her, because she hadn’t grown up watching Laverne & Shirley in the UK.