Aech shook her head and began dancing backward, away from me. Then a huge grin spread across her face as the Time launched into “The Bird,” their hit dance single from 1984.
“Y’all ready?” Morris asked from the stage. “OK! Anyone who wants to audition, I’m counting off ten seconds to get to the dance floor! Ten! Nine! Eight! Seven—”
Aech continued to dance backward, out onto the dance floor, motioning for us to follow her. A second later, Morris Day let out an earsplitting “Whawk!” and the song kicked into high gear.
That was when I began to see falling directional arrows on my HUD that matched the arrows lighting up on the dance floor directly beneath my feet, like a giant game of Dance Dance Revolution. Shoto saw them, too, and we both let out a jubilant roar.
“DDR!” we shouted, as we both began to dance in sync to the arrows.
Aech joined us, and the three of us danced side by side, hitting our marks on the floor in perfect sync.
We managed to keep it up until the very end of the song.
When it was over, Morris called us up onstage and announced that we had passed the audition with flying colors.
“Say, ‘I pledge allegiance to the Time’！” Morris shouted. “Can y’all say that?”
We each raised our right hand and pledged allegiance. Then Aech leaned over and whispered something in Morris’s ear. It sounded like “the kid.” Whatever it was, his expression changed and he stormed offstage, motioning for the rest of the band to follow him—including the three of us.
“It worked!” Aech said. “They’ve agreed to come battle with us. Let’s go!”
* * *
We got back in the Little Red Corvette and sped south on Alphabet Street. Morris Day and the Time followed behind us in their tour bus, which had their logo for the Original 7ven painted across the side.
Once we were a few miles outside the city limits, the landscape around us abruptly changed, and the road led us into a desert that appeared to stretch to the horizon in all directions.
Every seven seconds, long tines of purple lightning descended from the sky to strike the desert sand, burning and melting it into strange pillared formations of purple fulgurite that dotted the barren landscape like sentinels.
Eventually a small lone pyramid emerged in the distance ahead of us, just off the highway, like some sort of strange roadside attraction.
When we reached it, Aech told me to me pull over, and motioned for the tour bus behind us to do the same thing. She told us all to wait while she ran inside to get something, and I watched from inside the Corvette as she ran across the barren sand, over to one corner of the pyramid, which appeared to have no entrance. I used my HUD to zoom in with maximum magnification and saw that she was running her fingertips across the surface of one of the large stones that made up the pyramid’s base. Then she leaned forward and blew a layer of sand and dust away from one tiny section of it, revealing several rows of hieroglyphs. She began to press them in a specific sequence, like buttons. I heard a loud grinding sound as a massive stone at the base of the pyramid slid aside, revealing a secret entrance. Aech ran through it.
A minute later, she emerged again, now wearing a huge smile on her face. As she jumped back in the car beside me, I saw that she was clutching three gold chains, each with a gold pendant shaped like a different element of the Love Symbol. The first pendant was a golden circle, which Aech gave to me. The second was a golden horn, which she gave to Shoto. The last was a golden androgyne symbol, which Aech placed around her own neck.
“All right,” she said, letting out a heavy sigh. “Now we’ve got the Three Chains of Gold too. I think we’re as ready as we’re ever going to be.” She pointed to the road ahead. “Let’s go face the music, fellas.”
I pulled the Corvette back out onto the road, the tour bus behind me, and gunned the engine again, hurtling us forward toward the dark, luminous, purple horizon ahead.
A moment later, the desert was behind us and we were in a strange, otherworldly purple landscape, with purple mountain ranges in the distance, and a dark-purple sky over our heads that was filled with dark-purple thunderstorm clouds with bright-purple tines of lightning crackling across and between them. We put the top up on our Little Red Corvette convertible just in time—right before big fat droplets of purple rain began to fall, creating a strange syncopated rhythm as they drummed against the car’s roof and hood and on the asphalt road ahead as we continued to speed down it.
A glittering at the end of the road caught my eye, and as we got closer, I could just make out that it was a structure of some sort, looming like a grand fortress or temple. As we drew near, I saw that it had seven spires vaulting toward the purple sky, each topped with a dome shaped like a Hershey’s Kiss. Six of the spires were wrapped in bands of blue neon, while the much larger seventh spire in the center was topped with a golden chhatri.