I realized that Og’s birthday was coming up again soon. If I patched things up with him, maybe he would start inviting me to his yearly birthday party at the Distracted Globe again.
I’d spent the past year trying to work up the nerve to call Og and apologize. Promise never to ask him about Kira or Halliday again. He might listen. If I just swallowed my pride, I could probably mend our friendship. But to do so, I’d also have to obey his wishes and abandon my search for the Seven Shards.
I closed my grail diary and stood up. Just seven more days, I promised myself. Another week. If I hadn’t made any progress by then, I’d hang it up for good and make my amends with Og.
I had made this promise to myself many times before, but this time I intended to keep it.
I pulled up my bookmarked destinations to teleport back to the Third Age of Middle-earth and get back to work. But as I went to select it, I noticed a small shard icon blinking at the edge of my heads-up display. I tapped it and my email client opened in a window in front of me. There was a single message waiting in my SSoSS Tip Submission account, stamped with a long system-generated ID number. Some gunter out there had just submitted a potential lead about the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul—one that had made it past all the filters and reached my inbox. This hadn’t happened in months.
I tapped the message to open it and began to read:
Dear Mr. Watts,
After three years of searching, I’ve finally discovered where one of the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul is hidden and how to reach it. It’s located on the planet Middletown, inside the guest bedroom at the Barnett residence, where Kira Underwood lived during her year as an exchange student at Middletown High School.
I can make the shard appear, but I can’t pick it up. Probably because I’m not you—Halliday’s “heir.” If you’d like me to show you what I mean, I can.
I know you probably receive a lot of bogus leads, but I promise this isn’t one of them.
Your Fan,
L0hengrin
I did a double-take when I read the sender’s name. L0hengrin was the host of a popular gunter-themed YouTube show called The L0w-Down. She had about fifty million subscribers, and I’d recently become one of them. For me, this was a huge endorsement.
Most gunter shows were hosted by clueless fame-seekers spouting a steady stream of complete nonsense about the Seven Shards, when they weren’t waging epic flame wars with viewers or rival hosts, or posting tearful apology videos in another desperate bid to win back followers.
But The L0w-Down was different. L0hengrin had an incredibly upbeat personality, and an infectious brand of enthusiasm that reminded me of how I’d felt in the early days of the contest. The brief voice over that opened her show seemed to sum up her life’s philosophy: “Some people define themselves by railing against all of the things they hate, while explaining why everyone else should hate it too. But not me. I prefer to lead with my love—to define myself through joyous yawps of admiration, instead of cynical declarations of disdain.”
L0hengrin also possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of James Halliday’s life and his work. And she appeared to know just as much about Og and Kira Morrow.
My appreciation for L0hengrin and her show may have been slightly colored by the fact that I’d developed a mild crush on her. She was cute, smart, funny, and fearless. She was also a vocal High Five superfan. Her own gunter clan called themselves “The L0w Five.” Most flattering of all, her avatar’s name was a not-so-subtle tribute to my own, because in several German versions of the King Arthur legend, Lohengrin was the name of Parzival’s son.
L0hengrin had proven herself to be a loyal fan too. Her support of me hadn’t wavered over the past few years, despite the disastrous PR decisions I’d made. And she didn’t seem to care about the army of Parzival haters who attacked her on her meed feed every time she mentioned me on her show.
Like many of L0hengrin’s regular viewers, I was more than a little curious about her real-world identity. On her show, L0hengrin never talked about her real life, or her real name, age, or gender. She only appeared as her OASIS avatar, which usually looked and sounded exactly like Helen Slater in The Legend of Billie Jean—a teenage girl with short blond hair, piercing blue eyes, and a faint Southern accent. But like Ranma Saotome in Ranma 1/2, L0hengrin was also famous for changing her avatar’s gender, unexpectedly and without warning—sometimes in midsentence. When she transformed into a male, she seemed to prefer the likeness of a young James Spader, especially his look from the 1985 film Tuff Turf. Regardless of her avatar’s current gender, L0hengrin’s public profile specified that her preferred gender pronouns were she and her. In her oneline user bio, she described herself as “A wild-eyed pistol-waver who ain’t afraid to die.”