“Seriously?” I said, with genuine surprise. “They did that?”
Shoto and Aech both nodded.
“So…” I said. “That’s got to be it, right? The Ninja Princess, Kurumi, was the ‘very first heroine, demoted to hero’！”
“Oh! Yo! I said God damn, Shoto!” Aech suddenly began to sing, as she half hunched over and began to dance sideways toward him. Shoto moved toward her in the same fashion, and they launched into an elaborate five-part high-five ritual.
“Let’s wait until we have the shard to celebrate, OK?” I said.
Shoto nodded and opened his OASIS atlas. I saw him do a quick search for Rieko Kodama’s name. He got several hits in the Console Cluster, a group of worlds in Sector Eight where the landscape of each planet resembled the distinctive graphics of different classic game consoles.
“There’s a planet near the center of the Sega quadrant called Phoenix-Rie,” he said, reading off his display. “It’s the most popular shrine to Rieko Kodama’s life and work, and it dates back to the early days of the OASIS. And Kira Morrow is listed as one of its original creators in the planet’s colophon.”
“Phoenix-Rie was Kodama’s alias,” Shoto said. “I visited that planet a few times during the contest. It contains quest portals that lead to OASIS ports of every game Kodama ever worked on, including Ninja Princess. That must be where we need to go.”
“Boom!” Aech said. “Then let’s make like a tree and get outta here.”
I selected Aech and Shoto’s avatars on my HUD and prepared to teleport all three of us to the planet Phoenix-Rie in Sector Eight. But of course, I couldn’t take us anywhere. Anorak had taken my teleportation powers away from me, along with my other superuser abilities, when he stole the Robes of Anorak from my inventory. My avatar was still maxed out at ninety-ninth-level, but now I was mortal once again, just like any other avatar. And I wasn’t properly equipped. I’d collected plenty of new weapons, magic items, and vehicles over the past three years, but I didn’t lug all of that stuff around with me. Everything was in my old stronghold on Falco, and we didn’t have time to waste making a detour back there so that I could gear up.
“Hey, Faisal,” I said, trying to conceal my embarrassment. “Can you hook me up with one of those Admin rings you gave to everyone else during our first co-owners meeting?”
Faisal smiled and removed a small silver ring from his inventory and then tossed it to me. I caught it and slipped it onto the pinky of my right hand. It appeared in my avatar’s inventory as a Ring of OASIS Administration. It gave me the ability to teleport anywhere in the OASIS for free, and enclosed my avatar in a shield that made me immune to attacks from other OASIS avatars, even in PvP zones. Faisal had offered me one of these Admin rings when he’d given them to Art3mis, Aech, and Shoto, but I’d declined because the Robes of Anorak already gave me those abilities and many more—and I was also showing off for Art3mis.
“Thanks, Faisal,” I said.
“Here,” Aech said impatiently. She flashed her own admin ring at me, then selected Phoenix-Rie on her own OASIS atlas. “Let me do the honors.”
She placed her right hand on Shoto’s shoulder and her left one on mine, then she uttered the brief incantation required to activate her teleportation spell, and our avatars vanished.
* * *
A split second later, we rematerialized on the surface of the planet Phoenix-Rie. It was a bright and beautiful little world, rendered in colorful 8-bit graphics, and its pixelated landscape was a patchwork of different environments that Rieko Kodama had created for a variety of games. The area where Aech, Shoto, and I arrived was modeled after the game Alex Kidd in the Miracle World. But as we began to traverse the planet’s surface, we found ourselves running through the Green Hill Zone from the original Sonic the Hedgehog. Then the landscape quickly changed to resemble environments from the very first Phantasy Star game. I recognized graphical elements from all three planets in the Algol system—in just a few minutes, we sprinted through the forests of Palma, the deserts of Motavia, and the icy plains of Dezoris.
We also saw dozens of different nonplayer characters from Kodama’s games roaming around aimlessly, but like most OASIS NPCs, they wouldn’t attack or talk to you unless you attacked or talked to them first, so we just stayed out of their way.
Eventually we reached the planet’s equator, where we found a line of game portals positioned along it, stretching to the pixelated horizon in each direction. The portals were arranged in chronological order by the games’ year of release.