1??????????????Soul Bound
1.1????????????Finding her Feet
1.1.7??????????An Extreme Response
1.1.7.12???????Heather gets serious
Heather: “Hush. What? No. Never heard of her.”
Muhamed: “Oh but surely there cannot be two amazing crafters who are friends with our wonderful Ms Kafana?”
Harun: “Don’t be scared, Ms Sabanagic. We would never reveal your secret. But when we realised that you were the online game player totally ruling this new game, we were so proud of you that we just had to find a way to let you know we support you.”
Vedad: “Not all of us play, though most of us do. Not much else in life, is there?”
Jasic: “And I think most of us picked the Slavic Dominion. It is full of player killers. I hate them worse than Cetniks.”
Daris: “I think you may be the most famous person to have ever come from our village.”
Tarik: “We have followed your exploits, your courage. You are our hero. We stand with you, Kafana.”
Nadine looked at Heather. Heather blushed.
Heather, in a small voice, said: “Sorry Nadine, I didn’t get a chance to warn you. I put together a video. It has become rather popular.”
Jasic nipped back out to the courtyard for a moment, to have a word with Cosic who closed the doors, put up a closed sign, and left. Heather went over to the projector they sometimes used for showing big soccer matches, and set the video playing.
It started with a shot of Kafana and Tomsk looking happy together, followed by a shot of her standing facing Kullervo protecting Pierrot from his bone sword. Heather had spliced in the music from the start of the song that she hadn’t covered as background. The video then had a shot of Vessel-Kafana standing by the Sanctum, her arm pointing out commandingly, and a shot of the forces pouring over the bridge into Alto in a smoothly flowing stream behind a grim Tomsk. Each shot was very brief, maybe only about a second in length.
Then the singing started. The first verse showed her in the darkness. Heather seemed to have re-created the room from when Tomsk saw it later and re-jigged the lighting, before super-imposing a ghostly figure of Kafana over it. In the gap between verses, there was a shot of Tomsk leading the way through tunnels, sword bared, probably from Mary-Lynn’s point of view. My god that man was furious. It radiated out from his every movement. He was in Captain-leading-the-soldiers mode, and it looked impressive. The next verse showed Vessel-Kafana singing from the Sanctum, which must have been from Wellington.
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The last verse showed them both facing each other singing in duet, arms reaching out to the other, and between them in the middle of the screen, Tomsk’s duel with the larger, stronger and faster Wibano. The video ended with music carrying the tune, as Tomsk burst into the hastily abandoned room and fell to his knees in anguish at being too late. In the last second, his head moved back up, as a ghostly reprise of Kafana singing the words “come find me” faded away.
Nadine: “Heather. Wow. That was like a professionally-produced TV music video. A whole story in 30 seconds. And you stitched that together from unstaged footage, alone, in what 2 hours?”
Heather: “Not entirely. I did have to ask Tomsk to do the scene in that room again with Mary-Lynn watching him. You really don’t want to get close to him when he’s wielding Nothung with that expression on his face. Even a dragon would give him a wide berth. And of course I took liberties with the timeline, and used expert systems. Nowadays, everybody’s capable of producing stuff that looks professional.”
Heather turned to the regulars, who were grinning broadly: “And as for you lot…” she put her hands on her hips. “Well, you got me good. Well played.” she put her hands in the air, as though surrendering.
Heather carried on talking to them: “But, seriously, what Nadine and I are doing is dangerous. We’re not just playing a game. We’re defying some very wealthy men in arlife. Men behind whole guilds of player killers who are known to have used assassins to kill people in arlife who get in the way of their money-making schemes. If it gets out that Nadine is Kafana, if you even drop hints about it, then some time in the next couple of weeks you’ll turn up to get some coffee and find a police drone setting up a cordon of yellow tape, and this place will never open again. I’m not exaggerating, I can provide you with checkable references.”
Daris: “No need for that.”
“But come, our reward.” said Harun, optimistically “Now you no longer need to hide your activity, just this once log in down here where we can see it.”
Jasic: “We will be your defenders.”
Nadine tried to look outraged, but she felt encouraged by their enthusiasm, and allowed herself to be cajoled into doing it. Heather had the regulars set a table up on the stage, which she covered with padding and then a golden coloured wall hanging. Two tall thick candles at the head of the bier by a white pillow strewn with flowers completed the look to Heather’s satisfaction. She took Nadine upstairs, picked out clothes for her and did her hair and makeup, before talking to Minion about the look she wanted and weaving in more flowers to disguise the crown.
Heather: “The code word to turn off sensations is ‘NULL NULL’. Don’t worry about direction magic too much. What you did last time when you triangulated on strong mana sources will do fine. If you want to try magic, draw upon Vessel-Kafana’s mana to try reading his thoughts - Vessel-Kafana will be holding the purple gem and concentrating on the same thing.”
Nadine: “Ok, well I’ve a song that sort of fits that. I’ll go into The Burrow first and sing it. Heck, maybe Wellington ought to create a performance stage in there, for plays and things, that mirrors the Plaza’s auditorium in game. Can you arrange someone to carry it to her and set up a time signal for me?”
Heather: “Consider it done.”
Heather went online for a minute, and then they both went downstairs, Heather wearing her own custom tiara too. The lights had been turned off, except for the two candles. The projector was pointed at the wall behind the stage, so seen from the side, the recumbent Nadine would be mostly just a silhouette. The scene reminded her of something, but she couldn’t figure out quite what.
She lay down, and logged in.