Following ROAD TRIP: SKELETOR were other enormous green slabs labeled → IOM, which, as Richard knew only too well, was the airport code for the Isle of Man. Then PAY FEALTY D2 and finally → SEA.
Red was for things like medical appointments and doing his taxes. A week that was even lightly spattered with Red was pretty much a write-off when it came to getting anything accomplished. Blue wasn’t as bad as Red, but it did tend to infiltrate neighboring regions of Green and mulch them. Rare indeed were the moments when Blue time could be converted to Green; for example, yesterday when he had realized that Zula ought to be working for Corporation 9592.
Waking up in Green mode, then spending the whole day there, was really the only way to get anything done. So color physics now dictated that he must steal out of the hotel without having any interactions whatsoever with the re-u crowd that would already have filled the Ramada’s breakfast room and spilled over into the lobby.
He checked out over the phone and stood in perfect silence, eyeball to peephole, until he could no longer see miniature Forthrasts in bathing suits, going to or from the pool. He then stole out of the motel through a side exit and gunned the Grand Marquis to a gas station half a mile down the road, just to get decisively clear. He pumped a bathtub-load of gasoline into the thing and bought a cup of coffee and a banana for the road. He fired up the car’s onboard GPS device and began coping with its user interface.
The Possum Walk Trailer Court was no longer listed in its “Points of Interest” database, so he had to settle for browsing the greater Nodaway region of northwestern Missouri. Expecting to see nothing more than a post office and maybe a county park, he was dismayed and fascinated when it hurled up a low-res icon of a pointy-eared humanoid with long blue braids, labeled KSHETRIAE KINGDOM. Further browsing informed him that it was part of a larger K’Shetriae-themed complex that included an amusement park and a retail outlet. He could not bring himself to choose this as his destination and coyly allowed the machine to vector him to the county seat.
On his way out of town, deeply preoccupied with the fact that the ersatz quasi-Elven race known as the K’Shetriae were now embedded (though sans the controversial apostrophe) in the memory chips of real-world GPS systems, he almost plowed into the back of what passed for a traffic jam around here: Black Friday shoppers trying to force-feed their vehicles into the parking lot, and their bodies through the doorway, of Walmart. In olden days he would have pumped the brakes judiciously, bringing the enormous vehicle to a stop, but nowadays he knew that this could be outsourced to antilock brakes, so he just crushed the pedal to the floor and waited. The pedal thrummed beneath his foot. The white plastic teat of his go cup discharged a globule of coffee and his banana boomeranged into the glove compartment lid. He watched dispassionately as the tailgate of a pickup truck grew huge in his windshield, not unlike a calendar item zooming onto the screen of his phone. No collision occurred. The driver gave him the finger. A light changed and traffic seeped forward. Soon enough, he was on the interstate, southbound. That rapidly grew boring, so he switched to two-lane roads, to the mounting chagrin of his GPS.
In spite of his cloak-and-dagger exit from the Ramada, his brain was jammed with family stuff. He had woken up in the wrong color! He had to get all traces of Blue out of his mind and achieve full Greenness before he got anywhere near the Iowa/Missouri line.
For this was not just a friendly meeting. Nuances in today’s conversation, things left unsaid, or said in the wrong way, could have expensive consequences. The day after Thanksgiving might have been time off for most of the country, but not for Skeletor. The parochial turkey-eating customs of the United States were of no interest at all to the hyperinternational clientele that he and Richard shared. And even their American players, though they might have taken a few hours off yesterday for family observances, would be devoting most of today to questing for virtual gold and vicarious glory in the world of T’Rain, making this one of the heaviest days of the year for Corporation 9592’s servers and the system administrators who kept them running.
But his mind kept drifting into the Blue. It was like a puzzle in a video game: he had to figure out what was really bothering him. It wasn’t the Furious Muses; after a brief howl of outrage when he’d almost rear-ended the pickup truck, they had been silent for hours.
Somewhere around Red Oak, he finally put it together: it was yesterday’s short but uneasy exchange with the Wikipedia-reading in-law.
The actual content of the Wikipedia entry was not at issue. What bothered Richard was the mere fact that such a thing existed and that he had been abruptly reminded of it at a moment when he just wanted to be Dodge, hanging around the old place, doing normal Iowa stuff.