The new riddle is a cinch. I think I’ve already got it figured out, actually. What’s the hold-up on your end?
It was an honor to meet you, too. If you ever feel like hanging out in a chat room, let me know.
MTFBWYA,
Parzival
ps—Are you challenging me? Bring the pain, woman.
After rewriting it a few dozen times, I tapped the Send button. Then I pulled up my screenshot of the Jade Key riddle and began to study it, syllable by syllable. But I couldn’t seem to concentrate. No matter how hard I tried to focus, my mind kept drifting back to Art3mis.
Aech cleared the First Gate early the next day.
His name appeared on the Scoreboard in third place, with a score of 108,000 points. The value of obtaining the Copper Key had dropped another 1,000 points for him, but the value of clearing the First Gate remained unchanged at 100,000.
I returned to school that same morning. I’d considered calling in sick, but was concerned that my absence might raise suspicions. When I got there, I realized I shouldn’t have worried. Due to the sudden renewed interest in the Hunt, over half of the student body, and quite a few of the teachers, didn’t bother showing up. Since everyone at school knew my avatar by the name Wade3, no one paid any attention to me. Roaming the halls unnoticed, I decided that I enjoyed having a secret identity. It made me feel like Clark Kent or Peter Parker. I thought my dad would probably have gotten a kick out of that.
That afternoon, I-r0k sent e-mails to Aech and me, attempting to blackmail us. He said that if we didn’t tell him how to find the Copper Key and the First Gate, he would post what he knew about us to every gunter message board he could find. When we refused, he made good on his threat and began telling anyone who would listen that Aech and I were both students on Ludus. Of course, he had no way of proving he really knew us, and by that time there were hundreds of other gunters claiming to be our close personal friends, so Aech and I were hoping his posts would go unnoticed. But they didn’t, of course. At least two other gunters were sharp enough to connect the dots between Ludus, the Limerick, and the Tomb of Horrors. The day after I-r0k let the cat out of the bag, the name “Daito” appeared in the fourth slot on the Scoreboard. Then, less than fifteen minutes later, the name “Shoto” appeared in the fifth slot. Somehow, they’d both obtained a copy of the Copper Key on the same day, without waiting for the server to reset at midnight. Then, a few hours later, both Daito and Shoto cleared the First Gate.
No one had ever heard of these avatars before, but their names seemed to indicate they were working together, either as a duo or as part of a clan. Shoto and daito were the Japanese names for the short and long swords worn by samurai. When worn as a set, the two swords were called daisho, and this quickly became the nickname by which the two of them were known.
Only four days had passed since my name had first appeared on the Scoreboard, and one new name had appeared below mine on each subsequent day. The secret was out now, and the hunt seemed to be shifting into high gear.
All week, I was unable to focus on anything my teachers were saying. Luckily, I only had two months of school left, and I’d already earned enough credits to graduate, even if I coasted from here on out. So I drifted from one class to the next in a daze, puzzling over the Jade Key riddle, reciting it again and again in my mind.
The captain conceals the Jade Key
in a dwelling long neglected
But you can only blow the whistle
once the trophies are all collected
According to my English Lit textbook, a poem with four lines of text and an alternate-line rhyme scheme was known as a quatrain, so that became my nickname for the riddle. Each night after school, I logged out of the OASIS and filled the blank pages of my grail diary with possible interpretations of the Quatrain.
What “captain” was Anorak talking about? Captain Kangaroo? Captain America? Captain Buck Rogers in the twenty-fifth century?
And where in the hell was this “dwelling long neglected”? That part of the clue seemed maddeningly nonspecific. Halliday’s boyhood home on Middletown couldn’t really be classified as “neglected,” but maybe he was talking about a different house in his hometown? That seemed too easy, and too close to the hiding place of the Copper Key.