wasn’t very useful against clay people, not unless you used plasma and that was forbidden by Gina as too dangerous to the school, the students, and the spectators. But the fire tubes quickly evolved into single-shot guns shooting ball bearings, propelled by a compressed air spell, cast by enterprising witches. I skipped the standard tubes and loaded some experimental ones of my own design, a new approach.
The bleachers were filling up and I could see lots of extra people with the witch families. I also saw Ashley’s minder, Neeve. The two agents, Mazar and Krupp, were back and that hard-assed general, Creek, was even there, sitting with a man and woman who looked as military as he did.
“Dude, you okay?” Mack asked, Justin just behind him.
“Okay? Why Mack, I’m abso-fucking-lutely fantastic,” I said, smiling. They both recoiled a bit from my expression
“Uh oh,” Justin said in his deep voice.
“Just keep it together for the match, alright?” Mack asked, clearly worried I was going off the deep end.
“Sure,” I agreed, pulling more spelled artifacts out of storage and sticking them to DD’s vest. All the avatars wore loadbearing gear now, most of it hand-sewn or modified from toy dolls. DD’s is handmade from fine copper mesh, with a rune-carved chest plate of soft copper. All my own work, which puzzled the hell out of my friends and competitors. It was new and its secrets would soon be out.
“Teams to the benches, faces away from the course,” Miss Berg called out.
We placed our avatars on the landscape, then turned and sat on the benches so that we faced the audience. Only a few of us could drive the dirt players with our regular eyes open and it was considered cheating, if you could handle the double vision. I had been doing it forever, but a couple others could do it, Delwood surprisingly one of them.
When we were seated, Miss Berg nodded to someone out of our view and the sounds of the landscape remolding itself rumbled through our ears. The audience oohed and ahhed, clearly impressed.
“Alright, players. Wake up your avatars and proceed to your assigned starting points.”
I closed my eyes and pushed into DD, letting my senses adjust to his perspective. Driving an avatar was thrilling, but the mini-golems lacked the sensory input a real human deals with constantly. We had vision and hearing as well as smell. But touch was very muffled and there was obviously no pain. If your avatar got burned, blasted, or knocked to powder, you felt the impact but not the damage. It allowed kids to do horrible stuff to each other’s avatars without causing any pain. Lots of anger, though. People got pissed when you trashed their dirt partners, more so than in video games.
The others were grouping up and I took last position, following as Caeco led us along the edge of the course to the far end. The referees had reformed the course into what looked like six or seven mountains, with deep valleys and peaks that almost reached the ceiling.
At our end, Caeco’s green and black tiger-striped avatar turned and waved one hand at Ashley’s green and brown mottled fighter. Ashley took off at a trot to the nearest mountain slope, the team’s flag over her dirt shoulder.
Dropping a stone from her vest, she stood back to watch as it formed an avatar-sized hole in the side of the mountain. One cave, ready made.
It was illegal to bury your flag, but hiding it in a cave was okay. She laid some stones and wood chips at the opening and then moved back till she was almost off the landscape. There she built a sniper hide, draping a handkerchief over her form with an arsenal of gun tubes lined up in front of her. The handkerchief was the result of a photo of the game course ground, printed by a specialty shop on Church Street onto the handkerchief. It made a perfect camo sniper cover.
Caeco pointed at her three other teammates and waved them to follow her, ignoring me completely. I watched them go, my temper doing a slow boil. Then I looked at Ashley’s hide. The ground appeared to shrug. Great.
Fuck it. I sprinted around the opposite side of the mountain from Caeco’s path, running across the valley on the other side, ignoring the newly mounted cameras on the ceiling that were projecting our activities to the freshly installed monitors for the audience to watch.
The next mountain over, I climbed. Right straight