Midnight in the garden of ice and plenty

The cold made pins and needles on her skin. And there was a lot of skin. It was the rage that year. There were clots of young men dressed in clear plastic, their rosy cheeks... all of them... bare to the snowy night. There were women in ermine, old ladies with diamond teeth. When they opened their mouths, the light sparkled even through the cloud of their breath.

Vitelina needed more cream towers. The first batch of fifty had been consumed within minutes. The patrons were crowding around the ice table, rending the edges of it slick with melt. All the food was white or clear. The spun sugar goblets dissolved when pale punch was dribbled in, leaving hands sticky. The white cygnet meat sweated with crystals of ice.

It was the first party of 2157. Madame Faurme was entertaining one hundred fifty-seven guests in her garden outside of the city. It was one of those affairs. It would have to be memorable.

Vitelina had served at many of Madame Faurme's parties, but never one this demanding. The temperature of the spouting mermaid fountain had to be constantly checked as the night went on, lest the water fail to seize into ice as it touched the growing stalagmite at the base of the flow. Likewise the mischievous cherub fountain.

The night was growing colder; the stars were painfully close. Above the garden a wet mist began to hang, risen from the fountains and sugar-goods and breath and trampled snow. And sweat. As Vitelina pushed toward the house, she came upon a tangle of youths in sharp rustly plastic, stuffing snow into whatever warm folds appealed to them. Their hair was plastered to their bodies. Their grunts and laughs were muffled in the hovering fog that reached to obscure the stars.

By the time Vitelina had returned with a triple-deck platter of cream towers and radish flakes, she could scarcely see where she was going. She led herself through the garden by sound. The greatest mass of guests was there by the food, and when she unloaded her platter, they fell around her with gleaming eyes. The wireless lights were floating in a soup of white above their heads now, but the light was enough to show their teeth, their white and glittering teeth, and the still-rosy glow on their cheeks.

The vodka moat would have to be replenished.

Vitelina stepped slowly to the faucet beyond the bleachedberry hedge. The snow was wet and pasty and clung to the sides of her glistening plastic shoes. Her toes throbbed in their cold cage. She would make more money working eight months for Madame Faurme than she would in the next ten years. But the toes, the toes. And her hands... the handle of the vodka faucet was slick. She lifted it and beyond her vision, a silver glissando tickled the air.

And was it colder when she returned to the food-heaped ice tables than when she had first passed that way? Vitelina pulled her polar bear hood around her tighter. She watched the guests warily. The sugar goblets dipped into the vodka moat, over and over. Shards dissolved, fell steaming in the white slush below. Tongues appeared to do their pink work. Everything was wet. No one was shivering but Vitelina. She turned and the flush on the cheeks of the woman behind her frightened her. Vitelina hurried to the garden's edge.

She would do rounds. She would look for something to clean. There, ten steps through the fog along the outer hedge, where the sounds of the eating and drinking were almost too muffled to be heard, she found something. It was a woman, her legs wrapped around the translucent body of an ice stallion, her blonde hair long and lank, sufficing for a mane on the unmoving beast. The strange woman did not shiver. She was already cold. White.

Vitelina wanted first to go back, but she decided to go on. Twelve steps more into the fog, she came upon lovers, lying blankly in the snow, which did for clothing on them. Their ermine wraps were tossed aside. They had been pushing snow atop each other in smooth mounds when they lay down to close their eyes. The sweat on their cheeks had already frozen to crystal. The vodka reddened their skin no longer.

Five steps onward, there was a circle of trillionaire septuagenarians, their riches now in faux diamonds that hung at their lips from imagined confections of snow. They lay now where they had consumed, on a round bench of ice three feet thick. All Vitelina could hear was the chattering of her own small teeth. The warmth had been sucked out of the night from above, and the air seemed so sharp she feared for the coverless skin of her arms and her thighs.

Madame Faurme would be in her drawing room, where she spent every party. She would be watching through the windows. She would be disappointed, of course, that she could not see her guests through the fog. She would want to know at once if anything had happened that would reflect unfavorably upon her reputation. If the cooks had botched a dish, Vitelina must report it. If the ice sculptures were melting badly, Vitelina must report it. If guests were behaving in a rude fashion, she must report it all the quicker.

Vitelina hung in the air, her feet lost to her as the miasma thickened. She could not feel them. They were gone.

Tremblingly she turned, feeling her way along the pale hedge until she reached at last the black door to the kitchens. She walked as if on stilts. She could scarcely tell with her numb fingers, but she felt the black door must be warmer than the outside. Some heat existed here, from the world of the house. The garden was dead silent.

Vitelina slid her hand to the right, along the brick of the house, pushing her numb feet through the snow, which was freezing up in an uneven mess. Her steps began to crackle and squeak. The sound seemed to follow her, unnerving her until by the time she reached the door to the undergarage her heart was racing. She yanked open the door and thumped onto the dark stairs, pulling the door closed behind her, fearing the skin of her palm might be left behind on the slick metal knob. She reached in against her fluttering chest, fumbling for her key. When she clenched it, she saw a light wink on hazily on in the concrete distance, and she made for it.

Rehousing it

So I went to write for a bit, as you will see below, hoping it would perk up my mood, but it was rather heavy going, especially toward the end. I just didn't know where to take the story. I forced an ending and then randomly clicked on a link to my own archives, landing on this:

"The book I'd been reading (until I had to return it to the library, anyway) was very heavy on the inseparability of plot and character. Plot, it averred, is what characters do next -- asserting that plot problems can be solved by changing the nature of your character. Now I see that. Stories get a lot easier to write when you have a character who really wants something. And would do just about anything to get it."

Well, jeez. I have no idea what my character wants. I went into the story thinking about setting, and that was about it.

Warehousing it

It was in her first year after college that she got the job. After graduation, there had been a period of a few months where she pretended she could get a better one; it felt like the pretense was necessary, the way saying "bless you" was necessary after somebody sneezed. Nobody believed they were really able to prevent illness and catastrophe by inducing God's blessing after a sneeze. But it would have been wrong not to say it.

And when she applied for the job, it had the inevitability of a flu coming on. All her friends were already warehousing it. Nikkita had a degree in physics. She was twenty-two.

"You can take this one," her supervisor said, steering her to a desk about three-quarters of the way down the right-hand wall of the dimly flourescent space. The computer was already on, the log-in screen already set up. Taped to the top of the monitor was a card:

Account: MXFR5609
Password: yesterday718

"Go ahead and log in..." said Boyd. "I'll hang out and make sure things are working all right."

Nikkita put in the account name and password and the game opened up. She was on top of a mountain somewhere, with a blue wyvern in front of her--

"Whoops," said Boyd, as claws flashed and the screen turned red. "The last guy didn't log out right." He leaned in front of Nikkita where she sat, reaching for the mouse. "We had to let him go. He was a little too interested in doing his own thing."

"Right," said Nikkita. "Do you want to sit here?"

"No," said Boyd. He blocked her whole view with his big body, stretching both hands in to use the keyboard. Finally he leaned back. "There you go." Her avatar was in town now, safe and sound. "Wait, let's see. You're..."

He clicked on a few info bars. The screen angle changed to show her avatar now: a leggy female with a blond ponytail and two breasts like Norman helmets. She was a fur-clad valkyrie of slaying. She had a war hammer with a massive head the size of both breasts put together with her butt thrown in. Her name was Heidihammer.

"You're a level 89 warrior. Can you do that?" asked Boyd.

"Give me a couple days, I'll figure it out," said Nikkita.

"Cool," said Boyd. "Call me if you have any issues."

Nikkita didn't break for lunch until two o'clock. She'd spent the first fifteen minutes of the morning trying to find her way back to wyvern mountain and the next four and a half hours trying to kill one. She didn't even realize she was hungry until the latest wyvern to get a kill on her began to rip open her bare valkyrie belly and stuff red strips of her flesh into its mouth in a pixellated feeding frenzy that was vastly appealing in its artificially intelligent way.

She returned from the cafe with two slices of pizza and ate with one hand while her other lazed over the mouse. She felt sufficient only to exploring the town while she ate: there was the inn, there the armorer's, there the bordello, there the punishment square...

That would be entertaining enough. She wandered closer, checking out the characters in the stocks. People were hurling tomatoes at them. "If anybody can hurl something other than a tomato," said the character on the right, "I'll give you a million gold pieces."

But there was nothing other than tomatoes. That was the way punishment square was coded.

"I can hurl insults," she said, typing with one hand.

"Do it!" said the character in the stocks. His name was Marfalcon.

Nikkita was at a loss. She took another bite of pizza and walked around the character, examining him. "Your momma dress you?" she said.

"My momma was killed by a troll! You witch! I hate you!" said Marfalcon. Nikkita had to swallow fast to let the laugh come out. Then came a private message from Marfalcon at the bottom of her screen: Are you Rubicant?

She typed back: No, I'm Procosys.

Said Marfalcon: Me too.

So he worked for Procosys too. He was somewhere in the warehouse. Typing. Nikkita resisted the urge to turn around and look. She could only see a portion of the workspace, anyway. Beyond her first row against the wall there were sixteen more double rows till the next wall. There were hundreds of players.

She typed: Know anything about hunting wyverns?

And he said: I'll let you know when I get out of this thing.

By five that evening, she had made her first gold pieces and deposited them in the Procosys account at the town bank. The players around her were logging out, some heading to the lounge where they could log in again on their own private characters. Nikkita was exhausted. It was her first day.