Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two

Two doves rose up from behind him and hovered above his head. They both opened their beaks and fired shriek attacks down at us.

After Purple Rain Prince and his two attack doves finished their bombing run, Cloud Suit Prince descended. This incarnation wore a sky-blue suit covered in white clouds. And he apparently had the ability to turn his suit invisible and phase-shift, rendering him immune to our attacks.

Cloud Suit Prince seemed especially pissed-off at me, and focused all his vocal attacks on my avatar. It took me a few minutes to figure out why: it was his Cloud Guitar that I was holding, and he wanted it back.

Cloud Suit Prince was singing a song from 1984 called “I Would Die 4 U.” But he altered the lyrics of its chorus slightly, so what I heard was, “You will. Die for. Me. Yeah! That is how it’s gonna be!” Each rapid-fire chord he strummed on his Mad Cat fired another sonic blast down at me, like a gunfighter fanning the barrel of his six-shooter.

Aech referred to the next Prince in the attack conga line as Gett Off Prince. This one was dressed in a tight-fitting yellow lace suit with two circles cut out in the rear to expose his bare ass cheeks. Thankfully he didn’t fire any sonic attacks from them. Those came from his yellow guitar, which looked identical to mine, aside from the color.

I thought I was hallucinating when the next Prince descended on us. Aech referred to him as “Gemini.” Shoto called him “Partyman.” My image-recognition software’s best guess was “Batdance Prince.” To me, he looked like the villain Two-Face, except that he was Batman on the left half and the green-haired Joker on his right half. He hurled joke bombs from one hand and batarangs from the other, then swooped back up and away, to dodge our counterattacks.

I’m not sure of the correct name for the next incarnation to attack, but I mentally nicknamed him Microphone Gun Prince. He wore an all-black suit, a black head wrap, and an oversize pair of black sunglasses. He also wielded a pair of gold microphone guns that he wore in black leather holsters on each hip. They looked like pistols, except that their barrels had old-school microphones at the end, which hurled a rapid-fire hail of sonic funk waves down at us. After he unleashed his salvo, he blew away the smoke rising from each microphone-gun barrel, then turned and holstered them both as he flew back up into the sky.

The next incarnation scared the living crap out of me. Third Eye Prince had a giant round Afro and a pair of sunglasses with three lenses. The third lens was centered above the bottom two, and it fired a devastating beam of sonic enlightenment from his concealed third eye, which incinerated everything in its path.

After Third Eye Prince finished his bombing run, Purple Rain Prince swooped down to make his second attack, even though he’d only completed his first run about six seconds earlier. Meanwhile, I hadn’t managed to get off even a single attack of my own—and my Chain of Gold wouldn’t hold out forever. It was a terrifying wake-up call, and made me realize how outmatched we really were.

The seventh and final incarnation, Mesh-Mask Prince, was the only one who didn’t swoop down to attack. Apparently unarmed, he continued to hover up above us, silent and motionless, watching the battle below unfold with an impassive expression on his face (at least, from what I could see of it through his mask).

I finally pulled it together and started to return fire with my Cloud Guitar, landing two direct hits on Cloud Suit Prince. This appeared to weaken him considerably, and he pulled out of the attack run rotation and remained hovering up above, alongside Mesh-Mask Prince.

Meanwhile, Aech had pulled up the henchman-activation incantation for the Original 7ven on her HUD. Facing Morris and his band, she read it aloud, prefacing each line of the incantation with a snap of her fingers:

Snap!

“Yo, Stella! If you think I’m afraid of you…”

Snap!

“Grace, if you so much as think I can’t do the do…”

Snap!

“Girl, if you dream I came to jerk around, you better wake up—”

Snap!

“—and release it! ”

As soon as Aech finished reciting the final two words of the incantation, Morris Day and the Time sprang into action, launching into a song from the Graffiti Bridge film soundtrack called “Release It.”

Our front man, Morris Day, stepped forward, and a microphone appeared in his hand. He raised it to his lips, tilted his head up at his seven opponents, and spoke.

“What is your main problem?”

The moment he said that, a pair of devil horns grew out of his head, and his eyes turned a dark shade of red. Spikes of red lightning shot from his horns, where they arced up to deflect the purple lightning attacks from above.

Then he unleashed his “Whawk!” attack, which involved him making a deafening birdlike “Wh-ha-ha-hawk!” laughing/shrieking sound, which unleashed a sonic area-of-effect attack that injured all seven incarnations at once.

But what made Morris an even more fearsome opponent was his right-hand man, Jerome “The Mirror Man” Benton, who carried around a large gold-framed vanity mirror that he used to create half a dozen mirror-image clones of Morris, each of whom began to unleash his own Whawk! attack.

The rest of the Original 7ven joined the fight too. Jimmy Jam and Monte Moir each wielded a modified red Roland AXIS-1 keytar that fired sonic funk blast waves out of its neck each time a chord was played on it. Jesse Johnson fired sonic thunderbolts from the pickups of his Fender Voodoo Stratocaster, while Terry Lewis did the same with his bass, and Jellybean Johnson stood behind them, firing red lightning skyward with his drumsticks, wielding them like two magic wands. Each of the band members could also fire a deadly blast of sonic energy directly from their own mouths, just by shouting the word “Yeow!” over and over again.

In between his Whawk! attacks, Morris unleashed equally devastating verbal attacks. And for some reason, when the other members of his band repeated what he’d just said, it seemed to power up his verbal sonic attacks and cause them to do even more damage.

Morris would shout, “You can’t battle me, son! You still wet behind the ears!”

And his boys would echo him: “Wet behind the ears!”

Morris Day and the Time were magnificent to behold. But in the end, it wasn’t enough to save them, or us. Because the Princes had just summoned their henchmen too.

Purple Rain Prince summoned his band, the Revolution . They all wore regal outfits with ruffled collars, just like him.

Microphone Gun Prince summoned the New Power Generation . There were a bunch of them, and they were all armed to the teeth, with every kind of instrument.

And then Third Eye Prince summoned his band 3RDEYEGIRL (which, my HUD informed me, was spelled in ALL CAPS).

All three bands appeared on the ground, encircling us in the arena. They began to attack us from the surface, while six of the Princes continued to attack us from the air.

That was when Aech shouted something to Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis about “activating their producing powers.” They smiled and nodded, and then snapped their fingers in unison—instantly summoning two dozen uniformed henchmen of their own:

Janet Jackson and the Rhythm Nation.

When they came marching into the arena, Aech looked like she might pass out.

“Holy shit!” she said. “I can’t believe that worked!”

And then it became an all-out sonic war.

I don’t know exactly what happened next, or how it all went down.

But when the dust settled, all seven members of the Time had been killed, including Morris Day and all of his mirror images. (Purple Rain Prince somehow used his mirror shades to shatter Jerome’s mirror, so he was no longer able to use it to make Morris clones—and that was the beginning of the end, I think.)