Kaleidscope: Slices Of Life - Stardust

Written by: Leia Ong Rui En (20-U1)

Designed by: Poh En Xi (20-E3)

“What is this,” I said, looking at the glowing violet display. 

“Uh, only the coolest thing since last week? Where have you been, silly?” Parie said, her crystalline earrings glittering. “Everyone’s raving about it. We have to try it too.” 

“Stardust,” I read sceptically. “‘Escape reality in a blink.’ Really? Drugs are so last century.”

“That’s the thing, Mirt. This isn’t a drug,” Parie said. “It’s a stim. It’s so much better.”

“Getting high isn't my thing,” I said, flicking the e-advertisement back to her screen. 

“I just said it wasn’t a drug,” Parie huffed. “Get this: you get immersed — like, really, really realistic — into whatever situation you can think of. It’s like dreaming while awake.”

“And you’re telling me troll magick couldn’t do the same? Or that there aren’t a hundred other simulations that could do this?”

“Mirt, wait!” Parie’s blue hand caught my arm. Her freckles shimmered like a constellation beneath her white eyes, which were trained on me. “Listen. There. Are. No. Strings attached,” she whispered, almost reverently, in a way I’d never seen before.

A magick that didn’t eat at your soul? Now, this I had to see. 

Living in Zliphir-Wa felt insane sometimes with the sheer amount of light and sound and things surrounding you, 24/7.

As Parie dragged me through the bustling square, my head was already starting to spin worse than usual. It was Hexing Day, and the mechanical zwooom of hover-vehicles ran in counterpoint to the cries of various creatures around us: elves and a gnome bickering over the newest dowsing rod e-tracker, the laughter of a human and troll child gambolling on the cobblestones. Occasional minor explosions and bursts of light emitted from glitter spells gone awry, illuminating the already-light-polluted evening. Everywhere, chatter and tourists and technology and magick; it was chaos. It was Zliphir. Sometimes you could just never get used to it no matter how long you lived there — or at least I never quite could.

My city wasn’t one of the most advanced and successful interspecies cities in the realms for nothing, I supposed. 

Dodging an errant hologram of a scantily-clad fairy boy, I fought to ground myself with the sensation of Parie’s hand in mine. “Are we almost there yet?” I yelled above the clamour. “Why aren’t we taking your bike?” 

Parie nodded at the hard-light roads above. “Too traceable! Besides, we’re almost there.”

Weaving past the crowds, we turned down one nitrogen-lit street after another, the air thick with the ozone odour of exhaust and hexes. Finally, a mixed-development building that looked perfectly unassuming came into view. “Hidden in plain sight,” Parie said, with an air of satisfaction. I raised an eyebrow.

As we entered the complex, the air rippled like oil on water, a telltale cloaking glamour — and then a shop appeared that hadn’t been there before. 

I wasn’t sure what I expected from an underground business, but a cheerful orange storefront with the words Sugary Breads (And Other Delightful Comestibles) wasn’t it. 

“Welcome!” called the bearded proprietor, waving a six-fingered hand. A gnome. The lilac interior of the store smelt like vanilla and smoke; understandable, since they were decked with shelves of pastries of every culture: fairy cakes, elf sun-bread. “Ah, Mistress Featherdon. I see you’ve brought a friend.” 

I looked sideways at Parie. They were that familiar? How often had Parie come here to buy — what? Stims?

“We’d like a helping of Stardust, please, Mr. Petram,” the elf in question said, grinning at him. “Mirt here’s curious about how it doesn’t sap our energy.”

“Anyone who enters the fold is a friend of mine,” the gnome, Petram, said, hopping off the stool he’d been sitting on and disappearing into the back of the store. “But let me show you exactly what I mean. Hexing Day’s got me overworked.”

He emerged with not a dessert, but a small turquoise cache of a shimmery something.

‘We harness astral energies — for example, Taura, Dergo, Ipsolyne —  take their aura, and draw from those instead using this celaestial charm. Magick and technology: the ultimate marriage.” Petram’s flinty eyes gleamed. “I won’t bore you with the maths or specifics. Bottom line, however, is that this way, this spell won’t draw from your lifeforce.”

“This is…” An insane breakthrough, I thought. What society couldn’t do with this innovation!

“Wonderful,” Petram finished. “So I want to use it to help people the best way possible. Pure escapism, better and more immersive than any crude e-simulation or dangerous dream enchantment. And, of course, make the most money possible, before the ol’ potentate can take it from me first.”

Now my curiosity was absolutely threatening to burst free. “How much?” 

Petram considered. “Well, Mirt, it’d normally be fifty kerq.” My eyes bugged out of my head. Fifty kerq! “But since it’s your first time, and you’re Parie’s friend, you can have just one dose to try.” He passed the cache to me, and it glimmered with the light of a thousand stars. “Come back and tell me if it’s worth the price. But for us fey folk—” he nodded at Parie—“it’s more than worth it.”

“Don’t freak out,” Parie told me, her fingers dipped in iridescent shimmer. The cache contained, I found, a small well of a fine, glittery paste. 

“Oh, you think?” I snarked, from my prone position on the floor of Parie’s bedroom. “Shady magickal substance on my eyes. Let’s go.”

“Oh, calm down, Mirt,” Parie said placatingly, closing my eyes gently with the heel of her palm. “I’ll see you Ringside.”

What? I wanted to ask, but she was already smearing my eyelids with something cold. Then — oh — suddenly heat, tingling, crawling, and I opened my mouth to yell but found I could not, as my consciousness and the world slipped away from me…

I opened my eyes on a different planet. Literally. 

How I knew? There were plants everywhere, vines and grasses crawling along the ground, looming trees rising all around me, vegetation I didn’t have a name for growing and moving and living. Gigantic bands of faraway planetary rings encircled the purple atmosphere, that is, the sky. I guessed this was what Parie had meant by “Ringside”. 

“Incredible,” I breathed, feeling and smelling loamy dirt beneath my palms for the first time. No wonder people could get addicted to this.

Parie suddenly popped into existence beside me. “Here we are!” she exclaimed. 

“Where are we?” was all I could ask. 

“Barou, Moon 7. I came here last week. Stardust brings you to — or at least, your mind — to whatever place in the realms you can think of,” Parie said. “Or, whatever you can think of.”

She took my hand and suddenly we were zooming out and away from the planet’s topside, green and brown plains becoming pocket-sized. The effect was incredibly disorienting as we entered a dark, sparkling space; beneath us, astral orbs of rain and sun, terrain and realms of all kinds sprawled serenely like colourful floating toys.

“How about we go to Fenuali — you’ve always wanted to visit, haven’t you?” asked Parie. “You can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone. It’s wonderful.”

Despite my bemusement I looked oddly at her. “I never knew you felt like that,” I said. “Why?” Parie had always been whip-smart, exceptionally skilled in magicks — in fact, she was to become a Deep magickologist in a few years. So why, with her expert handle on all things otherworldly, should she feel the need for more? 

A beat. My friend stared back at me, her pale hair blowing in a nonexistent wind. “Because it’s fun, duh,” she laughed, and I grinned awkwardly too. After a bit, though, she softly added, “And, well, when the real world is too complicated, sometimes you need a bit of — simple beauty you can lose yourself in, without worrying that you might die or turn insane.” 

She gestured down at the microcosm laid out below us. “When you spend all your time surrounded by magickal darkness like I do, I like to pretend sometimes that magick... doesn’t exist. I wonder what Zliphir-Wa would be like without it.”

“How could you think that? We’d just be like me, Parie,” I said, taken aback. “Human. Where’s the fun in that? Besides, without magick we wouldn’t be here. Heck, our city wouldn’t exist without it.” 

“Magick is everything — just, not in some other realms. So it’s… nice to pretend sometimes, is all,” the elf replied. She got a gleam in her eye that I knew well. “Want to see?”

I looked at her, at that indomitable spark, sighed, and said without rancour, “I guess I don’t have a choice.”

Hand in hand, rushing starlight bore us away.