Trixie Lulamoon meets a hobo
“Yes, mom, I’m sure I’ll be perfectly happy here.”
“No, you don’t need to drive up and see if my new apartment is big enough.”
“Yes, it has a bed.”
“Yes, only one.”
“No, mom, Trixie isn’t planning on turning her apartment into a den of iniquity. Honestly…!”
“No, mom, it’s not too far away. Los Manegeles is the center of the performing arts world. Besides, Trixie needs some space to find out who she really is.”
“No, this isn’t because of what you did at Trixie’s graduation.”
“Yes, I love you too. Really.”
“I’ve got to go now, mom. My water pipe is leaking again. What? No, of course it’s not a serious problem!”
“Trixie can handle herself.”
Firmly—maybe a little too firmly—Trixie jabbed the End Call button on her phone and sighed. Unfortunately she hadn’t been lying about the water pipe, but it was nothing that Trixie Lulamoon—alias Trixie the Great and Powerful—alias Trixie the Magnificent—alias Single Blue Female, 19—couldn’t solve. She still had plenty of plumber’s epoxy left over from her hurried trip to the hardware store, and applied some with only a few muttered curses from an ancient pagan tongue. Patching the leak would have been easier with the water turned off, but Trixie didn’t want to get her landlord involved any more than she had to. Maybe it was for the best that apartments without exposed piping had been more expensive, since it would have been a lot harder to fix something behind a wall.
Harder, but obviously not impossible. Trixie could do anything.
Yes, she thought as she finished up the newest patch, moving here had been the right decision. Sure, her apartment wasn’t very large. The kitchen amounted to a stove and a handful of cupboards on one side of what was ostensibly her living room, there were some very unsightly colors of mold growing in the shower, and her bed was too short unless she slept diagonally, but none of that really mattered. The life of the performing artist wasn’t about the place she happened to pay rent for! No, Trixie’s life revolved around gala luncheons, sold-out performances, late-night hot tub conversations with the world’s biggest stars, and pearl-clutchingly exclusive interviews in the wildest periodicals.
Or that was the plan, anyway. First Trixie needed a job. So she gave the pipe a last reassuring (if somewhat tentative) pat, stuck her phone in her bag, closed and locked her front door, and made her way out of her apartment building. 11am on a Tuesday and the air in Los Manegeles was already hot and humid, but Trixie kept her smile bright and not at all manic. It helped that Trixie looked spectacular. Her bag was striped purple and midnight blue with gold stars all along the sides, and she wore a knee-length sapphire-blue dress that was not so much spangly as it was spangles with a hint of dress on the side. Her shoes were a dark blue that stood out well against her lighter skin, and—in an act of acquiescence—she swept her silver hair up into a ponytail, tying it with a zirconium-studded purple band, to keep her shoulders from getting all sweaty.
Los Manegeles! The city of hair gel! It was glorious. Windowed mountains of stone and concrete rose into the sky like celestial giants, far outstripping the pathetic one- and two-storied buildings of Canterlot. Palm trees dotted seemingly every last street corner, their shielded trunks a tribute to their brave domination over all more native species. Golden five-pointed stars adorned the nearby walls—illegal graffiti, sure, but stars nonetheless. A faint layer of darkness oozed through the sky up above, as though cementing Los Manegeles’ position as somehow set apart from the rest of the world: even its air was different. The city smelled of smoke and car exhaust and… well, Trixie was reluctant to identify that last smell. Hope! Why not say it was hope. This was a city of dreamers, after all, where young women and men came from all over to prove that they too could be famous, could bring in and bear and enjoy the adulation of thousands—no, millions—no, billions! Billions of people would come to love Trixie!
“Yo, watch it, broad.”
Trixie stumbled to the side just in time to avoid being run down by the dour-faced green man walking past in the opposite direction. Her eye twitched for a moment. Come to think of it, there were quite a lot of dour-faced people around, walking with hands curled into fists or thrust deep into their pockets, glowering like the world wasn’t promising them anything but a hard time. It was momentarily disconcerting. Still, Trixie pulled herself together. The performing arts were admittedly—necessarily—appropriately!—cutthroat. These were clearly the poor fools who had lost the game that Trixie was now poised to win so easily.
Trixie walked across the nearest zebra-striped crosswalk, smiling madly against the honking car horns that assailed her from every direction like the background music of the city. An angry music, yes, but irrepressibly alive. And maybe Trixie could even learn to channel some of that anger into her performance. An elderly woman with light tangerine skin walked by too slowly, and Trixie transfixed her with a glare. Somehow it did make her feel a little better.
Yes, that was the way. Take the range and frustration brimming around her and channel it into a fierce determination sure to win her any starring role in the city. That was the way the arts worked! If you had the courage to demand what was rightfully yours, anything was within your grasp. And then she’d have fame and power and professional headshots and, well, the money for a better apartment. Yes, it was good to be alive! Trixie’s graduation from Canterlot High had not come nearly quickly enough.
A particular tall building caught her eye, painted a light tan with ugly green pillars around the front door. The pillars supported an awning with a sign reading “Underground Ape Films.” Trixie had never heard of the studio before, but supposed it would do for a start. Besides, it was very close to her apartment building and she didn’t have a car. Trixie reignited her smile, strode up to the glass front door, pulled it open, and stepped inside.
The receptionist was a thin olive woman with pale yellow hair and an ugly gray dress. She was also reading a tabloid magazine and blowing bubblegum. Trixie found her smile becoming a little more fixed. She waited for several seconds, but the receptionist didn’t pay her any attention.
Trixie coughed. “Good morning.”
“Huh? Oh, hey.” The olive woman crammed her gum back in her mouth and spun her chair around to get a better view of Trixie. She looked disdainful. Trixie disliked her immediately.
Still, she wasn’t ready to burn the bridge quite yet. “Trixie saw that this is a film studio,” she said imperiously. “Are you casting right now?”
“Casting?” The receptionist shrugged. “I dunno. Probably? Are you looking for somebody?”
“No, Trixie is the one being looked for, even if you don’t know it yet.” Trixie allowed her smile to turn into a smirk of appropriate confidence. “Trixie is your newest star. Please show me to your audition room.”
The olive woman didn’t say anything for a long time. She stared at Trixie for so long that Trixie wondered if she was going to need to explain herself again, since the woman was clearly an idiot who hadn’t understood her. Then she started laughing. Her magazine dropped to the floor as she laughed and laughed, tears starting to drip from her eyes, and Trixie felt her face growing hotter.
“What is so amusing?!”
The woman valiantly stopped laughing just long enough to choke out a few words. “Oh… oh my gaw, you have got to be the most just-off-the-bus kid I’ve ever heard! ‘Show me to your audition room’—ahahahaha!” She doubled up, laughing for another half minute while Trixie stood stone still, not trusting herself to speak. “Look,” said the woman eventually, “we don’t—nobody works like that! We work with a casting agency! You need to get yourself a talent agent, and have your agent call our agent, and then maybe they work out an audition and maybe we give you something, not… not… hahahahaha!” She suddenly thumped a button on the desk, evidently activating some sort of communication system. “Ned! Hey, Ned! Remember that naïve boy from last month? You’ve got to come down to the front desk, I’ve got a girl here who could beat him twice over!”
Trixie drew herself up to her full height of five feet nine inches. “Trixie has no use for this Ned person,” she said, clinging desperately to authority. “Kindly give me the number of your casting agency.”
“What for?”
“So that Trixie can call them herself. A talent agent sounds like a ridiculous and unnecessary expense.”
The woman stared at her with huge, disbelieving eyes and an equally huge and disbelieving smile for a moment before grabbing a note card and scrawling something on it. “There you go!”
Trixie grabbed the card and strode out, doing her best to ignore the sounds of the woman resuming her scornful laughter. Not until she was two blocks away did she trust herself to slow down, breathe, and look at the card she had crumpled up in her fist. There was no phone number written on the card, merely a suggestion that Trixie perform an act she suspected was physically impossible. Trixie screamed and threw the card into the gutter.
The nerve of that woman! Trixie clenched her teeth so hard her jaw hurt, restraining herself from running back to the studio only with the worry that she might get arrested in the process of getting her revenge. There wasn’t any Principal Celestia to report the receptionist to, not in Los Manegeles! Suddenly the only higher authority was the police, and while the woman had been incredibly rude, Trixie couldn’t think of any law she might have broken. Trixie had walked up to the world, demanded it open its doors for her, and the world—in the form of an ugly woman with an awful laugh and an obvious dye job—had laughed in her face.
There was something making it harder for her to see. Trixie put a hand to her face and was startled and disgusted to discover it was tears. The Great and Powerful Trixie did not cry! Not since her birthday party in the sixth grade when nobody had shown up. She’d remedied that one by not having any more birthday parties, at least not until her old bandmates Fuchsia Blush and Lavender Lace had come to Canterlot High. That had been nice. Sure, they were somewhat simple, but they’d been great fans. Idly Trixie wondered what had become of them and how badly the world had laughed in their faces for daring to be great.
No. No! Maybe the Great and Powerful Trixie could cry every once in a while, but that didn’t mean she had been defeated. This was just a temporary setback. Los Manegeles was a big city, and Trixie would find another opportunity somewhere and work her way up until the day she could burn Underground Ape Films to the ground. But first, even though she definitely hadn’t been defeated, maybe it would be for the best if she sat down for a little while. Just until she felt better or at the very least until her shoulders stopped shaking.
There was a park on her left, and she stumbled into it and claimed the nearest bench. It was strangely relaxing. In a city of skyscrapers and smog and angry drivers, the park felt like a little planet of its own, with even the sounds of car horns dulled by the intervening trees. The grass was a lovely shade of green under her blue heels, the trees were comforting in their height, and even the dirt pathways felt welcoming and familiar, as if a half-forgotten dream of a simpler place had spilled into her world in the form of dirt and grass and bushes and trees. She could even hear the faint sound of birdsong, although… Trixie frowned. Surely birds didn’t usually sing operettas?!
“Well, well, if you aren’t a clever one!”
Trixie yelped and turned around. An old white-haired man in a raggedy brown coat leaned against a nearby tree, humming along with the improbable birds. His skin… she wasn’t sure what color it was. Her perception of it seemed to change depending on where she looked on his body, only when she looked away at some other part, she decided she’d been wrong before. It was blue, or maybe orange, or gray, or… suddenly her head hurt.
“What do you want?” she asked. She sat up straight, ready to run if she had to, with one hand on her bag—she wasn’t carrying any kind of weapon in there, but the old man didn’t need to know that. “Trixie has no money for hoboes.”
“Money?” The old man frowned at her like he hadn’t heard her first question. She was getting tired of people ignoring her. “What would I want money for?”
Great, not just a hobo but a crazy one. “Food. Water. Shelter. Medicine.” She glared at him. “Better clothes than that old coat.”
“Why, don’t you like it? I was told it was the very newest thing in homeless wear!” The old man snapped his fingers, and before Trixie’s eyes his coat morphed into a full black three-piece suit with an incandescent blue tie. “Is this better? Or this?” Another snap, and he wore the armor of a military commander from some ancient culture. Then an old-fashioned bathing suit, all polka dots and elaborate frills. Then a huge purple robe with oversized sleeves that covered every inch of him but his head and spread out onto the grass for several feet in every direction.
Trixie’s mouth was an empty desert. She had seen quick-change routines before; they always relied on a cape, an oversized umbrella, a shower of petals, something to obscure the magician while he or she pulled some hidden tab on their outfit to change it with another. This was something entirely different. This was magic, real magic, like the Rainbooms and so on had been showing all their last year at Canterlot High.
“What are you?” she asked, worried that the answer would be too complicated for a simple ‘who.’
“Oh, I’ve been so many things!” The man was no longer where he’d been standing; instead he was no more than three or four inches away from Trixie, but to her side, and standing on one leg with his left arm extended above him. Water poured from the sleeve of his robe to fall to the grass below, where it turned into millions of triangular soap bubbles and floated away. “Most recently,” he said, “I was a statue in a fountain! For hundreds and hundreds of years, can you believe it?! But before that, I was a trickster—“ he morphed into a lean brown dog, recognizable only by his white beard and frighteningly knowledgeable eyes “—a tyrant—“ the costume of the military commander returned, fitting loosely around the brown dog as it stood atop a pile of laughing human skulls “—and a god.” The dog and skulls disappeared to be replaced by an eerie black mist that refused to dissipate, lightning bolts crackling around its edges and occasionally raining turnips. The old man’s voice came from the center of the mist, whimsical yet ominous. “But all that’s so wordy for chums, isn’t it? Please, call me Discord.”
“I see,” said Trixie, so faintly that she wouldn’t have thought he could hear her, except suddenly she doubted it was possible to say things this man could not hear. She swallowed and tried to regather some of the confidence she had felt before entering that accursed film studio. “I… would you excuse me for a moment? Trixie needs to, uh, make a phone call.”
“But of course!” Without ceremony the black mist was gone, leaving only the old man—back in his tattered brown coat and without any shoes—resting under a tree quite far away, though she had no trouble hearing him. “The young are such social creatures, aren’t they? Always calling up their girlfriends to gossip about this thing and that! Be my guest, ironically!”
Fighting down the urge to run for her life, Trixie yanked her phone from her bag, grabbed and paged through her list of contacts, and dialed the number. If there was anyone in the world who might know something about what was happening to her, it would be this girl.
Several excruciating rings later—during which Discord shuffled the leaves of the tree he was lying under through the full spectrum of colors—a familiar voice answered. “Hello? This is Sunset Shimmer.”
“Sunset! This is Trixie the Magnificent calling.”
“The wha—oh, Trixie! Hi. I didn’t know you had my number?”
Trixie smiled smugly. “Trixie has a rolodex.”
There was a pause from the other end of the line. “A what?”
“A rolodex. You know, a bunch of cards with people’s contact information! They rotate around the pole in the center, so Trixie can look up anyone she wants without losing any of the cards.”
“Um. You mean like an address book? My phone has one of those built in.”
“…” Trixie had a feeling this phone call was not going very well. For someone who had grown up in another world, Sunset Shimmer was sometimes a little too adept at learning about life as a human. She would have to figure out what her phone could do later. “Look,” she said, “this is not important. Remember your pony planet?”
“Equestria?”
“Yes, there. Did you ever meet a magical”—she thought about it—“thing that called itself Discord?”
The pause on the other end of the line was even longer this time, and Trixie was not at all sure how she felt about that. Finally Sunset spoke again, her voice sounding worried. “Um. Yeah. I never met him personally, but he’s the spirit of chaos. He ruled Equestria about a thousand years ago until my old teacher and her sister turned him into a statue. But apparently nowadays he’s been reformed and lives with Fluttershy. Pony Fluttershy, not the one we knew at Canterlot High.” She could hear Sunset hesitate before saying the next words. “Why do you want to know?”
“Trixie just met him here in Los Manegeles.”
“Okay. Um. Let me find Twilight’s book just in case. Does he… look reformed to you?”
“Trixie is not sure how to tell.”
“No, I guess not. Do you feel safe asking him what he’s doing there? Or I could talk to him, if you think he’d be more comfortable talking to somebody who used to be a pony.”
“Trixie doesn’t think he has much of a problem with feeling uncomfortable.” She gritted her teeth. “I’ll ask him. Hold on.”
She wasn’t actually all that surprised when Discord was already sitting in front of her when she looked up from her phone. He wasn’t sitting on anything in particular, but he was definitely sitting down, which she guessed was friendly of him. He batted his white eyelashes, which were suddenly long and sensual and perfectly trimmed. “So what’s the latest gossip?” He gasped and pushed his cheeks together. “Is there a sale at Penny’s?!”
“No!” Trixie glared at him before realizing that might be a very dangerous thing to do. “Look, Discord… how did you get here?”
“Dear girl, I already told you I was a statue! Over in that very fountain.” He pointed in a direction that didn’t seem to contain any fountain within Trixie’s range of vision. “But then one day the air was just filled with anger and magic, and my stone shell fell right off, poof, like that!” The surface of the nearest arm of Trixie’s bench melted away to reveal an inner structure of a thousand grinning Discord heads, and Trixie jumped in terror.
“And when… when did that happen?”
“Well let me think.” Discord stood next to a tree, which reshaped itself into an enormous wooden calendar, whose pages he flipped through casually. Trixie’s head spun. “I suppose it was about five months, eight days, fifteen hours, forty-three minutes ago! Approximately speaking.”
Trixie quickly did the math. “The Battle of the Bands.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“A large fight, with plenty of magic involved. It was not one of Trixie’s best moments.” Images of the Dazzlings flashed before her eyes, summoning unearthly creatures and convincing her to sabotage the Rainbooms’ chances of winning the competition. “But that was half the country away! And besides, you’re supposed to be in Equestria!”
Bespectacled, balding, and wearing a scarlet dressing gown, Discord paged through an enormous atlas. “E-ques-tri-a? Equestria, Equestria… no, I can’t say I’ve ever heard of it! I’ve always lived right around these parts, you know, just a homebody.”
Trixie nodded carefully. “Will you excuse me for just another moment…? Sunset? Hi, Sunset, me again. Discord says he doesn’t know what Equestria is.”
Sunset sounded more worried than ever. “That means he must be a human version of Discord, from this world! And Fluttershy never got to him at all! Trixie, listen to me, you’ve got to find a way to escape, okay? I’ll write to Twilight and we’ll find the others somehow, okay? What’s he doing now?”
Trixie blinked at the old man, the object in his hands, and the very inviting—and very dangerous—grin on his face. “Discord is… offering Trixie a magic wand.”
Another pause. “Trixie, please say that’s some human euphemism I’m not familiar with.”
The events of the last half hour played through Trixie’s mind, accompanied by the events of her senior year. She’d called Sunset almost instinctually, expecting the Equestrian girls and their friends would come in and use some sort of pony magic and make everything normal again like they had in high school. But Trixie was an adult now. An adult who had been grievously wronged by her inferiors. What rule was there saying that everything always had to go back to normal, when sometimes normal wasn’t good enough?
“Don’t write to Twilight,” she said to the phone, still staring at the magic wand. It was long and silvery blue and somewhat curved, almost like a crescent moon, and the five-pointed star at its tip shone with the light of limitless potential. “Trixie will call you back, Sunset Shimmer. There is nothing to worry about.”
“Trixie, wait!”
But Trixie hung up the phone and stashed it deep within her bag. She gathered her greatness around her and looked into Discord’s eyes. “What’s your deal?”
“You want power, my pretty, and revenge. I want a place to stay.”
“You want to be my roommate?”
“It beats park benches!”
“And in return you’ll give me magic? Real magic?”
“And instruction in the same.”
Trixie smiled and grabbed the wand.
Trixie vs. her Internet Service Provider
Error! Web Pioneer 6.0 is so so sorry it could not find the requested resource, but it tried really hard! Please don’t replace it with another browser! Maybe there was a problem somewhere else. Have you tried restarting your computer?
Curled up in bed, Trixie Lulamoon stared at her laptop monitor with a growing rage. That was at least the fifth such error today! “Discord!” she screamed.
Discord’s humorous voice echoed down what passed for Trixie’s hallway, meaning he was still in the living room using her only good chair. Well, her only chair. “Yes, my duckling?” he asked, sounding far too innocent.
“Are you using all my internet connection again?! I’m trying to read my celebrity gossip sites.”
“Of course! I can’t let any of those ones and zeroes go to waste while I’m livestreaming, you know.”
An already all-too-familiar feeling settled upon Trixie. She didn’t know what Discord was talking about. She felt a strong temptation to ask. And she knew that she’d regret doing so. But maybe if she asked him nicely he’d let her use some of the internet again? She was paying all the bills, after all, and so far his promise to teach her magic hadn’t come to much more than telling her to feel angry and see what happened. On the bright side, her neighbor’s radio wasn’t playing holiday music 24/7 anymore…
Slowly, reluctantly, Trixie got out of bed and marched into the living room. Discord had magicked himself up a computer a few days ago, a massive thing that ran circles—sometimes literally—around Trixie’s old laptop. Currently it was floating a few inches above Discord’s head, a screen-mounted camera fixed on him as he lounged in her chair wearing a gingham dress and curlers. There were certain curves under the dress that definitely did not belong on an old man, and Trixie could feel the regret building even before she started asking any questions.
But, “What are you doing.”
“Livestreaming, poppet, I told you already! Isn’t this age marvelous? I just point my computer at me, and anyone in the world can watch what I’m doing!”
“But you aren’t doing anything.”
“I know, I know, isn’t that the beauty of it? Well, I suppose that’s not quite true. I’m also watching somebody else’s livestream, a cute little magenta-skinned girl in Manehattan.”
Trixie sighed and continued the farce. “And what’s she doing?”
Discord blinked suddenly enormous eyes at her. “I don’t think I understand the question.”
The final straw snapped inside Trixie’s brain, and she grabbed her wand from the dresser and thrust it in front of her. Discord’s computer exploded into an immense, multicolored fireball that quickly rematerialized into an old worn-out birthday balloon. Several blessed seconds passed of Discord not saying anything, which time Trixie used to stand panting from the sudden exertion. Magic was a more physical force than she’d expected, and whatever muscles she needed to blow things up, they were still developing.
“Well,” said Discord with the air of one not in the least put off by events, “your aim is improving!”
“I was aiming for your head,” she said, not really meaning it.
“Then I’m glad to report your aim is exactly as conveniently poor as ever. But tell me, Trixie, haven’t you ever thought there might be more behind your connection problems than one sorry old man, taking his first opportunity to learn about a brave new world?” The yellow t-shirt he was suddenly wearing over his dress read ‘Computers for Dummies,’ although the text was printed upside-down.
Trixie raised an eyebrow. Discord was an infuriating roommate who rarely made much sense, but she hadn’t yet known him to directly mislead her. If Discord said there was some other trouble with Trixie’s internet, then for the sake of her celebrity gossip, perhaps it was worth it to believe him. And it wouldn’t do any harm to ask him just a few more questions… probably. “What are you telling Trixie?”
“Oohoohoo! The third person again, always ever so delightful. Who is it that provides us with our access to this wonderful thing you mortals dub the internet?”
“The Los Manegeles ISP. Trixie believes it is called ConQuest.”
“Yes! And how many internets does this ConQuest promise to give you?”
“Trixie is paying for ten megabits per second.”
“And what are we getting?”
Trixie felt her face turn white as she rushed to her computer. Some sort of speed test program was already on the screen, no doubt another of Discord’s unpredictable moments of helpfulness. The number 0.4 stood out in big red letters, even as the air in the room coalesced into red mist.
“Trixie will destroy them.”
An hour later, the remaining battery charge in Trixie’s phone was just barely higher than her remaining patience. Only the full box of peanut butter crackers she had demolished in that time kept her sane, but she was beginning to suspect that ConQuest did not have a single employee, for all she’d been able to talk to was an endless stream of prerecorded menus and other messages. And they were all in the same odd chanting voice!
The first menu had asked her what language she would like the call to be in, except none of the options were ones she recognized. Suspiciously she pressed the ‘repeat all options’ button, only to be treated to an entirely different list of languages than before. She was so startled she picked the wrong one and wasted the next ten minutes trying to get the prerecorded messages to use words she could understand before she finally gave up and redialed. The experience had not gotten much better from there.
Even with the words taken care of, there was still plenty she didn’t understand, like the hold times. Trixie wasn’t even getting to talk to any real people! Why was she constantly being put on hold?! Especially since ConQuest had apparently never heard of the idea of hold music, and instead subjected her to an endless and ominous low chewing noise. On the bright side, she was getting very skilled at repeatedly inputting her account information.
By the time she reached an automated menu dedicated to the details of her account, with its seventeen distinct options, the cracker box was on fire and suggesting that her apartment did not have a sprinkler system. She pressed 4 to access advanced information about her account, only to listen to a chanting voice repeat the exact same account numbers she’d entered into the phone at least a dozen times already. Trixie’s eye twitched wildly, and the flaming cracker box sped out her open window to fall to the street below. She savored the screams.
The visceral satisfaction from the chaos outside helped Trixie realize that she was approaching the call entirely the wrong way. She wanted a better connection—ConQuest wanted her money. If she was going to get anywhere, she would need to at least pretend to give her enemy some of what it wanted, like a conscientious performer. With nothing left to lose, she pressed 4 (the list of options had changed again) to upgrade her account.
Almost instantaneously she heard the blessed sound of a real person talking to her. He was still talking in the same odd chanting cadence of the prerecorded messages, the pitch of his voice rising and falling every few seconds without any regard for what he was actually saying, but he sounded alive and Trixie was willing to take what she could get. “ConQuest account services, this is Whitewash. How can I help you?”
Trixie smiled dangerously into her phone. “Trixie has some concerns about her account’s connection speed.”
“Okay, let me have a look at that. What’s Trixie’s twenty-three-digit account number?” Trixie rattled it off in record time. “Great. It looks like we’re listed as giving ten megabits download, is that right?”
“Yes. However, Trixie is receiving less than a tenth of that.”
“That’s too bad. Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to make changes to an account without the account holder’s direct permission. Have this Trixie person call me back and I’ll see what I can do, all right?”
“But Trixie is Trixie!”
“Right, right. Okay, you have a good day, whoever you are.”
“No, you incompetent fool, I am Trixie!” Trixie shouted into the phone, but the line had already gone dead. Frantically she redialed the ConQuest phone number, only to be met with a prerecorded message informing her that automated phone service would be offline for maintenance for the next week.
Trixie’s cellphone caught on fire and was flung out the window after the empty box of crackers. There were more screams. Trixie supposed it said something about her when the only real source of pleasure in her life was other people’s suffering, but she was past caring.
Discord’s head found its way into her room, attached to an impossibly long neck. “Too bad, too bad!” he said, without so much as a hint of sympathy. “Have you considered a more direct attack?”
Another hour later, Trixie stood outside the ConQuest ComPlex in her best ‘moneyed professional’ look. A pair of sharp-cornered white spectacles clung to the tip of her nose by sheer force of will, although Trixie prided herself on her 20/20 vision so the lenses were nothing but plain glass. She wore a dark blue unbuttoned vest over her favorite white and gold-starred dress, and her magic wand was tucked threateningly into the turquoise sash around her waist. The heels on her shoes were essentially knives. She took a deep breath and walked inside.
ConQuest’s main lobby was an immense semicircle, several stories tall, with every last surface painted an offensively inoffensive beige save for the ninety-foot rendition of the company’s logo at the back of the room. Window-guarded information centers lined the walls every few feet, each one lying behind a long line of disgruntled or simply very confused petitioners. Trixie, in a moment of graciousness toward the travails of her fellow customers, chose the line with only one other person and patiently waited her turn.
Twenty minutes in, Trixie was feeling significantly less patient and could not have cared less about the effects of wireless towers on the sallow-skinned man’s begonias if she’d been paid to ignore him.
Thirty minutes in, Trixie waved her wand. The man’s shirt and glasses turned into a pudding-like substance and melted stickily off his body. He screamed and ran, and Trixie strode proudly to the front of the line.
The heavy-eyed woman at the desk had pale pink skin, with a few wavy blue curls poking out under the hood of the huge white robe that covered her whole body. She gazed at Trixie with an expression of deepest gratitude, though she made sure to keep her voice professional (if also in that same up-and-down chanting rhythm from the phone). “Did you just scare that guy away by magic?”
“Yes.”
“Oh my god thank you so much. I swear on Shell.log, if I ever so much as see a flower again in my life it will be too soon. Look, can I help you somehow?”
Trixie nodded. Her day’s interactions with ConQuest, to say nothing of Discord, had left her all but drained of hope. Trixie was Great and Powerful and could summon enough energy to try one last time, especially with a woman who felt gratitude toward her, but if this time too failed, well, she was fully prepared to bestow the full extents of her wrath on anyone who got in her way. Even if the woman’s white robe was kind of creeping her out. “Trixie has a question about her account,” she said, and recited all twenty-three digits of her number from memory.
“Awesome. Trixie Lulamoon?”
“That’s me.”
“And what’s your trouble?”
“Trixie is receiving less than one tenth of her promised download speed.”
The pink woman froze, her expression caught halfway between an apologetic smile and a look of profound fear. Out of context it was not an expression Trixie minded seeing on people, but at the moment it filled her with an exhausting, inescapable dread. “Uh…”
“Yes?”
“I… can’t do anything about that. This terminal doesn’t have the permissions.”
Trixie nodded again. No, of course it didn’t. Somehow now that it had come time for her fullest wrath, she didn’t even feel capable of mild surprise. She waved her wand and blew up the woman’s terminal, but more from necessity than from malice.
The woman, however, was coming to realize that an angry magician could not be trusted to always be on your side. She rose unsteadily to her feet, even the endless chanting gone from her voice as she looked uneasily behind her. “Uh, in that case… I can take you around back to look at your connection, if you like?”
“Very well.”
The window and the bit of beige wall under it turned out to be a sliding door, and the pink woman escorted Trixie back into the depths of the ConQuest ComPlex, through a long series of hallways whose walls were decorated with arresting and disturbing symbols from another age. The beige on the walls faded the farther they went inside, to be replaced with a color that was not quite black but seemed to flicker into any of a thousand other colors whenever it wasn’t being looked at too closely. Trixie also had the uncomfortable feeling that the halls were getting less spacious and regular, resembling more rocky tunnels than the right-angled halls she had grown to expect.
At last they stopped in what looked like nothing more than a small rocky grotto, with a deep dark crevice in the center about six feet in diameter. A single thin white cord ran through the grotto from one stone wall to the other, glimmering with constantly shifting colors and shapes that Trixie thought looked alarmingly like the fragments of websites. An inky black… something extended from the dark crevice, jointed every few inches and wrapped around the center of the white cord.
Trixie stared, bewildered. “What is all this?”
“This is your internet connection. The white thread, I mean. All the data and stuff flow along this thread into your house. There’s one for every one of our customers in this place somewhere.”
Trixie leaned in to take a closer look at the thread, and recoiled; Discord must have made himself another computer, for he was viewing some websites in her absence that she had definitely not wanted to see. She turned to the pink-skinned woman. “Trixie had heard the internet was supposed to be more complicated than this. Someone said it was not a series of tubes.”
“Well, it isn’t! It’s a web. So it’s made of threads.”
“And what is that black thing?” asked Trixie, pointing at the long series of joints sticking out of the pit.
“Oh, that’s an arm of the spider.”
“…what?”
“The giant spider, almighty Shell.log. She feeds on bandwidth from the threads of the web, that’s why everything runs so slow. We’re her worshippers.”
Trixie nodded, the last refuge for someone who can no longer afford to question what the world was telling her. “I see. Trixie thinks she is going now, and will maybe report you to the Better Business Bureau.”
The robed woman sighed. “I’m afraid we really can’t let anybody else know about the spider.”
“But you just told Trixie about her.”
“Yes. Look,” said the woman, “I really am sorry about this,” and then she pushed Trixie into the crevice.
When Trixie came to, she was lying at the bottom of what appeared to be a sacrificial pit. Human bones littered the sides, as did half-chewed résumés and several graphics design portfolios. Before her rested an enormous bulbous black mass, its only discernible features a pair of malevolent house-sized red eyes and a series of vicious fangs around a mouth gaping large enough to swallow Trixie whole. Millions of arms extended from Shell.log’s body, rising up into the ceiling to, Trixie presumed, wrap themselves around other white threads and ruin the internet experiences of nearly every other citizen in Los Manegeles. She growled and aimed her wand directly at Shell.log, but the resulting flash of pink light bounced off the great spider’s skin with no effect. Perhaps it was simply too big for her.
A now-familiar chanting sound filled Trixie’s ears, and she looked up again. A dozen or so white-robed figures stood around the edges of the pit, reading from the longest and most evil scripture she had ever heard. “The limitations of liability set forth in this Section apply to any acts, omissions, and negligence of ConQuest and its underlying third-party service providers,” they intoned, “agents, suppliers, distributors, licensors and business partners (and their respective officers, employees, agents, contractors or representatives) which, but for that provision, would give rise to a cause of action in contract, tort or under any other legal doctrine…”
Trixie whimpered and tried to shut her ears against the evil chanting as the robed figures began to speak of customer equipment and the responsibility for its damage. The room was lit by a series of burning torches attached at regular intervals to a wide bronze ring, suspended from the high ceiling by three long ropes. As Shell.log closed in on her, mouth opening still wider for the kill, Trixie weakly lifted her wand to point at the ropes suspending the torches aloft. Perhaps Trixie’s magic could not affect the spider directly, but she was sure she could cut a few ropes.
A few seconds later, as the flame from the fallen torches engulfed Shell.log’s black body and the robed figures ran shouting from the room, Trixie laughed. “Time to get net-neutered, you bastards.”
The sun was lowering in the distance when Trixie left the Conquest ComPlex once and for all, pointing her wand threateningly before her in case any of the spider’s robed worshippers wanted to make one last try. There were none more to be seen, and Trixie sighed in relief. Her glasses were gone, along with one of her spiked shoes. Her vest and dress were torn and had several patches completely burned away, and her arms and legs were bloody and torn from climbing out of the pit. Her vision still swam from when one man had hit her on the head with a routing device. But she had won. ConQuest would not be able to spin more threads of its web to obtain more customers, but without Shell.log to feed on their connections, the customers it already had would enjoy high speed internet forever after. She had saved Los Manegeles.
Unfortunately, nobody would ever believe her if she told them. Trixie cursed under her breath. What was the point of being a hero if nobody ever thanked you for it?
Then she remembered her other hand and grinned. She’d managed to steal a new cellphone from one of the hooded people. Life was looking up.
