Chapter Text
Today I got beat-up by a couple of gremlins…
Zi frowned at what she’d written then scratched it out.
Today I had to fight some awful gremlins
, she wrote instead.
Less embarrassing to reread - active, instead of passive. Made it sound like she’d fared better than she really had.
In truth, she got in all of six flailing hits - most of them deflecting the skulking gremlin’s claws - before the wild one jumped on her back and started pulling her hair. It was just a good thing that Avalon was a virtual space, or she might have actually been seriously hurt… Even now, she was still sore, as her body remembered bruises and cuts it hadn’t actually received.
All because she’d asked them - pretty nicely, she thought - to stop making such a mess of the square. There was no reason to tear up the shrubs and trample the flowers, or scratch rude things into the bricks, benches, and trees.
Some people minded the monsters being around, but usually Zi wasn’t one of them. Most of the monsters were just curious, or kept to themselves. She’d had plenty of low-key encounters in that very square, in fact.
Now? She was mad at them. In general, sure, but more at those two, specifically.
There had been other monsters around, but they’d been fine. She’d been just about to strike up a conversation with the weird horse-faced fox-dragon, and everything.
Then again, maybe he was with them? He didn’t seem to want to be there any more than anyone else did when the gremlins got going. But he did stop them, in the end, so maybe they were together?
Either way, Zi wished someone had stepped in sooner. Her own friends didn’t arrive until after. After the three had left. After others logged out and new folk logged in. After all the onlooking monsters and humans and bots had left and she’d been the only one who knew why she was crying.
The only thing that stayed was the square’s helpdesk VI. And it could do nothing but flag the incident as a code of conduct violation. One that would be written off as an anomaly, because (officially) those monsters didn’t exist, and no other accounts had been involved in the attack. To the admins and troubleshooters, it would look like a bad interaction with some external code.
Eventually, they would upgrade security - there were enough of these incidents where the monsters could easily be flagged as dangerous malware.
But somehow the thought of that didn’t sit well with Zi. Not when her classmates brought it up. Not when she’d logged out and heard it mentioned on the radio. Not now, as she logged the day’s events in her diary.
There was more to the monsters than that, no matter what the officials said. Folk befriended them, sometimes. Heck, her friends had even urged her to befriend a few of her own to prevent these sorts of incident. Friendly ones were out there, and even the mean ones were certainly more than buggy or malicious code. They were too smart, and too varied.
...
Maybe tomorrow, she’d set out to prove it.
At the very least, tomorrow she could try to find that dragon again and ask if he’d sit for a picture. He was cute enough to paint, Zi thought.
And if those gremlins showed up again, she’d be prepared.
Tomorrow, she was bringing a bat.