Kingdom Keepers IV(36)

“We’re in danger.”

“Yes.” It was as if this was old news to Ariel.

“I need to get to Epcot.” To the Return, she was thinking.

“But you just got here!” Ariel complained.

“My friends and I want to help,” Willa reminded. “But we can only help if we’re together. Like a team.”

“Friends? A team? My friends are a crab and some fish. I’m all alone here,” Ariel said, wistfully.

“Not anymore you’re not,” said Willa. “You’re part of the team now.”





WHILE WILLA WAS SITTING with her feet draped over the catwalk surrounding the Disney’s Hollywood Studios water tank, Finn was awake contemplating a text message he’d received from an unidentified sender. It wasn’t that he didn’t receive text messages; of course he did—hundreds a week, maybe more—but this particular message held more interest than most:

www.thekingdomkeepers.com/key

Beneath the URL was the title of the book and a page number—a book Finn knew all too well. A book written about him and his friends. Underneath the title of the book, a single letter:

W

It was that W that had held his attention for the past hour or so. That letter and all it represented. Philby had been contacted by Wayne at school. He’d sent them on the Kim Possible adventure.

Now this.

Wayne was becoming involved again.

Finn’s first instinct had been to find the book and go to the Web site. That was why the book was sitting open to the right of the keyboard, and why Finn was sitting in the chair in front of his computer. But for the longest time he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He just didn’t completely believe Wayne had sent the text—even though Wayne had given him and the others their phones and therefore would know how to text him. Even though he was eager to connect with Wayne. The problem was this: Wayne never made it simple. Finn couldn’t think of a time that Wayne had given them something easy to solve or easy to do. The method he’d used to contact Philby supported that notion. Why hadn’t he just texted Philby if he thought texting was safe?

Wayne had a tendency to surprise: arriving uninvited in a chat room or interrupting a Skype session. A straight text seemed so unlike him.

But that W was like a finger drawing Finn closer to his keyboard. The longer he stared at it, the more tempted he was. Finally, he webbed the fingers of both hands, cracked his knuckles by bending them backward, and placed them upon the keyboard. He typed the address into his browser.

The page loaded, and he was instructed to hold the particular page of the book up to the computer’s internal video camera. He pushed the laptop back a few inches and hoisted the book. He hit enter. The computer bonged and the screen changed color.

SUCCESS! the screen declared.

For a moment there was no change. It was late, and he was tired. All that anticipation had been coursing through his veins for the past hour like caffeine from a soda. With nothing happening, a wave of fatigue overcame him. He felt like a pool toy losing its air, a condition that left him wholly unprepared for what happened next.

Wayne appeared on top of his desk, just in front of the keyboard. A small hologram of Wayne, no more than four inches tall, impossibly real-looking. Finn waved his hand through the image just to confirm it was what it was.

“Whoa!” Finn said aloud. “Can you hear me?”

“Hello, Finn.”

It was Wayne’s voice—there was no mistaking the scratchy quality. But, maybe because of the projection or the transmission, the words sounded somewhat artificial, almost glued together, the intonation wrong.

“What exactly…? Where…? Is that really you? Where are you?”

“Come down…lower…Finn. Look at…my face. I should see…you…better.”

Finn had heard Philby talk about augmented reality apps—AR—baseball cards that came to life as holograms on your desk, maps that did the same thing. The Keepers had heard rumors that Disney was considering making Kingdom Keepers playing cards with an AR component, allowing them to appear as 3-D images just as Wayne was now appearing. Some augmented reality could even be animated—a baseball player swinging a bat, a dancer spinning on her toes—but he had never heard of an AR element projecting in real time the way this one was. It was like a 3-D video chat, and Finn found it captivating.

He backed up his chair and lowered his head as instructed in order to look directly at Wayne’s small face.

Somewhere in the far reaches of Finn’s mind, a warning light went off. The choppiness of Wayne’s voice could be a transmission problem, as he suspect-ed—but why would the hologram be so clear and the audio be so choppy? That didn’t make sense. The audio sounded edited—words cut and pasted into sentences.