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“Dude, I miss the shrimp. What the hell happened to the shrimp, The Ball?”
Riz stared at the wok, which was violently spitting out grains onto the floor around it. “I mean, I don’t know,” he said, “but the rice sure is still being fried.”
The exhibits in front of Fabian and Riz seemed much more sprawling than the last time they had come to ArtificerCon, and the venue somehow even more packed despite this. They’d managed to get into the building with relative ease — by the time they’d entered, the queue had stretched around the block — but the place itself was starting to fill up, and quickly. Yet, Fabian had insisted that they trek to the exhibit that seemed the most familiar first, to great their aquatic acquaintance.
Instead, their shellfish shell-friend seemed to have vanished. The wok remained, of course, and so did the fried rice, but it had been replaced by a black screen with infinitely generating text. He wasn’t quite sure how the programme worked, but the wall of names and scrolling white words reminded Riz heavily of The Bad Kids’ group chat whenever Fig felt like she had something that she really needed to tell the rest about, urgently.
“The wok stir-fries the rice based on the inputs of the chat!” The gnome running the invention chirped helpfully. Riz hadn’t asked, but he supposed that people who stopped at exhibition booths generally seemed like they might want explanations for what was happening in front of them.
“This arcanotech engine uses a modified version of Detect Thoughts to probe the minds of those walking past for basic directional instructions, like thinking ‘left’ or ‘right’. Or ‘north’ or ‘south’, those work too! Or names of ingredients, like ‘peas’ or ‘carrots’. Then it collates all of that information and synthesises the most common input every 10 seconds or so, which triggers the bot to do its thing. Pretty cool, right?”
Riz could barely remember the name that the shrimp had had the last time they had visited, but he did see Fabian’s point. It wasn’t quite the same.
It wasn’t like they were here without Gorgug, but he couldn’t exactly walk around the convention floor with them at the same time. ArtificerCon had apparently managed to get the crystal number of the greatest wizard of their age, because they’d somehow called him several weeks prior and asked him if he’d like to join a panel on 'innovations in artificing, from the youngest minds of today'. Gorgug had been flustered; Fabian had been entirely jubilant. Riz had been mostly curious. And while the girls had been very excited about the whole affair on Gorgug’s behalf, Adaine had not been keen on the idea of losing Kristen in an overstimulating and obnoxiously crowded space for the umpteenth time, and so had respectfully declined to go. Fig and Kristen hadn’t wanted to leave Adaine behind, and so it was just Riz and Fabian again. Which, while Riz missed the presence of his other friends, it was nice to have this be a thing that was just them, too.
There were still a few hours to go before Gorgug’s panel, though. So plenty of time to explore the convention floor and see other things, and there were plenty of things to see.
Some of the exhibitors did look familiar: Riz supposed that he had probably seen some of them the previous year, even if he couldn’t remember exactly what it was they had put together. The whole event had been kind of a blur, a whirlwind of odd experiments and strange technologies. This year was the same in spirit, but with the space being technically the same, it was easier to navigate, even if they’d opened up a new hall to contain the overflow of presenters.
Outside in the courtyard, Riz and Fabian watched as a juvenile dragon turtle was subjected by a caster to piloting a go-kart in the courtyard, in order to control the movements of a dragon turtle in a parallel racing video game. Even as it was being held in captivity, the creature seemed to be somewhat enjoying itself, perhaps even relating to the character that was being displayed on a massive LED screen for the entire convention hall to watch along.
The monster was even winning.
“I bet I could take him,” said Fabian, breaking their awed silence, as the dragon turtle breathed fire into the air.
“In the game, or in real life?”
“Whichever you think is harder.”
“Toxic masculinity is dead, Fabian, you should know this.”
While they’d gotten distracted by a few other exhibits (a machine that 3D-printed with cotton candy, a pipe-based obstacle course only navigable by wing suit, something called a “Rune Goldberg machine” that seemed to activate sigils based on marbles knocking over dominos as part of a chain of small happenings), Riz had checked his watch obsessively enough to ensure that they got to the front of the queue for Gorgug’s panel, and managed to snag seats in the front row.
Riz didn’t know all of the other panelists, but he had seen one of their names on a poster in Bastion City a while ago, promoting a live egg drop from space, using an (allegedly unfertilised) basilisk egg. Those things were pretty huge, so he’d remembered being mildly impressed by it, and filed the information away, just in case it ever came in handy later.
(Well. He supposed it did come in handy, sort of.)
Riz watched Fabian fidget in his seat. The last people were still filing into the room, but the chairs were already looking pretty packed. The stragglers would probably have to stand at the back, and it pleased Riz to know how much interest there was in Gorgug’s work. As if on cue, his friend emerged from backstage to seat himself down on the stage, chatting with the other panelists. He towered over the other two for sure, an elf and a human, but his shoulders were hunched, in the way that Riz knew meant that he was stressed.
Gorgug’s eyes scanned across the room, and made contact with Riz, who gave him a thumbs up and a huge grin. His shoulders slackened, and he reached for the microphone.
“Hi.” Gorgug tapped the mic, causing a sharp bit of feedback that made Riz flinch on instinct. Gorgug winced. “Oops. Um. My bad. Let’s try that again.”
He cleared his throat.
“Hi everybody. My name is Gorgug Thistlespring, and I’m a Barbificer.”