Chapter VI
Maybe Finn or Sara trusted one person with it, who then told just one other person. Or other people were finding out on their own. Who knows, maybe people noticed Finn and me wearing Silph Scopes throwing Poké Balls all around the OASIS that one night. I wasn't going to try and find someone to blame for it.
Fact was, that after just a couple of days, the whole OASIS was playing Pokémon. Not just on Satoshi, but everywhere. People were wearing the goggles and catching creatures.
While you pick up the Silph Scope only halfway through the original games, Satoshi wasn't designed to be experienced linear, like the original games. You could start wherever you wanted. New players only had to clear the Team Rocket hideout behind the poster in Celadon City's game corner.
It could technically be done in an afternoon. There were already speedrunner videos explaining how and people offering to help out for a small fee. Finn and I made a pretty sum selling tough and rare Pokémon to newcomers.
Selling Pokémon was officially against the rules on Satoshi. The OASIS kept track of the ownership history of the little creatures. They had to be traded. But Pokémon could hold items while being traded. Buyers would capture a weak, low level Pidgey and attach an expensive item to them they picked up from an in game store. Then we would sell those again. It's a bit of an exploit maybe, but not one they ever tried to fix.
It became a hype. All the popular content creators were posting videos about catching Pokémon in weird places, and everyone wanted to experience this novelty. It was one of those OASIS wide events people enjoyed being a part of. A sense of togetherness. Like getting mass killed in the Battle of Castle Anorak or making memes about Star Wars episode 22.
Surely someone else must've figured out the location of the Rainbow Road from the riddle as well. We had no idea, there was no online leaderboard keeping track of the contest. Maybe we weren't even the first to solve the riddle. The only thing we could do was move forward with our hunt.
None of us had understood the phone call on Rainbow Road right away. But after a quick online search it was easy to find out where the reference was from. A movie called Scream that was a big blockbuster in 1996. We watched it the next day.
Now we had to fiddle out what to do with the clue. There was no Scream planet in the OASIS. Fifty years after the movie was released, not a single person alive had felt the urge to recreate it as a flicksync. There were also no planets dedicated to actors like Drew Barrymore (unlike her grandfather), Neve Campbell or Courtney Cox.
You could find them in other roles, like Cox hanging out in Central Perk as Monica from Friends, but it wasn't related to Scream in the slightest. Finn suggested we still had to find all those actors around the OASIS and kill them, see what would happen. I think he even started that venture, but gave up on the idea quickly.
Together we watched the Scream sequels and a television series adaptation. The general idea was the same. Someone from small town America dressed up in a black robe with a white ghost mask. Then that "Ghostface" stabbed the people he or she grew up with. It probably was more fun to watch when this kind of stuff was still uncommon in the real world.
Binging the entire Scream franchise didn't bring us any closer to finding out what to do next. We visited worlds with other horror themes. A planet devoted to the work of Stephen King. Locations inspired by classics like A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Exorcist and The Ring. Nothing.
Finn and I decided to study the year 1996 more thoroughly. What other movies were popular? What did people listen to, which games were published? Every title had the potential to be a lead in our perspective. And that made it hard to narrow them down. Should we be investigating Space Jam with Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan or focus on Blizzard's first Diablo? A lot of franchises from that year survived the toll of time.
One of the places we visited was The End. A world dedicated to disaster movies and other apocalyptic events. I went to New York where I got a long list of options of mayhem to unleash on the Big Apple. A tsunami, Godzilla, zombies, King Kong, tornadoes filled with sharks... I chose the big alien UFO from Independence Day, another 1996 blockbuster. It was quite the spectacle, but other than that a waste of time.
Still it was a lot of fun to travel all over the OASIS with my brother. It gave us a reason to spend some time on Tamriel again, because 1996 was the year The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall released. Another time we were throwing money at strippers in Duke Nukem 3D to see pixels that were supposedly breasts. "Shake it baby, you wanna dance?" became an instant running gag.
Sometimes Sara joined up too. Of course she took us along for the two big Disney movies that were released in 1996. One about a whole bunch of dalmatians, the other The Hunchback of Notre Dame. A very sugarcoated adaptation of the tragic 19th century novel. The music was awesome and Sara got angry at me because she thought I was staring at Esmeralda too long.
Eventually a month passed without any progress.
