Street Fighter was a test of endurance between them, Sonic Booms and Hadoukens canceling each other out at center screen for hours on end until one of them flinched an instant too soon or potassium deficiency slowed the muscles of the finger just that much. After that first hit, the normal rules of melee applied, but they were able to elicit moves from the little pixilated fighters that even the game’s programmers hadn’t imagined. In the words of one awestruck 12-year-old watching from the gallery of gamers that always formed when the two played each other, fanned out like disciples waiting for the prophecy of the glowing screen, “It’s so beautiful.” Those within earshot wept openly.

Euclid was over at the at the toy crane machine, exhibiting a similar mastery of her craft, fishing out stuffed griffins and pegasuses and unicorns two and three at a time, making a neat pile as the manager of the Siren Arcade looked on with a mixture of awe and disgust. Sometimes a child would come up and ask to have one, but with a terse expletive Euclid sent them crying back to bored mothers waiting in the mall promenade. The mothers expressed momentary anger, but were glad enough to get back to their shopping. The arcade was right next to Belk, after all.

The Street Fighter showdown grew to a fever pitch, Ryu and Guile reduced to blurs on the screen, streaks of black and blond spinning violently through the air, never seeming to land. Faster. A teenager in a flannel shirt passed out. Several others had blood dripping unnoticed from their noses. And just as the simulated g-forces were exceeding the bounds of human endurance, the screen flashed white. Rommel and the Little Laotian stepped back.

“Awww, shit. We broke it,” said Double L.

A voice came from behind, “No, you awoke it.”

They spun around to find a man looming behind them, dressed in the robes of a Jedi (the less refined wardrobe of the original trilogy), hunched over in the way that wise people hunch because apparently wisdom is very heavy and resides in the head.

Rommel asked, “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m Luke Edwards. I played video game prodigy Jimmy Woods in the 80’s film classic The Wizard.”

Double L grew wide eyed. “You know Fred Savage?”

“Indeed, but that is incidental to the point.”

“Suddenly there’s a point?” asked Rommel.

“Look.” Edwards pointed at the screen.

Ken stood smiling on the blank white background, arm extended in a thumbs up. A conversation bubble read: Go to the Mermaid Grill and slay the dragon there.

“What’s that?” asked Double L.

“A quest.”

“Not the classic 1986 film The Quest with that monster thing in the lake that turned out to be a crane or something?”

“No, a quest of the normal variety.”

Rommel ran his hand over a week’s worth of stubble. “Kill a dragon…”

“The last dragon,” said Edwards.

Double L shook his head, “No, that came out in ’85.”

“You have proved worthy of the task.”

“Does it pay?” asked Rommel.

“Dragon slaying is pretty much pro bono.”

“Sorry, not interested.”

“But you passed the test.”

“Whoopdeefuckingdoo.”

“Here, I got five bucks on me.” Edwards searched through his robe for a full minute before his hand emerged again from the sleeve with a Lincoln. “But it’s all I got.”

Rommel snatched the bill, and turned to Double L, “So, got any plans for the afternoon?”

“Eh, the five will get us a six pack of Icehouse.”

“Right, we’ll do it.”

When they looked back, Edwards had vanished into the crowd. A pile of Jedi robes lay discarded by the emergency exit between Hoop Shot and Skeeball.

“Do you think he really knows Fred Savage?” asked Double L.

-----

The Muzak was a cover of Dre’s classic Bitches Ain’t Shit, and everybody in Abercrombie bobbed their heads even though it wasn’t trendy. The Siren Arcade was in the corner by the Belk estuary, where old ladies exited to mix with the disenfranchised youth that swirled about in self-discovery throughout the rest of the mall. The adolescents spoke in stilted slang that never quite flowed like it did on MTV, and they practiced curse words safely distant from disapproving parents, familiarizing their mouths to the shape of the word fuck, quoting it back and forth like a favorite song. The secret password of the human race, in whatever language, is the taboo for sex. A one-syllable rite of passage.

Observing the throng in the promenade, Rommel muttered, “Aw, fuck.”

Said one nearby teen to another, “See, that’s how it’s done.”

Euclid waved goodbye from next to the toy crane, where she was stitching together a great chimera from her pile of plush prizes, a monster she thought considerably more frightening than any dragon, or she might have tagged along.

Distant gunfire echoed down from the high glass ceiling. Probably from the food court. Chik-Fil-A and Sbarro had been exchanging volleys all afternoon.

Rommel and LL rounded the corner at Sunglasses Hut. Rommel glanced inside, but didn’t see anything he liked.

The Muzak shifted from rap to Spaghetti Western. Tumbleweed rolled by, kicking up a cloud of yellow dust. Everybody wore ponchos and wide-brimmed hats. Frightened mothers in long, poofy dresses shuffled oblivious children through worn, bare-wood doors. Shutters clacked across windows. The saloon grew eerily quiet. Eyes peered out of every crack and crevice.

Conspicuous among the fashionably-clad youth of the promenade were several French peasants, tilling fields by hand, selling cheap, gaudy jewelry from a kiosk, spraying perfume on passing ladies.

Beneath the muddy rags they called clothes, obscured by the hair matted by sweat to their brow, concealed by the pall of ignorance lay buried a deep hatred like a mountain waiting for pressure enough to earn the title volcano.

And then it pops, an explosion, smoke and ash and a sea of lava, resurfacing the highway of creation. It’ll stall traffic for a few months, but you just wait till it’s done. We’re adding a lane in each direction, so you can keep on going, but some jackass is driving slow in the left lane, and you’re alone and can’t cross the double white line into the commuter lane. Alone, stuck behind somebody who just can’t get it through their thick skull that you’ve got somewhere to be. Only you don’t.

The angry French peasants erupted, and threw the tools of their trade into a great bonfire, perfume bottles exploding like sweet-smelling Molotov cocktails, the steel of the plow glowing red like lava. Somewhere, they found a guillotine and AK-47s. The revolution had begun. Only later would they realize the poor timing of their action. There are people at whom you do not brandish weapons. Two of them were on their way to kill a dragon.

The peasants opened fire indiscriminately, mistaking middle-class for affluent, striking down innocents barely less oppressed than themselves. A 5.45 caliber bullet passed within a yard of Rommel. He pushed up his sunglasses, and rubbed his eyes beneath them. Fucking mall.

In a few seconds he and LL had killed five of the peasants, and winged the other 20 or so. Jericho Left hummed Debussy in victory, Jericho Right hummed Wagner. LL bobbed his head to the sweet dissonance of the interplay, harmonic and philosophical.

Mall security confiscated the guillotine, which is why so few mannequins have heads anymore.

The duo wended their way to the exit without shooting too many more people. Rommel paused to buy a handful of Runts from the candy machine. Crunching happily into each 2.3 cents worth of bliss, he stepped into the loose embrace of the city. Normally, this is where a story would end, with a reflectively optimistic light contemporary road song as the black and white of the credits faded in and everybody filed out of the theater. The feeling of having arrived, gotten somewhere, accomplished something.

There’s less shooting outside, where the craziness isn’t compressed. Where the sky has its own sort of gravity, lifting everybody up. At least that’s how it feels. Everybody an inch taller outside. Takes longer to erupt.

So no one shot at them. They passed a theater (patrons filed out to a reflectively optimistic light contemporary road song), a drug store, a bar. Shops and townhouses, skyscrapers and parking garages, block after block. The Mermaid Grill was across town, and the taxis wouldn’t go there, what with the dragon. So they walked.

They passed an elementary school. The students were getting out for the day, and every one of them headed in the opposite direction (accompanied by a reflectively optimistic light contemporary road song), back towards the townhouses and high-rise apartments. Ahead was a commercial district, the kind of place kids never go without being dragged. Fancy clothes stores and expensive restaurants. And the Mermaid Grill.

A bored crossing guard stood at the crosswalk. Her stop sign hung from a limp arm. Her orange vest seemed muted, demanding fuzzy fruit more than caution. There was no traffic on the road, nor had there been since October 1972. Trapped in his box, the little white handless, footless silhouette of the walk signal beckoned from the other side of the street.

Rommel and LL began to cross.

“Hold it!” shrieked the crossing guard like she was a tiny banshee in their ears with physics defying lung capacity (the incredible shrinking woman would have been unable to speak because her vocal chords would have been too small to create an appreciable vibration in the air). The sound shook them to the brain stem. They stopped.

“What?” asked Rommel, steady though he desperately fought to regain equilibrium as his cochleae reverberated with the echoes of her voice.

She asked, “Where are you going?”

“Across the street,” said LL.

“Not on my crosswalk. No one’s crossed here for as long as I’ve been around. Damned if I’m gonna let you ruffians pass.”

“We piss you off or something?” asked Rommel.

She laughed once. “I wouldn’t say that. Only the worthy can cross between these lines. No one worthy ever comes this way.”

LL asked, “Can we just go outside the crosswalk?”

“That’d be jaywalking. I might let you pass, if you answer my question, but if you’re wrong, you’ll be cast into the pits of hell.”

Rommel and LL exchanged a knowing smile.

“What?” growled the crossing guard, “You don’t believe me?”

She spread her arms wide like Charlton Heston as Moses, and the road broke apart, black flames bursting through the fissures. Her eyes rolled back into her head and she sang Wagnerian opera in the banshee voice, accompanied by cackling demons from the deep. The white walking man signal turned red, sprouted horns, and grinned fiercely. The sky turned black.

Rommel shook his head like an old man reprimanding a careless child. JR slid out of the holster, and shot the stop sign in the center of the O. It fell from the crossing guards hand and clattered on the sidewalk. Instantly, reality returned, all aspects of hell banished back beneath the street where they belonged.

“Next time,” said Rommel, “get a better threat. Ask the goddamn question.”

She looked at him with terror in her eyes, a kind of fear usually reserved for the deeper levels of the hell she represented. Her banshee voice was reduced the peeps of a shy little girl.

“What’s on the other side of the road?” she asked.

LL answered, “The same as what’s under it.”

The two men passed unhindered as the crossing guard curled up around her stop sign and wept. The white silhouette tried to escape from his box as they went by, to run away from this new vision of hell, made all the more horrible by the way it was so openly embraced. Slowly, the crossing guard sank into the sidewalk.

Even before they made it to the Mermaid Grill they saw the dragon. Its glistening green serpentine body curled all the way around the building, the tip of its tail tucked beneath the white beard on its chin. Patrons quietly climbed over the yellow crest on its back to get into the restaurant. Whiffs of smoke drifted out of upturned nostrils.

“You’re here to slay me,” it said, giant eyes opening to slits.

“That’s yet to be seen,” said LL.

Rommel continued, “An arcade game told us to kill you.”

“Fucking Street Fighter,” said the dragon. It raised its head to look at them.

“Aw, hell. You two look like you could do me in, too.”

“Why exactly are we supposed to kill you?” asked LL. “You don’t seem to be posing much of a threat.”

“I owe some guys some money. It’s hard to get work, being a dragon. Look at these arms. Can’t use a computer. Can’t use a hammer. Like a T. Rex or something. Can’t even jerk off, which sucks since I’m the last of my kind. Not a lot of girl dragons around, if you know what I mean.”

Rommel stared straight into the giant golden eyes.

“You put the hit out on yourself, didn’t you?”

“How’d you know?” laughed the dragon.

“Shit man, you’re a closed book. One of a kind.”

“You know,” said the dragon, “this restaurant sucks.”

“Yeah, we know.”

With a wash of wind chimes and raked cymbals the dragon spread it great prismatic wings, spawning rainbows that danced through the sky and across the old brick walls of nearby buildings. It rose with impossible slowness, and flew away to distant parts of the city, casting a glow like a halo of moonlight.

“So, we gonna kill it?” asked LL.

“Not now, at least.”

-----

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