So he stumbled into his character, the one that came quite naturally, built off his quiet and observant nature, his loathing of and incompetence at executing any and all lies. He was, when all was said and done, just acting like himself.

Yes, he had mastered the language of the trade. Yes, he had come to recognize the twists and kinks of human nature brought to the surface by habitual drug use and/or addiction. And yes, he had come to know what was expected from a dealer in terms of both professionalism and disregard for the weaknesses of his customers. But he learned all those intricacies as Park. Employing no techniques for building a sham persona to scrim his true intentions, becoming, instead, genuinely masterful in the skills required of a dealer.

When he was introduced as Park the dealer, there was absolute truth in the description. Just as, simultaneously, he might have been as accurately described Park the cop.

Being inherently Park in both rolls carried minimum requirements. One of those was that when engaged in either job he expected certain rules and standards to be lived up to. And one of the most, if not the most, central of those to his job as a dealer was the one that any and all dealers adhered to as religion: Cash, up fucking front.

As cop it behooved him to remove his finger and allow Cager to take possession of the dragon. It would help build a case, and put him further inside Cager’s good graces. The only cop worry being that to give up the dragon without cash in hand might be out of character for a dealer and arouse some slight suspicion.

Park the dealer had no quandary. For him it was simply a matter of how business was conducted in a professional manner with a new buyer.

The moment considered, he did his job.

“Cash, up fucking front. Please.”

Covering the dragon with the cup of his hand.

Cager flicked the exposed edge of the dragon’s wrapping.

Behind him, a restiveness was taking hold of the room. The audience, anticipation fully whetted, was starting to twitch, attention focusing less on the static scene still holding on the screens and more on the far smaller screens they all had in their possession. The gamers in the ball chairs were still invisible other than their legs, but those legs had begun to shift, cross and uncross; one pair was drawing into their chair slowly, as if the occupant were being slurped inside and swallowed. The characters on the screens remained frozen, unresponsive to the occasional avatar that had approached and attempted to engage them for whatever unknown purposes of commerce, information gathering, combat, or sex.

Cager took in the energy of the room and turned his attention to the bartender.

“Tadj, pass some drinks, please.”

She dipped her head, placed several ceramic choko cups and a 1.8-liter bottle of sake on a tray, and rose, balancing the tray and herself on eight-inch platform Mary Janes as she scaled a stepladder out of the bar well.

Cager waited until she was kneeling well out of earshot in front of one of the members of the audience, holding the tray of cups in one hand, the huge bottle in her other hand, pouring one of the choko full to the point where only surface tension kept the sake from spilling over.

“She’s an artist.”

Park did not disagree.

Cager continued to watch as the boy she’d poured for lifted the cup, his touch disrupting the liquid, perhaps an ounce dribbling onto the tray.

“It’s the presentation. If she looked like a gymnast, the way she controls the tray and bottle wouldn’t be as impressive. But her delicacy, it disguises just how strong she has to be to do that.”

The girl rose, moved a few steps, knelt in front of another fan boy, and poured again. The attention of all the young men had transferred from the screens, their impatience, their toys, and was now focused wholly on Tadj.

Cager shifted.

“Her medium is their imagination. She has a persona, the clothes, the attitude, the skill with the sake bottle, her grace; it makes them think she’s something she’s not. They think she’s anime-schoolgirl bar chick. What she is really is a fairly conservative premed student at UCLA. But she can shape how she’s perceived. Make her physical presentation into art.”

Cager pointed at the hidden gamers in their chairs.

“Them, they’re doing something similar, but on an entirely different level of complexity. We all manipulate how we present in everyday life, yes?”

He paused, and Park had a flash of that self-consciousness from his first deal. Thinking for a moment that Cager had seen through him and was making a point of letting Park know that he knew before summoning Imelda and Magda to deal with him. Which they could do with some ease, seeing as he didn’t have the.45 or any other weapon on his body. But the moment passed. There was, after all, nothing to be seen through. There was only Park. He wasn’t the bartender, carefully grooming herself, playing a role to maximize gratuities. He was himself. Always.

He nodded.

“Yes.”

Cager nodded back.

“We present for work, for our friends, for women, for people we don’t even know anymore. We present an image of ourselves that we think would impress some teacher who told us we’d never amount to anything back in sixth grade. Humans, we’re presenters. We compose what we want people to see, and hope that they read it as we wrote it. Everyone does it. What makes Tadj special is that she gets her show across so clearly. But them, they’re in another medium.”

He was looking at the gamers again.

“They’re creating perceptions out of whole cloth. They don’t work on the canvas of themselves; they work from pure imagination. There’s a palette they have to paint from: the races and character classes and all the elements that the game limits you to, but the variations, once you start manipulating them, are near infinite. And players around the world are constantly adding to the palette, building new artifacts, designing clothes, founding communities, breeding new races, starting fresh guilds. These artists, they use those materials to create second skins, and employ them to tell stories.”

He was looking at the screens, at a landscape stretching without physical limits.

“They’re creating myths and legends, founding empires.”

He focused his gaze on Park.

“They’re slaying dragons.”

He turned.

“Bandoleros!”

One by one, heads peeked out from the mouths of the ball chairs, only the gamer who had been swallowed whole staying hidden. Park stared at them, and they stared at things unseen, eyes focused deep in the spaces between matter, necks at stiff angles, pupils narrowed to pins, seeing otherwise.

Park winced.

“They’re sleepless.”

Cager shook his head at something wonderful.

“Utterly lateral. They do things in there, twist the whole Chasm, make moves that shouldn’t be possible. Because they’re relentless. And seeing something we aren’t. They’ve been someplace we have not and have special knowledge because of it. Like when I went to Japan.”

He touched Park’s hand with the end of the comb.

“But they need focus. To be able to create.”

He opened the flap of his bag.

“I don’t have fifteen thousand dollars.”

He reached into the bag with one hand, waving at the air with the other.

“The club, it breathes money. What comes in, it gets taken apart to keep the place alive; what’s left over goes back out. I can’t interrupt that flow. If I do, I’ll choke off what’s going on down here. The heart of the place. I won’t do that.”

He fumbled with something in the bag, something large and heavy shifting. Pointing now at the audience, where Tadj was pouring the last of the sake.

“These guys, they’ve paid to see something special. They’ve paid to see the artists create. They’re here to see an epic written before their eyes. What they pay, it goes to the costs of keeping this room up and running; that includes paying the crew for their artistry. Any profit I make off recordings of their quest, that goes back into the room as well. It all zeros out.”