Raster opened the door from backstage, and let the roar of the club pour over him. It wasn't good - It wasn't, after all, his fingers on the controls, massaging waveforms and huge decks of samples into driving, dance-able greatness, but he could find, in a corner of his heart, a certain admiration for the sound's creator. DJ Cesium threw his body around the booth, too busy to notice Raster's approach to the stand, the heavy case in his hand.
DJ Cesium trailed his fingers trailing through a cloud only he could see in his HUD. Underneath the heavy notes that swayed the crowd, his blippy, trippy freestyling lingered, the more complicated rhythm lurking, waiting to be picked up by the more adept dancers and performers in the crowd to underpin their gyrations.
Cesium looked down slightly, sizing the other DJ up while stepping aside to give him a solid square foot of space at the top of the stairs. "Raster, eh? What, do you build arenas?"
That made him grin. "Do you decay radioactive particles?" both of them had to shout over the twisting, looping rhythms that Cesium's loops coalesced into once unleashed. Cesium started to smile back, until something heavy hit the booth with enough force for nearby dancers to look up and mistake it for a bass beat.
"There room for my kit up there, or you gonna hog the whole booth?" Cesium glanced down, and saw the immense case, one side studded with inputs for various cables.
"What do you call it?" he wondered, turning back to his gear, hitting one side to gently nudge it over. He still doubted that the other half of the booth would be a big enough berth for the yacht of a system. "Boats usually have names, right?"
"Ha. Very funny."
While Cesium renewed his loops and threw in a soft fade to the new set, Raster hefted the bulky case up, plugged in, and flipped it open, big, chunky hinges flipping over the edge of the booth. The grid of frosted, backlit squares inside fired up in a slow pattern, growing from the middle, and the jagged lines of Raster's avatar started a rising tide of cheers from the audience.
As the kit came online, Raster threw his fellow jockey a chuckle and a smile. "You had your chance, ready to give up some territory? The green room is nice, if you want to go take a load off."
"I am pretty sure," Cesium balked, flipping a line of switches, making a bright, pulsating wall of virtual light appear on one of the club's walls, "That the only thing I'll be taking is a piece of your hide."
blocks and tunnels seemed to grow out of the wall, blocky architecture lit in neons and pastels, dark cell-shading and high contrast edges. The howl that had gone up at Raster's reveal grew again, and Cesium let his loops expire, leaving only the low rhythmic pulses of the backing bass and drums filling the air as the crowd lost themselves in sudden anticipation.
When a huge wheel appeared, Raster clicked his deck first, spinning the counter hovering over the projected digital cliffs from '0' to '1'. Cesium followed suit a moment later, ticking it over to '2'.
The wall moved, shooting upwards to a cry from the crowd. Like falling off the edge of a continental shelf into the depths below, the entire club was thrown into darkness for but a moment, the drums and bass subsiding for just a moment, before a lighter, faster line rose up from nothing. As it did, a tube of light grew from the wall, shedding bright green over a thousand impatient faces, crawling across the ceiling over their heads. On either side, squares of brightness burst into existence, then faded from featureless squares and resolved themselves - Cesium and Raster's FreQs, their callsigns and avatars burned into the air ten feet high.
With a loud metallic jangle, a neon iris over one end of the long tunnel slowly spiraled open, wireframes of the two avatars leaping off the wall and resolving into bright loops, rising towards the tunnel opening as bodies jumped and voices cheered, music crescendoing as each of the artists in the booth above grit their teeth, and watched their personal collections of samples and loops load in.
When the triple-ringed cursors of the FreQs hit the open edge of the tunnel, laying down explosive sound in their wake, coalescing into phrases and choruses, the shrieks from the dancers below almost drowned out the sudden onslaught of sound. As the feedback poured in, flickering beams all but cut the club's ratings into the air above the booth, the digital counters rapidly rocketing into the stratosphere, neck and neck, and the duel was on.
That day may very well be in the future, for all of you.
We made it! But we're not out of the woods just yet, Harmonix Fans! You all want online multiplayer, right? RIGHT? Go back the Amplitude Kickstarter!
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