A brand new Avatar Dining Club Mysteries episode. Listen to the YouTube version below or pick up the podcast version via pod.link or Spotify. Read along below!
The Hidden Snowglobe
“I mean, the last time I invited someone,” Vanilla Sharp said to me in frustration, “I practically broke the club.” We were strolling hand-in-hand towards L’Albero Verde, the Italian restaurant which hosted the monthly meal of the Avatar Dining Club. It was a glorious August evening of warm, golden light. The fine weather had inspired us to park a little further away than normal so that we could lengthen this pleasant walk together, coming as it did at the end of an exceedingly pleasant day.
Vanilla was referring to the meeting held the previous October, when her virtual guest had come to the group seeking a way of determining whether her metaverse girlfriend was male or female in real life. Edward, our white-haired founder – whose only rules were that we remained in our virtual world identities throughout the meeting and shared no real-life information – had been distinctly unamused by the request and declared the mystery unsolvable. To the other members of the club, it was the only time he had failed to find a solution to the regular assorted problems which got presented to us by our guests. Only I knew different.
“This was my chance to put things right, Leonard!” Vanilla insisted, tugging on my sleeve.
“And you’ll get it again next month, honey,” I reassured her. “Indigo said this was urgent.”
“But she’s brought someone twice already!”
“You were one of those guests!” I exclaimed.
“Yes, I suppose,” she relented. “And it was very good of her to set that up for me. She had to sit on that secret for days. Not an easy task for Indigo.”
“So there you go,” I said, as we started up the steps to the restaurant. “This is your debt to her repaid.”
Originally, it had been Vanilla’s turn to organise the present meeting’s virtual guest, and she had done so a couple of weeks earlier. But, with just a day to go, Indigo Williams – a skin designer and club owner in the metaverse – had messaged the group to ask if she might bring someone instead. “I wouldn’t normally ask on such short notice like this,” she’d written, “but it is kind of urgent. This is a really close friend of mine and she’s distraught. I think we might be able to help her.”
A few minutes later Raw Concrete, the youngest member of the club and a builder in the virtual world, started setting up the laptop at the end of the table on which our virtual guest would shortly appear. Edward and Indigo were chatting quietly about various metaverse matters, whilst Jennifer Bit and Mary-Anne Middlemarch were discussing fashion photography. I sat back happily and stole quick glances at Vanilla across the table. She caught me in one of them and beamed back at me, blushing slightly.
“What’s going on with you two?” Indigo demanded suddenly. Nothing nonverbal ever escaped her attention. “You’ve hardly said a word since you got here but you keep grinning at each other like two…” A huge smile spread suddenly across her face. “Oooooooh!”
“No real life information,” I said quickly, and coughed. “Right, Edward?”
Our founder smiled. “Quite so, dear fellow; quite so.”
“Only now?!” Indigo spluttered, regardless. “You two have been together for three months!”
“We wanted to keep things virtual for a while,” Vanilla explained. Now it was my turn to blush. “To see how we got on,” I added, somewhat redundantly and somewhat hoarsely.
“Would you two like to sit together?” Mary-Anne said suddenly, from her place at my right-hand side.
“Let’s keep things as they are,” Vanilla replied. “Leonard’s not good with change.”
“I’m not?” I queried.
“You’re not,” she told me.
“An example being?”
“An example being I tried moving some of the indoor plants in our metaverse house the other night and you immediately noticed and complained about it.”
“Because they were linked objects!” I exclaimed. “You moved the orchids and the cactus ended up hovering just above the seat of my chair! If you want to move linked objects then you have to select them individually first.”
“Who says I didn’t want that cactus there?”
“Leonard,” said Jennifer. “You don’t like change. I recall how distressed you got when we had a conversation about taking on new members after Vanilla left.”
“Well of course I was – I missed her!”
“Awww,” said Vanilla and reached across the table to pat my hand. “You really missed m- wait a minute: I was absent for one meeting and you started planning my replacement?”
“A purely hypothetical conversation,” Jennifer added, hurriedly.
“Perhaps you might take a moment to brief us on this evening’s guest,” Edward said to Indigo, sensing a change in topic might be timely. “You were just saying to me that there were some details it might be easier for her not to have to say.”
Indigo nodded and outlined these details whilst Enrico, our waiter, took our orders. Our guest’s name was Helena Hollander and she’d been a regular in Indigo’s inworld club for many years. The two had become close friends and, a few months previously, Indigo had made her co-owner. “It just made so much sense,” she told us. “I’ve neglected events there for so long because of my skin work, especially since I let Hargreaves go on the business side of things. Our membership now isn’t half what it used to be in its heyday. Helena had a ton of great ideas for the place and I think she loves it even more than I do.”
For all this energy and enthusiasm, Helena carried with her a great pain. A couple of years earlier, her online lover of five years, Matieu, had passed away.
“Five years?” Jennifer said, appreciatively. “That’s a long time in the metaverse.” We all nodded at this in agreement.
“Did he actually die, though?” Raw asked. “I mean, she can’t know for sure, can she?”
“Yes Raw,” Indigo said, her eyes narrowing slightly, “he actually died. He gave her access to his real life cancer blog and his family entered all the details of his passing there.”
“Oh,” the young builder said, and then added quietly under his breath, “Still could have been faked.”
Not long before he’d become too unwell to continue in the metaverse, Matieu had made Helena a gift to remember him by: a snowglobe. On one wall in her metaverse house she had a painting of an aunt’s cottage she’d stayed in over a number of summer holidays as a child: Matieu had created a small, three-dimensional replica of the building and placed it in the centre of the snowglobe. It had become her most treasured virtual possession.
“Fast-forward to two months ago,” said Indigo. “Helena met Denerick. He seemed like a nice guy at first and we were all so thrilled for her when they started dating. I don’t know the ins and outs of why they didn’t last very long, but his actions when they broke up prove he was a jerk all along. According to him, however – he delivered a very long and embarrassing monologue about this in the club a couple of nights ago – Helena dumped him because he didn’t measure up to Matieu.”
“What ‘actions’ did he take when they broke up?” Vanilla asked?
“He hid her snowglobe,” Indigo told us. There was a collective gasp from around the table. “She’s devastated. She has no idea where he put it.” A number of honorary titles were assigned to Denerick in the ensuing assessment of this behaviour.
“Hid it?” Raw said. “How can you hide something in the metaverse?”
“You put it somewhere and you don’t tell others where you put it,” Vanilla said, levelly.
“She must have given him editing rights over her objects,” the builder continued, shaking his head at the very idea.
“It’s a form of trust and intimacy, Raw,” Mary-Anne said (quite sharply for her, I thought, and wondered what story lay behind the comment).
“What we need to work out,” Indigo told us, “is where he hid it.”
*
A few minutes later, Helena appeared on the laptop. “Hello!” she said, waving. She was a middle-aged woman with jet black hair in thick, shiny curls. “Which one of you is Vanilla? I’m so sorry to have bumped your guest. I feel really bad about that.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Vanilla waved the issue aside as though it had never even occurred to her. “I owed Indigo one anyway.”
“I’ve brought them all up to date on the situation, Hels,” Indigo said. “We are ready to find your snowglobe!”
“Awesome! I’m logged in and can share my screen with you. Consider yourselves my remote control!”
Edward cleared his throat. “If I might interject,” our host said, a tiny bit gruffly. “This is, I might remind everyone, a dining club. It is not a mystery-solving panel. Perhaps we could at least start by introducing ourselves?”
So we did that. Then Edward expressed his sorrow at hearing about Matieu’s passing and we added our own comments of condolences.
“Thank you,” our guest replied. “He was such a lovely man, wasn’t he, Indi? So gentle and kind.”
“He was,” Indigo said. “I wish I’d known him better.”
Helena smiled sadly. “I still can’t get my head around him just being gone,” she said. “I didn’t know him in RL. He told me as soon as he got the diagnosis, of course, and to begin with I thought that we would never recapture what we’d had before. But, somehow, we did. Once he’d adjusted to his new life, the metaverse became a place of sanctuary for him, a place where some part of his ‘normal’ could be stored and protected. He told me it helped him to stay connected to the person he’d been before.
“The thing is,” she continued, “sometimes I even forgot that he was ill. I felt so guilty about that, but I wasn’t a part of what was going on in his everyday and he wanted it to stay that way. Of course, there would be days in a row when he couldn’t come online because his treatment made him so poorly, but when he was on, he was – well – Matieu, just the way he’d always been. Sometimes a little quieter. Sometimes a little more absent. But still Matieu. And then the days when he was online became less and less frequent. And finally there was a long period of nothing and his journal had no updates added. I began to suspect the worst. But then, one evening, he was back. We went dancing. He was still Matieu, but this time it was taking him a lot longer to type things out. He only stayed online for an hour or so. I think somehow I knew that it was the last time I’d see him, but when he promised me he’d be back inworld soon I chose to believe it. I thought that maybe believing it would help it come true.”
The table was silent for a few moments. Finally Raw cleared his throat and said, looking down at his plate, “I’m very sorry for your loss.”
Edward said, his voice catching a little, “Perhaps we can be of some service in restoring a piece of his memory.”
Helena smiled. “I hope so too. Indigo was most insistent on me coming tonight. I don’t know what you’ll be able to do though. I’ve looked everywhere for my globe. It’s nowhere to be found.”
Raw asked her, “Are you certain this guy didn’t just delete it?”
She sighed. “Well he says he didn’t,” she replied. “I say that, but all I have to go on is this private message he sent me the day after we split up. After that, he unfriended and blocked me, so there’s been no further communication since. This is what he said: ‘I wasted two months of my life on you that I’ll never get back -’”
“The poor thing,” Vanilla said. “A whole two months.”
“Indeed,” Helena replied and continued. “‘I wasted two months of my life on you that I’ll never get back. Now you can waste some of your time on a lost cause by looking for your precious snowglobe. It’s still in your skybox – I haven’t deleted or broken it – but I doubt very much that you will find it. Have a nice life.’”
“What a total jerk,” Vanilla said. Or something along those lines.
“Tell them about the numbers,” Indigo said.
“Oh yes. He also sent me a notecard with a list of numbers on it. No explanation; just a whole bunch of numbers.”
“What sort of numbers?” I asked.
“How many sorts are there?” Helena replied. “Just… numbers.”
“I need to see this list,” Raw said authoritatively. Indigo gave him a sweet smile that said, See how well I know you? and unfolded a sheet of paper and handed it to him. The young man immediately began examining it.
“18 numbers,” he announced. “The range is… 0.35 to 598. About half have digits after the decimal point.”
“It’s like watching Einstein,” Vanilla commented.
“If he were reading his shopping receipt,” I added. She grinned at me and we fist-bumped across the table.
“Enough of the freaking afterglow!” Indigo cried out.
“What else can you see there Raw?” Jennifer asked, encouragingly.
He frowned. “Some of them are similar in value. But some of them aren’t. But the ones that aren’t are themselves very similar to other ones that aren’t. I think they’re six groups of three… but I’m not sure.”
“Groups of three?” I repeated. “Like an X, Y and Z value? Could these be coordinates?”
Helena said, “Actually, I did think of that. More truthfully, a friend of mine who I showed the card to thought of that. So I treated them as such and checked all six locations they pointed to… and there was nothing there. As Raw says, three of those locations were roughly the same spot in my skybox. The other three are right down at ground level.”
“When you looked in those places, did you turn on transparency mode?” I asked. “He might have made the globe invisible.”
“Oh yes,” she replied. “I thought of that too.”
“More truthfully,” Indigo said, “your smart, kind and attractive co-owner thought of that.”
“I don’t suppose that spot in your skybox was where the globe had originally been placed?” Mary-Anne asked.
“No it wasn’t,” Helena replied. It was just a space on my kitchen table. The globe was originally on a shelf in the adjacent lounge.”
“Perhaps it might be helpful,” Edward suggested, “if we had some sort of description of what the snowglobe looked like.”
“Yes of course.” She looked down at her screen. “I have a photo of it somewhere here that I downloaded. I should be able to bring it up on screen.” There was a brief pause whilst she located the file, then the screen went blank for a split second and the image appeared. The globe was pretty much as I had imagined it would be: a simple glass sphere on a rock base; in the middle, surrounded by fallen snow, was a little, red brick cottage.
“And the painting?” Edward asked.
“Sure thing,” Helena replied. “Let me switch to my inworld view.” The screen changed to the inside of an apartment that looked as though it had been created inside a disused warehouse. A compelling contrast had been created between high quality furnishings and the rough finish of the walls and floor. I spotted a kitchen area next to a large, spacious lounge. Between them stood a large aquarium.
She cammed over to one of the whitewashed walls, where a painting hung showing the exact same house we’d just seen in the globe, except now it stood by itself on a country lane.
“Oh wow,” Jennifer said. “That’s where you used to spend your summers?”
“Some of them, yes,” Helena replied. “With my Aunt Maude. My parents both had busy jobs and they couldn’t really take time off to look after me during the summer holidays from school, so they’d drive me down to that cottage in Sommerset at the start of the break and pick me up again when August was over.”
“That must have been amazing,” Mary-Anne said. “It looks so tranquil.”
“Honestly,” Helena told us, “I protested like hell about it every single time. My Aunt was a single lady and she lived in that cottage her whole life. Her own father had grown up in it. To say that the interior was antiquated would be putting it mildly. There were no wall sockets! The only electric appliance she had was an ancient iron that she screwed into one of the hanging light bulb sockets when she needed to use it. It was like a time capsule in there. No TV. No washing machine. She washed her clothes by hand and then squeezed the water out of them using a mangle before hanging them out to dry. She had a battery operated radio and – I kid you not – a freaking wind-up gramophone.”
“I still say it must have been amazing,” Mary-Anne said.
“Actually, it was. There was something about waking up in that house in the mornings, especially the sunny mornings. The way the light came through the windows with the sound of birdsong outside was just… magical. It was so incredibly peaceful. And yet I spent most of my time there being bored out of my brain. We never appreciate things properly when they’re happening to us. I’d give almost anything to go back to that time now.”
“The price of wisdom,” Edward said, nodding thoughtfully, “is so often regret.”
“Well I’d be bored there even as an adult,” Raw commented.
“Let us know if that’s true when you get to that age,” Indigo told him.
“So I take it you’ve used transparency mode to look all over your apartment,” I said. “Not just in the location of those coordinates.”
“We’ve established they’re not coordinates,” Raw said, still examining the note.
“Yes Leonard,” Helena said. “I conducted a full search in transparency mode. If he’d just made it invisible and put it somewhere inside the skybox then I’d have spotted it.”
“What about under and above the skybox?”
“Well he said it was still inside it.”
“Seriously, Hels?” Indigo said, incredulously. “You just trust him on that?”
“In the first place, what would be the point in him writing that and lying? In the second place, there’s hundreds of metres below my skybox and thousands of metres above it!”
“The point would be to have you scurrying around for hour after hour inside the place when it was clearly discoverable outside it.”
“What about inside the walls and floors?” I asked. “Did you check there?”
“Yes,” Helena stated.
“In transparency mode?”
“Yes.”
“What about inside various objects inside your apartment – the couch, the bed, any kitchen appliances, bathroom fittings-”
Helena said, “Let me save you some time here: I figured out to look inside stuff, so I looked inside stuff. And yes: I used transparency mode.”
“Maybe he miniaturised it,” Raw said. “Maybe he shrunk it down as far as he could. Then he could have hidden it inside something tiny.” He pointed at the screen, where there was a view of a fruit bowl on Helena’s metaverse kitchen table. “Like a grape.”
Helena sighed. “Ok,” she said. “I confess I didn’t look inside the grapes.”
“How on Earth is she going to find it if she has to look for something that small?” Jennifer asked.
“Actually,” the young builder said, “that might be easier than you think.” To the screen, he said, “This is your land, right?”
“Yes,” Helena replied.
“So you’re looking for an object that belongs to someone else: Matieu made it for you and displayed it in your skybox, right? It belongs to him. All you have to do is go to the land controls tab and click on the box for the option to highlight objects owned by someone other than you.” He turned to the rest of us. “We’ve all used that before, right? To find and get rid of stuff that others have dropped on our land parcel.”
“Brilliant, Raw!” Jennifer declared.
But Helena just sighed. “It is a good idea,” she said sadly. “But think about it for a moment. I gave Denerick editing access to my objects, not to Matieu’s. If Matieu had retained ownership of the snow globe then Denerick wouldn’t have been able to do anything to it. Sorry Raw, but he transferred ownership of it over to me.”
Raw was unperturbed. “Ok then,” he said, “so use the local area search function. Type in the name of the globe, click on ‘find’ and it should highlight it for you.”
This time, Helena grimaced. “This is going to sound hopeless, I know, but I tried that and I couldn’t remember what Matieu called it. It wasn’t just a name like ‘snowglobe’ – he used the title field to store a short message to me. But I only really looked at that the first time he gave it to me – over two years ago now. I’ve tried all sorts of words and nothing gets highlighted.”
“Then search instead using the creator field,” Raw responded. “You know exactly the name of its creator.”
“Except I don’t.” She sighed again. “It’s a linked object, made from three components. The globe itself and the house Matieu created himself, yes; but the rock base was an off-the-shelf component he used – and also the root prim.”
“What difference does that make?” Vanilla asked.
“When you link together objects into one,” I said to her, “the final object you select becomes the root prim – and then the whole object takes on the meta properties of that root prim. So, in this case, the creator of the whole snowglobe would be listed as the creator of the rock base, and not Matieu.”
“And I have no idea who made that base,” Helena confirmed.
“Oh,” said Raw, looking defeated. “Then I think a systematic, centimetre-by-centimetre search is the only option that’s left to you. Sorry.”
Helena started to look tearful. Then she took a deep breath. “Fine,” she said resolutely. “Then that’s what I’ll do.”
“Come on, people!” Indigo cried in exasperation. “Surely we can do better than that?! Edward, you don’t have any clever suggestions to make?”
Our host paused to gather his thoughts. “Well you do seem to have exhausted almost all of the possibilities,” he said finally, emphasising slightly the word ‘almost.’ “There’s only really one line of inquiry remaining that I can think of, which is that the snowglobe might have been split into pieces.”
“Wouldn’t that constitute destroying it?” Jennifer asked. “He said he’d left it intact.”
“He said he hadn’t broken it,” Edward responded. “There are lots of things you can do to objects in the virtual world without technically breaking them. It’s already been suggested that the item might have been resized, for example. Why not, then, split it up?”
“A linked object,” said Raw, thoughtfully. “One object made from a number of different pieces linked together. You think he hid them in different places?”
“Precisely, dear fellow. So, instead of looking for a snowglobe, maybe we are looking for the parts of a snowglobe.”
On the laptop screen, Helena threw her hands up in despair. “But that’s even worse!”
“Not necessarily,” replied Edward. “We can apply some of the strategies used earlier. Perhaps you might be good enough to move your camera to your fruit bowl? I did notice earlier on that you have some oranges in there.”
“Select the bowl and move it,” Raw told her, seeing where Edward was going with this line of thinking, “and keep transparency mode on.” Helena followed his instructions and moved the bowl to one side. Right where one of the oranges had been was a red tinted sphere. She let out a gasp of surprise.
“The globe!” she cried. “My God, Edward, you’re a genius!” She reset the transparency value back to normal and the globe appeared, hovering above her gingham tablecloth. It was empty other than a layer of white, fallen snow. She gave it a tap and the snow swirled around inside.
“What about the base?” Indigo asked. “You said it was like a piece of rock, Helena?” Our guest nodded, eagerly.
“Yes,” said Edward. “I was wondering about that one for a while. Not an easy thing to hide cleverly. And then I remembered your aquarium…”
Helena cammed over to the tank. We all saw it immediately, now that we knew what we were looking for. It sat nestled in the gravel, partly obscured by a plant.
“So that just leaves the cottage,” I said. “Not so easy to hide that in plain sight.”
“Oh on the contrary, dear fellow,” Edward replied. “That one I worked out straight away. You mentioned that Matieu modelled the house on the one in your favourite painting. Could we perhaps see that painting again?”
“Of course, Edward,” Helena said and cammed over to the depiction of the little cottage on a country lane.
Edward leaned forward to look at it. “When you said he got the likeness of the house exactly right,” he said gently, “I imagined that you meant within a reasonable margin of error for such an undertaking. But it does sound like Matieu loved you very much, and true lovers are rarely satisfied with anything less than perfection when it comes to the things they create for each other.”
“Yes,” Helena said, her voice cracking slightly. “He worked on the house for weeks, he told me.” Slowly, she zoomed in her camera on the building in the painting.
“So if Denerick had taken that house and flattened it,” Edward continued, “would it have appeared any different at all from the original which it depicted?”
Vanilla gasped and then all of us saw it too. The house in the painting was not actually in the painting: it was standing a tiny bit proud of the surface of the canvas, a detail that could only be seen with such a high level of zoom that just one of its little windows filled almost the whole of the laptop screen. “There it is,” Helena whispered. “There it is. Oh Edward, you brilliant, wonderful man: there it is!” Slowly, as though she was manipulating something incredibly delicate, she extracted the pancake thin house.
“But how is she going to put this back together?” Vanilla asked. “All the pieces have been resized. The house has been flattened. Without knowing their original dimensions and relative positions it’ll never be quite the same as it was originally. Doesn’t that constitute… ‘broken?’”
“Indeed,” Edward agreed. “But I think it was important to Denerick to be truthful in his promise – whatever things we might agree him to be, a liar does not seem to be one of them. In his mind, after all, he was the wronged party and his actions fully justified. In his mind, you understand.
“So, in fact, he has given you all the information you need so that the snowglobe can become perfect again. We have three component pieces and for each of these we need their original dimensions – width, length and breadth – and their original position: x, y and z. That’s six numbers per piece, making 18 numbers in total.”
“And there’s 18 numbers on the list,” said Helena. “Oh Edward, how can I ever thank you enough?”
“Thanks, I can quite assure you, are not required,” our white haired host told her. “I once lost a person I loved too. By restoring a piece of your love to you, I’m restoring a piece of my own.”
What the Huck? 