Bugz looked up from her feet and saw a mirror image of her own ’Versona looking back at her from the clear seven-inch glass panel clutched in Stormy’s hand. Stormy’s eyes were softer now that she saw Bugz through the filter of her Floraverse skin. Bugz said a tiny prayer of thanks for the mediation of Stormy’s phone. This window into the augmented reality they all inhabited through their ’Versonas served as a lifeline, connecting Bugz to a state in which she felt a little more relaxed.

Bugz raised her phone in kind, a similar-sized glass pane powered by the CPU hidden in the watch on her wrist. The looking glass sprung to life, displaying the filter of Stormy’s ’Versona in front of the young woman and letting everything else behind it pass through uninterrupted to Bugz’s eye. She’s as beautiful in the real world as she is in the ’Verse, Bugz thought. As Stormy pulled out a vape pen, looked to Chalice and then back to her feet, Bugz’s phone showed her the augmented Stormy doing the same with perfect synchronization. Even when Bugz dropped her phone clumsily, wishing she could die in the process, the device accurately displayed Stormy’s ’Versona to Bugz during the split second it fell, like a tumbling portal into a hidden world.

Bugz grabbed her phone and scanned the other girls quickly. They all wore ’Versonas purchased from a famous influencer and customized superficially. Through her phone, Bugz saw an Arianna with longer eyelashes, an Arianna with poutier lips, and an Arianna with a face tattoo. Noobs. No real gamer would be caught dead in an off-the-rack skin like these. A real gamer would have designed their own skin, like Bugz did.

Again, Stormy gave an approving, if absentminded, nod to Bugz’s ’Versona. After spending years cursing her belly fat and studying her profile in the mirror, Bugz had poured a ridiculous number of resources into perfecting her ’Versona with a lean, trim waist. Stormy angled her phone down slightly to study Bugz’s digital form before lowering her phone completely, revealing Bugz as she appeared in the real world. Bugz felt vulnerable. She wished she could return to the Spirit World, the higher plane of virtual reality in the Floraverse where she would be untethered from the real-life location to which she was currently bound in augmented reality.

“You can look at me through your phone if you want,” Bugz said.

Stormy raised her phone again, a smile returning to her face, and pulled a long drag from the pen. She blew the vape smoke down toward her moccasins as she glanced knowingly at her friends and back to Bugz.

“So, how’s your brother?” Stormy asked.

Oh, that’s why she’s talking to me, Bugz thought. God, how perfect are her eyelashes? They look like the eyelashes of a camel in the desert, long enough to keep a sandstorm out.