Ready Player Two

Wade locates L0hengrin in one of the OASIS’s 256 virtual copies of Halliday’s hometown, Middletown, Ohio. Although Kira also lived in Middletown as a teenager, Wade never bothered to search for clues there because the Middletown simulations are set in 1986, and Kira did not move there until 1988.

Although he knows it is an unethical—and illegal—invasion of privacy, Wade uses his administrative privileges to pull L0hengrin’s records in the real world. She is a 19-year-old trans woman living outside Dallas, one of the most impoverished cities in the country. She reminds Wade of himself, as he lived in a similarly poor slum outside Oklahoma City. Wade notes that years ago he would have been upset to learn that a woman to whom he is attracted was assigned male at birth, but experiencing ONI sex with and as different genders than his own has broadened his perspective.

In the basement of a replica of Halliday’s teenage home, Wade materializes in front of L0hengrin, who kneels and refers to him as Sir Parzival, Wade’s avatar during the original Easter egg hunt. L0hengrin says that although she was able to make the first of the Seven Shards appear, she could not touch it because she is not Halliday’s heir, as the riddle stipulates.