On our third trip to Shade, we got arrested.

  Twilight wasn’t far from Shade, but the other fetches sent us further out into the city, to the Minotaur Labyrinth and then Heartland Park. As much as I was keen to explore both places, sketchy guys appeared by the entrance of each district, each one similar to the last. Not clones, but they could have all been destitute relatives. Same patchwork cloak, same gnarly hair, same dumpster vibes.

  A semicircle of cops surrounded us when we came out of Shade Church, having hit level 4. They marginally resembled law enforcers from the Old West, but the guns on their hips weren’t Colt revolvers.

  The patter of rain bore down a hard, rushing sound on the thick grass. The dull roar of it rang in my ears, the only sound as the moment crystallized. My eyes shifted from one to another of the grim-faced deputies.

  My lips twitched, pressing into my tusks as I fought a smile. One of the deputies resembled a mantis. It looked kind of adorable with a cowboy hat.

  Jake froze, throwing his hands up in the automatic body language of ‘I give up.’

  I’d never had a posse roll up to me when I stepped out of a door, so I paused, too. A deputy—with the nameplate Parthena Savage—grabbed my cloak by the simple brass clasp and yanked it.

  I believe in my heart she meant to just grab it, but when I twisted away from her grasp, it unfastened, coming off in her hand. Again, my skin was exposed to the harsh rain that never seemed to stop falling on the forsaken hill village.

  Again. Wet yet again, and I was over it.

  I crossed my hands over my slick, bare chest. To cover the hot flare of embarrassment, I growled, “Lady, if you wanna strip me, buy me dinner first!”

  “Cute,” she sneered, backpedaling with my cloak clutched against her. She had a strange twang to her accent that somewhat reminded me of the Southwest.

  Her aggressive move had instigated her colleagues to close ranks around us. More than one had a hand on their plasma pistols. Six deputies, probably more than we could handle. I couldn’t see the exact HP or anything apart from their titles, but each of their life pools looked bigger than ours.

  “I see you have badges,” Jake started cautiously, hands still high in the air. “Are you guys players, or just advanced NPCs?”

  Savage narrowed her eyes at Jake, then glanced at me. My hair, which had been mostly dry by that point, plastered to my skull again. “Can I have my cloak back? Pretty sure you can see I’m not hiding anything. We’ll go quietly.”

  Actually, I had a lot of junk in my inventory. The rusty axe was the most dangerous thing in my possession. Unimpressive, at best.

  Jake shook his head vigorously, soggy white hair flapping from side to side. “No! I don’t want to go. We didn’t do anything.”

  “What did you do at this here church?” Savage asked, her squint turning from Jake to me.

  I shrugged. I didn’t dare speak actual words because I really wasn’t good at keeping up a lie. Something about the disgust of it got to me. I hated disingenuity.

  And yet I could take a sketchy box from a skeevy dude and take it to a creep-factor ten church. But they were just bones. What was the big deal?

  Jake stomped a hoof, splashing water off the step. It splattered my bare torso, and I shot him a look. He didn’t notice.

  “We just came to pray,” Jake wheedled.

  I sucked breath through my teeth. Great. They’d definitely be suspicious of a demon saying that. Even I would have come up with something better. I shrugged noncommittally. That would be my default response for this situation.

  “What’s an NPC?” Savage asked, shaking out my cloak. Was she searching it? As if we carry things in our clothes in this place.

  My cold-sedated brain snapped things into place. Her intimidation was all for show. Maybe they couldn’t see the lowbie jobs. Maybe they didn’t know what went on in that horror show of a church.

  “Non-Player Character. An entity created by the System to interact with us, the PCs,” Jake explained.

  I held out my hand and asked, not without a little irritation, “My cloak, please? This is the third time I’ve been soaked to the bone today.”

  Savage scrutinized me, the brim of her deputy hat streamed rivulets of water down the shoulders of her long, oiled canvas coat. With a sniff, she tossed the eelskin back to me, and I caught it, snapping it out before throwing it over my shoulders and yanking up the hood.

  “Never met an Orc that could talk right,” she said, eyes shifting to Jake. “Met plenty o’you, though.”

  Talk right? I thought I was casual with my speech, but Savage impressed me in the worst way.

  “It’s wet. Can we go away from here first?” Jake asked, steam rising off his body like he was a furnace, clothing likewise giving off clouds of mist.

  I hadn’t wondered if he was cold before. Well, I was an asshole for not noticing. And wait, she never met an orc that could speak our language? My gaze dropped to her boots and traveled upwards. Those clothes were authentic cowboy-style gear. The boots were practical, round-toed, with a slight heel to hook to a stirrup. Pair all that with her not understanding inventory...

  Stolen story; please report.

  “You’ve been here two hundred years,” I stated out loud and felt damn proud of myself for sussing it out.

  Ha! I was smart!

  Instead of being amazed at my revelation, she motioned to the others. The mantis clicked, head tilting, water sliding off its faceted eyes. The elf’s lips thinned, fingers tightening around his gun grip.

  “What. Do. You. Know?” Savage snarled, stepping right up to be an inch away from me, staring up into my face with an impressive display of intimidation.

  I was not smart.

  Even though the woman was much smaller than me, she had the aggression of a wolverine. Of course, she was surrounded by five others that could shoot me dead in an instant, so she had a reason to be brave enough to manhandle me.

  “Let’s get out of the rain,” I replied, casting my gaze to the area beyond the steady fall.

  At her glance, the others fell into place beside us. A skinny, bookish-looking guy with glasses that were fogging up prodded my back. My lip curled up, but I started walking.

  They led us away from Subterania, down the hill. Once we stepped out of the sheets of rain, we were in sunlight again. I dropped my hood. A few yards away from Shade, the grass faded yellow, then the earth became cracked and dry. Dust kicked up as we walked along a worn track.

  No need to read my map; a wooden sign marked the track. Thorn Ridge. The wind picked up, whistling over the district, sending a few tumbleweeds rolling. Beyond the little village of Old West buildings, pyramids rose near a lush green landscape with the hint of a river shimmering in the sunlight.

  Savage walked beside me, giving me the stink-eye the whole time. I weighed my options. Talk to her and soothe some of the hostility, or stay silent until we get thrown in jail.

  “So,” I started, flipping the hem of my cloak ungracefully, “Never met an orc that spoke your language, huh?”

  “Don’t make small talk,” she snapped, hand falling to her plasma pistol.

  Her party was made up mostly of humanoids. I wondered if that was by chance or design. Had humans monopolized the law industry here?

  I guess it made sense. Humans are a conflicted group, and we tend to want a purpose. Justice was as good a purpose as any to keep busy.

  I caught Jake’s eye. He slouched along, wings sagging behind him, arms flopping at his sides, lips twisted into a pout. His gaze flicked across the group around us.

  There was nothing left to say. We were probably screwed.

  The town wasn’t big, just a strip of a dirt road with a little crossroads and a single side street. The largest building looked newer than the rest, but kept the 1800s style. Out back, a walled-in yard with a roof looked uncomfortably like a cattle enclosure.

  The most unsettling feature in the town wasn’t the sheriff’s office or even the yard in the back. It was the looming platform with the nooses hanging from a thick wooden bar in the dead center of the crossroad. The gallows hung empty, for now.

  We were marched in through the double doors. The weathered wood had scores, burns, and more dubious stains. A few deputies lounging on the second-floor balcony whooped, “Savage strikes again!”

  I couldn’t tell if they were praising her or mocking her. Savage ignored them, gripping my elbow and steering me to sit in a chair by a desk. The spacious building had been divided into the front room, which resembled a rudimentary bullpen, and whatever lurked behind the door by the front desk.

  I figured the real criminals went back there. The elf led Jake to another desk, far enough away from me that we couldn’t coordinate. Dammit.

  “Where’s the ridge?” I asked, having not seen one on the way into the district.

  Savage’s expression darkened. I really needed social skills. Belatedly, I recognized that the ridge was probably back on Earth somewhere, two hundred years ago.

  “What do you know?” She asked again. Her voice relaxed a notch. Probably since we were firmly in her territory.

  I defaulted to a shrug, glancing at Jake. It couldn’t hurt to tell her what I knew, for a lot of things. If we were lucky, we could distract them from the real reason they arrested us.

  “On Earth, a comet came by every hundred years. Each time, people would disappear. Not a lot, maybe five hundred or so people would go missing.”

  “Did your people do it?” she asked with a note of accusation.

  I snorted. “My people. Orcs? Have you been to Bauring Tok Kraup Patarshan? They don’t have the tech.”

  A figure passed by the window—a peddler leading a donkey with a rattling wagon. Savage squinted at him, her expression ripe with distrust.

  “He steal money from you?” I asked, glancing over.

  “He’s one of the Possessed,” she said, scowling faintly.

  Ah. So that was what they thought of NPCs. People from a time frame before mine had no context for them. Interesting.

  “City’s full of them. We call them NPCs, Jake and I,” I tilted my head towards Jake.

  Her scowl returned to me. “Doesn’t matter what ya call ‘em. They ain’t human.”

  “They’re not,” I agreed carefully. “But they don’t mean any harm. They’re just here to flesh out the world, make it feel lived-in.”

  I tried to piece it together, but I didn’t know when the comet first appeared. Guessed that, from the fact she knew Orcs, Elves, and the bug people, they weren’t new, so there were actual populations of them somewhere, on some planet out in the galaxy.

  Wild.

  “Keep talking,” Savage said, pulling out a notebook.

  “I’ll try to sum it up in a way you can understand,” I said, and then nearly withered from the stare she gave me.

  “You think I’m stupid?”

  “No, ma’am,” I replied, glancing at Jake. He seemed to be getting grilled as much as, if not worse than, me. “You just didn’t live on the Earth I have.”

  She leaned back in her chair, expression waxing shocked. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m two hundred years into the future from you. You know those plasma guns you have? That’s something like what we have on Earth now, but we don’t use them as weapons.”

  I didn’t want to get into science I didn’t really understand, myself. Instead, I tried to explain VR, the internet, and gaming.

  We sat there for hours as I talked. The glasses guy fetched coffee, leaving Jake alone at his desk. Apparently, we proved we weren’t a threat.

  At the end of it, Savage wasn’t completely sold. However, she reminded me of the reason she brought us in when she said, “The flashing red glow in Shade was you two. Tell me about that.”

  “It was just a delivery job,” I shrugged.

  “The System alerts us to illegal activity by using that,” she replied, hands on her desk. “What did you do?”

  “We just dropped off some boxes to the ghosts there!” I raised my hands, irritated that she’d let me lull myself into complacency by letting me talk at will.

  I wasn’t sure if she pretended to be ignorant or intended to let me dig my own grave.

  “Boxes of what?”

  “I don’t know! The note said not to look inside,” I said, raking fingers through my now dry hair with frustration.

  “What note?”

  “The task note. The job, the quest, the things we do to get money and gain XP.”

  Her eyes flicked up to the top left. Of course she had an HUD like the rest of us—she was a player, an abductee, but she didn’t know how to operate the game. Her context kept her from using the System in the way it was designed. Damn.

  She squinted at me, then shot a look at the deputy with glasses. He nodded at her. She jabbed a finger at me. “Stay right there.”

  I sighed and slumped, knees bumping against her desk. My head fell back, and I looked at the ceiling boards. The two deputies went through the door behind the long, wooden front desk.

  Just sitting here lost me money. My head rolled, and I could just see the gallows from that angle.

  I hoped I wouldn’t be losing anything else.

  -ARCHIVE-